New poster, long time lurker.
I'm after opinion/clarity on a few things from my childhood/teenage years/potentially young adult years. I'll do some bullet points to keep it short, but also to not make it outing.
Small bit of background without being too outing: parent had me young, only child until teenage years, never knew my father, step parent from being a young child, very close to grandparents, family is terrible at communicating and speaking about feelings or anything serious.
- parents, mostly step parent got very angry when I was a deeply shy child. I would struggle to talk to waiters (I still hate ordering food), struggle to make conversation with family members I didn't know very well etc...
- if alone with step parent in house, when other parent returned, step parent would have done something to uspet me and cause argument/fight so they could go straight to other parent to tell them how bad my behaviour had been
- physically hit by parent, 'normal' punishment smacks when younger but then also hit in teenage years in response to what they would deem as arguing back - realistically it was me having an opinion and standing up for myself
- when I was younger my parent was ill, not drastic, just a bug or something, step parent would not allow me to see parent and would hide in dark on stairs to catch me going along to parents room (I'll not say what happened next as would be too outing, but physical)
- always walking on eggshells, not knowing who was going to be in what mood, who was going to give silent treatment, parent and step - parent always arguing and shouting at each other in their own toxic mess
- grounded for days/week at a time for literally being 1 minute late home from being out with friends - literally 1 minute, I'm not exaggerating
- I was generally treated like a child, but expected to be very independent, rarely given lifts to places and had to come home through city centre late at night on own - not abusive in itself, but stark contrast to how siblings are treated now
- very different childhood/upbringing to siblings
- lots of gaslighting, mostly in the way I was told I had acted
- I actually suspect i may be mildly autistic based on a few traits I had when i was a child but nothing was ever picked up and I don't struggle with some of those things now, but some of them I still do. I've not been assessed, it's just a suspicion.
There's so much that this would be pages and pages long. I'm not sure what I'm after, I've never written it all down before. I guess it's the typical validation I need.
I can give more detail to specific questions I guess. I probably need to have therapy to talk through it all but it's a hassle isn't it.
Thank you if you've made it this far!