"But we took you to Stately Homes" - survivors of dysfunctional and toxic families

[pocketsaviour]

It's October 2016, 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
March 2011
November 2011
January 2012
November 2012
January 2013
March 2013
August 2013
December 2013
February 2014
April 2014
July 2014
Oct 14 – Dec 14
Dec 14 – March 15
March 2015 - Nov 2015
Nov 2015 - Feb 2016
Feb 2016 - Oct 2016

Welcome to the Stately Homes Thread.

This is a long running thread which was originally started up by 'pages' see original thread here (December 2007)

So this thread originates from that thread and has become a safe haven for Adult children of abusive families.

The title refers to an original poster's family who claimed they could not have been abusive as they had taken her to plenty of Stately Homes during her childhood!

One thing you will never hear on this thread is that your abuse or experience was not that bad. You will never have your feelings minimised the way they were when you were a child, or now that you are an adult. To coin the phrase of a much respected past poster Ally90;

'Nobody can judge how sad your childhood made you, even if you wrote a novel on it, only you know that. I can well imagine any of us saying some of the seemingly trivial things our parents/ siblings did to us to many of our real life acquaintances and them not understanding why we were upset/ angry/ hurt etc. And that is why this thread is here. It's a safe place to vent our true feelings, validate our childhood/ lifetime experiences of being hurt/ angry etc by our parents behaviour and to get support for dealing with family in the here and now.'

Most new posters generally start off their posts by saying; but it wasn't that bad for me or my experience wasn't as awful as x,y or z's.

Some on here have been emotionally abused and/ or physically abused. Some are not sure what category (there doesn't have to be any) they fall into.

NONE of that matters. What matters is how 'YOU' felt growing up, how 'YOU' feel now and a chance to talk about how and why those childhood experiences and/ or current parental contact, has left you feeling damaged, falling apart from the inside out and stumbling around trying to find your sense of self-worth.

You might also find the following links and information useful, if you have come this far and are still not sure whether you belong here or not.

'Toxic Parents' by Susan Forward.

I started with this book and found it really useful.

Here are some excerpts:

"Once you get going, most toxic parents will counterattack. After all, if they had the capacity to listen, to hear, to be reasonable, to respect your feelings, and to promote your independence, they wouldn't be toxic parents. They will probably perceive your words as treacherous personal assaults. They will tend to fall back on the same tactics and defences that they have always used, only more so.

Remember, the important thing is not their reaction but your response. If you can stand fast in the face of your parents' fury, accusations, threats and guilt-peddling, you will experience your finest hour.

Here are some typical parental reactions to confrontation:

"It never happened". Parents who have used denial to avoid their own feelings of inadequacy or anxiety, will undoubtedly use it during confrontation, to promote their version of reality. They'll insist that your allegations never happened, or that you're exaggerating. They won't remember, or they will accuse you of lying.

YOUR RESPONSE: Just because you don't remember, doesn't mean it didn't happen".

"It was your fault." Toxic parents are almost never willing to accept responsibility for their destructive behaviour. Instead, they will blame you. They will say that you were bad, or that you were difficult. They will claim that they did the best that they could but that you always created problems for them. They will say that you drove them crazy. They will offer as proof, the fact that everybody in the family knew what a problem you were. They will offer up a laundry list of your alleged offences against them.

YOUR RESPONSE: "You can keep trying to make this my fault, but I'm not going to accept the responsibility for what you did to me, when I was a child".

"I said I was sorry what more do you want?" Some parents may acknowledge a few of the things that you say but be unwilling to do anything about it.

YOUR RESPONSE: "I appreciate your apology, but that is just a beginning. If you're truly sorry, you'll work through this with me, to make a better relationship."

"We did the best we could." Some parents will remind you of how tough they had it while you were growing up and how hard they struggled. They will say such things as "You'll never understand what I was going through," or "I did the best I could". This particular style of response will often stir up a lot of sympathy and compassion for your parents. This is understandable, but it makes it difficult for you to remain focused on what you need to say in your confrontation. The temptation is for you once again to put their needs ahead of your own. It is important that you be able to acknowledge their difficulties, without invalidating your own.

YOUR RESPONSE: "I understand that you had a hard time, and I'm sure that you didn't hurt me on purpose, but I need you to understand that the way you dealt with your problems really did hurt me"

"Look what we did for you." Many parents will attempt to counter your assertions by recalling the wonderful times you had as a child and the loving moments you and they shared. By focusing on the good things, they can avoid looking at the darker side of their behaviour. Parents will typically remind you of gifts they gave you, places they took you, sacrifices they made for you, and thoughtful things they did. They will say things like, "this is the thanks we get" or "nothing was ever enough for you."

YOUR RESPONSE: "I appreciate those things very much, but they didn't make up for ...."

"How can you do this to me?" Some parents act like martyrs. They'll collapse into tears, wring their hands, and express shock and disbelief at your "cruelty". They will act as if your confrontation has victimized them. They will accuse you of hurting them, or disappointing them. They will complain that they don't need this, they have enough problems. They will tell you that they are not strong enough or healthy enough to take this, that the heartache will kill them. Some of their sadness will, of course, be genuine. It is sad for parents to face their own shortcomings, to realise that they have caused their children significant pain. But their sadness can also be manipulative and controlling. It is their way of using guilt to try to make you back down from the confrontation.

YOUR RESPONSE: "I'm sorry you're upset. I'm sorry you're hurt. But I'm not willing to give up on this. I've been hurting for a long time, too."

Helpful Websites

Alice Miller
Personality Disorders definition
Daughters of narcissistic mothers
Out of the FOG
You carry the cure in your own heart
Help for adult children of child abuse
Pete Walker

Some books:

Toxic Parents by Susan Forward
Homecoming by John Bradshaw
Will I ever be good enough? by Karyl McBride
If you had controlling parents by Dan Neuharth
When you and your mother can't be friends by Victoria Segunda
Children of the self-absorbed by Nina Brown - check reviews on this, I didn't find it useful myself.
Recovery of your inner child by Lucia Capacchione

This final quote is from smithfield posting as therealsmithfield:

"I'm sure the other posters will be along shortly to add anything they feel I have left out. I personally don't claim to be sorted but I will say my head has become a helluva lot straighter since I started posting here. You will receive a lot of wisdom but above all else the insights and advice given will 'always' be delivered with warmth and support."

murmuration yep she's been an ex-GF since I met BIL 15 years ago. They've remained close and I believe she's moved to live closer to him, which I really think is cool, that they have this (I guess) non-romantic relationship but they seem to be becoming each other's de facto family in the absence of anything more conventional. I approve, I really do.
Yeah, she was writing to me with actual paper, twice a week. I got so fed up with it, these long, emotionally involving letters that you couldn't just dash off an answer to, that I never opened the last letter until years later. It was just a list of stuff she was wanting to get off the ground, projects and stuff, I don't even know why she was bothered with telling me. Oh christ, as I write this I wonder if she's another narcissist. Oh well not my monkeys not my circus. I'm not proud of the way I treated her (I'm not ashamed either, though) - I'm not perfect, I wasn't a great friend to her, I could probably have been a bit more grown up about refusing the letters than to just let it slide. (Full disclosure, I also said no when BIL asked if she could come to our wedding - they weren't together at the time, I'd never met her, and my wedding was tiny - both sets of parents, other BIL and my best mate. That's the sum total of bad things I've done to her.)
But it doesn't matter how much of an arsehole I was to her, it was a shite pretext for BIL to stop talking to DH. Not his monkeys, etc. It was a dysfunctional play, trying to make DH responsible for my behaviour, trying to make me responsible for facilitating their relationship (and you're right, that bit smacks of emotional wifework) and like any decent codependent abused kid I accepted all of that and felt appropriately guilty. I don't now though.

I'm probably repeating myself and I'm not claiming to have all the answers but I think this is key to us getting better. I didn't behave perfectly, but the resulting shitstorm was not my fault. Whenever someone takes the hump at us we reexamine our behaviour and try to see what it was we did wrong, we try and decide whether we are to blame. There's pages of us doing it here. Were we perfect, or were we to blame for what happened?
It's a... false dichotomy? Is that the one? We are neither perfect, nor to blame. The people who abuse us like us on the back foot so when they decide to abuse us they find a pretext, something we did. As children we learned to take responsibility for all the trouble, all the bad feelings in the family. It's the classic thing. It's a thing abused children do, because it makes them feel in control and it makes them feel as if there is a magic formula that if they find it, their loving parents will be restored to them.
Our abusers provoke us, they find our weak spots and they poke around in them, they cause drama, and when we respond, they blame us for all of their subsequent bad behaviour but it is bullshit. We are responsible for our own thoughts and our own actions. I was a shit friend to ex-gf, but that had nothing to do with BIL cutting contact with DH for 7 years.

Ah, shove, I see what you're saying. I guess I meant irrational as I feel like I'm a bit beyond rational control while in the throes of it, but you are right in that it is justified anger. And both DH and I are 'solvers', so I have a lot of sympathy for forgetting that sometimes just sympathy is what's called for :)

And wow, it seems like siblings really do make things utterly complicated, for many of you. As I kid, I used to wish that I had a sibling to dilute my parents' attention, but as an adult, I wonder if it just doesn't make everything simpler.

Anyway, what I didn't get to before: I finally finished Toxic Parents, and it left me feeling like that last little tiny bit that was only a few pages is really what I want to know more of. How to manage the moving on stage.

I guess I haven't shared my history at all other than a brief, unplanned vent in my first post. I basically did everything she suggests a bit over 20 years ago (gah, that makes me feel old), when I had it 'out' with my parents. I was living away from home for the first time, and had a complete breakdown at the thought of visiting home for a few days after what was at the time my longest-ever separation from my parents of about 7 months. (I'd been away to Uni, but always saw them every ~1.5 months at least due to holidays.) Turns out I'd probably been clinically depressed for most of my teen years, if not longer, and it took several years of medicine plus therapy to learn to actually like myself and think life was worth living. I went complete NC for a period of time (I honestly don't remember how long, something close to but a bit less than a year), during which I communicated only through my godfather, and there was one 'confrontation' in a therapist's office about which I recall very little (I have dissociative tendancies) but I'm fairly sure it didn't go well. Then we had very limited contact for a number of further years only via telephone, but I think it was something like 4 years down the line when I was fine enough in myself to visit for Christmas and then actually stay on for several months as my work took me near them (and again the next year, so it must have not gone too badly...).

Since then I've avoided them for the most part, and realised that I'll never get the kind of emotional support I once craved, but they are at times useful (if not always dependable, yet I've learned to avoid them for things I really need), and thus I've maintained contact, which is simplified by our physical distance. But now that I have a daughter, they expect weekly Skypes, which DD really enjoys, but keeps sapping my energy.

I'm just wondering, where to go from here? I can't see how a repetition of the 20-year-old confrontation saga would help, plus I simply don't have the energy for it (sorry I keep going on about energy, but my chronic illness is fatigue-based and I'm barely holding down my job, so just don't have any to spare). Yet I can't afford to be continually upset by them. And so far everything I've read concentrates on healing yourself, which I agree is a very important first step. But once healed, my parents still exist! And while I don't hate myself anymore, or self-sabotage as I used to, I still get very worked up.

And as I recall upthread people mentioning how they're in therapy and saying some very down-on-oneself things, I just wanted to end with the hope that there is another side. Whereas there was a time my self-image was truly terrible, I actually like myself quite a lot now, and don't feel bad about saying it! I am so glad I've learned to be the person I want to be, and it was definitely worth effort. So hang in there. There is a person to love inside of you.

Xpost toomuch. I'm sorry, I can't see anything 'bad' you did to her at all. You said no to having a stranger at a wedding that consisted exclusively of close family and one good friend. (Um, I said 'no' to having my now-DH come along with friends to an event he would have quite liked - and was reasonably once-in-a-lifetime - as I was in the middle of my breakdown above and couldn't handle a stranger. He still married me years later once we properly met :) ) And you let a correspondence, of a type and frequency that is simply unheard of in modern times, peter out and lapse. She may feel hurt as she perhaps had some unhealthy attachment to you - either that or she is a narcissist, as I just can't think of any way to explain that behaviour. And, yeah, that should have absolutely nothing to do with your DH and BIL's relationship, and really only can in some twisted mind that is looking for some kind of blame to place.

I actually think you should stop taking any blame. You are taking far too much responsibility. You behaved like a normal person in the face of unreasonable behaviour. And if BIL wants to point to that as his reason for not speaking with his brother, he's perfectly free to, but it has nothing to do with you.

toomuch - here is what I actually read in your post, with that story with your SIL. I have probably got loads of things wrong, but maybe seeing how it appears to a neutral observer might be helpful in putting the extent to which you blame yourself in some kind of perspective?

"Toomuch has longstanding emotional pain and issue around self-esteem, as a result of abusive parenting. This makes the setting of boundaries a very difficult issue for her.

When she became friendly with her SIL, the relationship quickly became emotionally involved, at the SIL's instigation. toomuch felt obliged to respond, maybe even a little flattered that she was wanted and needed by someone within the family at last. However, the extent of the practical and emotional demands that were made of her was at a level that the majority of people would consider highly unreasonable, involving regular, lengthy, and emotionally involved letters that required a detailed and empathetic response. The interaction was also largely one-sided, with toomuch offering far more support than she received.

Eventually, this imbalance eventually became unsustainable and toomuch began to feel a victim of yet another self-involved individual who didn't really see her as a full person. Unable to see a way out of this, and finding open setting of boundaries too emotionally risky, she began to back out of the friendship slowly, gradually lengthening the time between her responses. When SIL realised that this withdrawal was occurring, instead of taking a gentle hint to be more giving of herself and less self-centred, she became angry and a family feud resulted.

toomuch quite unreasonably blames herself for this, when actually her part in the deterioration of the friendship was always very much a secondary one. This may be partly due to a longstanding pattern of being the scapegoat for negative dynamics within her family. Because she brings balance to this discussion, while others who are more to blame peddle narratives of being the victim, she suffers in a way that her family members do not with feelings of guilt and responsibility.

Aargh, sorry, no murmur and shove I don't blame myself for the thing with BIL! I did, but I don't now. I'm just enjoying (for want of a better word) exploding the dynamics of it, because it is such a classic setup for a bunch of abused kids. I don't think my behaviour was all that bad, but I do want to fight for the space for us to be less than perfect and still be able to say that our relatives' behaviour in "response" to that is unjustified. Do you know what I mean?

shove just thinking about your mum and the gaslighting, it's kind of the wrong question, isn't it? Truth means bugger all to them - they start with the emotion and then work their way back to what must actually be the case. They're such fuckers. Of course they have to imagine us as problem children because even they must find it hard to deny the reality that there's a hell of a low of shouting and throwing things seems to happen in their house, so of course we must be specially bad... it must be such a slap in the chops to them when they actually have a baby, as the realisation that there is nowhere to hide slowly creeps in. It was OK for my mother though as I was an ideal baby, I slept through the night from birth and only ever cried when I was teething. No, she actually said that. We watched The Secret Life of 4 Year Olds and she tutted all the way through it, commenting that when she was a child, 4 year olds never fought with each other over toys or told each other's secrets or anything else that the scheming little reprobates in the program got up to. Fascinating to see the personality disorder so close to the surface!

murmur on the Skype thing... are your parents like my mother, in that any attempt to set boundaries is basically met with a massive tantrum? Yeah, I don't know what to do on that one. (I think you all know I'm not great at setting boundaries!) You could go the unconfrontational way and make sure the laptop's got about 10 mins' worth of charge in it when they phone... I used to do that with my mother, leave the phone off the charger before I phoned her.

Hi. I wonder if I can be cheeky and ask about experience without having posted on this thread before? It just seemed like it might fit here.

This is more generally about the nature and success of the therapy experience rather than sharing my individual circumstances. But as a summary, relationship breakdown has raised many emotions about my (abusive) childhood. Some fairly serious things.

I see a therapist who helped me through leaving H. She is caring, intelligent and seems to "get" me. My problem is not about her or our dynamic. I'm just finding the idea of continuing daunting. I read an Alice Miller book. Whilst I think it makes sense and seems to reflect the approach of my counsellor, it does emphasise a need to visit the past in detail.

I'd like to feel a bit more sure about success.

I should also say I've been experiencing some fairly serious mental health issues so I can see burying things might not be the most sensible approach.

I wonder if anyone has experience/thoughts they might share please? Thanks.

toomuch - Yes, that's absolutely right, I think. That no-one is perfect and everyone makes mistakes and sometimes we all screw up. The trouble is, though, that you're dealing with people who work on the very different logic that everything they do - including some really appalling stuff towards small children - is totally justified. The monstrousness of that 'perfect parent' narrative has to be acknowledged first, perhaps, before the balance can come.

murmur - sorry that you are dealing with illness on top of all this. You voice my own dilemma: how to maintain some kind of relationship without being constantly sapped by the pain that is involved in doing so. I have huge reservations that confrontation will breed anything other than more stress and problems.

fuckingitup - Is your question: 'will revisiting the past be worth it?'

I honestly don't know the answer to that - I have the same enquiry, and I'm now in the middle of a recall exercise where I am writing down, systematically, all the bad things that happened. My counsellor told me it would be terrible and I would be crying incessantly and unable to get out of bed. Actually, I am neither of those things. It hasn't been bad at all to sit down and recollect these experiences, which include quite bad violence and sexual assault, because I have always been living with the weight of them. They have never not been there. I haven't shed a tear. I don't know if that is a good or a bad thing, and I can't promise that what is true for me will be true for anyone else. But maybe it's useful to have someone's perspective who hasn't struggled as much?

But I think there is another question, which is: what are the risks of not attempting to deal with it? For me, personally, the risk of not dealing with the past had become greater than the risk of trying to do so. Accepting that I can't just go on as I have been settled my mind to give it a try.

shovetheholly yes, that is my question I guess (thanks for summarising ). I too feel the risk of not dealing might be greater. That's what keeps me in counselling. But I worry about ending up feeling worse and more isolated.

I have chunks of my life where I know things happened but unable to recall those periods. I'm not entirely convinced that I've blocked out those memories or just have a particularly bad memory - I may disappoint my counsellor!

Interesting approach re list writing. I get the impression my counsellor is taking a slower approach.

I hope it works out for you.

fuckingitup - I understand your anxiety, I think I have the same thoughts myself. I don't have any answer, except an intensely personal one: I don't really feel I can go on as I am, so I have to try something new, even if it's scary.

I spent the last week systematically writing down some of the things that happened when I was a kid. I thought I had forgotten a lot of what happened, but actually I'd done something quite diferent, which was simply to cover over the memory with a blank bit of mental space. Once I took this cover off, I could remember a great deal of detail. It has all sat there behind the screen all this time.

I haven't found the exercise difficult. My counsellor told me I'd be unable to get out of bed. But I've not even cried. I'm worried now that I haven't, that there is something wrong with me because all I feel is the same sort of dull ache that I'm in all the time, and not some acute emotional pain. I've remembered some bad stuff - violence that left physical damage, sexual assault, uncontrolled and regular rages that went on for literally 5 or 6 hours unchecked. Being kept sleep deprived. Being deliberately humiliated, e.g. by not being allowed to go to the toilet. But none of the stuff that was evental - none of the stuff where you could say 'This happened and it was clearly wrong' - really hurts me that much.

What hurts far, far more is the persistently abnormal state of normality. The lack of love and care that lay behind all those things, but was also a feature of daily life. I honestly feel worse about trivial, stupid ways in which my sister escaped the worst behaviour than I do about the big stuff. Because my mother could give love, just not to me.

One thing I have remembered is that as a child, I was always told I was shit at creative stuff. Especially gardening. My sister and I had patches of earth, and I would assiduously rake and tidy mine in the hope it would win some approval. I ended up with an amazing display of daffodils, since these really like being in disturbed earth and tend to respond by multiplying. Yet I never did get praise for any of it - it was my sister who was wonderful/creative/artistic, whereas I was machine-like and unfeeling. For those who know me from the gardening forum here, this might explain quite a lot about why I am so desperate to encourage people to plant and grow things.

Oh, and meant to say - I have counselling again today. Discussing this stuff is going to be weird, and I am not looking forward to it. Partly, I fear that my counsellor labours under the delusion that simply talking about this stuff is going to 'fix' it, and I know that this isn't actually going to happen.

When I came to the gardening forum it was like this wave of love from you shove, in the direction of everybody. You could stop wars with a force like that

I think I feel the same about the episodes of overt abuse as you do - damaging as it no doubt was, it's clear that it's abusive, and it doesn't mess with my head all that much. (I have about 4 or 5 instances of abuse that I tell to people when I need to talk about it, and it's like OK, we've established that's abusive, just assume the rest of it was similar because I don't really remember.) For me what's more damaging was the emotional abuse, although it took a different form to yours. She trained me into a craven people pleaser, and my boundaries consist of a bunch of deliberate, conscious thought processes with this sort of roar of childish emotion behind it that I have to just ignore. No, toomuch, you don't have to despair because this person in front of you is unhappy. Nothing bad has happened. Just wait for it to be over. The worst is with the kids whose moods are up and down the whole time. I find it incredibly stressful, and that thing where you have to project loving calm in the face of their fear, their anger - it doesn't come naturally, I feel like it costs me, every time. I feel like parenting is a lot harder than it would need to be because of all this.

shove, can I ask whether the counsellor gave you any sort of specific procedure to go through to help recover those memories? It's something I'd like to try myself.

Shove, you seem very able to describe events, and are aware of the injustice of what happened to you but you say yourself that you seem to have an emotional disconnection from them.
Do you think your counsellor expected this exercise to break through this defence mechanism ? I don't think you are not normal in this, I think you may have had to work very hard for a long time to work out ways of defending yourself from hurt, and they are rather to well constructed for this exercise to make the "walls tumble down"
Sometimes what helps us survive gets in our way of healing, but don't think you are "wrong" because of this.
There is a self affirming phrase I use when I feel..well..
"I have always done the best job I can with the tools I had available"
I think most of us do this, and if you have built excellent self defence mechanisms, well done! Now you need to work out how to safely dissassemble them. Clearly the "all at once" is not best for you, perhaps you don't have the tools or resources to deal with that, See how you save yourself ? but you are doing something, or you would not be able to fill in the blanks. Maybe you feel safer removing a brick at a time.
I hope your session today goes well.

Oh and I've been watching the videos from that Richard Grannon guy you linked to snort. He is awesome! It is such a powerful combination - he's knowledgeable, but he's also angry on your behalf, which I find incredibly validating.
Anyway there's a thing if anyone's interested at 12mins in this video (if I've linked correctly) when he talks about what happens when you withdraw narrcissistic supply and it's quite cool.
"Sometimes, all you need to do is withdraw your special attention, and fawning, enabling, sort of pandering kid-gloving of that individual. If you just withdraw all that sugar-coated shit that you're firing at them, that can send them into a spiral of anxiety, and confusion, and insecurity, provocation, jealousy, rage... nastiness. They get vindictive, they get snappy. Just because you're not giving them the special ego stroking that they need. You're just treating them as you would anybody else. You start to treat them like a normal human being. If that sends somebody into a rage, I think we can all agree they're pretty sick."

I was thinking about how you quite often see people coming on here (me included) and their first post is basically "[my crazy parent] was [describes abusive childhood, questions whether it was really abuse] but then as an adult my relationship with them improved. Then I [had a life experience that took up a lot of my emotional energy, kids, an illness, a new job] and suddenly things seem to have deteriorated and I don't know why.

It's basically what he says, I think - that when you turn off that hose of pandering narcissistic supply, they go nuts. Doesn't matter what you're doing instead, doesn't matter if the other thing's life or death - their needs are the most important, and you'd better make sure you take care of them all and - this is important - make sure that you can magic away any sense of guilt they might feel about having their needs put ahead of everyone else's. You need to do the dance constantly, and you need to make it look like it's not any effort.

This is where I get to tell the chips story. The last time my mother visited us we went with her and the kids by cable car to a mountain restaurant near here where you can eat a famous local speciality that my mother has eaten and enjoyed in the UK in the past. By the time we got up the mountain though she was already suffering narcissistic injury because when she manufactured an incident at the entrance to the cablecar in order to be the centre of attention, I didn't jump out and leave my two 3 year olds on their own in the cable car, I just let her sort it out herself. So up in the restaurant she'd have chips, she decided, like the kids. DH went and got the food, including two sachets of tomato ketchup for the ladies, who would basically eat tomato ketchup on its own for dinner. As we are going through the whole blowing on chips/be careful with your drink, lift it with two hands sort of business with the kids, my mother picks up a sachet of tomato ketchup and starts to put it on her chips. "NOOOOOOO" goes kid 1. And DH takes it from her and says "Sorry, this one's for kid 1. They've got more next to the till, if you want to go and get some?"
She didn't speak to us for the next three days.

toomuch - first thing to say is that I'm sure you are a great Mum. Don't assume that because you are struggling, that struggle is coming over in any way. I am not saying this to make you feel better: I just really strongly feel that it's far more likely you are over-compensating for your own experiences, and your kids are totally unaware and only experience your love and care.

Of course, that doesn't make your struggle any less difficult for you. I wonder if people-pleasing is the right phrase for what you are experiencing? What I mean is that I associate people-pleasing with a need to be liked/popular, and to avoid conflict. What you're describing sounds a tiny bit different: like a kind of extra-strong empathy, where your emotions are very associated with those of someone else, to the point that you almost panic around unhappiness - you feel someone else's pain as a weight, a burden on you and you immediately fear that you can't lift it. (I'm not saying this doesn't go with people-pleasing, in fact it seems logical to me that it would. But it feels different in nature from someone who simply says 'Yes' to everybody all the time to keep the peace).

I think what you're doing with your mother, in terms of setting new boundaries, is absolutely the right way to go. You're never going to stop her being utterly selfish, but you can make it clear that you think the behaviour is unacceptable and withdraw the 'reward' that it procures from you. Getting outside of the dynamic of attention/martyrdom is vital. And it is about enduring the squalls that you'll get as a result of daring to put normal boundaries in place, which must be very, very difficult indeed for you, but is absolutely a positive way forward.

With the memory, I am just writing everything down - the act of having to write it makes me remember it. But I think I would strongly caution not just doing it on your own. The fact that I'm writing it to speak about it with someone else alters the nature of it fundamentally. I wouldn't like to think of anyone doing an excavation like that without that support.

665 - I don't know if it's that I'm dissociated from it, or just that I've lived with it for a long time and am accustomed to feeling pretty low as a result (I'm starting to realise that I live with thoughts and feelings that are very much below normal in this regard, on a daily basis). The memory thing is strange, and hard to describe. It's not that I have totally wiped the memory that is there - I live with it every day. I am quite self-analytical, so I think about it too. It's more that I haven't excavated the experiential details. I remember I was sexually assaulted, I don't remember exactly how it felt. The exercise has forced me to recall that second bit. But really it doesn't affect me any more than the constant certainty that it happened. Do I understand that it shouldn't have happened? Yes, absolutely. But I don't have a cathartic burst of anger or sorrow at that. I feel like the only thing that could make me feel better would be getting the love I want so much from my family, and that is the one thing that can never happen. So stuck, really.

PS Thanks for the kind words about the gardening forum. It means a lot. (And like most PSes this is far more significant for me than it looks by bein left to the end!)

shovetheholly and fuckingitup:

Thank you for your posts. I so identify with what you're saying.

In February I had 12 sessions of counselling through work for a minor work-related problem. During those sessions the extent of the emotional abuse I'd suffered as a child kept intruding, and after they were finished I took a month off counselling and then started seeing the counsellor again and paying for it myself.

I too keep asking whether all the excavation of the past is worth it or whether it just makes me feel worse. I have had some bad times after sessions, and once I did take to my bed for 24 hours as I felt so felled by shame that I couldn't face the world. Have name changed for this post due to shame!

In the end I also decided that not facing these issues wasn't working either. I'm in my late 30s, have struggled with depression and anxiety since my teens, have found that things like CBT help in the short term but not really in the longer term so perhaps I do need to go deeper.

I have found some positives from the counselling so far. There are times when I really start to believe that the bad things that have happened to me are not my fault, and the immense shame I feel belongs to my parents not to me, and I'm not responsible for everything bad about the world. I'm hoping these feelings will continue to grow.

I've also cut contact with my parents for 3 months, to be reviewed in the New Year. I feel so much better for this but don't think I can carry it on permanently. I think there will need to be a minimum level of contact again at some point (it was pretty low before).

I really identify with the ongoing emotional abuse, feeling of not being loved, valued, or respected, as the most damaging thing of all. I have no self-esteem. But there are also some horrible incidents that I think I want to talk about and never have, and I'm trying to decide whether I can tell my counsellor about them.

In particular I have awful memories of being humiliated in one of the ways shove describes: not being allowed to go to the toilet when I needed to. From toddlerhood to teenage years my mother regularly used to try to prevent me going when I was desperate to pee or when I had heavy periods. I felt like she was trying to make me wet myself or bleed into my clothes. I have no idea why she would do this.

But it causes me immense shame to even consider telling anyone - such as my counsellor - about it still. And as an adult I consider myself fairly body positive, but I still find it hard to ask to use the loo in situations where I need to ask (like in someone's house, or when I'm out and about with friends and need to suggest a loo stop), and worry that other people will think I go too often. I worry when I'm going to be going away overnight with other people that I might need the loo in the night and others will think less of me if I do and they know about it. Silly, but I can't seem to get over it.

shove I actually, seeing you on the gardening thread, had the oddest spidey-sense that you were a Stately Homer in recovery. It's something about making a deliberate decision to be kind, to be happy. I saw the same off my other half when I met him, before I even knew what it was.

I wonder if people-pleasing is the right phrase for what you are experiencing?... What you're describing sounds... like a kind of extra-strong empathy, where your emotions are very associated with those of someone else, to the point that you almost panic around unhappiness - you feel someone else's pain as a weight, a burden on you and you immediately fear that you can't lift it.

That's a good description. Very porous boundaries is what it is, and I don't know whether it would be possible for me to remain this sensitive to feelings and moods but not be affected by them. What's also odd is that as I'm thinking about it I realise I trust my instincts about women's feelings far more than men's, which makes sense in the context of a crazy, unpredictable mother. With women, it's basically "I think she thinks so and so, but maybe she really actually doesn't like me oh no oh no".

I'm not in contact with my mother any more - I cut contact last year. I was just tired and sickened beyond what I could cope with, after 20 years of dealing with her at arms length and trying to bring some bloody joy into our interactions, I watched her scheme and fume and demand her supply through us moving, to another country, with toddlers, for the second time in a year, and I just.... I couldn't do it any more. Letting go was such a relief. I came on here and got lots of support and validation and it's been awesome. One of the main things was that the kids had been through so many changes, effectively three different languages they had to cope with in their childcare settings, and you could see they were stressed out by stuff, little habits, and that's all got better. They've settled down and settled in now where we are, they're actually really well integrated and they've got wee friends and I've forced myself to speak to people and go with them on playdates and stuff to help that along. It's worked really well and they get invited to lots of stuff. It's a massive deal for me because I was really socially excluded and I didn't want them to be sort of held back by their foreigner mother. I think it would have been much harder to do all that with my mother like a bloody vampire, still attached.
I do think sometimes that it might have been good for me to face the demon head on, that it would have been good practice, establishing boundaries and stuff like that. But it's not like she was ever going to respect that, or change her relationship with me in anything but a surface way: I believe she would have complied, on the surface, while storing up a whole new load of resentment that would have been expressed in her fucking us up whenever a chance presented itself where we wouldn't be able to hold her directly responsible.

I feel like the only thing that could make me feel better would be getting the love I want so much from my family, and that is the one thing that can never happen.
This might be way wide of the mark but it reminded me of something i read in Steve Biddulph's Raising Girls. Apparently, baby girls (not boys) who had an insecure attachment to their mothers would tend to go closer to their mothers when they were depressed, distant or angry. In contrast to the boys, who would go away from their angry mother.

It sounds to me like you feel there's a love you can only get from your parents - love from other people's not going to count, it's not going to fix you. That sounds like a feature of that sort of insecure attachment, that you're somehow compelled to look for love in the wrong places?

And I realise I've now started quoting the lyrics of country and western songs...

Back from counselling. And had a bit of a lightbulb moment. I was talking about how I'm far less upset about events than I felt my counsellor expected me to be. And she said that there are three levels of injustice with a dysfunctional situation:

1. Events- things that are done that are unloving and wrong and abusive
2. Interpretations - the way that blame is placed for events, e.g. scapegoating the victim of abuse and blaming them for what was done to them
3. The injustice of having to seek help to get your life back on track when you've been the victim of abuse.

And in my case, I'm not upset by (1) but I'm very upset indeed by (2).

I have no idea why or what this means in terms of going forward, but it's not something I had realised before. So progress of some kind, I guess?

justawoman - I'm so sorry this happened to you as well, wrt the use of need for the toilet as humiliation. It's very distressing, and I'm in the same boat as you in the sense that it's had long-term consequences. (To complicate matters, I had a very bad bleeding disorder a couple of years ago that meant I was effectively having a heavy period all the time - which was awful in its own right, but particularly so after having those experiences). Like you, I struggled to talk about it with a counsellor, but actually it has helped. I can't speak about your case, because every one is different, but in mine it had to do with a need to control and my mother's hyper-sensitivity to nighttime noise.

toomuch - It sounds as though you've found a more peaceful place without your mother in your life. I don't think there's any kind of script that is right for every case. For some people, NC is the way of escaping the pain. For others, confrontation works. For others, some different way of finding equilibrium. The main thing is: I really, really don't think you should feel bad for having taken the decision you have, which sounds necessary to allowing you the time/space/energy to place the needs of your kids first. I'm really glad things are working out for you socially! I have a feeling that without the negative source of your internalised panic in your life, you might find that you're actually far more successful at dealing with social situations than you thought!

I think I'm good at looking for love in the right places (DH is definitely right), but that it's not a kind of replacement somehow...

The comments about controlling access to the toilet are interesting Shove. My mother, and the rest of the family have always made a monumental fuss about me needing the toilet too much.
My mother (and now my MIL) also criticised me for going to the loo in the middle of the night. Partly to do with her hypersensitive hearing and insomnia (we used to say she could hear a gnat piss at the end of the garden).
Both women have awful gastric problems, one diagnosed and the other refusing to talk to a doctor about it.
I wonder if they were projecting to a degree. I know my mother said she hated going at work, which must have been very, very hard to acheive with her condition.

I am over a year into psychoanalytic therapy, and also had a MASSIVE urge to write down the events that happened to me (and still happen to me) last week, but felt it was a bit self indulgent. My therapist hasn't suggested doing this, though someone in my group who is quite repressed does. To be honest with you, that put me off.

I've also wondered about projection. I think my mother hates her own body. She has borderline eating disorders and is always putting on and losing loads of weight, for instance.

She gave birth three times vaginally, which I understand is likely to have an impact on the pelvic floor. Now she's in her 60s she wears incontinence pads every day (my sister found this out when helping her after an operation last year). She has a horror of doctors and would never have asked for any help with continence so I wonder if all her attempts at controlling my access to the toilet were indeed projection.

It's helping to learn that others have been humiliated in this way too, thank you for sharing.

justawoman - snap with the eating disorders! In my mother's case, it's again about extreme levels of control. Bodies, I think, escape such control - my mother made a lot of very intrusive comments about sex as well in my teens, which shows perhaps a related kind of discomfort.

ethel - if it helps, it's not self-indulgent Do it, if you think you would benefit and have the support in place to cope with anything that comes up. One can write without ever intending to have a reader (my counsellor didn't read my stuff, we just talked about what came up) - so it's not even really 'sharing'. What happens is like a short-circuit: you to the page, the page back to you. For me, it's easier than sharing the stuff with my counsellor, because I do sometimes feel I am burdening her in a self-indulgent way, especially when she gets angry on my behalf or emotional. Actually paying for counselling is helpful with that, because it feels at least a bit like an exchange.

Shove: yes to the bodies being uncontrollable! But rather than making intrusive remarks about sex my mother just refused ever to talk about it. If any topic even vaguely linked to sex came up on radio or TV she'd immediately turn the set off. I learned about sex from the playground, she never discussed it with me. Same with periods.

Justawomen To elaborate, since eating disorders came up, my MIL pretty much has an eating disorder. She eliminates food claiming it causes her gut problems, but the list is ever changing, endless and includes lots of 'unhealthy' foods such as cream and butter. If she gets the squits after a meal out (not that she will eat out any more) she claims it must be because they fried part of it in butter.
Still she won't go to the doctor.
It has come to a crunch point now as she has had cancer this year, and having blamed her massive weight loss on the treatment (she now has a BMI of 17), she is faced with having to put weight back on. But she can't, because she can't gain weight on her 'healthy diet' .