statley homes thread - dysfunctional families

[Mummiehunnie]

I had a look back and could not find the old thread, for adult children who grew up in unhealthy dysfunctional families, and were abused as a result!

• stepfather's child

Goodness. Reading your post really hit a nerve. I think you're right.
I'm plagued by a feeling that any moment the rug is going to be pulled out from beneath me. My OH or DD is going to die or the world is going to end. It's a constant feeling of dread and doom.

I've just had a phonecall from my MIL and beforehand I was crying buckets but as soon as I answered I switched to happy smiley friendly bookcase. That's how I live my life.

Have I killed the thread?

Not yet [hgrin]

Sorry if that seemed flippant, Bookcase! I'm not ignoring you ... posting here can be quite taxing (as you may have found) and the threads tend to go through quite phases, while we're all off processing (or ignoring!) stuff, or maybe even catching up with ourselves. I know what you mean about the happy act, I think. Once, when I was doing group therapy, I said "I'm really depressed!" They all stared at me ... of course, I'd said it in really chirpy tones, with a big happy smile on my face. Until then, I'd had no idea I did that

It's important to let the real feelings out safely - and to work through them, in the sense of figuring out what they're all about and what you're really feeling, deep down. I think generalised anxiety, misery, anger and so forth signify that your mind is trying to tell you something. It comes out in dreams, too, and in odd little truns of phrase. Trouble is, it's hard to notice these things in yourself. While you were doing therapy, did you find any methods that work well for you?

That's okay, I understand.
To be honest, in all my therapy, I never addressed the dissociation. I didn't understand what was going on with me until after I had left (it was an 18 months full-time therapeutic community).

I haven't really found any strategies that I've managed to keep up. I just seem to cling on for dear(?) life. I don't know if I can keep doing it or if more therapy will make the slightest difference. Maybe this is how I will always be.

Sorry if this all sounds disjointed.

Could someone talk a bit more about dissociation and what it feels like, please?
I am well known for being calm in a crisis but recently I've started wondering whether it wasn't in fact dissociation.
I know when my mother used to start screaming abuse at me when I was a teenager, my response would be to get very quiet and sort of try to let it wash over me--partly in the vain hope that she would get fed up and stop. And I don't really remember how or what I felt when she did it. Numb, maybe. That's one reason I underestimated it for many years and blamed myself for my continuing problems.
And no one realised that or even understood that the issue was dealing with the aftereffects of emotional abuse. So I've been through the useless ADs and unhelpful diagnoses too, Bookcase.

The first time I was aware of it - though I didn't know what it was - I was nine. We were on holiday. I had this feeling of being 'not there' - I could see, hear, smell, touch everything around me, but felt as if I wasn't really present. It was a lot like that brief perceptive shift you get during a deja-vu, only it went on for hours. People dissociate in various ways. Some feel they're floating above their own bodies (I got this as a child, but it hasn't happened since my teens); almost everyone who dissociates gets a feeling of looking at life through a thick window, or on TV. I do fugues: they've been reducing in frequency & duration, but yesterday I lost 3 hours. Have absolutely no idea what I was doing, nothing at all I suppose.

Like you, quiddity & Bookcase, I 'wasted' a lot of expensive therapy ... well, it wasn't wasted but didn't really get to the point as everyone seemed very keen to gloss over the childhood stuff! Mind you, I was probably going "I was brought up to believe I was rubbish!" with a big happy smile

Pete Walker's good on flashbacks & dissociation. He's heavy going at times, but worth the emotional & intellectual investment. I'm also very big on mindfulness/compassion work. I reckon my fugue yesterday was related to the fact I haven't been meditating lately. It feels like a waste of time - damn that inner critic! - but it's a heck of a lot more useful than going mentally AWOL for hours without warning.

Dissociation describes a spectrum of disorders which include Depersonalisation, Derealisation, and dissociative identity disorder at its most extreme end.

For me, it's feeling that I exist purely in my head, with a disconnection between my feelings and thoughts. When I talk to people I don't connect with what I am saying and lose the thread of the conversation very easily. It's as if my voice isn't mine and I exist just behind my eyes.

Numb is a very good way of describing it. After a while of suppressing sadness and fear you begin to detach from all feelings, including the nice ones.

It's also a sensation that the world around me has an unreal quality. Everything looks like a 2D image.

For many people, these sensations come and go but for me it's a constant problem.

There I go, in my head again and concentrating on facts instead of feelings.
Ghoul's description is exactly as it is for me.

Oh, yes, like a 2D image! Did you love that delirium cartoon sequence in The Beach? I kept raving about it to people - then realising I was on the verge of telling them MY LIFE REALLY IS LIKE THAT sometimes [hshock] It must be totally fucking exhausting to be dissociated all the time, Bookcase. I don't know how you keep going. On the upside, I've discovered a knack for designing game content - the edge where 2D meets 3D (and reality is faked) feels quite natural.

Have you been doing any very s-l-o-w work to ease your senses back in touch with your awareness? There are a lot of mindfulness exercises like this. I started with trees (I had to pick something I felt was interesting and friendly) - my second day in the park, a kid came up to me and asked if I was a tree-hugger

So I hugged the tree! Therapist wasn't too impressed, but I enjoyed it [hwink]

I don't know either Ghoul. I have tried mindfulness but find that I get very frightened. I struggle to find the motivation for self-help. I find everyday such hard work but am not getting the right help. Sorry to keep going on about it.

You're welcome to go on about it :)
It's not surprising you find the mindfulness frightening. After such a long time tangled up in self-protection, self-criticism, self-reprimand & self-avoidance, it can feel like a terrific risk to allow real contact with the world on any level. I wish I could show you a way to really grasp that these fears and protections belong to a past time, when you really were helpless & vulnerable. Mindfulness provides a small-scale, gentle way to make adult contact with the world (a leaf or two) but I fully understand the fear of even that much 'letting go'.

I feel it, too. I've got it intellectually (mostly) and I'm some way towards getting it emotionally. But I am still abandoning & hating myself. I'm working on it. I know, and 'little me' knows, there are no fast cures: only re-parenting, wisdom & self-compassion. Takes time.

Have you ever told somebody about the things you remember? Written it down in private? Or is it still all locked up?

I attempted it a couple of times in therapy but couldn't go through with it. I just can't find the words to say it. I've tried drawing pictures and writing it, then I tear up the paper and bury it all inside again.
I remember writing in my diary as a teenager that I would never tell anybody everything about me.
I don't think I have the strength.

Hello bookcase.

I am angry that so much of my life, my feeligs, my reality was, and is being denied me. Angry now. Now I know what it is.

I find a huge amount of solace in the birds in my garden, and the stunning sunsets I see.

When I was still seeing Brenda (inner child therapy), we talked about the anger I should feel about having my whole life ruined....because it has been.... and I simply could not express it, I just shut down....hide back under the sofa. That is what I physically did as a child, and I would stay there for hours, imagining how I could build a coccoon where I could hide away from the world for ever.

As I get better, the anger is definitely there now. It's quite frightening. Those people have destroyed my life. I am too old now to do the things that I should have done. I will always feel like a failiure, that I somehow don't deserve to exist, but at least now I am angry about that. I just wish that there was some way to get some life back before I die. After spending all my life wishing I was dead, I am now well enough to want some, and it's been left evry late indeed.

Rambling I know, but I hope it helps some.

Oh thisihowifeel you've said everything that I have been thinking myself. I have, in the past, taken some enjoyment in seeing the roses grow in my garden but it's all very superficial. I mostly can't be bothered with anything and get no enjoyment out of life.
I'm clinging on with both hands to something I hate and believe I'm always going to be like this.

Ive really struggled through to get a career but always fallen at the first hurdle. I could have been so successful if I had been given the chance and if someone had believed in me enough. Now I'm having to do my own therapy because there is no help.

I used to sit in the cupboard under the stairs with a torch and books. It was the only place I could get away.

My kids have really brought home to me how my life could have been so very different, because despite the fact that my first h completely abandoned his son, after failing to assassinate my character in court, many times. My wonderful DS is doing amazingly well at school, achieving so very much.

DS gets nothing from his "father", not a birthday or christmas card, nothing from him. He disgusts me now, to the core of my being, and is a stark reminder of the disgusting place I came from.

The stunning beauty and wonder of my kids, is in part down to the fact that I have done evrything in my power to make it not like my childhood. And despite the splits, I have done that....They KNOW that as my mother scathingly wrote: "fight to the last drop of blood for them" Yes....mother, that's what normal mother's do, and what YOU were supposed to do instead of shagging any bloke that came within striking distance, and then telling us, especially goldenchild sister, all the gory details, and I mean all.

I wonder what I could have been had I come from a normal loving family. I know that I would have been happier and successful, and not living in a world where hiding is a default setting I have to battle against daily.

I know exactly you mean about comparing how your life could have to how you take care of your children. I will always grieve for the life I never had and am determined that my little girl will never have to go through the same.

Bookcase, thisis, I'm going through exactly the same thing now.
My dd is the same age I was when my mother started abusing me. She is a bit shy but still so much more sure of herself than I was at that age. I would rather die than do anything to hurt or damage her at this fragile stage. If she asks for help with any kind of problem she will get it, from me, the rest of our family or other people in her life.

When I was at that age my mother set out to destroy my confidence and I have never been able to believe in myself since. It was like having dozens of doors slammed in my face. I didn't have the courage to try for the career I would really have liked, I thought I wouldn't be good enough.
I was made to feel I was a nuisance if I had any kind of problem, so I should just keep it to myself. No one would care if I tried telling them. And if I had trouble with something it was because I was so pathetic and incompetent. I was obviously struggling to cope and they ignored it.
Seeing my daughter greet the world with hope and confidence, I am grieving too over the life I might have had and once again am unspeakable angry and bewildered--I just don't understand how a mother could destroy her child as mine did.

Bookcase, the thought of you sitting under the stairs is so awful it has made me cry. It's like Harry Potter, that's what his horrible uncle and aunt do to him and it's so horrible it's funny because it can't possibly be real. But for you it was. I wish I could hug the you that had to go though that.

In my positive moments I feel I owe it to myself - we owe it to ourselves - to make what we can of our lives. Then the fear takes over, the belief that I am stupid after all, incapable of anything other than 'laying on my back'.

After my therapy finished I went an did completely the opposite of what I believed I was capable of. I left my home town and went to university to study Psychology. My degree has proven nothing to me. I still believe I am all those awful things. Even the love and support of my DH doesn't break through.

Tonight, I'm really feeling that dd deserves better than me. Without me she will have a normal life - no neurotic messed up mother to deal with.
There is no help out there for me.

Hi, I've been reading this this thread and the past ones for the last year or so but haven't found the confidence to write anything before.

So here goes - I'd like to applaud you ladies for your honesty and courage in posting your hurt & pain. Reading this thread has given me the strength at my really worst times to get through the badness and know that I am not alone in feeling the things I do - especially when all the voices in my head say I that I am just plain wrong & a failure & it is my fault.

I don't find life very easy. Growing up I was angry and defensive most of the time & still now it is a struggle for me to remember to be the person I want to be and shake off my label. I've never confronted my father for the way he bullied me - he would just deny it & dismiss me & I don't have enough self-belief to stand up to him. My mother isn't interested in me or the truth - she says that she didn't want another baby & my father starting drinking as a result of me being born - I am to blame for his alcoholism. Of course on the surface you would never guess any of this and we were well-schooled in keeping the family secrets.

So a thread like this has been a great source of comfort to me - and it has made a big difference to me to know that I am not alone with this. With all the lies and manipulation its hard to remember the truth, but I come on here and this is where I feel at home & myself again.

Kirly, thank you for posting! I'm glad to hear these threads have been supportive for you. Me, too :) How are you now?

... and I came to ask a question of my own, so here goes. I'm still having trouble with being passive-aggressive to myself, gah! Can anybody offer me advice on how to tell whether I'm being nagged by my Parent/critic, asked by my Child/self, or advised by my Adult/self? My current issue is (surprise, surprise) housework. My place is far, far dirtier than my comfort level. It hasn't got to unhygienic (yet), but it's been way past 'shame' for quite a while now. And I'm still not doing it. I don't whether to carry on, pickng my way through the filth, until it starts growing hairy legs of its own (!) or boss myself around and clean it.

All thoughts welcome ... [hconfused]

Maybe it would depend on whether you feel you are with-holding something from your child self by not cleaning; fed-up of being told what to do by your parent self or ignoring the advice of your adult self?