My parents were odd and I worry they’ve made me odd

[Cheping]

Superficially I seem like a lovely person ( I know, get me ) but it is on a superficial level.

I struggle with friendships and always have. My parents were so bloody WEIRD about my friends - obsessed with me arguing with them, blaming me if I did, saying it was ‘too soon’ to go on sleepovers () micromanaging my friendships …

Now I struggle. I don’t deal well with some aspects of friendship and I tend to avoid when this happens. Also thanks to my parents I don’t have a ‘group’ from school which would be good. Not sure why I’m posting - just wondering if anyone else feels this!

I’m not really a group person, I tend to form a strong friendship with one or two people in a friendship group and treat the rest more like acquaintances. Thinking about the people who tend to be the butt of jokes in my friendship groups, it’s often the extraverted, visible ones who everyone feels they have a strong enough relationship with to be able to gently mock.
I think it’s cos there’s a sense (rightly or wrongly)that they have the confidence and self esteem to find it funny, not take it seriously.

People that pick on the perceived weaker or quieter members of the group aren’t good people, not people I’d seek out friendships with. Nasty, toxic behaviour. If you find yourself drawn to people like that over and over, I’d ask myself why.
(Work colleagues are different, obviously you don’t get a choice in that)

I feel like you have feelings to work through about your parents and how it’s affected your own sense of sense and self esteem. You sound really nice and sensitive, and you don’t have to live feeling like this.

I think friendships are something that can become easier later in life. Workplaces aren't always the best place either - though if colleagues are unsupportive, maybe chatting informally to a line manager is an option? Finding friends through mutual interests and shared activities is really a better route. While our parents do shape us - sometimes in ways that are problematic - unless they are genuinely abusive and toxic - they may also give us some values and skills that are useful. Perhaps oddity, as in being independent minded, can also be something to be celebrated?

@FrozenGhost your DCs are very young so this may be for later. Something I did was to strongly encourage activities outside of school.

Our county music service runs a Saturday music school which starts from early years. Children are encouraged to take part in different activities which are music based but not intensive music lessons.

This gave my DDs a different group of friends. Took the pressure off school friendships. Both DDs stayed at the music school becoming assistants until they 'aged out' and went off to university. Neither were particularly musical but enjoyed the atmosphere.

I think what’s interesting is that I didn’t struggle socially at all to start with. Primary school photos of me show me surrounded by friends, at parties and such like. As I got older things got trickier.

Now - it’s hard to say. I do know that whenever I join a ‘group’ through mums or through work or whatever it always seems to take a fairly sour turn. Not in the form of an argument or anything but I end up feeling on the periphery, feeling judged, feeling something not positive.

Few of us emerge unscathed from having been parented (Larkin expressed it more eloquently).

I'm the same. My parents have no friends at all and I have no friends.

Growing up, they didnt want people intheir house so I could never have friends over. They always hated people for no good reason. They werent involved in any community groups or sports groups and we werent allowed to go to any

I do feel that if they had been different and more encouraging, things would have been different.

I'm sad that I didnt get to play the team sports I wanted to play.

I'm just trying to make things different for my DC. My older DS is 9 and does have social issues. Having said that though, he does have a few close friends and knows lots of people. Hes in lots of clubs so mixes with different kids his age from different nearby schools as well which I think will help him have a different social life to the one I have.

My two children are high functioning autistics. I definitely am I tovk all the boxes but need to get assessed properly.
My father is autistic and abusive and a narcissist.
My mother is abusive and a narcissist.
My ex is a narcissist autistic and abusive

yes autism is genetic - doesn’t have to make you abusive etc though that’s a choice.

Me I’m a people pleaser and a rescuer- I will have people to stay for months whilst in a difficult situation. I’m a worrier and empathetic and I look at people and think why would they want to be friends with me me - look at me I have nothing absolutely nothing. So I give the shirt off my back. I now look at boundaries. And I stop offering so much and accept a friendship must be two way and it must cherish me too

counselling is your friend here

I do appreciate autism throws another thing into the mix but I don’t think that’s what it is here.

My parents did have friends. It’s not quite as simple as - socially awkward parents, socially awkward DD.

They did use punishments that used humiliation, I remember them inviting a school friend on a day out with us and then my dad smacking me for some reason - no idea what, I’m sure I wasn’t an innocent party in it but it just meant I never felt totally safe around him in particular. There was also a really nasty tendency for them and my brother to encourage other children to call me names - god knows why. They’d also make up stories about me, this was something that my dad was doing well into adult life.

So obviously I wasn’t happy at school or home. What worries me is that having worked hard to emerge from this some of the old awkwardness seems to still be on me, like stains on a much washed t shirt. And I can’t get them off.

I am the same OP. Very functional on the surface but more impacted by my childhood and my parents than I once thought. As I have aged, I have become odder! It doesn't bother me that much. In my case, I have come to realize that my mother was ND and my father had a lot of childhood trauma that was never dealt with and these greatly contributed to how they raised us.

I wouldn't describe my parents as massively weird (other families are always odd) but my Mum definitely has some kind of social anxiety going on which has been passed to me. You can count on one hand how many times we had friends over during my childhood & I do not remember meeting anyone at the park etc. Mum definitely took comfort that I was (her words) as naturally unlikeable as she saw herself.

I found myself on the periphery of groups & inwardly I'm still massively awkward but I had a bit of a pivotal moment where I decided I was a decent person, my mum was wrong & if people didn't like me they could take a running jump.

I do model behaviour of socially confident people I know - I used to genuinely think 'what would A or B say in this situation' but now it's much more natural.

I'm trying hard to model friendships & having fun for my DC. My boys have friends over, we do a little Christmas party for friends & kids, we have family over for BBQ and dinners... I always worry I'm doing it wrong, but inevitably it works out okay.

As PP have said, I think at some point you have to make a conscious decision to leave your families weirdness behind, embrace your own quirks and be brave & just be you. It's hard & tiring but you deserve it.

I was never the child who had friends around for tea and birthday parties and we never had or went on sleepovers either. My DM would say we didn't go on sleepovers as my Dad didn't know who who we would be staying with. That I now know is untrue because 1) my Dad wasn't a Dad who would voice his concerns and 2) he and my DM would know damn well the parents of the children we would have stayed with.

It was always just me and my sister. We both have one close friend we made when we were in the first year of comprehensive but that is it.

I wasn't allowed to go on a school outward bound weekend as a Junior as I had just come back from a fun school week at an education centre and was told "you would have been tired".

My cousins told us the other day we didn't have much freedom as they did and when I mentioned it to my DM she bizarrely said "I just wanted to live long enough so that you and your sister were old enough to look after yourselves" !

I've always thought my DM has been a worrier and she would really get annoyed if I would tell her to stop fussing. She has recently has been diagnosed in her late 70s as having anxiety. Obviously she has always had anxiety but has hidden it well under the guise of doing things "for the best".

please goggle inattentive ADHD and see if this applies.
My parents are kind and lovely but also odd. I have never seen my mum with a friend (she is about to turn 75 bless her) my dad has autistic traits (ie no eye contact and talks at you) although he likes people and has 'friends' although I must admit I have not seen him with one so I wonder if its more he knows people he visits or has hobbies with as they never get invited to the house.
There are 5 children in our family - two of us struggle with friendships which is not a huge surprise if you consider our role models...but the other three have masses of friends. My point being that you can come from the same parents but turn out differently in the end.
Perhaps get some counselling if you think it would help seek out someone who specialises in autism as they would know how to help with interpersonal relationships.

If things are taking a sour turn are you perhaps perceiving behaviour from them as negative that might not necessarily be so? We have a lovely woman at my work who always seems to be worried she's offended us and apologises for banter or missing a part of conversation etc. She also sometimes misinterprets what we are talking about as negative towards her and we have to explain that's it's not.

We have a nice supportive environment but I can see how in one that is less so that could get picked up on in a negative way and seen as a weakness.

I think if your parents deliberately were humiliating you its probably hard not to feel or appear guarded.

If you are like this your best bet imo is to stop caring what people think (hard as that may be) and just trust that people know your intentions and if they don't they are not your people.

I sympathise OP - my parents were part of quite a constricting religion so I was never allowed sleepovers, and never had anyone round to play. I was only once allowed to go to someone's house for tea in the whole of my time at school.

Personally I have concentrated on my work and this has been good as I can focus on something other than relationships, I actively try not to be "weird", I am definitely not part of the religious group my parents were in so that helps, I try to be friendly, but I still have the nagging doubts like you.

I’m not sure I want to go down the route of diagnosing myself or my long-passed parents with conditions, I genuinely don’t think I’m on any sort of spectrum, and I don’t feel my memories of my parents are reliable enough to say for sure whether they were or not. The drinking also meant that things were exacerbated.

I suppose that my issue is that because I don’t have this nice stable background my confidence is never great and I second guess myself a lot. I’ve just distanced myself from a friendship group because there was so much picking it was just no longer particularly enjoyable for me to spend time with them. But it does get me wondering about why that might be.

I identify with that @TokyoTen

Your parents weren’t weird so much as abusive. Am sorry they were unkind to you. You carry that unkindness now. I was thinking of your post it example. If I asked for one there would be much ribald laughter as I do always loose mine! The difference is I would laugh too and heartily believe all were laughing in fondness rather than malice. It’s your self esteem that needs to improve to allow your confidence to grow.

m I might not worry too much about big groups of friends - so often not what they look like from outside. Could you focus on building relationships with individuals/ small groups? I have quite a lot of friends but find I sometimes don’t get any new ones for ages then suddenly get a blooming of great people. It reminds me that if you are looking for friends you need fertile ground and it’s hard to predict where they spring from. If I look at work places I left one with no friends I wanted to keep (5 years there) , another with two, one I was at for just under a year provided four and my current place has quite a few. Keep open to friendship and keep working on you. It’s hard to get past being badly treated but you can do it.

In some ways they were quite abusive but in others they were very kind and generous and always seemed like lovely people on the surface - which is also my worry!

I don’t know. I wish I could say I was ‘normal’ - and I know no one is really but even if only on the surface it would be good.

Counselling has helped me OP, although not in the way I expected. I struggled for a long time with actually being listened to by an adult and seem as person in my own right with opinions, strengths and weaknesses and I think this stemmed from being brought up by people with crap boundaries. My relationships with friends were also intensely micromanaged by my parents and I have also really struggled with adult friendships. I have to be really careful with my own kids as I can wade in and do the same, and my kids hate it. So I have to have a word with myself and remember that they need space to learn to grow and manage these things in their own way.

So your fear is that you have turned into them? Or one of your fears is this? But you aren't them OP, you are your own person.

People are odd OP, not just you or your family.

You likely have low self esteem which is no wonder given how they treated you.

Please believe me that people from “normal” families such as without the drinking, smacking, put downs etc can feel odd and on the periphery too.

mum or toddler groups don’t help and can alienate anyone further.

You spend half your life being messed up by your parents and the other half messing up your kids. That is obviously a very simplistic version.

No, I don’t fear I am like my parents, but my worry is that I am able to put on a veneer of respectability and normality which people seem to be able to see through once they get too close.

I think a lot of what is said on this thread may boil down to neurodiversity. I have done some counselling courses although I am not a counsellor. I found it to be lacking in ND understanding and I do worry there is a tendency to over-analyse our upbringing. Not to say that counselling doesn't have its place, I personally found aspects of it to be self-indulgent and counterproductive at times. I think we need a balance between understanding ourselves and getting on with it.

Following with interest