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When I read this:  High ConscientiousnessOverachievement: workaholic absorption in job or cause to the exclusion of family, social, and personal interests; compulsiveness, including excessive cleanliness, tidiness, and attention to detail; rigid self-discipline and an inability to set tasks aside and relax; lack of spontaneity; overscrupulousness in moral behavior. I understood.

Its a personality-type characterization of a specific kind of masochist, my kind.

I was a very sheltered and over-protected child in many ways.  I traveled frequently and had cultural and educational opportunities most will never know, but it was always under tightly controlled and orchestrated circumstances.  This isn’t to be critical of my father, what good parent doesn’t protect his child?

But, the thing is, I had very little exposure to popular culture – so when I did experience it, it had a lot of impact … and my impressions were almost always formed by a misrepresentation of fact and/or reality.  

Case in point, masochism.  I thought a masochist was defined as she was by the punk-rock culture of the late 70s and early 80s … and that certainly didn’t have anything to do with me!  I was nothing like *Those People* 

In truth I wasn’t, but they weren’t masochists, particularly my kind [per se] either!  

I was on a shopping trip with my mother in NYC when I was about twelve, and for some reason that escapes me now we found ourselves in The Village.  There we saw a young couple – both were dressed in dark leather clothing and had a very unkept look about them.  She wore a collar and they didn’t walk arm-in-arm like the couples in my world did; he walked with his hand in the middle of her back *pushing* her along.  

I, of course, could not take my eyes off of them.  I was intrigued beyond measure by everything about them.  My mother, aghast, said: “Elizabeth, well brought up young ladies do wear collars, nor do they stare at those who do.”  

This memory is 30+ years old and it is still so vivid it could have occurred yesterday!  My mother’s reprimand had an enormous impact on me … 

I knew that I was somehow like the young couple in The Village, and I also knew  this was unacceptable to my mother.

My neurotic self injuring behaviour that up ’til then had been very mild, became an enormous part of my unconscious coping mechanism after that shopping trip and it continued for decades completely unchecked.  

Almost three years ago, when I was ready for admissions and disclosures, my mother was accepting, kind and truly wonderful … and that means all the world to me now.  

A Psychiatrist herself, she helped me in ways my therapist could not …

Just because she finally understood me, her daughter, the little girl who had been too much for her to handle … 

I finally made sense to her … and neither of us, turns out, failed the other.