Being in a double bind means that no matter what I do I am always wrong. Growing up I always felt this way, and even to this day I still do sometimes, I just didn’t know that there was a term for it. I like that there is a term for this because it means that this happens to other people too and I am not alone to think I am the only person always messing up all the time. It makes a lot of sense that now as an adult I have anxiety and depression. Of course, there are other factors to that, but it is nice to see that this is in fact a real thing and not just something I was making up.
I felt very connected to the section on manipulation. I knew that my father was manipulative, which makes it easy to hate him, but when you learn about the possibilities of how he became that way from his own childhood, it makes it a little less hard to hate him. Looking at it now from an adult perspective, I can see where maybe that may have been the case of him growing up. My grandma was in an abusive relationship with an alcoholic, which made her baby my dad and pretty much give him whatever he wanted because she didn’t want him to be mad at her too. I think that it is crazy how all this effects everything. There is a part in the section that said that the father will throw tantrums to get his way, and I never looked at it like that when I was growing up. I always just thought my dad was angry and pissed off at the world all the time. Seeing as how this is a form of manipulation, it makes a lot more sense. My dad would often behave in the pouting and guilt trips the book described. He would always tell us that there are other parents out there that are way worse than he is or that we are ungrateful, and he will just literally ignore us until he either needed something or one of us got into trouble. It did not help that my dad also was an alcoholic. This only sped up everything and made everything worse. I always tried my best to be perfect and to not be on his radar, but even being a straight A student, being in the honor society, getting into college, etc, it was never good enough, and I never felt good enough. Even to this day I still feel like I am not good enough sometimes or that I should be doing even more because I am not doing enough.
Both traits have influenced my life. They have made me who I am today. I am trying to make sure that who I am today is better than who I was raised around so that I don’t do that to other people. I am not the only child in this family, there are three others. This has affected all of us in different ways.