What crap did your parents try and feed you growing up.

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i got some of this from my parents, especialy as regards sports. my dad still brings it up now and then....telling me that i would not have been a starter on the high school football team if i had played my senior year. i pretty much knew that back then, and i really don't need to be reminded decades later that i sucked at sports.

otherwise my 'rents are pretty cool, but i could do without being reminded how bad i was at sports.

My parents were pretty truthful.

Being constantly told I was not normal (in reality, who is?) as if everyone else in the world was "normal" and I was the only person who wasn't.

Negative comparison with other people, usually with cousins who weren't overly disparate in age from myself.

Being told, with genuine solemnity, I was a feral child - less of a human being and more of a wild animal. This is how a tiny minority of people view those with autistic traits.

Mashed Potato

My mother once told me that "Everything happens for a reason."

And I just thought, naah. Things happen and there are consequences that we have to deal with.

Yeah I had bullies that literally... like since I responded so much less than usual to bullying at one point, they used to jump up and down on top of me as hard as they could to try to see if I would react. I didn't react. A teacher told them to stop and they said "But she doesn't feel anything, do you?" and I didn't respond so they said "See? She doesn't."

The thing about ignoring is that simple ignoring doesn't work. I read a really good, really short book by Dave Hingsburger on dealing with bullying for people with developmental disabilities. He himself had been bullied growing up because he was fat among other reasons. The book was called "The Are Word". It contained advice that I'd never thought of in my entire life, and as an adult it's been invaluable when dealing with cyberbullies. (Advice that also was played out in a workshop I attended.) The idea is that instead of simply ignoring bullies, you have a particular thought in your head that you play to drown out whatever messages of "you are inferior" the bullies are sending. The idea he thought of was incredibly simple (some people might say over-simple) but it works because it's not anything complicated. It was "I'm okay, you're mean." As in, "There's nothing wrong with me for being bullied, but there sure as $%&^ is something wrong with you for being a bully!" And it worked. It didn't work instantly, but using it all the time gave me an attitude of "No matter what they do to me, it doesn't mean anything about me, it says everything about them." After a lifetime of considering myself lesser because of the messages bullies send to me, that was a really important idea to get into my head. And it was far better than simply trying to pretend the bullying wasn't happening.

As far as my parents... they told me a lot of things that didn't turn out to be true, but they weren't trying to feed me a line of crap, either. They genuinely believed the things they were saying and were only trying to help me or teach me about life. Sometimes they were just passing on a line of crap they themselves had been fed and came to believe, though.

Some of the things they told me that weren't true were (maybe not word for word, I don't remember exactly how they told me):

"You're smart enough that you'll be able to excel in any field you are interested in."

Shyeah, right. That explains why I couldn't keep up in junior high, high school, or college, and had to drop out of all three, and ended up attempting suicide due to the pressure to perform academically.

"Compared to you, most people are ret*d."

That one is word for word, not wording I'd ever use, nor an idea I'd ever promote. And totally untrue. Just because I once got a really high score on an IQ test (another time just being above average, another time being on the edge of borderline) doesn't mean crap about how I compare to other people. Frankly I've found it easier to relate to a lot of people with intellectual disabilities (including severe ones) than I have related to the average person. Because IQ doesn't mean crap, and it's easier to identify with other outsiders than it is with "normal" people. I've never identified with that many "gifted" people either. When I was sent to a summer camp for mostly "gifted" people (or academically talented), they saw me as just as weird if not weirder than the "normal" kids did. And treated me accordingly. The only real friend I made there (and it took me years to realize what she was doing to me was friendship, because I didn't have any real friends otherwise) told me later that the reason she got to know me was because she saw me spinning in circles alone somewhere and asked someone who I was, and was told "That's Amanda. She's crazy." She thought that might mean I was interesting. (She was also somewhat of an outsider there despite being so talented that she discovered a new mathematical property while still in high school. Her social skills were... really really nonstandard to put it mildly.)

I know there were a bunch of things they told me about bullying that were patently untrue, but I can't seem to remember them at the moment. (Possibly due to sensory bombardment, I'm outside on a busy street across from a construction site with loud beeping machinery.) I'm recalling the conversations, but I can be terrible at recalling actual words, I remember mostly the underlying feel and nature of things rather than the overlying idea and word of things. Oh well.