I've read most of the thread now, and I apologise for writing so much, but this is so important to me. I think people should write as much as they can about it because if just one thing they say 'switches on a lightbulb of enlightement' about something in someone's head and helps them to be the sort of parent they want to be then that is brilliant for our children. I feel so strongly that we must do all we can to learn how to parent differently from parents who caused us damage. It is our duty if we have chosen to be parents, to learn how to parent our children properly. There are so many thoughts and feelings common specifically to people from abusive backgrounds and I feel I have so much to agree with lots of you on and so much I want to share with you, both to share the 'burden' and in case any of the thoughts that have helped me can help anyone else.
Armadillo, I didn't feel I had any big problems with my parenting until I had my second child, and then, like you said, just seeing a similar structure to my own childhood (1 older child, 1 younger) brought back my feelings about that particular relationship for me. I had thought I was 'over' it but the intensity of the feelings that came back to me shocked me.
I was seeing all older siblings as evil! It felt so wrong to feel extreme negative feelings towards my own DD who had done nothing wrong! So I found a good therapist and it is 'sorted' now. Like Picklemum said, sometimes the anxiety that my children might really hurt each other it intense because I find it hard to believe that they won't. When you experienced something yourself you feel that is the norm and that it is likely to happen to your children. It is really important to learn what is normal and what is not.
I also feel similarly about what you said about separating out what was good that your parents did from what was bad. My 'instinct' is to do everything oppositely from the way they did it because I react against the bad bits so much, but not everything the did was the wrong way to do it. Just because they did some of it right doesn't mean you aren't allowed to feel negatively about the bits they got badly wrong.
Re 'muddling along' and not feeling you know how to do it, like a few people have written about, I think all parents do muddle along but if you felt your parents got it badly wrong you feel even less sure about what to do because you didn't have role models for good parenting to base your starting point from. I've been obsessed by learning what is normal because the more I learn this, the better I feel and the better I cope. Observing people I know and reading MN have been great for this.
I also know what people mean by worrying and worrying about whether you are getting it right, because you so don't want to do anything to make your children feel anything similar to the really bad things you went through as a child, but you fear that you may have subconsciously picked up too much of your parents ways. Well, you can measure how much better you are doing things than your parents. Eg each time I cuddle my children I can think (I didn't get this so this is one thing that I'm doing better). There are loads of other examples which, added together, make me a better parent than how I was parented. You can look out for them in yourself throughout the day. The more you notice them, the more motivated you feel to do more of them.
Despite so not wanting to do things the way your parents did, sometimes like Allegrageller said, you see/hear yourself doing similar things without 'seeing it coming'. The way they did things and the way they reacted to things became ingrained in your brain while you were learning about the world and your brain was still developing, as templates for how to behave and how to feel about certain things. I realised that some things the children do that I have got angry/irritated by, I don't need to get angry about! I don't need to think about it the way they did, I can think of it in a different way. In this way, we can see that it 'isn't our fault' because they made us this way, and feel less bad about it, but it is also a really important job that we MUST do, to undo the learning of ways that are unhealthy for our children and for us. I will not let myself excuse myself from mistreating/neglecting my children by thinking 'it's not my fault, it's the way I was brought up'. I feel this is what my mum did - didn't even bother trying to do things differently, just stuck to "all I've ever known" even though she knew how unhappy those things made her as a child.
It is very very hard to change it and takes a lot of thinking and practising, mistakes and re-evaluation, but it is important to keep at it. Something that might make people with difficult childhoods better parents than others is that they do actually think about what they are doing with their children and what effect they might be having on them, because they are so aware of how horrible it can feel to be mistreated/neglected. I agree with people who say "At least you know how NOT to do it". They may have more focus on how their children are feeling. Other people could carry on, almost on autopilot, just parenting according to their role models, because they didn't find anything really awful about how their parents did it, but not really paying as much attention to how their actions could make their children feel. Having said that, if they found their own parents ok and they parent the same way then they will probably do ok anyway.
Like HerBeautitude and Lynli said, it can make you put so much pressure on yourself though. It is sometimes hard to know what circumstances would make any normal person find things difficult with their children and which things are because of bad experiences from your own childhood. I think it really does help to look at what you are doing that is good and different to the bad things from your past instead of only focussing on 'I must make sure I don't do it like this or this etc'. Instead of thinking 'I must NOT do x', think 'I am GOING to do more of a, b and c, which will be good things'. Think of the bad things your parents did which you do not want to do, then think of 'opposite' things you can do which would be good and then focus on doing those good things, eg for a dumb little example of mine 'I resolve to try to say to my children "I love you" when I kiss them goodnight and when I say goodbye as they go into school for the day, as much as I can'. (It doesn't come naturally to me, I feel stiff and self conscious and repressed, so I practise saying it until it feels more normal. Some days I've found I couldn't make myself say it! But I try not to beat myself up, just resolve to keep trying and not give up, and I'm gradually saying it more often and it's coming more naturally.) Like SillySow said, violence breeds violence but I think the opposite is also true, the more you do a positive behaviour, the more you condition yourself to do it more.
Allegrageller, Picklemum and CherryAlmond, I know what you mean about sometimes feeling you haven't got love in you to give out because you never received enough yourself. I think it is a gradual process giving yourself love, seeing things to love in yourself and in other people by focussing on looking for these things. I see it like a form of meditation, stopping everything for a few moments, more and more often, and just observing your children, looking at all the little things you love about them and all the things that make them children rather than adults, which you want to appreciate in the present moment, before they grow up and those moments are gone forever. When you look at your children and feel love, they feel your love, even if you don't say anything, it is expressed in your body language. And the more you do it and practise, you will find yourself behaving affectionately without you even doing it consciously. I like what Simic has written as well, about stopping and noticing the good bits and celebrating them more.
I so agree with Leonine, that if you think about what you are doing with your children and care about it enough to worry about it and talk about it and try to do better, then you are definitely not the world's shittest mother. My mum just simply stated once, when I said she should have shown my brother more affection and then he might have not ended up doing violent things, "I don't know how to do it as I never had that (affection) myself". Yes, I can see that it wasn't her fault from that point of view but I also think it was her duty after choosing to be a mother to learn how to do it properly instead of not even trying to do things differently. She didn't appear to feel any guilt about the way she did things, unlike people on here.
I recognise what you say Fairybaby, about the worry about doing things similarly badly to your parents, as a big fear. It's intense. The fact that you fear it and look out for it, means you are a lot less likely to let it happen than your parents who probably didn't give it much thought.
Leonine, I sympathise with you finding it difficult to find any time to deal with your own difficult feelings when you are so in demand from children, husband etc all the time. From my own experience and from lots that I have read, having children really brings up lots of unresolved difficult feelings if you had an unhappy childhood which interefere with your ability to parent the way you want to. You feel you need to work on your stuff and get it sorted so you can be a good parent but there is little time to do this time consuming and exhausting work on yourself. I felt there was so much in my head all at once that my brain was gridlocked and I couldn't concentrate enough to do anything much properly. I was depressed, found it hard to cope with normal life, exhausted and despairing. I was lucky that we could afford for me to give up work but continue to send the children to nursery twice a week and I went to see a therapist for a year and a half, spent lots of time writing and thinking and using MN. I managed to clear out most of the crap and now feel better, so it can be done. I put loads of effort into 'getting it done' and looked for new ways to think so that I could keep moving forward. I was worried that therapy could just encourage me to wallow in self pity, but I found a really good therapist who let me do the right amount of 'wallowing' but also help me to progress from that.
I so agree with you Picklemum, and I've read other people write similarly, that when you have your own children and you feel the way you do about them, and it is so strong, it is a big shock to realise that your parents didn't feel that way. Dealing with that shock is hard. I also recognise what you say about feeling fear a lot and not being able to relax as I am very anxious and find it exhausting. It makes the job harder for you than for people with a normal level of anxiety. Maybe some of it is us feeling the anxiety we felt as children their age as they remind us of who we were (which we may have tried to forget).
AfterAllYouKnow, I so recognise what you say about being "mentally absent" from your children. I used to have so much crap in my head all at once that I couldn't focus on them and they needed so much more of me than they were getting. I can see that this is how my parents were with us, blinded to us by all their own problems. When my children were younger, to lots of people I looked like I was doing all the right things with my children and doing lots of things with them, but I know that I wasn't 'all there' and I also know that my children felt this and were anxious and over-attention-seeking and less happy than they are now that I am not depressed anymore. It is really important to work on getting yourself more and more sorted so that you can give them more of what they need.