I want to get over my childhood and move forward but I don’t know how to do this when I feel it has completely shaped who I am as an adult and the anxiety disorder I developed as a result affects me every day. I’m now 30 and have tried to move on with my life, to tackle my mental illness and not look back on my past. However I still have no self-confidence and feel unlikeable and inferior to everyone. I constantly worry.
I was raised by a single mother after my father left when I was 3 and my brother was 5. She seemed to be in a constant rage and was highly stressed and abusive towards us, shouting stuff at us like ‘You fucking cunting bastard children! You drive me up the fucking pole! Stupid fucking pillocks. Fucking little shits!’ There was just a constant and relentless stream of insults such as this and she would literally swear at us hundreds of times a day. I remember her screaming in my face, digging her nails into my shoulders, shaking me, pinching and slapping us for no reason. She hated me particularly and blamed me for everything. She would tell me often and sadly ‘I love you but I don’t like you’ and would say ‘I’m going to send you to (far away country where my father lived) you fucking little bitch, how would you like that? I’m going to send you away’ which was a constant looming threat and terrifying to me as a young child who had no memory of my father. She was always extremely aggressive, and while taking it out on us verbally she literally punched holes through the bathroom door. We were blamed for everything (such as being late for school every single day) and she would punish us constantly without reason. She only ever treated us like this, there was never a kind moment when we were alone with her. She would also leave us in the car all the time for very long periods and had a seemingly endless string of different boyfriends, locking herself in the bedroom with them instead of taking care of us. Growing up we were terrorised, miserable and frightened. I would end up crying hysterically every single day for many years and thought this was normal. I had suicidal thoughts by the age of 9 – waiting at the bus stop on the way to school each morning I would imagine throwing myself under the wheels of any large vehicle that passed and was convinced I would one day have the courage to do it. I wished I was dead every day.
I’ve recently become a mother myself and was very worried that I would feel the same resentment to my daughter that my mother felt for me. I actually cried with despair when I found out I was having a girl for this reason, and spent my whole pregnancy worried that I wouldn’t bond with her or take well to being a mum. However, I’ve found the opposite to be true and my baby is the most important and precious thing of my entire life and now that she’s here those fears have vanished completely. I adore and love her fiercely. But now that I’m a parent I’ve found myself thinking about my own childhood a lot more. I now have a good relationship with my mum who is like a completely different person to the woman who raised us and is now kind and supportive. I see her almost every day and watch her with my daughter, being so good and loving towards her, and I can’t help but wonder why and how she could have treated me and my brother so badly all those years ago.
I try and think to myself that other people have a lot worse childhoods than mine and manage to get over it and live their lives despite of and in defiance of it, but it just makes me feel guilty and pathetic that I seem unable to overcome mine. I don’t want it to define me but it has and I want to let go of it once and for all and move forward. How can I do this? To anyone else who has suffered abuse, how do you get on with your life and leave it in the past?