A Thousand Paper Cuts

Some of the most crippled people look perfect on the outside. Learn about the unseen, but disabling effects of "emotional paper cuts" by parents. 

00:00 What dying from 1,000 paper cuts means.

01:29 Example of an unhappy woman, Tara.

03:23 Examples of paper cuts from parents.

05:00 Expectations attached to gifts.

07:43 Description of Tara's mother and father and their expectations.

16:24 Giving time, money, and energy to your child is trying to buy them.

17:28 Process of healing.

Transcript:

There is an expression known to many of us that states that a person or business or project died from “a thousand paper cuts.” What does it mean?

When somebody drowns in the North Sea, or is crushed by a collapsed building, the single cause of death is usually obvious. But sometimes a person or an effort can die or fail from a great number of events or circumstances that each alone seems small, even insignificant.

A single paper cut never kills anyone, but with enough of them, you could induce blood loss and shock that might result in death.  

Let me illustrate with a real person, Tara.  When we first met, it was so obvious that she was not loved, anxious, fearful. Couldn't look me in the eye,  25, no steady job even though graduated from a highly-regarded university. She was just utterly alone. Had no friends. Didn't have any activities, miserable, depressed. 

She burst into tears when I saw her months later she wrote me a letter and she said you saved my life. Well, I didn't remember. She continued, she said, "You held me and told me that I'd never felt loved and I had never understood why I was unhappy until that moment."

A year later. She didn't do anything with that information other than she'd never been loved. She was actually worse. More isolated, more alone, had zero relationships, no contact with her mother or her father.

Now, nothing that ever happened to this child in her home would be even notable by like Social Services, for example. There was no obvious abuse, beating, or sexual abuse. None of those things that everybody goes, "Oh well, her life was ruined because of this thing."

No, she died from 1,000 paper cuts, emotionally speaking. It's a slow process in which a multitude of bad things happen which ultimately culminated in the demise, the end of whoever or whatever was suffering paper cuts — a project, the system, administration, a person's reputation, a person's life.

Examples of paper cuts from parents. This is the important part. What are some examples of things that we do with our children that make these 1,000 cuts?  

• A single look of disappointment . That can be 10 paper cuts.
• Look of anticipation, that a performance will go well, or a certain level of performance will be reached. That anticipation just puts expectations on our kids. They're crushing. 
• Criticism 
• Even praise is a very common paper cut because we praise them for doing well and now the kid goes, "Oh gosh, I gotta do well next time and the next time and I have to keep doing better otherwise I don't get the praise, I get disapproval." Some of the most crippled people I've ever seen look perfect on the outside because they've always done the right thing to get praised and avoid disapproval. And inside they are hollow, miserable shells of human beings.
• Irritation. It's a paper cut, a big one, that might be a knife cut.  
• Frowning 
• Disapproving tone of voice 
• GIFTS, with the expectation of gratitude and affection in return. 

Tara wrote me recently and said that she remembers being showered with gifts as a child, but her mother then had expectations attached to the gifts. She HAD to be very, very grateful, and talk more than once about what she had received.

And if she didn’t do what her mother wanted—didn’t make her mother happy—mother would REMIND Tara of the gift she had gotten. That is NOT a gift. It’s called an investment, something given with an expectation of a return, just like buying stocks.  

Tara remembers hearing expectations all day, no beatings, no screaming, just nasty manipulation. Clever, but still papercuts.  

Mom would say things like, "Why aren’t you good at karate like your brother?" And so what was the daughter's response? She quit. Then Mom said,  “Why do you quit everything?’  

I get this feeling this kid can't win. Paper cut, paper cut, paper cut.

So she decided to take piano and mom said, "You just hit wrong notes all the time. How come you don't just play it like..."  She quit. Mom said, “Just like karate.”  

This kid was just hearing a never ending stream of expectations and criticism and guilt and obligation just never stopped. 

I made some suggestions to Tara about reading RL and PCSD, and about finding Real Love, which can be found under Finding Love on RealLove.com and much more in Chapter 2 of the REPT.  

Days later I got an email from Tara’s mother, asking to talk on the phone. When we started off, she introduced herself and then she talked without breathing for half an hour. There was no pause. She didn’t pay any attention to the fact that several times I would try to get her attention to interject because she would ask a question and answer her own question.

She was right about everything. Admitted absolutely no flaws or mistakes as a mother—especially odd since her daughter will now not even talk to her, much less spend time with her.

Some notable things that I learned from Mom’s own words in that one conversation:  

1. Her husband (Tara’s father) was a narcissist, whose interests were only himself, his business, his money, and what his wife and children could give to him. Narcissists only know one word: Me. Me, me, me, me, me, me some somebody will make a comment and he'll go, I don't know how to apply this to me. Why are you speaking?
2. He was emotionally and physically abusive to Tara’s mother, and apparently the mother was just too weak to leave, and enjoyed the money he provided because he was so focused on his career. So she allowed the emotional abuse of her daughter and herself to continue. (Didn’t admit that she was responsible in any way, it was all her husband’s fault. Nothing was Mom's fault.) 
3. Mom mentioned over and over and over the many gifts she had given her daughter, so she named them. The list was endless. Her schooling, a car, a condo in her name, money, and on and on. We're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars of gifts. Every word was heavy with expectations that the daughter would feel obligation and guilt as a result of these “gifts.” 
4.  Mom experienced no intimacy or closeness whatever with her husband, and yet she said that he “really loved Tara,” which of course is impossible from a narcissist. You think you're being loved by a narcissist, You're simply being played. And if you don't realize that, then you're what's called a mark or a fool. This was mom's rationalization for not leaving the marriage earlier. They finally divorced in 2007.
5.  Tara withdrew from any relationship with her father—wise choice—for her own protection, but her mother has badgered her a LOT to resume the relationship with her father. When Tara refused and even expressed fear of her father, Mom said, “God wants you to forgive him.” She didn’t listen to her daughter’s feelings at all. Again, it was about MOM’s agenda, nothing about daughter.  
6.  In many many ways—in one phone call—Mom indicated that Tara was somehow broken and unacceptable. She said Tara was bad at relationships, wouldn’t do swimming or karate or piano, was shy, not like “her brother.”  All she could say about her daughter was negative and the daughter wasn't there and I didn't ask. She's just freely offering this.
7. Here was Mom’s main reason for calling me: “I don’t know how to convince her that I love her unconditionally.” If she cared about Tara AT ALL, what would her goal be? To learn to love her obviously dysfunctional daughter. But no, horrifying as it is, her goal is to convince her daughter of what is not true, for the mother’s benefit.  What did Mom REALLY want? She wanted Tara to love MOM. The ultimate selfishness for a parent, and fatal to the child.  
8. I told Mom that she had done her best, but she hadn’t loved Tara unconditionally. Mom just argued and told me how she was right. I told her that she doesn’t listen—not to me, not to her daughter. Her response: “No, you’re wrong, I do listen.”  

See how this would have slowly, one paper cut at a time, destroyed Tara as a child? More important, can you see how YOU do some of these things to your child?

Maybe you're not married to a narcissist—or some of the other details are different with you compared to the mother in this story—but we all exhibit so many characteristics of this mother who was absolutely, no-doubt-in-the-world convinced that she was a great mother. But she WASN’T, and we benefit from seeing how we do many of the same things.  

• She didn’t listen to her daughter. Lectured, obligated, bought. 
• Mom constantly heaped expectations on Tara. The pressure was crushing.  
• It did NOT matter whether the expectations were for things “good for Tara.”  
• “I was trying to help” precedes so many crimes. (Karate, piano, swimming) 
• Disappointment constant. Child feels defective.  
• Mom gave gifts and used other manipulations (crying, complaining) to get Tara to love HER.  

Any one or all of these would leave a child feeling worthless and alone, utterly unequipped to deal with life.  

This picture—the whole of it or parts—is so common that this kind of parenting is regarded as NORMAL. But it’s crippling.  

Tara wrote me:  

"You may not remember, but at the seminar where we met, you held me for a long time. It was the most loved and happiest I have ever been in my life. You helped me see that I was not defective, just that I had never been loved. And you helped me see that with my mother right there next to me. I felt so validated and understood.

"Since then, I have been healing my wounds little by little. Even gaining the confidence to move across the country in January fulfilling a life long dream of mine. I have been able to recognize wise men and women here and there and over time have 'kind of' found a few but it has been hard for me to open up and feel as though I'm not a bother to them... vulnerability is something I am working on." 

Greg: You’ll need help. You’ll need someone you can really trust to love you before you’ll discover true vulnerability.  

(I gave her a Real Love person to love her, and apparently she’s doing quite well.) 

Why this story? Because we fail to see each paper cut until a child is emotionally disfigured or dead. We have to listen better. We have to recognize the harm we cause, before they experience the nightmare described by Tara—and her story is relatively mild. We have to learn to find love for ourselves, so we can love and teach these little creatures we brought into the world.  

We can learn to do this. You’re doing it right now.