February 2025 Well we took you to Stately Homes

[AttilaTheMeerkat]

A new thread indeed!.

By contrast my gc ex sister went along with it in a 'all girls together' talking about sex way. Gc organised a balloonogram naked man to surprise mum at a restaurant once, they were like a weird permanent hen party together with mother being also prudish about sex with my father.

Apparently Dad asked gc what he could do to satisfy mum and gc bought him 'Joy of Sex'. Mental.

Thank goodness they're dead, honestly, the relief is immense.

there Was something off about my mum and sex. My dad went abroad as a young man, i remember him mentioning it as a child and her saying “that’s where your dad went with that prostitute”. Err what??! I had a cosmopolitan magazine as an older teenager and it had pictures of men’s bits I think to say look they are all different. Don’t let your dad see that he’ll feel really inadequate was her comment. going to bed for a “sleep” every afternoon in Spain on holiday as a young child and me sitting in my bit of the room, separated but a flimsy door so could hear them having sex, she then made doubly sure I knew “when your dad and I say we are going for a nap you know we are having sexual intercourse “.

getting back from a night out and telling me that they’d been sat with a couple and the bloke had said “let’s talk about sex”.

When my dad was older he had a catheter and there were two types, she helpfully told me (I was in my 40’s) that one type was so that you could carry on having sexual intercourse.

when I was 11 someone broke into our hotel room and assaulted me (parents were in the bar) when I saw the figure at the bottom of my bed and they started to get in bed with me i honestly thought it was my mum, I felt so ashamed for thinking that but it’s actually not that much of a surprise is it!

sorry that was too long but quite cathartic .

I am just coming back to ask:

This experience I had with my mother (most intensely as a teenager but at other times as well) where she has absolutely no idea how I was feeling, or how much I was struggling, or that I was crippled with social anxiety - this is emotional neglect, isn't it.

@CheekySnake it is. Read up on attunement. It's every parents job. Many fail at it. Probably because they were never nurtured themselves etc , typical generational trauma. It would still have been your mother's responsibility to sort herself out and be an actual parent.

I told my mother as a teen that I was suicidal. She ignored it. It was never mentioned again. If my mother couldn't respond to that there was no point in me telling her anything. Of course she also complained that I never shared anything about anything 😆

Yes it was emotional neglect, but tbh I think it goes further than that. I view her as complicit in the domestic violence.

To me, probably wrongly, I see neglect as not doing something rather than doing something actively wrong. I think your mother stirring herself to save herself but not you is appalling.

@Twatalert I'm speechless. That's horrendous. I'm so sorry. I'm glad you found a way through. Xx

The bit of conversation I've spent the weekend wrangling with was that I discovered that my mother had no idea that from the ages of about 12-19, I was terrified of men. Not just a bit wary, but panic attack terrified. I've got a better grip on it now though I've never lost the awareness of how some men behave when they think no-one can see. She didn't know. I think I have touched the edges of understanding this before, but I've never had to face it head on. I feel a bit sick, tbh.

Yes @cheekysnake. The very definition of emotional neglect. I'm so sorry.

There's a good book called Running on Empty about this. I have this image in my head of an empty follicle (can you tell I'm going through IVF..) and it's the mother's job to fill it up with all of the substance and goodness that allows you to thrive as a growing human. The neglect is where she doesn't, and you find yourself an adult with a hole where that sense of self should be, desperately seeking approval and validation and love from external factors. Jobs, relationships, appearance, food, substances, wealth, whatever. It was your mother's job to attune to you, mirror you and build up that sense of self and positive regard.

There's a good quote from Tig Notaro talking about her own step dad who had a revelation in his later years and apologised to her. He said "it wasn't the child's responsibility to tell the parent who they are. It was the parent's responsibility to find out who the child is."

I think that represents the feeling so well. It's a feeling of being completely unknown by your parent. That's how I feel about my mother. She never tried to know me. She projected all of her stuff onto me and expected me to do and think and believe all of the same things. But I don't. And I didn't. And as a kid you carry that as a deep shame right into your adulthood until you can figure out how backwards and wrong it is, and then you have to work through seeing all the good in you that your parent never did.

Hi everyone, have seen these threads for a while, read them every now and then but too close to home and had doubts about whether it was the case or whether it was really me.

Just had the saddest week of my life. A family holiday from utter hell which was supposed to be a once in a lifetime event of joy for us all. They went at my partner. For a week. Poor man has patience of a saint and mustered through but was in tears at times. I don’t know how he did it.

It’s made me realise it wasn’t me. Watching them be so nasty and petty over nothing. I feel so awful, so guilty that my partner had to endure that. So ashamed and embarrassed. Equally sad that this is probably the end. I have lost my family on what should have been a time for us to all celebrate together. I don’t see how we can come back from this. It’s irreparable damage.

This is so well put and so true.

Completely agree! 👏👏👏

Hi there and welcome! I found this thread is full of lovely, wise and insightful people: hopefully you'll feel in very good company while navigating the challenge of discovering your wounds. 🙏💐

Thank you @FriendlyReminder

It’s a lot to process. It’s all come flooding back, but not clearly. Just some key events and overall the feelings of sadness, stress and confusion.

I wish I could speak to my sister about it, but our relationship was damaged by all this. We have become closer in adult years but there’s still a gulf and the toxicity has damaged us both into being guarded with one another.

I also can’t bring this up now. The holiday was to celebrate a huge milestone in her life. It should have been utter joy. I think my parents wanted me to blow up so they could blame me for ruining her event. I didn’t so they went for my partner. We held it together but it was difficult to navigate the whole thing and hide our distress. By bringing it up she might think I am trying to make it about myself. Or it may taint what should be one of the best moments of her life. So thank you for letting me vent here.

Sorry everyone if I derrail a bit the conversation, but there's something I've been wanting to ask for some time. I feel very naive with this issue, I don't know why: I feel very triggered by threads where people minimise or even ridicule children's experiences, and specifically (what to me, at least, is) violence against children.
For instance, there was a thread recently about smacking children where the OP asked if being smacked had had any effects in our lives. I felt literally sick reading some of the replies: the sheer denial, the blind justification of the parents actions, the blatant dissociation... I had no words. People are so afraid to critique their own parents that they will go to infinite lengths to justify their abuse. And, when confronted with this reality, I despair. Seriously: I feel depressed and, as I said, physically sick.

I know it's my own issue and I have to learn to cope with the world we live in without falling into a depression. But the fact is that I am hyper aware of any hint of children abuse. I try to comment on these threads without losing my cool, just to counteract the dominant narrative (oh we came out just fine, children are now snowflakes, my parents loved me in their own way, I am now a fully functioning citizen thanks to them, it's not abuse it's discipline...).

Have any of you read Alice Miller? I may need to re-read her to find validation in what I'm experiencing. But then, she has a very dark side herself (if you don't know, look for her son's testimony) and I'm not sure I've reconciled with that.

Anyway, sorry for this long and strange post. I feel this is the place to share it 🙏

With my own children I don’t see them as an empty object. I see them as full and it’s my job as a parent to nudge and guide the basic laws of life. I can’t stand people who pipe on about how nice and kind their kids are or how quiet and well behaved they are. Safe kids are loud kids who push boundaries. I see it as neglect when people parent that way also. If my kid is loud and flamboyant then great, if they are quiet then great. I feel we are born with a full personality and it’s not my job to place any of myself onto them. The hole is a person that’s formed who is not in tune with who they are. We get no satisfaction from life because we aren’t who we are supposed to be. We try and get joy from things we are sure we should do but we don’t. Being unknown by a parent is bad but being unknown by yourself is where it gets really tough. I don’t know if it’s possible to be a full version of yourself after this. I don’t know what a version of me would look like had I of been parented properly. Maybe I’d be worse, who knows.

Friendlyreminder I do know what you mean and I feel the same way. I hate how children are overlooked ie in grieving people say that children bounce back. I can't bear how rude people are to children and I can see how silently bewildered and hurt they are.

As we well know children don't bounce through things, they're not resilient they just don't yet have the vocabulary. Everything crashes later on.

I think I read that some statute of limitations (must have been US?) had been removed on reporting of SA. Loads of people can't find any agency at all until they're in their 40s.

In those 'it never did me any harm' threads I think there's often a treasure trove of people like us. We can spot each other a mile away don't you find?

I think our parents ignored or denied the fact that having children is not a two way street. It's not an equal relationship. You have children for yourself not for the child. You love them and hope they love you, if they want to.

@FriendlyReminder I am very sensitive to it. I can remember being smacked by my father. I can't remember any of the things I supposedly did wrong, but I can remember the terror, and I can remember begging him not to and being ignored. I never smacked my own children. I was definite that it wasn't happening. I came to the conclusion that even if every parenting expert on the planet said it was the right thing to do, I still wasn't doing it. If it's assault to wallop an adult, then it's assault to wallop a child. AFAIK, my sibling, who is a lot younger than me, wasn't smacked. I never threatened to drive them to the other side of town and leave them there, to knock their block off, to knock them into the middle of next week, or any other variations on that theme. I have a very low opinion of adults who do it. I also can't cope with swearing or aggressive behaviour. I just have an almost uncontrollable urge to hide, even if it's not directed at me.

I think there are two things going on: I think some people did have those experiences and are able, because of temperament, the wider family etc, to be minimally affected by them. However I also think that a lot of people can't really face the truth about their parents. I don't judge them for it. Facing the truth about having been badly parented is very, very hard, not just because it means accepting painful things about your parents, but because it also means accepting painful things about yourself, that there is damage, that sometimes because of the damage you behave in ways that aren't good, that your responses aren't always healthy. This can be a really scary rock to look under.

We know how common child abuse is because we lived it. It's not some rare thing that happened to other people far away. It happened to us, in our homes. We are the walking wounded. It makes the world really difficult to navigate. Are we over sensitive, or are other people just really effing naive? Both things are probably true. All I know is that there's no abuse in my house now, where I live, where my children live. That's the best I can do. FWIW we got new neighbours about 18 months ago and she screams at their kids. I have to hide in the garden when she starts. Literal flight.

That's true, Dogaredabomb: finding people who really gets it fills my heart. That's why I'm here! And yes: it really feels like some kind of secret code that we share.
But it's so hard to see the denial...

@FriendlyReminder oh I'm the same when I see these threads. One of the worst terms for me is 'children are resilient'. They aren't supposed to be resilient. They are supposed to be seen, loved and nurtured to become resilient adults.

These threads open my own wounds but I still want to comment to help put things right in the world. Smacking is an abuse of power. No parent would accept being smacked for 'being naughty'. I dislike how adults are being absolved of much wrong doing. But there are so many immature adults that actually don't behave reasonably sometimes and who is going to smack them? I know smacking is just one example but it's wrong. Adult children who justify this live in denial and can't see their parents as just people who made mistakes.

I think there is a great stride towards improvement in relationships with children. They were once to be seen and not heard and there is much bigger emphasis on emotional health now. This was never preached and I wonder if this had an impact on us. Lots of parents just parenting how they were taught to.

If you'd asked me from 5 to maybe 22/23 if my mother was a good parent, I would have said yes. I couldn't see it. But my focus was on her needs, that was my job, or so I believed at the time. When I began to move into adulthood the cracks started to open up massively. Little and big things. A few occasions where she was absolutely foul to me. Just spiteful and foul. The behaviour when I got married was TBH a bit weird. And then when I had my kids she was awful. But it took time, and I can see how easy it would be to keep telling myself it wasn't what it looked like if there was a lot to lose and I'd had others around me making excuses for her.

Yep. Children are not there to serve you.