DD wants to cut ties-Says her childhood was toxic

[SadandStressed3]

This is long, so my apologies.
I’m in a horrible, stressful situation with my 19yr old daughter. Basically, she feels that she had a very unhappy childhood and now doesn’t want to have a relationship with us (apart from us continuing to support her at university and keep her during holidays from university 🙄) She does not keep in touch whilst away and when home, spends the entire time in her room. I’m just going to give a brief overview so as not to drip feed.

She is the eldest of 3 with a 5yr gap and essentially says she feels like we ruined her life by having the younger two. Apparently this meant no time for her and less holidays. She said she had to listen to us saying we couldn’t do stuff because of money but yet we chose to have the younger kids. She said it was toxic due to arguments and stress. There was an awful 2yrs after the youngest was born where I had hideous PND but still had to try and cope as we have zero extended family and DH was working away through the week. There’s 18mths between the younger 2 so DD would have been 7-9yrs during this time.
When she was Y5 we put her in for grammar entrance (she’s exceptionally able academically) She passed and went to an all girls grammar. She hated it and we let her move to the comprehensive for Y8. She hated that too but still came out with 4 top A’levels.
There has been lots of teen drama and she was under CAMHS for a year. This was counselling and I was called in for the last 10mins of each session to be told how awful I always made her feel. How she was belittled and unloved and how the younger two were treated more favourably and how I gaslit her. She complains that the younger two have more relaxed rules on bedtime and internet use (probably marginally true but not by a significant amount) She’s also very angry that family holidays can now be more teen focused whereas when she was their age, we had to accommodate younger kids. To me this is all just what happens when you’re the eldest. Every year, I’ve made sure her and I had a weekend away just us. I’ve also taken her shopping for clothes and when she was 14, we completely redid her bedroom allowing her to choose and putting in a make up desk etc. If anything, she’s probably been over indulged a little.

It breaks my heart that she refuses all contact when away and lives by this narrative of having had a toxic childhood. I work in child safeguarding and thus deal with kids daily who really have experienced toxic situations and it frustrates me and upsets me so much to hear DD say such things. Half of me wants to support her and acknowledge, as I have tried to, that there was a very difficult period when her siblings were young and the other half wants to tell her to stop wallowing in self indulgent MC bullshit. Obviously the latter isn’t ideal and I do push that away. As things stand, she’ll finish next year and we’ll never hear from her again and I’m desperate to sort this out beforehand. Well done if you’ve got this far. Any advice is very welcome.

@slore I am not being sarky but that was a very interesting post. I hadn't thought of things like that.

I did this with my mum and now my dad. My mum I wish I didn't cut off, she's dead now but my dad is horribly toxic and negative it gives me anxiety even thinking about talking to him again

I used to be resentful of my childhood upbringing. Had an autistic DB and a chronically ill DD. As the one not making noise or needing constant care I was mostly left to my own devices and ended up feeling left by the way side. After all if I didn't complain, I was fine right? Well after a bucketload of MH issues and feeling like I had to constantly compare myself to other people and be more "likeable". My mum herself said she might have emotionally neglected me, however on the verge of being a mum myself and now with adult eyes i can see that the resentment towards my mum is pretty unreasonable. She sacrificed herself to take the best care of DD and DB. And whilst I'm sad that we never got to have the close relationship or feeling like she was best friend growing up (we often butted heads and I contemplated going NC with her in late teens early adulthood). I now understand what she went through. We are slowly building our relationship back up and have never been closer.

This is fascinating even out of the context of this thread… could you please elaborate on the differences between ASD and NPD?

I fear for our young people today if a teacher is struggling they go straight to diagnoses. I remember when my daughter was in year 4 her teacher told me in a parents meeting that he is not going to listen to what her past teachers have said about her in reports. He knew I took my children to tutors and other educational settings he was not going to pander to her. He pushed her and I respected him for doing it that.

Why are people always so quick to jump to this response? Maybe she's just hurt and needs help and support, since when did that mean a person has ASD?

@MrsAnon6 I think we are programmed to look for a reason for things. To try and make sense of what we struggle to understand.

Yeah that's a good point.

That's offensive and phenomenally unhelpful to autistic people in stoking prejudice. Your belief that only you and your generation are 'genuine' is mistaken, if indeed you are who you purport to be (who knows on the Internet? Lord knows there are enough people out there who enjoy maligning autistic people for cheap thrills).

If you read the NICE standards for assessment you will see you very much still need to have significant symptoms.

Thanks, I will do so in a couple of days.

I spelled out how misdiagnosing personality disorders and very mild autism as proper autism is outright harmful to people with significant symptoms, and the only way you can dispute me - a person with significant symptoms - is to insinuate that I'm totally lying about having autism at all.

I don't care how much anyone screams "OFFENSIVE! PREJUDICE!" this is actively harming the most vulnerable autistic people (don't get me started on the now totally forgotten sufferers of classic autism), and I will always prioritise actual disabled people - my friends and peers, and also people vastly more disabled than ourselves - over people who are nominally autistic only.

I convinced myself that I'd had a traumatic childhood. Didn't go NC with family but was always distant from my DM, although I loved her I knew I didn't love her as much as I should. Something was wrong somewhere.

I was recently diagnosed ADHD. I'm only now seeing that I was a very different child to the one my mother expected to have, and that she struggled with that. I, on the other hand, struggled with life as a whole. My mother did what she could in the best way she could and my childhood was actually pretty normal.

She's gone now and I wish I could tell her that I understand now.

It is not a zero sum game.

You are making a lot of asumptions about the lives of other autistic people.

There is no diagnosis for mildly autistic.
Either you are or aren’t and so mildly autistic is still autistic

I'm sorry that it happened that way but that's a beautiful post x

what about those of us who when we had children we realised our parents were just shit parents

When I had children it brought home to me how nasty my mother was. How everything was about how she felt. What she wanted to do and what she wanted me to do.

I found raising my dc (both ND as am I and all undiagnosed till adulthood)
very easy and even though they have completely different personalities and interests I made sure they had equal time to do things on their own and with me and as a family and got to choose their own path and own friends.

I moved out at 16. My mother told me I would have no money and would soon be begging to come back because I would realise just how expensive real life was

Turns out it was so much cheaper than living at home.

Haven't posted before and not sure you'll read this but just wanted to say good luck. You're in a difficult position and you are trying your best and your posts show that you are really thinking. I am sorry about all the negativity you have been getting, it does not seem fair to you. All the best.

As a late diagnosed Neurodiverse person I find ur post quite rude! Autism and adhd has been seen as very much boys condition and there wasn't the research on how it effects girls. It's very common for parents of adhd/autistic children to go for and get a diagnosis later in life. As its a very a hereditary condition and makes sense it runs in families. That doesn't mean the assessment criteria has changed to make it easier that means there wasn't the awareness or understanding on how it effects boys and girls 10/20/30 years ago. That also doesn't mean anyone diagnosed now is somehow less valid , it just means we have struggled on not knowing about it and especially with adhd just thought I was lazy and rubbish and that's why I couldn't do simple tasks. And with autism traits I just didnt have knowledge to know this isn't how everyone's brain is wired or thought! My daughter is considerably more disabled by her autism, than me. And yes that does seem wrong that there is no distinction between two types, and there is so much policing around language in general in autism, but that's not on the late diagnosed people. Also u seem to assume a lot and I wouldn't nessasery think ur right!

Absolutely agree with this.

Most of us think that our minds are much like everyone else's, as I think we all do , broadly. That's precisely why we hate ourselves so much - because WHY can't we do what everyone else can do so easily?

It's only when something happens to bring to our notice the details of how ND brains differ that we recognise ourselves in the criteria. It's often our child being diagnosed via schools with much greater awareness of the signs, especially for girls.

Then we look down the list of signs and literally, tick, tick, tick, tick - oh shit my whole life becomes clear.

It's incredibly frustrating and upsetting to hear that people think it's bullshit. As I said, many of us have carried terrible self-loathing for our whole lives, not understanding why we are bright (sometimes seriously so) and yet cannot bring our intelligence to bear on anything in a sustained way. We feel like utter failures, many of us.

Being diagnosed often leads to a period of real grief - for our younger selves as children, teens, and then adults, and all the shame and guilt we felt for letting our parents, then teachers, then tutors, then bosses down. Their endless disappointment, and the misery of self-recrimination we put ourselves through.

If I'd known then what was 'wrong', I would never have put myself in situation after situation where I was absolutely predestined to fuck up, and hate myself for doing so.

So. Lucky you, that you haven't had this experience of late diagnosis; but also poor you, that don't have the imagination to consider that your own experience is not the model for all.

@WinterDeWinter absolutely spot on. Not me but a family member and to be honest my heart breaks for them.

The OP did not actually say that. She said there had been a lot of "teen drama" (whatever that might actually mean) and a year of CAMHS. Not quite the same thing.

@slore apologies, I've read your posts properly now and I can see you're making a different point to the one I thought you were making when I skim read one of them (hello ADHD, both inattentive, and impulsive. All the kinds!). I can see that you're making a more complex argument about PDs vs Autism vs 'traditional autism', sorry. I can't comment on that from a personal perspective because that's not my ND but it's an interesting point and one that I think you can see play out across a lot of 'identity-based' communities.

TBH (I am a left wing gender critical feminist) it feels to me that we've reached the end times and that whole communities are experiencing a kind of communal personality disorder haha, and the rest of us are enabling them because the culture war discourse distracts from all the other horrors.