SEPTEMBER 2025 - Well we took you to Stately Homes

[AttilaTheMeerkat]

I have now set up a new thread as the previous one is now full.
This long runnning thread 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
The Echo Society
There are also one or two less public offshoots of Stately Homes, PM AttilaTheMeerkat for details.
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."

It takes a lot for adult children to completely break ties with their parents. The problem isn't so much what exactly happened in the past and all the mistakes that have been made. The problem is the lack of acknowledgement of what caused the child pain and the continued emotional immaturity into the child's adult life.

Unfortunately a myth is being upheld by some that adult children hold past mistakes over the parent's head and somehow weigh up whether the number of the kind of mistakes would be enough to break contact. Usually a herd of parents come along that say 'this doesn't warrant NC on the child's part' and 'they are being a brat and ungrateful. I did my best.'.

I can forgive my parents everything but one thing. I cannot forgive how they chose to never reflect and 'become better' and continue to deny. It is often said that this is because they aren't capable. Their defences are too high and some have personality disorders. I understand this on an intellectual level. What I don't understand is the masses of parents this is supposed to be applicable for. Like a big chunk of boomers for example because 'that's just how it was'. I spent my whole adult life trying to come to better emotional health. I didn't know a life free from depression until my 40s. I read books in my teens to try and understand what is wrong with me. I had thoughts of wanting to see a psychologist but I could not on my own as a minor. I saw a psychiatrist at 21 and from then on I never stopped seeking more treatment because I was in so much pain.

I understand now that my parents were just people who were trying to figure stuff out. They missed the mark spectacularly, but I am somehow supposed to accept and forgive that they didn't read a book or watch a documentary because 'they aren't capable of facing the truth'?

I 100% agree with you.

Every interaction is subjective and impacts the recipient uniquely irrespective of the intention.

Our responsibility is to be respectful, sensitive and attuned to the impact of our words and actions on others.

When we are given or seek feedback that something was off / confusing / negative - then we need to be open to dialogue to understand the impact on the recipient and our stance should be seeking resolution, acceptance and a commitment to a better way forward.

I am happy to hold my hands up to my limitations, discuss perspective and context without invalidating the others feelings.

Because being defensive is a one way street to loss of respect, increasing the pain and risking the connection and communication with your child.

I am not saying it’s easy to respond in a measured open way when something triggers our guilt, shame or anger to react emotionally. But we are the adult always, even when our DCs are adults - we have lived longer and should have more wisdom / emotional stability and calm to role model which is a gift to them about effective communication, agency and boundaries.

Dealing with an individual who is very entrenched, defensive and prioritises their need to be right over maintaining the connection with their child is futile and painful. All you can do then is ‘manage’ that relationship so that you are at the personal level of detachment and narrow topics of conversation that protects your own peace.

I agree as well. But it isn’t really helpful to respond in the way my DM does. I don’t doubt that her feeling of guilt is genuine, or that she genuinely didn’t know what my F was doing. But she gets very emotional every time the subject of the past comes up (very rarely now) and I find myself having to comfort her and reassure her that I don’t blame her. (My DSis is a lot less tolerant with her than I am.)

I think the thing that we need to remember as parents is that it will always be on us to maintain the connection. It’s just how it is. It’s bread into me to maintain at all costs. These parents don’t have this, some fundamental parts are just missing.

Not just to maintain a connection but to model a healthy connection. That includes mistakes, owning up to them and trying for change. This is HARD to do if you never experienced it yourself. I think many children of immature parents know this and try better and do a lot of things better, but probably remain emotionally immature themselves because there are so many blind spots (unless they do significant work). I could imagine for example that my parents tried to do some things better, but they just still don't understand what it takes.

Looking back I was emotionally immature as HELL. In hindsight I wonder how I managed to keep friends, or a job. I'm very embarassed. Had I had kids in my 20s I would have passed on A LOT despite trying not to. Simply because I had no understanding of healthy relationships and a lot of blind spots (mildly put).

It's taken many years of work on my part to 'understand' where I was the problem now that I am an adult in my adult relationships. The best work I have ever done is with a professional who could mirror me and bring my issues to the surface. Who wasn't buying all my crap and all the ways I tried to subconciously avoid addressing an issue. I did myself a massive favour by engaging with it, but it also highlighted how my parents never did one percent of this and I cannot, for the life of me, understand how someone wouldn't try and get help.

@Twatalert it does take a lot. People who don't get it talk about estrangement like your parents wouldn't buy you ice cream one day so you overreacted and never talked to them again and it's just not like that. I cut my father off at the first opportunity, it's true, but that had been years in the making and something I knew I was going to do from the age of about 13. By fifteen I was already making plans so when it actually happened, it wasn't a decision I rushed in to. And he was a deeply disturbed individual. Any relationship with him would be damaging.

Being LC with my mother is harder, and I haven't completely cut her off, though I often think about it. She exists in a place where any relationship is based on what I can do for her and never the other way round and I don't have the bandwidth for that. I also know that if I open the door even a tiny crack, she will immediately see it as an opportunity to lean on me and I feel like I can't risk it because she's been known to be awful to me if she doesn't get her own way.

My father was violent and abusive and my mother also struggles to face the fact that she allowed me to grow up in that environment. There has definitely been an unspoken pressure to act like I'm fine with it. (It actually occurred to me recently that as well as feeling like I had to manage my father's anger because he was dangerous when he lost his temper, I also had to manage my mother's feelings so that she didn't feel upset about the fact that she was bringing her children up in an abusive home. Which is batshit, really).

I don't apologise for the fact it makes her feel bad any more, that's her problem.

I don’t think there are any perfect parents and most people inevitably pass on something. I get hormonal at my age, I get snappy sometimes, I get overwhelmed. But I always communicate and apologise and discuss things, I always make the first move as it’s my responsibility. It doesn’t affect me to be wrong and out of order. My OH I have to say never admits blame and I find it pathetic. I always think just get a grip you are how old and behaving like a child.

The saying that 'no parent is perfect' is totally out of place here. It actually grates on me bcause this term is often used by 'these' parents to continue to deny and deflect and whose children end up on these threads. It is not a parenting thread. NOBODY claims that ANYONE is perfect or must be perfect. It's a red flag to me by anyone who says it to be honest. As if anyone ever expects their parent to be perfect.

Despite imperfection it should be possible to have a healthy relationship with children. This doesn't require being perfect. Have we lost all sense of direction on this thread?

No I think you just take offence where it’s not. I was agreeing with you about it needing to be healthy and openly communicative.

We aren’t the abusive narcs on here, we have to be mindful of not projecting our triggers and flags onto people that aren’t part of the worlds we come from.

Are you speaking for yourself?

If it applies to me then yeah. But I find you write quite defensively. None of us are enemies and we are all coming from the same place despite perhaps not always coming about it in the same language.

You didn't really mean yourself, did you? It's interesting you find my writing defensive. You are of course allowed to find it defensive. So my writing is a little uncomfortable to you - is that why you tried to police the thread a few times now by saying we 'must be mindful this or that; not do this; do that'? I think it's an attempt to control and therein lies the problem: the secret isn't about trying to control. It lies in being able to deal with and work through your own uncomfortable feelings.

If you tell yourself 'twatalert is this; she should do that; she should not do this' you continue to live externally and this is what we see on here day in day out. It has nothing to do with me.

Sorry I’ve lost you a little, Im not sure about the psychological analysis but I appreciate this is the worlds we have come from. Not everyone is doing something strange or controlling. I just find you attack when ypu
don’t agree.

Everyone, absolutely everyone, is doing something strange or controlling. That's the whole point. It's what humans do. And some take it to an extreme.

There, it's about me again. I'm attacking. I think if you wanted to bring a point across in an emotional mature way you would say that you feel attacked by me.

hirik thanks for calming my mind a little. You know, the usual wondering if I'm being too harsh on the narcs in my life when I enforce NC.

Some of the things narc1 did were criminal. With the knowledge they had at the time, they could reasonably have been expected to know it was criminal - so they could have "done better" at the time, they didn't need more time or life experience to gain the knowledge to do that, they already had the knowledge and chose to do what they did anyway.

I suppose it's inevitable really that things would never work. I couldn't see it before, but I do now. By the simple act of being willing to lay the past aside and wipe the slate clean for going forward with the future, I've been accidentally displaying to them that I'm not a person to be respected. Because who sets aside such awful things as if they were nothing, never addressing those things? So the narcs were never going to treat me with respect in the present then. Not while I was willing to lay aside the past and pretend like it never happened.

The alternative of confrontation wouldn't work either because if they believed they'd done anything morally wrong in committing a criminal act then they wouldn't ever have done it in the first place. So they were never going to see it from my perspective and voicing my feelings would only have resulted in further invalidation. Which is why I never bothered with that option.

I can see it clearly now. The track narc1 chose to go down, which happened before I was even conceived, was a track it was impossible to tread and keep their children safe. And they would have known that. I was not an accidental pregnancy. So in choosing to live their lives walking that track, in choosing to make me part of it, that was the day they destroyed their relationship with me. Not the day they chose to commit a criminal act themselves, but the day they chose to keep walking down the track that lead to that happening.

What a futile waste of time it's been trying to fix anything between us. I've spent my life trying to have a relationship with someone so fundamentally dysfunctional and uncaring that they couldn't even be bothered to step onto a decent track before conceiving a child, they looked at the track they were on (because they never did/do anything without careful consideration), they saw the heightened risks, they saw the criminals that resided there and they thought, "yep, that'll do", because all they were thinking about was themselves.

I never mattered, right from the start. And yet they expect to matter to me now, with everything that's happened and even though they can't even grant me basic equality, respect and civility in the present. What a fucking joke.

Ah sorry I don’t view everyone the same I’m sorry you do, that must be hard to always feel people are being controlling and always on the look out. There is softness in people, I don’t think the whole world is controlling and strange.

That's precisely how I expected you to respond. The other person (me) has a sorry view on humanity and oh it must be so hard to live like this and you don't and oh that's so much nicer and maybe a bit superior? It's precisely how you describe every situation you have with your family/anyone where you come out as allegedly 'more aware, the better parent, just somehow better'. It's a pattern I have noticed and it's just so interesting how you are now applying the same to this situation here.

You are an intelligent person. I think you probably know that my point wasn't that the whole world is strange and controlling. Was it not clear that I meant that absolutely everyone has defenses and less than ideal attributes and behaviours? Id laugh at anyone who said they never felt the need to control unless you are the Dalai Lama. The difference is who is aware of some of the stuff they do and who isn't? To deny this is normal in any human is a red flag.

if you feel this means being on the lookout then this again says all about your view on the world, not mine. It's a projection.

I agree and we are wired as a newborn and beyond to seek safety and emotional connection with a caregiver to sustain us until we can cope more independently. If you have an appropriate caregiver then your emotional development progresses to stability and independence, I think when as a newborn and a young child this safety and connection isn’t provided we continue to seek it from them. I think it’s almost physiological because in our rational minds we know they won’t and/or can’t fulfil that need relationally but our nervous system is wired to continue seeking in a relentless hope which is almost compulsive and very painful. I think the drive is so intense because when it was needed it was for survival as a young baby.

You are my ex husband aren’t you? I knew he’d find me.

I think this thread out of how many over the years? Has taken a turn that needs to cease. These threads have helped me immeasurably over the years and I love the support and the fact we can just pop in and say what we need to about our abusive parents without judgement and without judging each other for posting as none of us had the same lived experience while also having very similar lived experiences.

I agree @Genuineweddingone - for me it’s always been a safe place to discharge when there is nowhere IRL to do so. Sometimes it’s just a stream of consciousness an outlet without any expectation of response.

Personally I miss this thread being about adult children of abusive parents. It's become at times a ND thread, a parenting thread or a husband and in laws analysis thread.

Once the ND card is played my back is up and I have mentally left the thread many times this week due to it being honest. Its just not something that needs to be mentioned on these threads as far as I am concerned. We should just get things back on track not least because we are coming up to damage season - well Christmas I think it is called really and we all know our toxic families will have something up their sleeves and we need solidarity right now. Hard time of year for most people and harder still for stately homes ones.