Is it possible to build a happy home out of an unhappy one?

[MsBird]

Hi there, new poster. I'm currently feeling really down about my life and have been thinking a lot about the future. I had a really bad childhood with an abusive father who I now have no contact with. My mother can be very lovely at times but hasn't provided the best life for her children. (I'm quite young btw, I moved out not long ago). All my life I have longed for a functional family unit and feel insane jealousy whenever I see families doing things together and being happy, as I don't think I will ever have that. I worry I will recreate the behaviour of my parents in whatever relationship I will find myself in as I don't know any different. Is it possible to build your own happy family when you are severely damaged from your own upbringing?

I think it is, but you have to build yourself from the ground up and learn good boundaries and relationship habits. Otherwise you sort of slip into the familiar patterns.

I love the shark cage analogy for thinking about good boundaries and I think this bit is pretty relevant:

"However, most of us don’t live in an ideal world. For those of us who need to build our shark cages as adults, the following tips can help.

• Working with a therapist or other professional to work through the trauma that is in your way.
• Spending time and effort examining your belief that you’re “not good enough” and changing it.
• Observing people in healthy relationships to see how they interact.
• Practicing recognizing, respecting and fulfilling your own wants and needs as best you can.
• Getting in the habit of saying “no” to small things, and work your way up.
• Saying “thank you” as full repayment for compliments and attention, especially if you didn’t ask for it.
• Dealing with touch starvation through use of an emotional support animal, family, and/or supportive friends.
• Getting into the habit of “listening” to your body and your “spidey-sense”.

Thank you so much for your detailed reply! I have been in therapy for an incredibly long time and I still feel hopeless even with what they've taught me. I don't know if I'll ever let go of the anger that I feel from being failed as a child, but then I often think that's why my parents hurt me - because they were failed as a child. It's driven me to not want children as I'm so scared of recreating that dysfunctional family dynamic, but I still long for a family.

You are smart enough to know what you want and what you don’t want.

You are brave and determined enough to attend regular counselling.

You have the power to shape your own life. You just don’t believe it yet and that’s ok, that’s what the counselling is for. No rush.

You won’t hurt your children. You will be a better parent than yours were. The counselling will help you move on from the shitstorm of the past.

Plenty of people go on to live happy fulfilled lives. Why shouldn’t you?

My upbringing was difficult for various reasons. Despite that I've managed to build a happy marriage, home and family since I met DH 32 years ago. I knew what not to do.

OP, you sound very self aware and I think you'll be just fine as you also know what not to do. Best of luck for your future.

Yes it is. Mid-fifties here, only managed to get my head screwed on reasonably Ok in, um, my late 20s?

Luckily my lovely OH stuck by me as I peeled all the barnacles off (as it were). I learned a lot from seeing how his (happy) family worked. Up til then I'd pretty much had no examples of a healthy relationship and not surprisingly just expected my own relationship to die because as far as I could see, that's what relationships did.

As well as just looking with wonder (and surreptitiously taking notes, no not really!) at happy families, I learned a lot from the soft skills courses at work (though again, it sank in a lot more once I was in a firm where people were decent to each other as a matter of course).

As you build your life, over time there will be more and more to your life that's not your bad childhood. You'll have built good relationships with normal (ish) people, you'll have had pets, and bit by bit you'll feel the crap from the past crumble away.

I never did have kids but I never wanted them - thought I might change my mind one day but, well, didn't happen. Reckon I could have coped by my early 40s. But bear in mind it took me years to work out that there were bits of me that needed to change and more to work out how to change them. There's so much more help and info available now so in a weird way you have a head start.

What category said is fantastic advice. Oh and if you've not read "The body keeps the score", try that. Great book, very clear and evidence based, about trauma and mental/emotional processing and how to rebuild.

Hi MsBird have you heard of Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families?

adultchildren.org/

It might help you?

So much good advice! Thank you for all your kind words. I definitely relate to living my life through the viewpoint of a victim, on the Children of Alcoholics link. From what you've all said, I think not having a chance to build a new life yet, and define myself in a different way to being the abused child, is really holding me back.

My dad was physically and mentally abused as a child. He's 75 now, he didn't have access to therapy and he did marry a narcissist. They divorced shortly after my little sister was born. We didn't have much contact with her post divorce, what we did have was damaging, so not a complete success. But he never hurt us, he gave us a safe home and the long periods our mother was absent from our lives were happy ones. Maybe not the success story you were hoping for, but my dad managed to over a very traumatic childhood and he was and is a wonderful parent. So I think it is possible. If he'd had access to therapy my dad might have been able to avoid the narcissist marriage too.

Yes, of course it is. But it does mean taking care of yourself and getting support where you need it to be the healthiest you can be. Dh and I both come from homes where there was abuse (physical, emotional, verbal) and addiction. Our mums are now both married to men who have been convicted of child sex offences (so obviously still quite dysfunctional), and we, as you can imagine, have no to very limited contact with them.

But we have a happy life together and two happy, healthy, functional children. We decided a long time ago when we were dating that this bullshit was going to stop with us. We weren't going to add another generation of dysfunction to our families and we made a conscious choice to live our lives differently. It's not quite as easy as simply 'choosing' to not be a toxic dysfunctional mess, but it was a first step. We take a lot of care to make sure our relationship is solid and we are making appropriate healthy choices for our dc. Therapy has also helped immensely to gain some perspective on the past and make insight about the decisions we are making now. But it's also been very healing too. To do it and do it well and create the sort of family that neither of us had has gone some way to healing the wounds we have carried around with us. It's not a reason to have children, but it's been a nice benefit too.