Help me with this please you vipers

[iHeartTheoJames]

I need some help making sense of this memory.

When I was a child my father would show his affection in inappropriate ways. He would put his hands down my knickers and squeeze my bottom and he would suck on my earlobe.

I have a memory from my childhood that has been bugging me for years. I was ten and I woke in the night to find my father in my room at the foot of my bed. When I woke up he looked awkward and wandered round my room before turning the light on and saying the gulf war had started.

I am sure the memory is real and it makes me feel so uncomfortable. What was he doing in my room? Part of me thinks he may have been concerned that the war might put us in danger so he came to check on me. Or also, my parents divorced the year after, did he come to check on me because he knew he was leaving?

I remember this even and I feel like a confused child all over again which is why I need to make sense of it.

It must be really hard for you, remembering this.

I don't think that if he had the war on his mind, you would feel so uneasy, do you?

If your parents divorced a year later, the likelihood is he didn't even know they would be divorcing.

Did you spend much time with him on your own when they divorced? At what point did he stop touching you? That was so incredibly inappropriate.

It's really hard Imperial.

I don't quite understand your first question, my head feels muddled with emotion when I think about this so it's an issue my end!

I remember feeling confused and unsafe. My fear is, what if I woke because he touched me in my sleep? What if I woke before he did? I wonder if he ever did anything to me in my sleep. It's that which causes this memory to not go away. It's the not knowing.

He stopped when I was fourteen and told someone about him. He sucked my earlobe once in front of my stepmother and she did nothing! She just stared at us.

I can't write anymore for a little while.

hugs hope youre not alone wherever you are - be gentle with yourself

I think, given the way he behaved towards you the rest of the time, you unfortunately have to assume the worst. Did you get any counselling help age 14 when you told someone?

What I meant was that your instinct was that something was wrong; that's why you felt so uneasy. If he had just been sitting there worrying about something like the war, then you wouldn't have felt uneasy.

Instincts are very strong. We can tell the difference between someone acting in a predatory way and someone who is mulling something innocuous over.

It does sound as though your father's behaviour was inappropriate and it was your instincts kicking in to protect you. What's your relationship with your father nowadays? Do you have someone there with you now to comfort you?

I have estranged myself from both my parents.

My mother was physically and emotionally abusive, I was put in care because of her and that's when I told my key worker what my father did to me. My mother encouraged him in his impropriety. She took pleasure in suffering, she saw honour in it and thought it character building.

No I have no one here right now. I'll be ok, going to curl up in a minute with a brilliant book I am reading, that will distract me.

I can't remember if I was offered support and refused it or whether none was offered. If I was offered it there was a chance I would have refused it because one of the things my mother would do was tell me there was something terribly wrong with me and would take me to various therapists even though I was fine. In the end I did believe there was something wrong with me, I was 25 before I realised I wasn't an evil, broken thing that would bring out the worst in people and cause them to abuse me.

As part of trying to heal myself I have been trying to find out what caused her to be the way she was. She was either narcissistic or borderline, maybe both. My brother who had similar experiences from my father (but not my mother, she idolised him) thinks she is bipolar but I disagree.

OP, I wouldn't waste my time wondering what was wrong with her. She clearly had some sort of problem that made her an awful mum.

I think you'd really benefit from counselling. How do you get on with your GP? Could you talk to him/her about this and ask for a referral?

How is your brother now? Are you able to talk to him?

Oh and what are you reading? I'm looking for a good book!

I second Imperial's advice to consider some counselling.

I think I need to understand the causes of my parents behaviour and have a label or a reason because I need to know it wasn't their genetic makeup because I am 100% them.

I will look into therapy. My brother had therapy for years and he kept suggesting to me to try it but I wasn't ready, had too many connotations because of my mother.

He tries not to think about the past and my parents so I don't feel I could raise it with him and I treasure him and our relationship so much I don't want to introduce my parents poison into it

I am reading Are We Nearly There Yet by Ben Hatch. It's worth reading just for when he sticks a toothbrush up his arse to alleviate constipation. That's got to make it a classic

Therapy should help you identify the reasons for your parents' behaviour but even more so, identify how it's effected you. You may be surprised at some of what comes up. Finally, it should help you formulate strategies for managing and changing these effects.

I can see why you would be anti therapy. Tell the therapist about it, and they will be able to understand any reticence, and hopefully reassure you.

There is always a reason why people behave in odd ways. If people haven't had a normal family, growing up, then what they did have is normal to them. It's much harder to be normal, even if you understand that how your parents were wasn't right.

And, while you are genetically your parents, you were also "nurtured" (ha!) by them, which probably has a much larger bearing on how you are today, than the genes. And the good news is, that you can do something about that.

(Sorry, I'm not saying there is anything wrong with you, just trying to reassure you that you are not like your parents, just because you share their genetic make up.)