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

[toomuchtooold]

It's August 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
May 2017 - Aug 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."

I'm finding all this so hard and Christmas is just making it even more acutely painful. Used to be such a family time and now I am out in the cold with them. Got a (brief, reluctant, tense) visit with them at the weekend and I feel beside myself with anxiety and dread. I just don't know where I'm going with it all really and I'm so tired and hurt by it. I desperately want to stay LC but it's all just so utterly shit that I can't help but wonder why.

Lou. My D is very, very similar to yours, and I recognise a lot of what you describe in terms of behaviour. I'm so sorry to hear about the treatment you were subjected to. Hope you're ok. I really want to go NC with mine too.

NerNer your story sounds similar to mine. I always thought my family and upbringing was fairly normal. It was when I first got pregnant that the relationship with DM started to become challenging. Is there a correlation between becoming pregnant and an increase in narcissistic behaviour I wonder?

Anyhow, very shortly after DC born we had a huge fall out and things have never fully recovered. A few fall outs in between. The most recent several weeks ago. We haven’t properly spoken since and it has actually been quite freeing. Not becoming tense when I see she is phoning or I have a whatsapp from her. I get nervous opening it and seeing what she’s written!

During the latest fall out, there was a lot of woe is me, all i ever did was my best, why don’t my kids like me, how did it come to this etc. She also says she feels like she can’t be herself and is walking on eggshells. Well right back at ya, cos that’s how I feel!

Christmas and NY is going to be extremely challenging as she is arriving in a couple of days for a fortnights visit 🙄. May be checking this thread to remind myself others are going through similar.

By the way- I too question whether it is actually me that has the problem and is being unreasonable and mean.

Hi everyone

Haven't posted on here for a while but I have been following.

I have a question about lasting Powers of Attorney. I know in general if you have a normal family they're a good thing, but does this still apply if they're one of our sorts of families?

There's already a LPoA for my M that she set up after my F died 13 years ago, but at the time a LPoA was just financial. Now there's an additional one for health that you can do, so I've discovered she's set this in motion and without asking me (or DSis who will be doing it jointly) if we're happy to do it, the paperwork is in the post for me to sign.

My gut feeling (that I am learning is something I should listen to) doesn't want to sign. But my head is telling me that it would only come into force if she actually has dementia, by which time she wouldn't be able to manipulate me anyway. Have I got this right?

She has a history of using illness to manipulate other people. She loves to be a martyr, sometimes to the point of deliberately not helping herself so that other people feel sorry for her. We have been LC for a year, maybe a bit longer. There have been signs that she's trying to 'hoover' me back in, so I am wary of this latest development.

On the other hand, this might be just a trigger that I'm reacting to. I spent a lot of my childhood taking responsibility for either her or my F's feelings, so when I am asked to take responsibility for anything to do with her now, I immediately feel incredibly resentful. But it might actually be in my interests to have this responsibility, IF by the time I assume it, she has lost the power to manipulate me.

It's further complicated by the fact that if I refuse to sign, quite apart from the family-wide ruckus that will ensue, everything regarding M's ultimate health care will eventually fall on DSis. I'm not sure I can live with that, but on the other hand I'm beginning to wonder if making me responsible for DSis is one of the ways she manipulates me into doing something that actually SHE wants, so maybe I should just do what I feel I need to anyway?

I'm getting myself tied in knots over it, so any advice that helps me achieve clarity would be gratefully received.

Spare

I would think long and hard about signing any such legal document before signing. At the very least thoroughly research this whole issue and seek your own legal advice before doing anything.

Typical of your mother also to set the wheels in motion with this without prior consultation with yourself (I know of some toxic relation who have acted the self same with the recipient). The document was signed by this recipient.

Personally having seen this, reading more widely about this whole issue (read what Denzil Lush has written about this and he of all people should know), seeing my dad's experiences of such things (awful) and knowing too that utilities and bank staff in branches have little to no real understanding of these documents (not their fault necessarily because they are not trained) there is absolutely no way I would sign one.

This may help you initially but do your researches a lot more thoroughly!:-

www.nhs.uk/Conditions/social-care-and-support-guide/Pages/lasting-power-of-attorney.aspx

Hi CockneyLass

No its not you, its her. She is the unreasonable one here and you are mired in your own FOG re your mother. FOG is an acronym for fear, obligation and guilt. She has trained you from soon after birth to serve her and to put your own needs dead last. I would read the resources at the start of this thread and also the website entitled Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers.

Your mother is coming over for a fortnight; oh no!. Can you cancel the visit?. Is she also staying with yourselves or (hopefully and far more preferably) in a hotel. Who invited her or did she basically invite her own self?. Never have her in your home ever again. She sees your children as narcissistic supply so will ramp it up with them as well right in front of your very eyes.

At the very least if she does arrive you need firm and consistently applied boundaries and enact the same each time. This will be difficult because your mother will likely resist this. I would therefore go out as a family unit as much as possible and keep her as much as possible away from your children in particular.

spare your post about PoAs reminded me that I've been meaning to find out what the status of my mother's one was. She asked me to sign it about 5 years ago, and I agreed as I expected to be doing all that stuff anyway at some point - I don't have any brothers or sisters. Today I got in touch with the office where they are registered and guess what she doesn't have a PoA. The wording of the reply strongly implies that there is no record of any lapsed/cancelled ones either She had me do all the paperwork for it and told me she'd gone to the solicitors with it. This was all before I went NC and was on as good terms as you ever can be with a toxic parent.
So my best guess is that this was just another little effort to wreck my head from beyond the grave. She does shit like this, "forgetting" important documents when you need them etc. But to go to all the bother of filling in the forms and getting me to sign them? And this when we were getting on? I can't wait to see what the will will have in store. My mother used to mention her will to me at least twice every phone call. I was to inherit everything, apparently - now I'm wondering if she was planning to e.g. donate everything to the local cat and dog home all along!

Toomuch that just beggars belief - or it would anywhere except on this thread. Why would anyone do that except to be mean? It wasn't even in her best interests to deceive you, really, was it, at the time, if she wanted care in her old age?!

There is a mechanism for reneging on attorney duties, I've discovered. I'm worried that even if I agree to my M's, if we become NC at some point I might regret it. But you can go back on it by completing a form online.

I've told DSis by email that I'm wary of signing as our M has been so devious over health issues in the past, so I'm going to check all the issues really carefully first. I'm going to see how DSis responds.

It was a surprise to me spare - when we went through all the papers I didn't anticipate much scope for drama but I underestimated her .

Are you worried about e.g. acting on your mother's instructions and then her telling the family "I wasn't keen but spare insisted"?

No, I don't think she'd do that because having things look as though we're a perfect family (when we're not!) is one of her motivators. She'd be much more embarrassed and angry if for example I refused to do it at all, and she had to ask someone else to replace me, and potentially explain that I'd not agreed to it.

I'm more worried that she would use that fact that I've agreed to do it to pull me back in. She is a great one for deliberately neglecting or even jeopardising her own health (and subtly that of others such as my DF when he was alive) in order to make people feel sorry for her. (I could give examples, but it'd take ages...) I know that the right way to deal with this is to 'drop the rope' if she is trying to get me to help her out/care for her in a situation that she's deliberately engineered to make me do that, but I'm scared that having the LPoA will make her think she has even more leverage. I suppose I'd just have to hold on to those boundaries even more firmly, but it'll make it harder. Having got to what I thought was a kind of LC equilibrium, it feels like a backwards step, and it freaks me out!

Spare

Have you heard as yet from your sister?.

Goodness if I did not know better I thought you were writing about my MIL; two sentences in your post in particular stand out because they are the self same behaviours she does!.

Drop the rope she holds out to you. If you do not want the duties associated with the power of attorney documents you do not have to do it. She cannot coerce you or otherwise force you into doing so.
I certainly would not sign any legal docs in any case without seeking my own legal counsel beforehand to know what I was getting into. Low contact as well with narcissists often leads to no contact, do bear that in mind also. Also remember that its not possible to have a relationship with a narcissist.

Atilla DSis replied to the email, which was about a variety of things, but didn't mention the LPA. I think I worded it a bit too cagily maybe. We are meeting up just the two of us in the new year so I'll bring it up then and won't sign anything before then. We are away for Christmas (hooray - our first Christmas without the family!) so I can use that as an excuse for delaying.

I think my M has finally twigged that I'm withdrawing (she's so self-absorbed that it's taken her probably a year to notice...). My uncle (her brother) is away for Christmas this year as well, in Australia, and she's really miffed that she's kind of lost control of who goes where at Christmas. My uncle has told everyone he's not taking any presents to Australia (totally fair enough) and we are opening presents on Christmas Eve because we're flying on Christmas Day. For some reason she is finding this really hard to take. So when we were all together a few weeks ago she gave my uncle an envelope with a voucher in it, and said, 'I know you're not taking any presents with you, but I've put something in an envelope for you and I WANT you to open it on Christmas Day. Whereupon I said to my uncle, 'Our present's in an envelope too, but you can open it whenever you like.' She looked really angry with me for a split second. It was the first time I think that I'd actually properly seen the mask slip. She put her nice face back on very quickly though, so unless I'd been watching I don't think I'd have seen it.

Anyway, I think she's aware now that I am not as compliant as I used to be, and I think the LPA might be part of an attempt to reassert her control. To be honest DSis and I expected to have to make decisions about her care in her old age anyway - it's not like it will really materially change anything.

Hi toomuch and everyone else.

I have seen my new therapist four times now, so I guess it’s still early days.

We haven’t delved too deeply into my childhood yet, but have been talking about recent events with my parents. He actually said during the third appointment that it sounds as though my mother has narcissistic traits.

Anyway, I told him how much I am struggling having no contact with my sister, especially at this time of year. After the initial email and letter back in November I also sent a Christmas card and presents for my niece and nephew a few weeks ago. I know they were received because I could track them online and they were signed for.

My therapist suggested I also send a Christmas card to my parents in order to give my sister ‘permission’ to contact me.

I did and I haven’t heard anything from anyone. I am really struggling. Part of me thinks at least I have done all I can now and I don’t need to feel guilty, but another part regrets it deeply.

to everyone who is struggling at this time of year. I can’t wait for Christmas to be over.

Sunflower sorry you are having such a painful time. Christmas brings it all even more into focus doesn't it? Are you happy with your therapist?

Tomorrow is the day that my parents and one of my siblings are visiting. I feel absolutely wretched with anxiety and dread about it.

More than that, I am increasingly feeling dissatisfied with the situation and am mulling over what to do next. Tbh whatever happens, it's painful and shit :(

Thank you Chest.

I haven’t seen my parents in two and a half years, but I remember the anxiety you are talking about.

Actually, it sometimes feels like I can’t win. Being in contact with my parents makes me ill, but having no contact doesn’t do much for my mental state either.

Sorry, pressed post too soon!

I wish you strength for the upcoming days.

Hi Sunflower

Sorry to hear that you are having a hard time of things.

I was also going to enquire as to whether you are happy with your therapist even though it is early days. How skilled is this person in the machinations of narcissistic family structures?.

I hope I am wrong here but I would not be absolutely surprised if you did not hear further from your sister. She is likely to be the more favoured sibling here in your family of origin, the golden child, and so does not want to rock the boat with your parents. Her role though is also a role not without price though she is unaware of this.

Please be kind to yourself . You absolutely deserve that much.

Sorry, just realised I didn’t answer your question about my therapist. He is actually the second one I’m seeing; I didn’t feel comfortable with the first one so went back on the waiting list for a while. The one I’m seeing now seems to be a much better ‘fit’ for me.

I am also still seeing the CPN every two weeks, but this will stop at some point in the new year. She started seeing me in April as she was on duty with the Crisis Team and my GP referred me (I was doing very badly back then).

Sunflower

The mental state unhappiness stems from your own FOG that persists re your parents, your fear obligation and guilt. If you can address that with your therapist you may well make progress in that area. This is a good website generally:-

outofthefog.website/

Would also suggest you read the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers website if you have not already done that either.

Chest

I would be as unavailable to these people as possible over the festive period. I would seriously consider further lowering all levels of contact with them so for instance after this visit there should be no more visits from them to your house. They are not worth it.

Be kind to yourself.

Thanks for your kind words Atilla, as always.

To be honest, I have no idea what experience my therapist has with Narcissism. I never mentioned the term at all, it was him who brought it up.

But then I’m thinking can my mother really be narcissistic if she doesn’t want any contact? You usually hear that Narcissists have a hard time relinquishing control, so you would think she would jump at the chance to be back in touch.

I am so tired of it all

I would like to dispense , , and to all the people who post on this thread and or otherwise read and not post on this thread. My only regret is that it is virtual. I can honestly state that I would very much like to meet you all.

You are all in my thoughts over the holiday season and I wish you all the very best for 2018. I won't be around much now till the New Year because I am going on a plane to escape the festivities and not least of all my MIL.

Peace and my best wishes to you all

A x

Thank you Atilla.

Enjoy your peaceful Christmas. Xxx

sunflower

(((((((((((((((sunflower))))))))))))))

Your mother is probably still very much in thrall to your abusive father, she seems very much like him and all contact or a lack of is still them controlling you. Honestly neither of them are worth one millisecond of your time and no good at all comes from contacting them. You are chasing their approval that they will never give you. Let that need for their approval go.

It is not repeat not your fault they are like this and you did not make them that way.

I hope that you make and continue to make good progress with your therapist. Try also to work on your own FOG too.

(BTW Munich was great!).

Thank You Atilla and much love to you all xx