Jennifer Armstrong1 second ago
That was me--I didn't have any normality to hold onto after the workplace mobbing tore down my health. People kept telling me, "You have to adapt to this now, as this is Western culture." My own thoughts were, "I don't know how to, as I can't see how what I experienced was a human interaction. It seemed like a cross-species interaction. I have no idea HOW to "learn" this "Western culture". But I must do so quickly. " In the mean time my father kept seeing me as the externalization of his own shame and guilt and trying to destroy what he thought he saw (just as the scapegoat is first laden down with all the sins of the community and then sent out in the wilderness to be destroyed). And my digestive system broke down. If I ate very much, my belly swelled up, and I had a massive case of burping that never seemed to stop. My parents told me this was "disgusting" and that I should snap out of it by embracing conservative Christianity. This was during an intervention that was infantilizing as my father told me, "You can't even speak properly." And somehow people found HIS explanation about the situation superior to mine, or more logical, because for the life of me I could not explain what was happening to me. Because I had lost my prior points of cultural reference, I really did believe that extreme narcissism and workplace harrassment was "Western culture" and that I should learn it and adapt to it. Absolutely everybody told me it was supremely normal to have had the experiences I'd had, and that the key was to "stop being so sensitive" and to start viewing societal narcissism as normal. My deeper intellectual mind knew this made no sense, especially as I was already very stoical and had persisted through a lot, but everyone told me I just needed to shake it off and adapt to this extreme set of circumstances that was the new "normal" for me now.
