This mother’s inability to handle her child’s pain, let alone to help her child handle her own pain, denied this little girl the opportunity to feel her emotions. Instead of being allowed to feel hurt and disenfranchised, she was made to believe that if she changed her outer appearance enough, her peers would accept her. In this way, she was learning that painful emotions are too painful to deal with and need to be swept under the rug, or better still camouflaged by various forms of “doing,” such as blaming others or fixing her outer appearance. Because all effort was directed to squelching
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