My childhood was horrific but also amazing

[MixedUpchildhood]

AIBU to feel so absolutely confused by this ?

I’ve been having therapy for over a year now and I can’t work out anything around these issues. I think even my therapist is frustrated at me. I was horribly abused - probably 80% severe emotional abuse and 20% physical abuse. I was always on edge , always on high alert BUT :

I had SO many toys I always got what I asked for at birthdays / Xmas / Easter.

Christmas was always magical.

A few times a year there would be odd days where my mother was lovely to me instead of cruel and I remember every single one.

We had plenty of food and treats, got taken out to places (under extreme threats to not say or do anything out of line).

When I look back I see all the good things, the nice times and the days I was treated well despite the majority being hellish. In some ways it would be easier if it had all been awful. I don’t know how to deal with it and my therapist is telling me it wasn’t real but it was real as some times were genuinely good ?

It's called cognitive dissonance. It was life changing for me when I realised there was a term for it. Your brain is trying to accept two contradictory things at the same time. One is that your childhood was abusive and painful. The other is that your childhood was full of happy days. It literally messes with your mind.

Think of women in situations with domestic violence, whether the man punches them in the face and then tells her he loves her.

I am so sorry you went through that. I had a terrible childhood as well and it takes an awful long time to get over it. 💐

I had a practically identical childhood to you OP ❤️

Find this very relatable. It’s so confusing isn’t it.

I hear you! mine wasn’t physical abuse just mental and emotional neglect but we also had everything we needed and all the toys etc you could dream of. The two just “don’t go together”

But by focusing on the positives your brain is trying to protect yourself by blocking out all of the negatives.

You are disassociated from the trauma.

Life isn't black and white, and people aren't all-good or all-bad. Accepting this and realising that even the worst people and situations might have some good in them might help. Benefit finding is a very well known aspect of healing from trauma. Surprised your therapist is trying to polarise you into a certain view of your own childhood instead of helping you see that it had some good bits and some bad bits, because you can't heal if you accept an exaggerated lie in either direction. Although I suppose cynically if you don't get any better, that's great for your therapist's bottom line. I'd be finding another therapist tbh.

Do you actually have to pick one or the other?

Maybe it was both horrific and amazing. Maybe you can feel good and thankful about your good memories and toys and the times when your parents tried hard to do right by you, and OK that you enjoyed those things, without that needing to deny that for much of the time they did not succeed in treating you well and have caused you harm.

It is OK to have conflicting feelings & memories given you were treated in conflicting ways.

It seems to me that the good stuff is literally real in that it did happen, but perhaps it wasn't a realistic reflection of your usual situation or the usual relationship you had with your family - and that is fine to acknowledge too.

Do you perhaps still feel that you will be in trouble/bring shame or embarrassment to your family if you don't project the perfect image, even to your therapist or yourself (given what you have written about days out)?

Your parents showering you with stuff doesn't mean they weren't abusive. They were probably the type that put on a good display to the outside world, which would have insured you never got any help from outsiders. Some abusive parents are like that.

I think my therapist is trying to get me to realise that the good things / days were not genuine ? That is was mind games and planned by my mother to keep me unsure and destabilising me all the time , and I can see how that is probably true but I’m drawing on memories from when I was very young for some and to me in those moments it was genuine happy times so yes I can see it may not be real now as an adult but the memories don’t seem to change for me ? If that makes sense , I can’t seem to recategorise them as ‘bad’ or not real .

I think it's actually quite easy to remember a traumatic childhood in this way, simply because the trauma is no longer happening. It all happened years ago and our brains sort of forget the enormity of the pain and the suffering that was endured at the time. A classic case of looking back with rose-tinted spectacles, I guess?

I have done the same, OP - but I just remind myself of why the good memories shouldn't overshadow the bad ones.

Emotional and physical abuse cannot be mitigated by material abundance, if it could you wouldn’t feel the need to be in therapy now.

Parents who aren’t abusive would never only offer materialistic love, and that’s why it’s easy to raise an emotionally healthy child in an ordinary household without lots of money.

A few times a year there would be odd days where my mother was lovely to me instead of cruel and I remember every single one.

I was thinking this the other day. My childhood was blissful but there were rare occasions where I'd get an unfair bollocking or my mum would blow her top and those are the days I remember, becaise they were the exceptions.

Same same.

The truly good things were good though - the experiences, skiing, horse riding, caving, going out bat or badger watching, freedom to play and explore..

Trips to amazing places and getting to talk to and spend time with some very interesting people.

That doesn't make the verbal abuse, the terror, the hitting and frankly, torture over food OK. It doesn't make those things 'not abusive' but equally the abuse doesn't mean that the good things weren't good.

I understand for some people, the 'amazing good times' actually weren't, they were just in comparison, dramatically better than the abuse but were in fact normal things - I experienced those too of course.

I wonder why your therapist thinks they understand why your mother did this, and whether their explanation is correct.

It could have been calculated game-playing. It could also have been different but genuine behaviour, with patterns arising from substance abuse, a mental health crisis, a slippery slope effect of allowing herself bad behaviour, her own perception of what Christmas etc should be.

I don't know if it makes any difference to you, why it was like this, but I always find it difficult to engage with people who are certain about things that don't seem to admit of certainty.

I don't see why you shouldn't be able to consider the good times as good and not part of some overarching masterplan. Most people don't have masterplans. If your therapist's description seems wrong it's not minimizing the bad times to acknowledge that. I hope you'll get the comfort you need.

Sending you love OP.

I'm thankful to have never experienced abuse from family, but I have a similar difficulty reconciling other things in my life so I can relate a little bit. It's so weird isn't it? It feels really fucked up to say some things were amazing.

Personally, I think those experiences were 'true' and you should be able to enjoy those memories. It is just you can look at them with 'multiple lenses' now. I hope your therapist is showing you that one way to understand them is through that prism of abuse. But that shouldn't replace what you think about them, I think trying to do that is not a good approach at all to be honest - there's no single right way to think about anything, ever! It hopefully goes alongside it as another way to look at it, and at different points in your life you're going to need to draw on those different perspectives.

I think your therapist could be wrong.

My childhood was very difficult due to my mum's moods. I have no idea what was behind them, whether it was bi-polar, hormonal, or just her nature. She could get incredibly angry and physically abusive, or go silent for days. My brother and I lived on the edge, dreading the next bad mood.

But when she was up, we had some wonderful days, experiences, and holidays. She had loads of friends and our house was busy with interesting and fun people (who obviously didn't see the other side of her). I loved that. There are bits of my childhood that I'm grateful for, as well as the bits that (since her death) my brother and I find ourselves unloading about and which bring back the bad stuff that I put away after I left home.

I'm not 'pretending' that there were good times. There actually were. And that was our lives. A kind of roller coaster, but we could rarely see the rapid descents until they happened.

@WiddlinDiddlin , if I had a sister, you could be her. Your childhood sounds exactly like mine

OP I have had a similar conversation with a therapist and I stood my ground. It took me decades after the conversation to actually understand the dynamic or what the therapist was clumsily trying to get at. Now I’m not saying your mother was or wasn’t doing the nice stuff to cover up the bad, my mum didn’t, my mum just didn’t and still doesn’t recognise the abusive behaviours we endured. In recent years I’ve come to understand her narcissism and how she was essentially responding to my grandmothers behaviour towards her (not narcissistic but she got the brunt of my GM wishing she’d done more with her life and that involved fists, parenting her own siblings and lots of housework or fear of her mothers wrath). I don’t blame my mother for her personality disorder and I still love her but I accept my childhood was a mixture of abuse and genuine good times. My mum didn’t give us nice times because she was trying to put on a face for others or sweeten us, she genuinely meant those times and she can’t remember or recognise her abuse as being abusive because it’s how she grew up too. That doesn’t excuse her behaviour towards us but it’s never as black and white as MN or even therapists like to make out. We all have to find our own peace with our pasts.

don’t tarnish your good memories to suit the comments of a therapist who wasn’t there but also be sure your therapist isn’t seeing something within what you say that you’re unable or unwilling to recognise. Keep an open mind and if your therapist continues to try to manipulate you find another.

I hear you.

Took me so long to face the reality that the times they were pleasant were just part of the intermittent reinforcement game, that it was all contrived and manipulative. It was a system designed to confuse and keep me caught in going back for more and trying to make it better. Honestly, when the penny finally dropped, with the help of a good therapist, it was liberating.

And despite the violence and emotional sadism, I do have good memories, warm memories and that’s ok. I don’t take those memories to mean anymore that they may have been struggling or were just hurt people doing their best or that everyone is a mixture of good and bad. I have no illusions that some people have absolutely no conscience. I enjoy and am grateful for the good memories because they show I am normal and ordinary and can enjoy life, good times, nice things.

Really good luck to you. Take a therapy break if you need to, go back when you’re ready or try someone new. It’s your process.

Inconsistency is actually more damaging to humans than consistent mistreatment. We like to know where we stand with people, reliable steady people have more friends and loved ones even if they are not the life and soul of the party. Not knowing what the response will be keeps us trapped coming back for more, for example charmers and alcoholics cause the worst suffering.

I very much relate to this. My F (who is long dead) sexually abused my DSis and me; he was also emotionally abusive. Both my parents smacked us hard, regularly, mainly my F. But we also had some amazing holidays and days out.

It was so confusing that we repressed the memories of the SA (apart from distressing images in my head), and it only came back to us when we had young DC.

It was also very distressing for my DM, who didn’t know the SA was happening and previously believed that my F was a loving husband and father. (Although when I came across some of his letters to her whilst helping her with a sort out, I saw how emotionally abusive he had been towards her, too.)

So I really do understand, OP. It will take time to process, but you will eventually come to a place of acceptance. I remember how I used to get very defensive with therapists who pushed me too hard. It needs to happen at your own pace.

It's possible that your mother was playing mind games but equally possible that she wasn't good at coping with life and parenting and meant well some of the time (hence the big gestures) while failing at the day-to-day stuff like making you feel secure. People who mean well but can't cope can also be bitter, abusive and neglectful, alongside those who are truly evil.

I was just thinking similar.

I had an abusive childhood, too. I also remember how amazing it felt when any of my parents were being lovely and kind and attentive. It should have felt normal, not like a special treat. The intermittent reinforcement and resulting trauma bond is a real head fuck, but I genuinely don't believe my DM or DF were deliberately cruel/kind in order to manipulate me and keep me guessing and off guard. They were just really shit, unaware, self-absorbed parents who didn't know how to self-regulate or seek help. My step-father was definitely the deliberately cruel/kind manipulative type. That felt very different.

I understand this to an extent.

My parents weren't abusive to me but they argued all the time (no violence but full on screaming matches and then wouldn't speak to one another for days and days), it was like they hated each other.

But we had so many wonderful family experiences and I got absolutely anything I wanted whenever I wanted it (only child and we had money at the time, but I was always very grateful!). We went to Disney, proper once in a lifetime holiday, and my abiding memory of it is the blazing row they had in the Magic Kingdom and my elderly DGM trying desperately to get them to stop. It was horrendous.

When my father left (I was about 14), we had awful money worries but the atmosphere in the house was so much nicer. DM and I argued but in a normal teenage way! They clearly weren't compatible anymore and in hindsight I wish they'd got divorced when I was younger, although the thought terrified me at the time.

@MixedUpchildhood This is exactly my experience as well. I am not sure mine was contrived, but was very manipulative and designed to trap me.
As with @thelongestwayhome my DPs were likely struggling which I have recognised as an adult. It doesn't make it less painful but gives me a rationality that I can build from.
Knowing what I know now, I would say your therapist is no longer a good fit for you. In my opinion, she is trying to drag you back to a black and white situation, when - really - human experience is multiple shades of grey.

I tried to say that I do often think was my mother suffering with MH issues maybe ? She said I’m excusing the behaviour rather than dealing with it and accepting it as abuse and manipulation. It’s hard to explain that there were times even as a small child I just knew my mother had had enough ? I know I wouldnt do the same to my dc but I want to be compassionate and think there may have been more to it. Not to excuse it as we are NC now and have been for years and years but because I know sometimes things aren’t straightforward.