Our 5th visit to the Stately Home

[Nabster]

Here we go again.

Once again, so many new posts, so little time! But one thing that struck me whilst quickly reading through is the fact that many of our parents weren't out and out evil people. Mine were the same, my father used to be quite generous with money. And on very, very rare occasions there was the occasional 'flash' of real emotion from him. There were literally one or two times that i can remember when my dad actually seemed to really and truly 'see' me and care about me. In a life of, so far, 38 years, i think these moments happened about 3 times. My mother also was not evil, but in all my life, 38 years, I NEVER once saw from her any real emotion directed towards me. Not ONE sign that she 'saw' me, understood me and accepted 'me', exactly as I was. She tried her best I suppose, but she was and is so damaged that her best fell far far short of what i needed.

So, in a lifetime to date of 38 years, I have 3 genuinely 'good' memories of my dad and none of my mum. That's it. You could, if you were feeling particularly generous, count the times in between the actual abuse as the 'good' times, but really they weren't. They were just the lull before the next storm.

Like somebody said a bit earlier, any happy memories from my childhood were not with my family, they were all outside my family, with friends/school. I nearly put extended family there ie cousins etc as i have this 'image' of growing up and having lots of happy times with my many cousins. But when i really stop and think about it, the time with my cousins wasn't particularly happy for me. A lot of the time i was picked on and perhaps my cousins (all of a similar age to me) when we were all children could sense i was 'different' to them in some way as i always felt left out and not really part of the group. I spent a lot of time with them when i was a child as my parents spent a lot of time, weekends, holidays etc, with their brothers and sisters, my aunts and uncles.

The flood of memeories i mentioned earlier involve a lot of memories from the time i spent with my cousins, when one older boy cousin seemed to really dislike me and always picked on me. And the girl cousins were not particularly nice either. I am a bit overwhelmed at the moment as i have always had this idea that the time spent with these cousins was so happy, but the reality is it was not. And with my mother not in the least bit interested in me, whenever i was picked on/teased by a cousin, even if she was there i would never go to her to tell her and be comforted etc, i knew from a very young age that i shouldn't go to my mother if i fell over/hurt myself/felt sad/upset about something. So i would keep all my hurt feelings to myself and as always, act normal, act as if everything was fine. I think i would even sometimes laugh a lot more than was probably normal just to try and prove to everyone that i was 'happy' when nothing could be further from the truth.

I almost want my parents to be all evil, it would be simpler.

My father made a speech on my wedding day which everyone said was lovely. I was his little princess and he was proud of me etc. However in the car on the way to the church I tried to hold his hand and he pulled it away, clearly uncomfortable with the show of affection.

Just dropping in to tell you I am going for my appointment at the mental health assessment unit tomorrow afternoon.

Have had a break through today with letting something go.

Hope I will be okay.

Nabster - I will be thinking of you tomorrow

Thank you.

Pleased that MIL offered to have the kids already as it means we get the evening and next day on our own.

oh my.
Whenever I start thinking it's all me blowing things out of proportion I come on here and realise it is not. So much of people's posts resonate.

ANormal- again you have hit the nail on the head, re controlling parents.

oneplusone I have things like that- experiences I thought were happy, but actually were not. I have made myself laugh at my Dad's demeaning 'jokes' so many times one some level I think they are funny. It sounds a bit sick, and twisted.

That trip with my mum yesterday- you see I would consider that to be quite a good experience, but any 'normal' person would have found it intollerable.

I have told her not to do the feeding thing, buit she does not listen. The problem yesterday was that I had to change my baby- vest and everything, just as we sat down to eat, so I had to leave DD1 with my mum. I was worrying the whole time that this had put her in control of DD1's lunch.

Anxiety. I have an attack at least once most days. Usually around panicking that I am not doing right by my children. I worry when I am doing soemthing and one of them is tired I get anxious that I am making bad choices/decisions.
In fact any choice or decision creates a lot of anxiety for me.

Nabster- having good thoughts for you for tomorrow.

Nabster - all the best for tomorrow. I'm sure it will be OK - you've been strong enough to admit that everything is not OK, and ask for help. I think that's the hardest step of all.

And good on your MIL!

Nabster - all the best for tomorrow. I'm sure it will be OK - you've been strong enough to admit that everything is not OK, and ask for help. I think that's the hardest step of all.

And good on your MIL!

Thank you to those who replied to my last post.
ActingNOrmal, I think you're exactly right regarding parents and control.

Thanks. DH will be home at 2 and then I will leave soon after.

Really scared atm.

Nabster, all the best for today. Have only just got home, been out all morning. I hope you can come on here and post afterwards, may help you to offload your feelings.

I would like to ask a favour. If anybody has a link to the 4th thread in the Stately Homes series, could they please post a link for it on here? I wanted to read over some past posts and I can't seem to find the thread by doing a search.

Thanks.

Argh, this not speaking thing not quite working how i expected. Had nightmares last night that my mom committed suicide and shouted 'Its all your fault' just before she did it. Then woke up at 4.30am thinking i'd heard the house phone ringing and it was someone phoning to say my dad had had a heart attack.

Obviously the phone wasn't ringing at all.

Seem to have gone from righteous anger to uncertainty again. Are they really that bad? Did they really do anything that bad when I was younger or were they just doing the best they could? Parenting today is different to back then maybe that accounts for it?

Also keep trying to remember happy days from childhood, and I can, mainly when with my Grandparents who I adored or when I was reading / playing on my own. We must have had fun surely? My dad goes on all the time that the reason I and my brother did so well at school and uni was because my mom read to us all the time.

Feeling weird...

oneplusone,

The Stately Homes part 4 thread is attached below:-

www.mumsnet.com/Talk?topicid=relationships&threadid=583597-but-we-took-you-to-stately-homes-part-4#1 1929317

Attila x

AN, i have just re-read your post about your letter to your brother. I think what you have said to him is 'just right'. The only thing is he may not be able to 'see' that you are right. In much the same way many of our parents seem unable to sincerely and unreservedly apologise for their wrongdoing towards us. I think sometimes people are just not ready to go on this journey and perhaps some people are never ready.

What really struck me though was how you said about people like him committing shocking crimes because of the severity of what they went through as children. He was deeply hurt as a child and he wanted to hit out at other people in a kind of retaliation.

It reminded me that i have actually committed some crimes too. Not as shocking as your brother and not against a person. But nevertheless what i did was a crime for which i could have been prosecuted. I got into shoplifting at the age of about 12/13, a couple of years after my dad started abusing me. But even before then i had stolen some money from an aunt when i was about 7/8. I discussed all this with my therapist today and we both knew that i had been trying to desperately attract the attention of my parents. None of my 'crimes' did the trick though. Even when i got caught shoplifting once and i had to tell my parents they just ignored it! I didn't get into trouble, told off, nothing. I simply did not exist in their eyes. I am actually surprised now i didn't progress to anything more serious. I think the reason i didn't go off the rails completely was because i had a veyr good friend who was very level headed (although she did go shoplifting with me) and was from a 'good' family and she, without knowing it, kept me on the right side of the tracks. And perhaps occasionally i did get little 'morsels' of attention from my parents, just enough to keep me on the right side.

Even as recently as around 10 years ago i was still committing little 'assaults' on people. Not physical assaults and not crimes in the usual sense. But i remember at work i used to sit behind a girl who had a green car. It was actually quite a nice green. Perhaps i was jealous of this girl, not of her car, but just the fact that she seemed 'sorted' in herself. Anyway, one day remember i was talking to the person who sat opposite me and I said deliberately loudly that i hated green cars, that they were awful, or something along those lines. The girl with the green car had done nothing to me. I know now i just just 'hitting out' verbally, because i had been hit verbally at home and i needed to take it out on somebody. I couldn't take it out on my dad who was verbally hitting me, so i took my rage and anger out on somebody else. The girl behind me at work.

And now that i think about it have done that sort of thing on a few occasions, not loads, but a few. And after i had said the hurtful thing i would kind of pretend i hadn't realised the person was sitting behind me or i hadn't realised they were within earshot when i knew exactly where they were and that they could hear me.

I have been quite ashamed of these incidents for ages, but i know now that they were 'driven' by my inner child, who was hurt and wanted to hit out herself, she wanted somebody else to feel the pain so she would stop feeling it herself if only for an instant.

Hey Attila, thank you so much.

Deep breath.

I am going now.

Thanks all.

Hesdoneitagain, i know you won't think this but nightmares are a good thing! I started having nightmares a few months ago. In them i was at various times, terrified, heartbroken, in the worst emotional pain imaginable. I realised after a while that the nightmares were my brain processing repressed feelings from childhood that were simply too much for a child to bear. So as a childhood survival mechanism my brain suppressed my feelings of terror for eg. as to actually feel the full force of my terror as a child could result in death/severe coma. So my brain stopped me from feeling these feelings and stored them away to be felt at a later date when i was strong enough to withstand the force of the feelings. I think, fwiw, that the feelings that surface during nightmares though are still too strong to bear even as an adult which is why they appear as nightmares. Again it's a survival mechanism, the 'protection' is provided by sleep, your brain is able to process the long buried emotions but you are shielded from the full force of the pain/terror/anxiety precisely because you are experiencing it in a nightmare from which you can awake. If you experienced these feelings whilst consciously awake, even as an adult, they could perhaps caused some serious psychological damage. And as the body is always set to 'survival' mode, it always does everything it can to ensure your survival, whether it's emotional survival or physical survival.

I had a terrible nightmare a few months ago in which my DS died. It was indescribebly awful as i'm sure you can imagine. I was utterly devasted and heartbroken in that dream and felt i would never recover from the pain. I feel sure that dream was about my feelings from around the time my dad turned from being a nice, loving dad, and the parent who seemed to really love me, into a nasty, angry, psychotic monster who seemed to hate me. As a 10 year old child i must have been devasted and heartbroken that my dad who i thought loved me now seemed to hate me. My feelings at the time would have been too much for a young child to bear so they were buried and only surfaced a few months ago in my nightmare. My brain must have known i was strong enough to be able to process and feel those long buried emotions, but still only whilst asleep, not in fully conscious mode.

Sorry to go on so much, perhaps none of this will apply to you but just wanted to relate my experience in case it helps you.

Oneplusone - with you on that one. Its like I have this inner pool of rage / bile and sometimes it just spills out volcanically onto totally innocent people

I'm actually very soft but everyone always tells me I come across as hard or reserved. And I could be pure evil sometimes if I don't keep a lid on this 'rage'

I did the stealing thing too, think I was about 10 - 14 odd. Got caught by my parents. Mon took to her bed for a week, they wouldnt let me go unaccompanied anywhere at others houses even to the loo in case something went missing and i got the blame, they were protecting me apparently and they withheld my pocket money so that if anything turned up in the house they'd know i had no money and therefore had stolen it.

The shame lasted with me for years and years. Now I just think, jeez I was a kid I wasn't bloody Jack the Ripper!

cross post x

Hesdoneitagain, I think it in Toxic Parents that i read something along the lines of "Every abused/neglected child has a volcanoe of rage inside them...."

I definately had the rage inside me but i have processed it and it's gone. It really has gone. I used to blow up/fly off the handle all the time at DH and go berserk at DD but not anymore.

One silly thing to add. When i posted my request for a link for part 4 of this thread i felt scared! I felt scared like i did as a child, of feeling the pain of rejection. What if everyone ignored my request? Or if they thought i was horrible and didn't want to do anything that i asked? Or that i wasn't important enough to anybody for them to go out of their way to do something i had asked for. I felt the same anxiety i did as a child when i was always ignored and my needs went unheard and unheeded and I was continually rejected.

So thanks again Attila! I'm sure you had no idea how much anxiety there was behind that one little post.

oneplusone I feel like that quite a lot. Then I feel embarrassed and needy and ashamed.

Since we are sharing things we are ashamed of, my defence mechanismas a child was to invent- friends that did not exist, things my mum did- nice things, for charity that she would never do in a million years.

I think this has helped keep me from blaming my parents all these years- because I am so ashamed about my childhood fantasies. I was clearly very unhappy, full of feelings of innadequacy, and basically lonely.

The thing is, I think many chiildren do things that are wrong, or naughty. BUt their parents do not hold these things over them for the rest of their lives, and abuse this feeling of guilt to controol every aspect of their child's life.

Hesdoneitagain, I am constantly fluctuating between feeling that I was abused as a child and then feeling guilty for thinking anything bad of my parents.

Hi Oneplusone

You're very welcome.

I had no inkling re your anxiety behind that request, I just happened to see this soon after you posted it up (well MN beats cleaning the bathroom hands down!) and thought I could help.

Am glad to be of assistance. I try and help also because I know all too well (courtesy of mis parentes) what's its like not to have help and/or much support. I have forged my own path through the morass and am happier these days (Narcissist BIL and inlaws in denial are a different kettle of fish to which I employ physical distance for my own wellbeing) but its not been at all easy; it is not for anyone with "normal" non dysfunctional parents let alone toxic ones. I honestly used to feel like I was not waving but drowning.

I hope that small action I did took a small chunk out of that armour of your underlying anxiety and that you go on to conquer same.

With best wishes

Attila x

P.S yes, I have now cleaned the bathroom.