"But we took you to Stately Homes!" - Dysfunctional parents?

[ItsGraceAgain]

It's October 2010, and the Stately Home is still open to visitors.

Forerunning threads:
December 2007
March 2008
August 2008
February 2009
May 2009
January 2010
April 2010
August 2010

Please check later posts in this thread for links & quotes. The main thing is: "they did do it to you" - and you can recover.

Thank you so much all of you.
iso, it's really good to hear that I'm being listened to. It does feel sometimes that what I type disappears into the ether. I like your analogy and will work on using it myself.

Hi Mums and welcome. What an incredibly brave thing you have done in sending the email. I hope it has given you a sense of empowerment.

If you need support after reading the reply, I will be here for a little while longer.

bookcase I have the same voice you describe and as you know I refer to her as Edna. Actually after reading the last few posts I have an urge to turn Edna into a chattering monkey. Its extremely appealing.

mums You are incredibly brave, as standing up for yourself against the abuse is a HUGE step. You deserve a large dish of Kudos for that. Have you opened the email yet? If you can come back and post, it might help to offload what I am only guessing will be an email full of poison.

Hello to all of you brave ladies xx

bookcase Meant to add that what you post is always incredibly important because you are voicing things that others might find difficult to. Some things you post are way to difficult to grasp or percieve. So what you are doing is adding definition and validation to others experiences by sharing your thoughts.

Morning all! The reply from my parents was pretty much as expected. I'm glad that I read the opening post on these threads concerning the excerpts from the Toxic Parents book as I was seriously doubting myself and my recollection of events.

Apparently I have deeply hurt my mother, she had a hard life and worked her fingers to the bone bringing us all up. What I put in the email never happened and should have remained between my CBT therapist and I. There is also a lot I don't know concerning my real father and their marriage-but 'it's between my mum and him and nothing to do with me'. Grrr, I am an adult - why won't she bloody well tell me? Also my stepfather never differientiated between us and his real children and we were all treated equally.

I have reread my brother's email reply to the email to my parents and he makes lots of digs about my financial situation (he is extremely rich). As we are virtual strangers there is no way he could know anything about that unless my parents told him. They are really are bastards and have probably been continuing to put me down behind my back even though we have had a very good relationship since I left home.

They want to met up next week and discuss things face to face. Really don't think they deserve my time at the moment. I know I have burnt my bridges with my siblings as they are all apparently furious with me for daring to open my mouth and blame my mother for my 'fuck ups'.

Yep, mums, as the scapegoat it's part of your job to be the fuck-up so the others don't have to. It makes the hard work of facing your reality even harder, doesn't it, because it means breaking the imaginary thread that binds you to your siblings :(

Congratulations on what sounds like a fantastically courageous and honest move!

No, they don't deserve your time, headspace or diplomatic effort. Especially not at an emotionally-loaded time of year - and not at any time, actually.

I hope you don't mind me posting this, as it's not really anything to do with current conversations. It helps me to post sometimes, even after writing in my notebook. I trust you to ignore me if appropriate

I wrote a list of people who have actually made bad things happen to me - as differentiated from those whose behaviours have caused damage: specific actions which caused specific events. Only one of them did it inadvertently (story below); the others harmed my life by choice. They are:

Dad. He took steps to ensure I wouldn't get university funding, and told the police to prosecute me for a minor crime.

Two ex-bosses, named Chris and Peter. Both systematically destroyed my career - successfully and on purpose.

The 'other me'. This peculiar story is related to Chris's campaign against me. He had a personal (incorrect) reason to believe I corrupted my colleagues and was an alcoholic. He successfully convinced many decision-makers of his belief. Years later, I discovered there was another person in my profession, who has the same name as me and looks like me! Mine's an unusual name; the whole tale is so weird, it sounds made up. Anyway, she was an erratic alcoholic. So, although she didn't know it, her actions were ascribed to me thus supporting Chris's smear campaign.

Mum. She's never gone out of her way to make bad things happen. But she knowingly failed to rescue me from harm being done by others. As my mother, she should have done.

The person who wrongly accused me of benefit fraud. Benefits were suspended pending investigation and I became homeless. The probably thought they were doing their civic duty - the ad campaigns don't disclose what happens following a report!

The workplace first-aider, who hated my guts and broke the finger she was supposed to be treating! It's still giving me problems, 20 years on.

My ex-best-friend and flatmate, whose actions against me were so pointlessly malicious, I didn't believe it for ages.

So that's eight people, including one whose influence was just a quirk of fate.

Then I wrote a list of people who have deliberately made a positive difference to my outcomes. This list of benefactors is much longer :) But only three of them are friends - all the others were acting in a professional capacity; none were partners or family members.

List number three is a list of people who've gone out of their way to be kind: helping me weather a very bad time; letting me stay when I had nowhere else; doing something special just to make me happy. This list is very long and includes friends, partners and relations :)

It's done me good, I think, to see how much kindness I've experienced. I'm also finding it helpful to separate the specific harms from the more general - but still damaging - effects of the kind of abuse we discuss here.

Childhood abuse and its consequent effects on my self-worth is responsible for my choices of abusive partners and friends. It's also the reason why kindnesses stand out like beacons in my memory: a person had to try pretty hard to get me to accept kindness, so all of those people must have had their saintly moments!

I'm still not 100% sure why these lists were so important to me just now, nor why I needed to distinguish malice from fuckwittery. Still, if anybody sees what I can't see right now, or gains any clues about their own life from my exercise, I guess it's worthwhile :) In the meantime, I have a positive balance of effects. That's got to be helpful!

Had a small "Aha!" The 'malice' list describes actions that were taken without my knowledge and for absurd reasons that only made sense to the perpetrator. It's like the discovery that I was a Worboys victim - could have happened to anybody, and probably did. It helps me to get my head around the fact that I didn't deserve it, there was no reason ... although these attacks hurt me, they really had nothing to do with me: nothing to do with me being a bad person, or a good one. I could not have stopped it, altered it or even avoided it.
Bad people do bad things. Not my fault!

... and those last three words are the ones most of us struggle with, aren't they?

Just wrote a lengthy reply grace but I lost it. Anyhoo, in a nutshell I was asking if perhaps the major difference between an absed child/adult and a lets say 'normal' adult is not the 'things' that happen but out innate belief it is ultimately all our fault? Yes it is a difficult thing to let g of.

mums Yes, typical repsponses but it is good and healthy you are feeling some righteous anger. It is important to hold on to that as you confront your family.
Remember your family system needs you to remain in your assigned role. They will do everything in their power to draw you back in.

our not out*
and let go of

S'okay, typos are part & parcel of a no-edit forum! As are lost posts :(
If you use Firefox, you can get a free add-on called Lazarus, which retains everything you type in forms. Obviously a bad idea if you have privacy worries, but very handy for things like this!

Yes, I agree. It's about losing undeserved self-blame.
Thank you!

I too lost a post earlier on and seriously cannot be bothered to re-type it (luckily for all of you!).

MumsMunchkin I too find it difficult to make friends and will stay awake all night going over and over in my head the conversations I've had with people during the day, analysing them to see if I've said the right thing or anything to offend.
I generally do not talk to people unless they approach me because I don't think that they would be interested in me as a person. I don't think I dress well enough, have enough money or am not as well educated as them etc etc.

Grace I too make the same sort of lists, not on paper but in my head. I find it hard to let go though, especially when the people on the list are not sorry or have no remorse for making my life a misery.

Have been to see my older brother today and have come home realising that I'm on my own. He knows too well what my mother is like but he's back in the game.

Your lists sound a very good idea Grace. You are all an inspiration in the dedication you show towards getting on and improving your lives.

Bookcase, you have just written what I was going to write x

Thank you!

I wonder whether those people ever even thought about the ongoing damage they caused? They did want to hurt me, no doubt about that, but their thinking was so weird & warped that I'm not even sure they saw me as an individual person with a life, like them. I doubt they care about the repercussions. As we've reminded each other on the NPD threads (and here), you'll no more get an apology out of them than you would from a rock that fell as you were walking past.

I did manage to get bad boss Peter fired but, even when presented with the reasons why his actions were wrong, he couldn't see it. Dickhead.

I actually think some of those sort of people get a kick out of the thought of long lasting damage being done, sad that I think that way now a days!

How did you get Peter fired?

Long story, MH, and I think you've already read it. He kept his huge pension entitlement, 12 months' notice pay and sizeable shareholding, while I got 6 months' redundancy and a breakdown. So I didn't exactly win!

Yes, I think they get a power trip out of it. But I do, also, think they're just so weird in the head that they're not capable of caring, feeling remorse or even seeing a reason to apologise. It's like a board game to them.

Would an apology help you Grace?

No. It's irrelevant. I did get an apology from Dad, but that was pretty meaningless as the damage was done and he knew it. I would have liked a more complete apology from Mum, but she's given me the only sort she's capable of. The people on my 'malice' list - nope, don't give a shit. What good would it do?

I was thinking about mampam's post. While I really understand and sympathise with wanting the apology, I feel that desire is all about validation. In a way, perhaps, I got my validation (from myself and you guys) by writing the list.

It's also very important to me that the 'good' lists are so much longer than the 'bad' ones. Recovery (for me at least) rests on acknowledging the harm that was done, and the fact that bad people do bad things because they are bad. The further I move towards understanding exactly what was done to me, and how it's affected me, the further I move towards release from that harm. Of course the balancing effects of good things, done by good people for me, gain more purchase as I un-power the bad.

That's all simplistic but it sort of typed itself, so I'm leaving it in

Munchkin, well done for telling them exactly what they did to you. In my family that's all stayed swept under the carpet so I am still the problem for being full of this mysterious unfounded resentment towards them and then messing up my own life for reasons that of course have nothing to do with them...
I also come bearing tidings of great joy for those who were here a few pages back!
After I sent the showdown e-mail to toxic mum there was complete silence. DB said he would call her the following day but apparently didn't. More silence.
But today he texted me to say he'd called and she said she was cancelling her flight!
He said she was "bitter but philosophical."
Who knows what she'd have done if he hadn't called--pretended she'd never got y last e-mail and turned up regardless, perhaps?
So thanks to all of you who were so supportive. I feel liberated, at least for now. I just hope that knowing I can sometimes fight through the fear and say difficult things will carry over into other areas.
I still have to figure out how to survive a very solitary Christmas, but that's so much less horrible than one with a witch slouched in the corner of my living room sucking all the energy out of it.

wooohooo!

Oh, WHAT a relief quiddity! Hurrah, well done!

And you seem to have given your brother one of his balls back
Have an extra Well Done for that!

Crackers all round, I think.

Bookcase, I was thinking about you in bed last night (not like that!!) This may be old news to you, but anyway. I get stuck with my hopelessness and my inner bully whenever I feel I have to 'do well' - that is, when I'm coping. My mechanisms for being okay (successful, even) are all based on self-criticism and negativity; expecting the worst. In terms of compassionate thinking, I function "best" when in the fear/protection state and do not, yet, know how to function any other way. The adrenal overload, from being constantly in fight, flee or hide mode, wears me out and I end up wanting it all to stop.

I'm a long way from being recovered yet - in fact, an outsider might say I'm going backwards - but am quite pleased, personally, with the fact that I now spend at least part of each day feeling content. And my thinking has changed, dramatically, since the first years of my illness. I'm fairly optimistic that I will achieve a full recovery - by my definition, this means being able to function contentedly and free from self-hatred. I'm learning that the way forward is to stop fighting the illness.

Mumsnet, especially these threads, has been (is) a powerful assistant. Here, I'm allowed to feel weak, confused, lost and helpless. And I am not allowed to hate myself - there's a steady supply of gentle encouragement to like, love and be kind to myself. My first therapist was good at this, too, and she's the one who made the most difference.

There are books and CDs which express this better than I'm doing now; hopefully someone else will come along here and express it in other terms as well. In a nutshell, what I'm trying to say is that perhaps you need to love yourself just enough to let it all go - allow yourself to be ill, damaged, down, sad, broken, empty, etc. Let yourself sink and have some compassion for the hurt you feel.

There's a Pilates method for relaxing the head, neck and shoulders, in which you lie on your mat and let the floor take the whole weight of your head (10lbs, if I remember right). The instructor asks you let your head 'sink through the floor'. It's surprisingly hard to do. We are so used to carrying constant tension, we hang onto that weight even when we know the floor can carry it for us. People in our situation carry our burdens just as tenaciously.

I don't know about you, but I'm so attached to my burdens of blame, fear, etc, I can't let it all go at once. It feels as if I'd become a pile of jelly without the tension. Experience tells me now, though, that letting it go for a bit - and letting a bit of it go - allowing myself - is what lets in the healing.

That was lovely Grace, I will come back later and read it again later!

I had a strange experience today, I got two messages on fb, one was from an old school friend, I messaged her yesterday as it was her birthday so a simple birthday wish was all it was, I have posted the odd little comment on her photo's wall etc, and she has the odd on my wall, not a lot. This morning she sent me a lovely messsage and it made me feel good.

The other message was not so, it was from someone I got friendly with after the ex left through a friend of a friend in a group, I was very vounerable at the time, just having become a single parent and not understanding anything about emotional abuse etc by this stage. She was in and out of mental hospital at the time, and was diagnosed with all sorts personality disorders and bipolar disorder. I was never particularly close to her, she was in the group. I strongly suspect she used to play games with the group and I think she used me as a scapegoat, I have no idea of the full extent of it all. I left that group of people two years ago! I have for a long time had my profile viewable only by friends of freinds and last week I changed my profile to everyone, as I hope really that some people from my past (positive people) would be able to find me if they wanted to. Well I got a threat from this girl and some nasty utterings, she had obviously in the middle of the night ( as that was when it was sent) gone and hunted me down as my name has changed since I knew her to a double barrell as I am now divorcced, to send me this message, all this time later! It was because I asked another girl who I liked to meet for a coffee, and was quite innocent and who I later found out was bpd and quite nieve, who was in the group in a friendly way...a year ago who was sending me from her email for the past year a load of nonsense (I did not think it was her doing it and asked if anyone had access to her email), that it had to stop or I will go to the police, as I have ignored it long enough now! Also the girl who sent the messsage was asking me a lot at one stage a year or so ago to go on some other friendship site! I ignored the lot. I am finding it very telling the sort of people who I knew in the past, the girl from school, who was average when my life was average (before parents split up), and the girl from that bad time in my life who was twisted!

I am sorry if I am incoherant, it has been strange to get two very different messages and to hear from that girl again, who I never had much to do with and it was a long time ago, is never in my thoughts and I have no interest in what so ever and seems to have some kind of vendetta against me for some reason!

Grace, I take from your post (correct me if I had not got it right!) that you are saying, allow your whole self the time to fall apart, to allow the parts of yourself that are not working to no longer be held onto? once they are released your go back to the bare bones of who you are and it is only them that you can grow yourself into the person you should have been from the start if it was not for things going wrong? to grow into someone else, who you will be happier?

sorry for the typo's and spelling mistakes!