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

[toomuchtooold]

It's May 2017, 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
Oct 2016 - Feb 2017
Feb 2017 - May 2017

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
Childhood Disrupted by Donna Jackson Nazakawa

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."

Good morning all.
First time poster on these threads so please accept my apologies if this question has been asked before.
My mother was physically & emotionally abusive throughout my childhood, & the usual things were said, 'but you never went hungry' - as if the fact that I wasn't starved to death should be something to be thankful for.
But what bothered me the most was she never apologised or acknowledged her behaviour. Not that an acknowledgement or apology would have changed much, but I'm sure it would have helped my 'healing' in some way?
Just wondering what others think?
Did your mother ever apologise? & if so, did it help you at all?
My mum died 5 years ago without ever mentioning the abuse I suffered as a child.
to you all.

Treacle I hope you have a lovely day out - sounds lovely. And also that sounds like great progress that you are recognising your thought patterns and starting to challenge them. (Another )

Flaming there must be something about birthdays... it was my impending 50th that got me started on thinking I must sort out things with my M. I just thought I'm too old to take this crap any more!

Diamond my guess is that anyone who did get an apology got one of those "sorry you feel that way/sorry I'm such a disappointment" non-apologies. IDK. I never raised anything with my mother - it's possible that she still thought she was the perfect mother right up till the point where I sent her the NC letter. I never saw the point in raising it, as my mother cut people out of her life for much less - and when I got to the point of going NC I didn't have the appetite for the drama.

Anyway welcome, and sorry you have to be here!

Hello everyone,
Background , been NC with narc dm for 20 years until df's funeral 12 wks ago.
Tentative reconciliation for selfish reasons but also out of compassion and concern for dm's current situation.
Now it would seem I've committed some awful crime , not entirely unexpected but the reason has stumped me.
I did not make a donation to the charity chosen.
That's it. She got a letter from the funeral director and I ( & my sib) are not on it.

It wouldn't even have occurred to me , I got flowers for the grave after the funeral but even if I hadn't it still wouldn't have entered my head to make a donation.
I thought I'd be thanking those that did as I am immediate family.
There is a long history of mind games and it would really help me out if anyone could tell me if this is what this is or if I have committed a funeral faux pas

Soda at my DF's funeral, immediate family gave flowers and everyone else donated. So I think what you did was perfectly usual.

Even if it wasn't though, it's not kind or polite of your M to comment on it, so it sounds like mind games to me. Maybe she's implying that because you were NC for 20 years, you don't count as 'immediate family' any more, so it's a subtle dig at you?

That's it. She got a letter from the funeral director and I ( & my sib) are not on it.
Soda

Your mother has not fundamentally altered in the intervening years and I would go back to being no contact asap. No good at all will come from remaining in contact with her, even a tentative reconciliation is problematic.

You feel compassion towards her because you are at heart an emotionally healthy person, your mother is not emotionally healthy (an understatement) and probably made her late H's funeral all about her as well. She was also not a good parent to you.

At my late FILs funeral people other than the immediate family donated to the charity collection (which reminds me MIL never informed anyone of the final amount raised). You only committed an "offense" in your mother's eyes; she would have found fault with you regardless. Its not possible to have a relationship with a narcissist so my advice is to keep well away and reaffirm your no contact position.

Thank you spare.
DM has this unique ability to make me wonder if black is white.
There isn't much subtlety , apparent my sibling and I were in cohoots to do this as an absolute kick in the teeth to our late DF and out of respect to his memory she isn't sure if she can see me again.
I don't think there is any point even discussing it with her.
She hasn't changed one bit.
Thank you for the reply

Soda

Its not you, its her. And you are right in one important respect; she has not changed in all the intervening years you have been no contact. Such disordered people really do not change and it is not your fault she is like this.

She really could not give a fig about his memory and she's made this all about her rather than him.

My narcissist MIL made her H's funeral all about her (she had no opinion or ideas re his wake and did not want to pay out very much for the catering out of cheapness) and went onto rewrite her relationship history with him, a man whom she herself could not abide. She also needed a willing enabler to help her and he was also a weak bystander of a man.

Attila, I posted before I read your message.
You understand EXACTLY.
Even in the last few weeks I've bitten my tongue about so much.
She has told everyone a pack of lies about why we were NC and repeated the same crap to me as though it were true.
Rewrites history as a matter of course.
I was hoping we could have a cordial relationship, god knows she needs someone , she has agoraphobic leanings and needs assistance with groceries etc.
I don't think I've any fight left , I'm not even that upset.
It is all so predictable.
Thank god for MN, its too difficult to explain to friends .

FilledSoda it was absolutely inevitable that she would try to punish you in this way. If she couldn't find a fault she may well have made something up. You're a nice person but nothing has changed. You need to ignore all her drama. Assist her if you can do so whilst retaining an emotional distance, if that's impossible she is the architect of her lonely widowhood - not you.

filled yes, thank god for MN, on this topic in particular for me. Despite what I said earlier, Toxic Parents is on kindle and I have read half of it today. Thanks meerkat and others for the repeated suggestion to read it. I now get it.

I am going to do this in MY TIME, at MY PACE and if it means NC for a while then that is OK. Even if it means NC for ever I can live with that.

It's now a week since my mother put the phone down on me. I feel horrible, yet also proud and determined. I'm definitely not ringing her, if DF really starts to go downhill quickly I assume that she'll call or rather get my sister to do so. I have actually bought flight tickets to visit next weekend but am not telling DM till a few hours before we leave. If she starts on at me I plan to say that I'm going to get a refund on the tickets, take it or leave it. I can't afford to keep going anyway. It's £200 each, plus car etc, this is the second trip in 3 weeks, we are better off than many people but financially this can't continue indefinitely. I'm too scared of the verbal abuse to go alone. DH being there stops it as DM never misbehaves towards men, (grandson's excepted). Tried talking about the travel costs to have it turned against me, it's just another sign of my selfish lack of love. I really really do not want to visit at all, but Dad's condition makes it so difficult. I am determined not to be bullied into stayig to nurse him. I have been emotionally blackmailed and bullied, told how selfish I am but the fact is I just want to do it. I can clean up kids vomit, and offer tea and sympathy to DH with Manflu but wiping the bum of DF is different, that's just how I am. I'm really struggling with it all, my mother's comments are never out of my head, it's wrecking my health not that DM sees any link. She blames it all on my lifestyle, she "never had any problems like that" and most of the time doesn't believe me.

Hi all. Sorry but I have no words of advice or support today.
I'm feeling really down at the moment. I tried and failed to do the first exercises of the Richard Grannon course. If I can't even do that then I'm not sure there's much hope of ever getting over it. Even if I was properly NC with my m I'm not sure what difference it would make. You can't go NC with the thoughts in your head.
Apologies for the self indulgent complaining but this is the only place I say exactly how I feel.

Hi Sleepy
It must be in the air, I watched some of his stuff the other day (nothing I had to pay for yet) and started to work through Toxic Parents part 2 today where you have to do the work. It's exhausting.

I think it's worth persevering, do try to keep on with taking back control. You need to use your energy for your recovery from their stuff. But go at your pace, baby steps- it took years to get us here, it's not going to be undone overnight. Please don't give up I'm here rooting for you. X

Sleepy I have so much fellow feeling with this:
You can't go NC with the thoughts in your head.

Oh god yes, this. I had an extremely boundaried relationship with my mother from the day I left home to the day I went NC, 20 years later. If it wasn't for the kids I would probably still be in contact, and while it was an utter misery of a job to hang out with her, she had no way of getting under my skin.

But. The lifelong phases of depression, the missing self-esteem - the shitty relationships I put up with, the workplace bullying and actions of shitty "friends" who I never sussed - the incredibly low expectations I had of life, the feeling that every tiny success had to be striven for, that it was the normal order of things to do things you don't like - the damage was all done when I was a kid already.

It's been my experience that some of the recovery exercises can be retraumatising if you go at it too hard - can't remember if I talked about it on here but I tried to do a fairly innocuous inner child visualisation and ended up feeling suicidal for a couple of days. The only thing I've found to help consistently is yoga - I have this trauma sensitive yoga DVD which I do when things are bad. It's one of the few things I can bear to do when I'm really low.

Thanks flaming I won't give up with it, I was just having a really down moment. The dramas with my m are pretty much over as we're so low contact. Now I'm just left dealing with how it's affected me. Finding this thread and realising that it might have been her with the problem and not me has been life changing in itself. I think I'm just so used to avoiding my feelings that any attempt to understand or listen to them makes me quite defensive and down.
I've read the toxic parents book, and would also recommend 'CPTSD: from surviving to thriving and thriving' and 'The Tao of Fully Feeling', both by Pete Walker. X

So today I started working through the active bits of Toxic Parents and was role playing me and my mum. And I've always known she manipulates with questions but today I found out that it has a name.

It's called Tag questions: e.g. You like that, don't you?,
Your better now aren't you? You like your job don't you?

And I realised that her control is linguistic as well as financial. (It was a Google search not TP that led me to this linguistic gem).

Does anyone else have this issue? Mine controls or tries to control conversations with this method and it's been the source of nearly all our telephone rows, because I feel coerced into agreeing but fight back with either a reactive or non defensive response which winds her up. When I do non committal or downright disagree that's when it all goes wrong.

I've also had reinforcement that I don't have to forgive and everything will be ok. Thanks Susan Forward. I'm going to tackle this .

Flaming re tag questions, yes my M does that too. So do a couple of my friends who I'm beginning to see are a lot like my M...

I think I was already frustrated by this technique, subconsciously but without knowing what it was, but what's the best way to respond to it if you don't want to tacitly agree? I have sometimes said 'Actually, no, I don't think x....' but it seems quite confrontational. (Though maybe that's just me and my programming.)

Flaming never thought of this before but my mother does tag questions too with with emphasis on certain words such as You don't go to that do you? What do you want that for? It's hard to get across in writing but they are not real questions just statements of disapproval always made in a particular tone of voice. DM has done this for as long as I can remember, I in my fifties and it still puts a dampner on things for me. She activly dislikes DH and does it a lot when commenting on things that we enjoy or that he has bought me.

spare and frami I've not got past naming it yet! I'm just relieved to discover it's a thing. Common in teachers and women who need validation (apparently).

So I'm going to try a mix of: no response, change the subject, or hmm that's interesting... my current default is NO. And that's the pattern, we're straight into the row, because she always does it so she can make me agree with her and I cannot or rarely do.

flaming my m does this. She tends to project her own stuff on to me with it. Just one example is that she takes any opportunity to tell me I'm scared of the sight of blood. This is absolute rubbish, she has a phobia of seeing blood but it's like she needs me to be the same as her. She will also just assume I have the same opinion as her about a lot of things and get really pissy if I don't react in the same way as her. It's usually when she's had a completely pointless argument with someone and she then has to make nasty comments, usually that they are thick or stupid. I used to go along with it all as well, it was the only time she would ever really want to talk to me. Thinking back, most of my conversations with her involved her bitching about someone or something. Now I don't engage with it, just sort of give her a pitying smile and change the subject. I think this is why I hardly ever hear from her now.

sleepy mine does it to project too. And she says things like "the reason we don't get on is because you're just like me, isn't it?" And I say no, I don't think we are alike. And we're off...

Her tags are statements of her views or projections couched as questions to seek agreement that she is indeed the cleverest woman ever.

flaming I think your m may have some competition as my m also believes she is the 'cleverest woman ever' and only other 'certain' men are allowed to be more intelligent than her

I am a teacher. Now a bit paranoid that I do it! I don't think I do though.

Yes, mine also does it to project. It's one of the things that really annoys me about her, because I usually realise she's done it after the event and then I realise I've not disagreed with something that really I ought to have done. It winds me up a lot.

I think I'm going to respond with something that firmly reflects back at her that it's her opinion (not mine), without actually agreeing or disagreeing. E.g. 'Thanks for sharing your opinion, Mum.' (Although if anyone can come up with a better version of that that sounds a bit more like normal conversation, I'd be grateful!)

When my mother did that with the tag questions I would shrug or say "I don't know" in a neutral/negative tone. But I'd been doing that since I was a monosyllabic teenager. It would probably attract attention if you started doing it suddenly.

She did manage to start a fight with one of those questions once when my dad had just died. All the aunties were up to visit and one of them, she's probably my favourite, has a thing for the M&S food hall - in contrast my mother cooks as though rationing was still a thing. My auntie had brought some baked goods with her and I was like "ooh, lovely!" and I put them on a plate and had a bun. Afterwards in the kitchen my mother angrily beckoned to me and demanded to know why I was eating one of those buns because once in 1986 I'd looked in a shop window and said I didn't like them. What do you even say to that? I quite like wine and having matching crockery and listening to the Today programme on Radio 4, I didn't much care for them at the age of 10 either!