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.

and my father hit me and my sister so hard he left wields on our arses.

of course he 'cannot remember' any of that now.

twat.

unlikelyamazonion, my mother is similar. I got pg at about 26,accident wasn't my 'fault'. My mother told me she wouldn't support me in anyway if I had it. So I got rid and when devastated afterwards and crying on the phone to her she told me to pull myself together and to stop being so self obsessed.
When pg with my 6th she tactfully suggested there were "ways of dealing with this", she denies having said that now of course. And when she heard I wanted a 7th she yet again told me she would not support me.

She's a horrible cow.

so angry - you said 'why would my dad say such things?'

Because he was projecting. He was dumping onto you what he feels about himself deep down. Where he ends and you begin is not clear, what he feels you must feel.

You know this fresh anger and hatred will be ultimately healing. I too have had a bad week (see thread in Parenting re trying to parent after an abusive childhood) but I know after a bad patch it is like another layer of pain has come away and I actually feel stronger afterwards. Then the time that lapses before I lose it with ds agan lengthens and it is not quite so bad because I don't beat myself up as much. I feel bad yes and I apologise but I tell myself that I am not my parents. I do love my children unconditionally and I am not a narcissist. Somehow I feel that will shine through and my mistakes will not ruin them or our relationship

It is so shit dealing with all this but I live in hope that one day we will be free. You know that your father is a cruel, bullying and narcissistic man and that your mother was cold, neglectful and also abusive. Your siblings are just blindly living out their script, reading the lines to procure little scraps of accolade and love from your parents. They are still locked into the cycle of abuse because it doesn't matter that they are golden childs or chosen ones or whatever the hell they are. Love from a narcissist is never real, it has no substance and only hinges on the lines of the script being read perfectly

It may not seem it but ultimately you will be better off. You have screwed up that script and chucked it into the bin. There will always be a gap in your life where their love should have been but it may be that whilst mothering is hard, you can offer your kids something that others cannot. You apologised to your ds, not every parent even feels remorse when they make mistakes.

When I think of the pain I have been through since I stepped outside my assigned role, I try to think in the words of Martin Luther King

'free at last, free at last, thank god I am free at last'

keep going you are doing so well

soangry - I recognise what you say about your dad - mine was similar. I'm in therapy and it has been tremendously helpful. What's difficult is that as a child you don't understand that it's not your fault and that it's their own stuff, you internalise the messages they give you and they become part of how you see yourself, which is why cutting off ties with them isn't enough. You have to 'rewrite' the messages they gave you about yourself. It's a daily task, it takes a long time, but I really believe it can be done if you stick at it.

unlikely and kitty so sorry to hear how your mother(s) behaved when you fell pregnant at 26. Parents are supposed to be there to help you, support you, guide you, pick you up when you stumble and fall whilst walking through life. Not judge, criticise and make you feel even worse than you already do. Have you sought therapy to deal with the issues arising from that time? It could help you to process the feelings and truly move on from that time?

Re my dad, yes, he did sexually abuse me once, and I do have a clear memory of the incident. It was when I was very young, perhaps 4/5. It was just the once, although once is still too much. The years between 5 and 9 were when my siblings were born and I think that is why they are such a blank. I think that during those years I must have felt, even more than I did already, totally and completely rejected and unwanted and unloved by my mother and it must have been a very very lonely and painful time for me and that is why those memories are still a complete blank.

But even though I have no actual memories from that time, I think some of the 'feelings' are triggered by things in everyday life. Eg I have very strong feelings of sadness and rejection and exclusion because I feel DD is sometimes not included in things that her group of friends at school do outside school. I feel quite intense pain when i hear about things her friends have done at the weekend but she wasn't invited. I feel quite sure that these feeling are my feelings of pain from my childhood and not feelings on behalf of DD. Because DD does occasionally find out that her friends have done something together without asking her, and she truly and honestly doesn't seem in the least bit bothered. I have even asked her directly if she feels upset that her friends did something without her and she always says no. And so I am very sure that the hurt that I feel when DD is left out of things is purely my hurt from when I was a child when my mother spent time with my siblings and left me out, didn't even ask me if I wanted to come along too/join in.

Rose, thank you so much for your post. I do know this stuff in my head, but it so good to hear it from somebody else. It kind of confirms that I am thinking along the right lines about why my family was so cruel to me. It is very hard doing things differently but definately worth it. I would rather die than subject my DC's to the sort of emotional cruelty that I experienced as a child.

My dad just didn't seem to care about my feelings at all. In fact he seemed to enjoy mocking me and being cruel. He was like a man torturing a little mouse he has got trapped in a cage. Sometimes he would be 'nice', but only when he chose to be nice, and if and when he needed to vent his rage and hatred then he had no hesitation in venting it on a little 8 year old child - me.

Just13, like you said, as a child it is impossible to understand that the rage and hatred and anger that is being dumped on you by your parents is not because you are a horrible/hateful/nasty child. I know now that my parents have HUGE unresolved issues and none of their behaviour was because I was an unloveable horrible child. But the internalisation of those messages runs very deep and I still have days when I hate myself. Like you said it is a daily task of reprogramming your internal script.

Was talking to DH last night about some problems he is having at work. I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about what we had talked about. It was really bothering me and upsetting me on his behalf.

I realised today that I had been triggered by the problems he had mentioned to me. I can see that my reaction to his work problems was a over-reaction. DH is a grown man who is more than capable to taking care of himself and not let people bully him, push him around and/or manipulate him and blame him for things which were not his fault or responsibility.

I think I was feeling emotions from my own childhood when I was bullied, blamed and manipulated by my parents/siblings.

I also felt an urge to stand up for DH, call up his work and tell them on DH's behalf that they were being nasty and unfair to him/. I didn't do it of course. But I realise now that these feelings also come from my childhood where i felt I had to stand up for myself and my mother and my siblings against my dad's bullying and abuse. I feel I am programmed to take on other people's problems as my own and fight their battles for them. Because that is what I felt i had to do and actually did do in childhood because there was nobody else to do it. My mother should have been standing up for me, but she was a cowardly, pathetic waste of space and did nothing.

I need to find the right balance between feeling sympathy and empathy for other people and their problems, and being supportive, but not taking on their problems internally and making them my problems and worrying about them and feeling like I have to fight their battles for them.

This is another bit of the legacy left to me by my parents and my abusive, dysfunctional childhood and yet another thing for which to feel angry at my parents.

It's me, btw, soangry is now ABitTipsy. But I'm not actually, time for another name change.