This 18-year-old girl has severe anxiety and ADHD, but she didn’t get diagnosed until she grew older. Back when she was just a kid, she would constantly cry, and her mom was exasperated trying to figure out how to get her to knock it off.
She cried because she was unable to properly process her emotions, as ADHD makes that more difficult, and so crying was her form of self-expression.
Finally, her mom confronted her and just demanded to know why she could not stop sobbing her eyes out, so she told her the truth from her perspective.
“Eventually she asked me why I cried all the time. I told her that I’m a princess, and princesses cry (every single Disney princess cries at one point or another),” she explained.
“So, my mom came up with a new princess story that talked about the consequences of crying all the time. The plot line was this: Princess Ana loved playing with her friends. She started crying all the time and now her friends didn’t want to be around her anymore.”
“Her fairy godmother came and basically told her if she stopped crying so much her friends would come back to her. She stops crying all the time and has fun with her friends again.”
Her mom invented the princess story in an effort to curb her crying, as her mom figured the waterworks were for getting more attention.
She is currently in therapy and she shared the princess story with her therapist, who suspects that her ADHD was what caused her to cry so hard.
The princess story caused her to stifle her emotions, and instead of trying to discuss her feelings, to this day, she keeps them bottled up on the inside.
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She hates being vulnerable, and the princess story did her more harm than good – it emotionally damaged her, and she’s still dealing with it as an adult.
“The thing is, this story is my mom’s pride and joy. To her, it succeeded in getting a child who cried for attention to stop crying,” she continued.
“She’s even thought about publishing it. I don’t know how to tell her that the story isn’t a good thing and my anxiety is spiking thinking of all the worst-case scenarios of what will happen if I bring this up.”
How do you think she can tell her mom that the princess story hurt her as a kid instead of helped her?
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