When you’re raised in an abusive family, it doesn’t feel like you’re a victim of something, not while it’s happening. Instead, you feel like you’re not doing a good enough job dealing with what’s presented to you as ‘normal’. It feels like you’re overly sensitive and need to learn how to be more tough, like you’re whiny and spoiled and deserve to feel bad about yourself. Like ‘tough love’ and constant criticism, threats and put downs is what is needed to fix you, like only thing that can make you better is more pain and more hatred.
Abusive parents work very hard so you wouldn’t be able to recognize abuse; they will make sure you believe that what they’re giving you is love. They’ll even make you feel like they believe it’s love, like they are so sure they’re helping you with all of the hatred and neglect and violence, like they’re worried about you when they’re forbidding you any privacy, freedom or skills, like they’re simply not able to do any better, when they make you suicidal.
And they don’t stop there; they convince you that everyone else has it worse, that you’re ‘lucky’ to have them, that other children are beaten worse, starved out, abandoned, homeless. They tell you horror stories about how you’d be dying on the street without them, how grateful you need to be. They threaten you with how bad you’d have it in an orphanage or a home. They give you anecdotes of children being treated worse, in order to terrify you.
So you don’t know that you have it bad. You don’t know that you have human rights that far precede being fed and sheltered. You look around convinced, that everyone’s home life as as bad as yours, they’re just somehow taking it better. They’re somehow still grinning and acting normal and keeping it together, they’re less anxious, less scared, less inclined to sink into darkness. You don’t know how they do it, and you feel inferior, stuck, left behind. You don’t know what’s wrong with you, why can’t you just be like everyone else, and deal with ‘normal home life’ as well as they do. Why can’t you talk to your parents like you love them, like everyone else does. How is everyone else so much better at being tough, brave, enduring, strong, and hopeful.
And abusive parents will dismiss your every thought and feeling that recognizes the reality of what you’re living in. It doesn’t matter if you’re having anxiety and trauma symptoms so bad you’re barely able to function, they’ll call it whining. It doesn’t matter if you secretly self harm only to ease the amount of inner pain and shame you’re feeling, they’ll call it ‘attention seeking’. It can be panic attacks, eating disorders, ocd, dissociative disorders, flashbacks, nightmares, fight-or-flight reactions, it will all be dismissed as you being ‘dramatic’, ‘playing the victim’ or ‘making a drama for nothing’. You could be close to death and your abusive parents would dismiss it as your own fault.
Because nothing is more important to them than covering up their abuse and making you feel insane for trying to point it out. Nothing stops them in forcing their own hateful perspective on a child they abused. There is no compassion or decency to acknowledge that they hurt you, you could be dying and they would accuse you of doing it on purpose to spite them. There is no place in their hearts for you. There is nothing they couldn’t spin to depict you as a spoiled, selfish, vengeful monster, in order to spin the reality of what happened in their own favour.
They’re waging a war against a child they had out of their own volition, and were responsible to take care of. They declare the war on your sanity the second they hurt you and tell you that it’s fine, that you’re okay, that you need to shut up so nobody else can hear and get ‘the wrong idea’. They taught you that abuse is love from the start, and seeing the consequences of abuse on you, they double down and insist it’s still love, it’s still normal, it’s still good, it’s just you who is the problem. They didn’t do anything wrong. You who is taking ‘love’ the wrong way. You who doesn’t understand that they’re ‘human’ and ‘did their best’. As if they acknowledged you as a human being even once during your entire life.
Much of your childhood consisted of your parents lying to you in order to avoid you realizing you’re being abused. It makes you spend decades thinking that you’re crazy, delusional, oversensitive, imagining things, acting whiny or dramatic for no good reason, experiencing symptoms for no reason, no events that caused it, all while being completely alone in your pain, unable to ask for support, because ‘nothing bad happened’. It can bring shame to your every feeling, make you feel like you’re not allowed to even experience your own feelings. It makes you doubt your memories, your senses, your own instincts, because you’re shamed and punished for believing yourself, for imagining that you were right to express any of it.
That’s why it’s so hard to get out of it. It’s hard to even dare to believe yourself, with how high the stakes are for you parents, and by extension, for your own life. You’re not dumb or gullible for struggling to acknowledge this, nobody wants to believe this could be going on in their life. Nobody wants to see their parents as villains, if there’s any other option available. And nobody wants to believe their parents capable of this level of cruelty. Nobody wants to know that they were raised by people who felt nothing while psychologically torturing a child.
Reparenting yourself isn’t just about learning to regulate your emotions or heal your inner child. It’s also about teaching yourself all the skills you were supposed to be taught, but never were.
A list including but not limited to: cooking, cleaning, time management, setting boundaries, enforcing boundaries, self care, making friends, maintaining friendships, asking for help, accepting help.
Even adult, romantic relationships are meant to be modelled for you by caregivers, and abusive caregivers often have toxic or dysfunctional relationships.
Parenting is incredibly difficult and capitalism/the nuclear family makes it even harder. You probably need to learn some of these things even if you had good enough parents. If your parents were abusive or neglectful you may need to learn most or all of them.
It’s a fuckload of work that is frustrating when you could be doing other things. It’s gruelling, it’s boring, it leads to so much lost time and so many mistakes.
But you deserve to do it. You can do it. You are worth it. You are not alone.
I just realized that I’m hyper-focused on the moods, behaviours and point of view of any person that exists near me, for as long as they’re physically close. For me to be able to focus on myself at all, I have to be alone. Any other presence means my entire world shrinks into figuring out what this person is thinking, feeling and what they might do. And I can’t control it, I can’t relax if there’s anybody else in the room.
I think there’s a deep kind of injury we get from spending such a big chunk of our life loving people whoa are abusive. Because we give our love and attention to them, we care not to hurt them, if they seem hurt we try to comfort them and make it better for them, if they need help we offer a hand, we even forget all of our feelings in order to prioritize theirs and try hard to make them happy.
But they do the exact opposite to us. They don’t care not to hurt us, if we seem hurt they use it as an advantage to do further damage, if we need comfort they give us disgust, if we need help they humiliate and ridicule and shame us. They prioritize themselves to the point where we don’t even exist except as a resource. And we get used to it. To the point where we don’t know how any other type of love looks like. To the point where we don’t even expect anything else.
And sometimes they go and do something so incredibly cruel to us, it feels like a betrayal. We work hard to protect these people from harm, we light ourselves on fire to keep them warm, we fight for them, we stand on their side. They then go ahead and push us into the worst pain we could possibly experience. It’s shocking, disarming, almost unbelievable that anyone could do this, that anyone could be that cruel, and for no good reason at all. Having our love be returned with cruelty damages us permanently. We no longer even expect the same love back when we love someone, we are just hoping they won’t turn around and damage us. If we get completely neglected but not actively attacked, we feel grateful!
And if someone later does even a tiny thing that hurts us, we start re-living every past instance where our love was returned with cruelty and the pain of it can crush us. We can’t cope with the slightest injustice anymore because it’s triggering, it’s been so far over our limit we’d rather not have anyone in our life anymore than be betrayed over and over again. It makes us vulnerable and crushed by betrayal so much worse than the average person would feel it. Where we should get mad we feel broken, horrified and helpless.
I’m curious, did anyone else have this experience as a kid, of waiting to find the person who wouldn’t hate you? Like yeah, your parents acted like you’re a waste of space, but you were sure that deep inside there was something more to you, and one day someone would realize that and care for who you really are. And you kept trying to reach out, outside of the home, to find someone who would get you.
And then eventually you found someone you connected to on a deep level and who you felt intensely bonded with, who seemed to accept you and want you for something at last. And when this person suddenly changed their mind and also decided that you were not worth a second glance, it broke something inside of you?
Like you were able to keep resilient against all the abuse if there was one person who was on your side and saw something good in you, but if even that one special person decided you were worthless, then your resilience broke and you couldn’t find it in yourself to doubt what everyone around you thought of you, that you were nothing, bad, poisonous, evil.
I keep carrying this shame in me and still trying to prove to myself and to the world that it is not true, but I’ve never gotten over that intense rejection and reactions of disgust on me being vulnerable, hurt, or wanting to be close. Even if I don’t feel it when I’m alone, next to other people I only wait for the moment they’ll decide that I’m not worth a second of their time, and that I’m in fact, repulsive in every possible way. Did anyone recover from this?
abusive parents will act like the world is insanely dangerous place where you get shot on sight as soon as you make a slightest mistake or displease anyone, when in reality the only place where this happens is your parents house
The reoccurring theme of being unwanted in your childhood and seeing yourself as some kind of monster and how you feel like you have to move mountains to get people to like you
for the abused children life is just being tortured and broken for most inane things like being sad or needing attention or making a face someone doesn’t like, and then when you despite all efforts grow up, you’re supposed to suddenly know how to stand up for yourself?? you’re supposed to negotiate your salary?? tell people OFF?? without feeling like you will be crushed to the inch of your life if you even look at someone wrong?? what on the gods good earth
Of course I have jealousy issues. You’d have them too if you saw everyone around you getting what you want while you’re subjected to neglect and abuse. In sight but out of reach. Forced to see what I want constantly but unable to have it myself.
“After a traumatic experience, the human system of self-preservation seems to go onto permanent alert, as if the danger might return at any moment. Physiological arousal continues unabated. In this state of hyperarousal, which is the first cardinal symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder, the traumatized person startles easily, reacts irritably to small provocation, and sleeps poorly.”
i do wonder what kind of a person i would have turned out to be, if instead of self-doubt, harsh criticism, shame, self-hate, someone would have poured the opposite into me.
self-trust, gentleness, kindness, self-love. who would i have become? and do i still have access to that potential?
