robot_therapist

Do your employees know you're undocumented?

My grandmother was born in 1929. When she was 18, she got accepted into an engineering program at a state university.

Her first day of class, she walked into the lecture hall and the professor looked at her and said, "What are you doing here? Go home and get married." That kinda set the tone for all the other students to start in on her.

She stuck it out for a while, but was so relentlessly harassed that she dropped out after her first semester and, well, got married and had my dad.

Silver lining: in the 60s, she went got a nursing degree and ended up introducing my parents.

Clearly I don't speak for the whole world, but as a female victim of childhood abuse:

In my experience, when you grow up that way, it seems normal. If that's the attention you got from the adults in your life, it's the attention you crave, because you honestly believed that the person doing it cared for you, and you are conditioned to believe that abuse=an expression of caring.

So when you grow up, either you get amazing health insurance and a thousand hours of therapy, or you bounce from relationship to relationship, looking for someone to love you the way you want to be loved. And the people around you say things like "he's no good" or "you don't deserve to be hit!" But they don't understand. Hitting is how you know you're loved. And how you show it. You might know, in your thinking brain, that it's wrong. But in your heart, it's what you crave, because it's what you understand. When someone is sweet to you, it's just confusing.

Childhood abuse really fucks a person up, and even though I've been in therapy since I was 13 (I'm now 28) it is the reason I stay out of relationships. I don't trust myself to treat people correctly, or find people to treat me right.

Students: What do you think the US is like?