'But We Took You to Stately Homes'...a thread for adult children of abusive families

[therealsmithfield]

Welcome to the Stately Homes Thread.

This is a long running thread which was originally started up by 'pages' see original thread here

So this thread originates from that thread and has become a safe haven for Adult children of abusive families.

One thing you will never hear on this thread is that your abuse or experience was not that bad. You will never have your feelings minimised the way they were when you were a child, or now that you are an adult. To coin the phrase of a much respected past poster Ally90;

'Nobody can judge how sad your childhood made you, even if you wrote a novel on it, only you know that. I can well imagine any of us saying some of the seemingly trivial things our parents/siblings did to us to many of our real life acquaintances and them not understanding why we were upset/angry/hurt etc. And that is why this thread is here. It's a safe place to vent our true feelings, validate our childhood/lifetime experiences of being hurt/angry etc by our parent?s behaviour and to get support for dealing with family in the here and now.'

Most new posters generally start off their posts by saying; but it wasn't that bad for me or my experience wasn't as awful as x,y or z's.

Some on here have been emotional abused and/or physically abused. Some are not sure what category (there doesnt have to be any) they fall into.

NONE of that matters. What matters is how 'YOU' felt growing how 'YOU' feel now and a chance to talk about how and why those childhood experiences and/or current parental contact has left you feeling damaged falling apart from the inside out and stumbling around trying to find your sense of self worth.

You might also find the following links and information useful if you have come this far and are still not sure wether you belong here or not.

'Toxic Parents' by Susan Forward

I started with this book and found it really useful.

Here are some excerpts;.

"Once you get going, most toxic parents will counterattack. After all, if they had the capacity to listen, to hear, to be reasonable, to respect you feelings, and to promote your independence, they wouldn't be toxic parents. They will probably perceive your words as treacherous personal assaults. They will tend to fall back on the same tactics and defenses that they have always used, only more so.

Remember, the important thing is not their reaction but your response. If you can stand fast in the face of your parents' fury, accusations, threats and guilt-peddling, you will experience your finest hour.

Here are some typical parental reactions to confrontation:

"It never happened". Parents who have used denial to avoid their own feelings of inadequacy or anxiety will undoubtedly us it during confrontation to promote their version of reality. They'll insist that your allegations never happened, or that you're exaggerating. They won't remember, or they will accuse you of lying.

YOUR RESPONSE: Just because you don't remember, doesn't mean it didn't happen".

"It was your fault." Toxic parents are almost never willing to accept responsibility for their destructive behavior. Instead, they will blame you. They will say that you were bad, or that you were difficult. They will claim that they did the best that they could but that you always created problems for them. They will say that you drove them crazy. They will offer as proof the fact that everybody in the family knew what a problem you were. They will offer up a laundry list of your alleged offenses against them.

YOUR RESPONSE: "You can keep trying to make this my fault, but I'm not going to accept the responsibility for what you did to me when I was a child".

"I said I was sorry what more do you want?" Some parents may acknowledge a few of the things that you say but be unwilling to do anything about it.

YOUR RESPONSE: "I appreciate your apology, but that is just a beginning. If you're truly sorry, you'll work through this with me to make a better relationship."

"We did the best we could." Some parents will remind you of how tough they had it while you were growing up and how hard they struggled. They will say such things as "You'll never understand what I was going through," or "I did the best I could". This particular style of response will often stir up a lot of sympathy and compassion for your parents. This is understandable, but it makes it difficult for you to remain focused on what you need to say in your confrontation. The temptation is for you once again to put their needs ahead of your own. It is important that you be able to acknowledge their difficulties without invalidating your own.

YOUR RESPONSE: "I understand that you had a hard time, and I'm sure that you didn't hurt me on purpose, but I need you to understand that the way you dealt with your problems really did hurt me"

"Look what we did for you." Many parents will attempt to counter your assertions by recalling the wonderful times you had as a child and the loving moments you and they shared. By focusing on the good things, they can avoid looking at the darker side of their behavior. Parents will typically remind you of gifts they gave you, places they took you, sacrifices they made for you, and thoughtful things they did. They will say things like, "this is the thanks we get," or "nothing was ever enough for you."

YOUR RESPONSE: I appreciate those things very much, but they didn't make up for ....

"How can you do this to me?" Some parents act like martyrs. They'll collapse into tears, wring their hands, and express shock and disbelief at your "cruelty". They will act as if your confrontation has victimized them. They will accuse you of hurting them, or disappointing them. They will complain that they don't need this, they have enough problems. They will tell you that they are not strong enough or healthy enough to take this, that the heartache will kill them. Some of their sadness will, of course, be genuine. It is sad for parents to face their own shortcomings, to realize that they have caused their children significant pain. But their sadness can also be manipulative and controlling. It is their way of using guilt to try to make you back down from the confrontation.

YOUR RESPONSE: I'm sorry you're upset. I'm sorry you're hurt. But I'm not willing to give up on this. I've been hurting for a long time, too."

Helpful Websites

Alice Miller

Personality Disorders definition

follow up to pages first thread

Im sure the other posters will be along shortly to add anything they feel I have left out grin. I personally dont claim to be sorted but I will say my head has become a helluva lot straighter since I started posting here. You will recieve a lot of wisdom but above all else the insights and advice given will 'always' be delivered with warmth and support.

Happy Posting (smithfield posting as therealsmithfield)

roseability the images thing happens to me too during sex and has done every since I started remembering. It makes me numb and incapable of feeling anything. It is truly awful and I feel so lonely sometimes. I am trying to believe this is my way of processing it and that one day I will be free of the images.

I share your ambivalent feelings about your father's attitude wrt your body, Roseability. I also feel your "niggling doubt within myself that I am looking for reasons to hate him". The fact that I'll probably never know for sure is something I find uncomfortable: the odds are that he did use me sexually (he did in every other way, so why stop there?) but I wish I remembered. There's a dream which bothered me once, when I was about 12, but I'm not sure it was a dream. It may have really happened. After I'd left home, my younger sister rang to sy he'd been interfering with her. She has no recollection of it now.

My mother recently confirmed that he was a sadist, sexually - most likely, any activities he used me for would have been super-weird so it's not surprising I may have suppressed them. The not-remembering, though, feels like gaslighting! I literally don't know my own mind. Gahh!

roseability I know just what you mean about your grandmother's reaction when you announced you were going to be a nurse. It's more to do with making sure you don't get ideas above your station so that you don't appear 'better' than them. I have a friend who calls this the 'crab syndrome' which is when the one crab in the fisherman's bucket manages to almost get to the top of the bucket and escape and the rest of the crabs pull it back down. But once you've escaped that bucket of horrors there is no looking back. So with that in mind I am off to do some positive affirmations and tell my reflection that she is lovely and loved Well my mum sure ain't going to do that for me hahaha!

rose and cremeegs and Grace, thank you for posting about your experiences. I'm sorry you have been through this as well.

Creme, your therapist sounds very knowledgeable. I very much agree that memories are stored in the body when they are 'too much' for a child's mind to process. That makes so much sense and really helps me to understand how my eczema is so directly connected to my abusive childhood experiences. It seems that the more my memories leave my body and enter my mind as conscious memories to be processed by my brain, in a way I can do now as an adult which I couldn't as a child as my brain did not have the capacity at that time, the better my eczema gets. It is literally the body memories which showed up as eczema on my skin becoming emotional and mental memories and being finally processed and released by my brain. Wow, thank you for mentioning what your therapist said, it really does make perfect sense.

And the bits of the puzzle all finally fitting together, that's is exactly how it was for me. All the seperate pieces on their own just did not make sense to me and did form a clear picture that told me what had happened to me as a child. But somehow my brain put all the right pieces together and they fitted together so perfectly and hey presto, there was a clear picture where each seperate piece sort of confirmed that the other pieces were true and real iykwim? But if I looked at each piece seperately and on their own they did not make sense and did not give me a picture of anything really.

Perhaps I only realised that I had been sexually abused after reading in a book about all the things that constitute sexual abuse of a child. It is not just the obvious things, but a wide range of things which I had not fully appreciated before and does involve a fundamental breach of the child's boundaries which a parent is entrusted to respect at all times, even though there is nobody there to make sure the child's boundaries are not breached. Or in my case there was somebody else there, my mother, but she chose to do nothing even when she saw that my dad was crossing many lines that he shouldn't be crossing with me.

Hi exotic - would you mind recommending that book to me, the one that contains what constitutes sexual abuse?

Hi Rose, of course. I found the description in "Ghosts In the Bedroom - A Guide for Partners of Incest Survivors" by Ken Graber M.A. I've only read a few pages but it is definately spot on so far (for incest read sexual abuse). I bought it for DH to read, I wanted him to be more of a part of this journey with me and share it with me. I am reading the book first before he reads it.

Hi all,

Its good to see that you're all finding some common ground, and I'm sure the shared experiences - horrific as they are - must be in some way eased by the sharing. I hope so at least!

I had my first face to face counselling session today. I was relieved to like her, and she said / did a couple of things that really stayed with me. I was talking about not wanting DS to experience the horrible screaming rows my parents had. She asked me about the rows, and whether there was any violence. I said that it was mostly verbal and without thinking about it, tried to downplay the one incident I know about (they used to throw it at each other every time they had a particularly foul fight) when my mother hit my father and he broke her glasses somehow. She just calmly said, so yes, there was. And I couldn't really argue with that. And I remembered how scared I was of my father for a long time - at least when he was in those moods.

She also drew a diagram of my family (and some of my H's) and the relationships between them, and their main issues and just seeing it all in black and white was scary. You think you've got a handle on it all, then you realise what an amazing achievement it is that you've got this far in life without completely breaking down.

I've only got 6 sessions with the counsellor, but its a start and I think she will help. I've asked her to help me work on myself and my own reactions to things rather than my relationship with my H - as I don't think I can deal with that until he is being honest with me (or until I can give up on us)

cremeeggs, I'm also more of a lurker than a poster. But thank you for what you have said. I'm trying to come to terms with the fact that I had two abusive and neglectful parents. My Mum was a chaotic bullying narcissist and my Dad was a strange, distant man who I believe also sexually abused me at the age of 4 or so. Like you, I can't remember anything concrete, just powerful, terrifying sensations that I can't verbalise. I thought it was just me that was this unlucky, it helps to know that I'm not the only one.

queenofwhatever we are definitely not alone - have done a lot of reading/researching as I found it so hard to "believe" myself. I kept on thinking I would surely remember something so important in detail rather than just snippets and began not to trust my own memory.

one thing my therapist said was that these things are somehow "written" into you - i.e. things like feeling unworthy, low self-esteem, strange hang-ups about sex etc are all clues that what you are remembering has affected you in a big way. She als said that children of that kind of age often dissociate. They can't understand how someone who "loves" them can be bad, so they make themselves carry the guilt and the feeling of being bad and dirty, whilst continuing to believe their parent is "good" and loves them. It's a survival mechanism. That made a lot of sense to me and helps me to start letting go of some of the guilt and unworthiness I have always felt. Hope that helps you to understand it a bit?

It's an awful realisation tomake at any age. I was 38/39 when the images started returning. They must have been buried so deep.

I am really troubled by this and feel like I am going a bit mad. The 'powerful, terrifying sensations that I can't verbalise' Queenofwhatever makes sense to me. It is something I have never explored before - the idea that my adoptive father might have been sexually innapropiate or crossed boundaries. I do not have any concrete evidence or memories, so could never start making accusations. It is just a 'sense' and I remember when my ds was born this overwhelming feeling of protectiveness whenever my adoptive parents were around - I just didn't want to leave him on his own with them. On one of the rare occasions I did, I fretted and stressed and suffered anxiety for the whole hour they were away with him. I have never felt such relief, seeing him return.Why is that? On some fundamental level I didn't trust them at all.

I also feel terrified of this sense that I have more to remember. Dark memories lurking in my subconscious that were shut away to protect myself - to survive. The image of him trying to have sex with me flashes into my head sometimes, unexpectedly and cruelly. I just don't know, I really don't. I am so confused

One thing I am sure of is that it seems quite common for these bullying, raging and narcissistic fathers to cross sexual boundaries as well

Can any of you offer advice please? I was sexually abused by my stepfather when I was around 10. My mother was very subservient to him and still accepts no responsibility for her role in the situation. He was very controlling and a bully.

Now my soon to be ex DH (he has very recently told me he can't do this anymore) says I am also controlling and a bully. I do not think I am. However, from reading your stories some of you say you have replicated behaviour learnt in your childhoods in your current relationships. I do nag when things are untidy and my DH says I change the atmosphere of the house etc etc. But I feel he is lazy and I feel (because he has read up on abuse issues) that he uses the abuse in my childhood as a way to avoid responsibility for his own flaws. How do I know whether these issues are down to my behaviour as a result of the abuse or because we clash like other "normal" couples do? Please help, I have been looking at houses today and I am due to sign a lease for it later so we really are on our last legs.

PS We have had couples counselling twice and I have been to counselling myself. We didn't find any of them particularly useful.

Hi, I've been reading the recent posts, which make a lot of sense to me. I have memories, but I wonder if they actually happened or if I'm imagining them. I hate thinking that I don't know what happened or who it was, and that I'll never know.

Lately I have been remembering a lot of incidents of "crossing the boundaries". I can't believe I could have actually forgotten them. The worst part is it was more than one man and I think my mother was encouraging it. I had never considered her part in it in this way before (although I knew that she knew about the abuse) but lately I've realised she may have been an equal part of it. I remember her putting my stepfathers hand up my nightie when i was ten.

reddaisy I have similar problems with DP. I have to look really hard at my behaviour and cannot work out whether I am being rational or not. I go through phases of thinking all arguments are his fault, and then realise after it was my fault. My DP has also learnt that not every clash is due to my "problems" and that he sometimes is in the wrong too. Our relationship was awful for years but is starting to improve now.

Oh glad its over, how awful. Your mother was part of your abuse. I found with my own mother that she was always so desperate to please my stepfather that she let him get away with anything like him physically throwing me out of the house for hiccoughing. Perhaps your mum was desperate to please him? (That of course, doesn't make it right in any way at all).

How did you and your DP break the pattern of arguing/attributing the blame? I definitely find it very difficult to say sorry for things...

Have just read the recent posts and can relate to pretty much everything you all have said.

Rose, you said "..I also feel terrified of this sense that I have more to remember..." Me too. I have started wondering whether the tiny memory fragment that I have is the only one or is there more? Why did this particular memory come back to me? But like you have said, on some fundamental level I did not trust my parents at all. When DS was born and I was at their house (before I cut ties) I felt so uncomfortable if my dad was around when I changing DS's nappy. Just the look on his face........thinking about it now is making my skin crawl. And just knowing how cowardly and useless my mother was. There was no chance that she would stop my dad if he had tried to do something wrong to DS. I know nothing happened because I never left DS alone with my dad, ever. But, years before that, before DS was born and before I my buried past burst into my consciousness, DD had spent quite a bit of time alone with my dad. I am scared to think about that time now. How will I ever know if he did anything to her? Like you said Rose..."One thing I am sure of is that it seems quite common for these bullying, raging and narcissistic fathers to cross sexual boundaries as well..." I think that is absolutely true. I think it's all part of being a narcissist in that they don't even see any boundaries, they do not feel they are crossing any boundaries because to them the other person does not exist as a seperate entity with his/her own boundary, to them the other person is almost like an inanimate object with no feelings that can be used and cast aside at will.

reddaisy, hello, so glad you have posted. What you said here describes how I feel perfectly "... he uses the abuse in my childhood as a way to avoid responsibility for his own flaws..." Me and DH have been grappling with this for ever it seems. But to try and give you some hope, very recently we seem to have made a real breakthrough in that I have realised that pretty much since day 1 of our relationship I have been scapegoating DH because he was unknowingly almost constantly triggering me and I was totally confusing him with my dad and even though I thought I had seperated him from my dad in my mind, and thought i was acting normally with DH, i was giving out a very different message with my body language which DH was picking up on and reacting to. But I had no idea all this was going on and thought DH was to blame when all along he was only reacting to my unspoken but clear message via my body language. Once DH and I both became aware that he was inadvertently triggering me (simply by coming home from work for eg) the problem seems to have melted away. As with all this stuff, self awareness and self knowledge and insight are the absolute key to breaking the behaviour patterns ingrained in childhood.

I have since got a number of books for both myself and DH to read to help him understand what I am going through and perhaps you could suggest your DH read these as well? I have only just started one of them but already it describes what has been going on with me and DH, and it is such a relief for me to know we are not alone and that this is actually 'normal' for couples where one partner is a an adult survivor of childhood abuse. The books even talk about how the abuse means that the survivor is unable to do the housework! And if I tried to explain that to DH I am sure he would feel that I am trying to use the abuse as a excuse for everything a sort of get out of jail free card. But the abuse was precisely why I have been unable to do many, many everyday things, including the housework, and to have a book that will explain all this to DH is amazing. And for us it's not a moment too soon as DH was also feeling like he had reached the end of the road with me. He said to me not long ago that he just didn't think he could live with me and all my problems anymore, even though he still loved me. But things have changed so dramatically since I realised just how constantly I was being triggered by DH. I now am seeing him and not my dad and I am sure this is why I am suddenly able to be so much more affectionate with him. He always used to say I was cold and distant and unaffectionate and I was, because I was not seeing DH at all, but my dad.

gladitsover, I am so glad you are finding your way out the father/DH maze. It is simply awful to be having problems in your marriage as well as dealing with your childhood isses.

Here are the books I have got in case anybody else wants to get hold of them

Ghosts in the Bedroom by Ken Graber; Haunted Marriage by Barshinger, LaRowe and Tapia and Allies in Healing by Laura Davis. There are quite a few others as well, all available on Amazon and one I got from Blackwells. Finding them has been a bit like when I first found Toxic Parents and Alice Miller, I cried with relief that I was normal and not alone in all this and there was a way out of the tunnel into the light.

I also find it difficult to say sorry, but am making an effort to do it now (it will normally take a couple of days though!).

The turning point was last year when he ended the relationship. Somehow (and I really don't know how) I realised how awful I had been for years, very unreasonable and controlling and decided I would try to change that.

I have learnt to trust him. I have always been suspicious of people, I wonder why they are being nice to me. I now just tell myself that my thoughts are really silly. I also try not to act/speak on impulse because I know I will probably regret it.

He has started to listen properly to my "nagging" so now he understands what I am trying to say. We are both trying really hard to make it work.

I also try to remind myself that all couples clash, and just let the frustration pass! Depends on how serious the clash is though but I tend to get annoyed over trivial things.

Do you think your DH is willing to try to make it work?

And you are right about my mum, she will do anything to please a man.

The posts over the past couple of days left me feeling very shaky. I realise that, if there is sexual abuse buried in my past (and there probably is), I'm not 'ready' to remember it. Maybe I never will be ... or, just maybe, it'll come back after my mother dies. I dislike this feeling that my own head is keeping secrets from me! But, since thinking about the mere possibility disturbed me so much, I suppose I have to trust my unconscious mind to do what's right for me at this time.

I've remembered an incident when I refused to play a certain sex game - it was harmless, and I'd done it before, but this time I freaked out: started hysterically ranting about things that had been done to me as a child. I didn't know where it came from but, as I'm aware of the possibility, put it aside for consideration later ... it doesn't seem to be "later" enough yet

I am so angry with the 'authorities' that have deemed it incorrect for psychotherapists to work with memory recovery. I'd need a very safe place to find out what I'm ignoring, but am not allowed to seek that safety.

reddaisy, I have often countered abuse with abuse in the past, and have been verbally very cruel without understanding I was wrong. I'm very sorry for it now. With me, it just sort of stopped during the course of therapy. The key (for me) was insight into the fact that everybody's emotional makeup is different. It should be obvious, but - like many other abused people - I actually assumed everyone was pretty much like me. In fact, most people are infinitely more fragile (and in various ways, too) as they have not been toughened up as I was. I try to take more care of other people's feelings now.
Taking care of my own is still a bit of a challenge ...

I was reading From Rage to Courage by Alice Miller and perhaps something in there triggered the recent realisation about the sexual abuse. She said that it was naturally very hard for a child to feel that there was no love for her at all from her parents and the child would do anything to believe there was at least some love. I think that is what I was doing by allowing myself to have believed for all this time, even after I had realised about most of the abuse, that at least my dad loved me until I was 10. But that was never true. He never loved me. He was incapable of loving me from the start. His inability to love me was simply less obvious and more hidden in the earlier years, later on it was not hidden at all and was completely overt. Even witnessing his and my mother's rows and no doubt sensing the animosity and contempt between them was abusive and damaging to a child, causing me to feel fear and anxiety and insecurity about the stability and safety of my home and indeed myself.

And how can a father who truly did love me for the first 10 years, then turn on me like he did and tell me he hated me? That in itself is proof that there was no real love in the first 10 years even though I thought there was. What I had in the first 10 years from my dad was not love but something else. And the sexual abuse which took place before I was 10 is proof of that. I had, no doubt as a survival mechanism, created for myself the illusion that he loved me and it is only now, at the age of 39, that I have felt able to withstand facing this fact. Neither of my parents have ever truly loved me and this has been the case from day 1, from the day I was born. I don't feel devasted saying this, I think I have always known it all along, somewhere deep down inside.

Sorry, am jumping around a bit here, but I wanted to talk about something else that I had been thinking about. I am noticing so much more these days mums for whom having children was not the trigger for opening up all their buried secrets from childhood. I often meet mums for whom, after the initial adjustment of having DC's and the usual coping with sleepless nights and feeding issues etc, life continues quite smoothly. I can see yet another chunk of my life has been taken away by my parents' abuse. I couldn't go back to work after I had DD as I was in such a state, physically and mentally, all due to the abuse, and yet I can see now that I would have been much happier if I had gone back to work as I am not a natural SAHM at all. But I was deprived of that choice to go back to work because my issues were triggered like a huge bomb exploding in my face when I had DD and I have been dealing with the aftermath of the bomb ever since. But not every mum has a similar experience, most likely because they do not have an unexploded bomb ticking away inside them which was placed there by their parents. Yet another loss to grieve over and feel angry at my parents for.

Sorry, one more thing, i have been meaning to say but keep forgetting. Like many of you have mentioned I also felt my dad was inappropriately pervy at times, just little comments and remarks, and I also cannot believe I overlooked/ignored these at the time. Again this must be due to the crossing of boundaries from the start, i was just so used to all the inapprorpiate stuff, it simply didn't register with me as wrong. I say that, but that's not quite true. Because I did have a sense that some of the things my dad would say were not right, but it was a very 'muffled' little voice inside me, certainly not loud and clear and was easy to ignore I suppose.

The hidden/covert pervyness/sexual abuse coupled with the overt prudishness and sex is bad/wrong attitude is so obvious to me now. It's exactly like the other mixed or opposite messages I always got from my parents along the lines of, they would say the following "We love you so much, we are the only one's you can rely on in the whole wide world, nobody else cares about you like we do" etc etc, but would do things that were the complete opposite of what they always told me. Their actions completely contradicted their words. Because words after all are cheap, it's actions that really count, following through on what you say which my parents never did.

One last thing. At first I did not feel I wanted to post about being sexually abused on here. I felt ashamed. I have never found it hard to talk about the emotional and psychological abuse on here (apart from about one incident) and have never felt ashamed about what I went through or talking about it and I always knew it wasn't me it was my dad at fault. But with this it was different.

I had put the pieces together in my mind and realised what had happened, what that puzzling, previously inexplicable, memory fragment had been about, but I felt ashamed. Just like in so many of the books I have read, somehow the child feels the shame when it should be the wrongdoing parent. Why that should be so is at the moment unclear to me - more reading to be done when I have time. But, I only felt shame for a a short time, a day, and the next day I felt able to post on here about my experience. I don't feel I can talk about what exactly happened, but I can talk about the fact that it happened.

That is one of the worst things about all of this. That people feel shame and therefore unable to admit to themselves let alone others about what they have been through. And so they are deprived of the help and support and care that they so desperately need.

I am happy that this thread provides comfort to so many people who read but do not post. But I very strongly believe that posting and talking about one's experiences, getting the skeletons out of the closet and holding them up to the light, is a very important part of ensuring those skeletons are destroyed forever and will not lurk inside you anymore.

Grace, not much time but wanted to say that your memories will come back to when you are ready to deal with them. And if one therapist says they cannot help you, then please find yourself another one. I am sure you have read about people's therapists on here and there seem to be so many wonderful, enlightened ones out there, please find somebody who can help you, even if you have to go through 10 therapists to find the right one.

Thanks, Exotic I'm going to push my current (NHS) psychologist a little harder tomorrow. Can't afford a private one. We'll see how that goes!

Forgot to ask: Exotic, you gave me another lightbulb moment when you said: "The books even talk about how the abuse means that the survivor is unable to do the housework!"

Can you summarise, please? Is this likely to be something like the fact that housework is often a tension trigger in dysfunctional families?

What do you think I should read? I'm neither a Christian nor in a relationship.
Thanks!

... but I never do housework.

Grace, I have only read a few pages but I am sure the book was talking about how when one is dealing with these huge issues, it can be so all consuming that nothing else gets done, including housework. This can be difficult for others, including DH's to understand as from their perspective there seems to be no reason why the housework cannot be done, they simply do not understand how dealing with stuff can just totally consume you, use up all your resources, at least for a while, months at a time.

Re books, I don't think it matters if you're not in a relationship, I think all knowledge is power in dealing with this stuff and nor am I a Christian and I know one of the books seems to have a religious aspect to it but it does not seem to dominate or govern the book (I think you must be talking about Haunted Marriage?). Perhaps start with Allies in Healing or Ghosts in the Bedroom, the aim is to help you understand yourself, not necessarily for a partner to understand you. And if you do find a partner in the future, you will be far better prepared having read such a book, so it will not be time and effort wasted.