I make no claims to benevolence. For my first 40 years, my default behavior was often diminishing and hurtful. Openly aggressive, harsh, and raging. I hated how reactive and hurtful I could be. But decades of mistreatment taught me only
There’s a deviant cruelty in having it said that you “got what you deserved.” Who even thinks like that? (Clears throat.) When I question the unequal terms of a relationship or ask for mutual consideration, the focus shifts from my
I’m recognizing a pattern in the personality type I’ve come to call The Archetype: disproportionate retaliation in response to discomfort. There is a swift intolerance for anything or anyone that appears to interfere with their ideas, preferences, plans, comfort, or agenda.
For most of my life, I didn’t even recognize healthy and unhealthy connection as distinct possibilities. Like a fish unaware of the water it’s swimming in, I understood relationships through the only environment I’d ever known. I had learned distorted
May I Remind You? Different people. Different circumstances. Continued familiar patterns. A few months ago, I said to my neighbor, “Hey, when you said X, it hurt my feelings.” Her response? “May I remind you…” followed by a list of ways she’d
In my family and marriage, my emotional and sensory sensitivities were treated as unreasonable burdens and acts of defiance. Rather than information worth considering, my preferences and limitations were interpreted as resistance. I struggled to navigate these relationships, which I
The ability to engineer someone else’s downfall while appearing to have had nothing to do with it. I’m intimately familiar with calculated hostility. What I still cannot fathom is the level of executive function required to provoke someone, anticipate their
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Magda’s Progression: Bottom Level—Cleared. ✅* Food, shelter, clothing. Check, check, check. But I was starved for affection, acceptance, and the security of belonging. After years of therapy, recovery work, and training in child development, I sense that my pervasive distress came from a genuine need for affection,