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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I’m not trying to be overbearing, but now there’s the elephant in the room of knowing that they had she horrific experiences for 17 years and she pretends that it was this idyll except a couple people who were jealous that her mom was a nurse and their mom was on welfare or worked in a grocery store. Knowing that isn’t at all what her childhood is really like, we’re all questioning her ability to be honest about things that bother her. Is this her regular coping mechanism or a one-off? She’s told Stepson so many stories about the moves and being a new kid, and never mentioned that they moved for their safety! That is huge. [/quote]

OP, assuming all you have the facts right, which is on its own a [i]huge[/i] assumption that I'm not sure you can make, what you know boils down to this: your future stepdaughter grew up with bad racism, so bad that it forced the family to move. She has internalized it less as racism and more as classism. Maybe she's right, maybe she's half-right (it was both race and class), maybe she's wrong. But that's how she interprets it now, years later. And you want her to view it differently....why?

And by the way, how do you know exactly what she "never mentioned" to her soon to be husband? How can you be confident that stepson is telling you every little detail here?

Can you imagine if this were about some kind of other trauma like a sexual assault? If she said that she had been physically assaulted, but you found out there was a sexual component that she is repressing in order to not relive the trauma, would you be "questioning her ability to be honest" and demanding that she tell you all the gory details?

I mean, seriously, this poor girl who lived a tough upbringing is about to be part of your family, how about you just support and love her before you go around policing whether or not she's given you enough details.[/quote]

This is exactly why I’m concerned. I am a survivor of almost a decade of childhood sexual abuse by a family member. I know that secrets make you sick. I don’t love her any less, but I’m not sure that I can ever again take at face value her statements that everything is okay. By her profession, she had a rougher 2020 than most of us and has always said it wasn’t so bad, mostly complained about her commute. [/quote]

OP, you are a survivor of horrific childhood abuse and you do not understand why someone isn't exactly eager to open up about their own traumas!? Do you even hear yourself? You're concerned that you can't take her statements at face value because she doesn't complain as much as you would if you had her job?

Honestly, what do you want from this girl at this point? It sounds like you won't be happy until you have her break down in tears because you've pushed her beyond the breaking point demanding that she frame her OWN experience of trauma in the precise way that YOU want her to. Please leave the poor thing alone and find a way to be happy that she is able to move forward in her life despite the difficulties she's experienced both in her childhood and her job in 2020. Stop trying to make her life worse.[/quote]

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