I'm looking for feminist resources for adults who grew up in families where there was domestic violence and abuse. Posting here because I'm particularly interested in resources which talk about the sex / gender / patriarchal aspects of DV.
Explicit descriptions of domestic violence follow.
The abuse in my family was not sexual, but it was very much about gender roles and social norms. My Mum in particular has been treated like a servant or slave. I was explicitly told that I was worth less than my brother, that my education was a lower priority, and was denied material resources and emotional support given to my brother, because I was a girl.
My parents are still together and legally married. My brother also lives with my parents. He has absorbed what he grew up with, and is an entitled, vicious, thoroughly unpleasant man, who takes a lot of drugs, and in his mid-thirties has never held down a job.
I am concerned that when my parents die, I will be made to take on the responsibility of caring for my brother, who has multiple diagnoses. I am absolutely not willing to have my brother in my home, nor am I capable of taking care of him financially or physically. I know that my brother has acted abhorrently towards women he wanted a relationship with. In the past, I have tried to teach him not to do this. I can't. Giving up is hard.
I hugely admire my Mum in many ways. She knows that I would prefer she leaves my Dad. She does not want to. I have to allow her to make her own decisions. I wish that I could see her more, which I cannot do while she lives with Dad. I am concerned by what may happen as she gets older, particularly as Mum's side of the family has a strong family history of dementia (no signs yet). I want to see more of my Mum. I want to keep her safe. I have told her that I cannot while she stays with Dad, accepted that I cannot force her to leave. This is hard. I am afraid for her. I know that my refusing to return and be a willing victim of my father makes things worse for her. I refuse anyway, and find ways to live with myself, but it is hard.
I have always been the black sheep of the family. My father has no capacity to understand that he might have done wrong, or to take responsibility for his own life choices. He will actively tell people outside the family in so many words that I am responsible for all our problems. For example, I am held responsible for my father's multiple affairs, which began when I was a young child, because of my 'bad behaviour'. All of this is explicitly because I am female, or fail to fulfil gendered expectations.
Because of my family circumstances, I have had a series of mental health diagnoses, beginning in childhood, which my father uses as 'proof' that I am the problem. As my family are 'respectable' white middle-class, and my parents are still married, the mental health system has been all to ready to go along with this. I have been told that my 'difficult' relationship with my parents is a symptom of mental illness, rather than of my father being an abusive, violent, high-functioning alcoholic. I have 'got over' my mental illness, and built a good life for myself, but nothing addressed the issues with my family and interaction with them. Please don't tell me to go back to mental health services. I am not allowing myself to be pathologised again.
Dad killed my pets. I was never allowed to cry about this. I haven't thought about it for decades, but something reminded me tonight, and I desperately want to get my childhood cats, push the furniture in front of my bedroom door, and hide under the bed stroking the cats and trying to block everything out. I haven't had flashbacks this intense for years.
I am coping. I want to do more than cope, I want to unlearn the guilt, fear, and shame I feel when I tell my father that there are very clear boundaries to any contact I have with him. I am managing this well. I am not being drawn into arguments, or attempts to 'justify' my position. I have said clearly where the boundaries lie, and not responded to anything else. This is hard, but I can do it. The run up to Christmas has always been difficult, since for decades it was the only time I would visit the family home. I will no longer do this. I will no longer allow my father to insist on an outward portrayal of family togetherness, when the outcome is always reinforcing the subservience of women in the family, culminating in my cowering behind furniture from my father's drunken rage. I am terrified of Christmas, even with my in-laws who have been nothing but gentle and welcoming.
I don't talk about this a lot. For most of my life I believed what I had been taught, that it was me who was the problem. I would not have recognised the term 'domestic violence', since it was rare that my father would need to actually hit me to get his own way. There wasn't sexual abuse at home, although I was being repeatedly raped by other pupils at school. I was broken, wrong, evil, to cause all this to happen.
I'm new to radical feminism. It has begun to give me concepts, handles, words to talk about this. Ways to locate the problem outside me, as male violence, rather than the decades of 'treatment' for 'mental illness'. I need these words, these ideas.
I don't know where to start looking. There must be resources out there. How to deprogram myself from having grown up under the control of a violent man, in a world where there was no refuge because violent men are everywhere. Other people who have been through this, who have struggled with the same feelings. I don't know where to find them.
I don't know where to start. I want to identify the beliefs which come from growing up in a household with a violent man, and the ways they are still fucking me up. I want to understand. I've made a good life for myself now, after decades of struggle. My parents are getting older, more frail, having health crises, and it is only going to get more difficult to avoid being sucked back into their lives, until they die, which is another layer of complication. I want to hear from other people who have walked this path and can talk about it in terms of male violence, misogyny, the ways violent men and boys hurt girls and women. It is always going to be difficult, but I want a framework to understand this, to reinforce my determination and deal with my feelings while I refuse to give in to my controlling father.
I am sorry if this is incoherent. I have had recent messages from my Dad which fill my head with shouting and throwing furniture and his hands pulling away the blanket I would roll up in. He would still do this if I went back. He did it to me as an adult as much as during childhood. I am not ever going to be in a position where he can do that to me again. I am safe now. I have a good life. He does not control me.