Our 5th visit to the Stately Home

[Nabster]

Here we go again.

My mother never comforted me when i was hurt/upset/worried as a child. In fact I know i realised very early on as a child not to go to her with any 'negative' or difficult emotions as she simply wasn't interested. I don't remember her ever giving me a cuddle if i was upset or had hurt myself.

Until quite recently i was repeating this pattern with DD. Whenever she hurt herself or was upset instead of feeling sympathy for her i would get annoyed and irritated with her and blame her for not looking where she was going or being clumsy or something. I think the blaming thing was so i could avoid having to be sympathetic towards her or giving her a cuddle. I felt awful afterwards and I knew i was making her feel exactly how my mother used to make me feel in the same situation as a child.

Occasionally i would really force myself and try and give DD a cuddle/hug be sympathetic. But our cuddles were awkward and uncomfortable and i felt totally uncomfortable being loving and sympathetic towards her.

However, recently, i have found it easier to be sympathetic and loving when DD hurts herself and is crying. It still doesn't feel completely natural and I kind of have to tell myself in my head not to get cross. But when i do give her a cuddle i imagine how she must have been feeling all these years when i was unavailable to her in this way. That thought is enough to make me cuddle her and feel sympathy for her and our cuddles feel a lot more natural and less awkward.

I know my inability to give DD sympathy and cuddles is a direct result of being deprived of this nurturing from my own mother. By working on my own issues I know I am breaking the cycle that no doubt has been passed on from generation to generation; from my grandmother to my mother and to me. And I have noticed a subtle but real change in DD, she seems happier. I feel terrible when i think about how she has been emotionally deprived for all this time. I can hardly remember a thing from the first 6 months after she was born, but i know that i hardly ever cuddled DD, during the first 6 months or even after. I held her when i had to for feeding and changing etc and i did lots of things with her like going to the park and reading stories so it probably looked to the outside world like i was a loving caring mother. And whilst i did care, enough not to completely neglect, i know i wasn't loving in the way she needed to be loving, which was exactly the same way i needed my mother to be loving with me when i was a child.

I have read more of the book I mentioned. I can't say i would recommend it other than for some good descriptions of types and manifestations of emotional abuse and deprivation. It seems to place a lot of emphasis on the behaviour of the child as a reason for emotional abuse/deprivation. I totally disagree with the author on this point as i feel, in my case at least, that the reason for the emotional deprivation that DD suffered was nothing to do with her or her temperament as a baby, and everything to do with me, my childhood and my mother's issues. DD hasn't changed at all, I have changed over the last couple of years as a result of my ever increasing self awareness and insight and it is purely as a result of the changes in myself that there have been changes in my relationship with DD. To place any blame on the child in cases of abuse/neglect/deprivation is, IMHO, is absolutely wrong.

One positive thing about the book is that it uses the term emotional deprivation which in my case describes my situation far better than simply emotional abuse or neglect, although neglect is not too far off as a good description.

I have been thinking a lot about middle sister. I realise that a lot of the time until now I have been lumping my 2 sisters together and not really seeing them as seperate and completely different individuals. But i can see this a lot more clearly now. Youngest sister is definately the least toxic. When i have contact with her i rarely come away feeling upset about something she has said whereas this happens frequently with middle sister.

I can see now that the way middle sister treats me now is simply a continuation of how she treated me as a child. Of course the way in which she is nasty to me now has changed from the obviously nasty taunting and bullying and name calling she subjected me to when we were children. But in essence her behaviour towards me is the same. I think i have been confused though as sometimes she can be extremely nice, generous with gifts etc and so when she is nasty i almost kind of ignore it or dismiss my feelings of being upset/hurt by something she has said/done.

I also know with absolute certainty that her behaviour is nothing to do with me, is not because i am bad/nasty/horrible, and is everything to do with her and her own deep seated insecurities that come from being abused and probably also from being the middle child. She seems to harbour a lot of jealousy towards me and youngest sister, she tries to copy us both and is clearly trying to always prove she can do anything we can do. She lacks the confidence to forge her own path and go her own way and do her own thing. Her judgment in men is way off and i think she has been horribly used by her DH and she knows it but is too afraid to speak out. She has married quite a dominant and forceful man just like our father, and she is just like our mother in that she is afraid to stand up to him and stand up for herself. I can see their marriage ending up just like our parents, full of unspoken simmering bitterness and resentment on her part and contempt on his part.

It is a completely new concept for me to see my 2 sisters so seperately and as completely different individuals. I realise now that i can and should have completely different relationships with both of them. I know i need to be quite wary with middle sister and keep her at arm's length as she is definately toxic. But with youngest sister i can be a lot more open and less wary as she does not have an axe to grind like middle sister.

I was feeling sad recently at the thought that youngest sister and i will probably never be as close as i'd like as she has found a substitute family and substitute older sisters in her family in law, but actually i do have a bit of hope that over time we will become a bit closer than we are now. I suppose i have been keeping youngest sister at arm's length as well as i was lumping her in with toxic middle sister, but now i have seperated the two of them i feel it is safe to open up a bit more with youngest sister.

Smithfield, I know what you mean about one minute feeling you are too soft on your child and the next minute thinking you are too strict. I talked to Therapist about this a while back and said "But how do I KNOW whether I need to be hard or soft?" I was flabbergasted and a bit annoyed when he just said "You know." I thought "that's not very fucking helpful" hahaha he makes me laugh even though he doesn't mean to! He went on to say that if I listened to my instincts and trusted them then I WOULD know! At some point we must have come to distrust our instincts. We don't have faith in ourselves. We want to be told by someone else that we are doing the right thing. I think that maybe we are blinded by our anxiety - it takes over and we aren't free to fully feel our instinctive responses. We need to keep STOPPING, observing everything around us, taking it all in, feeling it all, letting all the feelings in and letting our instinctive feelings come to us. Easy to say, not easy to do.

I think the same about my DD, I KNOW what feelings she triggers and about who from my past but just knowing this doesn't seem to make a difference to how angry I feel. I keep telling myself that DD is not him and I am angry about what HE did so shouldn't be taking it out on her. This helps a bit but still isn't enough. I have to keep STOPPING, looking at her, noticing what makes her HER and this makes me KNOW that DD is not the person she sometimes triggers memories of. Often I forget to do this 'technique' though. I get taken over by my feelings without it entering my head that they are an overreaction and that I'm being triggered.

If you didn't bond so much with your DS as your DD at birth it won't do you much good to keep beating yourself up over it. The situation surrounding his birth probably wasn't your fault. It wasn't my fault that giving birth to DD was not straightforward. What about people whose babies need to go straight into an incubator and they don't get to be physically close to them for a while after birth. That isn't their fault but the bonding process is interrupted. Like OnePlusOne says, we just have to work on building the bond more gradually over time. It might not be as instant as with our other children but it can be built up to the same strength over time.

Roseability, I agree that it would be really unnatural if our children never saw their parents display any emotion other than the calm, quiet, 'reasonable' talking that all the childcare books and TV programmes seem to tell us we must do! If they only saw this it would be a bit of a bloody shock when they made someone angry outside the family, either on purpose or by accident, and they 'blew up'!

OnePlusOne, like learning how to recognise when we are being triggered, it seems from what you are saying that we need to learn to recognise when we are anxious as well! When I read what you wrote I could recognise times when I have also been really irritable and prone to anger outbursts with my DCs and DH and I also think the same as you "But surely it is the wrong time of the month for PMT!" hahaha. I thought I was having PMT several times per month! But it isn't is it! It's anxiety which makes us snappy because we are so uptight! When Therapist was listing symptoms of stress gone out of control one of the things he said was when people (in my case DCs) talk to you, you might say "Can't talk!, got too much to do!, got to get it all done" and feeling overwhelmed by the feeling of too much to do but if someone asks you what you actually have to do you can't think of much! In my case I feel like I need to feel I have done lots of things to 'prepare' - for what? - I don't know! - anything bad that MIGHT have a possibility of happening! I'm a bit of a nervous wreck I suppose. Because during childhood my brother's mood could change in a flash and he could turn on me at any moment. And if my mum's dad was in the house I had to make sure I knew where he was and that I would always have a piece of furniture in between me and him or be able to get to the bathroom and lock the door before he could come into my room if I hadn't heard him coming.

AN, just read your post and SNAP! That feeling like of you said of not having time to talk with DC's or anyone really because you have this 'feeling' that there is loads you have to do and get done and yet when you actually take a moment to sit and think about what exactly it is you need to do you realise it is actually very little. I thought it was only me who felt like that! I'm glad and sad that you feel it too! IYKWIM.

AN, snap again :"I get taken over by my feelings without it entering my head that they are an overreaction and that I'm being triggered."

I keep thinking i am getting better at recognising if i'm being triggerd and then it happens again and i don't realise til afterwards.

My thoughts, for what they are worth, about the fact that you still feel anger towards DD that you know should be directed towards your brother, are that you still have a lot of anger buried inside that you need to locate and release. By locate i mean you need to try and work out what things your brother did that made you angry but which you are not letting yourself get angry about because you feel guilty about feeling that way towards your brother because you know the reasons why he probably behaved that way. Knowing the reasons is something Alice Millers calls 'intellectualisation' and it is fact a defence against feelings. You need to allow your feelings in despite your intellectual knowledge about why your brother behaved as he did.

Recently DD has said to me quite a few times "You're always cross". And i think she is right. I am not cross 100% of the time but i think i am cross enough of the time to make her feel i am cross all the time. I thought i was getting better as i was no longer having the huge angry blow outs at DD that i used to. But it now seems to have been a low level almost constant 'crossness'.

I think a lot of the time it is due to anxiety about various things and like AN i also feel i have so much in my head to process and offload and basically i never have enough time in which to do this fully and this is also what makes me cross. I get cross when the DC's demand my time and attention as i want to be left alone to think my thoughts and work out my stuff. I find myself craving time to myself and i know every mum needs 'me' time but i feel i want and need it all the time, but purely because i have so much going on in my head all the time.

become not been, sorry.

AN, i remember you posted a while ago that you thought our mother's were probably always irritable and seemed cross with us for the same reasons we are cross and irritable with our DC's.

But the feeling i always had a child and now that i am an adult is that my mother was not irritable and cross with me for our reasons as described above but because she didn't like me, that i had not turned out to be the sort of DD she had wanted or expected when she fell pregnant. This feeling has always been reinforced by the fact that she behaved so differently with my sisters and seemed to genuinely like them and want to spend time with them.

I hope that DD does not feel how i feel, that i am cross with her because i don't like her, she's not the daughter i wanted/expected. But the chances are she probably does feel that way, how is she ever to know the real reason why i am cross and irritable? Realising this is i hope going to be enough for me to change my behaviour from now on. It is going to be very hard but i have to do for DD's sake.

Am sorry for all the typo's, i can't keep up with my thoughts. I hope you understand what i'm trying to say.

AN, re your peg theory, i think you are not wrong. The book I am reading says it is very common for parents to feel they 'dislike' only one of their children and feel perfectly normal things about their other children. I can understand your friend who feels very differently in a negative way towards her middle child.

In other books I've read the consensus seems to be that it is very commonly the eldest child on whom the parents 'peg' their negative feelings. I have been thinking about my own childhood and i feel now that until my dad had his mental breakdown I was his favourite. But then he had his breakdown and saw me as the 'enemy' or bad child. I think he transferred his good feelings towards me onto my youngest sister and he treated her in the way he had previously treated me. She took my place as his favourite and I became the one he disliked and blamed for everything. Wrt my middle sister i think he never really liked her from the start and this continued and has never ended. He always said middle sister was just like our mother whom he despised and he has the same contempt for middle sister that he has for our mother. And the funny thing is that middle sister is very very much like our mother in many of her character traits. I don't know if our dad has almost forced her into that role or if she was really always going to be very much like our mother.

Re what your friend said to you about your DD growing up and saying you are horrible.....well I'm not so sure that will happen. Because even though i realise now how emotionally deprived i was by my parents, for so long i thought it was me, that there was something wrong with me, not that my parents were horrible.

In a way i would be pleased if DD did grow up and recognise that i had been horrible to her; i would rather that than her thinking it was her and there was something wrong with her. If she can see that it's me and not her, to me that means her self esteem and self confidence are nowwhere near as damaged as mine were and that despite the repeating of the bad patterns from my parents, some of my parenting has been good enough to ensure she is emotionally healthy.

AN and OPO, I've been thinking about you and the situation with your DDs for a while, and have a thought that I want to share with you but am really struggling to express! Anyway, the thought is whether what's going on is projection? As in, you each projecting your childhood self onto your DD. When we are hurt by our parents, we cannot blame them at the time, it is too unsafe, so we have to blame ourselves. (And they of course they ususally blame us too so that reinforces it.) So we build a picture of ourselves as being blameworthy, unlovable, deserving of punishment/cold treatment etc. That internal picture stays with us maybe our whole lives unless we take active steps to change it; and unfortunately, being able to intellectually identify that we were not to blame is not enough (though of course it's a necessary step). We have to somehow change the programming in our brains that was set at such an early age.

So what I'm thinking is that maybe because they're girls, when you see them, you see the child you were who was hurt and all those feelings of blaming yourself are transposed onto her, her vulnerability and innocence, instead of inspiring the natural reaction of protection and love that you would feel if you'd been protected and loved yourself (and that I know you want to feel and are trying to create), instead causes you to feel the way your own mothers felt towards you. So it's almost like you become your own mother, and your DD becomes you as a little girl.

So a tactic I would suggest is that when you do feel irritated by them or cold towards them, say to yourself "this is how my mother/father felt towards me, this is how they treated me" or if you're blaming her, "this is how they blamed me" and try and let in the compassion for yourself suffering through that - and then hopefully that will stop the projection so you can see your DD for herself and let in the compassion for her too. I know you're both doing some of that anyway, but just wondered if this perspective might help a little bit.

I think when you're talking about the peg thing, AN, I would call that projection - quite often there is one child in a family who fills that space, Smithfield maybe in your case it's your DS? I don't know, am just speculating wildly, sorry if unhelpful.

Certainly for me I am aware of projecting my child self onto DS, and getting angry with him just like they got angry with me, and I can feel this part of me that wants to blame him, wants to make it his fault, this part of me that is my internalised parents - even though I, the person I truly am, believe 100% that it is never the child's fault (right with you there on that one, OPO). Like I say, believing something in your head isn't enough to magic away all the years and years of programming that have built up layers and layers of protective denial. I thought I had done so much work on this before he was born that I would not repeat these patterns; I was really shocked to find how deep it goes and how hard it's been to change it. I have sometimes thought what a good job it is I had a boy, as I really think I would have found it even harder to disentangle me from my child had I had a girl. I would never have believed I could shout at him like I have done, and it 100% isn't his fault; but we are only human, and if this is how we were parented, with the best will in the world, we cannot help but replicate at least some of it. At least we acknowledge that it is not our god-given right to treat them like this, and we apologise when we do this to them.

AN, your post about trying to get it right all the time really struck some chords with me. I too have often felt that if he's ever distressed, I have to fix it, it's a sign I'm not doing it properly, he mustn't ever suffer! But of course that's unrealistic. I don't think any parents can protect their DC from all pain and distress; and certainly not us who are battling with the damage caused in our own childhoods. How can we be damaged so deeply and yet still expect ourselves to function as if nothing had happened? It's yet another aspect of the damage and the denial, that we expect such high standards of ourselves, when we should really be cutting ourselves a little slack.

OPO, I'm so glad to hear that you have already noticed a change in your DD since working on your own issues. It's proof that whatever mistakes we do make, we can correct them if we have the intention and the will to work at it. And surely too we've got to have the right to make mistakes - cause everybody else does!

So much on here to talk about, very interesting things. I want to respond to everything, but as others have said, the amount of anxiety I am experiencing at the moment is exhausting me. AT least now the week of my old family is over as my sis went home today.

I found myself in a room today with just my old nuclear family. It was a very heavy and opressive atmosphere. The room was dark.

They talk as if I am not there, but at the same time I am watched. Such a claustrophobic feeling, suffocating. Everything I say, my body language, facial expression is watched, interpreted, judged. I don't know how I ever survived in that atmosphere.

They all have some sort of superiority complex, I'm sure. They way they talk it is clear they believe themselves to be better than everyone else. Just seeing them all together, without extended family, inlaws etc, I could see how miserable they are.

As soon as I could get out of the room I went. My own family were in the garden. In the sunlight and it was lovely.

It was such a symbolic moment. I decided I didn't want to be in the room and I left. I chose to leave, and I went out to my own beautiful family and the sun was shining and I chose to be out there with them.

My therapist says to me 'why would you spend time with these people when they cause you so much pain?' My answer would ahve been because I feel I have no choice. But I do. ANd I exercised that choice today.

Oh we were late in arriving which caused a stink- the usual cold shoulder from mother and disaproving looks and head shaking from the others, but I am beginning to feel I don't have to care. They lie, they decieve,they talk viciously and cruelley about people who ofer them friendship, and they dump all their negative junk on me.

All that is negative in their own behaviour gets projected onto me, but you know, I saw today that My DH and I, and my children, we are 'normal' people. Yes I have anxiety issues and cripplingly low self-esteem, and this suffocating feeling of guilt, but I am dealing with it. I am getting up in the morning(which as others have said can be a feat in itself)and trying to be the best person I can be, to love my children and my husband, and to care about my friends.

I am beginning to feel that I am saying goodbye to my old family.

The problem I have is that the only one of them who asks to come to see me is the most toxic one of all and I am still to scared of her to say no to her.

Bop I was quite scared at the thought of having girls. My first is a boy. I was so sick when pg with DD1.I lost my job because of it. I think sometimes I over compensate, I, as others have said, try to fix her problems all the time. I can't bear it when she cries. I feel guilty when my chidren are upset, like others have said, I blame it on my bad parenting. The main thing I worry about is my lack of energy. I feel so tired, I find myself saying 'no' to their requests. I am working hard on this, to say yes. I think this sunshine is helping- making things seem more possible/doable.

DD2, my baby, is quite significant for me, as she like me will be the youngest of three.

I love my son quite naturally, but my daughters have come with these anxieties. BUT at the same time, they have been the catalyst for me getting help. I just wish I could get this process through and over with. I feel I am 'skim-reading' it, because I want things to be ok, now, so that my children don't get hurt any more than they possibly have already. I feel guilty that I didn't deal with it years ago, before they were born, and then I could have saved them from this harm.

Yes I think its usually the eldest child who is the target for the "pegging" or "projection" and then if it is the mother who is the main abuser/neglector/deprivor then I think her little girls are going to bear the brung more than any boys. I was the eldest and the only girl out of five kids My mother loathed me.

I think my parents are shocked that I've removed their channel for their negative feelings by cutting contact with them (letter contact only with my dad, none at all with my mother). Of course they want to regain contact with me because they are flummoxed now as to how to live without their "whipping boy". I used to regard my mothers attempts at contact as "love", but now I'm much much wiser than that.

Sakura Loathing I think is a word that really sums it up.It is an active thing, not passive. We are not just disliked, or liked less, we are actively sought out to be loathed, required for their own equilibrium, so to speak. At the the moment it seems very strong- they are united in their disapproval of me. Sometimes one of the others is disapproved of, and I am brought briefly into the group, but it doesn't last.

I was ignored, but deliberately so. It was like yesterday, they didn't want me there to talk to, but I was quizzed every time I moved from a room. My sister doesn't want to chat with me about life,she just wants me to believe hers is so much better than mine.

I am not the 'norm' for a scapegoat, then, being the youngest? I think my parents regretted having me. My brother and sister are closer in age (but we are all within a few years of each other). My mother always says how people thought they were twins, how close they were etc. etc. I think I disrupted the balance of their perfect family.

I was thinking about that book you were reading, oneplusone. I think much of it comes down to language, as with the labels. All of my dc's births had dificulties, either a crash section, as with DS, severe hyperemesis with DD1, unplanned cs with DD2. DD1 had reflux, it was a difficult time. But you see mum would say DD1 was a difficult baby. I think once you start laying the blame at the babie's door, rather than the condition, which they have no control over things are not in a good way.

I had some medical issues, imperfections- my parent liked to all me a demmic- which is like shop seconds, flawed in manufacture. I think my other flaw was looking quite a lot like my mother- so it was a straightforward process to transfer any negative feeling about herself onto me.

I still have so much anger in me. I think there is more to come out. DH came home drunk last night and I raged at him . I cannot express my feeling towards my old family, and I can't talk about things when my DC are here, so in the evening, at night, my anger sometimes bursts out. Poor DH. THis week has been hard for him, too. Because he is very angry with my family for the way they have treated me, I think that was why he went out and got drunk. But thta hits a nerve with me, as my old family are big drinkers, and drunkeness and hangovers were dangerous things in my childhood.

Just got off the phone to my mother. I always feel guilty, like I haven't listened enough or sound distant. I suppose I just don't care about my old family anymore and that makes me feel guilty. She talks to me about my father's health problems but why should I care? He never phones me, asks how I am getting on, takes an interest in my life. He didn't even speak to me on my 30th Birthday.

But then the doubt creeps in. Are they that bad? Is it in my head? My mother is trying in her own way I think, by being friendly and concerned on the phone (I am pregnant) but there still has never been an apology for the hurt caused in the past.

I really struggle calling her 'mum'. She is not my mother. She is my grandmother who raised me. My biological mother is dead but she was still my mum. Carried me in her womb for nine months and tried to care for me in the first few years of my life. My father isn't biologically related to me at all. He is the second husband of my grandmother and is a bullying, abusive man. My adoptive mother keeps defending him though. He had a terrible childhood and I believe is to some extent repeating that pattern with his family.

They think I should be grateful, that they gave up their life for me. But shouldn't all parents do that for their children? I don't expect my DS to be grateful. I am doing the best I can and that is the least I can do.

I believe my mother and father 'pushed' the issue of calling them mum and dad and took that right away from my biological mother. When they are dead I will no longer give them the title they don't deserve.

sakura and pinkyminxy, I agree about the loathing and active dislike, i felt it directed towards me by my dad starting when he had his mental breakdown.

pinkyminky, even though the books seems to agree that the eldest is usually the most common scapegoat for the parents, i personally know 2 people who are the youngest and they were the scapegoats. There are no real 'rules' to all of this, each family as we know is highly individual in it's dysfunctionality (is that a word?) but there are common traits throughout.

I have talked about this many times already but i can absolutely relate to the feeling of desperately not wanting a girl when i was pregnant with DD. I am quite sure now in hindsight that I had ante-natal depression when i was pregnant with DD although i didn't know she was a girl until she was born. But i remember secretly hoping and hoping and hoping she was going to be a boy but having this uncanny and sickening feeling that she was going to be a girl.

When i was pregnant with DS i felt so different. We found out he was a boy at the 20 week scan and I cried with relief when i found out. It wasn't relief that everything was normal at the scan, it was relief that he was a boy. We were given a dvd of the scan and i went home and watched it over and over to make sure there had been no mistake and he was definately a boy. I was so excited and so looking forward to him being born. It was all so different to when i was pregnant with DD. I felt no excitement at all, i was numb mainly and like i said i realise now i was probably depressed.

My middle sister who is 3 months pregnant with her first said to me she felt like she was in shock when she found out she was pregnant and she still felt like she was in shock. That is how i felt when i found out i was pregnant the first time. I thought i was ust in shock as i had fallen pregnant so quickly, far quicker than i was expecting, but perhaps it was not shock at all but numbness followed by ante-natal depression which was followed by post-natal depression? Again in hindsight i think i had severe PND for about 6 months and then it lifted but i feel it remained at a low level until i fell pregnant again and it lifted completely when DS was born. After he was born i had so much energy and felt so good, it was so different to when DD was born when i just wanted to sleep all the time and had no energy at all.

Hi Just quickly read through posts so sorry if I missed anything but just jumping in on the things that have stood out for me.

The pegging thing- I dont think this is quite it with ds. Ive thought long and hard about it. There is an element of pegging, I do see him as me (especially in being the eldest), similar birth as my mum had with me etc, but I think it makes me 'overprotective' of him and I am guilty of not allowing him to feel 'any' frustration at all. I am over vigilant always searching his face for emotions. Is he happy? Is he sad? If he is sad is it my fault? Analyzing his behaviour. Is his behaviour showing any signs of damage I have caused so far.
My husband doesnt understand any of this because he just sees ds as a normal, balanced and happy go lucky child.
Surely this behaviour can be just as damaging. He needs to be allowed to experience his own emotions. Be able to own them and deal with them himself.
Then there are days when I feel like yelling at him but I do recognise this is my stress, my anxiety and inner tension with no real outlet and at that point I am wanting to offload it onto him just as my mother did to me.
This is my constant level of anxiety buzzing in my head. At times dh or ds tries to talk to me and I literally feel their words bouncing off my brain. Its like my mind is refusing to take anymore...literally. I feel cross because I dont want to allow anymore content in. There's simply no room left.

So there is a complex mix of emotions and my biggest fear is because of his mother's 'endless' emotional issues ds not having the tools to deal with his adult life emotionally....

I think with dd being the second I dont have enough time to anxiously examine all her reactions and moods. I guess there is an element too of not sharing the same birth order with her as I did with ds. Her birth was a completely different experience too. Ds was in an incubator and I still blame my mother for sending me in to labour by her insistence on picking a fight with me whilst my waters were broken.And all the other shit she caused me as a new mum.

There are many times that I feel dd is left to get on with it. So she 'has to' deal with her emotions herself if that makes sense.
I see her as being more resilient and assertive as a result of that.

I do peg DH. Does anyone else so this? He becomes me I am sure. I feel coldness toward him frequently. Noithing he does is ever good enough and I constantly criticise him. I know this is awful and wrong. I dont kmow how to stop. Its like an auto response.
Its like Ive pegged him so that the pecking order of my old family unit cant be repeated. Instead DH takes my position.

Pinkyminxy-Im not sure there is a norm as such. I did read that the eldest is alone with the parents for a period and there is no sibling then to half the focus. Which is shitty if the focus is a negative one.
I think it can depend on so much. The circumstances of the birth, birth order, marriage stresses, who the child looks like, which parent his/her behaviour mimics...the list is endless. But you are so right that it becomes really fucked up when the parent blames the child.

My mother said all her children had personalities in the womb displayed at birth. My brother flew out, my sis came out looking perfect, younger db feet first (other family scapegoat...and he is the youngest by the way).

I apparently didnt want to come out and started swimming backwards . I took this all through life until recently when whilst watching a programme I discovered all babies start to move backwards in the birth canal.
I also had lots of issues. The worst however was the bed wetting which went on for some time. But why the hell didnt it occur to my mother that I started to wet the bloody bed when my father left us suddenly and I was taken from my home to my aunts house where (at 3) I shared a bed with two older cousins I'd never met before.
My mother never comforted me or re-assured me during that time. In fact I remember being sick and just left in my aunts bed, my mother never even came into the room!

I look like my father and have his temperment so all the anger she felt toward my father went onto me. It was venomus anger and coldness, not just distractedness.

oneplusone- I feel like I am always cross too. But as I said earlier and we have all mentioned I have a huge amount of anxiety over the smallest things. Because I am so shut off from my feelings I find it really difficult to 'feel' the emotion and I just react to it instead.
I lash out when I am stressed and the simplest thing like taking ds to a party (this weekend) made me anxious and snappy. What could I be anxious about when I am just taking him to a bloody party? It is because meeting people makes me anxious. I was so shy as a child I was almost mute. I think because I was humiliated and shamed a lot as a child, whenever I am in an environment where it is possible I could feel embarrassed the tension rises inside me. Fight or flight. I sway one way or the other and either avoid the situation or become so tense and anxious just beforehand I become snappy and aggressive because my body is getting ready for the flight.
I think I am going to start keeping a log of all the times this happens. What the situation is, how I feel/react and then the outcome. Because I need to start believing that I can deal with situations and that Im not a child anymore and people aren't out to shame and humiliate me.

I have been thinking lots about middle sister. Now that i can see her so much more clearly i wonder how i didn't see before just how insecure and jealous she is. I remember when we were younger if i bought something i was excited and pleased about she would always say somehthing horrible and burst my bubble. Because of my low self esteem i would think she was being horrible because she didn't like me because i was a horrible person, but of course it was because she was jealous and insecure.

I can see so many ways now in which she is clearly desperately trying to copy/keep up with me and/or youngest sister. It explains so much of her behaviour which to me has seemed quite bizarre sometimes.

I feel sure her pregnancy and new baby will throw up lots of issues for her, much more so than my youngest sister experienced when she had her baby, and i will be curious to see how she deals with it all. I was talking to a friend of mine about middle sister's insurance fraud to get a private birth and my friend told me that as the older sister i should talk to middle sister and make sure she knows the risks in what she is doing. I was surprised at my own reaction to this suggestion as i said emphatically no way would i go out of my way to 'look out' for middle sister. I can see now how mean and nasty and cruel middle sister has been to me so many times, how she uses me and cares not a jot about my feelings and there is no way i am going to help her out in any way. It's up to her husband to do that afaic and i will just watch from the sidelines and see what sort of mess she makes of her life.

Re anxiously watching your child for any signs of damage we have done...me too. I keep reading in my current book that one sign of possible insecure attachment is a lack of 'stranger anxiety' on the part of your child.

Well, when DD was less than a year old my dad used to come over to my flat (obv this is before i cut them off) and take DD to the local library for stories/rhymes etc. I remember him quite often coming back and telling me that if a stranger talked to DD or held her arms out to her DD would always be quite happy to go off with the stranger and would never be clingy or not want to go. I am sure this is what the book is talking about. Because i was completely emotionally unavailable to DD and had not bonded with her at all, she must have developed an insecure attachment which is why she was so willing to go off with strangers. If she had had a secure attachment she would have been wary of strangers and would have been clingy and not wanted to go off with them.

I can only even talk about this now because i feel a real growing bond with DD. If i didn't feel that i would have been far too scared to talk about the sort of thing i have described above, i would have kept it to myself and worried myself sick over it and felt scared and guilty and ashamed about what i had done to DD.

I read on another thread about emotional abuse that it is the 'death of a thousand cuts' and that is such a good description i think.

oneplusone- that makes me feel really sad because this is what I felt with ds. It was as though he didnt mind going to anyone else.
This is what caused such issues with me and MIL. I felt jelousy because I felt he had bonded with her over me. Just as I had bonded with my father and my GM over my mum.
I felt sick with anxiety, guilt and rage about this.
Things are so much better between me and ds now though. He wants to be with me more than MIL that has helped my relationship with MIL too because I feel more confident in my relationship with my children and so dont resent her anymore.
I think pnd and depression prior to birth interferred greatly with my connexion with ds. I think oneplusone the case can often be that our childhoods have made us prone to stress and anxiety and depression and as a result these are the things which interfere with the bonding process.
And also whilst 'unconciously' living our lives there is a tendency to project. In the early days I was definately a different mother than I am today.
I find it hard to congratulate myself on how far I have come though.

And also there are people who want you to be AS crap as them because it makes it seem more ok for them to be crap. My adoptive mum gives me this impression. They hold you back in little ways, maybe without even knowing it, eg by not praising you when you do something good, by pointing out negative points, by saying with barely hidden glee and relief "never mind" because you failing seems much more comfortable and familiar to them than you succeeding.

I have a habit of putting myself down and downplaying what I achieve because I'm scared that people will feel put out that I might have done better than them and they might feel I'm showing off and trying to be superior and they might not like me anymore. I pretend to be a bit thick and a bit of a slob and an underachiever when really I am not as crap as I make myself look! Then I get angry if people believe the image I have portrayed!