To think this is closer to a normal childhood than to extreme abuse?

[Greensl100]

I know you can’t and shouldn’t try to measure things like this but I am told that this sort of stuff constitutes extreme abuse and I just don’t think it does. I actually think it is within the realms of a normal childhood from the 90s.

Examples…

one occasion of parent trashing child’s bedroom

leaving 15 year old in home for a week while parents went away (in same country)

calling child self centred

saying child needed to be more like child’s friend

forcing child to spend time around a pet that caused child non life threatening allergic reaction

pulling hair and smacking

not allowing teen to use washing machine or cook for themselves in home

When left home and relationship broke down in twenties, told that they were not welcome in the family home and that if they visited they were a guest

these are some examples and of course I know none of them are brilliant parenting but I don’t think it equals extreme abuse?

Maybe change the wording - you are a "survivor" not a "victim" of extreme abuse. And yes, the stuff you described is reasonably bad - obviously some kids have it much worse but that is nowhere close to normal parenting. I get it - I had a more mildly abusive situation than yours at home as a young teen with a stepparent but still very damaging - the way I got my head around it was to understand how it made me feel (scared to leave my room when they were around and might see me, lying on my bed and just crying uncontrollably) and that helped me understand what was actually happening.

I wouldn't say it's extreme abuse. Alot of that is abuse though with the exception of being left home for a week (assuming 15 year old is capable) and not being allowing child to do cooking and laundry, I don't see them 2 things as abuse. The rest is though.

@Greensl100

I thought everyone would have experienced at least one thing on this list

No I have never experienced any of these & I suspect your idea of what is normal has been affected by how you were treated. I think they were quite cruel & you should avoid having any contact (that is if you are still in touch).

You did not objectively deserve it! Children are bratty and parents do not take pleasure in then trashing their room. It sounds like both your parents had anger issues and colluded and egged each other on which must have been so hard to understand as a child. Did they do drink and drugs? Honestly I was such a difficult child at times and never experienced that even in a very poor upbringing. A snap of patience is very different than systematic trashing of your room. It was cruel what they did - they punished you to hurt you and their rage is off the scale. It’s not normal. So sorry you went through this!

@Greensl100 I absolutely and entirely get you.

The thing is, a lot of people were NOT raised by people who were themselves immature/traumatised/mad as a spoon, and they will be horrified by everything on your list, not just the worst ones. Those of us who WERE raised by people with uhhh unfortunate stuff in their own past making them not very calm and coherent parents… get it. I don’t think what you’re describing IS “extreme” abuse, or what are we calling the kids who go hungry, are severely beaten, psychologically tortured with fear, sexually assaulted etc?

HOWEVER. It seems your therapist is trying to get you to engage with what did happen and that it was extremely wrong and, as a child and the vulnerable one in the exchange, you should not have experienced it and did not deserve it. Personally I don’t think defining it as “extreme” or not is helpful. Bring it up with her, it’s obviously caused you some thought.

That poem “they fuck you up your mum and dad” has the right of it - there is a good book about children of emotionally immature parents which I found helpful. It’s sort of for people who were abused because their parents tried but ultimately weren’t very good at parenting due to their own problems/limitations. Good luck!

Yes it’s abuse. I guess when you hear extreme abuse you think beatings ? But it’s still abuse and it’s not normal.

@Greensl100 i feel like I came off dismissive of your list in my earlier post, which wasn’t my intention. I think it’s honestly just a bit of a mess trying to navigate this kind of thing.

The first time my therapist suggested I had experienced a traumatic childhood, I was horrified, didn’t understand, thought she was wrong.
15 years of therapy later and I understand. One of the worse parts about childhood experience like this is that you don’t know how bad it is. I am so sorry this happened to you.
ask your therapist not to use the word extreme, and keep working on it. Take care op

My mum was more neglectful than abusive and has since apologised. She was very young when I was born, which contributed, and most of what she did was standard for our particular circumstances at the time (army family, all her friends were army wives). Myself step-dad actually was abusive and the reason I ended up moving in with my dad. I have experienced some things from your list.

The room trashing thing I would class as quite extreme abuse. That's absolutely awful and nothing you did could have justified it!

leaving 15 year old in home for a week while parents went away (in same country) - My dad went camping every year, which I hated and chose not to go. At 13 I stayed with my grandparents for 2 weeks and was bored senseless. At 14 I stayed with a friend who lived 2 doors down. At 15 I was allowed to stay at home.

calling child self centred - I was called selfish for not wanting to look after my younger brother.

saying child needed to be more like child’s friend - in my case it was a cousin, but yes.

forcing child to spend time around a pet that caused child non life threatening allergic reaction - this one does sound abusive, although my mum always had a dog growing up despite being allergic

pulling hair and smacking - pulling hair definitely abusive. My stepdad smacked us for things like back chatting, not tidying our rooms when told. Mum I guess could be considered abusive for not stopping him. Almost every child on our (army) estate got smacked through, so it seemed normal to me. I remember kids being shouted at then physically dragged home for not doing as they were told. My mum used to get threatened with the belt so probably thought smacking wasn't that bad.

not allowing teen to use washing machine or cook for themselves in home - more like the opposite. At about 9 I was expected to cook dinner for my siblings while mum got ready for a night out. I wasn't allowed to touch the chip pan though. By 11 I was babysitting and was absolutely not allowed to cook while parents were out (but definitely did anyway). As a teen I lived with my dad. Dinner was cooked for me but in the summer holidays I got my own lunch. At that time I was also expected to put a load of washing on (for everybody).and hang it out while dad and his partner were at work.
I had a friend who wasn't allowed to cook but her parents weren't abusive - just extremely overprotective! She wasn't allowed a key either - if she was out late they would just stay up until she was safely home.

When left home and relationship broke down in twenties, told that they were not welcome in the family home and that if they visited they were a guest - after moving to my dad's I was only ever a "guest" in my mum's house since the room I formerly shared with my sister officially became my sister's room, then they moved house and anytime I visited I slept in my sister's room there. I was welcome anytime but it never felt like my home. My teenage bedroom at my dad's house still existed until it was redecorated to become my (much) younger brother's room about 8 years ago. When I visit now the spare room we stay in is my sister's former room (she ended up moving in with my dad at 15) but there's only the wallpaper to remind anyone that it was hers. Being explicitly told you're not welcome feels a bit nasty though.

I got your post - it wasn't dismissive.

There's a lot of suggestions on this thread that those of us who experienced dodgy childhoods (and witnessed them through friends too) have some how normalised the neglect or abuse and can't see it. Someone above referred to us as having a 'low bar', someone else as viewing parents through 'rose-tinted glasses'. Lots of people expressing pity.

I personally haven't normalised any of what I experienced by carrying it on. I don't feel the need to forgive it, because I am not angry. It happened, it wasn't right, I can't change it, I move on. I don't place my parents on a pedestal. They are flawed and complicated humans with poor mental health, and if they had their time again today, would probably try and be better people. The world has changed.

I am not in therapy though, and I recognise we all respond differently to ACEs. I wouldn't necessarily go back and change my childhood as it may change who I am today, right now. I wouldn't want that.

Perhaps individually and in isolation most of those things might not be considered extreme (although they are all abuse) but if they're taken together they demonstrate a pattern of something approaching extreme abuse.
It doesn't have to be physical to be extreme. The impacts of this kind of insidious abuse can be just as devastating.

NB as a child of the 80s/90s I experienced none of this.

I'm from a working class background, youngest in my family and born in the 1970s and no, neither I nor any of my friends from similar backgrounds were subject to harsher parenting than more middle-class children. My parents didn't smack any of us.

I would say that my more working class friends and I also spent more quality time with our parents as kids than my more middle-class friends did.

You've hit the nail on the head. Focusing on how these situations made you FEEL is imperative in recovery, rather than trying to analyse each event through the lens of ' was that abuse' as definitions will vary. In my case, I can still feel the absolute fear of being around my abusive parent - the putting my key in the front door and panicking as to what mood they would be in, the hypervigilance and monitoring of small signs which would signal what I was in for that particular day, the wanting to hide away and make myself as small as possible to avoid the wrath, my heart pounding when I was called for and wrapping myself in knots to try and think what misdeed I had performed that day in order to prepare myself...

Each individual item is abusive (the self centred comment might be ok in context, though) in its own right. But this sounds like ongoing abuse over a long period of time. So yes, pretty severe.
I think there's a tendency to underestimate the damage caused by emotional abuse which can have a devastating effect on individuals. So it may be hard for you to accept right now but I think it'll benefit you in the long run if you can face up to it.

I think its always shocking to be confronted with the fact that your upbringing was in any way "abnormal". Everyone normalises the way their parents treat them, mainly because the parent is the authority figure so the child grows up seeing them as the moral authority.

My parents weren't abusive, certainly nothing anywhere near what you went through, but my dad was an alcoholic and autistic and therefore was incredibly lacking in emotional awareness and also thought it was absolutely normal to be drinking around us every day from about 5pm onwards until he became obnoxious and argumentative. I grew up thinking this is how people behaved and it fed into a lot of behaviour as a young adult which, looking back on it, was pretty self-destructive. I found it very hard to develop healthy relationships.

But when it was explicitly pointed out to me by a counsellor that my dad was an alcoholic my immediate reaction was to downplay it, defend him and suggest that the counsellor had the wrong end of the stick.

It took me several years to accept that their drinking, and my father's behaviour in response to his drinking, was extremely damaging, even though it stopped well short of physical abuse. Looking back, and with the benefit of a lot of therapy, having nearly given up alcohol myself and post his death its as plain as it could be that he was an alcoholic.

I agree with so much of what you say. I also think it's true that where other people see what's going on and say nothing (such as the other parent who might be the trusted one and considered otherwise not abusive) makes it far worse. That is what causes the normalisation and the long-term shame that never goes away. The people who witnessed it but looked the other way.

On the other hand, for your therapist to label this 'extreme abuse' in itself feels somewhat unhelpful. It's the way it played out over a long period of time and the consequences it has led to for you.

If the 'abusive' behaviour had been called out at the time and the child could have been reassured that they had done nothing wrong then it might not have been quite so extreme. It's the accumulation of lots of incidents that never got addressed.

Hi. I've had quite a bit of therapy over the years and I know that much of my upbringing wasn't OK. I was scared of my mother. She would sulk for days on end, not speaking to any of us. Usually I had no idea what had caused it. She opened all my wedding presents. She expected me to be responsible for her feelings - she barely noticed mine. Aged 5 i had an access on my gums and she found me sobbing in the toilet saying "please don't be angry with me". She didnt like me and I knew I was a huge disappointment to her.

Anyway, it can be hard to frame your upbringing as abusive, even if it was. And this should be a gentle awakening - it shouldn't be a therapist telling you this. That's like a slap in the face.

A lot of people had tricky upbringings. My daughters are adopted and were starved in their birth family and nearly died. That's an extreme level of bad experience of course but stuff like this ripples through everything. You may have trust issues, commitment issues, anger issues....whatever, therapy is definitely going to help.

Good luck

Sorry , I haven't RTT fully. but , yes. It's abusive. Why are you thinking that maybe not being extreme makes it , what, acceptable?

Obviously it's abusive but I wouldn't call it extreme. I can see why you're upset by that label, op.

I hope this doesn't come across as minimizing, but I think you also have to look at frequency and the bigger picture, ie, were there any positives as well, when determining how extreme to characterize the abuse ( I realize that switching between more loving and bad behavior can be part of the abuse in some cases.)

I would say that's abuse. And far from normal parenting.

I don’t think getting into semantics is worth it really. It’s abusive. For some people that would seem extreme, for others it would seem low level compared to what they experienced. People deal with things in different ways and can be affected more than others. For some people being hit, which was fairly common during childhood for people who were teens in the 90s, is something they can’t come to terms with and for others they don’t think their parents did anything wrong. I was hit (smacked) regularly as a kid by my great grandparents who brought me up until I was nine, and although I remember it, I can honestly say it doesn’t affect me. The mental abuse that I went through with my mother has affected me for my entire life. There were a handful of explosive incidents where she lashed out at me physically as well, but it was the things she said and did to me without raising a hand that have left scars that will never heal with no amount of therapy. My DP is from a different country and his mum used the belt and a slipper to discipline. He thinks he had a great childhood which to me is a little strange. If I’d been beaten with a belt I’m sure that would have affected me, but he thinks it’s totally normal.

I brought up a son in the nineties and this definitely wasn't normal. I never did any of those things. My own childhood in the seventies was neglectful and even then I was the exception. It's not your fault you were treated this way so you don't have to defend it. It was definitely abusive, and yes quite severe when I think about parenting my son.

I was a teenager in the 90s and none of that sounds normal to me. Nor did I witness behaviour like that in families of friends or my extended family.