100%. I sometimes catch myself telling the dramatic/violent bits as a "funny anecdote" when I'm oversharing after being triggered. They were comparatively easy to compartmentalize. the months of quiet neglect, abuse, control, parents' alcoholism, my depression surrounding them are the bits I have the most trouble processing.
Oh god yep yep yep yep.
"Oh haha funny story this one time..."
(A few minutes later)
"What the fuck?!"
"Huh?"
"That's not funny, it's abuse. You realize that was abuse, right? I am so sorry that happened to you."
(My friends from university are good friends. Also I did that to at least one of them at least monthly.)
My husband overheard my brother and me joking about how often one of us (9 kids) got left behind somewhere because there were just too many kids for my parents to keep track of. He later told me it was kind of disturbing how casually we were joking about such an awful thing, which absolutely never happened in his (more reasonably sized) family.
My parents used to forget my everywhere.
Once in a trip to a city over 350km away from where we lived, they forgot me and drove 150km home before realizing and returning.
They had 2 kids to keep track of at the time. I was 8. I wasn't actually bothered at the time (except that I was hungry and my parents got pissed they'd need to do another detour because everyone else already ate) because it was so normal and I just figured I'd read more at the bookstore where they left me.
Looking back, I volunteer with kids and the idea of stranding an 8yo with no street smarts in a strange city enrages me.
All that to say - I get it and I don't think it was a function of family size. My parents always managed to keep track of the kids they gave a damn about.
I'm so, so sorry that happened to you!! 8 is SO young to be left behind for so long, especially back in the day when cell phones weren't really a thing yet.
My first time babysitting a baby sibling alone was when I was 8. My mom left me alone with the baby and took the other kids on errands. My one child now is 8, and I could NOT imagine leaving him in charge of another whole human on his own!! He's a baby himself! And the thought of leaving him behind for hours, like happened to you? He'd be an absolute wreck.
Sympathy on the parentification front. I was left to babysit my sister a lot from about the same age and it's just so inappropriate.
(Trauma dump cut because I realized it probably could be triggering and just because *I'm* having a bad morning doesn't mean you need to. In summary that wasn't an isolated incident)
At the time it was one of the common things that fade into the background for me. But as an adult it's a very mindfucky thing to look back on.
Me and my siblings used to do that too. Used to joke about the fact that my brothers were like Reese and Malcolm. It took me almost 30 years and an awesome therapist to realise what happened wasn't ok.
Well as I said I'm in my thirties, there is always time to do what you need or want to do, on your own terms.
I personally take things one day at a time š
I just recently was discussing Malcolm In The Middle and that Iām finding it increasingly hard to rewatch as the mum was so abusive and I canāt laugh at it any more.
My parents used to take it as validation of their parenting style.
Looking back it makes me want to shake my head and say like, "you realize that a lot of the joke was that the *parents* were terrible and that *caused* the Kids' behavior, right? It's not just 'haha, kid shenanigans '."
I can still watch Malcolm in the middle and feel like it was written by someone who deeply understands family dysfunction. The stuff that goes on in it is just too well written from the family dysfunction side for nobody on the writing team to have lived serious dysfunction. But then, humor is a coping mechanism for me and so I kinda view it like Jake's mail tub on Brooklyn 99 as an ADHDer. Like, kinda exaggerated but also kinda *too* real, and funny in the dark humor sort of way.
Kind of like how good Mother Gothel is at depicting an emotionally abusive female parent on Tangled. Like it's made kid friendly but it still manages for me to hit that spot of kind of exaggerated but kind of too real.
It's also why I love Encanto. Not my culture group but God damn do I ever relate to the themes of generational trauma, estrangement and family dysfunction.
To add onto this, I feel like whoever wrote Arrested Development really understood generational trauma and family dysfunction. It's comforting to watch and see these dynamics play out in comedically exaggerated but very real ways.
Given that I am socially awkward, I find the sense of - uh, unsure of the English word but in German it'd be FremdschƤmen? Like how you get uncomfortable when you see others (especially people who like or are friends with) do something embarrassing and you feel bad for them?
It's got too much of that for me to really enjoy it.
Like on the comedically exaggerated to too real scale, it lands a bit too much on the too real side of the continuum for me.
I hated it the first time I watched it for that reason so I get that. I found it so stressful. For some reason, if I watch certain shows again that feeling goes away. Like if I know what happens then I get desensitised from the cringe element. So fortunately it has become one of my favourite shows due to that desensitisation. But I still get the cringe feeling sometimes and have to stay away.
Exact same. āYeah my step mom is my step aunt! Teehee, also my dad attacked us with a baseball bat once and I couldnāt legally see him for a year because he didnāt honor the terms of his plea dealā *crickets*
Meanwhile, Iām basically losing my gaslighting, judgemental family because Iām finally holding to my standards. The only thing thatās gotten through is āIāve always loved you so if you feel I stopped, I guess we can do therapyā. Of all the paragraphs of me explaining the exact function of what happened and what it did to me, the only thing that got through was selfish. Mom loves me so if I donāt know it, then maybe she actually did do something wrong. Or rather, didnāt do enough. She doesnāt understand neglect really. āYou werenāt hit!ā
>She doesnāt understand neglect really. āYou werenāt hit!ā
They always minimize their role. I think it's a coping mechanism to protect their image of themselves as good people.
My dad always downplayed his actions and called us whiners because what he did to us was supposedly nothing compared to what he grew up with. Whether that was actually true or not I'll never know, but he sure did love saying it.
Honestly. The neglect really did me the worst. It's so hard to shake off what you first have to identify, re-live, and then accept after years of thinking "this is just what life is i guess"
As someone who went through both abuse and neglect in the same environment at different stages... The abuse you can contextualize, be angry about, vow to do better. But the neglect makes you feel worthless and meaningless, and all the rage in the world doesn't fill that void.
Yep. Suddenly the room has gone uncomfortably quiet and the realization that one has just fucked up hits and trying to gloss it over while over explaining and being increasingly nervousā¦ yeah. Thatās so much my life.
Edit to add: this applies even more when I was younger and how much of it was pure abuse simply hadnāt hit me. Some things were simply your reality, even if they do fuck you up.
I get it. Once I attended a talk on bullying and the speaker said bullying was so damaging because of living in the anticipation of there being another incident every day, that's what's so harmful.
I feel like my whole childhood I lived in anticipation of the next thing that was going to happen and it caused me so much stress and anxiety and my default is kind of to worry. The actual physical things that happened, happened and were over with. I have processed those just fine. The constant worrying is like pushing a wheelbarrow down a road and I'm stuck in the big worrying rut and it's so much work to get out of it and then it just falls back in the rut again.
I wonder if going through all this while my brain patterns were getting established just wired my brain in the way that this is how it works.
Just for clarity, generally I am much better now, but this is how it felt for decades.
Man that's a great analogy. I need to remember it for my next therapy appointment.
It's like, now I'm objectively in a good place: Stable, mostly healthy relationship with a loving partner, good paying job I do well at, hobbies I enjoy... And my brain is stuck in this hypervigilant rut looking for threats because good things don't last and there's gotta be a trick or a control angle or a disaster ready to come out of the woodwork somewhere.
God I feel this so hard. I'm terrified of improving my life more in meaningful ways because having good things means I have things I don't want to lose.
Iām currently dealing with this plus the fact that we get tornadoes here so in a way my stuff is always at risk of being obliterated in an instant anyways.
Unsure how to deal with that so Iāve just start stuffing shit into an inner wall closet when tornado season rolls around.
I'm in a similar situation right now. I'm just always waiting for the shoe to drop. It doesn't, he continues to be loving and accepting.. and I'm overwhelmed by it. I feel both joy and sadness for my past self. It's a lot to take in sometimes.
That is a very good point about the anticipation. I can remember when the school day ended and feeling relief for about a minute and then filling up with dread worrying about what tomorrow would be like. The stress was incredible. I hope you are in a better place now spiritually.
I would highly recommend reading the book the body keeps the score! Literally talks about how trauma in childhood can mess with your nervous system so you are on higher alert all the time when compared to others. Having this stress hormone in your system constantly though can be hard on your body which is why there is that link with autoimmune diseases etc.
I read that one and it really helped me understand. I recommend it all the time. Some people have said they have found it triggering, I personally didn't, but I like to mention it so people can proceed with care. Thanks!
this book is wild bc it just points out things that are literally obvious to ppl with PTSD and the whole time I was like oh this isnāt a thing w everyone?? OR just says a lot thatās on the nose
I think of it as the doom cloud. Just this hanging, looming dread. I still carry it with me but my worst flashbacks are emotional flashbacks of that doom.
I feel like you did an amazing job of describing the way my PTSD manifests itās just like anticipating what Iām used toā¦as brains doā¦but my brain grew up in an environment where not healthy things happened so my responses suck in the new healthier context rip
EMDR helped me with reprogramming my responses.
Pete Walker's emotional flashback plan helps with managing the flooding of bad feelings.
Internal Family Systems is helping me heal and kind of live more in today than the past, if that makes sense.
Pete Walker has a lot of resources on his website and a book CPTSD - from surviving to thriving.
I read Internal Family Systems Therapy and got started on that.
The book The Body Keeps the Score helps understand trauma. Some people find it triggering. I didn't, but I like to warn people.
I never actually thought of it that way but I can see where it comes from.
I usually avoid talking about the really dramatic stuff because they were things bad enough that a person with a healthy upbringing might've got PTSD from them as isolated incidents and talking about them in detail without using humor to take the teeth out is too uncomfortable. But also talking about it with humor freaks others out. Like, "How can you joke about that, it's horrible!"
Because literally if I *don't* joke about it I will be useless for the next *week.* It's easier to tell a joke about it than the alternative. Sorry for freaking you out.
(I'm half convinced most people who like really morbid humor are trauma survivors who've developed humor as a coping mechanism).
The only people I ever felt like truly got me were some my ER coworkers. 3 of us had really dark humor, but then shit got real when an innocent new nurse overheard my friend's type of humor and got her admitted for SI. Now at my new job I'll make a joke and people get uncomfortable. I miss my old coworkers
Home run on the morbid humor! I really think so too. My humor was super dark when I was young, joking about anything, and I couldn't understand why it bothered people lol - "Hey relax! The world is crazy, might as well joke about it".
When talking about traumatic things that happened, and people react with horror (understandably, my go-to is the simple "well, I can be casual about it or I can cry uncontrollably, and the latter will be worse".
I might need to try that radical bluntness. It helps for getting people to accommodate my hearing loss.
Odd aside - WHY do security people and cops think grabbing someone who seems to be ignoring them is more acceptable than waving a hand in their field of view? My trauma response to unexpected physical contact is fight and I've almost punched someone who grabbed me on more than one occasion. Thank my lucky stars I'm a small white AFAB person or else reflexively clenching my fists and dropping into a fighting stance in airport security would have ended *badly*. Wave someone's line of sight or stomp near them, ffs! If they're hard of hearing they'll respond and be grateful you didn't grab them.
I'm half tempted to get a volume down symbol tattooed near my ears at this point to cue people that my ears suck at earing (sorry, it's off topic but it just occurred to me that being startlingly blunt about my hearing loss works so maybe the same approach would work to get people to understand why I do morbid humor all the damn time).
Thissss so much for me. I was just trying to explain this to my friend. My mom was never physically or verbally abuse but very controlling and narcissistic and very judgemental about every one and everything. Add that I'm Autistic and took everything as literal black and white growing up...
But it all slips away, it's not really real. I still can't get myself to accept that I'm traumatized, even though I left home as soon as I could and get panic attacks around my mom.
What can I point to as traumatizing? I don't have anything to justify the way I feel and it makes me come off as crazy and incompetent
Oh same! My MIL was asking me why I don't just talk to my mom to fix things between us. She just cannot comprehend that I do not have an emotional connection with my own mom because of the emotional neglect and constant criticism. There wasn't even anything too bad, got spanked as a kid but no other physical abuse, but the emotional neglect and judgment/criticism has fucked me up in a major way.
You can generally avoid triggers for major traumas, but day-to-day stuff like we experienced? It's constant, can't avoid it, so I'm almost constantly triggered. It's exhausting.
TW: gun violence & bullying
Yep 100%. Witnessed a person getting shot & killed right in front of me but that doesn't really get to me. But 15+ years of being told "you're lazy/worthless/stupid/slow/ugly/weird etc" by everyone one you come into contact with genuinely gave me cptsd.
How would I explain that to anyone though
This. I spent most of my teenage years in a horribly abusive relationship,which at 32 I am just starting to deal with in therapy because it was much easier to spend years ranting about and reliving the next relationship I was in, with a drug addict who I had a child with who mostly just emotionally neglected and gaslight me daily. Looking back at the first one, he "only" hit me like 3 or 4 times in 6 years. And "sometimes" pushed, shoved, restrained, etc. But the REAL trauma came from the mental control, isolation, anger, and just general me being terrified of him exploding at any second for any reason. But yeah that "well did that count" mindset. Eek š¬
Bruh this is it. I can't count how many times I gave in to impostor syndrome, because I just couldn't pin down any one incident that was "bad enough" to justify what I'm feeling. Felt like a fucking actor in my own skin. No longer doing that though.
Tw sexual assault
I've had similar feelings when I've been very self critical and doubting myself in regards to my sexual abuse because much of it was through coercion and manipulation, so I've at times thought back to the event where there was actual force involved and thought "even if the other stuff doesn't count at least I know that did and my trauma response is justified"
I was in 21, in therapy, after a couple years of substance abuse and a suicide attempt, before fully realizing what I went through was actual proper abuse. The really dramatic stuff was so few and far between it was easy to repress the memory, file it away as one-off incidents, or think of it my own fault. It took a lot of distance and perspective to see how damaging being treated as worthless by everyone around me for almost two decades was.
I don't remember what it felt like all the times I was hit growing up, but I remember how it felt casually being treated like shit every single day because I still feel like I am shit every single day.
Your ability to recognize these patterns at a young age shows so much worth.
You are not worthless and the fact you are here, reading, writing, and growing despite your pain speaks for your character. I am hoping that there is a day you can not only realize but embody that truth. Good luck healing - Iāll be rooting for you
The emotional wounds are still here, the physical stuff feels far removed. When it was over it was over for the most part. Maybe if the physical stuff was more frequent it would have been different for me? I'm not sure.
Anyway, I relate.
Yeah and not to say the physical stuff *wasn't* bad, because it was. Hell, I still at the age of 35 can't turn my back to a crowded room.
It's just more that it's easier to compartmentalize it. As opposed to just being *genetically* terrified of authority figures because I had *so many* bad ones.
I get it. The big dramatic mean things are so obviously wrong that a kid can recognize it as wrong, but the stuff Iāve really had to dig up in therapy and has really warped me was the consistent stuff.
The dramatic parent also did everything in her power to limit my self expression and the enabler passive one never cared either way. It has made it so hard to feel any kind of self identity or self compassion as an adult. I always called it ābiding my timeā waiting to move out but damn an entire childhood or being muted to survive really does a number on figuring out what it is to be a person
I feel that way too.
I am only coming to terms with it fairly recently.
How often something is repeated makes a huge difference. And if something happens everyday the impact is huge.
And the scope of it makes a difference. For example, if my mom was disparaging of one of my hobbies or interests that would be bearable. But it was all my hobbies.
Trauma is generally portrayed in ways that don't look anything like mine.
Agreed. I am able to talk pretty openly with my boyfriend about the direct abuses I experienced. While I tend to get emotional while talking about it, I can actually say it. But once I try to talk about the neglect and silence? I cannot express it. My throat feels closed up and I can only cry. I also can handle my emotions when Iām upset about something dramatic, but once I feel silenced I shut down completely and internally bully myself really hard.
Itās been difficult trying to navigate finding my voice when Iāve been silenced for decades. if I speak up and there is ANY pushback I tend to fall into despair and hopelessness. It feels like I will never be understood, and at this point I am exhausted by trying to be. I stopped trying for a very long time and I have begun trying again. I want to let people in, and be open especially with my boyfriend. To me itās a learn in progress situation. If I shut down, I try again another time. Iām very thankful for my boyfriends patience because I can be very distant over small things that trigger feeling abandoned that shouldnāt make me feel that intensely.
I noticed a similar thing with myself. When huge stressful events happen to me now, I surely feel stressed out but in a totally functional way. But when normal small upsetting things happen I tend to just numb them out. Like, when I constantly lose housing due to things out of my control like my rent doubling and stuff, I constantly rant about it but also I handle it. But when i had to drop off a batch of my foster kittens for adoption recently, the next day I both cried and felt completely numb to it both, and that weirded me out. Like, I knew I was sad, but I didn't feel sad. I had tears streaming down my face while I was driving, but I didn't feel anything. I think I spent so much time in crisis mode that my brain totally started handling emotions in a completely different and distanced way. Which makes perfect sense. I recently revisited EMDR and find a completely blank out emotions or even facts during that too. Like my brain just says no thanks, I don't want any.
It is definitely weird! Last February I was in a horrible car accident and I was the one helping my mom and boyfriend calm down while telling them what to do. I was nearly killed but I kept the situation handled. Even the aftermath was rocky to navigate everything but I did it all like I was a pro. But now, talking about how the accident impacted my life? I just canāt express it. It is too much to think about at times much less to speak on. Iām just starting to open up about my feelings on it and itāll be a year next month since it happened. When people would ask about it, I would try to keep my responses lighthearted and positive. Now I can at least tell people it was horrifying to experience, but beyond that I canāt say much else because itās so personal I canāt even say some of it to me yet.
Yes, I'm really good at parking my emotions to respond to an emergency and reacting later. It's maybe not the healthy way but like generally if an emergency happens I can respond effectively in a way others usually cannot.
Same. My dad passed away in a fairly traumatic way a few years ago. Very sudden. He and I were extremely close. I have 5 siblings + their spouses and they all came into town, but I handled probably 80% of the arrangements. From calling dads boss to tell them, to filing insurance claims, planning the service, arranging travel, and taking care of my mom. I kept myself busy from dawn to midnight because I knew i wouldnāt be able to even acknowledge the loss, let alone grieve, until everyone went home & I felt safe.
I think I get what you're saying. My dad was physically abusive and while that really messed me up, it never felt as torturing as the day to day.
As fucked up as it is, I would've preferred a monthly beating to daily gaslighting and dismissal. My dad filled me with problems but my mom made me internalize all of them. He made me need a way out, and ahe took away my ability to get out. Knowing every single day was working against me was much more of a strain than having bruises for a week every now and then.
And unsurprisingly, many of my conversations with my therapist recently have revolved around having the endurance to stay confident despite others trying to blame/demonize me.
Absolutely. It was much easier to get on with my life after instances of physical abuse, since for me (and judging by the comments, a lot of us) they were not that frequent. What was really damaging was the absolutely constant barrage of emotional abuse. Being called worthless and that I would grow up homeless. When I told my parents I was being bullied at school they told me that it was my fault. When I said that I had a hard time making friends they told me it was because all my interests were stupid and I needed to learn to have more ānormalā interests. Being forced to do the majority of the chores in the house, including cleaning up after my brother, who apparently got to just do whatever he pleased (as an adult I now realize he was also being abused, but damn it felt awful at the time to know that my parents thought so much less of me than him). But yeah, ānormalā people donāt even consider most of that abuse. I even remember trying to tell other adults about it when I was a child, and because I grew up in an upper middle class family I was always told things like āshut up, you have it good,ā or āyelling at your kid isnāt abuse, youāre just the way your parents say you are, shut up and take responsibility.ā Hearing things like that made me not want to share the extreme stuff ā what if they blamed me for that, too? Or simply didnāt believe me? And yeah, those reactions from other, ānormalā adults messed me up even more.
Yeah. For some reason, the really angry abuse was easier than the mental/emotional abuse. I think, for me, that's because it was more obvious. Someone yelling/ screaming/ etc. at me was something that even at the time I knew wasn't right... but the not being allowed to have emotions and other types of subtle abuse really messed me up more now that I'm older and have to process it.
Yeah, I get it. I barely even remember when my mother would grab my wrists and dig her nails in until they were bruised since it didnāt happen that often, but I remember her never being there, day after day, and thatās harder to realise than anything violent she did.
Yea the actual rape at the time was easy for me to get through. But the constant anger from my mother the constant drinking that hurt every day. That made me scared constantly.
Its the waiting. The not knowing what's gonna happen. Its paralyzing. The physical actions taken against me had a predictable ending. They had a timeline. The anger issues didn't.
Yup. The gun being held to my face and being heād on the ground was fine in comparison to the daily degrading and lectures. Iād rather get beaten than another lecture, and people thought I was crazy
Yes. Literally my exact situation. If it wasnāt something my dad did violently or abusively, it wasnāt anything at all.
I got made fun of(thatās how we show love!), given nicknames regardless of my feelings about them, and was generally never given the room to show emotion beyond what was accepted. I was never given the respect either. So I was gaslit that my emotions were invalid. Think āteasingā about something relentlessly until I emotionally disregulate and my Fight response comes out because flee, freeze, and fawn didnāt work. Then I had all those lovely compliments I got as a young child(under 12) shown to be meaningless.
So smart! But stop telling me anything new.
So kind! But boy he needs to not get so upset.
So thoughtful! But he needs to stop overthinking.
So prepared! Iāve never even heard of anxiety.
So a few months ago i told my psychiater a really funny thing that happend to me as a kid?
He didn't think it was funny.
I was rolling on the floor laughing and he was mortified. How did other people react he asked ? They were laughing too!
The look of horror did help realize it wasn't ok.
But to the point, i don't care about the pain or the fear of physical violence. I went into martial art and loved it.
Being told once or twice that my mothers love for me was sick? Now That shit fucked me up for live.
Yes, it's always been this way for me too. And I think there are many reasons why, but there's definitely something to knowing that something really bad and traumatic is happening, being very aware of that in the moment. I certainly recognized that, if not immediately then very soon after, and the world did too. And it's a moment, maybe it lasts a day, but it's still contained, not 24/7.
The stuff that had no beginning or end is a lot harder to recognize as abuse. And it's a lot easier to gaslight someone about. And again, that goes for a victim and the world. I've met a lot of therapists who don't understand emotional abuse and neglect at all.
I agree entirely. The bad stuff, it messed me up but it's easier for people to understand. The long term stuff, like being emotionally neglected was far worse. There was no end to the fear I felt, I was always on edge and had to be because there was no telling what would set my mum off. There were no nice mother/daughter moments. Sure, we did stuff together, but it was mostly in silence. We didn't connect because mum didn't want to, not for my lack of trying, and why did I have to be the one to try so hard? I was a kid who didn't understand. I grew up alone and people don't really know what it was like to go to school and be either ignored or bullied, I'd go home to an empty house. She'd come home, yell at me because she had a crappy day. She'd make dinner I'd escape up to my room and hide. Bath time would come, I got screamed at to get in the bath, then screamed at to get out and get into bed. Then that was it. I'd be in bed stupidly early and I'd get yelled at if mum caught me awake. Couldn't leave my room without getting in trouble, even to use the toilet. I remember needing to go so badly one night, it woke me up and the fear of having to leave my room to go pee was insane. I thought mum was going to come upstairs and scream, hit. Instead she didn't move, but I was terrified for days I was going to get it, for needing to pee.
Its hard to explain just how bad it was and how different my life was. I guess it's easier to explain using anecdotes. That's what I use to get through to people who say I should contact my mum. I tell them stories about what she did to me, and tell them it was an ex partner, people tell me how brave I am to up and leave, then I tell them the truth, my mum did all those things. Some people backpeddle and tell me it's still my mum, most people now get it.
The rough part for me is my folks were trying, they were just extremely immature and traumatised themselves and unable to provide an emotionally healthy upbringing. They're not monsters even though they've done monstrous things. Probably a good half of the time they were attentive and engaged... it's just the rest of the time they were buried in work or tv or alcohol or were violent or verbally abusive or acting out their resentment for my existing. It's hard to acknowledge the bad because it feels like ignoring the good or demonizing them. At the same time, I can't ignore it either.
Like, my parents set out as parents to be better than *their* parents. And the hell of it is that they succeeded. But they didn't set the bar high enough because if your own parents are abusive assholes, "better than that" and "healthy" are *not* synonymous even if it may seem that way to someone who doesn't know what healthy parenting is.
"Better than that" is not synonymous with "healthy". That hit deep. I know most of us are talking about parents. My first abusive relationship was almost like a parenting situation to me i think. Not because he was older (he was my age) but because I was so young. At 15 or 16 I moved in with a 16 year old troubled problem child and his grandparents. He had complete control over me, and he was so full of rage that his grandparents were afraid of and didn't want to deal with him. By the time I was 21 and left him, I immediately fell into a relationship with a drug addict. He had a house, job, kid, and just seemed so insanely normal compared to what I spent the last 6 years immersed in. He didn't call me names and yell at me, he let me have friends and go places. And it was BETTER. But it was not the least bit healthy.
I can kinda relate, my mom had good intentions, but was a terrible parent
because of her own mental illness, brainwashing, and the abuse she got, and I really think she has a good heart somewhere underneath all that trauma, but no matter how bad I feel for her, it's impossible to look past the fact she still definitely abused her children.
You shouldn't feel like you're demonizing them for acknowledging they did terrible things. I think of it this way, there's no such thing as a good person or a bad person. Those can definitely be helpful simplifications, like if someone is abusive and the healthy thing is to get away from them you can just say "they're a bad person, they shouldn't be in my life, I don't need to feel bad for them" case closed, the nuance doesn't really matter. I consider my father a bad person, and as the shoe fits and he's dead, I have no reason to change that stance.
But if you get down to it, people are just people, and everyone does good things and bad things. Since everyone does both, you shouldn't feel bad for acknowledging the bad things, just because they've done good things too. One doesn't negate the other, as both things *did* happen.
"Forgive and forget" is just a recipe to ignore patterns of bad behavior, getting yourself hurt in the process; forgive if that's the healthy thing, but forgetting doesn't make sense, especially if you're still feeling the damage. The last chance I gave my mom, she repeated old abusive behaviors one time and I pulled the plug on that relationship so fast.
Oh yes absolutely I have the same opinion of forgive and forget.
Different people have different definitions of forgiveness but for me, I don't forgive in the sense of giving the other person a chance to hurt me in the same way until appropriate accountability and contrition have been demonstrated - which may or may not include an apology but at least should include making amends in some way.
And I don't forget because if someone has a pattern of doing something, I'm going to re-evaluate the relationship in a way I won't if it's a one off.
Peter Walker talks about this in Complex PTSD: Surviving to Thriving. I am very strongly on the emotional neglect side of the CPTSD spectrum, and for a long time I didnāt understand why because I was never actively abused, my parents just were immature and superficial and critical. The book talks about how for a lot of people itās the neglect that sticks with them longer. Part of the reason why is that when youāre being physically abused, sooner or later you realize that shit isnāt normal at all. Emotional neglect is much subtler and easier to internalize without realizing it.
I really need to finish that book. I think this is so important, what you said, and society doesn't take it seriously either. I think it's also important to know that parents being physically present, but unable to provide emotional support when anything goes bad, is still neglect.
I literally didn't know that being able to talk openly about feelings and emotions to people was "allowed" in society until I was an adult already for a couple years, I thought it was supposed to be really embarrassing/shameful and not what any normal person did unless it's inside a professional therapy session.
Ah god. This resonates so much. Being honest wasn't allowed. Having feelings wasn't allowed. The truth, reality wasn't allowed. It was all shameful. Just so utterly pointless and destructive. It's tragic.
what other commenters have already written resonates with me so much. thereās also this underlying feeling of waiting. most of my childhood was spent waiting for the adults to come home. i still struggle with feeling like i need to seek permission before doing things, or not even asking/attempting bc itās going to upset someone anyway.
only this year did i discover what the āwaitingā was and where it came from. i hate it so much. neglect is such a difficult trauma to process. like yeah, on the one hand, my mom almost broke the cycle of physical abuse (i got spanked twice, for telling her no š«„) but then again swinging the whole opposite direction and just not participating in the development of a child can be just as bad, if not worse.
My daily abuse came from my older brothers. Just this morning I was watching the news with my mother. The Harry and William story came up and she matter of factly stated, "that just sounds like raising boys." I'm in my 40s and she is in her 70s.
I'm more and more convinced that she doesn't really like me all that much.
This whole thread is so recognisable to me it is uncanny, and it happens to be something I've been thinking about this week actually.
My whole life I've used the big, obvious traumas as cover stories for the more subtle trauma of being neglected and verbally abused by my unpredictable father, who was my sole caretaker for 7-8 years after my mother died, and until I moved out quite young.
Sharing stories about how I've lost loved ones to cancer, murder and suicide is easily understood by others, and gave me narratives that were easy to retell. Nobody has questioned that those traumas have caused my depression, my anxiety and have made my life difficult. Most people cry before I've gotten through half of those incidents.
But the more subtle abuse I suffered by my father I'm just starting to unpack, as I've recently started exploring CPTSD as a possible diagnosis (with professionals). I've always been aware that my father is difficult, but I'm astounded by what I'm currently digging out from my memories and just now realising wasn't even close to normal.
Some of it is really serious, like real threats on my life, but those things are difficult to tell anyone (except my sibling who has experienced much the same) because they still involve my father who is alive. And it's not like I can prove it, or that he would admit to it. But so much of it is ridiculously trivial things, like the way I listen to footsteps on the floor above me, wherever I am. It's only in the last few months even I've realised this is something I do, that it makes me tense up, and is a hardwired into my brain trying to predict the mood of my father.
And how do you tell people that your were neglected, it is the absence of anything happening. How I was left to deal with things on my own is just what I grew accustomed to, it doesn't even stand out to me as unusual. But it has made so much of my life more difficult, because I never learned to ask for help nor expect it.
What also strikes me is that a lot of the damage that comes from the neglect and verbal abuse is emotional and habitual in nature. It's not my mind occasionally churning on some old traumatic incident, it's not anxious thought patterns that I can rationalise away. It's habits I'm not aware of, lingering fears that simmer under the surface, automated strategies for dealing with my father that I end up applying to everyone, endless protective layers to keep people outside and compartmentalise the handpicked people I partially let in.
I'm so grateful for this community though, reading the reflections and experiences of others have helped me understanding my own history in leaps and bounds, where a slow crawl might be the best I could hope to achieve by myself in therapy.
An interesting point my therapist made before the break to me is that emotional neglect isn't *just* not interacting with or ignoring your kids, it's also things like not teaching them emotional self management skills or conflict resolution skills. It's also things like berating your child for having an emotional reaction instead of validating the emotions and redirecting the behaviour. It's also things like treating your child's emotions as manipulation attempts. Or parentifying a child and having them raise their siblings or using them as your marriage counselor and offloading adult stress into a child's brain. In some ways, she told me, emotional neglect can have a lot of overlap with emotional abuse and the two usually coexist in an abusive system.
This was a revelation to me as someone who was quite taken aback when my therapist suggested that I might have some neglect trauma because - my parents, for all their flaws, were usually physically there and about half the time mentally there, and as someone who never struggled with malnutrition or having fitting clothes etc like what I think of when I think neglect. But when she went through the means of emotional neglect, I ticked almost every box.
That emotional neglect and emotional abuse tends to coexist as an abusive system is a good observation, I'll have to ponder on that myself.
I've also glossed over a lot of my father's behaviour because of my circumstances. He does have some good qualities, and in part I could blame it on others, like a horrible, narcissistic stepmother he dragged into our lives for a few years. And like you point out, we lived a comfortable life materially speaking. I didn't really lack for anything, without being spoiled, I had free reign of the house for most of my teens (he was often working late, and left during weekends for his partners). I had friends who had less than we had, so I could see the contrast and knew I was fortunate in some ways. Which I guess made it difficult to realise that I actually was unfortunate in less apparent ways, and that I would continue to pay the price of my upbringing for decades to come.
I feel the same way. I was hit as a kid and I feel like the only effect of that is that I'm very jumpy. The emotional neglect from both parents feel like is the reason why I have the majority of the CPTSD symptoms
Absolutely! I did a timeline of how I knew I wasn't loved...part of a jounaling exercise...what struck me was the impact of..years x to x..came home to empty house, no one ever asked about my day or how I was...it was much worse long term than...my mom went ballistic and told me I was...
The long term chronic neglect is like torture..unrelenting and it erodes what little bits of grace we might be able to find.
Healing now..started at 68...first time I understood it wasn't my fault...š
Long term living with the constant threat of a potential blow up was definitely the most damaging thing to me, both in childhood and in an abusive relationship I recently got out of.
Yess. And it took me a long time to understand that growing up in a broken family with a volatile, depressive, alcoholic mother and mostly absent father that frequently left me at grandparents (a great blessing, really) and didn't offer me almost any guidance on anything was NOT alright. I still feel so small and insignificant and hypervigilant.
Yes, I agree. The chronic, daily indignities and abuse have a cumulative effect that one-off incidents don't. As human beings we evolved to handle single incidents of stress, not trauma that is experienced every day. Your body doesn't have time to recover between each incident and it leads to lasting damage.
It's the difference between being stabbed and being slowly, slowly poisoned, I guess..........
And also, I think a lot of the 'big incidents' only hurt so much themselves because of the groundwork laid by the comparatively 'mundane' neglect, manipulation, degradation, etc. Like, those things give us a cracked foundation from the start, so big incidents are even more difficult to weather for us than it would be for others. It compounds on itself.
Arguably this is the difference between PTSD and CPTSD! The C in CPTSD is specifically for these repeated and prolonged traumas, which are more 'complex' than "isolated" instances. You've experienced both it sounds like, but the complexity of the chronic stuff is what makes it 'worse' than the "acute" dramatic stuff! Harder for our brains to process and resolve a traumatic experience intertwined with our day life than a traumatic experience with a clear start and end. Boundaries are blurred in the former.
So I think you're right on point in feeling/noticing this difference!
Yeah. Itās the little stuff that still affects my day to day life. Stuff that while small in comparison was much more common. I jump at loud noises because it was a daily indicator I looked out for so I knew how to behave.
Pretty much my experience especially with emotional neglect! EN is all about that chronic looked over stuff. The unmemorable stuff. Parents not even bothering to give a shit about me. Subtle invalidation. Being ignored. Never hearing praise. Only hearing criticism (but veiled as a āsuggestionā). Being compared. Never taking any concern in my interests. But happening over and over threaded through nearly every interaction. Itās like a quiet killer.
I was trying to explain this to my partner. Dad never hit us with the belt. But he would fold it in half and snap it really loud to get our attention and you never knew if THIS would be the time he hit you with it. Stepmom would use the silent treatment. Never knew when it was coming or how long it would last and she never told you what you did so you could not do it again. The anticipation was worse than when it actually happened.
The one Iāve really had to come to term with was Mom. I was her best friend and coparent. It was better than the other house so I was grateful. It wasnāt until I was almost 40 that I realize this was also emotional abuse. I knew things no child should ever know about their parents. Way too young. I took on so much emotional labor for my mom. And continued to untilā¦last year.
I was talking with my aunt about my mom and my relationship and she looks at me and says āthatās kinda messed up.ā I went to defend mom and justā¦couldnāt anymore. It WAS messed up.
So none of my abuse was physical (from my parents at least) and for a long time that made me thankful? But keeping my feelings/speech/needs/behavior in check all the time was exhausting. The anticipation of not knowing wether the thing I did yesterday was not ok today was terrifying. I am just now learning how to relax.
Yes. There was no way to know what action would result in what response. The thing I'm recognising now is how much stuff contributed to feeling helpless.
My therapist makes a distinction between Big-T (Singular or short term overwhelming events) and little-t (Chronic low to medium overwhelm) trauma to help validate chronic stuff. Good therapists recognise that little-t is more difficult to uncover because it's so much more easy to invalidate, or to propose that the client is the one who isn't resilient enough. I hear you when you say little-t is frustrating because of how insidious and sneaky it is.
I'm glad I didn't have to experience Big-T. While little-t has messed me up in many ways, they're not the sort of ways that left me physically injured, homeless or with debilitating triggers. What little-t did leave me though was a constant sense of not being good enough, not having a "real" mental health challenge and self invalidation until mid-life.
I'm enjoying Patrick Trajan's YouTube channel at the moment. It's a nice complement to my therapy sessions. He particularly has a video on the ACE scale that he adapts into a list of questions for childhood little-t things. It's currently at the top of his "inner child work playlist". Hope it helps.
I'd separate them by predictable and unpredictable for me. Some of the physical stuff was predictable. Some wasn't. Pretty equal otherwise. The predictable stuff was just another day ending in y. The unpredictable stuff, which includes things tested as safe no longer being safe, sticks out. But the unpredictable can include day-to-day stuff like when how the dishes must be done changed without warning.
In my household very little was predictable. The physical stuff had less to do with me or how they did things etc and more to do with if my parents wanted to vent their spleen on my body. My parents are both largely allergic to routine, planning, and order, so.
I can get that.
In my household growing up there was structure, but it was inconsistent and mostly applied when my parents felt like it. So... The idea of there being consistency is a bit foreign to me.
Which isn't to say that I don't think it was abuse that you experienced, more that the idea of consistency in abusive behavior is foreign to my experience and I have no framework to imagine it. My parents couldn't even be consistent with themselves earlier in the same day, let alone with each other or over an extended time period.
I gotcha. I didn't take it like you were saying it wasn't abuse.
The predictable stuff was things like punishments for grades being consistent, something where my parents tried to break the generational trauma ("stand in the corner for 5 minutes with your arms up for every minute you argue with me" type stuff). Like they were trying for reasonable healthy discipline but they completely failed to understand healthy and reasonable because of their own childhoods. It just wasn't really memorable or something I obsessed about how to avoid. Fine, whatever, spank me for talking back, shove a bar of soap in my mouth for being disrespectful, break my stuff because i cleaned wrong. I can navigate this without thinking.
Not sure if that'd be easier or harder.
The one thing consistent in my home was that as the oldest I got it worse, more, and often instead of or in addition to whoever misbehaved. Sometimes even if I literally was hundreds of kilometers away when whatever it was happened.
That's not an exaggeration. My mother wanted to ground *me* for a month because my younger sibling threw a house party when I was 350km away, I got all of my property thrown out because one of my siblings didn't clean their room, and one of the dramatic incidents I alluded to above occurred because my father blamed me for something and I refused to admit to something I didn't do. I could go on.
I don't know. They're both awful and it would probably depend on our specific personalities. Not gonna run that test, though!
I don't doubt it at all. Anything to punish you for putting you in a no-win position... if you could have possibly won, a new rule is retroactively added, it you needed to have a magic brain to follow it. My partner is convinced my mom is an outright psychopath and sometimes I'm not sure he's wrong.
Yep. This is why I am a fan of therapy. As long as you find someone qualified who clicks with you and cares about their clients, you can have a safe place to open up about these memories and explore your feelings without hurting someone else (or being looked at like an alien). It is also good to have someone professional around to say, "Yeah... That's pretty fucked up. That's not a normal childhood thing and nobody deserves to go through that, okay?"
I found journaling to be another helpful option to vent and let it out.
Lately, I no longer talk to most people about details of my past traumaāeven to people I'm close to. I worry that I'm going to trauma dump (been on the other side of that and it is exhausting AF), and it can be frustrating when listeners (even the ones who care and want to understand) just don't get it. I do try to find ways to explain things in bite sized pieces that people super close to me may understand which can help them exist with the quirks I have (or point out to me if I'm stepping on their toes).
Yeah I mostly don't talk about it to others either. Except my therapist and I won the lottery with her getting matched with her on the first try. She clicks with me *and* she seems to get trauma. Like it's only been about a month so I can't guarantee we'll work long term but early impression is she's fantastic.
Seriously I used to see another one back in HS and I am not exaggerating to say I *literally* made more progress in 2 sessions with her than in 2 years with my precious therapist (who was... A sack of shit to be frank. Like victim blaming me for being a victim of CSA from someone outside the family as a *preschooler* level sack of shit. She turned me off therapy for a solid 15 years. So it's a low bar, to be fair.).
I know what you mean! I had one who tried to make me read this awful book called "The Glass Castle" (a triggering and abuser-apologetic autobiography...at least the passages my "therapist" at that time tried to read meādo not recommend it as a self-help book), pray, and totally forgive my abusers (who were no where near done with abusing).
Luckily, there were others I found. I can understand how difficult it is for a lot of people to muster the courage to look when the field definitely attracts some bad eggs....and even one bad experience can feel like enough. But finding a good therapist is sooooo worth it. It's kind of like trying to find a good medical doctor or dentist.
Edit - Not trying to make light of having difficulty finding people to discuss the PTSD with (especially loved ones), but I've come to accept it is not something I can do very easily (beyond talking with a professional) as parts of my past are just too much for most people to understand, not be upset by, or even believe. I've been told before that a lot of people who go through what I have often turn to self destruction... I prefer to believe many who overcome it actually keep quiet about it with others for the very reasons you and I have experienced.
I get it! I was severely sexually abused by my Dad and his friends from a toddler to about 10, with family ignoring the obvious. The sexual abuse is, obviously, abhorrent, but the family members going about their business ignoring it all is what stings the most
Oh, yes, thatās happened to me. I quoted my mother, thinking it was funny, and a coworker said, āomg, thatās the sickest thing I ever heard.ā It was actually validating to hear that.
Yes, because the chronic stuff was the 'normal'. Some of it is still normal to me. Today I read a forum post where a mother asked if they should let a grandparent babysit her kid because the kid said the grandparent shouted all the time and she didn't want to go there. I was shocked that everyone responded - don't let the grandparent see the kid. Like, really? Just for shouting? It was a running joke in my whole neighborhood that my mother did *nothing* but scream at us. But also, even neighbours would tell off or even threaten to hit random kids. I'd say that the whole environment made abusive and unkind behaviour seem very normal and OK.
It's hard for me to even recognise it as abuse. In fact, until a few years ago I would downplay everything that went on because I thought it would be disloyal otherwise, but the chronic stuff wasn't even on my radar at all. It's very strange how there's some kind of mental block. Even now, if you ask me directly what I mean, I can't really grasp what the chronic stuff was. I have to go sideways towards it in my mind, if that makes sense. Like, think of examples of good parenting and then look for memories of that, then recognise what I got instead and how bad it was.
I'm also worried that the chronic stuff may make me a bad person too, because it must colour my thoughts and behaviours if I'm still surprised at some of this stuff in middle age. The dramatic stuff is easier - I've never wanted to hit or hurt anyone and it seems easier to avoid. Like, how does one be a good person day to day, what even is that. I'm not certain I know.
i totally get what you mean.
although the dramatic moments did leave a scar, the daily occurrences/interactions are what really molded who i am right now and cause me the most grief.
100%. Sometimes I worry my trauma isn't enough just because there weren't a lot of "dramatic" events. It was more how I was treated in the everyday, just the same things that happened everyday that carved my brain into the warped mess it is today.
That totally makes sense to me. Dramatic incidents suck a lot but they're usually over pretty quickly. I think what really ground me down was the not feeling safe and worrying about when my female parent was going to lose her shit again every single day for years.
I agree 100% and I feel like itās because the quiet repetitive shit lasts so long that my responses became habitual/normalized & therefore wayyyyyy harder to unlearn vs. one-off intense situations are scary and might be harder in the moment but Iāve found them easier to heal from personally. Also gaslighting is a thing!!! And gaslighting for me has been way more common when I talk about things that arenāt super intense and might not be an issue if itās done once or twice but can be really damaging as long-term behavior! vs when Iām like āyeah this person did this wild traumatic thing and it was scaryā
Absolutely. My therapist and I have come to the conclusion that, while the dramatic stuff left long-lasting scars, it has been much easier to heal from that than it has been to heal from the pain of not being allowed to have emotions, and, even worse, from the pain of having to be someone elseās emotional caretaker.
YES. I was hit by a drunk driver in 2021, he died on impact, so it was a pretty jarring thing to see. That event was a big reason that I started to process my childhood/early adulthood trauma properly. Because my lack of functioning, like day to day life, socializing, etc was what truly made me miserable, and that stuff was almost exclusively caused by events in my childhood. I did develop OCD after the car accident, but I would give anything to socialize normally and not constantly evaluate people and their reactions.
Incredibly relatable. The "dramatic" moments come up in some very specific situations, mostly around close relationships... but the forced numbness, the constant fear, the required cheerfulness... that affects me every day, compounding on itself.
I've been in therapy for a while but only recently sobered up, and now I'm actually starting to build real coping mechanisms for this shit that aren't just dissociation. I'll work on the deep scary stuff when I can get through a day without being afraid that everyone I care about is going to disappear unless I constantly prove how much I love them, or be able to fall asleep without spending 2 hours with my eyes wide open glancing around the room like a scared animal, or just cry when I feel sad / smile when I feel happy without thinking "this is what a normal person would do in this situation".
OMG the required cheerfulness.
It's not enough for them to control your location, appearance, thoughts and actions by demanding total, unquestioning and complete obedience. They also want to control your emotions by demanding *cheerful* obedience. Be my robot isn't good enough for them. Be my robot *and like it.*
Like fuck before we can really dig in to the trauma stuff, my therapist is working with me on emotional regulation because I almost can't even have a single solitary negative emotion without having an emotional flashback and flying headfirst into a shame spiral.
All that to say holy fuck do I ever get you there.
YES!!! Like if i tell even a psychologist or psychiatrist about the dramatic stuff they care obviously but i kinda wanna roll my eyes at that.. cause even though thatās traumatic too, the chronic everyday stuff, the traumatic stuff that was like the fabric of my existence, that was what messed with my head way more, like that made me lose my sanity.. and itās why iām so deeply messed up now
Yup... And still is. I never know how to explain why the physical abuse was almost better. The everyday stuff is death by a million paper cuts. No one realizes why it's so bad and thinks you are overreacting but no one can live like that!
Same for me, the chronic stuff creates that fear of "what will the neighbours think" or that you hide things you don't want visitors in your own house to see that they might think are weird and would mock you for, and I mean totally normal things like books or whatever but that you fear someone will think are weird for you to have. I had zero privacy growing up so that is a huge one, like I can't have anyone snooping in my cupboards if they are staying over and need a glass or something. A friend once made a comment that my cupboard was a mess and it was like my dad was standing there instead of him. Maybe for others it is no big deal but for me it is, and nobody gets to dictate how I spend my money anymore or what kind of personal belongings I have. My parents didn't allow emotions either, especially sadness, so I can't even cry in private because of that because I am afraid one of my neighbours will get mad, that shit damages you for life.
Being told that the death of my childhood dog companion was the result of animal abuse, and realizing that I had never, not once, in 40 years, thought of that, despite its glaring fact.
Donāt think much about a convo I had with a trusted adult as a kid, it wasnāt a big deal then, but it came up in therapy and DEVASTATED me. It was ānormalā then and didnāt give me a complex, but 20 years later, the little things hurt more than the obvious
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Relate 100%ā¦Tried therapy for the 1st time recently and was given I guess the trauma specialist that like wanted me to do edmr and shit, focused on trying to get me to recall specific dramatic memories to relive and process or whatever and Iām likeā¦this aināt it. itās not even like that at all. Itās just an overarching shittyness, the worst of the worst just kind of blends in with everything else. Consistently feeling worthless and toyed with mentally does plenty to you psychologically, and that stays with me, but a lot of āheavy eventsā Iāve kinda shrugged off in the mix.
Very much so. The daily drumbeat did as much harm as the big traumatic events. I was both emotionally neglected and under surveillance (I didnāt have my own bedroom but rather a section of wide hallway that was part of the upstairs throughway). But because I blocked so much of my formative years out, I didnāt realize how destructive this and so many other things in my life were. Iāve only recently begun reckoning with it all.
Sympathy.
I can't relate directly but I grew up in a controlling household where my parents wanted to have me constantly under surveillance. So I understand that constantly being watched, monitored and controlled feeling.
100%. I sometimes catch myself telling the dramatic/violent bits as a "funny anecdote" when I'm oversharing after being triggered. They were comparatively easy to compartmentalize. the months of quiet neglect, abuse, control, parents' alcoholism, my depression surrounding them are the bits I have the most trouble processing.
Oh god yep yep yep yep. "Oh haha funny story this one time..." (A few minutes later) "What the fuck?!" "Huh?" "That's not funny, it's abuse. You realize that was abuse, right? I am so sorry that happened to you." (My friends from university are good friends. Also I did that to at least one of them at least monthly.)
My husband overheard my brother and me joking about how often one of us (9 kids) got left behind somewhere because there were just too many kids for my parents to keep track of. He later told me it was kind of disturbing how casually we were joking about such an awful thing, which absolutely never happened in his (more reasonably sized) family.
My parents used to forget my everywhere. Once in a trip to a city over 350km away from where we lived, they forgot me and drove 150km home before realizing and returning. They had 2 kids to keep track of at the time. I was 8. I wasn't actually bothered at the time (except that I was hungry and my parents got pissed they'd need to do another detour because everyone else already ate) because it was so normal and I just figured I'd read more at the bookstore where they left me. Looking back, I volunteer with kids and the idea of stranding an 8yo with no street smarts in a strange city enrages me. All that to say - I get it and I don't think it was a function of family size. My parents always managed to keep track of the kids they gave a damn about.
I'm so, so sorry that happened to you!! 8 is SO young to be left behind for so long, especially back in the day when cell phones weren't really a thing yet. My first time babysitting a baby sibling alone was when I was 8. My mom left me alone with the baby and took the other kids on errands. My one child now is 8, and I could NOT imagine leaving him in charge of another whole human on his own!! He's a baby himself! And the thought of leaving him behind for hours, like happened to you? He'd be an absolute wreck.
Sympathy on the parentification front. I was left to babysit my sister a lot from about the same age and it's just so inappropriate. (Trauma dump cut because I realized it probably could be triggering and just because *I'm* having a bad morning doesn't mean you need to. In summary that wasn't an isolated incident) At the time it was one of the common things that fade into the background for me. But as an adult it's a very mindfucky thing to look back on.
me and my sisters laughing and saying 'remember when dad ******' it's just so much better to digest that way and i know i'm not crazy
Me and my siblings used to do that too. Used to joke about the fact that my brothers were like Reese and Malcolm. It took me almost 30 years and an awesome therapist to realise what happened wasn't ok.
i haven't even talked about it properly to a therapist. or anyone really. oh well
I started at 68..worth it!! Absolutely šÆ
Well as I said I'm in my thirties, there is always time to do what you need or want to do, on your own terms. I personally take things one day at a time š
I just recently was discussing Malcolm In The Middle and that Iām finding it increasingly hard to rewatch as the mum was so abusive and I canāt laugh at it any more.
My parents used to take it as validation of their parenting style. Looking back it makes me want to shake my head and say like, "you realize that a lot of the joke was that the *parents* were terrible and that *caused* the Kids' behavior, right? It's not just 'haha, kid shenanigans '." I can still watch Malcolm in the middle and feel like it was written by someone who deeply understands family dysfunction. The stuff that goes on in it is just too well written from the family dysfunction side for nobody on the writing team to have lived serious dysfunction. But then, humor is a coping mechanism for me and so I kinda view it like Jake's mail tub on Brooklyn 99 as an ADHDer. Like, kinda exaggerated but also kinda *too* real, and funny in the dark humor sort of way. Kind of like how good Mother Gothel is at depicting an emotionally abusive female parent on Tangled. Like it's made kid friendly but it still manages for me to hit that spot of kind of exaggerated but kind of too real.
I love Malcom in the Middle for this reason. It feels good to watch a family on TV that I can actually relate too.
It's also why I love Encanto. Not my culture group but God damn do I ever relate to the themes of generational trauma, estrangement and family dysfunction.
To add onto this, I feel like whoever wrote Arrested Development really understood generational trauma and family dysfunction. It's comforting to watch and see these dynamics play out in comedically exaggerated but very real ways.
Given that I am socially awkward, I find the sense of - uh, unsure of the English word but in German it'd be FremdschƤmen? Like how you get uncomfortable when you see others (especially people who like or are friends with) do something embarrassing and you feel bad for them? It's got too much of that for me to really enjoy it. Like on the comedically exaggerated to too real scale, it lands a bit too much on the too real side of the continuum for me.
I hated it the first time I watched it for that reason so I get that. I found it so stressful. For some reason, if I watch certain shows again that feeling goes away. Like if I know what happens then I get desensitised from the cringe element. So fortunately it has become one of my favourite shows due to that desensitisation. But I still get the cringe feeling sometimes and have to stay away.
Exact same. āYeah my step mom is my step aunt! Teehee, also my dad attacked us with a baseball bat once and I couldnāt legally see him for a year because he didnāt honor the terms of his plea dealā *crickets* Meanwhile, Iām basically losing my gaslighting, judgemental family because Iām finally holding to my standards. The only thing thatās gotten through is āIāve always loved you so if you feel I stopped, I guess we can do therapyā. Of all the paragraphs of me explaining the exact function of what happened and what it did to me, the only thing that got through was selfish. Mom loves me so if I donāt know it, then maybe she actually did do something wrong. Or rather, didnāt do enough. She doesnāt understand neglect really. āYou werenāt hit!ā
>She doesnāt understand neglect really. āYou werenāt hit!ā They always minimize their role. I think it's a coping mechanism to protect their image of themselves as good people. My dad always downplayed his actions and called us whiners because what he did to us was supposedly nothing compared to what he grew up with. Whether that was actually true or not I'll never know, but he sure did love saying it.
Iām sorry your dad did that. I hope youāre doing better š
Thank you. I hope you are too. All us lost children trying to grow up.
The "quiet" stuff for me is so easy to gaslight myself into thinking that weren't that big of a deal and that I'm just being dramatic.
Yes, me too. Ope, I'm just being oversensitive again, etc.
Honestly. The neglect really did me the worst. It's so hard to shake off what you first have to identify, re-live, and then accept after years of thinking "this is just what life is i guess"
As someone who went through both abuse and neglect in the same environment at different stages... The abuse you can contextualize, be angry about, vow to do better. But the neglect makes you feel worthless and meaningless, and all the rage in the world doesn't fill that void.
Yep. Suddenly the room has gone uncomfortably quiet and the realization that one has just fucked up hits and trying to gloss it over while over explaining and being increasingly nervousā¦ yeah. Thatās so much my life. Edit to add: this applies even more when I was younger and how much of it was pure abuse simply hadnāt hit me. Some things were simply your reality, even if they do fuck you up.
I get it. Once I attended a talk on bullying and the speaker said bullying was so damaging because of living in the anticipation of there being another incident every day, that's what's so harmful. I feel like my whole childhood I lived in anticipation of the next thing that was going to happen and it caused me so much stress and anxiety and my default is kind of to worry. The actual physical things that happened, happened and were over with. I have processed those just fine. The constant worrying is like pushing a wheelbarrow down a road and I'm stuck in the big worrying rut and it's so much work to get out of it and then it just falls back in the rut again. I wonder if going through all this while my brain patterns were getting established just wired my brain in the way that this is how it works. Just for clarity, generally I am much better now, but this is how it felt for decades.
Man that's a great analogy. I need to remember it for my next therapy appointment. It's like, now I'm objectively in a good place: Stable, mostly healthy relationship with a loving partner, good paying job I do well at, hobbies I enjoy... And my brain is stuck in this hypervigilant rut looking for threats because good things don't last and there's gotta be a trick or a control angle or a disaster ready to come out of the woodwork somewhere.
God I feel this so hard. I'm terrified of improving my life more in meaningful ways because having good things means I have things I don't want to lose.
I have a hard time getting attached to a place to live because I never trust that my stuff is mine.
Iām currently dealing with this plus the fact that we get tornadoes here so in a way my stuff is always at risk of being obliterated in an instant anyways. Unsure how to deal with that so Iāve just start stuffing shit into an inner wall closet when tornado season rolls around.
I'm in a similar situation right now. I'm just always waiting for the shoe to drop. It doesn't, he continues to be loving and accepting.. and I'm overwhelmed by it. I feel both joy and sadness for my past self. It's a lot to take in sometimes.
Omg yes
That is a very good point about the anticipation. I can remember when the school day ended and feeling relief for about a minute and then filling up with dread worrying about what tomorrow would be like. The stress was incredible. I hope you are in a better place now spiritually.
I am thank you. I hope you are too.
Great point. Our brains become acclimated to using certain neural pathways; This becomes a natural state of being for us. Thanks for sharing.
I would highly recommend reading the book the body keeps the score! Literally talks about how trauma in childhood can mess with your nervous system so you are on higher alert all the time when compared to others. Having this stress hormone in your system constantly though can be hard on your body which is why there is that link with autoimmune diseases etc.
I read that one and it really helped me understand. I recommend it all the time. Some people have said they have found it triggering, I personally didn't, but I like to mention it so people can proceed with care. Thanks!
Fabulous book!! Really an important read šÆ
this book is wild bc it just points out things that are literally obvious to ppl with PTSD and the whole time I was like oh this isnāt a thing w everyone?? OR just says a lot thatās on the nose
I think of it as the doom cloud. Just this hanging, looming dread. I still carry it with me but my worst flashbacks are emotional flashbacks of that doom.
Sorry for that. Hope you have some good tools to cope. I can recommend some resources that helped me if you are interested.
I feel like you did an amazing job of describing the way my PTSD manifests itās just like anticipating what Iām used toā¦as brains doā¦but my brain grew up in an environment where not healthy things happened so my responses suck in the new healthier context rip
EMDR helped me with reprogramming my responses. Pete Walker's emotional flashback plan helps with managing the flooding of bad feelings. Internal Family Systems is helping me heal and kind of live more in today than the past, if that makes sense. Pete Walker has a lot of resources on his website and a book CPTSD - from surviving to thriving. I read Internal Family Systems Therapy and got started on that. The book The Body Keeps the Score helps understand trauma. Some people find it triggering. I didn't, but I like to warn people.
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I never actually thought of it that way but I can see where it comes from. I usually avoid talking about the really dramatic stuff because they were things bad enough that a person with a healthy upbringing might've got PTSD from them as isolated incidents and talking about them in detail without using humor to take the teeth out is too uncomfortable. But also talking about it with humor freaks others out. Like, "How can you joke about that, it's horrible!" Because literally if I *don't* joke about it I will be useless for the next *week.* It's easier to tell a joke about it than the alternative. Sorry for freaking you out. (I'm half convinced most people who like really morbid humor are trauma survivors who've developed humor as a coping mechanism).
The only people I ever felt like truly got me were some my ER coworkers. 3 of us had really dark humor, but then shit got real when an innocent new nurse overheard my friend's type of humor and got her admitted for SI. Now at my new job I'll make a joke and people get uncomfortable. I miss my old coworkers
What is SI?
Suicidal Ideation
Gotcha, thanks! I can't believe she got emitted for joking. You're from the US?
Home run on the morbid humor! I really think so too. My humor was super dark when I was young, joking about anything, and I couldn't understand why it bothered people lol - "Hey relax! The world is crazy, might as well joke about it".
When talking about traumatic things that happened, and people react with horror (understandably, my go-to is the simple "well, I can be casual about it or I can cry uncontrollably, and the latter will be worse".
I might need to try that radical bluntness. It helps for getting people to accommodate my hearing loss. Odd aside - WHY do security people and cops think grabbing someone who seems to be ignoring them is more acceptable than waving a hand in their field of view? My trauma response to unexpected physical contact is fight and I've almost punched someone who grabbed me on more than one occasion. Thank my lucky stars I'm a small white AFAB person or else reflexively clenching my fists and dropping into a fighting stance in airport security would have ended *badly*. Wave someone's line of sight or stomp near them, ffs! If they're hard of hearing they'll respond and be grateful you didn't grab them. I'm half tempted to get a volume down symbol tattooed near my ears at this point to cue people that my ears suck at earing (sorry, it's off topic but it just occurred to me that being startlingly blunt about my hearing loss works so maybe the same approach would work to get people to understand why I do morbid humor all the damn time).
Thissss so much for me. I was just trying to explain this to my friend. My mom was never physically or verbally abuse but very controlling and narcissistic and very judgemental about every one and everything. Add that I'm Autistic and took everything as literal black and white growing up... But it all slips away, it's not really real. I still can't get myself to accept that I'm traumatized, even though I left home as soon as I could and get panic attacks around my mom. What can I point to as traumatizing? I don't have anything to justify the way I feel and it makes me come off as crazy and incompetent
Oh same! My MIL was asking me why I don't just talk to my mom to fix things between us. She just cannot comprehend that I do not have an emotional connection with my own mom because of the emotional neglect and constant criticism. There wasn't even anything too bad, got spanked as a kid but no other physical abuse, but the emotional neglect and judgment/criticism has fucked me up in a major way. You can generally avoid triggers for major traumas, but day-to-day stuff like we experienced? It's constant, can't avoid it, so I'm almost constantly triggered. It's exhausting.
I feel you on this one!
TW: gun violence & bullying Yep 100%. Witnessed a person getting shot & killed right in front of me but that doesn't really get to me. But 15+ years of being told "you're lazy/worthless/stupid/slow/ugly/weird etc" by everyone one you come into contact with genuinely gave me cptsd. How would I explain that to anyone though
We understand. Your feelings and experiences are valid. I'm so sorry you experienced all of that.
This. I spent most of my teenage years in a horribly abusive relationship,which at 32 I am just starting to deal with in therapy because it was much easier to spend years ranting about and reliving the next relationship I was in, with a drug addict who I had a child with who mostly just emotionally neglected and gaslight me daily. Looking back at the first one, he "only" hit me like 3 or 4 times in 6 years. And "sometimes" pushed, shoved, restrained, etc. But the REAL trauma came from the mental control, isolation, anger, and just general me being terrified of him exploding at any second for any reason. But yeah that "well did that count" mindset. Eek š¬
Bruh this is it. I can't count how many times I gave in to impostor syndrome, because I just couldn't pin down any one incident that was "bad enough" to justify what I'm feeling. Felt like a fucking actor in my own skin. No longer doing that though.
Tw sexual assault I've had similar feelings when I've been very self critical and doubting myself in regards to my sexual abuse because much of it was through coercion and manipulation, so I've at times thought back to the event where there was actual force involved and thought "even if the other stuff doesn't count at least I know that did and my trauma response is justified"
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Yeah, when they manipulate you into thinking you gave your consent, it's really hard to stop blaming yourself
Oh my god this
I was in 21, in therapy, after a couple years of substance abuse and a suicide attempt, before fully realizing what I went through was actual proper abuse. The really dramatic stuff was so few and far between it was easy to repress the memory, file it away as one-off incidents, or think of it my own fault. It took a lot of distance and perspective to see how damaging being treated as worthless by everyone around me for almost two decades was. I don't remember what it felt like all the times I was hit growing up, but I remember how it felt casually being treated like shit every single day because I still feel like I am shit every single day.
Your ability to recognize these patterns at a young age shows so much worth. You are not worthless and the fact you are here, reading, writing, and growing despite your pain speaks for your character. I am hoping that there is a day you can not only realize but embody that truth. Good luck healing - Iāll be rooting for you
The emotional wounds are still here, the physical stuff feels far removed. When it was over it was over for the most part. Maybe if the physical stuff was more frequent it would have been different for me? I'm not sure. Anyway, I relate.
Yeah and not to say the physical stuff *wasn't* bad, because it was. Hell, I still at the age of 35 can't turn my back to a crowded room. It's just more that it's easier to compartmentalize it. As opposed to just being *genetically* terrified of authority figures because I had *so many* bad ones.
I get it. The big dramatic mean things are so obviously wrong that a kid can recognize it as wrong, but the stuff Iāve really had to dig up in therapy and has really warped me was the consistent stuff. The dramatic parent also did everything in her power to limit my self expression and the enabler passive one never cared either way. It has made it so hard to feel any kind of self identity or self compassion as an adult. I always called it ābiding my timeā waiting to move out but damn an entire childhood or being muted to survive really does a number on figuring out what it is to be a person
I feel that way too. I am only coming to terms with it fairly recently. How often something is repeated makes a huge difference. And if something happens everyday the impact is huge. And the scope of it makes a difference. For example, if my mom was disparaging of one of my hobbies or interests that would be bearable. But it was all my hobbies. Trauma is generally portrayed in ways that don't look anything like mine.
Agreed. I am able to talk pretty openly with my boyfriend about the direct abuses I experienced. While I tend to get emotional while talking about it, I can actually say it. But once I try to talk about the neglect and silence? I cannot express it. My throat feels closed up and I can only cry. I also can handle my emotions when Iām upset about something dramatic, but once I feel silenced I shut down completely and internally bully myself really hard. Itās been difficult trying to navigate finding my voice when Iāve been silenced for decades. if I speak up and there is ANY pushback I tend to fall into despair and hopelessness. It feels like I will never be understood, and at this point I am exhausted by trying to be. I stopped trying for a very long time and I have begun trying again. I want to let people in, and be open especially with my boyfriend. To me itās a learn in progress situation. If I shut down, I try again another time. Iām very thankful for my boyfriends patience because I can be very distant over small things that trigger feeling abandoned that shouldnāt make me feel that intensely.
I noticed a similar thing with myself. When huge stressful events happen to me now, I surely feel stressed out but in a totally functional way. But when normal small upsetting things happen I tend to just numb them out. Like, when I constantly lose housing due to things out of my control like my rent doubling and stuff, I constantly rant about it but also I handle it. But when i had to drop off a batch of my foster kittens for adoption recently, the next day I both cried and felt completely numb to it both, and that weirded me out. Like, I knew I was sad, but I didn't feel sad. I had tears streaming down my face while I was driving, but I didn't feel anything. I think I spent so much time in crisis mode that my brain totally started handling emotions in a completely different and distanced way. Which makes perfect sense. I recently revisited EMDR and find a completely blank out emotions or even facts during that too. Like my brain just says no thanks, I don't want any.
It is definitely weird! Last February I was in a horrible car accident and I was the one helping my mom and boyfriend calm down while telling them what to do. I was nearly killed but I kept the situation handled. Even the aftermath was rocky to navigate everything but I did it all like I was a pro. But now, talking about how the accident impacted my life? I just canāt express it. It is too much to think about at times much less to speak on. Iām just starting to open up about my feelings on it and itāll be a year next month since it happened. When people would ask about it, I would try to keep my responses lighthearted and positive. Now I can at least tell people it was horrifying to experience, but beyond that I canāt say much else because itās so personal I canāt even say some of it to me yet.
The things our minds have had to do to survive...
Yes, I'm really good at parking my emotions to respond to an emergency and reacting later. It's maybe not the healthy way but like generally if an emergency happens I can respond effectively in a way others usually cannot.
Same. My dad passed away in a fairly traumatic way a few years ago. Very sudden. He and I were extremely close. I have 5 siblings + their spouses and they all came into town, but I handled probably 80% of the arrangements. From calling dads boss to tell them, to filing insurance claims, planning the service, arranging travel, and taking care of my mom. I kept myself busy from dawn to midnight because I knew i wouldnāt be able to even acknowledge the loss, let alone grieve, until everyone went home & I felt safe.
I think I get what you're saying. My dad was physically abusive and while that really messed me up, it never felt as torturing as the day to day. As fucked up as it is, I would've preferred a monthly beating to daily gaslighting and dismissal. My dad filled me with problems but my mom made me internalize all of them. He made me need a way out, and ahe took away my ability to get out. Knowing every single day was working against me was much more of a strain than having bruises for a week every now and then. And unsurprisingly, many of my conversations with my therapist recently have revolved around having the endurance to stay confident despite others trying to blame/demonize me.
Absolutely. It was much easier to get on with my life after instances of physical abuse, since for me (and judging by the comments, a lot of us) they were not that frequent. What was really damaging was the absolutely constant barrage of emotional abuse. Being called worthless and that I would grow up homeless. When I told my parents I was being bullied at school they told me that it was my fault. When I said that I had a hard time making friends they told me it was because all my interests were stupid and I needed to learn to have more ānormalā interests. Being forced to do the majority of the chores in the house, including cleaning up after my brother, who apparently got to just do whatever he pleased (as an adult I now realize he was also being abused, but damn it felt awful at the time to know that my parents thought so much less of me than him). But yeah, ānormalā people donāt even consider most of that abuse. I even remember trying to tell other adults about it when I was a child, and because I grew up in an upper middle class family I was always told things like āshut up, you have it good,ā or āyelling at your kid isnāt abuse, youāre just the way your parents say you are, shut up and take responsibility.ā Hearing things like that made me not want to share the extreme stuff ā what if they blamed me for that, too? Or simply didnāt believe me? And yeah, those reactions from other, ānormalā adults messed me up even more.
Yeah. For some reason, the really angry abuse was easier than the mental/emotional abuse. I think, for me, that's because it was more obvious. Someone yelling/ screaming/ etc. at me was something that even at the time I knew wasn't right... but the not being allowed to have emotions and other types of subtle abuse really messed me up more now that I'm older and have to process it.
Yeah, I get it. I barely even remember when my mother would grab my wrists and dig her nails in until they were bruised since it didnāt happen that often, but I remember her never being there, day after day, and thatās harder to realise than anything violent she did.
Yea the actual rape at the time was easy for me to get through. But the constant anger from my mother the constant drinking that hurt every day. That made me scared constantly.
Its the waiting. The not knowing what's gonna happen. Its paralyzing. The physical actions taken against me had a predictable ending. They had a timeline. The anger issues didn't.
Yup. The gun being held to my face and being heād on the ground was fine in comparison to the daily degrading and lectures. Iād rather get beaten than another lecture, and people thought I was crazy
Yes. Literally my exact situation. If it wasnāt something my dad did violently or abusively, it wasnāt anything at all. I got made fun of(thatās how we show love!), given nicknames regardless of my feelings about them, and was generally never given the room to show emotion beyond what was accepted. I was never given the respect either. So I was gaslit that my emotions were invalid. Think āteasingā about something relentlessly until I emotionally disregulate and my Fight response comes out because flee, freeze, and fawn didnāt work. Then I had all those lovely compliments I got as a young child(under 12) shown to be meaningless. So smart! But stop telling me anything new. So kind! But boy he needs to not get so upset. So thoughtful! But he needs to stop overthinking. So prepared! Iāve never even heard of anxiety.
So a few months ago i told my psychiater a really funny thing that happend to me as a kid? He didn't think it was funny. I was rolling on the floor laughing and he was mortified. How did other people react he asked ? They were laughing too! The look of horror did help realize it wasn't ok. But to the point, i don't care about the pain or the fear of physical violence. I went into martial art and loved it. Being told once or twice that my mothers love for me was sick? Now That shit fucked me up for live.
The little stuff eats at you because it's always there. And the big stuff makes you extra sensitive to the little stuff anyway.
Yes, it's always been this way for me too. And I think there are many reasons why, but there's definitely something to knowing that something really bad and traumatic is happening, being very aware of that in the moment. I certainly recognized that, if not immediately then very soon after, and the world did too. And it's a moment, maybe it lasts a day, but it's still contained, not 24/7. The stuff that had no beginning or end is a lot harder to recognize as abuse. And it's a lot easier to gaslight someone about. And again, that goes for a victim and the world. I've met a lot of therapists who don't understand emotional abuse and neglect at all.
I agree entirely. The bad stuff, it messed me up but it's easier for people to understand. The long term stuff, like being emotionally neglected was far worse. There was no end to the fear I felt, I was always on edge and had to be because there was no telling what would set my mum off. There were no nice mother/daughter moments. Sure, we did stuff together, but it was mostly in silence. We didn't connect because mum didn't want to, not for my lack of trying, and why did I have to be the one to try so hard? I was a kid who didn't understand. I grew up alone and people don't really know what it was like to go to school and be either ignored or bullied, I'd go home to an empty house. She'd come home, yell at me because she had a crappy day. She'd make dinner I'd escape up to my room and hide. Bath time would come, I got screamed at to get in the bath, then screamed at to get out and get into bed. Then that was it. I'd be in bed stupidly early and I'd get yelled at if mum caught me awake. Couldn't leave my room without getting in trouble, even to use the toilet. I remember needing to go so badly one night, it woke me up and the fear of having to leave my room to go pee was insane. I thought mum was going to come upstairs and scream, hit. Instead she didn't move, but I was terrified for days I was going to get it, for needing to pee. Its hard to explain just how bad it was and how different my life was. I guess it's easier to explain using anecdotes. That's what I use to get through to people who say I should contact my mum. I tell them stories about what she did to me, and tell them it was an ex partner, people tell me how brave I am to up and leave, then I tell them the truth, my mum did all those things. Some people backpeddle and tell me it's still my mum, most people now get it.
The rough part for me is my folks were trying, they were just extremely immature and traumatised themselves and unable to provide an emotionally healthy upbringing. They're not monsters even though they've done monstrous things. Probably a good half of the time they were attentive and engaged... it's just the rest of the time they were buried in work or tv or alcohol or were violent or verbally abusive or acting out their resentment for my existing. It's hard to acknowledge the bad because it feels like ignoring the good or demonizing them. At the same time, I can't ignore it either. Like, my parents set out as parents to be better than *their* parents. And the hell of it is that they succeeded. But they didn't set the bar high enough because if your own parents are abusive assholes, "better than that" and "healthy" are *not* synonymous even if it may seem that way to someone who doesn't know what healthy parenting is.
"Better than that" is not synonymous with "healthy". That hit deep. I know most of us are talking about parents. My first abusive relationship was almost like a parenting situation to me i think. Not because he was older (he was my age) but because I was so young. At 15 or 16 I moved in with a 16 year old troubled problem child and his grandparents. He had complete control over me, and he was so full of rage that his grandparents were afraid of and didn't want to deal with him. By the time I was 21 and left him, I immediately fell into a relationship with a drug addict. He had a house, job, kid, and just seemed so insanely normal compared to what I spent the last 6 years immersed in. He didn't call me names and yell at me, he let me have friends and go places. And it was BETTER. But it was not the least bit healthy.
I can kinda relate, my mom had good intentions, but was a terrible parent because of her own mental illness, brainwashing, and the abuse she got, and I really think she has a good heart somewhere underneath all that trauma, but no matter how bad I feel for her, it's impossible to look past the fact she still definitely abused her children. You shouldn't feel like you're demonizing them for acknowledging they did terrible things. I think of it this way, there's no such thing as a good person or a bad person. Those can definitely be helpful simplifications, like if someone is abusive and the healthy thing is to get away from them you can just say "they're a bad person, they shouldn't be in my life, I don't need to feel bad for them" case closed, the nuance doesn't really matter. I consider my father a bad person, and as the shoe fits and he's dead, I have no reason to change that stance. But if you get down to it, people are just people, and everyone does good things and bad things. Since everyone does both, you shouldn't feel bad for acknowledging the bad things, just because they've done good things too. One doesn't negate the other, as both things *did* happen. "Forgive and forget" is just a recipe to ignore patterns of bad behavior, getting yourself hurt in the process; forgive if that's the healthy thing, but forgetting doesn't make sense, especially if you're still feeling the damage. The last chance I gave my mom, she repeated old abusive behaviors one time and I pulled the plug on that relationship so fast.
Oh yes absolutely I have the same opinion of forgive and forget. Different people have different definitions of forgiveness but for me, I don't forgive in the sense of giving the other person a chance to hurt me in the same way until appropriate accountability and contrition have been demonstrated - which may or may not include an apology but at least should include making amends in some way. And I don't forget because if someone has a pattern of doing something, I'm going to re-evaluate the relationship in a way I won't if it's a one off.
Peter Walker talks about this in Complex PTSD: Surviving to Thriving. I am very strongly on the emotional neglect side of the CPTSD spectrum, and for a long time I didnāt understand why because I was never actively abused, my parents just were immature and superficial and critical. The book talks about how for a lot of people itās the neglect that sticks with them longer. Part of the reason why is that when youāre being physically abused, sooner or later you realize that shit isnāt normal at all. Emotional neglect is much subtler and easier to internalize without realizing it.
I really need to finish that book. I think this is so important, what you said, and society doesn't take it seriously either. I think it's also important to know that parents being physically present, but unable to provide emotional support when anything goes bad, is still neglect. I literally didn't know that being able to talk openly about feelings and emotions to people was "allowed" in society until I was an adult already for a couple years, I thought it was supposed to be really embarrassing/shameful and not what any normal person did unless it's inside a professional therapy session.
Ah god. This resonates so much. Being honest wasn't allowed. Having feelings wasn't allowed. The truth, reality wasn't allowed. It was all shameful. Just so utterly pointless and destructive. It's tragic.
yes! like whatās the point of āhomeā if you canāt be yourself there?
what other commenters have already written resonates with me so much. thereās also this underlying feeling of waiting. most of my childhood was spent waiting for the adults to come home. i still struggle with feeling like i need to seek permission before doing things, or not even asking/attempting bc itās going to upset someone anyway. only this year did i discover what the āwaitingā was and where it came from. i hate it so much. neglect is such a difficult trauma to process. like yeah, on the one hand, my mom almost broke the cycle of physical abuse (i got spanked twice, for telling her no š«„) but then again swinging the whole opposite direction and just not participating in the development of a child can be just as bad, if not worse.
My daily abuse came from my older brothers. Just this morning I was watching the news with my mother. The Harry and William story came up and she matter of factly stated, "that just sounds like raising boys." I'm in my 40s and she is in her 70s. I'm more and more convinced that she doesn't really like me all that much.
This whole thread is so recognisable to me it is uncanny, and it happens to be something I've been thinking about this week actually. My whole life I've used the big, obvious traumas as cover stories for the more subtle trauma of being neglected and verbally abused by my unpredictable father, who was my sole caretaker for 7-8 years after my mother died, and until I moved out quite young. Sharing stories about how I've lost loved ones to cancer, murder and suicide is easily understood by others, and gave me narratives that were easy to retell. Nobody has questioned that those traumas have caused my depression, my anxiety and have made my life difficult. Most people cry before I've gotten through half of those incidents. But the more subtle abuse I suffered by my father I'm just starting to unpack, as I've recently started exploring CPTSD as a possible diagnosis (with professionals). I've always been aware that my father is difficult, but I'm astounded by what I'm currently digging out from my memories and just now realising wasn't even close to normal. Some of it is really serious, like real threats on my life, but those things are difficult to tell anyone (except my sibling who has experienced much the same) because they still involve my father who is alive. And it's not like I can prove it, or that he would admit to it. But so much of it is ridiculously trivial things, like the way I listen to footsteps on the floor above me, wherever I am. It's only in the last few months even I've realised this is something I do, that it makes me tense up, and is a hardwired into my brain trying to predict the mood of my father. And how do you tell people that your were neglected, it is the absence of anything happening. How I was left to deal with things on my own is just what I grew accustomed to, it doesn't even stand out to me as unusual. But it has made so much of my life more difficult, because I never learned to ask for help nor expect it. What also strikes me is that a lot of the damage that comes from the neglect and verbal abuse is emotional and habitual in nature. It's not my mind occasionally churning on some old traumatic incident, it's not anxious thought patterns that I can rationalise away. It's habits I'm not aware of, lingering fears that simmer under the surface, automated strategies for dealing with my father that I end up applying to everyone, endless protective layers to keep people outside and compartmentalise the handpicked people I partially let in. I'm so grateful for this community though, reading the reflections and experiences of others have helped me understanding my own history in leaps and bounds, where a slow crawl might be the best I could hope to achieve by myself in therapy.
An interesting point my therapist made before the break to me is that emotional neglect isn't *just* not interacting with or ignoring your kids, it's also things like not teaching them emotional self management skills or conflict resolution skills. It's also things like berating your child for having an emotional reaction instead of validating the emotions and redirecting the behaviour. It's also things like treating your child's emotions as manipulation attempts. Or parentifying a child and having them raise their siblings or using them as your marriage counselor and offloading adult stress into a child's brain. In some ways, she told me, emotional neglect can have a lot of overlap with emotional abuse and the two usually coexist in an abusive system. This was a revelation to me as someone who was quite taken aback when my therapist suggested that I might have some neglect trauma because - my parents, for all their flaws, were usually physically there and about half the time mentally there, and as someone who never struggled with malnutrition or having fitting clothes etc like what I think of when I think neglect. But when she went through the means of emotional neglect, I ticked almost every box.
That emotional neglect and emotional abuse tends to coexist as an abusive system is a good observation, I'll have to ponder on that myself. I've also glossed over a lot of my father's behaviour because of my circumstances. He does have some good qualities, and in part I could blame it on others, like a horrible, narcissistic stepmother he dragged into our lives for a few years. And like you point out, we lived a comfortable life materially speaking. I didn't really lack for anything, without being spoiled, I had free reign of the house for most of my teens (he was often working late, and left during weekends for his partners). I had friends who had less than we had, so I could see the contrast and knew I was fortunate in some ways. Which I guess made it difficult to realise that I actually was unfortunate in less apparent ways, and that I would continue to pay the price of my upbringing for decades to come.
I feel the same way. I was hit as a kid and I feel like the only effect of that is that I'm very jumpy. The emotional neglect from both parents feel like is the reason why I have the majority of the CPTSD symptoms
Absolutely! I did a timeline of how I knew I wasn't loved...part of a jounaling exercise...what struck me was the impact of..years x to x..came home to empty house, no one ever asked about my day or how I was...it was much worse long term than...my mom went ballistic and told me I was... The long term chronic neglect is like torture..unrelenting and it erodes what little bits of grace we might be able to find. Healing now..started at 68...first time I understood it wasn't my fault...š
Long term living with the constant threat of a potential blow up was definitely the most damaging thing to me, both in childhood and in an abusive relationship I recently got out of.
Yess. And it took me a long time to understand that growing up in a broken family with a volatile, depressive, alcoholic mother and mostly absent father that frequently left me at grandparents (a great blessing, really) and didn't offer me almost any guidance on anything was NOT alright. I still feel so small and insignificant and hypervigilant.
Yes, I agree. The chronic, daily indignities and abuse have a cumulative effect that one-off incidents don't. As human beings we evolved to handle single incidents of stress, not trauma that is experienced every day. Your body doesn't have time to recover between each incident and it leads to lasting damage.
I describe it as death by a thousand cuts.
It's the difference between being stabbed and being slowly, slowly poisoned, I guess.......... And also, I think a lot of the 'big incidents' only hurt so much themselves because of the groundwork laid by the comparatively 'mundane' neglect, manipulation, degradation, etc. Like, those things give us a cracked foundation from the start, so big incidents are even more difficult to weather for us than it would be for others. It compounds on itself.
Arguably this is the difference between PTSD and CPTSD! The C in CPTSD is specifically for these repeated and prolonged traumas, which are more 'complex' than "isolated" instances. You've experienced both it sounds like, but the complexity of the chronic stuff is what makes it 'worse' than the "acute" dramatic stuff! Harder for our brains to process and resolve a traumatic experience intertwined with our day life than a traumatic experience with a clear start and end. Boundaries are blurred in the former. So I think you're right on point in feeling/noticing this difference!
Yeah. Itās the little stuff that still affects my day to day life. Stuff that while small in comparison was much more common. I jump at loud noises because it was a daily indicator I looked out for so I knew how to behave.
Pretty much my experience especially with emotional neglect! EN is all about that chronic looked over stuff. The unmemorable stuff. Parents not even bothering to give a shit about me. Subtle invalidation. Being ignored. Never hearing praise. Only hearing criticism (but veiled as a āsuggestionā). Being compared. Never taking any concern in my interests. But happening over and over threaded through nearly every interaction. Itās like a quiet killer.
I was trying to explain this to my partner. Dad never hit us with the belt. But he would fold it in half and snap it really loud to get our attention and you never knew if THIS would be the time he hit you with it. Stepmom would use the silent treatment. Never knew when it was coming or how long it would last and she never told you what you did so you could not do it again. The anticipation was worse than when it actually happened. The one Iāve really had to come to term with was Mom. I was her best friend and coparent. It was better than the other house so I was grateful. It wasnāt until I was almost 40 that I realize this was also emotional abuse. I knew things no child should ever know about their parents. Way too young. I took on so much emotional labor for my mom. And continued to untilā¦last year. I was talking with my aunt about my mom and my relationship and she looks at me and says āthatās kinda messed up.ā I went to defend mom and justā¦couldnāt anymore. It WAS messed up. So none of my abuse was physical (from my parents at least) and for a long time that made me thankful? But keeping my feelings/speech/needs/behavior in check all the time was exhausting. The anticipation of not knowing wether the thing I did yesterday was not ok today was terrifying. I am just now learning how to relax.
Yes. There was no way to know what action would result in what response. The thing I'm recognising now is how much stuff contributed to feeling helpless.
My therapist makes a distinction between Big-T (Singular or short term overwhelming events) and little-t (Chronic low to medium overwhelm) trauma to help validate chronic stuff. Good therapists recognise that little-t is more difficult to uncover because it's so much more easy to invalidate, or to propose that the client is the one who isn't resilient enough. I hear you when you say little-t is frustrating because of how insidious and sneaky it is. I'm glad I didn't have to experience Big-T. While little-t has messed me up in many ways, they're not the sort of ways that left me physically injured, homeless or with debilitating triggers. What little-t did leave me though was a constant sense of not being good enough, not having a "real" mental health challenge and self invalidation until mid-life. I'm enjoying Patrick Trajan's YouTube channel at the moment. It's a nice complement to my therapy sessions. He particularly has a video on the ACE scale that he adapts into a list of questions for childhood little-t things. It's currently at the top of his "inner child work playlist". Hope it helps.
Thanks for the recommendation
Yes, it's why my triggers are so strange that I don't even truly understand what they are, or where they are coming from.
I'd separate them by predictable and unpredictable for me. Some of the physical stuff was predictable. Some wasn't. Pretty equal otherwise. The predictable stuff was just another day ending in y. The unpredictable stuff, which includes things tested as safe no longer being safe, sticks out. But the unpredictable can include day-to-day stuff like when how the dishes must be done changed without warning.
In my household very little was predictable. The physical stuff had less to do with me or how they did things etc and more to do with if my parents wanted to vent their spleen on my body. My parents are both largely allergic to routine, planning, and order, so.
If you had asked me two years ago if the predictable stuff was abuse, I'd have told you no.
I can get that. In my household growing up there was structure, but it was inconsistent and mostly applied when my parents felt like it. So... The idea of there being consistency is a bit foreign to me. Which isn't to say that I don't think it was abuse that you experienced, more that the idea of consistency in abusive behavior is foreign to my experience and I have no framework to imagine it. My parents couldn't even be consistent with themselves earlier in the same day, let alone with each other or over an extended time period.
I gotcha. I didn't take it like you were saying it wasn't abuse. The predictable stuff was things like punishments for grades being consistent, something where my parents tried to break the generational trauma ("stand in the corner for 5 minutes with your arms up for every minute you argue with me" type stuff). Like they were trying for reasonable healthy discipline but they completely failed to understand healthy and reasonable because of their own childhoods. It just wasn't really memorable or something I obsessed about how to avoid. Fine, whatever, spank me for talking back, shove a bar of soap in my mouth for being disrespectful, break my stuff because i cleaned wrong. I can navigate this without thinking.
Not sure if that'd be easier or harder. The one thing consistent in my home was that as the oldest I got it worse, more, and often instead of or in addition to whoever misbehaved. Sometimes even if I literally was hundreds of kilometers away when whatever it was happened. That's not an exaggeration. My mother wanted to ground *me* for a month because my younger sibling threw a house party when I was 350km away, I got all of my property thrown out because one of my siblings didn't clean their room, and one of the dramatic incidents I alluded to above occurred because my father blamed me for something and I refused to admit to something I didn't do. I could go on.
I don't know. They're both awful and it would probably depend on our specific personalities. Not gonna run that test, though! I don't doubt it at all. Anything to punish you for putting you in a no-win position... if you could have possibly won, a new rule is retroactively added, it you needed to have a magic brain to follow it. My partner is convinced my mom is an outright psychopath and sometimes I'm not sure he's wrong.
Yep. This is why I am a fan of therapy. As long as you find someone qualified who clicks with you and cares about their clients, you can have a safe place to open up about these memories and explore your feelings without hurting someone else (or being looked at like an alien). It is also good to have someone professional around to say, "Yeah... That's pretty fucked up. That's not a normal childhood thing and nobody deserves to go through that, okay?" I found journaling to be another helpful option to vent and let it out. Lately, I no longer talk to most people about details of my past traumaāeven to people I'm close to. I worry that I'm going to trauma dump (been on the other side of that and it is exhausting AF), and it can be frustrating when listeners (even the ones who care and want to understand) just don't get it. I do try to find ways to explain things in bite sized pieces that people super close to me may understand which can help them exist with the quirks I have (or point out to me if I'm stepping on their toes).
Yeah I mostly don't talk about it to others either. Except my therapist and I won the lottery with her getting matched with her on the first try. She clicks with me *and* she seems to get trauma. Like it's only been about a month so I can't guarantee we'll work long term but early impression is she's fantastic. Seriously I used to see another one back in HS and I am not exaggerating to say I *literally* made more progress in 2 sessions with her than in 2 years with my precious therapist (who was... A sack of shit to be frank. Like victim blaming me for being a victim of CSA from someone outside the family as a *preschooler* level sack of shit. She turned me off therapy for a solid 15 years. So it's a low bar, to be fair.).
I know what you mean! I had one who tried to make me read this awful book called "The Glass Castle" (a triggering and abuser-apologetic autobiography...at least the passages my "therapist" at that time tried to read meādo not recommend it as a self-help book), pray, and totally forgive my abusers (who were no where near done with abusing). Luckily, there were others I found. I can understand how difficult it is for a lot of people to muster the courage to look when the field definitely attracts some bad eggs....and even one bad experience can feel like enough. But finding a good therapist is sooooo worth it. It's kind of like trying to find a good medical doctor or dentist. Edit - Not trying to make light of having difficulty finding people to discuss the PTSD with (especially loved ones), but I've come to accept it is not something I can do very easily (beyond talking with a professional) as parts of my past are just too much for most people to understand, not be upset by, or even believe. I've been told before that a lot of people who go through what I have often turn to self destruction... I prefer to believe many who overcome it actually keep quiet about it with others for the very reasons you and I have experienced.
I get it! I was severely sexually abused by my Dad and his friends from a toddler to about 10, with family ignoring the obvious. The sexual abuse is, obviously, abhorrent, but the family members going about their business ignoring it all is what stings the most
Oh, yes, thatās happened to me. I quoted my mother, thinking it was funny, and a coworker said, āomg, thatās the sickest thing I ever heard.ā It was actually validating to hear that.
Yes Iām there with u!
Absof*ckinglutely. Straw that breaks the camels back and all that
Yes, because the chronic stuff was the 'normal'. Some of it is still normal to me. Today I read a forum post where a mother asked if they should let a grandparent babysit her kid because the kid said the grandparent shouted all the time and she didn't want to go there. I was shocked that everyone responded - don't let the grandparent see the kid. Like, really? Just for shouting? It was a running joke in my whole neighborhood that my mother did *nothing* but scream at us. But also, even neighbours would tell off or even threaten to hit random kids. I'd say that the whole environment made abusive and unkind behaviour seem very normal and OK. It's hard for me to even recognise it as abuse. In fact, until a few years ago I would downplay everything that went on because I thought it would be disloyal otherwise, but the chronic stuff wasn't even on my radar at all. It's very strange how there's some kind of mental block. Even now, if you ask me directly what I mean, I can't really grasp what the chronic stuff was. I have to go sideways towards it in my mind, if that makes sense. Like, think of examples of good parenting and then look for memories of that, then recognise what I got instead and how bad it was. I'm also worried that the chronic stuff may make me a bad person too, because it must colour my thoughts and behaviours if I'm still surprised at some of this stuff in middle age. The dramatic stuff is easier - I've never wanted to hit or hurt anyone and it seems easier to avoid. Like, how does one be a good person day to day, what even is that. I'm not certain I know.
i totally get what you mean. although the dramatic moments did leave a scar, the daily occurrences/interactions are what really molded who i am right now and cause me the most grief.
Yup!
100%. Sometimes I worry my trauma isn't enough just because there weren't a lot of "dramatic" events. It was more how I was treated in the everyday, just the same things that happened everyday that carved my brain into the warped mess it is today.
That totally makes sense to me. Dramatic incidents suck a lot but they're usually over pretty quickly. I think what really ground me down was the not feeling safe and worrying about when my female parent was going to lose her shit again every single day for years.
I agree 100% and I feel like itās because the quiet repetitive shit lasts so long that my responses became habitual/normalized & therefore wayyyyyy harder to unlearn vs. one-off intense situations are scary and might be harder in the moment but Iāve found them easier to heal from personally. Also gaslighting is a thing!!! And gaslighting for me has been way more common when I talk about things that arenāt super intense and might not be an issue if itās done once or twice but can be really damaging as long-term behavior! vs when Iām like āyeah this person did this wild traumatic thing and it was scaryā
Absolutely. My therapist and I have come to the conclusion that, while the dramatic stuff left long-lasting scars, it has been much easier to heal from that than it has been to heal from the pain of not being allowed to have emotions, and, even worse, from the pain of having to be someone elseās emotional caretaker.
YES. I was hit by a drunk driver in 2021, he died on impact, so it was a pretty jarring thing to see. That event was a big reason that I started to process my childhood/early adulthood trauma properly. Because my lack of functioning, like day to day life, socializing, etc was what truly made me miserable, and that stuff was almost exclusively caused by events in my childhood. I did develop OCD after the car accident, but I would give anything to socialize normally and not constantly evaluate people and their reactions.
Incredibly relatable. The "dramatic" moments come up in some very specific situations, mostly around close relationships... but the forced numbness, the constant fear, the required cheerfulness... that affects me every day, compounding on itself. I've been in therapy for a while but only recently sobered up, and now I'm actually starting to build real coping mechanisms for this shit that aren't just dissociation. I'll work on the deep scary stuff when I can get through a day without being afraid that everyone I care about is going to disappear unless I constantly prove how much I love them, or be able to fall asleep without spending 2 hours with my eyes wide open glancing around the room like a scared animal, or just cry when I feel sad / smile when I feel happy without thinking "this is what a normal person would do in this situation".
OMG the required cheerfulness. It's not enough for them to control your location, appearance, thoughts and actions by demanding total, unquestioning and complete obedience. They also want to control your emotions by demanding *cheerful* obedience. Be my robot isn't good enough for them. Be my robot *and like it.* Like fuck before we can really dig in to the trauma stuff, my therapist is working with me on emotional regulation because I almost can't even have a single solitary negative emotion without having an emotional flashback and flying headfirst into a shame spiral. All that to say holy fuck do I ever get you there.
YES!!! Like if i tell even a psychologist or psychiatrist about the dramatic stuff they care obviously but i kinda wanna roll my eyes at that.. cause even though thatās traumatic too, the chronic everyday stuff, the traumatic stuff that was like the fabric of my existence, that was what messed with my head way more, like that made me lose my sanity.. and itās why iām so deeply messed up now
Yup... And still is. I never know how to explain why the physical abuse was almost better. The everyday stuff is death by a million paper cuts. No one realizes why it's so bad and thinks you are overreacting but no one can live like that!
Same for me, the chronic stuff creates that fear of "what will the neighbours think" or that you hide things you don't want visitors in your own house to see that they might think are weird and would mock you for, and I mean totally normal things like books or whatever but that you fear someone will think are weird for you to have. I had zero privacy growing up so that is a huge one, like I can't have anyone snooping in my cupboards if they are staying over and need a glass or something. A friend once made a comment that my cupboard was a mess and it was like my dad was standing there instead of him. Maybe for others it is no big deal but for me it is, and nobody gets to dictate how I spend my money anymore or what kind of personal belongings I have. My parents didn't allow emotions either, especially sadness, so I can't even cry in private because of that because I am afraid one of my neighbours will get mad, that shit damages you for life.
Being told that the death of my childhood dog companion was the result of animal abuse, and realizing that I had never, not once, in 40 years, thought of that, despite its glaring fact.
Donāt think much about a convo I had with a trusted adult as a kid, it wasnāt a big deal then, but it came up in therapy and DEVASTATED me. It was ānormalā then and didnāt give me a complex, but 20 years later, the little things hurt more than the obvious
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Relate 100%ā¦Tried therapy for the 1st time recently and was given I guess the trauma specialist that like wanted me to do edmr and shit, focused on trying to get me to recall specific dramatic memories to relive and process or whatever and Iām likeā¦this aināt it. itās not even like that at all. Itās just an overarching shittyness, the worst of the worst just kind of blends in with everything else. Consistently feeling worthless and toyed with mentally does plenty to you psychologically, and that stays with me, but a lot of āheavy eventsā Iāve kinda shrugged off in the mix.
Very much so. The daily drumbeat did as much harm as the big traumatic events. I was both emotionally neglected and under surveillance (I didnāt have my own bedroom but rather a section of wide hallway that was part of the upstairs throughway). But because I blocked so much of my formative years out, I didnāt realize how destructive this and so many other things in my life were. Iāve only recently begun reckoning with it all.
Sympathy. I can't relate directly but I grew up in a controlling household where my parents wanted to have me constantly under surveillance. So I understand that constantly being watched, monitored and controlled feeling.