Interesting how many people on here talk about feeling bad to the core, or words to that effect. I thought it was only me for a long time. Having worked on it, I've realised that that feeling of being truly bad is what my parents should have felt, because they were the ones doing something truly bad, but it ended up being me feeling it instead of them. So I took on their guilt, as well as being the victim of their cruelty and neglect.
Wildandfree, I was very interested in what you said about the roles in your family and how rigidly defined they were. Denial of who you and your sibling(s?) really were, even when confronted with evidence to the contrary, eg your IQ test. To me that was a great example of just how solid and impenetrable denial is, how it resists all logic and reason and even irrefutable proof. There's a documentary called "Capturing the Friedmans" about a guy who was ultimately jailed for abusing a lot of young boys he was tutoring. There was a stack of child porn magazines about two foot high in his home, but when they first arrested him and showed this to his wife, she actually, literally couldn't see what they were, even when they were put right in front of her. She herself said this, later on (once divorced), that at the time she just couldn't see what these images were, her denial about her then husband was so complete. And I think that same phenomenon happens in a lot of families, in an invisible, intangible way. The truth is completely irrelevant, when placed next to the need of the family group to keep the status quo intact, if the existing family dynamic is beneficial to most members of that group.
Which I think is one reason this stuff is so absoulutely crazy-making. I feel like I'm dealing with a bunch of people who in the rest of their lives place a very high premium on the truth, on provable reality, empirically tested facts - but who in the context of their own family are dominated by an unconcsious lie so huge that it beggars belief. And they have convinced themselves that that lie is the truth and nothing will persuade them otherwise. This apparent adherence of theirs to the truth really had me coming and going for years, because I really thought that if I could only find the right arguments, put things into the right words, give them enough reasons, that then they would understand and believe me. NO! They will never deviate from the course they are now on, and while it still breaks my heart some of the time, having recognised that fact intellectually at least is very, very comforting and useful to me.
Another thing about them is that they are champions of the dispossessed in every other arena - strong sense of social justice, fair play, on the side of the underdog, campaigning for various things, trying to right wrongs etc - my father now volunteers for a human rights organisation. He cares about people in China, but he refuses to recognise my suffering or his major part in it, not to mention my mother's and brother's. It's so screwy it's absurd: there he is writing letters to foreign presidents about some poor bleeder he's never met, getting all hot under the collar about how they treat people unfairly, saying what other people should and shouldn't be doing; but he's got no interest in justice for his daughter whatsoever. He in his own home was a pathetic little tinpot dictator of the worst order, accountable to no one, and always, always right, no matter what the evidence to the contrary.
I don't need these people in my life. I did actually tell my father I was ashamed of him the last time we met/spoke, but the words bounced right off him, less effect even than a fly. He doesn't have to listen to anything I say if he doesn't like it because I'm just a stupid little girl, and he is my big, strong father-man. Wanker. Oh, sexism was another thing they were big on in theory - anti-sexism that is (though back in the day of course the word hadn't yet been invented, we were still in "women's lib" territory then) - and again it was laughable, my mother worked full time AND did all the housework and cooking and childcare, and got treated like a moron by my father; and they totally favoured my brother and let him walk all over me - but they believed in equality, of course they did.
AN, thank you for your comments about my mother, you're absolutely right - she does need or did need to keep me dependent on her to compensate for her own feelings of inadequacy. She needed me to be small, because she has no genuine self esteem at all, it's all front. Also I've been thinking about how the family needed me to be a loser. There was all this trauma, really bad trauma like the death of my "sister", but they didn't want to face or feel any of it themselves - they wanted to be "normal" at all costs. But the trauma had to come out somewhere, so in order for them to all be very functional (and in everyday life they all are), I had to be completely dysfunctional. I was the "trauma container" as well as the poison container. I really was their safety valve, I've known that for some time now, but it's still coming home to me just how deeply set this pattern was/is in me. Someone else talked about imprinting - good term. My imprinting was definitely to take on all the trauma and almost to be it. My life was a perpetual trauma. I had to feel it, try to contain it, and take responsibility for it. Even though the traumas I was coping with weren't actually my own. So I couln't actually ever resolve them, come to terms with them - how can you recover from a loss that you never actually had but that you carry with you and feel in every cell of your body? I grew up - I probably even grew in the womb - knowing on some level, feeling on some level, what it is like to lose a child. I have that knowledge, that sense of deepest, ultimate loss, hardwired into me. I lived with that as my daily bread all through my childhood and for decades beyond. And it wasn't mine.
It's very late. There is so much more I want to say on this subject but I'm glad I've managed to get this far (and I know it's a long, long post already!)
Rose - I have to say that whenever you say something about your adoptive mother (biological grandmother, is that right?), something inside me shrivels. It all sounds so, so dark, really bad. To me it seems like first she compromised her daugher's/your real mother's sanity, and now she has the same disregard for your wellbeing, and that of your DCs. I just really - oh, I just hope you can keep as much distance as possible between her and you. I'm worried about writing this, it may be clumsy of me, but - I know you're fighting to get some space from her and I really, really support you in that.
Pinky, I always got called melodramatic too. My mother is superbly melodramatic and it sounds like yours is too. PROJECTION PROJECTION PROJECTION!!! No, it's defnintely them, not you! I would say the same to every single person who posts on here, in fact. And also, re the melodramatic thing - if I got upset when I was a child, they called me that and so completely invalidated it - and then when I tried as an adult to bring up my childhood unhappiness, they told me I was a perfectly happy child, I think Pinky you have said the same - and yet we DID try to show them the unhappiness, even with all the pretending we had to do (and I was in denial to myself about the vast majority of it), and they just rubbished it, like they rubbished everything they didn't want to hear. It's that family denial again, sees and hears and remembers only what it wants to.
Big hugs to all you brave women on here. Rah!