To be green with envy at people who had 'good enough' parents and didn't suffer abuse as children?

[WannaRant]

Just that.

People who didn't have their souls shattered as children and were shown that they were of value, were loved and that they mattered, even if not all the time.

Its difficult, if not impossible, to try to retrain your goddamn brain from scratch as an adult and a parent, especially when your life is already stressful due to lack of support, financially due to low attainment, and emotionally due to all the trauma you've suffered.

I'd never wish my life experiences on anybody but why me?!!

Counselling it's pivotal to healing. It isn't a quick fix but allows us to talk about our experiences until they have no power over us.
It's a door to safely go inside the darkest corners of our life experiences and heal from there.
It's about coming to terms with our past and to forgive for our own sake.
Forgiveness it's a selfish act. We forgive to let go at all the negativity, all the pain and sorrow.

I’ve just finished therapy and it’s chsnged how I look at my childhood. I’d had counselling before but it did not work. This time I found a very experienced and qualified person who specialises in childhood issues.
I can honestly say she “got” me very quickly and it’s changed my life. I don’t feel anger any more and I’m able to control the anxiety, sonething I never thought I’d ever be able to do.
I’ve waited until my 50s to sort myself out and I wish so much I’d been able to do it much sooner, but it’s never too late!

Would you be willing to try another counsellor?

I hear you. I've found emdr really beneficial for me in a way no other treatment was.

I can understand you. Trauma and abuse can really have long lasting effects. Reading through the "how do kids know they're loved thread" hit me. I never had any of that, even simple things like being read to. I can remember the shock of being slapped for the first time when I was just 4. Growing up was just very very painful. I didn't feel safe at home and I never learnt what a real healthy relationship looked like cue falling for a unstable abusive boy.

I've been severely depressed since I was 14 (now 27), it's only with intensive twice a week therapy for close to 2 years that helped me finally move past all of that and feel happy .

I know exactly how you feel. I would often wonder how my life could have turned out if I'd had "normal" parents and felt safe as a child.

I was one of those kids who always had clothes too small, holes in my shoes etc. I can still remember going back to school after every Christmas, my classmates excitedly discussing what new toys they had while I used to lie and pretend. I never got caught out because I wasn't allowed anyone over to play anyway. People can say money doesn't make up for having neglectful parents. Whilst that's true, at least if I'd had material things I wouldn't have needed to feel so ashamed all the time. But my father preferred to drink the money away.

My dad kept a shotgun in his wardrobe (we lived in the country) and I always remember my mum telling me at around age 9 that she was scared he was going to one day shoot us all!

I'm not great at self care. Even now. I haven't ever managed to have a successful adult relationship with a man. My one happiness is my DC's have turned out well and happy, and I have a great relationship with them.

It truly sucks. No kid should ever have to feel that way and yes it takes years to recover from, if you ever do. Finally, at nearly 50, I feel I'm most of the way there but it's all a bit late really!

I had fantastic parents, my DP had a terrible controlling mother who even though she had been dead nearly 30 years has had a debilitating impacts. DP has used my parents has their role model and has not repeated their mother’s mistakes

for you OP.

Neither of my parents were abusive per se, but I did have a mother who constantly smacked me across the head whilst telling me I was stupid even for doing the most trivial things. Neither parents really showed much of an interest. Another poster said about being taught about hygiene as well - I was never taught to wash my hands after the toilet or brush my teeth before bed when I was little (obviously I do now but had years of dental problems!) and neither cared one jot about my education. I was left sunbathing at 10 years old with no sun cream on and left to look after myself when I suffered heat stroke later that day. Also, nearly drowned on a family holiday at about 6 years old after wandering off by myself and ending up in the deep end.

I now have a DS and a wonderful DH and am determined to do a much better job with him. DM has r deemed herself and loves DS to bits. My Dad is a complete arsehole and has washed his hands of all of us (including his first, and only Grandson!)

I’m conditioned to think a certain way. That I’m not good enough. I’m trying very hard to break the cycle.

Yup. I think I would have thrived much more career wise , confidence wise, in relationships with men, everything ... had I not suffered years of abuse from my own mother and step father. Is only now (I'm 33 and happily married now) that I look back on my adolescence / twenties and think "gosh you poor poor lost girl".

I will never, ever let my DC feel like I did x

I’m really sorry OP. Negative messages about yourself instilled so early in life are incredibly damaging, but not irreparable. If your brain has been trained in one way then it can be retrained in another. It’s possible, but it’s a slow, arduous and painful process.

I’ve been in the situation you describe. I was fortunate enough to have a lovely mother but my father was a cold, callous and systematic abuser. I internalised his hateful messages about myself without the smallest idea I had done this. You’re right about the counselling: years of this didn’t help. It was specialised trauma therapy that changed things for me: specifically EMDR therapy for cPTSD. And it’s been life changing. I hope you find similar help and it enables you to let go of your painful past. Susan Forward’s book ‘Toxoc Parents’ was also incredibly helpful. Sending you 💐

I think it's what you make of it. My mother was incredibly cruel. I learned some of the most valuable lessons in my life from that woman. It was unpleasant at the time buty life has been greatly enriched and I have become a much better person as a result of the things she did. A lot of it will depend on external factors. Friends, teachers, romantic partners etc. I don't think that having abusive parebts/parent is always a bad thing. It depends on the severity of abuse and the support you have in dealing with it. I certainly think that experiencing a little bit of abuse in your formative years is beneficial with the right support, it helps prevent mistakes in adulthood.

Use this as a learning opportunity and surround yourself with good people and never do to others what your parents did to you. Don't let the suffering be for nothing.

What you went through sounds terrible and I’m sorry you had to deal with that. You deserved more from your parents and they obviously let you down.

I do think YABU though, to think that good parents mean not experiencing horrible abuse. Yes it gives you a better start in life but lots of people are abused and hurt by people outside their family home.

I’ve known a few people who grew up in wonderful homes and still had horrible things happen to them.

Your life hasn’t been fair but (hard as it is) try not to be angry at the world for it.
There are people who will never suffer like you, and others who will suffer far worse. It’s not fair.

Xxx

I would've loved a 'normal', happy childhood but it wasn't what I got but it did help me to take those lessons and do the polar opposite with my kids.

I deeply feel for you . I don't think the pain and feeling of loss ever goes away, although counselling/medication/relationship/spirituality can help managing/containing it. I feel I learned a lesson from my past (namely being determined to do right by my dcs) but sometimes feel as if I contaminate them with the residues of my anxiety, anger, pain that I still feel, and on a bad day some simple tasks like getting DCs ready for school can feel like the most overwhelming situation as my nervous system is still on high alert after years of being exposed to the rage of my mother (she would flip several times a day, screaming, hitting, kicking, throwing heavy items. I luckily never got seriously injured but the ambulance came twice to take my father into hospital after two of her rages. He weirdly enough totally enabled her. When my mum didn't rage she would totally neglect me (i dont even think she ever fed me a single bottle as a baby, my gm did that), until that moment when she would wheel me out in front of neighbours to demonstrate what a loving caring mother she was.) I luckily have a lot in my life to be grateful for that has happened despite of my parents (most of all 2 wonderful dcs) but the sense of having lost out/sense of deep pain never really goes away fully. I see it as playing my part in a story of 'redemption' as i hope that at least my grandchildren will hopefully experience a 'normal' loving upbringing.

YANBU.

I'm finally at the point where I have been able to forgive mine, because I know they were both very damaged in their childhoods. BUT, I often wonder what my life would have been like if I'd had loving parents, and what my brain would have been like.

It's very, very hard, isn't it.

Thank you all for your posts. I agree with everything written. Growing up in a violent home with no place of safety and no one to protect me has been a life sentence of physical, mental and emotional problems. I feel very hard done by, having no feelings of self worth to pass on to my children. I suffer from lifelong digestive problems, now fibromyalgia, complex PTSD etc. As I am getting older I am now claustrophobic, and have late onset asthma. I am physically exhausted from trying to drag myself to function day-to-day. I agree with Albert Camus that "nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal".

There must be some spark of hope in me because I am still here and trying. Maybe one day I will find that place in the sun. Today, I have been on You Tube listening to Stevie Wonder singing "There's a place in the Sun" and weeping for this burden I am carrying.

.

YANBU

It is so hard to stop hearing that nagging doubt that you are simply not good enough

It impacts me from choosing what to wear to writing an essay to fretting about work the constant lack of confidence in myself is draining

I hide it very well and manage it better that when I was younger

WannaRant you have suffered complex trauma and the reason counselling hasn't worked is because your counsellor didn't know how to work with someone who has experienced what you have.

You have researched the effect of childhood abuse on the developing brain and you are right that the effects are lifelong however if you can access a clinician with real expertise in treating complex trauma, things can get a LOT easier. It might include PTSD but complex trauma is more than just PTSD.

Hugs to you. Please look into this and go to your GP, you have a right to access this treatment, and it is available.

These responses help in the knowledge I'm not alone. Thank you all and sincere commiserations to fellow sufferers .

I've had EMDR for the SA as we had no time to cover anything else, it took me long enough to be able to bring it up. It made me realise that I hadn't been half as affected by it than how my mother dealt with it at the time. It's as my therapist used to say, like peeling off the layers of an onion.

I was re-traumatised all over again when I was ostracised by my entire family on my mother's orders. Didn't want the dirty little secret that she thought I'd remembered again to get out, not that I'd ever forgotten, just disassociated from it. The childhood stuff was nothing compared to that. If it had been my choice to go NC it may have been healing but I would never have made that choice I was so desperate for her to live me, so she did me a favour although intended as a punishment. Disassociation is a very helpful tool as I know now I've done it automatically when I've had several traumatic events as an adult. It took me 10 years to start grieving for my 2nd child who died from an undiagnosed abnormality at birth. Floodgates opened while I was in therapy about my mother.

It's just so hard to alter your way of thinking and my about yourself when it's been made clear by people who should have cared even just a tiny bit, that you're basically worthless and crazy to boot! It was a suspicion I'd had all my life so they just confirmed it!

Back to the GP for me then. I wish I could start drinking sometimes but alas, my father was a heavy drinker before he left, and I remember being terrified of the violent arguments so I cant bring myself to drink a bloody drop, grrrr!

These comments are the very reason I work with teenagers in care.

Oh no, Wanna, so sorry to hear about your loss! NC with abusive family is so important but so difficult, as so many persons think it's OK to ask when I will bloody visit my parents, as they must feel lonely and surely have a right to be visited by gcs and surely every mother loves their child, and of course they all make mistakes but one must forgive!!! Actually, no. My mother is very happy to tell me that she never felt love towards me, was embarrassed by me when she (constantly) compared me to other children, and told me so in their presence. She even manages to hold me responsible for it. She will see me cuddling with dc and wistfully say: I wish you had been as cute as dgs. It was so hard for me to have a child that made it so impossible to love. For the record, I was extremely eager to please, well behaved, and academically gifted. So no, just having her around is like waiting for a nuclear attack going off. Why won't other people not understand that a significant amount of parents are just evil, and that they have to side with the abused child, not the 'lonely' parent? Rant over

Sending hugs op. EMDR has really helped me too.

It's amazing when I look at all the things I wasn't taught- manners, coping skills, relationship skills, financial skills, a sense of self worth at home, and I think of all the years post 18 that I spent learning these. I feel well behind my peers who were given loving, supportive, stable upbringings.

I hope I'm equipping my DC with the fundamentals but I feel drained from trying so hard to get it right. All the best to you, you're not alone

Hi WannaRant and all the other poor souls who have suffered

It is crap
Trying to get up off the sofa,trying to face the day, oh my goodness IT IS SO HARD!

I know every single one of you who has written here feels so very alone. It was nasty. Horrendously abusive. Life is not worth living.
I have had CBT, and am going through EMDR but I still feel like I did before. I don’t want to be alive.
It is horrendous that our supposed parents take NO responsibility whatsoever for what they did and blame it on the child. That is an outrage.
I do not know the answers, I am sorry to say, but I am sending loving thoughts to each and every one of you who has suffered at the hands of abusive parents. Some have written here,some will just look on and read, but cannot reply as it is far too painful.

The sun is shining here today. I have to make a change otherwise I will still be living in the hell that is surviving. Surviving. Not thriving. Not living. So unbelievably cruel. I think it’s the lack of acknowledgment of what we have all been through which makes life so very hard.
I know these are just words on a screen. But they come from a person, just as damaged, but I wish you all the best of love and care for your futures. I wish you healing, lightness, and peace. That is so very important.🌸💐🌸💐

oprahfan what a lovely, genuine post. I too am sending you sunny thoughts x

YANBU. It’s so hard. I have had to spend a lot of money on private therapy just to be able to function. Hang in there