I recognise myself as a child in your daughter. I started out fiesty, self-assured, wanting to carry out my own will, and not really understanding why anyone would try to stop me. I don't think I really grasped that I was a child (despite my parents being strict disciplinarians), but more than that, I didn't see a way out... I didn't realise that my life wouldn't always be a battle of control and that one day I would be the master of my own life.
Because of this, I had an immense amount of internal rage and frustration. I felt trapped and helpless.
I had no way to articulate what I was feeling or why I was feeling it, and the more I acted out the more I could feel my parents withdrawing emotionally from me, and/or (in my eyes) trying to 'break' something in me. The message (in my child mind) was very clear - there was something seriously wrong with me!
It was then that a long period of depression started (around the age of 12), and my battle with my parents turned inward (they had shut down by this point anyway), and I began trying to 'break' myself down with long streams of mental self-abuse, and later physical self-abuse. I saw myself as flawed, and the cause of my own rejection.
As an adult, I have overcome a lot of my own self-hatred, but don't think I will ever be able to fully fix what I did to my own self-esteem, nor feel confident enough to ever again fully express the internal person that I really am.
When I look back on how things might have been done differently when I was a child (not saying this would necessarily apply to your daughter, but might be worth considering) - I think it would have helped if my parents had:-
- Acknowledged to me that they knew I was finding life frustrating, encouraged me to talk about how I was feeling, and sympathised.
- Reminded me that life would not always be the same for me, and that one day I would grow into an adult and then would be able to make all my own decisions (seems obvious, but this just didn't really occur to my child mind!)
- Told me that their job of looking after me was just to help me learn what I needed to learn to be an adult in the future, and that the outside world has rules for adults too.
This is just my own theorising, but I really think knowing there was a light at the end of the tunnel would really have helped me, that I wasn't 'trapped' forever, and that my parents were trying to understand and explain my own struggle to me (because I couldn't understand it), and that they were my teachers, not my jailers. It was essentially a struggle for personal freedom.