Hello.
This is the first time visiting Mumsnet so as a guy I hope my posting here is OK.
I randomly stumbled upon your post after a google search on some stuff i'm going through personally and the topic intrigued me so I read your post.
I am someone who was also abused growing up in ways i never thought wad that bad until other abused people shook me and told me my life story was one of the worst they'd heard. Ironically these were people who's suffered molestation as children and fostercare telling me my life made them feel better about theirs. I wasn't sure whether to take that as a compliment or feel offended.
Throughout my child and adult life my mother and the long-distance siblings she has under her control from afar litetally broke me in every way a human being can be broken, and my mother intended for it and nurtured it to this point from which she is living happily ever after watching me decline into a sadness so profoundly consuming it probably will at some point end with me surrendering.
This is something I feel I need to warn you about to stop you falling down that rabbit hole.
A true thoroughbred Narcissist, and one I was never able to learn about despite every single book, video, blog, forum, my mother is something almost surreal. Nothing touched on what I had endured and have done to thid day, because the whole thing does not fall into any category. To be a scapegoated child, and totally switched into a golden and scapegoat once my dad was sick only to then become the lost after he died, who actually can say they've had 3 alternate forms of abuse like that over 40 odd years?
I have never done drugs, never been in trouble with the law, never stolen anything, never bullied anyone, never abused anyone, never brought shame to the family, never caused trouble and always been the peacekeeper, the one who'll help anyone, fulfill the moral duty and obligation, always do what is right, always thinking before i act......all i have ever done is love my family unconditionally and be a good son, a good brother, a good loyal friend, never cheated on a girlfriend, never done anything that could warrant the life i have had.
But none of that matters with a narcissistic mother with a pathological vendetta from origins unknown. Maybe it's just Occams Razor and i was just born hated and like a festering boil grew worse and more necrotic as i became a human being with a personality and qualities she found repulsive.
I spent 10 years studying this just to be able to fragment every single part of my entire life into fine components and once I did, i was able to gain clarity as to what this woman was. But more important what she had turned me into through abuse.....a foreigner in my own body. A stranger to the person i was 25 years ago.
Without beating around the bush, my mother is the most covertly pathological, vengeful, cruel, manipulative, devious, deceitful, two-facee nasty, and violent, person I have ever known, but she keeps it masterfully covered beneath a well structured facade which for the entirety of my 43 years has been used to catastrophically ruin my life. This is not an overexaggeration.
The reason for my monologue is the first paragraph you put down, made me understand that you are in a very precarious position that I know all too well, as does my eldest sister whom i'm very close with who has estranged herself from our mother. After what my sister has gone through and how our mother wasted no time in making everything many times worse just to accelerate as much pain and suffering as possible, because it will hopefully help you comprehend the gravity of the situation you may already be realising and why it is affecting you emotionally, why it is confusing, frustrating and perplexing.
You see, my abuse had no epilogue. It took until my dads death in 2013 for me to really begin grasping the truth which, the more layers I peeled back, was frustratingly implicit. I knew what it was, I could feel it, taste it, smell it, but always beyond my reach.
There were no words available for me to articulate what i thought, felt and experienced and with the emotional abuse, emotional blackmail, the residual traumas from 12 years caring for my dad battling cancer and carrying a whole family on my young shoulders, everyday felt like a pressure cooker. I have emotionally broken down at least 3 times, gone through depression more times than i've had birthdays and overcome suicidality at least twice. All out of my own self-determination and i still don't know where i get it from. Sadly at this moment in time i can't reach out of it, and things have got worse each day that passes so i think i may have used up all my tokens.
I like yourself, was for some peculiar reason singled out but was once my own pillar of freedom to be an independent child who was very different to my family in practically every way, my mother especially.
It began early and in all truth, I never stood a chance! What child can when they're up against something so grotesque?
I was hacked away one thin layer after the other until everything i enjoyed was habitually denied and sabotaged. Evetything that made me me, Daniel, was obliterated in order to shrink me back into one of the family. My character was seen as a budding flower in amongst a bed of weeds and she tore off every petal and throughout my life everytime i grew a new petal she tore it off.
I was depressed, muted, lonely and too detached from life to even havecthe energy to be angry, developing severe cognitive and neurological issues which erupted at age 10. These became pathological and ruined my school life, social life and forced me into a closed off isolation. My mother by the time was firing insults, smirking and laughing as i stammered, mocking my nervois tics which everytime participated in. Kids at school copying that so i just wanted to be alone and chose to stop being around anyone. I started truanting my spending whole days in the airport watching aeroplanes. For years i isolated to feel at ease until i'd have to return to a hostile home.
I was 13 when the physical violence started. She starved me by nominating a particular dinner plate she gave no-one else but me. While the rest of the family got given big full plates of food my plate had a very large perimeter pattern so the flat part of the plate was no bigger than a saucer. My BMI was too low for my age, i was given hand-me-down school uniform that was too small and needed to be thrown away while my little brother was kitted out in all brand new stuff. I was constantly mocked for it, aswell the homemade haircut where she would make me look a laughing stock on school photo days so the image would be seen for years and laughed at.
If i ever wanted to eat more to feel like i weren't going to faint, wgich happened quite a lot especially standing for long periods, i'd be called greedy and scorned for it, even witheld food. While everyone else was nice and plump i was tall and very skinny, something i was again bullied for especially during PE. Pretty doon i stopped all phydical activity and PE, willing to take the hour detention as it meant one less hour at home.
The more i grew the more i suffered the cognitive effects of malnutrition and physical weakness. I could no longer concentrate at school, always tired, always hungry and this was where the violence came into it.
My little brother was a psycho and now displays all the signs of a schizophrenic, but he learned from our earlier years that he could get me into a lot of trouble very quickly by making false accusations and simply blaming me for things he did. It was of course encouraged by my mum because it meant open season beatings. For about 3 years he would eat everything for packed lunch and as soon as judgement came i'd get the blame. After continuous accusations and then subsequent battering i grew angrier and angrier, which gave my mum the trigger she needed to gain an excuse for another battering, then weave a yarn to my dad who'd follow up for a double dose although his was more confinement to the bedroom and grounding. This went on as i said for 3 years and it destroyed me emotionally. I literally spiralled. One day she grappled me on my bed and trying to escape she put the full force of her leg through her heel into the side of my face, knocking me unconscious. My jaw ballooned and it remained deformed for about 25 years until a chiropracter reset it. But by that time my teeth had grown abnormally on that side and always get joint problems there.
My education went from being in the top groups to special learning groups in just 2 years that's how catsyriphic my decline was. I literally lost any and all want to be anuthing and do anything. She sent me to do my GCSE exams with a full blown outbreak of Impetigo on my face and body after my sister and husband came over from Cyprus (army). I had a fever and was ordered by her to take my exams. I failed every single one.
There was no-one around for me in any of this. I have 4 siblings and apart from my eldest sister I have always been one of one. But even back then while all this was happening I had no-one standing up for me, protecting me nor asking questions. And I have never known what i could have done to make them hate me.
A month after my dad died my mum said to my face "I hate you and hate everything about you!"
Opportune moments when pain amd suffering is at its highest she inflicts that sort of cruelty that, i won't lie, killed something in me that day. Not only had i just lost my dad but in my heart she had just died to and i think i have never got over it, because that sadistic hatred has been like a bullet through the brain on constant replay. I did nothing to her. Have never done nothing but love her and try to be a good son, a good person. But I am hated by default.
There were things happening already before I had even turned up years old, stuff which today would have social services knocking on the door every 5 minutes. But at that age you don't realise so much is problematic especially when you're kept away from interacting with friends at their homes around their families or them coming to your own and seeing the discrepancy between a healthy home vs a highly dysfunctional one.
But once pandoras box is opened your memory shifts back to those moments quite vividly and for me that was then i learned that these were trauma flashbacks.....and i had so many of them across 30+ years I still do not know how i am still alive. How my brain has coped with this much consistent emotional terrorism I don't know. I suppose it taught me that some people just cannot love, and true love for them is suffocating. But i choose to be someone who knows what love is because i damn sure know what hatred and abuse feels like and something i could not begin to cause another, not human, animal....nothing.
Again the monologue is pertinent to why you need to start sifting back through your past to unlock as much of your childhood as possible because trauma gets locked away, but from the depths prods at you and dictates your moods, reactions and feelings without really knowing where they came from and why, until you begin questoning your own sanity and coming to terms with the horrifying possibility you are defective and in need of fixing, and that what has always been done to you from times before you can remember, is justified because you are broken, unlikeable and unloveable.
These are the fallout reactions of a child who learns from neglect that he/she is invisible, unworthy of attention, their feelings and fears and emotions and pain does not matter, you are unloved and thus you no longer seek any of it. You form a self survival technique where you never ask for help. You sink into that learned helplessness, that small fetal ball, isolated in a cocoon and in a small space where nobody can see you. You adopt a familiar routine of people pleasing, always wanting to prove to others and yourself that you are a good person, you are not invisible and always at beck and call. Yet you are afraid to say no. You are always striving for acceptance, always hunting for approval, trying to reverse the injustice and unfairness for having done nothing wrong but treated as though you're a pariah with no redeemable feature.
Trust me when I tell you I have sailed yhat ship for 20 years, and those who i 'served' in the 5 years my older siblings went off the rails with drug addictions, pregnancy and attempted suicide that I had to deal with and fix at 13, 15 and 16.
Then at 20 dad is diagnosed with bowel cancer and for the next 12 years sacrificing EVERYTHING in my life for my family and carrying the weight of 3/4 of this family to rejected playing any part, stayed away and left me on my own to endure everything, the recoveries from surgeries, the chemo, the radiotherapy, the sickness, the colostomy bags, the constant care, the emotional support for my mum, the carrier up and down yhe stairs, the carer, the cook, the cleaner, laundrette, housemaid, physio, chaperone.....for 8 years, then 4 years of terminal cancer and chronic neuropathy, the nightly screams in pain the paralysis the hospices the deathbed the funeral.....all on my own with not one single person for support, all while my mother looking at her selfish future was intentionally breaking me readying me for the next shift as much as she could, especially in the last year of dads life and tried to break my sister and i apart and has done ever since.
My siblings trying to commit suicide again during this time my dad fought fir his life was again my duty which i resolved because there was no way i could turn my back. I held the family together yet felt like my head was permanently under water and only able to come up one in a while for a spare breath of air because they allowed it, not because i needed it. My step-brother, a psychologist, woke me up by saying i was the one holding the ropes that kept everybody else afloat, yet once i was in trouble they left me to drown.
And yet those siblings are doing to you what they have done to me and my eldest sister throughout and ever since. Literally a vsrbon copy and her spouses mother is just like that and now she is looking to separate after he has turned into a loveless and abusive husband. We support eachother still after all these years aswell as her sons, two of whom have given her two lovely grandchildren, one already born and one just announced so she has her loving support base.
I have pondered it alone and with my sister, and concluded that thing you are experiencing like ours was a mix of jealousy, fear of our mother, a lot of snear campaigns with mother placing herself in the centre as ringleader dictating falsehoids and lies from one side to the other where the more estrangement there is the guarantee her lies and slander will never be known and can never get back to you. Until of course they show you contempt, discard you altogether and start believing everything by way of reinforcement. Your reactions to this serve as fresh supply each and every time to continue the abuse by proxy and it is to punish, weaken and disorientate you for their own cowardly and cruel reasons.
They will also have their own untapped traumas and a LOT of shame and guilt like barbed wire wrapped around their conscience. The only way they can deal with you is to resemble a dog - run to the person that keeps them fed.
A one way street of me always caring for them switched into them not caring if I was even still alive. No calls, no messages, no cards, not one incentive as a sibling to see if i was ever ok. Not one.
And still after years of Complex-PTSD and being 43 years of age with absolutely nothing, having every attempt to rebuild my life destroyed by my mother and the incessent trouble making went to depths unthinkable - emotional blackmail has always been the strongest weapon and it drips acid on every part of my conscience and then she weaponise it. I've been denied everything in my life, everything, that others take on with total normalcy and it has left me bereft of any will to live.
I gave in a few months ago because I had reached my tolerance, and once i had collapsed my mother literally stopped working on me. It is mission accomplished for her and after what she did to my sister after she was r*ped by a woman in her care last year, the realisation of how wicked and hateful our mother is cannot be measured nor quantified.
This is why based on what you have stated there are solid grounds for you being part of a similar upbringing and life which you should consider getting as far away from as you possibly can.
One thing i had to come to terms with is despite dozens of attempts, to my own emotional detriment, there can never he any room for reconciliation.
There is nothing wrong with you, but what is wrong in you is what you have been cruelly taught to believe is wrong in you by someone else eroding your innate essence of who you are. Do what i wasn't able to do and leave, find a nice peaceful enclave and be happy, content, find the love of your life, start a family and enjoy life as much as you can.
Because right now all you do is live and beg to be wanted by those who don't care and never will. Love will be drawn from the blood of a stone.
The normalisation of abuse fools you into believing nothing was wrong with how you were treated and the toxic shame embedded into your inner self after years of being emotionally neglected and never having your feelings acknowledged, your right to express yourself denied, your needs dismissed and always being taught learned helplessness, develops into a rejection of all your own needs in life. You lose compassion for yourself, you punish yourself, belief you are broken and flawed and ugly and never fully live comfortably and contentedly in your own skin even though you prefer your own company and seek peace in any place you can find it.
Please.
Take care
Daniel x