to think that, however utterly shite your childhood was, you have NO RIGHT to inflict the same on your children????

[psychomum5]

some of you here may know that I am currently undergoing CBT for driving anxiety.

and you also may know that I really had a crappy childhood.......

anyhoooo

CBT lady today had a very very tearful psycho, and we touched a little on my childhood.

she kind of knew some of it, but by no means all, and today she said that a lot of my issues had a deeper cause, so she asked specifically about what happened to me as a child to make me so controlling now.

((she said controlling as I seem to be trying to ensure my childrens safety a wee bit too much, and if something happens to shatter my illusion of safety my anxiety levels peak......hence I try to control my enviroment)).

well.................

she was very lovely. she said I am a remarkable woman to have come thro things the way I have and to be as 'grounded' as I am.

she also said that I was in the minority as many people who have been thro what I have would use it as an excuse to then inflict the same upon their children.....blaming everyone but themselves for the abuse they carry thro.

how is this true (I know this is true, but how?). the very idea is aborrhant (sp?) to me. I would NEVER put m children thro anything like what I went thro, how hateful, how simply vile.

so......why why WHY.

how can anyone honestly say it is 'ok' to do this???

I just don;t get it!!!

Is this really ok, and does it really truly happen. and if it does, do these people really blame their childhoods and so 'get away' with what they have done????

no I wasn;t thinking you were quoting her verbatim but I do think she obvously gave you the impression that people who abuse "blame" their childhood when I think people who are so damaged by pesistant abuse that they are unable to control its part in their life can;t realy be consiered as self-aware enough to be "blaming"

Trouble is that its still an adult destroying the childhood of a child whatever the reaosn and sympathy. Difficult why/how some people can turn it around and others can;t. Natural resilience, luck, character, having the right support/partner/network.

I also feel that the breaking of the taboo in childhood facilitates the ease of going onto abuse yourself. That you care for your childrne more deeply than you care for yourself also helps.

Are you finding the counselling tough? I hate it when they start doing the "oh there must be a deeper reason" and start prodding around. I always want to ahout "stop prodding around in the cesspit of my brain - no good will come of it I tell you. There be dragons..!"

very very tought at the moment.

there is a whole 'can of worms' in there that I am refusing to open, for fear of a volcano going off, but the therapist is being kind and just digging enough to get a proper picture of me so as to help with the driving issues going on right now!!!

My mum was awful when we were children. Used to beat 7 kinds of you know what out of us.

When I became a parent I was useless at any kind of discipline. A real pushover. dh did most of the discipline (only ever verbal). So I was affected by my childhood.

Now dd is grown up, I have a lovely relationship with her. The kind of relationship I would have liked to have had with my mum.

but cheshirekitty.......we all (every person in the world) get affected by our childhoods.

what I am trying to say is that how is it fair for some people to be abused in their childhoods and then do the same to their children, and then blame their parents for it rather than admit their own blame.

you changed the pattern as you found it (and knew) wrong to be treated like that.

I am doing the same.

It just makes me so angry tho that people don't change and make yet another generation damged!

It just makes me angry that people can treat their children so bad.

I know what you are saying psychomum.

In some families it just goes on and on from one generation to the next.

Do not have an answer as to how to change it. Wish I did.

I think if you haven't had an easy childhood and a good role model of parents it takes an awful lot of effort to work out how to parent. I find myself in that situation - I know I don't want to be like my mother and I know that I'm not, but sometimes when things are hard and the chips are down it takes inordinate strength to not, to some degree, replicate what happened to me. I frequently have to step back and think "how do I do this?", "how should I react when DS does this?" etc etc, whereas I think (from talking to others) that if you had a good role model of a parent that comes more naturally. Also, when the chips are down I can find myself questioning my ability etc and I have to work hard to pull myself up from that and accept I am a good mum, DS has a happy, stable and fair home. I am adamant to break the cycle in my family, and I hope I'm doing a good job with DS but I know my sister at times (not always) really does show herself to be a product of our childhood with her children.

Would be lovely to be able to wave a magic wand and just heal people so they never feel the need to carry on the damage.

weegle, that is the hardest bit isn;t it, trying to parent in the way you know you want to, but not really knowing how.

That has been my struggle, but I am extraordinarily lucky in that I have a wonderful MIL who I can turn to, plus some utterly fabulous friends who did have good childhoods and can steer me in the right direction if I do have a wobble.

I also trained as a nursery nurse, which really truly helped!

I've only skimmed but I find it very very hard not to act the way my parents did to me

My anger flares up so quickly and over the most minute things but I have forced myself not to take it out on the children.

I stop myself all the time, just before I turn into one of the monsters I grew up with.

I totally understand your point about how you could never want to put your child through it, but that doesn't mean it's not a part of you, a horrid, dark, evil part that you wish you could just throw away, but it';s still there and IMO stopping it from coming out is the hardest thing I have to do in parenting.

That's great and you should be proud of yourself, truly.

I try to have open conversations with trusted friends when I am struggling with DS as it helps me to gain from their experience where my own experience is lacking

oh yes, VS, it is bloody hard stopping it from erupting at times (the anger side that is. The abusive side is so so so abhorant to me it is not even needing to be stopped IYGWIM).

And that is why it makes me angry. There are so many of us who were damaged in some way, and we don;t continue it on. So why on earth do other people out there continue and then say "It is ok, it's not my fault, I am allowed as I know no different".

er.......NO, it is not ok, just don;t do it!

Pshychomum you are absolutely right. I never suffered to the degree that you did but on a very minor level my mother was just full of fury and now I can understand why (dad always away for weeks and months at a time for work, stuck with 2 v young kids in a strabge town - I can see why she had issues). But she would just scream and shout and physically hit out at us all the time and it was miserable.

I swore blind I'd never do the same but I've got a temper (as has ds) and sometimes I have to work very hard to keep it under control. Star jumps, camera crews - you know the sort of thing! These issues never go away, as you said you have to be aware and then find ways to control them.

Instead of being saddenned by these cycles repeating themselves I try to look at it positively - when you look on MN and I daresay in RL there are so many parents who had terrible childhoods who are determined that they will not repeat those mistakes. They will break the cycle. And that is most definitely very heartening.

this happens in other walks of life too - not just parenting (prisons and politics come to mind - and when I say politics I don't mean "nice" politics, I mean former political prisoners being part of regime change and going on to shit all over people). I think a lot of it has to do with power and control - where someone has been made to feel like utter shit, totally powerless and worthless, at the very bottom of the heap, and then they see an opportunity to put someone else at the bottom - ie to exert power over another person, they take it. which is not for a second to justify it.

it sounds, psychomum5 like you're doing a great job of not doing this. keep up the hard work.

Yes, it is about gaining control back isn;t it. That has some degree of sense in it.

and thankyou......it is hard, but so worth it for me. my children are fab((of course tho, I would think that)

Psycho I know its a cliche but the really worthwhile things in life rarely come easily.

You are doing a great thing.

school bullies is another example.

I'm seeing a lot of myself in this thread. Don't have much time to post just now, but will watch with interest.

Psycho, i agree in my house it was sexual/physical/mental abuse.
Things like namecalling and aggressiveness I have to make the effort with. Beating my children and sexually abusing them wouldn't come into my mind.
Maybe it's all dependant on just how affected you were by it?

maybe VS. maybe it os perosnality too that makes you the type of person that fights the cycle and therefore breaks it, or carries it on thro simply not knowing how.

I try to understand it, and whhy, but it still does just make me so furious that people to it, blame their childhoods, and then 'psychoanalysts'(sp?) come on siting stat's or whatever saying that it is more likley for abusee's to carry on to become abuser's, and that is just (IMHO) a crock of shit.

and hatwoman, yes I agree re-school bullies. Altho I never bullied, that too would have smacked against my personality. I was however bullied, and very badly too!

My understanding is that while the majority of abusers were abused, it is only a minority of abusees that go on to abuse. This distinction is critical IMO, and one that 'psychoanalysts' could do more to attend to, to avoid labelling abusees as potential abusers.

I think thats a very good point Mamachris - I would liek to know what percentage of abused go on to perpetrate that abuse. I too suspect that its a much smaller number than we think.

Probably difficult to assess given the unrelaible figures of hwat the scale of abuse in homes is.

On ething I think you can say is that people who seriously abuse children are damaged in some way. Stable well balanced undamaged people do not (on the whole) commit serious abuse, therefore it is almst inevitable that every abuser will have some kind of "story".

It doesn't make every abused child a potential abuser.

The "control" thing is hard to get over psycho. First learning how to take control of your life again - to stop being a victim and start beign a survivor and then once you have the hang of that to start being able to let go of some of that control and not have to control every aspect of your/your childrens lives.

The fact that you can rationally talk about it and have an insight into your own behaviour is ultiamtely very healing. Hard to go through but you do come out the other end.

It think it is true. My mother abused me, and when she 'apologised' for it she would always blame not having a mum and her dad being so awful so she didn't know how to be around me. Then would do exactly the same thing again.

I really hate that it gets used as an excuse. My sister (who is older than me) still doesn't understand that just because our Ma had it hard too doesn't mean she wasn't abusing us, or that we should have been prepared to put up with far worse than others would from her.

I am desperate not to become another in a long line of people who abuse their kids, but it's hard because I am so desperately worried about it I am also worried that I will be too soft and ruin their lives that way. Sometimes I get really petulant and teenagery about it. We know it is not our fault that these things happened - but will still end up having to deal with them for the rest of our lives. It's not fair.

I agree, it is not an excuse. A partial explanation, maybe, but not an excuse.

As psycho shows, you can end the cycle (and more power to your elbow for that, psycho).

There's a related question I have thought of asking before. If you can't use your parents as parenting role models, who do you? I really have no idea how to bring up ds (easy while he's still a baby), but don't want to end up relying only on a library of different parenting books (and MN) as he grows.

I'm lucky that my mum was a very good parent (even my Dad was not bad just absent) so I do have a good role model but I equally think that I have learnt a lot from observing friends - thinking about what they do that I like/don't like. I also learnt a lot doing the preparation courses for the adoption but thats probably an extreme way to learn about parenting.

It isn't always parents that abuse so not all absued childrne are short of good paretning role models.

My parents were both disasters and alot of awful stuff went on that shouldn't. Like you I am about to start CBT to try to deal with it as I suffer enormous doubt about my ability as a parent and can't bring myself to have another child because of it. Weirdly today, my Mum is quite normal and I look back and see that alot of what was happening was circumstancial but I am so angry about it. Ironically my bloody Mother now accuses me of being too obsesive of ensuring that my DS is happy and balanced ? this is really messing with my head!