My first word was 'papa' - 'dad' - my father read somewhere that if you whisper in the ear of a sleeping baby words, then in this way you can teach the child to speak. That's how he taught me my first word (although usually for the Russians it's 'mama'- 'mom'.) As it turned out later, that wasn't the end of his experimenting with whispering in my ears; and when I became a teenager and started to fight for my independence, he and my mother began to apply this method for my upbringing. Needless to say that what they whispered to me were only prohibitions (someday, maybe I'll tell you what exactly they whispered: I don't think this can already make me vulnerable.)
Both of my parents were school teachers and both believed that everything can be achieved by suggestion. But in practice, the result of suggestion may not be as expected: I had anxiety attacks and fits of inexplicable, at first glance, fear. It was the fear of people (as a side effect of some suggestions that were whispered to me.) It started in the spring of 1980 when I was fifteen. Because of this fear, I tried to leave the house as little as possible, which was only welcomed by my parents. Increasingly, I found myself being overwhelmed by a flood of thoughts that I couldn't stop, probably this was because I couldn't fulfil myself in real life, so it became hard for me to concentrate. Naturally, I had problems with my peers, if only because I've always been an introvert and even a narcissist, but this was rather the result of my condition, not the cause. I understood that something was wrong with me, but I didn't know what exactly - it was only in 1982 I learned from a medical book that I had some kind of neurosis.
It's interesting that I heard several times what they whispered - the parents, especially the mother, weren't always careful in this - but hypnotized by the faith in them, I couldn't understand what was going on. One way or another, until the spring of 1984, I managed to hide my condition from all; the main reason was that I knew the parents wouldn't have understood me: they both believed a teenager cannot have any sophisticated emotional experiences (this was because they themselves were both emotionally immature) and that all my troubles came from mine not following their guidance. Otherwise, it was a typical helicopter parenting with obsessive care and constant control so that I became a classical hikikomori.
But in 1982, when I finished school, started working, and became more or less independent, my neurosis seemed to be turned off, it was as if I'd got into a new role, and it took a lot of my parents' effort and time to put things back the way they were supposed to be. Thus, in 1984, I already had to spend a lot of money on taxis because of the fear of public transportation - in fact, it was still the same fear of people - I contacted a psychiatrist and was diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder, and then, as I understand (in the USSR such diagnoses were not told to patients), it was upgraded to psychasthenia. I was hospitalized though it was a hospital with a regimen like in a sanatorium - there was one on the Volokolamsk highway in Moscow - despite the fact that the parents had been constantly spying on me, it was a complete surprise for them what they learned from the psychiatrist. I was prescribed a course of treatment with antidepressants (namely, with amitriptyline), but not liking the effect the pills had on me, I soon started to spit them out: hiding them under the tongue, you could deceive the nurse. When in the autumn being discharged from hospital, I told the doctors that I felt better although in fact I felt even worse realized that if I didn't get over myself like in 1982, nothing would help me anymore.
In October 1984, I took a vacation and went to our garden site (something like a dacha) a hundred kilometers from Moscow. There I did probably the main thing of my life: I suppressed my fears and promised myself to be different. Although the psychiatrists kept saying that it was impossible to get rid of a neurosis on my own, I managed to do this because I knew that the problem was me, that I had to change myself completely, and that there was no room for self-compassion. Actually, it was an improvised Zen practice: I just denied any of my thoughts; I just had no other choice since any my line of thinking very soon ended up with nightmares. After that, for seven years I actually didn't have any phobias. Instead of doing physics and maths - I was good in it - I became a bulldozer and excavator driver, which was extremely exotic for a Muscovite: it was thought that these professions were only suitable for provincials, but in the Soviet times, such work was also an opportunity to go to the North and thus to make money (for me it was a symbol of independence) and even to create yourself. During these seven years, I felt practically healthy, but I still was living with my father.
My condition became so good that I began to forget my previous experience and broke some of the promises I'd made to myself - whether this was the reason, or just a superstition, but as I already wrote in 1991 when I turned 26, I attracted the attention of a Christian sect, and practically the second time was repeated the situation with brainwashing, which made me superstitious, but this time it was already under the guidance of professionals though the executor was still my father. (As the USSR collapsed, all sorts of missionaries and other quacks from around the world flocked there although dirty tricks of missionaries are not only a problem of Third and Second world countries, and every time we learn about someone's 'demonic possession' and its 'miraculous' healing by religious rites this, I'm confident, should be the reason for starting a criminal investigation.)
I was lucky this time too: I was saved by the the certainty that if there is a god, he/she is within, all the rest is fraud. However, how I managed to escape, I think, no one understood. On the other hand, without this experience, I would never have realized what my parents had done to me before although everything was pretty obvious - I even remember the most important things as if I'd known that there was something behind them - I just didn't dare to see things as they were. Thanks to this experience, I also gave up smoking.
I slipped through their fingers abroad and ever since I've been living as I'd dreamed about in my early youth; I completely broke with my past, became carefree and stress-resistant - it turned out that left on my own, I'm a workaholic and can concentrate for hours - and I never again break promises I've made to myself although this might be just a superstition.
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