So angry at my parents, don't know how to handle it

[soangry]

I have spent the last 4 years dealing with the legacy of my abusive childhood. I cut ties with my parents 4 years ago. I thought I had dealt with most of my issues, but they just keep coming. As soon as I've dealt with one thing, another pops up.

I am feeling so angry right now at my mother. I am realising just what a complete and utter bitch she was to me, all my life. And recently a friend said to me she thought cutting off one's parents was a bit harsh, even though she knows that I was abused, although she doesn't know any of the details.

I am angry at my friend for saying what she did, she is no position to judge or criticise my decision when she does not know anything about what I went through. I had thought she was a good friend as when I first told her a little bit about my family situation she seemed to be very accepting that it was my decision to make and made no judgmental comments. I want to say something to her about her recent comment but don't know how or what.

I have also had a fresh batch of memories come back to me about my mother and her totally bitchy and nasty treatment of me and I honestly feel like she has got off lightly by me simply cutting ties with her and my dad. What I would actually like to have done and what they both deserve is to torture them slowly and painfully for the rest of their lives. The way I feel right now, if my parents were in front of me now, I could murder them both with my bare hands.

I am so angry that my poor, dear, darling children and husband have sometimes been the target of my anger when it should have been directed at my parents. Luckily for my parents they are a safe distance away where I can't vent my rage on them. But God knows they deserve it.

I'm not looking for any answers to this because there is no answer. My parents deserve to be put through hell for what they did to me as a child and as an adult until I finally cut ties with them.

It makes me mad that my siblings tell me our parents are devastated that I have cut them out of my life. They feel sorry for our parents, but not for me, the person who was abused all her life.

I just feel so angry about it all. It has hit me by surprise because I have been feeling quite content and 'sorted' about all of this for a while.

Ok, rant over for now.

Poor you, only you know what's best for you!!
Has for your friend I would leave it, she had an opinon, ok it wasn't what you wanted to hear but let it go!! The decisions you make in your life are yours to make, If your friend say s anything else just say ' it might sound harsh to you but it my decision'.

I wish you luck in finding some peace in life. Look at your children your husband they are the important ones in your life now, good luck xxxx

{{hugss}} I feel your pain. It is so easy for you friend or anyone for that matterr to judge when they hasn't walked in your shoes.

Wishing you peace and happiness, concentrate on the people who make your life happy.

I hope you can get the help you need to work through this - you really don't want your (understandable) hatred for your parents to ruin the rest of your life, and your lovely family.

in the normal state of things cutting off your dp is quite a harsh thing to do.

Your situation is outside the norm. Your friend is blissfully ignorant of what a horrific childhood can be like.

Some of the anger you feel at her lack of understanding is the deep seated anger you feel for your dp which this remark has unleashed.

If she is a good friend, couldn't you tell her how you feel? I would be devastated not to know how hurt a friend of mine is, really I would hate to be opening up wounds and causing more pain through my sheer ignorance.

if your siblings were not abused or did not suffer like you did, they have no right to say what you should or should not do about it.

I don't think you are wrong to cut your dp out of your life at all. How dare they mistreat a dc and then where is their sense of reality to be "devastated" at being cut off?

Thank you for responding. I am trying to make sure my anger at my parents does not spill over into my life here with DH and the DC's. But it did a little bit this morning. I snapped at DS, he was doing absolutely nothing wrong but a whole surge of anger welled up inside me as some memories of things my mother had said and done came back to me and I took it out on DS. I felt so awful afterwards. I apologised to him. But it should never have happened. I hate my mother, she is the one I should be raging at, not DS. She has got off very lightly indeed by me cutting them out. She and my dad are safe, away from me and my rage. But DH and my DC's are around and sometimes my rage spills out at them. It doesn't happen very often these days, apart from this morning I can't remember the last time I raged at them. But even once is too much when they are completely innocent and deserve nothing but love.

I hate hate hate hate hate my parents so much. I want to take my anger out on them. But if I do I will end up in jail. Right now they are wallowing in their self declared victim role and my siblings feel sorry for them. But have no sympathy or compassion for me or at least for the child I was once was who was abused and neglected all her life.

ZZZ thanks for your insight about how you would feel if you were my friend. I will think about that and try and find a way of letting her know how much she has hurt me without intending to. It's very difficult though as people who were lucky enough to have had loving caring parents often simply cannot comprehend the horrors some of us have been through.

have you ever written it all down?

Do you know what, it sounds very lonely to me to be a bit isolated from the people around you because they don't understand what you have been through and you are trying to store it all up inside to protect them.

Could you imagine talking to people who know from personal experience how this feels? A group, a therapist, just someone else who went through childhood abuse.

I'm really sorry for you, sounds horrible and well done for doing so well by your own dc and coming out the other end of the tunnel

ZZZ, again thank you. You have expressed my feelings so well, better than I could have. Yes, where is my parents' sense of reality that they are devastated that I have cut them out. I have given up on trying to find the answer to that question. Are parents are narcissists. People who are lacking the empathy gene. They cannot even begin to feel how I feel. They couldn't then, when I was a child (because if they could they wouldn't have abused me) and they certainly can't now, which is why they feel devastated that I have cut them off, why they feel sorry for themselves. They have never seen me as a seperate person with feelings. To them my feelings simply do not exist. So they cannot grasp that in fact it is I who is devastated that I have had no choice but to cut them off, and I who is devastated that I have never had the safety and security and comfort of knowing I was loved unconditionally by my parents.

My siblings weren't abused like I was, nor neglected and ignored like I was. So they, much like my friend, have little understanding about how I feel about our parents. I don't have much contact with them either these days which is a bit sad but definately for the best.

Thank God for MN where I can talk about how I really feel and let off some steam. In RL I have to put on my smiley face and act normal which is a nightmare on days like this.

ZZZ, thank you for your last post. What a kind and caring person you are. Coming on MN really restores my faith that there are good, kind, decent and enlightened people in this world. My experience to date in RL has been mostly with the 'other' sort of people.

ZZZ, yes I do have RL support. I do have a therapist and sometimes go to group therapy with other childhood abuse survivors. And I do have a handful of RL friends who do understand and are not judgmental or critical in any way. This particular friend caught me by surprise as her comments came a year after I had told her about my situation. All this time I had thought she was accepting and non judgmental. But her true views came out recently and threw me off balance a bit. I'll get over it, I'm a lot stronger these days than I used to be.

Have you tried the Stately Homes thread? Loads of good advice there.

You are doing the right thing for you and it's not anyone else's business.

Soangry,

it is normal when very distressed and upset to take it out on those we love ... but in a few years, you don't want you children feeling like you do now do you? Absue runs in families.

It's great you go to therapy, I just want to urge you to please please deal with this now so you don't subject your own family to the same kind of treatment - your future would be bleak indeed if they cut you out of their lives. Don't do it, our children are a precious gift, even if they drive us mad sometimes, it's not good to take it out on them because they cannot and never will understand. They will just think you are a nasty person (and from the above I can see that is abslutely not the case).

Keep going with the therapy and when the red mist descends, go outside, kick a footbacll / wall / whatever - but don't take it out on your beautiful children. you need to break the cycle.

Rhinestone, thank you, I have tried the stately homes thread and it was very helpful.

Lucy, thank you for posting. You don't have to answer, but may I ask if you had an abusive childhood?

I have no idea why this should be happening right now but there are so many memories coming back to me recently. Or rather the memories were always there, but I have not been able to explain, to myself more than anything, why they were so upsetting.

I remember when I decided to leave my first job, many years ago, to go travelling for a while. My boss was very nice about me leaving and everyone did a collection and gave me some spending money to take on my travels. I left the job feeling happy and excited about my trip. When I told my dad that I had left my job he persisted in asking me things like "oh, were they happy to let you leave, just like that? Didn't they try and persuade you to stay?" I remember feeling really upset at the time at his questions but couldn't really put my finger on why. But thinking back now I can see he was trying to make me feel as if my employers couldn't have really valued me that much or thought I was an employee worth keeping if they hadn't even tried to persuade me to stay when I said I was leaving. It seems so cruel. Why would my dad say such things? This example of his nastiness is minor in comparison to other things he used to say but it still hurts. I know my employers would have preferred it if I didn't leave, but I think they also understood that I had the 'travel bug' and nothing they could have said would have persuaded to me to stay. But that's not the point. I can't imagine saying such a thing to either of my DC's when they are older, it's designed to make you feel bad about yourself and is cruel and nasty.

And my mother would always make me feel as if it was my fault if for eg I told her I was having some problems with friends. I once told her I was going to speak to one of my friends who had been very unfair to me about various things. My mother couldn't care less about my feelings which had been hurt by my friend, all she said to me was to make sure I spoke to my friend nicely to make sure I didn't upset her. I can't imagine doing that to DD. If she came and told me one of her friends had been nasty to her and she was going to speak to her about it. I wouldn't tell her to make sure she spoke to nicely to her friend in case she upset her. I would be concerned for my DD and about the fact that a friend of hers had hurt and upset her.

I know my parents did this sort of thing because they lack the empathy gene. But knowing logically about why they were able to be so nasty to me doesn't take away the hurt they caused. They were so closed off from me, we had no bond, no feeling of "it's us (me and my parents) against the world"; it was always a feeling of it's them, (my parents) against me.

It's a miracle really how I survived nearly 40 years of sniping and bitching and worse from my parents. It meant that I had to toughen myself up very early on, in order to survive within my own home. The outside world was not a hostile and cruel place for me. My home was. The outside world was where I had friends who cared about me and where I felt safe and cared about. My home was where I felt scared and hated and unwanted and definately unloved. How topsy turvy is that?

Your friend will never understand what you went through, not matter how hard she tries. It's like telling someone who has never given birth about giving birth, they will never truly know what it was like.

I have had this about my abusive granny. People are amazed that I hate her so much and am still full of vitriol for her years after her death. Especially as my granny was brilliant at showing herself to be this great giving, wonderful person to the outside world but in the family she was utterly awful. She tried to turn me against my parents among other things.

I have learned that, even the best and closest friend can never really understand terrible things unless they ahve been through it also, and that people quickly forget things that do not actively affect them. I am sure some friends think "is she still going on about her granny?" but the anger I feel toward her is still just as alive as it was when I was 8.

I am now a very abrupt person when it comes to people's behaviour and tolerate very little crap. I know I talk to DD about people and their behaviours more than other parents do. For instance when DD's friend secretly ate DD's egg, my defence mode kicked straight in and I said "that child never comes to my house again" and I'm sure some people thought I was over-reacting and should have been more tolerant. But I am so against creeping and insidious nastiness in people that I just don't let anything go on.

I suspect your mum had narcissitic personality disorder, my granny did. You cannot have any form of relationship with people like that, they are just not normal.

Well done to you for cutting yourself off and building a life wihtout them.

Hello Miggsie, thank you so much for your post. And thanks for pointing out so clearly that somebody can be a good friend, but if they have no experience of childhood abuse themselves they just will not be able to understand how I feel about my parents. I need to remember that, as I find myself distancing from friends who are lovely friends in other ways apart from on this particular issue. I guess I need to adjust my expectations and realise that many people will never understand me on this.

And I am so glad you mentioned about going on about things said and done years ago which still anger and hurt you today. I am the same and I know my sisters in particular think I should just forget the past and move on. Easy for them to say as they weren't abused.

Like you, I also have very little tolerance now for nasty behaviour. I am a little bit more tolerant now, but more importantly I am also more able to be assertive and speak out if somebody crosses a line they shouldn't have. Assertiveness is a hard skill to learn I have found. I am still in the very early stages of learning how to assert my rights and needs and put in place boundaries, without being aggressive about it and without hurting/upseting/annoying the other person. ie doing it in a way that is win/win for both people involved as opposed to it turning into a row/falling out over it. It really is a skill and I admire people who have mastered it. It must make life so much easier for those people.

I agree that I am sure both my parents had NPD and I think my sisters are developing it, not surprisingly; they don't seem to give a hoot about my feelings wrt my parents or anything else for that matter. Good riddance to bad rubbish as they say.

And like you said about your gran, my mother, if you met her, you would think she must be the most lovely, kind, caring and warm mother in the world! But how wrong you would be. To me at least, (not to my sisters) she was cold, distance, uninterested. I was invisible to her. She had eyes and feelings only for my sisters. And herself of course. But never me.

I am sorry your gran was like this too. What is/was your relationship with your parents like?

You are able to punish them for the rest of your life though... I've finally figured out as a 36 year old first-time mother-to-be that the greatest leverage I've ever had is sat in my uterus right now. And they know it!

I've already told my sister that she is unwelcome in her nephew's life. That message has been rammed home and my parents? Putty in my hands - but they know I'm serious now - any fuck ups from them and no grandchildren. simple as that!

Stick with the Stately Homes thread - the women there are marvellous and all understand.

skihorse, thanks for the hugs, much appreciated!

And congratulations on your pregnancy!

I cut ties with my parents when DD was 2.5 and DS was 2 months old. When I told them I never wanted to see them again they thought I would come round and change mind after 6 months and they even told me, with the idea that they were doing me a favour, that they were agreeable to taking a 6 month break from me! I told them this was their last chance to sort things out with wrt their abuse of me as a child and if they didn't take this chance they would never see their grandchildren again. They did not take the chance I offered them (no doubt because they didn't think I meant it when I said I would never see them again) and 4 years later we are still estranged and they have not seen my DC's since that day. And it's most definately their loss not mine. I am far better off without them.

You poor thing. I could have written your post.

I has an abusive childhood (my gran) and I sometmes feel so consumed by it all, I feel that I was to hit out at everyone. It also manifests itself in never feeling able to trust anyone, being cold, being defensive, being bitter. It is bloody hideous.

My gran died last year - I ran away from home at 16 and had not seen her since - and I felt unbelievable bitterness at that, as I knew I would never be able to ask her why she was so cruel to me. Not that I had ever planned to do so, but I felt cheated that she had gone to her grave without knowing the blight she cast over my whole life.

Added to which, my relationship with my mother (who left me with her abusive mother, and who has refused to discuss anything to do with my childhood since I got to know her at 17) suddenly found a new found love for my gran once she died. My mother has not spoken to my gran for years as well, however since she died she is suddenly 'at peace' and carries round a photo of the monstrous woman, and tends her grave, with all teh devotion of someone raised by the Waltons. This made me so indescribably angry, basically she told me to 'just leave everything in the past' and to get over it. That, combined with a load of other shit she has done, has made me cut her off, and I haven't spoken to her since October.

I am going to start therapy soon as I realise that internalising anger like this is going to rot me from the inside. My DP and DD are marvellous and I love them so deeply, but realise that my freezing rages are not good. I expect everyone to let me down at some point - and I can see myself pushing DP sometimes. God know what he sees in me but thank god for him.

I have tried to keep all the full horror of what happened when I was a kid away from DD, but she knows that it is not a bed of roses.

Sometimes I feel like I am full of black, twitching, boiling hate, and that I am the same kind of nasty person my gran was. I need to solve this.

To be honest on the outside my life is great - and it is 90% of the time. That other 10% though - ususally in teh middle of the night when I lie awake fretting - is a black hole of hell.

Massive hugs to you OP. I know how you feel. Please try and speak to someone - you can't deal with shit like this on your own. I have just realised this after years of trying.

Soangry, I really identify with your post of 12:42, especially the last paragraph. You say topsy turvy, I say fucked up!

My mum and dad have said loads of nasty things to me over the years, too many to mention. However one that always sticks in my head is when I bought my first car - whilst it wasn't a swanky one it was nonetheless a nice car and I'd fallen in love with it when i test drove it as it was such a nice drive. It was a platinum grey colour, ok, maybe not the most exciting colour but I really liked it and thought it looked really smart.

I took it round to show mum and dad and they both made the right noises etc. Then as I was leaving my dad called after me and when I turned round he said in a really mocking tone of voice, "strange the factory never gave it a paint job, you should take it back!" I.e. he thought it was a shit colour. And he had a really snide and superior look on his face.

It's by no means the worst thing he's ever said to me, but it was just so pointlessly spiteful and unkind when I'd been so pleased with my new car. He'll just do anything to piss on my happiness.

Ggggggggggggggggggggggggggggrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr I am going through the same. It makes me feel 100 per cent shit.

Getorf, thank you for your post. So sorry you have had similar experiences to me. I want to say to you very firmly that you are not the same kind of nasty person your gran was. And nor am I the same kind of nasty person that my dad was, although like you I feel as if I am exactly like him sometimes. The rage you have inside you is justifed as is mine. In her book Toxic Parents, Susan Forward says that every adult who was abused as a child has a volcanoe of rage burning away inside them.

I am so very glad you are seeking therapy. It may take a little while, but at some point, you will have worked through your issues, released all the pent up rage and anger inside and become the person you were always meant to be.

Rhinestone, I had the exact same thing when I bought my first car (like yours, secondhand, not amazing, but to me beautiful) and my sister, told me she had heard that this make of car was 'sluggish and had dodgy steering' when she could see quite clearly how happy and excited I was about my purchase.

Unlikely, I share your pain. But you shouldn't feel shit, you have done nothing wrong. They should feel like shit. Pass their shit back to them, it's where it belongs.

Soangry - thanks

It comes in waves. I can go for ages feeling all right, then the furious rages come again, and I can't even look at myself in the mirror without feeling ashamed.

I think it comes of just hiding all my feelings away from years in the desperate attempt to forget about it. It doesn't work!

Soangry - are you attempting to have therapy at all?

Getorf, yes it does come in waves. I have had lots of therapy and also read loads of brilliant books and done loads of work by myself and on myself.

I have learnt how to recognise when I have been triggered ie when something in the present day triggers memories from my past and also the emotions associated with those memories. When you feel the rage, I am sure something in your present life has triggered a memory from your past perhaps when somebody was cruel to you but at the time you suppressed your emotions. It is those suppressed emotions which are coming out now, they were buried alive as it were, and need to be released. So you're right, trying to push things away and forget about them doesn't work. The body always remembers everything that has happened to even if your conscious mind does not. A really good book is The Body Never Lies by Alice Miller, have you read it?

I have not read any of those books, no. I will look them out actually, for years I refused to accept that I had been badly abused as it seemed like a weakness (mad).

You are so right about the rage being triggered from some deep memory - I can't describe the utter self loathing I feel if I lose something and scour the house in rage looking for my car keys or something. My gran used to go absolutely nuts if I lost something as a child and I used to scamper round the house gibbering with fear, terrified of what she would do if I couldn't find it (it being something really innocuos like a pen, or something).

Getorf, my dad used to go into sudden, terrible, massive rages. I used to be terrified, absolutely petrified. I was only about 7/8 when it started, I think, can't remember exactly. (I have a complete memory blank from the ages of about 5 to 9 of my childhood. It must have been pretty awful during that time for my brain to have completely buried every single memory). And like your gran, my dad would be raging about something innocuous, or literally nothing (nothing that i knew about anyway). I used to get raged at not because I had been naughty, but just because he was feeling angry and needed somebody to take it out on.

soangry but do you think he sexually abused you? Can you remember? If no memories like that, then anything inappropriate?

When I was 26 I got pregnant and my mother phoned me and said 'get rid of it. You won't be able to love it'

and I did

I have never recovered. I bloody hate her for that. I want her nowhere near my son. He is nearly three and thankfully wouldn't recognise her from adam. Still makes me feel shit though. Oh how she must laugh at her bigness..

grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr