Am finding it so difficult to get past how I was abused/neglected by my parents far more than my younger siblings

[jasminerice]

I know that it is unlikely my younger sisters emerged completely unscathed and undamaged by our dysfunctional family. But it is obvious that I was and am the most scarred and damaged in childhood as evidenced by how I am coping with adult life as compared to them.

I know I bore the brunt of my dad's abuse simply because I had the bad luck to be born the eldest. And I was neglected by my mother because she had PND with me combined with other difficult external circumstances that were not present when my siblings were born.

I've had years and years of counselling, read countless books, been on the many abuse threads on MN, worked and worked on my issues. But I just cannot seem to get past the random unfairness of it all. I have suffered and lost so much, and my sisters seem to have suffered very little, because my dad not abuse them like he did me and my mother did not neglect them like she did me. It's just so unfair. And I will feel the after affects of the abuse and neglect for the rest of my life

The way I see it, you have a choice which was not available to you as a kid. You either let the abuser ruin not only the start of your life but the rest of it by keeping on hashing over the past, wishing things were different, asking questions to which there is no answer. Or you decide to stick a metaphorical two fingers up at the past, point your nose firmly into the future and carry on with the hand you've been dealt.

Life is not fair. There is no such thing as 'karma' keeping a balance of good and evil. Bad things happen to good people and vice versa. There is no rationality or logic to our existence, no divine hand guiding events, no 'grand design' or purpose. Everything is largely random except for the precious few things we consciously determine for ourselves. Once you accept that, you can move on.

I agree with Cogito. There does come a point where you just have to let go of past hurt and unanswered questions. Otherwise they damage your present and future life.

Your life is the same is mine. I am 41 and still carrying all the shit. I am the eldest of 4 with crap parents. The eldest 2 of us (girls) are the shit/abused/unloved ones. The younger two have sunbeams coming out their asses no matter waht they do.. What makes it worse is that we all used to kind of stick together and the younger two agreed that we were treated unfairly. Unfortunately, as the years have passed, my parents have used money and sneaky behaviour to drive a wedge between us and now the younger two have nothing to do with us abused elder two siblings. I am very, very angry about it all. I am angry all the time. It is like a rot inside me and is probably taking years off my life. I have no advice to offer you (otherwise I'd have taken it myself!) I just wanted you to know that you are not alone. Feel free to PM me if you want to vent/discuss strategies. I am just starting a course of psychotherapy to deal with all this crap. I'll let you know if it helps. Anyway, much love to you. You have to keep telling yourself that your parents are the crap ones, not you. You are not a victim, you a survivor. All the best xx

It might help to cut off your sisters - harsh but it might save you dwelling on what you don't have.

Jasmine, I agree with Cogito, live your life, plan your future, hold your head up high and don't repeat the shit your parents gave you. If something from your past comes up, accept it for the shit it was, accept you couldn't have done anything other than you did. Don't compare yourself to others and fight for the life you want.
Shit happens, you have to clean up someone elses mess but you can do it.

I have no experience of what you're going through.

But from another perspective-I see what my mum goes through now because of what she went through when she was younger, the guilt she feels for decisions she made, and she is depressed and an alcoholic and has been for over ten years.

It makes no sense to me to let this weight on your shoulders affect your life now. You are letting it affect you and possibly loved ones around you? You must either forgive or forget.

You may never get the answers you need or want. And I know it's easy for me to sit here and preach...but. Only you can let yourself move on.

A scab will never heal if it is constantly picked.

Let yourself heal x

Well it's very easy to say 'move on' and 'look ahead not behind'. But that really isn't possible in lots of cases, without serious professional help to do it.

OP, you sound amazing: you have read around the subject, you have had counselling, you have been on MN for some help. You are obviously doing everything possible to overcomethe crap.

Well just continue doing these things until you reach an age and time when you have run out of puff with it all. Because IMO that is what sort of happens finally. Your mind and your soul make their peace with each other and you just think 'fuck it, I am going to Africa' sort of thing.

Because nobody ever gets over a terrible and dysfunctional childhood just by 'moving on'

Keep reading. Keep asking questions. It is obviously what you need to still do for now.

I for one am very very sorry that you had such an unfair and miserable time as a child. That was extremely unfair but you have to live with that and incorporate it into the brave and feeling person you are today. You are no doubt a lovely girl and were no doubt a beautiful and clever daughter with so much to give. You were overlooked and not Loved Enough or Cherished Enough by the people who should have showered you with love. Whether they are to blame or not, I don't care: love yourself. Know that to lots of people you are very important and loved and needed.

"Because nobody ever gets over a terrible and dysfunctional childhood just by 'moving on'"

The OP will probably never 'get over' it but that's not the same as 'getting past it'. No-one can forget a terrible childhood or any other traumatic event in their lives. Counselling can help organise thoughts and rationalise responses but real trauma can rarely be adequately resolved, only accepted and understood. Sometimes repeated counselling can even have the negative effect of keeping the trauma top of mind and more influential than it deserves to be. Moving on is an overused phrase but sometimes that is exactly what you have to consciously decide. Not forgetting. Not minimising the problem. Not pretending it didn't happen. But doing other things, letting time go by, and eventually allowing the past become less and less important.

I think it might help to shift your focus into the 'present' as it seems a bit like you're blaming yourself for being able to get past it or get on.

You are still in progress , you are a person who's trying. One of the many things you can do is to respect yourself and look after yourself - you need to take all the roads to self nurture you can as you missed out on that.

Because of your upbringing you may need more nurture. I am the eldest of alcoholic parents and there's also something about the anxiety of being the eldest, the self critical nature of being made to grow up and be independant quicker than other siblings that contribute to an adult feeling of a lack of self-worth.

I cannot stress this enough - you are an adult who needs to look after yourself and take all roads to do that. Fill your life with things you enjoy doing, and turn away from those that take away from you - if you are still in contact with parents and siblings minimise that - put very clear boundaries between you and them.

They are unlikely in the present to have turned around and started to nurture you so be around them less and spend more time on yourself and doing the things you enjoy.

I understand why you can't simply get over it, but I think you are wrong to let the serious issue that you were abused and have been damaged get mixed up with the thought that your sisters were not equally damaged.

Just think for a moment- if your sisters had been in a worse state than you, would that take one tiny atom of hurt away from you? It wouldn't, would it? Would you expect to feel guilty? They are not taking anything from you by being less damaged; you wouldn't be helped by seeing their hurt.

And how would you feel if it had been one of your sisters who was damaged- or if one day you find out that one of your sisters has been damaged- and that sibling resents you? Wouldn't that seem unfair too?

You know that your parents did not neglect and abuse you because you were any less worthy than your sisters, or because of anything to do with either your sisters or you: what they did was because of them. You need to take care that you are not shifting the guilt to innocent people. Let your anger be directed at the people who deserved it.

Hello, thankyou all for responding. Sorry I didn't come back for a while. I read all the replies and felt very overwhelmed and needed to go away and think before I could respond.

It's impossible for me to forget what I went through. The hurt is still very much present and runs very deep. I saw my mother being so loving and caring towards my 2 younger sisters. The three of them were a close, tightly bonded group and I was always on the outside. I cannot stop wondering why. Why did my mother never include me? What was it about me that she didn't like? Why did she love my sisters but not me? Why did she never spend any time alone with me?

If I ask her these questions I either get a silent blank stare from her. Or she blames me, saying I was difficult for her to talk to and get close to. In her eyes it was my fault. But I was just a child. I find it hard to connect with my DD sometimes. But I never give up trying. I persevere and it gets easier all the time. It will never be the same as it is DS with whom I have always had an instant connection. But I'll never give up on my DD like my mother did with me.

So if I can do that why couldn't she? I know my mother was probably neglected by her own mother and brought up by older siblings as she came from a very large family. I know she's lacking in self awareness and is not in touch with her own feelings of being a neglected child. I know all this intellectually and rationally. But emotionally I still can't understand why my mother could treat me that way when she must know the pain and confusion and bewilderment it causes because she was treated like that herself.

My sisters have no understanding of how I feel. They cannot see beyond themselves and their relationship with our mother and cannot imagine that my relationship with her was so utterly different to theirs. They think I'm an ungrateful, uncaring daughter, not realising at all how I never once felt loved or cared for by our mother, unlike them.

I have cut all ties with my parents and sisters for nearly 6 years now. It was the only way to protect myself from being continually hurt by all of them. But they don't see it that way. They don't realise how their behaviour hurt me so much, they seem to think they provided a lovely childhood. They seem to have forgotten the years of terrible abuse by my dad which was completely ignored by my mother. Ideally they want me to forget it all as well so they can pretend we are a normal happy family.

awww bless your heart.

What I think is - you are grieving here, asking 'Why why why???' This is good. But I don't know if there will be an answer. It just is how it is. Maybe your Mum had a hard labour, maybe her rel with your dad wasn't good at that time, maybe she found it hard becoming a mother, who knows.

Me I am the middle, elder sister younger brother. My mother only wanted boys. Disappointed with my sister, her first - terribly disappointed with me. Didn't bother with me at all. Abused me all thro my childhood, hitting, drowning, banging head, spitting, smashing plates round face etc, shouting I hate you, i wish you'd never been born and so on.

I too dont see them.

I think you should carry on asking why, and coming up with no rational answer, and I used to lie on the floor and sob, and then feel much better, and in time I got sick of asking why, cos there is no answer, and then what the other said would happen, happened - I moved on. It is still there but it doesnt hurt as much. i guess I gave it the headspace it needed and now it doesnt often need it.

I think tho that you might want to stop asking your sisters to understand. They don't sound like they want to. Plus, it sets you up as the one at the bottom of the love pile again, begging for love. F that.

I think, grieve it out, and limit their access to you, and work on loving yourself because you are worth it. You always were. Is this the lesson?

something, thankyou and I'm so sorry that you had an unloving mother.

Mine was never really overtly and obviously abusive. Which probably makes it even harder for my sisters to understand. Hers were sins of omission rather than commission.

I think I was just not the child she was expecting when I was born. I was too different from her for her to be able to identify with me and connect with me. Whereas my middle sister in particular was and is very much like my mother in temperament and personality so I suppose it makes sense that my mother instantly felt connected to her.

But even though I was not the child she was expecting, I was still a child who needed her, needed her love and care and attention. And I can't understand why she couldn't at least have tried and pretended to love me even if she didn't feel it inside. Didn't she ever think how I felt when I saw her with my sister so I knew she could be loving but was denied that for myself.

She was forced to give me attention before my sisters were born because it was just me and her. Although it wasn't loving attention, more like irritated, grudging attention that made me feel I was a nuisance that she wished would just go away.

Once my sister was born, she just totally gave up on me and devoted all her attention to her. I had started school by then and made a friend who I think became my attachment figure because my mother was unavailable.

I know there are no proper reasons why my mother behaved that way. As an adult I know it's just the way it was and my bad luck at being born the eldest in the family. But it's the child inside me who keeps asking for her mummy and wants to know why she was never there for her even though she was physically present all the time.

When I was born my mother was quite young (about 25) and definately very immature, a child in a woman's body really. And her relationship with my dad was not good at all. I think she was in a better place when my sister was born, 5 years after me. So why did she not at that time try to create a better relationship between us? Even if we initially got off to a bad start surely she could have tried at any subsequent point to connect with me. But she never did. I got off to a bad start with my DD and it's been very very hard work to establish a good relationship with her. Why didn't my mother do that with me? Instead of just letting us grow further and further apart meaning I felt more and more lonely and isolated and rejected and abandoned by my family.

I have nobody to talk to about this so am posting on here. I just want to know why my mother never made any effort to get to know me or spend time alone with me. If I tried to get her to spend time alone with me she would always insist on one/both of my sisters coming along too. If they weren't around then she would make me wait until they were. Once I got very angry and upset with her over this, it felt like I alone wasn't important enough to her, she would only do what I wanted if one of my sisters wanted to come too. When I got angry with her I didn't really understand myself, why I was so angry and upset. My sister then had a go at me for getting angry with our mum saying "..she does so much for us.." At the time I didn't really have an answer for that. Now I would say that she did everything for my sisters, but nothing for me. While my sister and I were arguing over our mother, she just stood there loving it. Loving the fact that my sister was so loyal and protective over her. She couldn't care less about me and why I was upset at that time.

How can a mother have 3 daughters but only care about 2 of them and just ignore and exclude the third one all the time. It's like Cinderella, only it's my actual mother not a wicked step mother who was so neglectful of me. She wasn't downright cruel to be fair. And a couple of times she did do things that seemed to show she did care about me and think about me a bit. But it just was nowhere near enough. I needed her much much much more than those few times she showed she was thinking about me. Especially after my dad seemed to change overnight from a loving caring dad who liked my company, unlike my mother, into an angry, nasty bitter man who suddenly hated me. I needed my mum most from the age of 10 when my relationship with my dad completely broke down due to his abusive behaviour. But she was never there for me, not even during or after some terrifying episodes of verbal abuse from my dad during one of his unpredictable rages.

How could she just bury her head in the sand? How could she not see how damaging it was to me to go through such experiences? How could she just ignore what was going on right under her nose? How could she stand there and watch my dad terrify me and do nothing to help me? And then years later how can she believe herself to have been a brilliant mother? How can she have no idea how much and how badly she failed me and let me down?

I suddenly became the focus of both my parents' attention when I fell pregnant with my first child, their first grandchild. They suddenly became nice, loving, caring, attentive parents that I'd wanted all my life. It felt lovely to finally have the parents I'd always wanted and needed. But something about it didn't feel right. Deep down I knew that they were suddenly only focussing on me and being attentive and loving because I had something they wanted, their first grandchild.

It's weird now how I believed all those years when they told me they loved me and that I would never be able to rely on anyone else like I could on them as they were my family. I don't know why I believed them when for years beforehand they had done nothing but show that the exact opposite was true by their deeds.

Years after my dad's abuse had lessened, I was still very angry towards him, even though I couldn't remember the actual abusive incidents, which I now know is a survival mechanism. My dad once cruelly asked me in front of my mother and sisters why I was always so hostile towards him and my mother. He made me look like I was a horrible, ungrateful daughter. My sisters were never abused like I was so had no reason to feel angry or hostile towards either of our parents.

My mother was there was my dad asked me why I was always so hostile towards him and surely she knew the answer to that? She had seen him verbally abuse me for years. But she said nothing in my defence. As usual. I replied to my dad that I was hostile because of the past. But at that time I couldn't remember any details so couldn't tell him it was because you said x, y and z. He told me to stop dragging up the past all the time. And the conversation came to an end. But he had got his point across to my sisters. That I was an ungrateful, horrible daughter and that he and my mother were the innocent victims of my hostility. I couldn't explain why I was so hostile because I couldn't remember anything then. So that incident along with many others meant that after my dad spent years abusing me, he then managed to make out to my sisters that I was the aggressor and he and my mother were the victims of my abusive behaviour. They readily believed him as like most children they wanted to please him and get his approval so they turned against me just like he wanted. He had not abused them so they had no reason to be angry or hostile towards him. And our mother had showered them with love and care and attention so they had no reason to be angry with her either.

I think you were right to cut contact with them all. Of course they knew the reality. Your sisters would have been very aware that they were closer to your mum than you were. Children pick up on that sort of thing really quickly. Your mum, too, should have been horrified that you said there was a problem between you. I hated the sound of her blank stares.

Just because she gave birth to you, it doesn't mean she deserves a relationship with you. It doesn't mean you shouldn't do everything you can to avoid seeing her again.

Do you have your own family now? Do you feel loved?

Hello Imperial thanks for reading. I wasn't expecting anyone to read or really understand. I've never met anyone else who was singled out like I was.

Perhaps you're right. My sisters did have an idea that they were closer to my mum than I was. Maybe that's why my middle sister especially bullied me so much. She was the closest to my mum. She must have known that our mum would always be on her side no matter what so she could get away with bullying me knowing my mum would do nothing to protect me.

Thankyou for saying my mum doesn't deserve a relationship with me. So many people, even friends, don't understand and feel sorry for my mum because I have cut ties and she doesn't get to see her grandchildren.

I do have my own family now. I have a lovely DH and 2 gorgeous DC's who I love and who love me. But nothing can fill the hole left by feeling like my mother always loved my sisters more and always put them first, over me.

My mother has never had therapy. She doesn't know she has huge unresolved issues from her own childhood. I'm sure I've spent far more time thinking about why she has behaved the way she did with me and my sisters than she's ever done. She has no capacity for self reflection and no self awareness. To be fair, nor did I until about 6 years ago, or very little at least.

I can see so much of my behaviour has been about trying to gain others' approval and to try and make other people happy. At a great cost to myself as I rarely got the appreciation and approval I was looking for. The only people who could have given me what I needed were my parents and if they failed to give me the praise, approval and recognition I was looking for then nobody else could ever fill that gap.

I used to constantly do things that I didn't particularly want to do myself but which I thought would please other people and make them happy. But most people didn't appreciate my efforts and I ended up unhappy and resentful, but it was not their fault. They didn't ask me to push myself and my own wishes aside, I did it of my own accord,unconsciously seeking a substitute for my parents' approval.

My mum was the youngest of a very large family, 10 children altogether. Her mum was a teenager when she got married and had her first child. I don't know for sure but I imagine that by the time my mum was born, her mother was exhausted and had her hands full looking after her 9 other children. I doubt she had much if any time for my mum, so my mum probably got neglected by her mum and was brought up by babysitters ie her older siblings. She was never adequately mothered herself so never learned how to be a mother. But that doesn't explain how she did manage to be at least an adequate mother to my sisters. At least I perceived her to be an adequate, even good mother to my sisters. I don't actually know what their relationships were really like on the inside. I do wonder how such an immature, inadequate person could ever be an adequate mother to anyone, despite what it looked like to me. But maybe all that matters is that my sisters always felt loved and cherished and important to our mother which they definately did and it matters not whether objectively she was a good mother by doing and providing the things a good mother should.

My sisters are blind to my mother's failures and her inadequacies as a person. When I was young I was very protective of her and hated my dad. I only saw him shouting at her and bullying her. I saw her as a completely innocent victim. (She never seemed protective of me at all though). I couldn't see her part in all of it. But as I got older I started noticing the sly, manipulative side of her personality and my liking and respect for her went down. She would even use me and my sisters in her manipulations to get what she wanted. I wonder if my sisters just didn't notice what I did or just chose to ignore it as it didn't fit with their image of their mother as perfect.