Our 5th visit to the Stately Home

[Nabster]

Here we go again.

Nabster How do you feel when I tell you 'IT WAS NOT YOUR RESPONSIBILITY TO FIGHT BACK'
What do you feel when you hear that? Not sure

Would you tell your closest friend if she confided in you, that she should have fought back? no

Would you blame your daughter and say 'but why didnt you fight back?' no

What would you say to me nabster? What could you have done?

I already know the answer because I know you have a good heart.

Why should you deserve any less than the respect you would give to others?

Muffinbaker, it is obvious you are finding this very hard and it is very hard to deal with. What gets me through is the thought of my DC's going through and suffering even a tiny fraction of the pain and loneliness I went through as a child. I have to sort myself out for their sake if not my own.

You have to find somewhere in yourself the courage to face up to your past, in small baby steps, and gradually lessen the hold it has on you. Take one day at a time, but resolve to try and take a tiny step forward each day. Can you do that?

Just got back from my self help meeting. I know all the rational side for why I feel certain things and what I probably should do, it is just the emotional side is so much bigger.

GOd so many posts and so little time to digest them all...
Smithfield I'm so glad that something I posted struck a chord with you. I think that is the whole point of this thread and that is why I keep coming back to it. I think one route to happiness is to be able to do things just for the sake of doing that thing, rather than for glory or whatever. I feel sad because I remember now as a child that I used to write for pleasure- in a diary or sometimes a poem or short story. SO I think we are all born with this ability to just do things without needing gain or reward.
But because I don't value myself intrisically, I can't return to that childhood state where I can just do things for pleasure. NOw, If I write, there has to be a purpose or a goal.

But I think, in my case, it extends beyond my mother's approval of me. I think I feel very vulnerable as a person. I feel like I am always waiting for my parents to get their teeth into my life and blow my life apart (or drive a tank through it as someone said before). I feel very nervous. I sometimes wonder if I married a foreigner so that this would reduce my parents' power over me. Now they can't call up and chat to my in-laws about what a terrible person I am. And they would do this if they could, and because I don't get along with my MIl, this would be a justification to them that I am the mad one and they are sane. And I really feel that my life would be threatened in the sense that they would use this evidence of my "madness" to threaten me with removal of my daughter. I think my mother is the kind of person who would report me to social services for having a messy house, for example, under the guise of "just looking out for my well-being". That would be an ideal way to control me, wouldn't it. And I have eluded her completely by emigrating abroad.
But regarding my in-laws too, I feel I need something solid, as if I need to say "look, the world takes me seriously, so you need to too". My writing has given this to me to a certain extent. I am taken seriously by people outside my family, in my work. And I think there is an element of power to this that I need. I will only feel relaxed enough when I have managed a certain level of achievement because I feel then that no-one will be able to hurt me.

Sakura I can totally relate to wanting achievement, to be taken seriously.

I still have this awful burdensome feeling that if I don't achieve something great I am worthless. An internalised attitude from my parents (particularly my father).

There is nothing wrong with wanting to achieve something for yourself, in having a talent and pursuing it. In being proud of yourself if you are successful. However we must be able to love our 'ordinary' self as well. To love our children for their ordinariness as well as their talents.

I want to be proud of my daughter for being a mother. For being able to cook for her family and drive a car. If she does have a career I will be proud of it, whatever it is.

This is the way in which I want my parents tto view me but my father doesn't. I want to be a great writer so that I can put two fingers up at my father and say 'look I am worthy of respect'. It is an awful pressure to be under. To feel you have to be great at something in order to be respected by your parents.

Well done for your writing success and I hope you get much from it and have further successes. I hope to do another creative writing course once this baby has settled a bit. However don't forget that you are worthy of respect, love and pride whatever you do

The thing about feeling you have to achieve something big to get your parents to show approval - maybe, even if you did, they still wouldn't? Maybe it is an unatainable goal? And anyway why should you have to bust a gut just to please them? Would you (anyone who feels this drive) feel relief if you took the pressure off yourself and said "I feel I am ok as I am, and I don't care what you think!" Why should you care what a 'failure' thinks? - because parents are failures if they have failed to teach their children to have any self esteem unless they achieve something bigger and bigger. Wouldn't you feel like a failure if you did this to your children?

Nabster, I never fought back with some people as well and I used to be disgusted with myself for this, but not so much now. I agree with what Smithfield said - that it is the perpetrator/s' responsibility not to abuse someone, not the victim's responsibility to stop them. If they targetted us because we were more vulnerable than the average child - I bet that vulnerability was our parents' fault anyway for failing to bring us up with self esteem and self confidence and to value ourselves enough to not accept bad treatment so easily.

Have you heard of "Fight, Flight or Freeze"? - primitive instincts that kick in, in an intense situation, and in our case it sounds like our body/mind chose to freeze. I think it is partly the primitive instinct and partly the shock that someone who is not supposed to do a certain thing, did it. How is a child with limited life experience supposed to know what to do for the best in this situation they never expected to find themselves in because they trusted the people around them? I think part of it was also just not knowing what we were supposed to do in that situation. In my case it was also my mum's wish for me to "don't cause a scene" and keep everything looking normal and respectable. Emotional outbursts felt forbidden in our house.

I've been thinking about what people have been saying about being in roles in families and then choosing to refuse to take their role as the one being mistreated anymore. I've got a little situation where I used to be in a role with a group of people, a role to make one of them feel better about herself by finding little ways to prove she was better than me. I'm thinking "I'm not going to play that game anymore". Either by not being there, or if I'm brave, being there but not reacting to anything, not caring what people think. I just don't know if I have the strength not to care and not to react. I'd quite like to be there and prove myself ('show her') that she can't do it anymore however hard she tries.

I think the key to some things is definitely to get yourself into a frame of mind where you truly don't care what certain people think of you.

I feel so mixed up about it as his wife was a prize bitch and would hit me and kick me but he was always nice to me.

You are so right AN. I want to get to a place where I completely don't care what my parents think of me, to be happy as I am and to consider them the failures.

I am getting there, but I am not completely there yet. I used to be terrified when I was due to be seeing my parents, that I had put on weight or that I didn't look slim enough for my father. He would be scrutinising me the minute I stepped off the train. I would be joyous if I got the look of approval and the 'you look great' and gutted if I got the disgust at my waist size (I would like to point out that at the time this was going on I was never bigger than a size 12).

I am a lot happier in myself now even though I am a bigger size 14-16 (and also 33 weeks pregnant!) and my father does not mention my weight anymore. I think he has given up on me, sees me as a failure and thinks I didn't have the bottle to fulfil my so called running talent (he said as much). It is linked into weight as well. That now I have given up dieting all the time and accepted my post childbearing body, I am some how a lost cause. The same as all the other overweight women he is repulsed by. I actually did lose a lot of weight after DS and he never once said anything complimentary about it. I know he would say it is because I am so sensitive about the issue he daren't mention it at all.

No you nasty man! Just don't call me a fat cow and say I look awful. It is okay to say 'you are looking well, you have lost weight' like everyone else who loves me did.

He judges everyone else and yet he is the most pathetic little man. He wanted me to do great things to boost his own ego.

The don't cause a scene and keep everything respectable attitude rings so true as well. My mother would wind me up, say the most wicked things quietly, calmly and discreetly. When I blew up and raised my voice, cried tears of hurt and anger she would hiss at me to keep it down 'in case the neighbours hear'

Being nice one minute doesn't make it ok to abuse you the next. It may have been a way of manipulating you, keeping you nice so he could do what he wanted.

I know this isn't as bad but I sometimes feel I shouldn't be angry about the things my parents did wrong when I think about things they did that were good. I think how can I complain about them when they did these good things. But then I think - the good things they did don't actually make the bad things feel any better. If I burgled someone's house, but while I was there I did the washing up would this make the burglary ok?

But it all seems so conditional. That if I was slim I somehow met his approval. So his compliments when I did fit into his ideal image don't really wash with me. It nearly drove me to serious eating disorders.

The good things don't make the bad things better. You are absolutely right. It is the black and white thing again. We want to see our parents as purely evil, to relieve any guilt we feel. No one is purely good or bad, but if the overiding principle of your realtionship with parents is negative feelings, hurt, anger, rejection then they got it wrong.

Also it is being able to say sorry when as parents we are wrong. Abusive parents rarely do that. My father has never apologised for the terrible things he said to me and never will

I still physically squirm and shake when i remember what he did

It must have been horrific, and you don't want to feel it when you relive it in your memories but if you try to repress it and block it, I think it will keep coming back to you - maybe bad dreams, flashbacks, little things that trigger intense reactions out of proportion to present day events, depression, anxiety, other physical symptoms etc. I think this happens because your body/brain holds the feelings until they are properly processed (which they weren't because you were in shock) and your body/brain tries to find ways of getting the feelings out so they leak out at times even though you try to repress them.

Hopefully with your therapist/counsellor you can work through what happened and process the feelings so they don't keep coming back on you.

It is on my mind today as the solicitor has called.

Actually the last few times I have made love with my Dh I haven't had the gremlins.

I have ben getting funny breathing patterns and I think they have been caused by stress with my life in total and I am not sure how to deal with the squirming things as that is quite new.

Sounds like anxiety as well as everything else. I had a thought yesterday about anxiety. Therapist keeps saying that we live in an "illusion of safety" and I think people with happy childhoods believe this illusion more than people who didn't and it helps them to function (because you could get so scared about all the potential risks that you never leave your house otherwise!). When we were children we may have originally felt that the world was safe but when bad things happen to you in your own home with the people you are supposed to trust the illusion is shattered and we feel that the world is a very unsafe place - so we are anxious all the time. A thought popped into my head yesterday after the EMDR - "If I'm not safe in my own bedroom then how is the world a safe place?" It must be a thought about the past as it doesn't apply to now.

i see accidents before they happen so are quite over protective of the kids but having said that we have had a few hospital trips

That's me too, I visualise the worst thing that could happen to the children then feel that thing is really likely and can't relax. It makes me want to stop them doing things that children should do.

Today I have stopped stressing about the future and what the kids will think of me and been a proper in charge mum and the results are pretty amazing.

I also feel free of something that has been causing me pain since before Christmas.

Do you feel that if you tell them off they will hate you?

yes

So long as telling them off isn't all you do and you show them affection at other times as well I don't think they will hate you. They get over tellings off quite quickly. When they are older they will see that you were fair and you had to teach them how to behave properly. If you didn't they would get into all kinds of trouble out in the real world wouldn't they.

Part of our job is teaching them how to cope and be happy in the real world and in the real world if they do something against the rules of society there are consequences. Telling them off or giving them a consequence when they are naughty at home is the same sort of thing and prepares them for the real world.

I don't know why I would think they would remember any particular thing I have said as I don't remember anything before about 12.

nabster- I have struggled with this myself too. I think the way AN described it is a really useful way to look at it.
That it's part of our job to show our children the difference between right and wrong.
It takes confidence though to know you are a good mum and that they will still love you. They do love us unconditionally and that is hard to process because its not something we've had before.

Also the man you described and the conflicting feelings, to me he sounds incredibly manipulative...like a predator.

The man? (which one? sorry)

My kids tell me a lot how much they love me. I just assume they don't know any better.