For me it started with bullying from my mom and continued with bullying in school. The only thing that pulled me out of it was time and MDMA. I don’t think I got my shit together until my mid 30s. Now I’ve got a family and a successful career. But I could have very easily have ended up drunk in a gutter somewhere.

This always tends to surprise people, which is encouraging - most mom's probably do not bully their children - but it might also be an unrecognized issue.

I would describe it differently, so I don't think I had it as bad as you, but I would say that my parents did not adequately prepare me for responding to bullying, and I likely did the exact wrong things as a response. I cried. I showed weakness. And the bullying continued for a long time - most of my elementary and secondary schooling.

I would say that I eventually formed a self image that went outside how my peers treated me, but then again, decades later, peer interactions can trigger strong emotional reactions.

If most people experience it, it wouldn't tend to surprise most people. But it probably does happen more often than most would believe.

Your Mom?! Holy crap, that's a source that hadn't occurred to me.

Good job getting it together - that must have been a tough row to hoe.

Parents are the absolute worst bullies. I'm not saying every parent bullies their children, I'm saying the ones who do the bullying is much worse than anything peers can dish out. And it's more persistent and impossible to escape. Then they turn around and act normal in front of other people so the fucked up kid looks like the bad guy to outsiders.

From as far back as I can remember until I left for college my mom berated me day in and day out about how my of a piece of garbage I am, how I ruined her life, how literally everything I did was wrong, and how I'm the reason my dad is an alcoholic. Despite me being a good kid who never got into any trouble.

I was bullied in elementary school, middle school, and summer camp for being a runt (literally off the growth charts) but it didn't actually bother me, I already learned that I was garbage from my mom.

Been through years of therapy... I don't think I'll ever be able to really recover, the best I can do is move forward.

I'm very sorry this happened to you.

So sorry you didn’t have it better. Parents should be the absolute opposite of a bully.

I'm not sharing my experience for sympathy, I'm sharing it to challenge the "parents are basically Jesus" narrative of society. If an adult child doesn't provide care for their parents (or even limits contact with them) then society thinks the child is the asshole. Yet it's been my observation that 9 times out of 10 the asshole is the parents, not the broken and innocent child. We have to navigate both the severe emotional turmoil the parents caused and the (sometimes severe) societal disapproval of distancing ourselves from the toxic relationship.

There are loads of us. And I wonder if our parents even know.

My family recipe, taught to me decades ago? Take normal discipline, punctuate it with crying and guilt of being a single parent, then sparingly frost with golden phrases like "you look just like your fucking old man," and "don't think with your dick like him", and "women who like him are whores...", and "look at how he sits" or "[laughing] look at his writing"...

Stir in some bad grades. Maybe a latent learning disability.

Let simmer alone.

Viola! You get a 12 year old pushed so low that they've spent their free time figuring out how animals are euthanized, how much to use on themselves, plotting ways to get their hands on it...

Try being the anxious daughter to a perfectionistic but insecure mother. You're one of the lucky ones if it has never occurred to you that mothers can be terrible bullies.

My mom was one of four sisters... whose mom was one of three sisters... That's a lot of unbalanced dysfunction to grow up into. I grew up with a dad who tried to get me to well adjusted and a mom who treated me like a broken girl, as opposed to a boy. They both wound up working against each other (not intentionally), and I was close to 40 before I would consider myself at a relatively well adjusted point in my life.

Can confirm, and I'm a lot older than 30. It's done huge, irrecoverable damage, caused me a lot of serious mental problems (recovering now from a year of serious crap that made me unable to work for a year). I'm actually pretty mentally robust at core, but that got beaten out of me (or, I should say, out of us). Memory and personality problems etc. Drug problems. Few life/sex partners because you're so wound up you can't deal with people normally and can react abnormally.

Not all bullying happens at school, and it's so much worse because you can't escape from it in the place you're supposed to be safe. You don't even realise it's abnormal because it is your normal. I'm not going to spell it out, you can read between the lines.

Has anything helped? 26, similar situation, have slowly lost my identity / personal narrative after years of school and work thousands of miles from my family.

WRT "...and work thousands of miles from my family" I don't think you understand. Read my last para carefully.

In answer, and this is risky as talking about drugs can be very misleading; give you too much hope they'll work for you, or perhaps just add to your woes.

* prozac removed the hideous clinical depression that was caused by what I went through. It was not a quick or easy process, and the removal still left a terrible after-effect that lasted many years. Something like that doesn't just disappear politely.

* Mushrooms helped resolve some issues, but not as much as MDMA

* MDMA. The first time I took it it showed my brain was another way to be. Something called 'happy' and 'relaxed'. I guess that's when I could start to become human. See another guy's comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21213649 but my experience was much later in life than his.

* The above, along with plenty of time. But life is very finite and I'm running out of road.

contrariwise:

* No form of talking therapy was of use. It is good for some people it just wasn't for me.

* Alcohol is a liability in these situations for me.

Using drugs worked somewhat for me but I don't know if they are appropriate for you. They certainly can add brand new dangers. In fact I feel maybe lack of human contact is the problem in your life? Some kind of talking therapy may be more helpful. Good luck.

Edit: One more thing that helped. It's too easy to focus on one's own situation but however bad things get, someone has it worse. The guys sleeping on the street in midwinter, those with agonising arthritis, there are many more and you will have met some... When it gets bad, remember what you don't have to deal with. It helped me, a little.

For me two things have helped a lot with self esteem/coming out of this kind of situation.

Firstly it is focusing on self improvement in a healthier way. I don't think about what I would like to improve or could do better so much as I focus on what I have been doing better. It is sort of not letting perfect be the enemy of good. Having an ideal version of yourself you aspire to is fine, so long as you recognize you won't ever be perfect, and the more you improve the more the mental ideal is likely to move. So instead of paying attention to how far away I am from my ideal self I instead focus on how I am (hopefully) a little bit closer than I used to be at regular intervals.

For me personally participating in activities where I can objectively measure improvement has been a big help in regard to the above. For example weight lifting is a form of exercise I find I enjoy a lot because I can measure it (more weight this week, more reps, etc).

The second was to focus on not feeling personally responsible for everything in life. I used to apologise to people if the weather was bad and they complained about it. Putting effort into not acting as if I should be responsible for everyone and everything helped.

The last thing is probably just a product of time, distance, and stability. I used to have a hard time trusting in good things when they happened because feeling good just meant I'd feel worse later. Having a stable life with good things in it for long enough means I'm not constantly on guard for the inevitable sucker punch from life... I still do occasionally just feel anxiety that something non-specific yet terrible is about to occur, but nowhere near as often as I used to. Directing some effort into taking pleasure in your life may help with that.

I am happy, successful, married, no complaints, super fortunate.

And there isn't a day that goes by where I don't think of the teasing and physical injuries I suffered in middle school. I have no doubt it affects things like career decisions and my reactions to violent scenes in entertainment media. I am literally afraid of having children because I don't want to witness a loved one go through anything similar (or worse, have them experience cyber-bullying, which I think would be way worse).

Me too, re:having children. my childhood abuse is the main reason I'm resistant to marrying and having kids.

I don't feel like "confidence" has much to do with it. In order to be successful, one must be willing to fail. As the saying goes, "The master has failed more times than the student has even tried". But if your every minor failure is met with overwhelming negative reinforcement then you learn that failure is bad and avoid it as much as possible.

I also kinda disagree with the "self-esteem" as a metric, but only because it seems to me that people try to solve that problem by telling people they're great and did good work even when they aren't and didn't. I think it is much more important for the message to be that failure isn't really a reflection of your worth as a person.

I believe confidence has everything to do with your willingness to try things that you might fail. You have to be confident that failure will not ruin you, and confident that you'll learn from your failures, and confident that the learning will lead to eventual success.

Self-esteem means believing (and having confidence) in your own abilities. That doesn't mean you people should say "you are great" for trying, but people can say "trying is useful" on the path to accomplishing what you set out to do.

Likewise if people with unchallenged confidence get to run things, bad things tend to happen and there is a difference in being confident and projecting it to others.

Understanding is often followed by humility.

> Likewise if people with unchallenged confidence get to run things, bad things tend to happen

They usually grow in the process and get ahead of the too careful and doubtful ones.

Throughout growing up I regularly thought other guys knew so much more things than me on various topics and often didn't dare to pitch in and felt like I couldn't contribute. Then most of the times, just a little later I realized how much they were just clumsily piecing together phrases they heard here and there but didn't really know what they were really talking about.

This includes topics like WWII history, computers, political ideology (communism, nazism), sex, sports, and all sorts of stuff they probably heard from their parents or older siblings.

An enthusiastic, confident kid (let's say 10-14 years) can just talk so much nonsense on and on without being disturbed in the slightest (adults tend to be more mindful of their own gaps of knowledge and are more afraid of embarrassment). But their peers won't know better and will be impressed.

Step by step it even continued to university. People would confidently talk about things I didn't know much about (AI stuff, Linux, various flamewars) and only later did I realize that they were mainly putting together pieces of arguments they heard here and there without any deep understanding.

I was too careful not to make mistakes and didn't hone my arguing and convincing skills nearly as much as these types of guys did.

What I want to say is that it's okay to be wrong sometimes. This is a message to specific types of people. Some people need to be more careful and introspective, but others are already too introspective and second guess themselves too much. For the latter, you need to relax and be okay with making rookie mistakes, getting called out etc. It's okay to discuss and give your opinion on things you're not fully knowledgeable about. Perhaps people will sometimes think you're stupid, but it's in active discussion how your opinions will get refined. Maybe you'll "cringe" about your early opinions after a few years, but it's still the quicker way.

I totally agree with this. I fall into the latter camp and generally stay quiet in order to avoid saying something wrong or foolish. But throughout life I’ve seen people surpass me who are initially less knowledgeable but who aren’t afraid to make mistakes or look foolish.

One most obvious case was when I studied in France for a semester. Even though my base knowledge upon arrival was higher than some of my peers, I was generally shy and embarrassed around native French speakers, while others who weren’t ended up getting a lot more experience and making a lot faster progress.

> They usually grow in the process and get ahead of the too careful and doubtful ones.

I don't know whether they "grow", as in "actually understand things", "acquire skills" etc if they're basically just using Markov chains to communicate (but maybe they are, maybe it's "fail forward", iterate over your mvp and turn it into a success product, but for communication). They often do get ahead with regard to social points, but at least in my experience, only very few of them are so good at bullshitting their way through life that they don't hit a wall. At some level, just having heard a word isn't enough to look competent, you also need to know what it means.

Middle management in most corporations proves you wrong. Knowing what you say is for lower levels, the ones that they rule over by whim. Leadership in those projects rarely knows things.

Sounds right. I was always talented and successful until 2014 when I started getting bullied, when I moved to SF. It’s been downhill since then. I’m now homeless with faded skills and vocabulary and no confidence. Feels like I’ll never get back to a normal life, and indeed at each job the bullying has become more intense and flagrant.

You need to work for normal company (not brogrammers startups). At most places, there is simply no bullying, so your problem will solve itself.

This is one reason I think big dreams and ambitions are a liability. Being a competent worker with a reasonable work ethic, putting money in your 401k, and making sure you’ve got other options if something goes wrong doesn’t leave a lot of openings for bullying. Nobody is going to bully Stanley from the Office and you’d look like a moron for trying.

> Nobody is going to bully Stanley from the Office

You can say that again!

https://tenor.com/view/the-office-stanley-jim-halpert-sumo-w...

Try something a bit further from the big city coasts... There's a lot of stability in Phoenix, Austin and Atlanta and not nearly as polarizing. Yeah some of the politics are a bit different if you're part of SF culture, but generally you can avoid it out here (I'm in Phoenix).

Phoenix in particular, regarding software jobs is mostly backend business work, with a surprising amount of line of business and banking work. Austin, from what I understand is heading more progressive, and Atlanta is some where in between. Definitely going to see less brogramming or "only progressive views allowed" cultures.

Psychologists have a term "self efficacy" -- as far as I remember from my graduate educational psychology courses, the best predictor of whether someone will succeed in learning something challenging is whether they believe they can do it.

Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-efficacy

While I agree... I do think there's something to be said for experiencing at least some negative interactions growing up. In the end, life isn't meant to be fair, but having the skills to work through, interact and negotiate in less than advantageous or fair scenarios is an important life skill.

I've interacted with enough millennial that are excessively entitled with a lot of ignorance to how free markets or capitalism works in practice.

edit: I'm not supporting persistent bullying, I experienced a lot of it through Jr HS and into HS.