Hi, I've NC for this thread. I'm late forties, gay uncle. Read Mumsnet Talk a lot and sometimes post. Suffered with depression and anxiety since mid-teens at least. Diagnosed with BPD almost ten years ago. Single, live alone. Relationships and sex life generally have been a disaster. Attachment issues and deep shame have seen to that.
Yesterday I was reading a thread (since deleted) about someone whose DP had smacked their teenage daughter for staying out an hour over her curfew. The OP said it was the first time her daughter had been smacked, and her DP had done it out of frustration because DD wouldn't apologise (or something along those lines). Anyway, pretty much everyone who responded to the thread was absolutely horrified by the smacking, and although I only got to read the first two pages before it was deleted, I remember the issue of trust being mentioned: DD would have lost their trust as a result of the smacking and would almost certainly tell others that it had happened.
What struck me most about the thread was the unanimous outrage at and condemning of the slaps on the back of the DD's legs. Not because I have ever smacked a child myself (I most certainly haven't) but because when I was a small child (and throughout my childhood until school-leaving age) I was variously smacked and beaten by my parents, caned at school, and twice ambushed by other boys. One of those attacks happened in a school corridor, and the other involved having stones thrown at me while I was wandering the neighbourhood on my own, as I frequently did. I was hospitalised with a head injury as a result. There were other incidents of bullying throughout my childhood, like being cornered and told to unzip my jacket so that my friend's older brother could stab me with a knife he was holding. After I had fearfully done as he said, he laughed in my face and told me he had been joking. But because he was always nasty to me, I had fully expected to die in that moment. So there was psychological trauma like that at times too.
Well, my father gave me a black eye when I was 5, sending me flying across the room. At least once before I was 7 (that I can remember) he literally beat the crap out of me - that's how scared I was. And then he shamed me for having such a terrified reaction and beat me more. I was left lying on my bed staring numbly at a streak of my own shit up the wall. Those are a couple of examples of what happened to me before my mother separated from him.
But unfortunately she then used smacking and beating to keep me and my siblings in line. Sometimes with a heavy hairbrush or a slipper, but she also kept a stair rod at the side of her armchair and would grab it and jump up swiftly and give chase for various reasons. I remember the hairbrush was from Avon, it had a hard white plastic handle and she sometimes cracked me over the head with it.
I can remember vividly an occasion on which family friends and their kids visited us for Sunday lunch. I was 4 or 5 and presumably already pretty disturbed by the domestic violence. I acted out, throwing a hardbacked book at my younger brother which hit him on the nose and caused a bleed. (He and I didn't get on as children, and he bullied me for years at home.) Suddenly I found myself the subject of a perverse debate between my parents and the visiting parents, to decide who would be the one to give me a beating for hurting my brother. In the end - somehow more humiliatingly than if it had been my own father - the visiting dad was given the honour of taking me into the bedroom, putting me over his knee and spanking me with his belt.
Perhaps predictably then, by the time I was in middle and high school I was failing and acting out (but not violently, no physical fighting) and got the cane from the headmaster at least twice.
During all those years, with the exception of my best friend who was anti-school and so could easily criticise the head for anything, nobody ever commented on what I now realise were repeated experiences of brutal violence towards me. No-one at all. Of course, gradually as an adult I've realised some of the implications of the sort of treatment I received, and have talked about it at times in counselling. I was estranged from my father for many years before he died, and have had an emotionally difficult relationship with my mother (to say the least). But because I don't have much in common with either of my siblings and no other close family, I've gone along with the weird relationship with my mother because I can't function well enough in the world to really stand on my own two feet, so have been afraid of cutting ties with her. (Not for financial reasons though - if anything, for many years I would give her relatively significant amounts of money occasionally to help her out.) But I've always felt a deep conflict and confusion in my feelings about her, resentment and ambivalence. I have to assume that given her use of corporal punishment it's understandable that I've found it difficult to love her more consistently, but I've always felt guilty about that. She was the one who ultimately did the lion's share of bringing us up, in various ways, but there was always a strong message of being lucky to have her and fortunate that she struggled to raise us, given my dad's absence in various ways.
There's much more, as you can probably imagine, but I don't have the werewithal to go into it this morning. The point of me posting I suppose is that despite being aware of a lot of what I went through, to this day I can't shake the core shameful feelings and the belief that I'm somehow 'wrong' or 'bad'. Years of counselling helped get me through some tricky times but did very little to fundamentally heal me. Reading that thread yesterday made me so sad, for other children and for myself. Most of all I can't get over how actually 'normal' it must be to feel unquestioningly that violence towards children in the name of discipline or punishment is always fundamentally wrong. I mean, my heart frequently goes out to suffering children. (A huge, ongoing anxiety trigger for me is hearing children crying or screaming, and I'm hyper-attuned to it! But along with that goes a feeling of powerlessness to do much or anything to protect them, because I'm not qualified to intervene.) But even though I can empathise at the drop of a hat, inside me is a very muddled up cognitive process that can still really 'lag', so that when I was reading that thread yesterday I'm waiting on the opinions of others to reveal the truth to me. A big part of me still doesn't readily know what to think for myself, if that makes sense. It's like my default position is something like, "Is that right or wrong? Let's see what other people think about it..." And then I read all these comments of people immediately affirming "That's not just wrong, it's abominable, LTB!" and I'm suddenly looking back at what I went through and thinking, wow, maybe it does explain a lot after all.
Does it really mess you up? My life has been very unsteady and apart from being rubbish at relationships I haven't been able to hold down steady employment. I've trained for three different careers (to degree or diploma level) and not been able to sustain any of them. I've had various health issues which have held me back too, and I read that past abuse can be somatised.
Sorry for the rambling post.