I have a very complicated relationship with myself.

[FromTheOldITravelToTheNew]

I don’t even know where to start with this.

I grew up in an abusive household. Not abusive enough for external agencies to get involved - and I came from a respectable family - but enough for others to notice that something wasn't right and that I wasn't 'right'. And enough for it to have had a lifelong impact. There was some physical abuse, but it was mostly emotional.

One of the impacts is that I can't celebrate birthday. My small remaining family knows whej it is and a few close friends but I don't mark it or celebrate it.

Someone put a post on fb wishing me happy birthday very recently and, for some reason this year, a few people kindly chided me because they didn't know. I usually just brush it off with, "Oh, I don't really bother with it," but one new friend caught me off guard and I just answered, "Oh, I have a very complicated relationship with myself."

Hearing the words made me feel very emotional.

And I think I realy had only realised for the first time that that is the truth.

I can talk about the specifics of the abuse quite objectively and dispassionately. I don't share generally but, when I do, the words are easy to say and I can even deliver some of them with 'mock' outraged humour - it's how my sibling and I have dealt with it.

But it destroyed my relationship with myself before it had even begun, how I see myself and how I perceive myself through the eyes of others, my worth and value in the world.

I remembered a quote I read years ago that read, When you keep criticising your kids, they don't stop loving you. They stop loving themselves.

Until I told a friend that I had a very complicated relationship with myself, I hadn't realised just how deeply and profoundly this was true.

I don't want more therapy. I'm in my 50s now and I've had therapy on and off since I was 16. I know it works for some people but I've never found it to be that effective. The version of me I live with is the only version of me I have ever known. And I suppose there is an extent to which I am comfortable with myself now. I heard someone say once that their parents had both experienced trauma and their teeth had fit each other's wounds. I suppose that's how I feel about relationship with myself.

Ive forged a life that appears to be socially 'acceptable'. I'm educated, i have a career of sorts, and I have (adult) children. But I hugely struggle with relationships with other people. I just feel trapped in a world that I don't belong in/to; that has no place for me. And I'm biding my time in it until the end. Its probably not the life I would have lived if I hadn't spent so long papering over my own cracks.

Something else has happened quite recently that has awoken a lot of 'sleeping dogs', shall we say. It's a good thing but it's also taken me back to a time in my life when the abuse was till very active. On the surface, I'm calm and even a little emotionless but inside I'm screaming.

I'm sure others feel the same and I just need to feel some connection with those people today. If you're around.

@FromTheOldITravelToTheNew

This way of thinking about it has really
made me pause today. Thank you for your vulnerable post. 💐

I feel like this. I seem to exist in a state where the only validation I feel is from other people. Low self-worth and if a friend is cruel to me I can’t handle it as I spiral.
Am seeking therapy for it.
My childhood sounds like yours as my father was very tough with me and I internalised it.
I know what you mean about getting through this life but just hanging on.

It's not something I can relate to & I'm one who perhaps seeks simplistic solutions to rather complex issues & I've no experience of therapy.

But to me it seems your parents treated you badly. You don't have to be defined by this, you are a mature adult now, In control of your own destiny. Just tell yourself that, everyday that you are awesome, they were/are twats & get on with your life.

Your post has made me feel quite sad - you sound like a person who has done good in this world and yet somehow feel unworthy of celebration and validation. You have raised children, how is your relationship with your adult children?

Do you not celebrate your birthday because you don't feel that you are worth celebrating? Because I'm sure the people who love you are grateful to have you in their life and would love to celebrate that.

What comes across is that you maybe have difficulty in loving yourself. The way your parents treated you was so very wrong but it happened because there was something wrong with them, not something wrong with you. You didn't deserve that treatment. You are unique and special, there has never been and will never be another you. You have a place in this world and it is important.

I'm sorry that therapy has never been much help to you. I can understand that at this stage in your life you don't feel you want to pursue any more therapy.

I hope you can find some happiness because you really do sound like you deserve it 💐

My parents shouldn't really have ever been together. They certainly shouldn't have had children. They both had their own trauma to deal with (not caused by their parents but adverse life events beyond anyone's control and a society that wasn't structured for support) but neither did.

So their traumas were unhealed and then compounded by further adverse life events.

My dad apologised to me for his part and spent the remaining years of his life trying to put things right. He did and we did manage to cultivate a relationship but it was still emotionally distant and I wouldn't have been able to deal.with it in any other way. He would tell me he loved me as an adult. I could never say it back. Because I didn't. And that is a heavy burden to carry.

My mother projected her own fears and self loathing on to me. She was ashamed of me, infuriated by me and jealous of me. She held me in contempt, she punished me for her own inadequacies. She despised me.

She criticised everything about my appearance from the colour and nature of my hair to the size of my feet and everything in between. I can't have my photo taken - I can be in group photos (just) if im partially obscured at the back. But there are no photos of me alone, few photos of me with my children, no photos of me with my partner. All I can see are the things she criticised.

My personality was criticised, my character, my intelligence, my interests. My mum told me once she wished I'd been born disabled because then I'd have been deserving of her love. She has some very complex issues.

My mother's abuse continued and worsened. We have no contact with her because her hatred of me began to extend to my children and I needed to break the cycle.

She intentionally sabotaged the positives in my life - irreparably damaged the relationship I had with my grandma with her lies; made a false report to the police, which she later (thankfully) retracted; tried to get social services involved when my eldest was a baby.

It was all (I believe) down to her unhealed trauma. She was very resentful about what happened and she spent the rest of her life trying to meet a need for sympathy, recognition, trying to recreate the care, validation and support she'd received at the time. She wouldn't seek professional help because she had done nothing wrong and therapy was for people who had something wrong with them (her words).

Unfortunately, there isn't a simplistic solution.

I've done that. Hence papering over my own cracks, gaining an education and a career, having a family etc. It doesn't work.

Do you not celebrate your birthday because you don't feel that you are worth celebrating?
Yes.

I've tried in the past to do it for others. I've kept it low key and I've tried organising something more but it put me into a fight, flight, freeze response everytime and was really damaging to my MH at the time so now I don't.

I can relate to everything you say, except in my case my mother covered up my CSA and remains in denial about it, and my upbringing was deprived and dysfunctional in many other ways.

I’d suggest a different type of therapy. I’ve had a lot of therapy, but have recently tried somatic therapy, a non-talking therapy that focuses on your nervous system and how you store childhood trauma in your body. It’s very slow going, but feels quietly revolutionary. I also think that sometimes you have to be at the right stage for some intervention to land. You say something that happened recently awoke some sleeping dogs. It might be a good moment to try something new. Best wishes. Your posts really resonated with me.💐

Oh, I have a very good relationship with my children. They are both adults now.

I was the adult for them that I always wished I'd had in my life.

Things weren't always good for us but the three of us have always been happy in our own little time and space.

They both went to university and their experiences and knowledge of my life means they have both gone into professions working with vulnerable people/families. I'm very proud of them both.

I think you need to give yourself more credit.

Despite your abusive childhood, you have grown up to be a kind, empathetic adult. You’ve had a relationship and raised children. You can hold down a job. You are literate, expressive & self-aware.

You have a quirk that you don’t like to celebrate your birthday. This causes some awkwardness once a year. You’ve coped with worse. You can do this, it doesn’t define you.

I appreciate what you are saying but this is something I live with all day every day. Not something that crops up once a year. It's just that this year I came to a realisation and my birthday was last week.

I can relate to much of what you say- in my case it was all dressed up as “teasing” and DM denies any of the horrible things she said and did which for years made me convinced I was deeply mad and bad.

another advocate for more somatic-focussed therapy that bypasses your thinking brain- you are clearly highly articulate person and I think that sometimes means the head/brain does all the work when it is actually the body that needs help. For me that was EMDR. It took a a few weeks of preparatory talking therapy but once we got to the actual EMDR bit it was rapidly and (so far) completely transformative in ways that years of lovely-but-ineffective counselling etc was not.

As others have said, maybe you could try again with something different. You, like everybody else, are worthy of peace and ease of being even if that has always been impossible to believe.

My goodness, I'm sorry you have these feelings. There are some very heavy situations you discuss which would, without doubt, impact you.

From your posts you sound like you have a true ability to reflect effectively, but this does not remove the trauma caused.

I can't offer advice, but really understand how you feel. I personally believe we are, or can be, individuals who are work in progress with regards our outlook, working out what what causes us to tick and be triggered.

I send you hope and wish you well for the future.

From your posts you sound like you have a true ability to reflect effectively, but this does not remove the trauma caused.

This is very true and also part of the problem, I think.

I don't actually hold any anger towards her. I'm not bitter and I'm not resentful. My sibling does and we rarely see each other because of it. I find it very difficult to be around someone who holds onto the anger and relives the resentment. It's also hard for me to hear because my sibling was the Golden Child and the resentment there is actually around the fact that life wasn't a easy for them as an adult as the narrative of their childhood suggested it would be. Although, I also have no doubt about the negative impact of growing up in that environment.

I have recognised the factors that played into this on my mother's life - adverse life events; undiagnosed PND (I was born mid 1970s); ongoing and compounded trauma whereas my sibling is just angry.

I have forgiven my mother (mentally, not to her because she wouldn't feel she had done anything to he forgiven for). But posting here has also made me realise I have more empathy and compassion for her than I do myself.

Part of that is because, when I look at myself objectively, very little of what she said about me was wrong. Just framed very critically. Not all of those things were necessarily negatives. They weren't necessarily positives either. They were just aspects of me.

But criticisms related to my appearance, personality and character traits have been harder to distance myself from especially when I see so much criticism of those same things elsewhere. Even when I know it's wrong, I have to actively work against that thinking and then I'm never sure whether I'm right or not. I feel like I'm constantly gaslighting myself into trying to think of myself as ok.

I spend a lot of time alone because I want to live authentically and be an authentic person but I'm too scared to let other people see me too closely. My most prevailing fear is other people seeing me the way she did.

Yes, I recognise absolutely all of that. I’d still suggest somatic therapy. It was absolutely terrifying trying to learn stuff about where in my body I was feeling things, and learning to trust those feelings because, as you say, nothing in your life has taught you that you’re either worthy in the same way other people are worthy, or that your feelings are trustworthy. And learning self-compassion is brutally hard when you’re not sure you merit it.

Yes, I think that's exactly it. I'll have a look at somatic therapy. Thank you.

Go back to ground zero. Throw out the programmed and conditioned hard drive.
Return to innocence.
Try vedanta teachings.
Who were you before they told you who you were?

Who was I before they told me who I was?

This is also part of the problem. There wasn't a me beforehand.

She used to tell me that, when I was born, the midwife handed me to her, laughed and said, "She's got a mind of her own, that one." A completely normal and innocuous comment but it was something she held on to as a warning and viewed me through the lens of something dangerous that needed containing.

She had another story of when I was about 6 months old and in my pram. Apparently, a woman passed, peered into the pram, recoiled in horror and exclaimed, "What an ugly baby!" I heard that often too.

When I was 2, she had to go to hospital for the week. Her friend whose son was the same age looked after me every day while my dad was at work. When she came home from hospital, she came to pick me up and her friend's son and I were toddling around the garden. I fell over and went crying to her friend. She felt that I had rejected her and she, in turn, rejected me. I was reminded of this in the last conversation I had with her in my late 30s.

I, obviously, have no memory of any of these things. I know these stories because she told me them often.

There was no me before they told me who I was.

I'm so sorry you've had to suffer this way. I'm reminded of when I met up with my best friend from school, after decades apart, and she said "my parents always felt sorry for you". That took my breath away – knowing that adults pitied me for who my parents were but didn't do anything (there was no physical abuse, just two damaged people like yours @FromTheOldITravelToTheNew who should have not been allow to adopt). I guess they didn't want to interfere.

You don't have to live like you are now. I'm a bit older than you and have an excellent relationship with myself due in part to the work I do with others. You can do the same.

I, obviously, have no memory of any of these things. I know these stories because she told me them often.
There was no me before they told me who I was.

Do you believe every story you've ever been told? As a child we believe everything adults say to us. Perhaps now you need to be that adult you needed to nurture you when you were a child.

Try Peter Crone the mind Architect on you tube. Watch a few of his videos. Hopefully might start you reflecting on this Untruth you've been fed.

Probably not to the same extent, but I’ve had a difficult relationship with myself too. I couldn’t love my adult (16+) self for the longest time, but I discovered I am fiercely protective of my much younger self. Motherhood brought her into my focus.

There was dysfunction in my childhood, that made me more vulnerable to other damaged adults, that resulted in experiences that led to bad decisions, that are very hard to forgive myself for. For now, I feel I’m at peace. But maybe truce is the better term?

I think life moves in messy spirals, and we find ourselves revisiting the same moments from different perspectives, sometimes at a distance, sometimes far too close for comfort. I don’t believe healing is linear in the sense that doing therapy can fix us. It has its uses but it’s not a magic wand.

The older my dc get, the more insight I gain and the more I find myself recognising how agonisingly young I was at certain crucial points. Sometimes I imagine being able to time travel and give myself a hug or a word of encouragement at the right time. That gives me pause, because maybe my future self is also trying to whisper words of wisdom or compassion to me now.

I hope this doesn’t sound trite - it’s hard not to, and I don’t pretend to understand anything of the magnitude of what you’ve endured.

Oh op. I can relate to much of what you say. My own mother was abusive and neglectful, she despised me and took enjoyment out of bullying me, physically and mentally. I now have zero self esteem and confidence, numerous mental health issues and every day is a battle. I also don't celebrate my birthday because, to me, it is just another day of misery. I also feel like I have a difficult relationship with myself in the sense that I don't actually know who I am as my own person

Like you, I've had therapy over the years and it doesn't seem helpful or effective.

But

You sound like you've really became a kind empathetic person despite your upbringing, I don't have any advice, only solidarity and a hand hold.

You sound like an extraordinary person. I can relate to how you see yourself from my own terrible childhood experiences but for me it also manifests itself in being completely unable to understand and identify my own emotions. That was a realisation that came to be when I was around 55.
I cut myself no slack, I think it’s hyper-vigilance that causes these feelings, we know that we cannot trust anyone if the person who was meant to love us unconditionally was cruel and in my case nearly killed me. How the hell is a bit of talking therapy ever going to fix that, so we do what we have to do to survive. We retreat but we do not know who we are. We develop coping mechanisms that crate a veneer but for me, I just never feel “normal”.
For what it’s worth, you’re incredibly articulate and insightful and writing could be a way of processing your thoughts.

@FromTheOldITravelToTheNew I suspect it is hard to hear people praising you, but the fact that you have raised two functional, caring children with whom you have strong, healthy relationships shows how amazing you are and just what you have achieved. You achieved what your own mother failed to do by being there for your kids even though you had a terrible childhood and bad role models. I truly believe we all have a choice in life to become something different from the experiences we had when young, and choosing to break the chain of generational trauma is the most amazing achievement and gift to your children.

As you’ve described your early days the narrative of abuse has likely got right into the core of your being which is so difficult to deal with and even harder to change, but if you can please try to believe this series of posts from us unconnected strangers with no skin in the game all telling you just how extraordinary you and your achievements really are.

Hello OP. For various reasons I vowed a while ago not to post on here again, but I’ve made an exception because something about how you described your experience really got to me.

I’m really sorry you’re carrying this. What you describe, feeling like there was no “you” before someone else defined you, is something a lot of people who grew up with emotional abuse recognise. It makes sense that therapy can start to feel pointless when the damage feels so foundational, like there’s no clear “end point” to work toward.

That said, I want to gently challenge one part of what you said: the idea that there was never a “you.” Even if your sense of self was shaped, limited or overwritten by your mother, it doesn’t mean there was nothing there to begin with. It definitely doesn’t mean there’s nothing there now. It may be buried, fragmented, or unfamiliar but that’s different from nonexistent.

So maybe a different question is more useful than “who am I?” what if you asked: who do I want to be, if I’m allowed to choose? Not what feels true right now, but what feels even slightly appealing, interesting, or relieving. Identity doesn’t have to be uncovered like a fixed object; it can be built, piece by piece.

On therapy feeling moot. Honestly, in severe situations like yours, that feeling makes sense. When there’s no clear resolution in sight, more sessions can feel like circling the same pain. If you haven’t already, you might explore some alternatives or complements. Somatic approaches as mentioned by a previous poster (working through the body rather than just talking) can sometimes reach things that words don’t. Dance, in particular, can be a powerful somatic outlet for some because it lets you express and move emotion without having to define it first. It can also help rebuild a sense of ownership over your body, which is often disrupted in early emotional abuse. If your “mother wound” has made anything associated with softness, beauty, expression or femininity feel unsafe or inaccessible, trying some gentle, private movement to music such as Starling Arrow can be a way of exploring that on your own terms. Without anyone watching or judging of course.

If dance doesn’t resonate, other somatic options can work in a similar way: things like yoga, shaking/releasing exercises, breathwork, or even slow, mindful walking where you pay attention to sensation rather than thoughts. The key idea isn’t the specific activity, it’s giving your nervous system a way to process what talking alone sometimes can’t.

Resources like The Body Keeps the Score can be a useful starting point for understanding that connection. And something like the Crappy Childhood Fairy on YouTube isn’t really somatic, but it can be a good place to feel less alone without going through the full rigmarole of therapy.

You mentioned being triggered by people who are aggressive or very open about their trauma. I could be off, but sometimes that kind of reaction points to anger that hasn’t had a safe place to exist. Not “you should be angry,” but if it’s there, buried anger can come out sideways as discomfort or shutdown. Physical expression—whether that’s dance, hitting a pillow, or even more structured movement—can sometimes help that surface in a way that feels contained rather than overwhelming.

You’ve probably already tried a lot, so take or leave any of this. Another more unconventional suggestion is Mami Onami’s work especially her “painkiller” theory. It’s definitely left-field, but for some people who feel stuck, unusual frameworks can open a different door. In a similar vein, you might also find the account Aromagnosis on Instagram interesting as she looks at parental wounds through more of a Jungian lens, and I believe she’s launching a course soon. If you’re someone who likes to understand things deeply, that kind of self-study angle might be up your street.

About your birthday. What you said really stood out and saddened me. If the original meaning of that day feels tied to pain or to other people, you’re not obligated to keep it. You mentioned celebrating it for others before but what if you reclaimed that idea for yourself? Or even chose a completely different day that represents something you decide matters?

The identity piece you mentioned could also be something you explore gently on your own terms. If formal therapy feels like too much, you might try some self-guided work at your own pace. Even simple journaling prompts like:

• If I could choose freely, what kind of person would I be?
• What do I wish I liked, even if I don’t yet?
• What feels even 1% like “me,” however faint?

On the appearance side of things since you mentioned not liking photographs of yourself—one softer way in might be through art rather than direct self-judgment. Looking at self-portraiture can be surprisingly grounding. Places like the National Portrait Gallery or the Tate Modern have powerful examples of artists exploring identity in very non-polished ways. You could even try taking photos of yourself or doing your own rough self-portraits not to make something “good,” just to observe. No one else has to see it.

And I might be wrong, but the fact you posted here at all suggests some part of you is at least a little bit ready to turn inward and explore, even if it’s slow and uneven. You don’t have to figure everything out you can just start by cracking one small thing open at a time.

And if none of this lands, that’s okay too. I just want to know I see and hear you.