"But we took you to stately homes" - Part 4

[oneplusone]

Can't beleive we're onto part 4, although i can't see this thread ever dying.

I was just reading through past posts to try and catch up on the months i have missed and something somebody said has triggered something for me. I know my mother didn't bond with me or love me and i think part of the reason why was because she thought i took after my dad whom she hates (although she is too gutless to leave him). I remember when i was young her saying things like my hair was like my dad's but she wouldn't say it an affectionate way, but quite a venomous way and it always made me feel uncomfortable when she said that but i must have been too young to figure out why.

The more i realise about my mother the more i despise and hate her. I remember she used to play hide and seek with me when i was very young, about 3. Only she would 'really' hide in a place i would never be able to find her. I remember crying and feeling completely distressed one time as i thought she had gone and left me alone at home. It was only after i had been crying for some time that she jumped out laughing from her hiding place. What a nasty, cruel, ugly piece of work and she parades around looking as if butter wouldn't melt and she has a lot of people fooled including my 2 sisters. I know my dad can see her for what she is which is why she hates him and i can see her true colours too which is why i hate her.

I know inside she is deeply insecure, lacks intelligence, strength and integrity. I have witnessed her lie, manipulate and cheat to get what she wants and the people to whom she lies and those who she manipulates are us, her own family. I just can't beleive my sisters cannot see through her, they are totally blind and deaf to her true character and have completely fallen for the victim role she has carved out for herself.

Cutting off my parents was the best thing i ever did and i have realised i need to set some boundaries with my sisters, my last remaining friend and even DH. How to do that is another thing, something completely new to me.

Wow this thread is like being on the psychiatrists couch!!

I don't feel in a position to give advice, hopefully I can help others soon. But I have been reading the posts and some of the stuff has hit me right between the eyes, especially the stuff about reverting back to the age where you were most damaged.I have ALWAYS felt like a child, NEVER and adult, and have always treated poor dp like a father figure, rebelling against him, being 'told off' by him etc.

Atilla, my dad left my mother when I was three, I can't say I blame him, but it left me feeling horribly rejected and feeling like I wasn't good enough. I also feel angry with him for leaving me at her mercy when he knew the damage she could do.

Having said that I saw my father every week and he has always been a supportive and loving figure in my life. NOW I feel he is the only person who truly loves me uncondtionally. He never judges, never criticises. I love him very much, he is a true friend.

I actually ordered the toxic parents book yesterday.

Do you really think that the 'love and admiration" stuff on my present was for her own purposes? I so wanted to believe that she meant it. Then I remembered, and told dp today, that she said to me " look at what I've written, did you see it?"..

oneplusone, that's a great idea re anger managment, sadly I am NEVER alone!!!!!!

My H is currently making noises about going around to see his parents again at their cesspit of a house (Kim and Aggie need to go there).

We haven't visited since late August when FIL and BIL ganged up on MIL and told her (after she saying yes to us) that they did not want DS for the arvo (it would interrupt their arvo you see).

I have made it plain to my DH that I will only go there for his sake if I go (still a bit IF in my mind) - not because of MIL, FIL and BIL (who in his mid 40s still bloody well lives in their cesspit house - argh!!!). I am heartily sick of my dysfunctional inlaws!!. And they're also enabling twats to boot!.

Attila x

Magsi, your parents sound a lot like mine. They don't say anything obviously nasty but they don't say anything loving or approving either. They don't show any emotion. Even when there are big issues in their lives, or their children's, they never talk about how they feel or ask other people how they feel, they only talk about practicalities. We never felt we could talk to them about the things that bothered us. When I tried I got a reaction that was scornful, dismissive and irritated. They would rather pretend nothing bad was happening than deal with a situation which might be emotional. So we felt abandoned and uncared for and detached.

There was no reassuring influence and this is something I still crave. I'm so anxious that bad things could happen (I think because I was never reassured or protected) and I want someone to say everything will be ok and they will look after me. This is what babies want and it is too late to have it now. But I feel the loss of never having it.

Magsi you sound like a lovely Mummy and I wish I could be like you sound. That is how I wanted to be, but I don't think I am living up to how I expected to be as a mother. I am so disappointed in myself. I am better at it than my parents but I want to be much better to make sure my children don't feel the way I did.

I'm much better with DS than with DD. I really feel the love for him and being loving towards him comes so naturally. Sometimes I have to tone it down a bit in front of DD because it just isn't the same with her and I don't want her to notice the difference. I hate myself for being more distanced from her and getting so angry with her because it means I'm no better than my parents. I hate the thought of her feeling alone and not connected enough to me.

I find her demands overwhelming and I feel pressured then I feel angry then I feel like escaping from her. I find it hard to accept that she is so attention seeking and has a 'spoilt brat' attitude and is materialistic. She has never been soft and affectionate like DS, she is kind of 'tougher' and 'grown up' and it makes it harder to show love to her because she isn't really into cuddling and 'soppiness'. I know that I should accept her as she is and that I am wrong. There are lots of things about her that I admire and I find it easier to write a list of what I admire about her than DS.

I think there is something about her being a girl as well and my mum made me think females were weak and pathetic and cold and hard and manipulative. During childhood I wanted to be a boy and hated myself being a girl. I tried to fit in with the boys in the street and they had contempt for female qualities. I didn't really have proper female friends until mid twenties.

I'm trying things to improve it eg reading a book Raising your Spirited Child and will read more books and I have started having special time just with her when DS has gone to bed doing exercises/colouring from her magazines and sometimes I have a day just with her and we go to 'our' special cafe. I feel inspired by what you said about doing loads of baking with the children (although I'm crap at baking), but I think I need to force myself to do more interactive activities with my DCs even though I really don't feel like it and really focus on bonding with them more. I think the more I do it the more I will like doing it. I feel so guilty and lazy that I don't want to do it.

Danae/OnePlusOne, I love the things you said, it all makes so much sense. Especially about being 'taught' that expressing emotions was bad and then 'freezing' them and feeling empty and cold instead. I feel the block on my emotions is so strong. I think when you start doing extreme things eg going at it in the gym in an aggressive way until it really hurts or drinking too much or doing anything excessively (eg my bro was a shopaholic amongst other things) or self destructive it is your body's way of trying to find a way of getting the frozen blocked emotions out. When it starts coming out on your DCs and DH that is when you really have to get it sorted somehow and that is what made me get on with seeing a therapist.

After writing all this I feel so venomous and bitter towards my mum. Most of the 'blame' for everything that happened, I seem to put onto her. I should really do an anger release method while I feel this and try to feel it more like OnePlusOne said, but I am not alone in the house til Thu. I want to bash things and think poisonous thoughts for a bit.

AN,

We do not share the same family but my outlaws are exactly like you describe below, particularly MIL. To a lesser extent my parents are like this as well:-

"They don't say anything obviously nasty but they don't say anything loving or approving either. They don't show any emotion. Even when there are big issues in their lives, or their children's, they never talk about how they feel or ask other people how they feel, they only talk about practicalities".

A sentence I just read jumped out at me and reminded me of the time I told my social worker I had told my Mum I could understand why she gave me up (now I'm a Mum I can't) but I would never forgive her. My SW said I should never have said that. {hmm] is that the same SW who left me in a house I was being abused??? I think so.

just had a thought about the "poison containers" thing in that article OnePlusOne posted about. I was thinking about why my DD picks an argument with me as soon as I pick her up from school and why she argues with every single thing I say on the way home and even argues with herself eg "What is that car doing there, it shouldn't be there". She seems argumentative, irritable, in a rush, hyper and moody. I find it hard to be with her and listen to it all and feel got at. I think "I've only just seen you and I find it horrible to be with you already!" I feel despair that I will ever feel the way I know I should feel about her.

I always say to other people who say "my child is so difficult after school", they have spent all day using self control to behave themselves at school because they are scared to misbehave there and then when they leave school they release all their pent up feelings on the people they feel comfortable enough to express themselves with.

It said in that article that parents should be the poison containers for their children's difficult feelings, letting their children express it and then absorbing it away from them and diffusing them. But some parents use their children as the poison containers instead.

So I can see I should be letting my DD rant at me and keeping calm and letting her continue until she feels she has released her pent up feelings from the day. I tried this today and when she tried to argue with me I just said "I'm not going to argue" in a calm voice.

The more she did it the more tense I felt and tired and weakened. I felt like it was really hard to contain all her negativity and keep calm and the effort of suppressing how I felt about it made me feel wound up and tired and angry.

I feel I don't want to endure difficult things and suppress my feelings anymore because I had enough of that during my childhood. Having to just take it and suppress the feelings again makes me resentful and angry and takes me back to how it was.

I'm not sure I'm strong enough to do this for her. I'm not an 'empty' container for her to release her poison into as there is still poison in me from my childhood. I'm hoping that by writing this and realising it the strength will come to me.

We are supposed to know how to deal with it better than them because they are children but how are we supposed to diffuse ourselves once they've put all their 'poison' into us? With rational thinking I suppose. By thinking "I've helped her to feel better and she has expressed herself and it's a good sign that she feels relaxed enough and trusting enough with me to express herself. She feels ok now so I'll just let the 'poisonous' feelings drift away and not dwell on them because they aren't important enough". Then do something else.

This could all be utter bollocks, I'm just thinking 'aloud' to try to work things out.

Magsi, I felt emotionally detached from my mother for years. Until last year, when I started to allow myself to feel the utter rage and grief which had gone unacknowledged, about not having had a mother in the normal sense of the word.

I feel less emotionally detached now, I'm still slightly irritated by her, but I'm less angry and slightly more compassionate than I was. The compassion is less forced, less rational, more real. Because I'm free of her now. Nearly.

I think you need to allow yourself to feel the grief/ anger. And kitty, you too - it's you who needs the compassion, who can still benefit from it, not your mother.

Re the cooking thing - I've just remembered that my mother absolutely hated it every time I went into the kitchen to cook, or offered to cook. She just wouldn't let me. It was like she felt that I was trying to usurp her role or something. At the risk of being immodest, I'm a fantastic cook and I was always interested in it, and not once did she encourage that. In spite of the fact that she is a hardened sexist and you would have thought that she would teach her DD's to cook. That had never really struck me before.

Thanks for your thoughts and advice. It is nice to be able to put your thoughts down on paper and, for once, have them acknowledged.

It is a great help.

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AN, I think Danae is spot on again. I don't think you need to 'take on' your DD's difficult emotions, you just need to be a safe place where she can express difficult emotions and know she will still be loved. I understand exactly what you mean about collecting her from school and wanting to be pleased to see her but instead her whinging immediately winding you up. I have most definately been there and done that.

On a very practical note, I know my DD is very whingy if her blood sugar is low so I have (when I remember) started taking her a small snack to have as soon as I collect her from school. It seems to work as she can't eat and whinge at the same time and once she has eaten something she seems calmer. Would it be worth a try for you?

Then, when she is whingy and moany and grumpy, I kind of let it go over my head, I know she needs to let off steam after being good all day and I sort of pretend to listen to her when really I'm not. I just make a few appropriate comments here and there and it kind of works sometimes. It depends of my mood as well, if I'm tired it's much harder. I have stopped beating myself up about this now, I used to, just like you're doing, now I just think I'm only human not perfect. But it's taken me a long time to really believe this, so maybe you are just not there yet.

On a different note, I have been thinking about how I become so overwhelmed with emotion whenever anybody, whether on MN or in RL, takes my feelings seriously and shows some care and concern for me. In RL i have burst into tears so many times if a friend shows she cares about me but then I also feel hugely upset and disappointed if and when I feel a friend has let me down or not thought of me when they should.

I realise now that my overwhelming emotional reaction to somebody being caring towards me and taking my feelings seriously comes from the little girl inside me, who's voice I seem to be able to hear so much more clearly these days. She has been crying out "I want my mummy" for so long and whenever anybody shows the tiniest bit of concern towards me she feels such huge relief because she thinks that at last her mummy, whom she has been longing for for so long, has finally come to take care of her. But of course none of these people actually are her mummy, they are just kind hearted friends for whom she is not their priority and so they quite often forget her needs or just have no idea how much she feels needs them.

Realising this, even though I don't have any real memories of times when I have been crying for my mother, makes me sadly think that these feelings must be from when I was very very young, possibly from when i was just a baby. Perhaps I was left to cry or perhaps my mother was just very cold with me and I never 'felt' like she was my mother, I didn't feel her warmth or her love. This makes sense as any memories I do have of her are always of her coldness, rejection and lack of interest in me and lack of warmth towards me.

It is hard, at the moment, for me to feel any rage towards my mother for treating me so cruelly and coldly, perhaps because I know 'intellectually' her reasons for behaving this way, most likely severe PND just like I had after I had DD. But I feel certain that something, some everyday event, will trigger my rage.

I know I haven't been here for ages, have been skimming through the most recent posts though and agree on the whole conduit vs container angle.

We all got filled up with our parents crap when we were young and that's not fair - so I can see why it can seem difficult to take your kids crap - but I think the idea is more that you don't really. Do as you do with your cup-of-tea for misery times with friends. Listen but don't bother getting involved with arguments or thinking up solutions that they will reject anyway. Try and guide their anger so that they come up with their own solutions. 'So and so did that to me today' gets responded to with 'well, why do you think she did that' or 'why did that upset you' so they're working things through for themselves and you're just guiding them. (Which in a way - is a useful life skill anyway, it's what we're learning to do here... work out what was appropriate and what isn't and how to stop it from controlling us.)

I reckon the food and a bit of chill out time in front of the telly is also good!

Personally I'm starting to get worried about what things will be like when the baby gets here again. I had a great conversation with my dad where I explained why I am the way I am with my mother (ie as distant as possible!) and all of the crappy things she'd done. He has suggested a plan of DC only being with my mum when either he or I am there. Am okay with him being there and me not because my mother has never been abusive to me when he was in the room as well.

Nobody else knows about this except my DP and my sister. DP is fine with it, Sis doesn't really get it (I think she's still a bit in denial about how bad it was, even though she got more of the physical abuse than I did - was hit and slapped if mum was angry) but I have no idea how I am supposed to explain this to family friends. Have some very close friends who think I am absolutely potty to not just be giving my DC to my mum to look after when I go back to work. (NO WAY) I don't want to explain... but the more I don't explain the more I get told I'm being unfair or selfish or mean and it undermines my confidence about how much control I have over raising my own child and keeping them safe.

I think the worries have got worse as well as it will be at least another 4 weeks before I find out the sex. I am desperately hoping for a boy as I am so so worried about how much worse it would be for a little girl that my mother might try to 'live through' as well.

Thank you. I will try the 'snack as soon as DD leaves the classroom' thing and will try asking her questions about what she has said and how she feels when she tries to argue with me. I will do it tommorrow and let you know the results!

OnePlusOne, what you wrote made me imagine you not daring to believe that someone cares about you in case they don't and you feel let down and then when they do care the relief is overwhelming. I know this is repeating what you wrote but in slightly different words but I wanted to write it because I was so struck by it, I could really feel it. I can feel how a baby would freeze off from everyone because he/she can't face the pain of wanting the love and reassurance and bond with his/her mother but then the one you are with is cold and distant.

The fact that I can really feel it as I read it probably means this is what I experienced too as a baby. It's like when I read the Primal Wound book about adoption and reading it felt so painful, as though it was reminding me how it was, even though I don't consciously remember because I was too young.

My birthmother looked after me for a week in hospital before giving me up but was crying all the time and emotionally damaged from her own childhood. I don't know what she was like then but since I've known her as an adult she comes accross as cold and 'locked away'. I had a foster carer for about 4 weeks after that before also being taken from them and going to my adoptive parents who are emotionally repressed. Their house feels emotionally sterile. I feel like a zombie there unless my children are with me.

When I met my ex boyfriend he was like a substitute mother. I was with him nearly every hour of the day and did everything with him and didn't feel stifled by this for a few years. I wanted that connection all the time like a baby needs it's mother. We used to lie down and just hold each other and not speak for hours. I felt so comforted and right and it was such a relief. He made me feel wanted all the time and was soft and loving and idolised me. He was quite a weak and dependant person but I didn't see that for years because I so needed someone to focus entirely on me and love me in that over the top obsessive way. He was so soft and non-threatening, most people would say a drip, but I needed someone I couldn't be scared of in any way who I knew would not abuse me. He was firm about waiting til I was 18 before we had sex because he wanted to make sure I was ready.

He really helped to heal me enough to cope with the outside world and I don't know how I would have been if I hadn't had him. I don't know that I would have 'survived' and built such a 'normal' life if I hadn't had him. He made me feel it was possible for someone to love me and he used to say a lot "you are an easy person to love". I am still grateful to him for what he did for me. I left him because I stopped finding him physically attractive and because he wouldn't let me go anywhere without him and was insanely jealous of me interacting with anyone else, male or female, gay or straight. I've been thinking about him a bit lately, don't know why (not in a fantasizing way). I would never want to get back with him but recognise how important he was in my life, in the whole scheme of my life. When we split up, even though I knew we had to, it was so hard to be alone.

LaWeasel, I think you are right to not let your DC be alone with your mum, because it sounds like your instincts tell you this is right. Don't let people who don't understand properly talk you out of doing what you instinctively know is right.

That is my verbal diarrohea for the day

I hate October.

It was the month you know what happened and I had to move to an emergency foster home and then a more permanent one a few days later.

A week on Saturday I have to leave my children with my PIL and go to London with my DH to see a psych and tell him everything. I am absolutely **ing myself.

Whenever I think about what he did to me I shake like mad. Does anyone else have such a strong physical response? FGS it has been over 20 years since.

NotMamaG, you are not being weak, you are being very strong. Just because it was a long time ago doesn't mean it should affect you less. You haven't properly dealt with your feelings about it yet so they are still there the same as they were when it happened.

I know you are really scared but you do know that talking to a professional will really help you in the long term if you really put everything into it and try to get the most out of it don't you.

You have to be strong and go through just a bit more hell but it will be worth it.

I wish we could make it easier.

It will be just one meeting I think as he is assessing how it has affected me for a court case. I am just hoping I will feel better after I have done it. I am not sure if he will be there to help me deal with it all though.

You do make it easier by being there to read when I just think out loud and post and then are kind enough to answer.

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AN, I hope the snack thing works with your DD. It definately helps with mine, what a differnce a couple of biscuits can make!

Thank you for reading my post. I feel overwhelmed and start crying whenever someone does even the tiniest thing for me, I feel ever so grateful to them as well, hugely grateful even for the tiniest bit of consideration shown to me, notice taken of me and my feelings. I think the little girl inside me is always secretly, desperately, longing for and hoping that somebody does care about her and when somebody shows they care even the tiniest little bit she feels a huge sense of relief that she is not alone in this world after all.

Sadly, I think that secret longing of the little girl inside me will always be there as it is only my parents that could have fulfilled the need that I had (and still have) but they failed and now it's too late. Nobody else can fulfill that need, so it will always be there in some way, however small.

AN, btw, for what it's worth, I think your therapist is spot on, he sounds brilliant and I really appreciate you telling us on here what he says to you as it is helping me as well.

Hi all me again, just need to offload, no obligation on anyone to read.

My cleaner made me cry today. She turned up out of the blue on my doorstep with a bunch of flowers for me! She said it was to say thank you for being a friend to her. I was totally caught by surprise, and yes, overwhelmed, i started crying and gave her a hug. She had to go and went inside and just couldn't stop crying. I felt like she was one of the few people who could 'see' the real me. I have tried to help her out where i can in small ways as she is a lovely girl and has been so reliable and hardworking, and I feel she is possibly the first person in my whole life who has shown some appreciation for my efforts. If I think back, over the years I have helped out friends and family so many times and in so many ways, not with any expectations of anything in return, but just because that's the way i am, i would like to help when and if I can. And yet most of those people to whom i have shown kindness and consideration have stabbed me in the back and not only not returned my kindness but actually been cruel and nasty to me. Whereas this girl, who I have only known for just over a year, and who I feel has helped me out more than I have helped her, has found the time and the thought to show a little appreciation for what I have done for her.

And this is in contrast to my so called one remaining friend, who whilst she has been a good friend to me in many ways, has also hurt me quite a lot recently. Every time we talk about my family situation, she always seems to take the side of my parents and shows far more concern for their feelings than for my feelings as s result both of being abused/neglected by my parents and also at having to take the drastic step of cutting them off which has effectively left me without any family.

I feel that I need to basically start afresh by ending all my previous relationships and beginning new ones, where I am a completely diffferent person and wish to be treated differently to how i was before. It would be much easier to simply end all previous relationships and start afresh as I am finding setting boundaries in my existing relationships really hard. In most of the cases where i have tried to set boundaries the other person seems extremely resistent. They clearly want to maintain the status quo as it means they can take out their issues on me and basically treat me badly to make themselves feel better and they don't like the fact that I am standing up for myself and am no longer willing to be act as their rubbish dump.

This is true of my sisters, but I think somehow, with at least my middle sister, we will manage to 'renegotiate' our relationship but am not so sure whether things will work out with my younger sister. My one remaining friend will probably be open to some new boundaries but I am struggling as to how to talk to her about this.

DH is another matter altogether and i have no idea how things are going to pan out with him, it's all so complicated. We had an argument today and he said again that he felt i have not been a proper wife to him because i have been so consumed with all my family issues which is true. But i also feel a kind of 'block' within me which is stopping me from being warm and affectionate towards him. And i realised today that this is because i feel, or the little girl inside me feels that she has been betrayed by him, that he has been disloyal and quite harsh and cruel towards her, and so she has closed herself off from him in order to protect herself from being hurt again. Her trust in him has been damaged and until it is rebuilt she will always feel wary of being warm and loving towards him in case, as has already happened, her affections are trampled on and hurt by his lack of respect and loyalty towards her. How to explain all this to DH......well, it's impossible and I'm not going to even try. He has agreed that he also needs to go and see a counsellor to offload some of his feelings as a result of my issues which have also impacted on him in a huge way and I hope this will have a positive impact on our relationship. I can sense he has a lot of anger, resentment and bitterness towards me because he feels he has been neglected because i have been so consumed by my own problems and to an extent i can understand him having these feelings. I suspect he also feels he can't express his feelings as he knows none of this is my fault, i am a victim of my parents dysunction, but that doesn't stop the feelings from being there. He keeps them bottled up but they 'leak' out every now and then and damage our relationship.

God, what a mess, my parents have so much to answer for and I so hate the feeling they have got away with causing so much pain, anguish and trouble in my life and my relationships. I am glad my mother has developed a heart condition, it makes me feel like she is having to 'pay' in some way for what she has done.

OnePlusOne, I feel I understand about the block you feel to expressing love and affection to DH because of things he has done in the past that you felt betrayed by.

I used to have this block because of things my DH did years ago. It involved him getting obsessed with another person and whenever we were with them, acting like I didn't exist and being all over them. He did this with one boy and 2 girls. I felt as though I had trusted him to love me and I felt I was important to him then he broke my trust by treating me like I was unimportant.

Things were never the same again between us for years. There was a barrier between us that hadn't been there before. When I kept doing little things outside the marriage that I shouldn't there was an element of revenge about it.

My therapist somehow talked me out of thinking about it anymore and talked me into letting it go. He said it was in the early stages of our relationship and when I hadn't been away from my family for so many years so the issues were still raw. He thought I was using what DH did to get out my feelings about abandonement and rejection from childhood. He also said that we were both more immature then and it is impossible for someone never to act rejectingly towards another person in some way. At some point DH was going to do something that felt a bit like rejection and abandonement and my feelings from childhood were going to be triggered.

I still think what DH did was wrong, and he has never admitted it was wrong, yet I do seem to have let it go. I've divided my relationship into two sections, immature boyfriend/girlfriend and married with children. The second part has been ok and I'm not holding stuff from the first part against him anymore.

It's also helped that I had an argument with one of the girls recently and said what I thought for once and the friendship is destroyed I think but I feel relieved not to have her in my life anymore. I had stupidly agreed to her and her DH being legal guardians for our children in our wills and am in the process of changing that at the moment. I gave my own feelings importance and expressed them and feel stronger unlike when she was manipulating my DH and getting all his attention and watching me to enjoy how it made me feel.

Even recently she would grab his bollocks in front of me and her DH to try to provoke us into arguing because she enjoyed the attention. I got the feeling she liked to think she could get him off me any time if she wanted to and that she was better than me. I truly think she is toxic and even DH admits she is the most manipulative person he knows, but he finds it amusing and wants to still be friends with her, even though he wouldn't trust her with any of his personal information and even though last time we saw her she kept telling me how crap he was. If she was his true friend why would she try to turn his wife against him?

Anyway, I digress, as usual....

AN thank you for your post, it is weird how we have faced similar problems with our respective DH's.

I think what your therapist said about you using what DH did to get out your feelings of abandonment etc is very insightful. And to an extent I do think that is also what has happened with myself and DH. Things have happened with him which have triggered very strong feelings of betrayal and lack of loyalty and breach of trust in me. I think my father's abuse originally created those feelings in me as a little girl. As I have mentioned before, he and I were actually quite close and had a good relationship until something happened in his life which basically made him turn 'psycho' almost overnight and he suddenly changed from being quite loving and caring and affectionate with me to being nasty and abusive, both physically and emotionally. I can see how this sudden change would have led me to feel like he had betrayed my trust and loyalty in him and had trampled on my love for him and almost thrown it back in my face.

Looking back now I am sure these were the feelings DH triggered as I remember feeling so utterly let down and hurt and betrayed by DH at the time and the intensity of my feelings were I suppose out of proportion to what had actually occurred. This is going back nearly 3 years and so was before i had any awareness or insight like i do now so at the time i 100% blamed DH for hurting and betraying me so badly, but now i realise that although did DH betray me, what i actually was feeling was my father's betrayal and breach of trust.

AN thank you, for taking the time to tell me your experience, I feel already that I may be able to let go of some of the negative feelings I have been harbouring against DH as clearly they should be directed mostly towards my father.

I feel so weary of all this sometimes...will this journey never end? I want to be able to put the past behind me and look to the future and enjoy what i have in the present but the past just seems to keep rearing it's ugly head over and over again.

I don't even know where to start with my issues that have arisen from childhood.

The problem is that, as a child your point of reality is fixed by your parents behaviour. You're taught that they love you, but as you get older you discover their particular brand of love is rather damaging.

I'm interested to know - how many of you have difficulty with your identity?

I grew up feeling very confused about who I am, and to an extent I still am. It has meant that I have not had enough direction to lead a productive life imo... I also relate to what kitty says about not feeling like an adult. I don't think I'm particularly immature - though at 20 I certainly was very emotionally manipulative - something I have made a conscious decision to curb. Over the past 8 years I have tried to learn 'normal' behaviour from other people. Although I think my reality is still skewed.