I really resent my parents for labelling us as children

[Tigss]

I am one of 3 girls. I have a sister who is 16 months older than me and a non-identical twin. We are now all late 20s.
As children my parents had a really bad habit of labelling us and boxing us in with expectations. For example my older sister was the kind one, the musical one, the friendly one, the easy one. I was the smart one, the quiet one, the shy one, my twin was the pretty one, the sporty one, the social butterfly etc. This approach made my teen years somewhat hellish. We all went to different secondary schools, my older sister went to a school that had amazing performing arts alongside academics, I went to a very academic school and my twin went to a very sport focussed school. I think my parents believed this was them treating us like individuals and allowing our own talents to thrive but the reality was it meant my sisters and I had very little in common.
There was a lot of pressure put on us based on our presumed talents, such as my sister was expected to do very well in music, attend the Saturday lessons at the conservatoire, I was expected to get top grades, apply to oxbridge and my twin was meant to perform really well in her chosen sports. This all backfired when my twin sister actually outperformed both my older sister and I in her GCSEs and A-Levels and went to a better university.
In the same way we didn’t all follow the same rules. Such as I was allowed to be out much later than my twin sister, they said this was because she had training in the morning, was too likely to go off with a boy, where as it was expected I’d just study with friends. This built a lot of resentment between us. My parents also constantly pointed out how gorgeous my twin was and would say things like “you got all the smart genes, your sister got all the pretty ones”, obviously this made me feel awful, even more so when she did better in her GCSEs and I felt like I couldn’t even claim to be the smart one anymore.

Now we are all adults, all successful in our own rights but none of us in careers particularly related to our perceived strengths. We aren’t very close as I think a lot of the childhood resentment runs under the surface. We are also all in very different life stages, my older sister is happily single, moved somewhere rural and is very happy with her life, I’m married with a DS and live 10 minutes from where I grew up, my twin sister has lives abroad and is now living in central London with her fiancé.

We are meant to be spending Christmas with my family but the more I think about how awful many of their comments made me feel and how much I have grown to resent them and my sisters makes me want to back off, go to therapy and work on reconnecting with my sisters.

AIBU?

Yes. My parents were in no way malicious. They were doing their best. Unfortunately theur best was nowhere near adequate.

In fact their lack of ill intent is actually one of the difficult bits — they think their parenting was fine, because their own parenting was awful, even by the standards of extremely impoverished, dysfunctional backgrounds on the 1940s and 50s.

I never said OP’s lived experience was wrong. Not quite sure how a lived experience could be wrong or right. I think OP should explore her past but it can throw up some unexpected things because your memory can play very weird tricks on you.

The intention doesn’t necessarily make any difference to the damaging effects.

How many people actually inflict intentional pain, damage and distress - so much is from ignorance, insensitivity, obliviousness or mental health problems etc.

And who’s to say precisely what anyone’s motivation is.

Exactly.

My father was evacuated at 3, sent away to school at 7 which practiced corporal punishment and was never visited. That was just the norm in the 40s.

I can see why there is resentment and it's a shame. I suspect as a teen being the smart one isn't much compensation for not being the pretty one, sounds shallow but i think most girls value looks or over academic ability. Then to have the pretty sporty social one be even better academically must have been really galling for you. I get it, my sister is a better version of everything than me, I have a lot going for me but she has a lot more. We are close in age but thankfully had a year apart in school and had different friends. We are close now but I had to work through some jealousy to get there.

Spend Christmas with your family. Then maybe arrange some time with just your sisters without your parents and try to talk to them about how they feel. They may have similar resentments and it might be really good for you to all air them. Sisters can be the best gift in the world so you need to try to overcome that resentment.

Yes, it’s heartbreaking for me to think about what my mother was subjected to — extremely mentally ill father, who’d only married her mother because he’d been windowed with two sons and needed a new housekeeper, and a viciously twisted mother who used to make the children go hungry so she could afford one respectable outfit per child for church on Sundays. It’s hardly surprising she was a terrible parent.

Your own child will be complaining about your shortcomings in decades to come, and you'll discover our parents are flawed, fallible humans.

Your trauma isn't your fault, but moving on from it, is your responsibility. Tbh if this was the biggest trauma you took away from your childhood, then it was relatively good.

Respectfully, get over it.

It sounds like your parents watched the movie Divergent, and took it too literally..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divergent_(film)
Seriously, it sounds like they love you very much and want the absolute best for you.

Same here @DoubleYellows
I can totally see that my parents are damaged. And I have compassion for that.
And I’m also aware of the impact this has had on me, despite the fact yes, there was no malicious intend.

But as a mother myself, I also know you have choices. You have agency.
I was NOT a perfect parent. cptsd and chronic illness ensured that. But I chose to put my dcs/their well-being before me. I chose to question myself not just protect myself.
I’m not resentful or angry. But I’m refusing to say that trying your best is enough. Or that one should just accept what their parents did as ok because they did their best.

But you can't compare yourself directly to them. Their trauma is not the same as your trauma. The environment they raised you in is not the same as the environment you're raising your children in.

Who knows what way your own children might see their childhood in years to come?

This thread is amazing by the number of posyers who are telling the OP to just ‘get over it’ whilst clearly ignoring the experience of people who have had ideal childhood from the outside (just like the OP) and yet still struggle a lot due to it.

fwiw @Outside9 , yep the OP is NOW the only person who can do anything.
she might never ‘get over it’. Childhood trauma has away to physically rewire the brain that stops that. She can learn about boundaries, distance herself from her parents, whatever else might be the right move for her.
And it STILL doesn’t negate her parents attitude. And it STILL doesn’t mean they should just be forgiven or let off the hook.
But the fact you don’t see anything outwardly that says neglect/trauma doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

No ofc we’re different people. It doesn’t remove their agency.

Like my dad used to (and still does) have those screaming, shouting, door banging episodes. They scared me as a child. Even now, someone shouting next to me sends me in fight and fly and it takes quite a while to relax again. And you know what? He never did that outside of home. Not at work. Not with his clients (with whom he was charming btw).
So yes agency was there.

And I’m fully aware that my dcs have been affected by my own trauma. Dc1 in particular. My surprise in the future would be for them to say things were ok.
im not saying I did my best and it should be enough because they went to the right schools for them, had hobbies, travelled etc…

So of course we need to distinguish between abuse and everyday human failings.

The OP however, clearly falls into the latter not the former.

Yes @MaurineWayBack and @DoubleYellows. OP sorry for the shaming posters. It is depressing how low standards are for parenting. Ofc parenting is hard but if you get it wrong you damage a child (person) for the rest of their life. Having an opportunity to create the foundation for a person’s life gives power and responsibility - often misused or abused. We should take that seriously. Sad to see all the attempts to compare your situation with “severe” trauma and suggest nothing to see. From your posts it seems this had a big impact. Being labelled by parents does immense damage (to sibling relationships and to individuals involved) if part of a pattern of parenting behaviour.

Talking to your sisters and accessing therapy could give you agency to make changes. Being told to “get over resentment” won’t help as the resentment is a clear sign things went too far. You needed to be seen and recognised for who you are/were, as subject not object, and not a placeholder for someone your parents wanted or thought they saw. Maybe they had good intent and tried to help you but it sounds like they got it wrong. If so then you are right to hold them accountable.

My sister was labeled as the outgoing, funny one, while I was the quiet one. I remember seething, years later, in my 20s, when my uncle, on meeting somebody I was working for, said something along the lines of "RafaFan is the quiet one, her sister's not shy at all" My employer had never met my sister, never would, and up until that point had no preconceived idea about what I was like.

This overuse of the word trauma, really is the epitome of first world problems. It's also so self-indulgent and fails to look at the grand picture. For example, how were her parents raised? What 'trauma' were they subjected to?

I'm sorry society as a whole places far labels and stereotypes on groups, some well-meaning, many inadvertently harmful. It's not ideal, still worth improving as our language evolves, but it's also human.

OPs lived experience is evidence enough we don't have to adhere to 'labels'.

Get over it.

Honestly I'm inclined to agree that people use the word trauma too liberally .
The ops and her sisters schools would all have had an academic side. Some sports and some theatrical stuff, it just might not have been a key focus for them.
her sisters academic performance is clear evidence of that so he doesn't appear to have hindered any of ye in life except that you feel you might have been closer if you had all attended the same school.

I think pigeon-holing children was all the rage for your parents' generation - I don't think it was just your parents. My parents did the same and school teachers even more so.

It's a product of the industrial style education system we had - this idea that if you're good at one thing, you can't be good at another.
It's nonsense but still goes on.
A young relative recently said she's no good at maths because she's good at languages when really one does not cancel out the other. Chinese girls now out-perform boys at Maths at age 15-16 and this was once perceived to be a boy's subject worldwide. Societal norms play a big role in this type of limiting behaviour.

They didn't hurt me. I'm fine. I understand they were trying their best and I don't resent them. In the long term my sister was probably the most affected and she doesn't resent them either. It was the 11 plus system itself condemning her to an awful secondary modern that did more damage.

Also, my parents died years ago.

Genuine abuse is an awful thing, but that's not what the OP describes.

This thread's touching on several complex topics that require far more in-depth discussion, but I wanted to pick up on this. Negative "labelling" is an abusive element. When other people try to tell us who and what we are, even as adults, it can feel very destabilising.

Friends, colleagues, partners might say things like You get away with coasting because you're good-looking! when you know you pull your weight, or Don't touch that! You're too clumsy, for instance. I bet lots of readers have been told they're clueless, haha, and other 'friendly' statements of their perceived failings.

Normally we can shrug these off. Still, anything that triggers self-doubt has us chewing over it for days or weeks, wondering if everyone sees us that way and losing confidence in ourselves. And this is in adulthood! Children have no wider perspectives; parents literally do define their kids' worlds and their understanding of their place both within the family and outside.

Kids whose parents tell them they're fat or thick, have no ear for music or no aptitude for sport, believe what they're told. Parents are the adults who know us and our siblings best. We rely on our parents to guide and teach us. How could we, as children, know they're wrong on such fundamental matters?

Nobody's suggested parents do this with intent to harm. They might do it thoughtlessly, or deliberately but with good intentions. They could be repeating patterns picked up in their own childhoods or going overboard to avoid their parents' mistakes. Whatever their motives, children accept parental definitions as absolute truths and it's very disturbing to realise, when older, that they were wrong.

Trying to overwrite your understanding of your own self, who and what you are, is really difficult because you only have your self to work with. Therapists spend much of their working days helping clients to pick their way through this. We can quarrel over the boundaries of abuse but what would be the point of that? Parental behaviours can give children a distorted view of the world and of themselves. This can cause problems for the children as they grow up.

Captain, you passed the 11+ and your sister didn't. This means you had more academic aptitude at 11 than she did. It isn't an opinion, it's a neutrally objective fact.

If the only available school for your sister was lousy, that's a very valid criticism of the educational provision in that place and time and I'm sorry she had a bad time. It isn't a value judgement on either of you sisters, however.

We both know that now. She did O and A Levels later and got a First in Fine Art. The system was wrong which is why I don't blame my parents.

Two things are valid:
Your parent's best intentions.
How you feel about it all.

Two unforeseen outcomes:
Their decisions ended up not being quite right.
The negative impact it made on you, inadvertently.

It's one thing to tell you to "just get over it" but nobody has ever "gotten over it" because they were told to. You can't help how you feel. You just need to process and pick through it to see clearly.

I hope you can end up seeing that they made decisions they thought was best for you three but got it wrong. In my opinion, it doesn't make them abusive, it just makes them imperfect and your childhood not a great one because of this.

Things like this can feel a bit more complicated than just a clear-cut being overtly abused as a child or having a "perfect" childhood. Though things were set up to go well for you, they ended up not doing so in the way they hoped/you wanted. It can be destabilising for you and you want to be angry at someone for that.

Hopefully a good therapist will help you sort through the core issue. You wish they'd made different decisions and I believe if they could see the future, they would have. But we all make decisions not knowing how it would turn out, don't we? Your parents (every parent) are no exceptions.

For me, I'd hate/be angry at the situation but not my parents. Definitely not my siblings because of it.

I'd also talk to my mum about calling my twin sister pretty and not me, and let her know it affected my self esteem. If she apologises (which a decent parent would), that would give me closure and healing. If not, that would tell me more about her, and not in a good way.

I'd do the same with my sisters too but generally about the effect of our upbringing on me and our relationship. Their understanding/support - or lack of - will tell me what I need to know.

I never said such experiences were only valid if intentionally malicious. The experiences are valid whatever the cause, but I have very different feelings about unpleasant things I have experienced through someone else's malice or thoughtlessness as opposed to unpleasant things I have experienced that were nobody's fault.

Intention and the degree of care and thought matter. If you were injured in a car crash caused by a driver who wanted to scare you or was racing another car, or drunk or talking on their phone while driving, you would be completely justified to feel deeply angry, bitter, resentful. If the crash was caused by a wild animal running into the road, you wouldn’t.

@Aluna The above was intended as a response to you.