naturalplastic wrote:
@Aspie1 you apparently had a really horrendous childhood. And its uniquely deplorable how that shrink was a coconspirator in the abuse your parents inflicted on you. I salute you for surviving all that.
To play devil's advocate, helping the parents is a family therapist's
job, so she was doing just that. She was helping them better exert control over me---I didn't matter because I was a minor, and none of their actions fit the legal definition of "abuse". I just wish it was honestly disclosed to me, rather than her stringing me along with false promises of helping me "in the long run"
, which is shrink code for "never". (Luckily, I figured out those promises were lies, and by then, learned what kind of answers she wanted to hear and fed them to her.)
As for "feelings", I could never answer her "how did that make you feel?" questions correctly---meaning give her the emotional answers she was looking for. So I wonder if she joined my parents in psychologically abusing me as as a retaliation tactic, since she kept insisting that I was lying her her or withholding things from her.
Not all is lost. At age 12, I discovered alcohol, and could get to it without much difficulty, since my parents never caught on that I was sneaking it. Be it swigging from their whiskey bottles and replacing it with water, or helping myself from their boxed wine and letting them think the other parent drank some. Plus, I didn't need much to feel happy to begin with.