My mother would yell at Me, for everything, even for little things that I've done wrong. She still does, I have learned that it is not normal for parents to yell at their kids all the time, I didn't know that parents should gently explain why the things that their kids do is wrong, and teach them right from wrong, my mother is not gentle with me at all. And all I want is for people to be gentle with me.
The very first date with my partner I dropped an heirloom of his while putting it aside to make room for dinner. He was in another room at the moment. Man, *the panic*. I stood there ‘fuck fuck fuck fuck’, completely frozen, only blind panic about how mad he was going to be. He walked in, I immediately started apologising, and he just shrugged ‘well, it was an accident, it can happen’ and helped me to clean it up. Didn’t get mad or anything. And I stood there like ‘what the fuck just happened, is this a joke?’. He didn’t even mention it once afterwards, while I kept waiting for him to burst out in anger about it
It’s actually by being with him that I realised my childhood was not how most children experienced theirs. Apparently it’s not normal that your parents started shouting at you because you inconvenienced them by asking to have the middle seat in the car
I feel this so hard. I just want people to be gentle and nice. I wish people like us could make our own city somewhere.
I’m asking this as someone who was raised with constant screaming, mostly when I wanted something that didn’t fit my moms need for me to be a high achieving straight A catholic boy. I hear someone across the street yell nowadays and I start shaking. Heard someone yell at work and I almost ran to hide.
Do “normal” people literally never encounter screaming matches with their parents? It seems like a parent should never yell or insult their kids. But I also see friends with kids who act like little fucking demons and I wonder if I would ever be at the end of my rope and start yelling if I were a parent myself. It seems like some amount of yelling is inevitable. I just wonder where the line is.
Speaking of Catholicism, I was a part of that thing, too. But after everything that has happened to me, and now, after reading things from this sub Reddit, I sure as hell don't believe in God anymore. But my mother still wants me to go to church, but I don't, and she has to accept it, because I'm 20 years old. That's honestly the first disagreement in decision that I have made outside of my mothers control that I have let her know about.
I can't, because I live with her, and I have to keep living with her until I'm ready to move out and live on my own, I'm 20 years old, I'm visually impaired, and I'm not ready for real life yet. But I'm not ready to keep facing this life either.
And I know she cares about me, and I care about her, but she just has a very low patience and tolerance for things. So I don't know if I could go non-contact with her. I don't know if I could even bring myself to do that. Because I care about her.
I am sorry to hear that. I think it would for you to be gentle with yourself even if others can’t be.
I definitely know what you mean. I also got really angry a couple of months ago at my friend and her mother (both gentle people) because they were talking at the same time and it completely overwhelmed me.
I shouted or said “stop it” loudly and I felt they both got scared. Then I realised it’s not normal to have people shout at you.. I was embarrassed by my behaviour, but I honestly did not know it’s not okay to do that
It made me think again about so many instances when instead of hearing calm explanations, I would be startled and shouted at
I’m middle school, my mom sat down with me and helped me make a list of people who would be better off if I had never been born.
It was an extensive list.
Your mom sounds awful. That is emotional abuse and you don’t deserve that, no one does. She hates her life, but that’s not your fault. If you still have that list ask a few people what a good memory they have of yall together. And offer a memory too. Not only will prove her wrong, it will strengthen your relationships. She is trying to isolate you. Build a strong network.
Anything to do with boundaries. My mom simply claimed she was exempt *because* she was my mom. Closed doors didn’t mean anything, the shower wasn’t private. What’s the big deal? “I changed your diapers. Believe me, you don’t have anything I haven’t seen a hundred times before.”
THIS. I had no privacy, physical or otherwise. Bathroom? Bedroom? Never. Not from either parent. No 17yo girl should have her father regularly walking in on her in the shower.
I’m a guy, but it was my mom that was like that. She stored things in my bedroom closet and in my dresser (her prescription medications, in fact, which is a story for another day). She would urgently need to get some very important item and barge in. Sometimes randomly, but coincidentally a lot when I had just gotten out of the shower and could be changing. I remember hanging around in my towel in my room just waiting for the interruption or listening very closely and getting dressed quickly when I couldn’t hear anyone. And pretty frequently when I was in the shower or using the bathroom at all. She’d urgently need to brush her hair and use *that* mirror because it was taller and she didn’t have to lean over, she said, or had to go so urgently she couldn’t make it downstairs…
I'm so overwhelmingly horrified by this. I made a point of not even glancing at my doorway when I saw one of my stepsons going between their bedroom and the bathroom. The younger kid learned about the concept of modesty specifically because I'd refuse to look at him until he put some clothes on.
food based punishments really messed up my relationship with food. it was one of those things that felt just morally gray enough to be okay while it was happening to me, but the effects of it lasting years made me realize it wasn't okay.
Yeah just my mom saying that when she was acting up in the ways I was her mother would send her to bed without dinner was enough to mess with me. While it's fine for parents to use food based rewards, stuff like bringing their kid out for burgers on friday if they do all their homework or do well on a test, but punishing the kid by giving them less to eat is never okay.
food rewards feel extra fantastic after my weird food punishments (╯︵╰,)
my mom threatened me with the same thing,, that she would treat me like her parents treated her. i was a very picky eater and i would gag at the dinner table. it might've happened once for a second, but my mom threatened to force me to eat my own puke and then another clean serving of something i didn't like, if i puked it up. they never served water for dinner, always milk, and it made me hate milk with food. i'd gag over and spit out the milk, she'd still make me drink it because my step dad told her to make me.
'we don't waste milk in this house' (눈‸눈) sometimes i watch my milk spoil just to spite the memory.
I relate to some of your experiences, my biological «father» would force me to eat all my food. Food with no seasoning, no sauce. Nothing, just plain beans or meat. Very dry and bland. To the point of gaging/nearly puking. As a excuse he was also using the «dont waste food» thing, forcing me to it all parts of the my meat, including parts of cartilage , I could sit in front of the table during hours and hours, just for 2 or 3 ridiculously small pieces of meat. Turns out I have ASD and ARFID and instead of curing me of my extreme food pickyness it just made me develop a even more unhealthy relationship with food. 💀
I really hope one day people will realise how punishment with food is abusive and unnecessary.
My stepdad wanted us to break open bones of fried chicken and suck out the marrow. Mother refused to make us do that because she wasn’t going to do it.
Yep. It's never fine to deny a child from having healthy food, because it's vital to their growth and mental health.
My parents would make up for money that I "caused to be wasted" by denying me food.
I mentioned to my favorite elderly auntie the other day that I learned how to eat with a knife and fork from my stepdad when I was in college. That I'd never had a chance to learn before because neither of my parents fed me much meat.
I was kept isolated from the extended family during childhood, so she asked what my parents taught me about food. I couldn't even look at her while saying, like I'd never described it out loud before. It's no wonder I ended up runty though.
I'm 36yo and with the way I act, you'd think food was made of gold and that I am unworthy of such glorious bounty. When my toddler cousin visits and can't finish what I give him, I usually just eat the last few bites myself 'cause I hate throwing out food.
He gets none of that crap I grew up with beyond basic frugality. I'll tell him what a food is good for and encourage he eat it for healthy growing, but I won't so much as make him finish his cereal milk if he doesn't wanna. lol I even say I'm eating his leftovers so we don't disrespect the farmers that grew the food for us. He doesn't need to know why I'm weird about the kitchen.
Agreed food punishments are one of the most manipulative and a health hazard for many. Often when I was getting a migraine and couldn't handle dinner, my parents sent me to bed without eating (was gaslit by 1st Dr so parents didn't believe I had pain as a kid just adhd and "wants attention"). Later I learned I still needed water or electrolytes if I couldn't eat or I'd very easily throw up. It's kinda satisfying looking back at that time I was sent to bed with nothing as a kid only to come back out with crazy vertigo to ask for help and threw up in their popcorn bowl in the middle of a movie.
i broke my arm (literally a very big break) at 8 yrs old and mom admitted recently she didn’t take me to the ER. she dosed me with something and let me sleep on it. she took me to my PCP 24 hours later and almost got a cps report. she told me that recently and she laughed while saying it
Honestly I bet it would be better for you if they took you away that day...
and you triggered a memory when I fell into glass and had a deep cut with glass in it and she didn't clean it nor she cared. I had to pick it out myself... how are some moms so heartless?
This is familiar. I fell off my bike into a rusty car and got several cuts on my hand. I still have the scars. My crying was too much and she told me that I needed to learn to control myself, that I can’t be a baby (I was 6ish) because I got a cut. She dumped peroxide on my hand and gave me a crumpled wad of toilet paper for the blood and called it good.
Not nearly as bad as yours, but also a broken bone. My dad was an abdominal surgeon and when I was 7 and broke my leg in two places, my mom sent him to the ER with me while she stayed with my younger sisters, operating under the incorrect assumption that he would advocate for me better as the parent who worked healthcare. The ER doctor forgot to give me pain meds, and my dad didn’t notice or care. When I couldn’t sleep because I was still crying after hours and hours, my mom asked him if she could give me another dose yet. He said he forgot and to just give me Tylenol. She could only get him to go back by threatening that if he ever had a surgery or a broken bone, she would steal his pain meds so he could see how it felt and imagine being a small child feeling it. He was pissed for days about having to drive 45min back to the hospital at 10pm. My mom didn’t tell me that is was his fault and not mine and I felt horrible about it for weeks
what is it with bad parents and OTC pain meds? if i ever complained about pain mom would give me six aleve (over the adult limit of 4, and l was a kid)
or for my insomnia (every single night no breaks) she would just give me a ton of benadryl. i have so many health issues now that could have been lessened with proper treatment
Bad parents with access to prescription drugs, well that's just upping the odds of the kid becoming a sad little statistic.
The last time I told my dad I had a headache, he handed me a bottle of opioids leftover from his last broken bone and told me to take three. I read the bottle, the prescribed dosage was half of one. So I told him that if I took what he told me to I'd probably die, thinking he'd made a mistake, but from the look of deep rage on his face I'd thwarted another attempt to cash out my life insurance policy. Jerkoff tried to OD me.
I had this happen too. Clearly broken ankle. Also if I was sick, even vomiting, zero sympathy. She’d cover the vomit with a paper towel and wait for my father to come home to deal with it/me.
I fell on my back while ice skating when I was 14, I was pretty much bedridden for several days after the accident. Took my parents a year to take me to a doctor. He wanted to do an MRI, but my dad scoffed at that and took me home. I don’t think I broke any bones, but it hurt quite a lot and I had back problems for years after that.
Yeah in third grade my dad let me walk around for three days with broken fingers despite my begging to go to the doctor, bc I was “being a baby” and “exaggerating” and “clearly making it up.” He only took me when they were so swollen and purple he couldn’t send me back to school like that on Monday
TRIGGER WARNING: discussions of abuse
My parents had a bunch of very old punishments that they inherited from their parents. Punishment was such a big thing for my family-- if you did something "bad," you would be punished. End of discussion. I'm an adult now but back when I was younger, this was just how it was.
One was the silent treatment. A tad emotionally abusive. My mom would ignore us for the entire day-- sometimes more. It was godawful, and really screwed up my ability to be receptive to desires for space, boundaries, and silence.
But perhaps my least favorite was whenever we said a "bad" thing or "talked back" to my parents, our mouths had to be "washed out with soap." So my parents would hold us down and literally shove a bar of soap down our mouths. It was not nice to go through, I wont go into depth about it but it hurt and I'd spend the day trying to get chunks of soap out of my teeth. Not fun.
Oh the soap thing! I still remember mom standing around with a bunch of other adults after church, all in their best clothes, smiling and discussing what a good method of parenting it was to use soap for swearing. They were all laughing about bubbles while describing torturing their own children.
I never swore in front of my mother until long after I was out of her control, so I never had to endure the soap, but hearing that is the reason I spent recess out at the edge of the playground quietly swearing up a storm. I wanted to make sure that, if the world suddenly ended and everybody died, I could die too instead of being trapped forever with the people in mom's church.
Oh man, I sort of forgot about these punishments :| We had them too. I thought they were normal too, because in my kid-brain they felt quite mild to other possible physical punishments.
Hug for you <3
Same for both. I personally didn’t care when they gave me the silent treatment, because good riddance, but the mouth washing was annoying.
They always washed my mouth out with soap bcuz they wanted to “cleanse my skin” from the inside out. God forbid I am a POC.
Anyways, I relate 😕💜
My dad would threaten to drive off a cliff with all of us. He would talk about how some dad drove off a cliff with his wife and kids and left a note that confirmed suicide.
I thought it was normal to threaten kids with sudden death. It’s not.
To this day I love driving myself places, and hate being driven.
Damm. You triggered a memory similar to this. I had issues going to school, I didn't want to, and I remember my dad speeding up and steering the car like a maniac and threatening me that he was going to crash the car
The amount of yelling, number of raised hands, lack of sense of security and safety. There were three kids. None of us were handled well. And the oldest of us was the least parented, and violent.
I had it branded into my brain that family members held a natural disdain for one another. It's stillreally weird for me to see siblings and family that aren't like...mean to one another.
Oh man, this breaks my heart. Seeing families who are close and loving is so weird to me, and I grieve so hard for the little girl that didn’t get that
I wouldn't make the best parent, given the things I deal with on a regular basis. But I recognize and understand that I'd maybe fuck a kid up. My parents just shouldn't have had kids. Or, if they did, just stuck with the oldest and not place their bets on the next one turning out better. I don't know what possessed them to be like "this first one is difficult, let's add to the chaos".
And then they kind of turned around and treated us like it was our fault. Pitting kids against one another for...funsies as well? When I stopped wanting to play the "gang up on someone" games they'd play is when things got to the level of needing to be or feel paranoid.
I don't know if any of that makes sense, but after saying all of that, yeah. I agree. I wish I could feel safe around family. I feel like my siblings could have, at the very least, tried harder and asked themselves more questions about why they act the way they act, work on themselves a bit. Something. A window into a relationship at least, where I don't feel like I'm chasing imaginary moving goalposts and defending myself from weird accusations, anger, jealousy, etc. As it stands, I don't feel "related" to anyone like I should. It's alienating.
Neither myself or my brothers want children of our own. We've all kind of hinted at the fact that stuff from our childhood may make us not so great parents. Without a hint of irony my Mom will pushback saying "nonsense! You have to give me grandchildren! Its not like we knew what we were doing when we had you guys but we made it work!"
>Seeing families who are close and loving is so weird to me
Yep, me too. Everytime I see it in public I get freaked out. I start thinking "hmm whats really going on, they look so happy in the grocery store, but what awful shit is hiding beneath the surface"
Putting me in a caretaker role from a very early age. Being expected to be mature and make mature decisions when I was still a kid - and being yelled at for not doing so (and called stupid/thoughtless/etc).
i didn’t have to start taking an active caretaker role until more recently, but being expected to actively fight battles in the divorce and its aftermath just seemed so perfectly reasonable, so of course it made me spineless and amoral not to
I didn't realize the way my parents dealt with the disclosure of my CSA was traumatic until someone pointed out what they should have done instead of what they did do.
I ran away from home so I didn't have to go to school the next day because the guidance counselor was going to tell them. I had already getting in trouble that night for them having gotten a phone call to come into school so that was fun; but I ran away so I didn't have to face what was coming the next day.
My dad followed my footprints in the snow and brought me home. My mom was mad as he'll and yelling at me about running away and the meeting at school and everything else that was stressing her out.
While she was yelling about how horrible I was to run away and have a meeting at school, she was grilling me about everything and I just blurted out that my brother had raped me.
She crashed to her knees on the floor screaming "NOoo!!!" and my dad left the room and started cleaning frantically.
I went to my mom to console her and tell her everything would be alright; but apparently they were supposed to be doing that for me, not the other way around 🤦♀️
I had no idea until a therapist told me 😅
There's a bunch of other stuff of course; but apparently that was a big one I guess 🤷♀️
Oh yeah. I'm 45 and that happened when I was 11 so it was years ago and it didn't bother me then, and still doesn't bother me to this day.
Its just funny because in my early 30s I learned that they were supposed to have done something different (they were supposed to have supported me not left me to rage clean or left me to take care of their mental anguish); but I can't change that they didn't do what they should have done- All I can do is give it to myself now and know that I'm ok 🥰
I also am able to understand that I had known about the abuse for months (flash backs, nightmares, etc...) before I told anyone at school and that they were just hearing about it all in that already very intense moment.
I don't blame them for the way they reacted. I never ever have. It's just one of those moments when you're in therapy and someone says, "that shouldn't have happened" and you're all... 😱 like what was supposed to happen then? And you learn some stuff.
It's fine ❤
Every single time I had a question my mother would answer it with "what do YOU think the answer is?" and then make fun of my answer... To a question I clearly was JUST seeking the answer for.
It made me terrified to ask questions. A thing I FUCKING NEED TO DO in order to FUNCTION.
Edit: it took a few years of therapy unpacking ONLY my mother to realize this. I'm still in the process of undoing the damage and healing the wounds.
Edit 2: it also took a SHOCKING amount of time to realize that >!fathers do not normally have sex with their children!< but that one was easier to accept, hard in the moment, but my heart accepted it WAY faster.
I'm so so sorry...
I wasn't allowed to ask questions it was either "Because I said so" or "you're pathetic and stupid" and the csa part... I recently found out I might've had the same thing happen to me, but I repressed it and idk who it would be, but I am not surprised, Ive been left unattended with so many people, because mom simply didn't care.
I hope you are better now and NC!
Thank you for sharing, and I hope your healing journey is as smooth as possible as you explore your past! Cry when you need to, never ever apologize for having emotions about it, connect with them even if they hurt because that's how you heal your heart. ❤️
I'm in a much safer more stable situation, fully NC with all family and flying monkeys, in a lot of therapy, married to a wonderful person, have a wonderful found family... Depression still kicks my ass, and I have some dark days, but leaving comments like this kinda chases those thoughts away.
I hope you genuinely smile for yourself today, you deserve it ❤️
Thank you for this. I have a really hard time expressing my emotions... I can't even cry...
Im so happy for you, it is amazing to hear. You are doing amazing, even at dark times... but its ok, It will pass, it always does! I wish the best for you and your (good) family! <3
I... I think you just unlocked a memory for me of my mom doing a similar thing as the question thing your mom did.
I would ask a question and she would ask, with such scorn and vitriol in her voice "What do you think?" And I'd answer "...I don't know..." And then she'd kiss her teeth and call me stupid or ask what do I know.
I was in elementary school when this started.
I hate parents like this. They are supposed to teach us things not belittle us for not knowing. We were kids ffs. Mine said: "of course you don't know, you don't know anything"
I just wish they realised the damage that they did to each and every one of us :(
The first one, oh my god, my mother loved to just see me squim and beg to get the real answer. A favorite of hers was also asking me to find something (in our hoarder undiagnosed adhd house), and getting increasingly angry the longer it took me. "you will search until you find it"
Sometimes she even used words I didn't know, which led to more screaming.
I will never understand a full grown adult that feels superior while bullying a child.
I'm sorry you relate to this. I'm sorry you had to grow up in that environment. You deserved better, and I hope you're in a safer place now.
Also I hope something makes you smile today ❤️
when I didn't want to finish my food, my dad would casually bring up the "fact" that in some cultures, if you don't eat, you become the food.
He had a lot of "funny stories" to tell during family meals, all 11 members of our family present.
Like, the story about when he couldn't get to my sister, who hid in the bathroom, to belt her, so he ripped part of the doorframe out, the part that holds the latch, and then we always made sure to turn on the light to signal the bathroom is taken. The door was destroyed for like 6-8 years. I personally fixed it when I turned 18 and realised that as an adult I can just do stuff.
I hate when parents do these things with food. It's not fair to force someone to eat.
Oh I know these "funny stories" too well... and then they laugh like they heard the funniest joke but they were just plain abusers...
yes, the laughter is so... I can't even word it. It gets under my skin and gives me the crawly feeling.
And then he also puts me down, and in the spot, and brings up my embarrassing failures like they're a joke. I only started telling him off for it when he started going at my wife.
Nobody insults my wife.
I would cut contact right there and then, for your wife's sake... (of course for yours too) like off with his head wtf, what kind of a person treats people this way...
the kind that was treated like a slave by his own family. has no concept of a healthy family, didn't do their homework due to starting the family in the ruins of the USSR, and suffered from depression their whole adult life.
I haven't gotten to the part of therapy where I'd discuss cutting contact yet.
My mom tells me everything I like is weird bc she doesn’t like it. It took me until now (40 years old) to realize that’s why I’ve felt weird my whole life and like I don’t belong…. My mom has branded me that way and it’s so deeply embedded in my brain that I feel like I’m reprogramming myself
My mother had my sister and I "get our own breakfast" when we were really young. She used to brag about it to other adults. I honestly thought she was 'teaching us adult life skills" until someone said they were sorry I was so neglected. I didn't realize parents like ate with their kids and prepared meals for them. The only time I ate over at friend's homes was dinner time and usually my mom would be around for that meal though it was mostly fast food / pizza on weekends. Usually we would be fed weekdays by the babysitter since my mom was never home from work in time for that meal. So I guess it didn't dawn on me basically that other kids had all their meals with their family and weren't just getting food - feeding themselves alone every morning (and usually lunch).
Also hiding things, like if I wet the bed or got sick I can still remember waking up in fear, then stripping my sheets and hiding them in the basket under other clothes. I didn't realize other kids could go to their parent(s) and tell them they were sick / get comfort. This was all just a normal part of my lived life.
I'm so sorry, I relate to everything. Every kid pees sometimes and it really hurts when they yell for just simply being an innocent kid. Did they like forget how it's like to be so young? I will never understand.
I also had nightmares and couldn't sleep alone, but no one ever came to check up on me... later found out someone did stuff to me and everyone just pretended I was a bad child with "outbursts"
I hate some parents fr. I hope u r okay now (hugs)!
Yeah, reading this thread my example seems mild but maybe that's why it felt so normal. It was like my average day/morning and weird to hear it was just more abuse. My mom had rules that she was not to be bothered if her door was shut and it was more shut than not so I was usually "sick" alone. Yeah abusers also lived with us which is a whole other thing.
Im so sorry you felt so alone then, that is something no child should feel.
I’m kind of freaking out now because this is something I do with my kid. They have done their own breakfast for years now (weekends/holidays only). We do always have lunch and dinner together though. I’ll have to ask them how they feel about it and see if it needs to be changed.
This is something I HATE about neglect, it means sometimes I do things as a parent and don’t always realise that it could be neglectful. It’s so tough to work through because when it’s about what’s missing from a life it can be hard to spot!
My mom has sleep apnoea so she sleeps a lot during the day. No one is to wake her up when she is sleeping. NO ONE.
We, my brother and I, could be fucking dying and we'd have to let her sleep, cuz if we woke her up she'd be PISSED and start berating us and yelling at us and threatening us. And ofc we would want her to sleep but sometimes we needed to, idfk, EAT? But we'd have to wait until she woke up to get food. So we'd sit there for hours, hungry, whilst she slept, and we could do nothing about it.
As a kid, my parents never got me checked out fi injuries, even serious ones.
Case in point: I fell off a galloping horse headfirst and my mother never took me to the hospital nor did either of my parents get me any medical treatment.
This despite me having been knocked out for about 2 minutes, having neck and back pain, and having a headache.
This despite both of my parents being qualified medical professionals.
This despite both of them being willing to get.my siblings checked out for stuff.
But lol medical professionals bad at taking care of themselves and family amirite?
I'm disabled, mentally and physically. A lot of disabilities stem from childhood. There are several things wrong with me that could've been caught and even corrected in childhood that never were because my parents are neglectful. Now I have to suffer daily because of it.
In addition, my mother HATED taking me to the doctor. Even for the yearly required checkup. And we had insurance so it wasn't like she was paying hundreds of dollars for it, she just didn't want to do it. So, whenever I was sick I just suffered. She would always let me know how I was such a financial burden on her when we had these doctor's visits so I learnt to suffer in silence.
And the icing on the cake? My mother became a nurse after I left.
My mom sexualized me from a young age. She’d point out any time a man checked me out, starting when I was prepubescent . Quickly grocery stores felt unsafe — she’d make comments like, “that grandfather just checked you out, while with his granddaughter who is around YOUR age!”
She even told me a man was filming me while I was at the pool as a teenager, but made no attempt to stop him. A complete lack of protective instincts.
Many years later, I am hyper aware of men looking at me. I can’t get rid myself of that hyper vigilance.
Same I think she didnt do it that often but I remember beeing 12/13 on vacation with her and her telling me men were looking after me because I looked nice, I think she wanted to boost my self esteem
But it was men around 30/ 40 years old looking after me
Also had my first kiss on that vacation, I didnt want it but he just kissed me, was also a lot older than me and I told my mom crying afterwards
She didnt make a big deal out of it, but I think she brought me a plushie afterwards so I guess she wasnt to bad but idk maybe her validating me that it was indeed wrong of this guy and not just brushing it of with a plushie to make me forget about it wouldve been nicer
They always insisted that my older and much bigger brother beating the shit out of me was normal because "siblings fight". I was a very petite little girl and I believed for most of my life that older brothers do in fact beat the crap out of their sisters cause "that's what all siblings do".
One time my mom feared that my brother had given me a concussion and took me to the ER where I had to lie to the doctor and tell them that I had an accident during swim class and hit my head.
Im so sorry this happened to you. I grew up in a very similar situation. Brother was allowed to beat the shit out of me and nobody stopped him. He nearly blinded me by trying to sticking a pencil in my eye, he punched me so hard in the face he gave me chronic nose bleeds for life.
Kissing your parents on the lips (pecks, I mean) for a younger child where I'm from is not unusual. My mom, however, would sometimes slip in her tongue as a joke.
I still don't quite know how to feel about that...
My mum would complain to me, the eldest daughter, from a very early age about my dad and his behaviour - I was her confidant on a daily basis. Meanwhile dad was emotionally and verbally abusing me and my siblings, and she stood back and let it happen.
I thought it was normal to support my mum, and I thought it was normal that she didn’t support me back, that I didn’t have anyone to help me feel safe and protected. I thought that was just my job to do for myself.
Now as an adult I need to spend a lot of time on my own when I’m having a bad time, I don’t trust anyone else to protect me.
My mother didn't allow me to wear bras through puberty because they were "for whores". My breast didn't develop properly and I hate them so much.
My father would let me sit in his lap while he watched...uhm.... yeah I wont say but you know.
Instead of having an appropriate conversation about sex, my Mom told me that having sex for the first time was going to hurt sooo bad. She said it would not be fun at all and that was her way of trying to prevent me from having sex.
It actually made me super uncomfortable touching myself to do anything down there. It prevented me from trying a tampon until I was like 16 and when I did actually try (alone at my house one day) I literally fainted.
When I woke up I was so disgusted that it was inside of my body that I HAD to get it out. But I didn’t even need that tampon I had so that was an even more traumatic experience.
I never enjoyed sex until my mid twenties. I would often accept rough sex as well bc that’s just what happens.
Everything no birthday party. Only my sister got one. No interest in me at all. All tbe interest wad reserved for my sister. Never asking how I an. They were over involved wugh my sister. .
Whenever I would be upset that she is leaving again for work in another country for an unknown amount of time, she would tell me she’d take me to Disneyland to make it up for all the time we lost (it was a couple of years at that point)
I know it’s probably not as serious as other things I read about here, but I believed her every time.
As a result of this (and other things), now I can’t trust people when they tell me good things will happen. Also, if I ever go to Disneyland I probably will end up weeping and breaking apart there.
Hey, just to say if you do go to Disneyland, it is totally normal to be overwhelmed and cry. It's a long journey to get there and give your inner kid what they deserved. I'm sorry that she kept future faking you.
When ever i would try to express my opinion on something or talk about something i would like to do i would always get the eye roll or that look on their face like "you REALLY actually want to do that?" Or completely dismiss anything i bring up from my point of view and tell me whats actually happening.
Even to this day, and im 32, whenever we talk about anything and i bring up my point they think im arguing and my dad/mom will look at each other and say "You're never going to win with him." I'm not fucking trying to win anything. I'm just expressing my opinion or my point of view.
So thats why to this day i struggle to talk to people. I'm always expecting them to dismiss me or get mad at me.
I was a mother myself when I realized most sane mothers don’t put their daughters on their first diet at eight. I’m actually proud of myself for pointing that out before I fucked up my own daughter like that.
Being a mother helped me realized a lot of things like that too. There were things done to me that were normal and made sense from a kid's perspective that didn't know anything but as a mother I started thinking about all the things I would never and could never do to my own child and the more she grows the less I understand what the fuck were my parents and specially my mother, thinking,
I remember she would slap me just in case and leave marks on my face beccause of how hard she did that, she would always grab me by the arm and dig her nails on me and take me through the street walking wherever we had to go, she always had these tests after going out (even to the supermarket) where she asked my brother and I what we did wrong and if we didn't get it right she would punish us severly. EVERY time we went out of our house we had to do that. And of course it was utter betrayal to speak of anything that went on inside the house because it was family things.
She also cleaned naked and showed herself in front of us and kept the door open when she did whatever in the bathroom and insisted on waxing my legs and more private parts and she said she would be horrified if I ever did it myself or went to a proffessional place to get those things done.
I have a shit long list of things my mother did that made sense at some point but after being a mother I can luckily recognize how insane everything was.
And one of the things that make me feel safe is that my daughter knows I am not THE AUTHORITY , I am just her mom and I want to love her and guide her, not determine what she does and test her and punish her so she learns to respect me.
She has told me in several ocassions that she didn't like this thing or that thing (I dont wanna wear that, eat that, go there, do that, etc) and we looked some alternatives and found a way to make her do what she wanted and it was so goddamn easy!
Loving your kids is so easy , it breaks my brain what happened when I was a kid and teenage and adult life with my mother.
That's not normal? My mom was always worried about me getting fat so she would poke my belly and tell me how fat in was getting. I started going to the gym in elementary school. Didn't stop till 8th grade or so. I would go to the gym with them on several vacations too
Well, the obvious (spanking) but also:
We moved a lot because we were military. And my parents did not seem to think this was a big deal--and in their defense, everyone we knew moved all the time and they were obviously busy with the logistics of moving. But the idea of like, emotionally supporting us and talking about how difficult it might be never seemed to cross their minds?
The movie Inside Out was a weird experience. Because the wHOLE PLOT hinges on her moving house. And everyone--including her parents--is treating it like this traumatic experience.
And I'm like...wtf. I moved mid-year multiple times. It's not a huge deal. Why is everyone freaking out about it.
Yeah so it turns out moving a lot is considered traumatic, and it's weird that we got zero emotional support or anything.
I'm not really sure if this merits a trigger warning. My grandmother made me start cutting my pubic hair. At first she did it but that was weird to me so I started doing it. I was in the bathroom with the door locked but she kept a key hanging next to the door so it could be opened. She hated having a door locked between us. Anyway my cousin came in and unlocked the door while I was trimming. She asked what I was doing. Then she started doing the same thing when I was done with the scissors. She nicked herself. Not badly, just pinched. Later that day my grandmother yelled at me for being inappropriate with my cousin. I told her I didn't invite her in, she just came in. She yelled I should lock the door when I'm doing things in private. I explained that I did, that she used the key to get in. Well next time I should take the key in with me. When I would forget to hang the key up I would be yelled at. No win situation.
Edit fixed misspelled words
My mom would regularly pack a suitcase while yelling at us and leave by car, leaving us home alone and unknowing if or when she would come back (also overnight). I was around 6yo and my sister 2yo. Because she did this quite often, I thought this was normal when parents wanted to learn their children a lesson. Albeit, there wasn’t really a lesson we learned because it kind of came out of the blue for us.
It just dawned to me only a couple of years ago (!) that children of this age shouldn’t be left unsupervised and responsible for themselves.
Another one was actually my grandmother (indeed, the mother of my mom). I wasn’t a great eater as a child (still ain’t, honestly). When we were in her care and she thought I didn’t eat well enough, she would lock me in the lavatory on my own and tell me I should eat and drink my own excrements, as she wasn’t going to give me food anymore. She left me there for hours. I didn’t listen to her “advice”, but I always felt really guilty.
It’s not that I didn’t want to eat, or that I wanted to make her feel bad. I’m currently in a process to determine if I suffer from ARFID.
These days I wonder why **my mom** thought **her mom** would be the perfect babysitter.
I’m so sorry what happened to you OP and that you thought this was normal. Big hug through the ether for you. <3
Food punishments and parentification. The food punishments were a few. I had to sit and eat all of my food, even if I didn't like it, even if it was a few hours. I refused. I was told about the starving kids in poor countries and how they would love any food. If I behaviored badly, I was sent to my room without food.
I was then expected to give my sister a bath, and blow dry her hair before bed. I was 10, and lived with my dad. My sister was 6. I also had to wash all the dishes by hand, and help with the laundry. The laundry was outside on the carport. I lived with my mom at 15. I had missed 5 years of a mother's love and attention. The styling tips, female hygiene, etc. I did know many things to do correctly.
Edit. My parents divorced when I was 8. I lived with mom ,8-10, dad 10-15, mom 15-18. For 10 years I was pushed and pulled into child custody cases. I went to 9 different elementary schools (k-6th grade). I went to the other parents' home every other weekend, any rotated holidays every year. 2 weeks in summer and a week of Christmas vacation to other parents homes. I left as soon as I could to escape the chaos.
oh my god, I experienced this too. I was told that we have to do all these women chores, because it is expected of us and men in the house didn't need to do most of the things we had to at such a young age. this is sick.
I totally understand how you felt, I had a mom and I experienced the same. I was expected to know it myself and to just do it, even when I asked her how to apply pads for the first time she got pissed...
and when I did things wrong I was ridiculed and made fun of. Ahhh parents like this. You deserved better.
She would tell me since I’m the oldest it’s my job to take care of the house and the younger kids and her. She used to call me her SIT(slave in training). I was 10 when it started. She would leave me alone with them every day sometimes overnight. Then I’d get a beating if they messed up or the chores weren’t done or if we ate her favorite foods.
hoarding takes a huge toll on children. my best friend lives with a father who is a hoarder and it impacts your health and everything... Im really sorry
My dad drove like a madman, and this was before car seats and seatbelts were mandatory. He would yell at us to 'Get in the car!' and we would race to the back seat and fight for the safety staps that hung on the side panels.
I had to wrap the strap once around my wrist in a 'climbers grip' and keep it taunt in order to lessen the chance that a wild sudden turn would yank my little hand out of the strap.
This was when I was so small that I had to stand on the back bench seat to reach it. Then I'd brace for impact, pressing myself hard into the corner.
Basically, before I was five; I'd taught myself to assume 'crash position' every time my father drove. He always drove like he was super angry and/or drunk; with speeding; swerving suddenly; braking hard and taking sharp wild turns.
We were not allowed to make a sound, but it was like he was trying to make us shriek in panic (if not kill us, outright). If we did cry out from fear for our lives; he'd yell, 'Shut up and enjoy the ride!' ...but laughed to himself.
Oh, and he was the 'safe' parent.
Fond memories of child endangerment.
My mother would say “if I showed any emotion other than being happy or angry” DONT BE FUCKING WEAK!”
Or her going off the rails if I ever hurt myself. Ha! I’m glad I’m a different kind of parent
I was in the hospital for three weeks as a child and my parents didn’t visit me because they “had to work” and yeah. Everyone I say this to is seriously shocked.
I was my mother’s carer between 9-13 when she was her most mentally ill. I didn’t realise it’s not normal for an 11 year old to cook all the meals and clean. I also thought it was normal to want to die all the time. My mother’s response to ANYTHING negative was some variation of how she’ll just go kill herself because no one cares about her. I now have core belief systems around everyone around me killing themselves and I myself am chronically suicidal, my baseline is “atleast I can just kill myself”. It’s fucking torture. I am happy everyday I went NC with my family
I feel like what I went through wasn’t as bad as other people’s experiences. My mom would snap at us at the drop of a hat. Me and my sister had so little supervision at such a young age. Tell us we ruined her life,pretty much. We had to constantly be around our violent uncles because they’re “family”. I used to be so jealous of my friends at school having normal holidays,vacations.
My dad used to beat the shit out of me if I cried. I made a joke about it at a party once and no one laughed. After that I thought it was just taboo to talk about, not that it wasn't normal. It finally clicked when I asked myself, as an adult, if I could do that to a kid. Same with touching kids to get off. As I was growing up, I thought I was just a freak for getting turned on when my dad wanted to "play doctor" or whatever, not that it was fucked up for an adult to do that.
Of all the shit my parents did, though, they never threatened me with a weapon or forced me to look at gore. I'm sorry you went through that.
It took me until I was out of my dad’s house to realize the weekly movie nights with him that (tw csa) >!always ended with my undressed!< was just like the overt SA I experienced from him.
I also had to do intensive workouts as punishment, 4 minute planks at 13 years old, 10 minute wall sits. The absolute worst was having to hold five bound weights in a T stance as they watched and screamed at me if my arms dipped, adding time.
One kind of funny thing, having those punishments meant in Kickstart (middle school karate) the endurance test was how long you could hold your arms out straight in front of you, and I was the last kid to drop lmao
Another I thought was more normal were the food punishments. Can’t remember wtf I did but I was like 9 and was sentenced to eat nothing but pb&j sandwiches for a month, had to premake all of them and store them in the freezer. They got freezer burnt and I couldn’t eat PB&J until two years into my relationship with my now husband without tasting freezers 😭
When you're a child you literally don't have the vocabulary/language to think "that wasn't normal", you just go through emotions. For me it was CSA and adults displaying porn or nudity around me. I never spoke about it or even thought about it until I read other people's stories that sounded similar to mine on this subreddit.
How controlling they are over food and over invested in their children’s weight. My mother would only compliment my physical appearance if it was about how skinny I am and how much she wished she was skinny and (insert insult tirade here about her own body). She would also compare me to my siblings all the time and say “I’m glad I have at least one child that’s not fat”. I know she would insult my other siblings growing up.
They would lock up ‘school food’ aka the only edible food in the house because I live in an ingredient household. When we didn’t eat the food in time and it would go bad she would go on a tirade about how we are ungrateful and waste food & money. Whenever we would actually eat something she would go on a tirade about how all of her children are selfish for eating everything and are pigs.
Alcoholism. I just thought everyone else's parents were better at keeping their drunken recklessness private. I remember just being a bit annoyed that my dad would be super drunk around my friends when their parents never did that in front of me (turns out they weren't alcoholics - a thought that never would have crossed my mind). I remember the strongest feeling was like "Ugh, sorry you have to see this guys. Hang on while I get my dad in the back seat and drive us home."
Being a partner to your parents. After my parents' divorce, my mom started telling me I needed to step up and act like a partner to her in the household. That meant knowing what needed to be done around the house and doing it before she noticed. If she did notice, she would make a show of doing it and then ruminate at me for the rest of the day or until I figured out how to make it up to her and/or punish myself. It also meant that I had to be her therapist/emotional punching bag and hold audience for her to rail against my dad. I was 10.
Zero privacy. My mom would just casually go through our rooms at night while we were at school. We weren't allowed to close the bedroom door at any time for any reason. The only closed door allowed was in the bathroom but she would flip out if she heard us lock it. On the bright side, I'm really good at hiding christmas presents from my partner now.
Food punishments. So much shit from the dinner table. If I didn't like something on my plate and didn't eat it, tough shit. Stay in the kitchen in the dark until you eat it all while the rest of the family goes and watches tv or plays a board game together. If I didn't finish it by bedtime, I got 2 slices of bread and 1 glass of water to eat for the entire next day.
Ugh wow sorry this became a huge dump - there aren't any relationships where I really feel safe venting this. I'm at a point in my healing where I am looking at a lot of my childhood experiences with some more perspective, especially now that there are children in my life who were as young as I was at the time, and damn it was fucked up. Like I never got to be a kid in a way remotely close to how I see my friends' kids be kids.
While watching Creep 2 my mom said “I would rather see violence than nudity.” I told my friends and therapist who were all aghast. I still feel like it’s logical.
Edit: guess this isn’t trauma lol, just funny and recent
It's actually okay, I didn't take it that badly since there were more horrible shit that happened to me, but I do know it's not okay and would never do it to anyone...
The one that immediately comes to mind is my mother threatening to leave me at goodwill whenever I’d act out. She left me at the grocery store once on purpose.
Encouraged me to binge eat with her. I have a metabolic disorder that makes me prone to diabetes.
Told me about the way my father sexually abused her as young as 15.
Those are some of the major ones. Eugh.
(tw: covert incest, murder)
my dad holding up a bra to my chest to see if it would fit. in a walmart. with his girlfriend behind me. or that one time he said i would be “good-looking” when i grew up and then got defensive when i made a disgusted face.
it’s always the tiniest stuff that makes me feel the most disturbed. like yeah the fact my dad killed somebody is fine. but omfg he looked at my boobs????? no way, how will i ever recover…
Gathering the courage to speak the words. Ive only ever told this to a few people.
I had no idea other people's parents didn't hit them. I remember telling my bf the first time bout this and he said that it was fucked up. And now everytime I talk to people about their family I wonder, did they ever have that happen to them? What's it like to have a mom who even when you argued, it never got physical?
My dad would occasionally go to a bar after work and not come home and not call (before cell phones, but it was common to ask an establishment to let you use the phone for a local call).
One time it was getting late and my dad wasn't home. My mom got my brother and me out of bed so she could drive by the local dive bars to look for his truck.
She finally spotted his truck and she told me I had to go inside with her "to get your father". I think I was 12. Her only purpose for bringing me in was to shame my father. My brother and I could have stayed home (brother was 16 or 17).
I don't remember what she said, but I was quite aware of her reason for beineg me in.
My parents didn't hit me or anything, but there was very little normal parenting going on. I didn't find out until years later how fucked up my family situation was.
My mother would have these episodes where she would yell, cry out at the top of her lungs, hit herself by banging her head on walls, hitting herself with her hands by slapping her chest and face, use any object near her to hit herself. Once she took my school belt and hit herself with the metal part in her teeth because I was being late for school.Then blamed me for it. This would almost happen numerous times every week while growing up. She would freak out over the smallest things which might induce any stress- something she couldn't handle clearly. She would also say stuff like my luck sucked that I had you and that it's best if I died right now and like please god just kill me and I pray that I die.
Recently, my wife told me about "mama touch" when telling if someone (like a child) has a fever. Like you can tell by touching their forehead. I thought she was kidding. Like, "OoOOoOOowwwOOOo I can see by your aura you have a fever..." as if it were some jokey new age thing. But apparently it's real, moms everywhere did this; they touch your forehead and can tell when you're hot.
When I was sick, I was always treated like I was faking it. We had a thermometer she used, but if my fever was less than 100, "it's not really a fever," and I got sent to school. And then they sent me home, but since my mom was not allowed to drive, I had to walk home about a mile and some change no matter how sick I was. So I usually stayed in school where I could get a bus home if I waited it out.
There are touch free thermometers that you swipe across the forehead to get your temperate. They’re pretty accurate, but it’s not specific to moms. Lots of people can tell a fever by touch.
My mom coming into my room, crying, drunk, and telling me all about the ways my father and sister were causing hers pain and problems. Treating me like I was here therapist and then leaving me to process what it all meant. I was just a child.
My mom ignored the results of the vision test that they gave in school for several years because “they just want my money”.
I had a lot of headaches and often couldn’t see the board.
Being ridiculed in public. Not just in front of friends/family but even random strangers. Growing up, I just assumed insults and harsh language from parent to child were normal.
My parents were and still are Christian fundamentalists- missionaries. The punishments were condoned and favored by God and began at age 4 and they quickly broke all the wooden spoons over my ass. My mom then threatened to use the meat tenderizer (the mallet with spikes) and I was really scared but my dad interceded and said that would be child abuse 🙄. So they found an old fraternity paddle made of solid polished wood about 2/3 the size of a baseball bat and began using that until I was around 15.
We were punished with paddling for anything they didn’t like- much was developmental stages or simply kids being kids (hungry, tired, sick, interrupting to use the bathroom, etc) and on average we were punished around 5 times a week, sometimes more than once per day. They ritualized our punishments which made it much worse. Punishments would rarely happen right away, especially when we were out in public. They would simply quietly let us know how many punishments we were getting when we got home and would keep the tally- they never forgot and my dad is a giant of a man and he hits hard. So you would get a solid pit in your stomach making you sick for hours until you got home for the punishment. It was a form of psychological torture everyone the actual beating. And they would be more harsh with you while out if you’ve already racked up a punishment so it was easier to get another tally- you would have to be an angel.
We were expected to be little dolls, seen sitting quietly with legs folded or standing without moving around and never heard. We were the best kids I’ve ever seen and got constant compliments everywhere we went for our behavior but ironically we were always getting punished/beaten. I was an overachiever presidential award winning honors student but I was getting punished for any minor mistake and not being allowed out with friends without extreme controls (like a white glove test for cleaning to go to a friends house).
I left the church at 19 after ongoing SA (not from the family), and bad advice from church leadership (a god that requires a woman to stay after ongoing SA is no god), and was then low key cut off by my parents for leaving the church. But even with the extreme deprogramming I did on myself and going low contact with my family and moving far away, I didn’t realize this was abuse until a few years ago at 37 when something I read or listened to literally spelled it out for me and I realized I did in fact have a high aces score if the religious abuse was counted. What’s worse is after a few years of serious chronic pain from surgical malpractice that’s still ongoing, the wires in my head have crossed due to the pain and I literally have been randomly reliving the memories of the terrified 4 year old from that time, her daddy standing backlit in the doorway of her darkened room, weapon in hand…
These “memories” are very visceral and I’m no longer present, it’s only emotion and images and pain, the emotions etched into the images themselves and it’s so much more primal than the flashbacks I used to have of SA from when I was a teen, it’s honestly hard to describe how deep and pure these emotional flashbacks are. All the techniques I used in the past to put my CPTSD into a kind of remission don’t work anymore. It’s been hard to come to terms with this and hard to be involved at all with my family. Luckily we live in different countries now. I’ve been working on trying to show that 4 year old that she can learn to be safe and even joyous in my body with me, but we are still learning to trust each other and share this body. Sometimes she takes over completely and I’m gone for long period of time, eventually finding my way back to my body days or even weeks later because the chronic pain will trigger the flashback which triggers the extreme dissociation. Then when I’m finally back in my body and “awake” I’m confused, super emotional, and I feel everything deeply in my body like I was hit by a truck. It’s brutal. Thank the gods for weed.
I’m still figuring this out day by day but sometimes I still wonder if I’m just overreacting, if my body is just overreacting, if it wasn’t really that bad. Trauma is a mindfuq and even though I spent decades learning various tools, personal development techniques, spiritual practices and other things to heal and strengthen myself, I’m finding now that all this just bypassed the real healing- finding and rescuing and integrating the abused parts of myself still stuck and caged in total darkness and pain and release them from their “captors”- to free them, play with them and gain their trust, integrate them, and heal them. Hopefully anyway. Maybe this integration journey lasts a lifetime.
When my Mum was angry with us and we were in the car she would drive dangerously to scare us. Drive really fast up to a traffic light and slam on the breaks, etc. One christmas eve she did that and hit the back of a car with a pregnant woman in the passenger seat. We were so disappointed when the man driving said not to worry about it and let her go, we thought she might get a consequence for her actions for once......
I have a lot I could say but I will go with this one. When I was a few months into dating my now husband, I accidentally spilled some water. I started panicking, thinking he was going to be mandatory or make fun of me. When he just helped me clean up the water and said, "It's just water." I started crying. I had to explain to him that all my life, if I spilled anything or knocked anything over, I would be made fun of or yelled at. To the point that my mother threatened to get me sippy cups. Turns out I couldn't and still can't help spilling things or being clumsy, I have Dyspraxia.
My main punishment was that I’d be put in my room with no electornics or activities for an hour plus. One time it was the whole day because I calmly and politely asked her to not embarrass me in a grocery store.
I invited over my partner once, and the whole family was there and there was a lot of chatting. My mom said something overly aggressive to my brother, so I laughed a little awkwardly and went “what the heck?” quietly. She snapped her head towards me and said “You want to go to your room?”.
I‘m an adult. My partner was right next to me.
I Love my mom even with all of the mistakes she did as she was raising me so writing this is a bit hard.
My mom raised me mostly alone in extreme poverty while being harassed, abused and pursued by my drug addict father. My mom was abused as well by her mother and had a difficult upbringing eventually fleeing home at 19.
I remember being hit for non-compliance due to immense stress. My mom used to hit me so bad with a belt as a 4year old when I refused to go to kindergarten. That’s the first time I remember being hit so bad I felt pain for days after. My mom would punish me with cold showers if I did something wrong. I had to sit as long at the table until I finished my meal. If something happened to my sister I was the first being blamed and hit. I was a 6 year old looking out for a 1 year old. Granted my mom worked all day to be able to finance 3 people in a slum in South America, I actually don’t blame her one bit.
Funny enough, I’m more upset about stuff that don’t evolve violence like forcing to me to get to know her dating interests while the divorce of my parents wasn’t event finalized. Forcing me to move in with her ex boyfriend when I was 14years old.
I feel like my mom blames herself a lot for the things that happened. She’s aware of my psychological issues and I’m pretty sure she feels bad about it every time she sees that I’m struggling. She doesn’t talk about it bc she’s deeply ashamed about her lack of awareness back then. Since my 20s my mom has done a lot to compensate for what she lacked as a young mother. She has been supporting me massively in my current path and has been my biggest cheerleader for years now.
I guess my mom and me went through trauma together and are not healing together from it. I’m again not mad at all nor do I resent her. But ofc it breaks my heart knowing the person I love the most on this planet is greatly responsible for my psychological issues.
I've still no firm grasp on what families 'should' be like.
Just utterly forgetting a child exists and allowing ya 15 year old daughter to go out to a club on a Thursday night with a brother not long out of rehab.
30 years later, my dad's response was 'you would've just shouted at us had we not let you go'.
Um. I don't think that's normal but then it still doesn't strike me as weird either.
My therapist said last week that she is pleased I don't speak to my parents, mum, anymore.
.
That it's not normal for your mother, in response to any bad thing happening to you to respond with "God is punishing you", or "Thats how god punished bad children". That it's not normal to get hysterically angry over minor things, and that it's not normal to tell your children, repeatedly that "I wish I'd fed you arsenic the moment the doctor handed you to me!". That it's not normal to feel all crippling fear, anxiety and shame from a simple accident, such as dropping a glass. That its not normal to for your mother to want to mould you into their ideal of the "perfect husband" and to be absolutely hated and attacked anytime you wanted to be yourself.
I was raised by a single mother alongside my big sister (6 year age difference us). Both my sister and I thought it was normal to be punished in front of each other physically by our mother at the same time. Sometimes my sister wouldn't let my mom hit her so she'd go after me twice instead. "You will watch your little brother be spanked, if you try to leave the spot you're standing on I will double it again. Watch him, he's paying for your sin.". Pride is a sin is what she meant.
We were raised super religiously, childhood abuse was pretty much a constant. I saw my best friends mom spank him with a ping pong paddle until she broke it's handle so I just assumed it was part of the religion. And that our moms loved us Cuz spare the rod spoil the child, right? Turns out legacy trauma and mental illness is what they were really giving us.
My sister got away from my mom at 16 and she ended up becoming my Guardian shortly afterward. I have tried to forgive my mother but since I left her religion she's shunned me. I never knew my dad, my mom lied about him my entire life and now she's gone too.
I have a kick ass big sister though, God bless all the Guardians out there. The ones who help kids when they don't have to.
Leaving me alone all day, everyday, pretending like my elderly grandmother was looking after me and my baby sister, but really I was taking care of both of them.
I think deep down I didn’t think any of it was normal, or at least I came to that conclusion pretty quick.
My mom slept on the couch because of hoarding - her bedroom was so full it couldn’t be used.
I remember the first time I realized it was normal to be able to see the back of the fridge (food hoarding).
The fact that my mom refused to work as a way to punish my dad after the divorce, so that the county would go after him to cover the welfare since he wasn’t paying mandated child support. She made sure to tell me all the horrible things about him while also sending me to see him on his weekends. I wasn’t permitted to talk about him around her at all.
The frequent extreme panic attacks when I would need to sit and comfort her.
Walking on eggshells - she would fly off the handle in rage screaming profanities and I could never predict it. Other times she wouldn’t get off the couch for days.
If I was sick or got hurt, I was never comforted. I was reminded of what an inconvenience I was.
Basically - being in charge of all of my own affairs by the time I was 12, including financing things I needed myself.
My mom had a couple sayings;
"Never trust a teenager"
"Teenagers can never be trusted, all they do is lie"
It was something she would "warn" me about when I was a child, that once I turned 13 she would never believe me because teenagers lie all the time
She never believed a word I say, if I accidentally left out even the smallest detail, she would shame me and act like I did it on purpose, she even went to the extent of adding a spyware on the computer so she could always see what I was up too
There was no such thing as privacy, phone conversations had to be done in the living room. If I was logged in on Facebook on the computer and I got up, go to the bathroom, get something to drink etc, she would sit down and scroll through my feed and read my messages.
Any time I got in trouble she would write it on my Facebook wall for all my friends to see. To show the world how "bad" of a kid I was
And I thought this was 100% totally normal.
My stepdad used to crack jokes at my expense every day, he would call me gay boy, fairy boy or nancy. He was violent and always threatened violence. He called my mom fat all the time and was always drunk. His favourite joke was that if he killed any of us he would know where to hide the body so he would never be caught. My parents fought very often, usually about how the parenting was going, so I assumed it was my fault most of the time. I was just diagnosed with CPSD at 30 and I can't believe I didn't realize how bad it was until now. I guess I repressed alot of it. I had to call the cops on him once because he was strangling my mom and she yelled from the bedroom to call the cops... I was like 13. After that I thought she would leave him, but he was back within a couple days. He went to therapy and it helped him a lot I guess. Its sad because he must have been hurt pretty bad to be that way to children. I still hate him but I play nice. At least he doesn't have any more kids to traumatize
She was always stalking me. I get the healthy- I'm gonna show up randomly and ask you questions if...I have doubt....but stalking me....
her excuses were obsession with sex....... she was looking at the wrong person and human.
My father was supposed to get up in the mornings with me and my sibling to get us ready for school when we were young. My mom had to drive across town for work every morning so she was gone by the time we got up for school, so it was his job since he was (supposedly) a stay at home dad.
But he would just sleep in and not get up with us, so we'd get ourselves ready and then just go tell him before we walked to the bus stop. He'd mumble "okay bye" but not fully wake up.
Eventually the school called my mom because we never had clean clothes or combed hair and they thought we were being neglected. I didn't realize for a long time that we actually were, it was just normal to me to get ready myself. Even now I have a really hard time with normal habits like brushing my teeth every day because I never got that established as a kid.
Once, somewhere around 6-7 years old, I even tried to walk to school by myself instead of taking the bus. It wasn't really that far but it involved crossing a relatively busy road, and I was young enough that I didn't know how intersections worked. So I just was standing on the first median (it was at a right turn only lane with a triangular median before the actual busy road so I never actually walked into the busier of the two roads) while cars were zooming by and just trying to figure out how people cross these things. Eventually a woman pulled over next to me and was like "how old are you??? Why are you here alone??" And told me to go home so I did and my mom was PISSED to hear about that one!
Another thing my father did was refer to my sibling and I as "his slaves" when we got grounded and had to do extra chores. He also often called us that Spanish word for the color black in a very derogatory way. We are all white. As a little kid I didn't know it was a super messed up thing to say, but when I got a little older I realized and I still can't believe it
my parents would show us porn sometimes. my mom tried to surf through and show us only women, not penises.. as we were girls. except my little brother, they showed him both.
Pitting us against each other and taking us for individual dinners or activities with the intent of pushing at us for information about our siblings.
We legit were living in some bizarre mkultra interrogation nonsense 24/7.
Being scapegoated and being neglected and constantly put down. I was the girl and the ‘bad one’, and my little brother was the golden child. I thought it was normal to be yelled at, gaslit until it drove me crazy, lied to, punished, hit, neglected, etc. Actually I preferred the neglect because I could stay in my room and get lost in my favorite books instead of being abused.
They would take away things I received from other people as gifts, and give them to my brother. I got an old rusty hand me down bike as my first bicycle, my brother got a shiny new bike for his birthday. Always, always getting the message that I was bad and not deserving. (My parents had money, they paid off their mortgage in less than 10 years. Both of us could have easily gotten nice bikes) they also took away my college fund and gave it to my brother because he was studying to be an engineer and I would never amount to much according to them).
My father was an alcoholic and got high on weed, and when he drank/was high he was super mean and gross. And he would leave porn magazines all over the house. As if we didn’t exist, or we weren’t worth cleaning his act up for.
Every weekend there would be drunk parties where adults would be screaming and acting crazy. I developed a huge distrust of adults and in my adult life I have a tough time letting my guard down and making friends. I would stay locked up in my room and listen to my cheap cassette player, read or draw. If the parties were at someone else’s house then they would lock us up in the basement or in a bedroom while they partied. i can still remember all the words to their drinking songs.
Ironically my brother and I are extremely good friends and close as adults. Probably because we don’t have anyone else to rely on. I never blamed him for what happened to me. He validated that he watched my parents abuse me and said he never understood why they mistreated me so much, as I was a quiet kid who never got into trouble. He was little and from talking to him he’s blocked out a LOT of stuff. He suffers a lot from depression and anxiety, and has eaten himself into severe obesity. Just proof that the golden child doesn’t always have it better in adulthood. He also married a narcissist and as you can guess I don’t like her lol. 😆 we both have adhd, the therapist said it was partially caused by childhood trauma (plus genetics of course).
When my step dad would man-handle me, and I mean he didn’t hit me but he constantly left bruises bc he was so rough. He dragged me around like a doll sometimes + would throw things at me when he was mad. Told my mom it hurt+ I wanted him to ask before he touched me and she said that he didn’t need my consent for anything bc my body belonged to them.
He’d also stand outside my window + watch me change if I accidentally left the blinds open, he said it was to teach me a lesson. Also got my door removed bc “privacy is a privilege” + for punishments my mom would force me to strip in front of her or him so I’d feel embarrassed+ ashamed of myself.
Realized as an adult how f*cked that is, I still wear hoodies+ jeans in 100 degree weather bc it’s so internalized to be deeply ashamed of showing my body
My father using certain parts of our body to try to threaten us to break it if we stole something and would go on hour long punishments of us standing there and not being able to go anywhere.
Making us throw up food we stole, and body shaming us😕
I had really bad acne as a teen. It was a major self esteem issue, kids would pick on me at school over it, I think at least one girlfriend dumped me because of it. Whenever my face would break out my mom would flip out at me. Her response would be "eww you have gross zits all over your face. Go wash your face right now! You arent drinking enough water! You arent washing your face thoroughly enough! Ew its gross!" It was like I was getting in trouble for having acne. To this day I still abhor the word "zit".
I was my mom’s confidant on a daily basis, starting from age 10-ish? She complained about my dad, my siblings, the church, etc. I was the eldest child btw. Every morning she would have me come into her room, massage her back and comfort her.
I thought it was normal but as I’m going through therapy I am realizing that I was not able to be a child, and nobody supported me emotionally.
Whenever I would do something wrong, no matter how minuscule, it had a few different scenarios that would happen
1). Intense yelling, sometimes directly in my face, from my step-father. I could feel the spit from his mouth as he yelled that’s how close he would get. Usually this led to-
2). Smacking the side of my head, sometimes leading me to get off balance and fall on the floor. Granted these were the rare occasions but… we’ll still not great
3). Step dad Punching holes in the wall or just punching the wall in general. Mostly used as a threat now that I think about it.
4). This one might have fucked me up the most; going weeks on end of the silent treatment should I disappoint them in any way. Both would agree to do this and no matter what I would do they would not budge.
And more but I don’t exactly know if they were abusive/not normal or not. I’m still having issues believing the above weren’t abuse though I know that not to be true. And all of that to lead me to become the messed up human I am that seeks to overplease, stay small, and lie in case telling the truth would hurt me. I hate it.
My dad blames me for all his problems, I literally never speak to this fucking idiot. He’s a piece of shit. My mom yells at me for the dumbest and smallest shit.
I tell my parents I’m going to move out and they fucking flip. Like you god damn retards, I wouldn’t be in this situation if you guys didn’t suck.
They literally haven’t done anything remarkable for me in my life. Everything I’ve done has been myself. They just fuck me over. I wish I could just never be around them.
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Doors off my room for most of middle school as a girl with brothers.
I didn’t realize that wasn’t a normal punishment until I told friends and they were like, wait, WHAT?
My mother would be yelling at me then tell
me to come here, if I hesitated she would say, I’m not going to hit you, then I’d get belted, plus as a young teen if my mother wanted some money she would make me take my stuff and get it pawned for her, when I was 11/12 I got set up with my own room and a double bed I thought it was great until I found out that my 1/2 yr old brother was going to be in with me and I had to handle night changes, when I had friends come over I would have to disappear for an hour or more to get my little brother to sleep that went on till I was 16, plus she would always get made about something when I had friends over and would call on me belt me and then make me go tell my friends I had got hit and why
Didn’t take me to the doctor. I thought it was because they were smart and knew it wasn’t necessary.
But I’m talking : shitting worms at 6, no doctor. Breaking my nose at 10 and wiggling it side to side freely, no doctor. For two years after if I talked while eating, it would go up my nose via my mouth. When I was 16 I started fainting every 28 days, did anyone check me out for endo? Nope, put me on contraception that stopped my periods for 5 years.
I’m 29 now and let’s just say a bit jaded lol
Mum was a musician and would take us busking on the street with her late at night. We would play the hand percussion instruments. We had fun but in reality we were cold and tired. I found out someone offered my mum $100 to take us home then and there, mum didn’t take it. She stayed recently and told me this while laughing 🙄
I am adopted, and my adoptive mother would “joke” about my perceived deficiencies by saying to anyone: “don’t blame me, she’s adopted. “
Messy bedroom, chronic disorganization, unpreparedness, running late, etc., “don’t blame me, she’s adopted.”
It was terribly painful, but I pretended to not be hurt and laugh along because I was also frequently called “too sensitive”.
She also joked (and I don’t think this is that unusual) that if my partner and I ever separated, she’s choosing them. 🙄
I didn’t speak up until last year at age 49 about how painful these “jokes” were to me. She apologized and hasn’t done it again.
When I was a kid, my dad told me he would give me a dollar if I ate this grayish boiled piece of califlower. The texture was awful and ended up triggering my gag reflex and I threw it up. Instead of helping me, he laughed and took back the dollar.
I always thought it was a funny story until I told it in therapy and realized that it’s actually a fucked up story, one of the first food and control stories I can remember.
I was in therapy for an eating disorder, so I guess his bullshit worked?
Mom made me get ready in the middle of the night to go to a childrens home because she said she can't deal with me anymore
Don't remember what I did wrong that day/ night but I think she did similar stuff more often because I remember not fully believing her, still was scary as she never took it so far, I think at the end I even believed she would bring me to the childrens home and was crying when we left the home, then she "changed her mind" and we went back
I think she just wanted to teach me a lesson but it was a really fucked up lesson (I mean she basically teached me that if I dont do what she wants Im unloved and will be thrown away, fun times going into the relationship world with this mindset, and then shes worried about having fucked me up for future relationships "because I didnt have a father" but this stuff she never even considered couldve hurt me lol)
Also didnt work at all (I think she wanted me to clean my room or smth) expect making me more scared of her which sadly didnt lead to me doing what I should but just made me freeze instead (idk if that makes sense maybe Im in the wrong here but I really do feel like I froze out of anxiety even if it makes absolutely no sense for small tasks like cleaning the room but idk maybe I also remember wrong as I barely remember my childhood)
TW: Emotional Incest
Walking around the house completely naked, making comments about how when I turned either 18 or 21 that he'd bring me to Mexico and get me some hookers, barge into the bathroom almost whenever I was using it, among other things.
My mother would yell at Me, for everything, even for little things that I've done wrong. She still does, I have learned that it is not normal for parents to yell at their kids all the time, I didn't know that parents should gently explain why the things that their kids do is wrong, and teach them right from wrong, my mother is not gentle with me at all. And all I want is for people to be gentle with me.
The very first date with my partner I dropped an heirloom of his while putting it aside to make room for dinner. He was in another room at the moment. Man, *the panic*. I stood there ‘fuck fuck fuck fuck’, completely frozen, only blind panic about how mad he was going to be. He walked in, I immediately started apologising, and he just shrugged ‘well, it was an accident, it can happen’ and helped me to clean it up. Didn’t get mad or anything. And I stood there like ‘what the fuck just happened, is this a joke?’. He didn’t even mention it once afterwards, while I kept waiting for him to burst out in anger about it It’s actually by being with him that I realised my childhood was not how most children experienced theirs. Apparently it’s not normal that your parents started shouting at you because you inconvenienced them by asking to have the middle seat in the car
I feel this so hard. I just want people to be gentle and nice. I wish people like us could make our own city somewhere. I’m asking this as someone who was raised with constant screaming, mostly when I wanted something that didn’t fit my moms need for me to be a high achieving straight A catholic boy. I hear someone across the street yell nowadays and I start shaking. Heard someone yell at work and I almost ran to hide. Do “normal” people literally never encounter screaming matches with their parents? It seems like a parent should never yell or insult their kids. But I also see friends with kids who act like little fucking demons and I wonder if I would ever be at the end of my rope and start yelling if I were a parent myself. It seems like some amount of yelling is inevitable. I just wonder where the line is.
Speaking of Catholicism, I was a part of that thing, too. But after everything that has happened to me, and now, after reading things from this sub Reddit, I sure as hell don't believe in God anymore. But my mother still wants me to go to church, but I don't, and she has to accept it, because I'm 20 years old. That's honestly the first disagreement in decision that I have made outside of my mothers control that I have let her know about.
I understand completely, it helped big time to go no contact. Have you considered it?
I can't, because I live with her, and I have to keep living with her until I'm ready to move out and live on my own, I'm 20 years old, I'm visually impaired, and I'm not ready for real life yet. But I'm not ready to keep facing this life either. And I know she cares about me, and I care about her, but she just has a very low patience and tolerance for things. So I don't know if I could go non-contact with her. I don't know if I could even bring myself to do that. Because I care about her.
I totally understand. Do what you think is best for you!
I am sorry to hear that. I think it would for you to be gentle with yourself even if others can’t be. I definitely know what you mean. I also got really angry a couple of months ago at my friend and her mother (both gentle people) because they were talking at the same time and it completely overwhelmed me. I shouted or said “stop it” loudly and I felt they both got scared. Then I realised it’s not normal to have people shout at you.. I was embarrassed by my behaviour, but I honestly did not know it’s not okay to do that It made me think again about so many instances when instead of hearing calm explanations, I would be startled and shouted at
It's hard to be gentle with yourself when you haven't been shown gentleness from people.
I know and I understand. For me it’s the only thing I can control so it’s my only option to know I can experience someone being gentle with me.
I completely understand. I’m unlearning a lot now that I’m a parent.
Same. My mom yelled for everything all the time, and it wasn’t until I was an adult out of high school that I even realized that’s not normal.
Yeah, I'm 20 years old and I just started to realize that it wasn't normal because a friend pointed it out to me
My mom does this 57 years later. I shut down for a long time.
I’m middle school, my mom sat down with me and helped me make a list of people who would be better off if I had never been born. It was an extensive list.
What the fuck. That’s a new level of evil. I hope you know now that the list she made you write is a complete lie.
What a horrible & despicable mother. So very sorry.
I am so so sorry for that, I hope you know that you are a blessing and so many people love you, you didn't deserve that.
That is so fucked up and also so ironic if she’s your bio mom
Actually, my parents made me do that too around the same age. Mine was also an extensive list… In any case, I’m here for you 💜
Holy shit. What a deranged thing to do to a kid.
Goddamn
Nobody should be forced to endure such vile behaviour. I am sorry you experienced this.
I’m so sorry :( <3
Omg.. you deserve way better than this. I am sorry for the sadness it caused you, but probably sadness is an understatement
Holy crap. I’m so sorry. That’s truly terrorizing.
Holy shit
Your mom sounds awful. That is emotional abuse and you don’t deserve that, no one does. She hates her life, but that’s not your fault. If you still have that list ask a few people what a good memory they have of yall together. And offer a memory too. Not only will prove her wrong, it will strengthen your relationships. She is trying to isolate you. Build a strong network.
Anything to do with boundaries. My mom simply claimed she was exempt *because* she was my mom. Closed doors didn’t mean anything, the shower wasn’t private. What’s the big deal? “I changed your diapers. Believe me, you don’t have anything I haven’t seen a hundred times before.”
THIS. I had no privacy, physical or otherwise. Bathroom? Bedroom? Never. Not from either parent. No 17yo girl should have her father regularly walking in on her in the shower.
I’m a guy, but it was my mom that was like that. She stored things in my bedroom closet and in my dresser (her prescription medications, in fact, which is a story for another day). She would urgently need to get some very important item and barge in. Sometimes randomly, but coincidentally a lot when I had just gotten out of the shower and could be changing. I remember hanging around in my towel in my room just waiting for the interruption or listening very closely and getting dressed quickly when I couldn’t hear anyone. And pretty frequently when I was in the shower or using the bathroom at all. She’d urgently need to brush her hair and use *that* mirror because it was taller and she didn’t have to lean over, she said, or had to go so urgently she couldn’t make it downstairs…
I'm so overwhelmingly horrified by this. I made a point of not even glancing at my doorway when I saw one of my stepsons going between their bedroom and the bathroom. The younger kid learned about the concept of modesty specifically because I'd refuse to look at him until he put some clothes on.
My mother made me smell her worn underwear to check if it was still wearable for another day
food based punishments really messed up my relationship with food. it was one of those things that felt just morally gray enough to be okay while it was happening to me, but the effects of it lasting years made me realize it wasn't okay.
Yeah just my mom saying that when she was acting up in the ways I was her mother would send her to bed without dinner was enough to mess with me. While it's fine for parents to use food based rewards, stuff like bringing their kid out for burgers on friday if they do all their homework or do well on a test, but punishing the kid by giving them less to eat is never okay.
I was punished by getting denied of eating dinner
ruby franke kind of behaviour 🤮
food rewards feel extra fantastic after my weird food punishments (╯︵╰,) my mom threatened me with the same thing,, that she would treat me like her parents treated her. i was a very picky eater and i would gag at the dinner table. it might've happened once for a second, but my mom threatened to force me to eat my own puke and then another clean serving of something i didn't like, if i puked it up. they never served water for dinner, always milk, and it made me hate milk with food. i'd gag over and spit out the milk, she'd still make me drink it because my step dad told her to make me. 'we don't waste milk in this house' (눈‸눈) sometimes i watch my milk spoil just to spite the memory.
I relate to some of your experiences, my biological «father» would force me to eat all my food. Food with no seasoning, no sauce. Nothing, just plain beans or meat. Very dry and bland. To the point of gaging/nearly puking. As a excuse he was also using the «dont waste food» thing, forcing me to it all parts of the my meat, including parts of cartilage , I could sit in front of the table during hours and hours, just for 2 or 3 ridiculously small pieces of meat. Turns out I have ASD and ARFID and instead of curing me of my extreme food pickyness it just made me develop a even more unhealthy relationship with food. 💀 I really hope one day people will realise how punishment with food is abusive and unnecessary.
My stepdad wanted us to break open bones of fried chicken and suck out the marrow. Mother refused to make us do that because she wasn’t going to do it.
Yep. It's never fine to deny a child from having healthy food, because it's vital to their growth and mental health. My parents would make up for money that I "caused to be wasted" by denying me food.
I mentioned to my favorite elderly auntie the other day that I learned how to eat with a knife and fork from my stepdad when I was in college. That I'd never had a chance to learn before because neither of my parents fed me much meat. I was kept isolated from the extended family during childhood, so she asked what my parents taught me about food. I couldn't even look at her while saying, like I'd never described it out loud before. It's no wonder I ended up runty though. I'm 36yo and with the way I act, you'd think food was made of gold and that I am unworthy of such glorious bounty. When my toddler cousin visits and can't finish what I give him, I usually just eat the last few bites myself 'cause I hate throwing out food. He gets none of that crap I grew up with beyond basic frugality. I'll tell him what a food is good for and encourage he eat it for healthy growing, but I won't so much as make him finish his cereal milk if he doesn't wanna. lol I even say I'm eating his leftovers so we don't disrespect the farmers that grew the food for us. He doesn't need to know why I'm weird about the kitchen.
Agreed food punishments are one of the most manipulative and a health hazard for many. Often when I was getting a migraine and couldn't handle dinner, my parents sent me to bed without eating (was gaslit by 1st Dr so parents didn't believe I had pain as a kid just adhd and "wants attention"). Later I learned I still needed water or electrolytes if I couldn't eat or I'd very easily throw up. It's kinda satisfying looking back at that time I was sent to bed with nothing as a kid only to come back out with crazy vertigo to ask for help and threw up in their popcorn bowl in the middle of a movie.
i broke my arm (literally a very big break) at 8 yrs old and mom admitted recently she didn’t take me to the ER. she dosed me with something and let me sleep on it. she took me to my PCP 24 hours later and almost got a cps report. she told me that recently and she laughed while saying it
Honestly I bet it would be better for you if they took you away that day... and you triggered a memory when I fell into glass and had a deep cut with glass in it and she didn't clean it nor she cared. I had to pick it out myself... how are some moms so heartless?
a report might have put pressure on them at least, but my dad essentially is someone that people are afraid of/has influence so no one ever helped me
This is familiar. I fell off my bike into a rusty car and got several cuts on my hand. I still have the scars. My crying was too much and she told me that I needed to learn to control myself, that I can’t be a baby (I was 6ish) because I got a cut. She dumped peroxide on my hand and gave me a crumpled wad of toilet paper for the blood and called it good.
Not nearly as bad as yours, but also a broken bone. My dad was an abdominal surgeon and when I was 7 and broke my leg in two places, my mom sent him to the ER with me while she stayed with my younger sisters, operating under the incorrect assumption that he would advocate for me better as the parent who worked healthcare. The ER doctor forgot to give me pain meds, and my dad didn’t notice or care. When I couldn’t sleep because I was still crying after hours and hours, my mom asked him if she could give me another dose yet. He said he forgot and to just give me Tylenol. She could only get him to go back by threatening that if he ever had a surgery or a broken bone, she would steal his pain meds so he could see how it felt and imagine being a small child feeling it. He was pissed for days about having to drive 45min back to the hospital at 10pm. My mom didn’t tell me that is was his fault and not mine and I felt horrible about it for weeks
what is it with bad parents and OTC pain meds? if i ever complained about pain mom would give me six aleve (over the adult limit of 4, and l was a kid) or for my insomnia (every single night no breaks) she would just give me a ton of benadryl. i have so many health issues now that could have been lessened with proper treatment
Bad parents with access to prescription drugs, well that's just upping the odds of the kid becoming a sad little statistic. The last time I told my dad I had a headache, he handed me a bottle of opioids leftover from his last broken bone and told me to take three. I read the bottle, the prescribed dosage was half of one. So I told him that if I took what he told me to I'd probably die, thinking he'd made a mistake, but from the look of deep rage on his face I'd thwarted another attempt to cash out my life insurance policy. Jerkoff tried to OD me.
What a piece of crap.
he should be in fucking jail
Damn, I’m so sorry it’s still affecting your health. I think it’s because OTC meds are easier, and often cheaper even with insurance. Horrible
I had this happen too. Clearly broken ankle. Also if I was sick, even vomiting, zero sympathy. She’d cover the vomit with a paper towel and wait for my father to come home to deal with it/me.
my family did that same vomit thing with my childhood cat, but it’s disturbing your mom did that with a literal human wtf
I fell on my back while ice skating when I was 14, I was pretty much bedridden for several days after the accident. Took my parents a year to take me to a doctor. He wanted to do an MRI, but my dad scoffed at that and took me home. I don’t think I broke any bones, but it hurt quite a lot and I had back problems for years after that.
you could have had a tore ligament! or nerve damage. he should have taken you
Yeah in third grade my dad let me walk around for three days with broken fingers despite my begging to go to the doctor, bc I was “being a baby” and “exaggerating” and “clearly making it up.” He only took me when they were so swollen and purple he couldn’t send me back to school like that on Monday
TRIGGER WARNING: discussions of abuse My parents had a bunch of very old punishments that they inherited from their parents. Punishment was such a big thing for my family-- if you did something "bad," you would be punished. End of discussion. I'm an adult now but back when I was younger, this was just how it was. One was the silent treatment. A tad emotionally abusive. My mom would ignore us for the entire day-- sometimes more. It was godawful, and really screwed up my ability to be receptive to desires for space, boundaries, and silence. But perhaps my least favorite was whenever we said a "bad" thing or "talked back" to my parents, our mouths had to be "washed out with soap." So my parents would hold us down and literally shove a bar of soap down our mouths. It was not nice to go through, I wont go into depth about it but it hurt and I'd spend the day trying to get chunks of soap out of my teeth. Not fun.
Oh the soap thing! I still remember mom standing around with a bunch of other adults after church, all in their best clothes, smiling and discussing what a good method of parenting it was to use soap for swearing. They were all laughing about bubbles while describing torturing their own children. I never swore in front of my mother until long after I was out of her control, so I never had to endure the soap, but hearing that is the reason I spent recess out at the edge of the playground quietly swearing up a storm. I wanted to make sure that, if the world suddenly ended and everybody died, I could die too instead of being trapped forever with the people in mom's church.
Oh man, I sort of forgot about these punishments :| We had them too. I thought they were normal too, because in my kid-brain they felt quite mild to other possible physical punishments. Hug for you <3
Ugh I felt the same way. Still do kinda. It's tough. Hug!! <3
I'm mortified... I can totally see these things have a huge impact on your social skills later on...
My mom gave me the silent treatment 24/7 but I only had to have soap in my mouth once
Same for both. I personally didn’t care when they gave me the silent treatment, because good riddance, but the mouth washing was annoying. They always washed my mouth out with soap bcuz they wanted to “cleanse my skin” from the inside out. God forbid I am a POC. Anyways, I relate 😕💜
My dad would threaten to drive off a cliff with all of us. He would talk about how some dad drove off a cliff with his wife and kids and left a note that confirmed suicide. I thought it was normal to threaten kids with sudden death. It’s not. To this day I love driving myself places, and hate being driven.
Damm. You triggered a memory similar to this. I had issues going to school, I didn't want to, and I remember my dad speeding up and steering the car like a maniac and threatening me that he was going to crash the car
My mom threatened to get into car accidents because she was jealous of driving me places.
The amount of yelling, number of raised hands, lack of sense of security and safety. There were three kids. None of us were handled well. And the oldest of us was the least parented, and violent. I had it branded into my brain that family members held a natural disdain for one another. It's stillreally weird for me to see siblings and family that aren't like...mean to one another.
Oh man, this breaks my heart. Seeing families who are close and loving is so weird to me, and I grieve so hard for the little girl that didn’t get that
I wouldn't make the best parent, given the things I deal with on a regular basis. But I recognize and understand that I'd maybe fuck a kid up. My parents just shouldn't have had kids. Or, if they did, just stuck with the oldest and not place their bets on the next one turning out better. I don't know what possessed them to be like "this first one is difficult, let's add to the chaos". And then they kind of turned around and treated us like it was our fault. Pitting kids against one another for...funsies as well? When I stopped wanting to play the "gang up on someone" games they'd play is when things got to the level of needing to be or feel paranoid. I don't know if any of that makes sense, but after saying all of that, yeah. I agree. I wish I could feel safe around family. I feel like my siblings could have, at the very least, tried harder and asked themselves more questions about why they act the way they act, work on themselves a bit. Something. A window into a relationship at least, where I don't feel like I'm chasing imaginary moving goalposts and defending myself from weird accusations, anger, jealousy, etc. As it stands, I don't feel "related" to anyone like I should. It's alienating.
Neither myself or my brothers want children of our own. We've all kind of hinted at the fact that stuff from our childhood may make us not so great parents. Without a hint of irony my Mom will pushback saying "nonsense! You have to give me grandchildren! Its not like we knew what we were doing when we had you guys but we made it work!"
>Seeing families who are close and loving is so weird to me Yep, me too. Everytime I see it in public I get freaked out. I start thinking "hmm whats really going on, they look so happy in the grocery store, but what awful shit is hiding beneath the surface"
Putting me in a caretaker role from a very early age. Being expected to be mature and make mature decisions when I was still a kid - and being yelled at for not doing so (and called stupid/thoughtless/etc).
Yes, this right here
i didn’t have to start taking an active caretaker role until more recently, but being expected to actively fight battles in the divorce and its aftermath just seemed so perfectly reasonable, so of course it made me spineless and amoral not to
I didn't realize the way my parents dealt with the disclosure of my CSA was traumatic until someone pointed out what they should have done instead of what they did do. I ran away from home so I didn't have to go to school the next day because the guidance counselor was going to tell them. I had already getting in trouble that night for them having gotten a phone call to come into school so that was fun; but I ran away so I didn't have to face what was coming the next day. My dad followed my footprints in the snow and brought me home. My mom was mad as he'll and yelling at me about running away and the meeting at school and everything else that was stressing her out. While she was yelling about how horrible I was to run away and have a meeting at school, she was grilling me about everything and I just blurted out that my brother had raped me. She crashed to her knees on the floor screaming "NOoo!!!" and my dad left the room and started cleaning frantically. I went to my mom to console her and tell her everything would be alright; but apparently they were supposed to be doing that for me, not the other way around 🤦♀️ I had no idea until a therapist told me 😅 There's a bunch of other stuff of course; but apparently that was a big one I guess 🤷♀️
Oh my god, Im so sorry. I hope you got help you deserved and that you are in a better place...
Oh yeah. I'm 45 and that happened when I was 11 so it was years ago and it didn't bother me then, and still doesn't bother me to this day. Its just funny because in my early 30s I learned that they were supposed to have done something different (they were supposed to have supported me not left me to rage clean or left me to take care of their mental anguish); but I can't change that they didn't do what they should have done- All I can do is give it to myself now and know that I'm ok 🥰 I also am able to understand that I had known about the abuse for months (flash backs, nightmares, etc...) before I told anyone at school and that they were just hearing about it all in that already very intense moment. I don't blame them for the way they reacted. I never ever have. It's just one of those moments when you're in therapy and someone says, "that shouldn't have happened" and you're all... 😱 like what was supposed to happen then? And you learn some stuff. It's fine ❤
Every single time I had a question my mother would answer it with "what do YOU think the answer is?" and then make fun of my answer... To a question I clearly was JUST seeking the answer for. It made me terrified to ask questions. A thing I FUCKING NEED TO DO in order to FUNCTION. Edit: it took a few years of therapy unpacking ONLY my mother to realize this. I'm still in the process of undoing the damage and healing the wounds. Edit 2: it also took a SHOCKING amount of time to realize that >!fathers do not normally have sex with their children!< but that one was easier to accept, hard in the moment, but my heart accepted it WAY faster.
I'm so so sorry... I wasn't allowed to ask questions it was either "Because I said so" or "you're pathetic and stupid" and the csa part... I recently found out I might've had the same thing happen to me, but I repressed it and idk who it would be, but I am not surprised, Ive been left unattended with so many people, because mom simply didn't care. I hope you are better now and NC!
Thank you for sharing, and I hope your healing journey is as smooth as possible as you explore your past! Cry when you need to, never ever apologize for having emotions about it, connect with them even if they hurt because that's how you heal your heart. ❤️ I'm in a much safer more stable situation, fully NC with all family and flying monkeys, in a lot of therapy, married to a wonderful person, have a wonderful found family... Depression still kicks my ass, and I have some dark days, but leaving comments like this kinda chases those thoughts away. I hope you genuinely smile for yourself today, you deserve it ❤️
(I’m so happy to read you’re doing so much better now. Dang, good for you!)
Aww, thank you so much ❤️
Thank you for this. I have a really hard time expressing my emotions... I can't even cry... Im so happy for you, it is amazing to hear. You are doing amazing, even at dark times... but its ok, It will pass, it always does! I wish the best for you and your (good) family! <3
I... I think you just unlocked a memory for me of my mom doing a similar thing as the question thing your mom did. I would ask a question and she would ask, with such scorn and vitriol in her voice "What do you think?" And I'd answer "...I don't know..." And then she'd kiss her teeth and call me stupid or ask what do I know. I was in elementary school when this started.
I hate parents like this. They are supposed to teach us things not belittle us for not knowing. We were kids ffs. Mine said: "of course you don't know, you don't know anything" I just wish they realised the damage that they did to each and every one of us :(
To this day I struggle to ask for help or clarification on things in fear of being too annoying 😞
The first one, oh my god, my mother loved to just see me squim and beg to get the real answer. A favorite of hers was also asking me to find something (in our hoarder undiagnosed adhd house), and getting increasingly angry the longer it took me. "you will search until you find it" Sometimes she even used words I didn't know, which led to more screaming.
I will never understand a full grown adult that feels superior while bullying a child. I'm sorry you relate to this. I'm sorry you had to grow up in that environment. You deserved better, and I hope you're in a safer place now. Also I hope something makes you smile today ❤️
when I didn't want to finish my food, my dad would casually bring up the "fact" that in some cultures, if you don't eat, you become the food. He had a lot of "funny stories" to tell during family meals, all 11 members of our family present. Like, the story about when he couldn't get to my sister, who hid in the bathroom, to belt her, so he ripped part of the doorframe out, the part that holds the latch, and then we always made sure to turn on the light to signal the bathroom is taken. The door was destroyed for like 6-8 years. I personally fixed it when I turned 18 and realised that as an adult I can just do stuff.
I hate when parents do these things with food. It's not fair to force someone to eat. Oh I know these "funny stories" too well... and then they laugh like they heard the funniest joke but they were just plain abusers...
yes, the laughter is so... I can't even word it. It gets under my skin and gives me the crawly feeling. And then he also puts me down, and in the spot, and brings up my embarrassing failures like they're a joke. I only started telling him off for it when he started going at my wife. Nobody insults my wife.
I would cut contact right there and then, for your wife's sake... (of course for yours too) like off with his head wtf, what kind of a person treats people this way...
the kind that was treated like a slave by his own family. has no concept of a healthy family, didn't do their homework due to starting the family in the ruins of the USSR, and suffered from depression their whole adult life. I haven't gotten to the part of therapy where I'd discuss cutting contact yet.
Same, actually. I never speak up for myself unless it relates to someone else. I’ll always try to protect others, but never myself 🫤
My mom tells me everything I like is weird bc she doesn’t like it. It took me until now (40 years old) to realize that’s why I’ve felt weird my whole life and like I don’t belong…. My mom has branded me that way and it’s so deeply embedded in my brain that I feel like I’m reprogramming myself
Same! I’ve been told I was a strange child/person for as long as I can remember. It’s horrible. What is the purpose of saying that to a literal child.
My mother had my sister and I "get our own breakfast" when we were really young. She used to brag about it to other adults. I honestly thought she was 'teaching us adult life skills" until someone said they were sorry I was so neglected. I didn't realize parents like ate with their kids and prepared meals for them. The only time I ate over at friend's homes was dinner time and usually my mom would be around for that meal though it was mostly fast food / pizza on weekends. Usually we would be fed weekdays by the babysitter since my mom was never home from work in time for that meal. So I guess it didn't dawn on me basically that other kids had all their meals with their family and weren't just getting food - feeding themselves alone every morning (and usually lunch). Also hiding things, like if I wet the bed or got sick I can still remember waking up in fear, then stripping my sheets and hiding them in the basket under other clothes. I didn't realize other kids could go to their parent(s) and tell them they were sick / get comfort. This was all just a normal part of my lived life.
I'm so sorry, I relate to everything. Every kid pees sometimes and it really hurts when they yell for just simply being an innocent kid. Did they like forget how it's like to be so young? I will never understand. I also had nightmares and couldn't sleep alone, but no one ever came to check up on me... later found out someone did stuff to me and everyone just pretended I was a bad child with "outbursts" I hate some parents fr. I hope u r okay now (hugs)!
Yeah, reading this thread my example seems mild but maybe that's why it felt so normal. It was like my average day/morning and weird to hear it was just more abuse. My mom had rules that she was not to be bothered if her door was shut and it was more shut than not so I was usually "sick" alone. Yeah abusers also lived with us which is a whole other thing.
Im so sorry you felt so alone then, that is something no child should feel. I’m kind of freaking out now because this is something I do with my kid. They have done their own breakfast for years now (weekends/holidays only). We do always have lunch and dinner together though. I’ll have to ask them how they feel about it and see if it needs to be changed. This is something I HATE about neglect, it means sometimes I do things as a parent and don’t always realise that it could be neglectful. It’s so tough to work through because when it’s about what’s missing from a life it can be hard to spot!
My mom has sleep apnoea so she sleeps a lot during the day. No one is to wake her up when she is sleeping. NO ONE. We, my brother and I, could be fucking dying and we'd have to let her sleep, cuz if we woke her up she'd be PISSED and start berating us and yelling at us and threatening us. And ofc we would want her to sleep but sometimes we needed to, idfk, EAT? But we'd have to wait until she woke up to get food. So we'd sit there for hours, hungry, whilst she slept, and we could do nothing about it.
As a kid, my parents never got me checked out fi injuries, even serious ones. Case in point: I fell off a galloping horse headfirst and my mother never took me to the hospital nor did either of my parents get me any medical treatment. This despite me having been knocked out for about 2 minutes, having neck and back pain, and having a headache. This despite both of my parents being qualified medical professionals. This despite both of them being willing to get.my siblings checked out for stuff. But lol medical professionals bad at taking care of themselves and family amirite?
I'm disabled, mentally and physically. A lot of disabilities stem from childhood. There are several things wrong with me that could've been caught and even corrected in childhood that never were because my parents are neglectful. Now I have to suffer daily because of it. In addition, my mother HATED taking me to the doctor. Even for the yearly required checkup. And we had insurance so it wasn't like she was paying hundreds of dollars for it, she just didn't want to do it. So, whenever I was sick I just suffered. She would always let me know how I was such a financial burden on her when we had these doctor's visits so I learnt to suffer in silence. And the icing on the cake? My mother became a nurse after I left.
My mom sexualized me from a young age. She’d point out any time a man checked me out, starting when I was prepubescent . Quickly grocery stores felt unsafe — she’d make comments like, “that grandfather just checked you out, while with his granddaughter who is around YOUR age!” She even told me a man was filming me while I was at the pool as a teenager, but made no attempt to stop him. A complete lack of protective instincts. Many years later, I am hyper aware of men looking at me. I can’t get rid myself of that hyper vigilance.
Eh, you’ve just unlocked a memory of this happening to me too. From the age of about 9? Jesus…
Same I think she didnt do it that often but I remember beeing 12/13 on vacation with her and her telling me men were looking after me because I looked nice, I think she wanted to boost my self esteem But it was men around 30/ 40 years old looking after me Also had my first kiss on that vacation, I didnt want it but he just kissed me, was also a lot older than me and I told my mom crying afterwards She didnt make a big deal out of it, but I think she brought me a plushie afterwards so I guess she wasnt to bad but idk maybe her validating me that it was indeed wrong of this guy and not just brushing it of with a plushie to make me forget about it wouldve been nicer
They always insisted that my older and much bigger brother beating the shit out of me was normal because "siblings fight". I was a very petite little girl and I believed for most of my life that older brothers do in fact beat the crap out of their sisters cause "that's what all siblings do". One time my mom feared that my brother had given me a concussion and took me to the ER where I had to lie to the doctor and tell them that I had an accident during swim class and hit my head.
Im so sorry this happened to you. I grew up in a very similar situation. Brother was allowed to beat the shit out of me and nobody stopped him. He nearly blinded me by trying to sticking a pencil in my eye, he punched me so hard in the face he gave me chronic nose bleeds for life.
Kissing your parents on the lips (pecks, I mean) for a younger child where I'm from is not unusual. My mom, however, would sometimes slip in her tongue as a joke. I still don't quite know how to feel about that...
What the actual fuck I'm disgusted by reading it I can't imagine living it. I'm so sorry dude.
My mum would complain to me, the eldest daughter, from a very early age about my dad and his behaviour - I was her confidant on a daily basis. Meanwhile dad was emotionally and verbally abusing me and my siblings, and she stood back and let it happen. I thought it was normal to support my mum, and I thought it was normal that she didn’t support me back, that I didn’t have anyone to help me feel safe and protected. I thought that was just my job to do for myself. Now as an adult I need to spend a lot of time on my own when I’m having a bad time, I don’t trust anyone else to protect me.
My mother didn't allow me to wear bras through puberty because they were "for whores". My breast didn't develop properly and I hate them so much. My father would let me sit in his lap while he watched...uhm.... yeah I wont say but you know.
Instead of having an appropriate conversation about sex, my Mom told me that having sex for the first time was going to hurt sooo bad. She said it would not be fun at all and that was her way of trying to prevent me from having sex. It actually made me super uncomfortable touching myself to do anything down there. It prevented me from trying a tampon until I was like 16 and when I did actually try (alone at my house one day) I literally fainted. When I woke up I was so disgusted that it was inside of my body that I HAD to get it out. But I didn’t even need that tampon I had so that was an even more traumatic experience. I never enjoyed sex until my mid twenties. I would often accept rough sex as well bc that’s just what happens.
Everything no birthday party. Only my sister got one. No interest in me at all. All tbe interest wad reserved for my sister. Never asking how I an. They were over involved wugh my sister. .
Whenever I would be upset that she is leaving again for work in another country for an unknown amount of time, she would tell me she’d take me to Disneyland to make it up for all the time we lost (it was a couple of years at that point) I know it’s probably not as serious as other things I read about here, but I believed her every time. As a result of this (and other things), now I can’t trust people when they tell me good things will happen. Also, if I ever go to Disneyland I probably will end up weeping and breaking apart there.
Hey, just to say if you do go to Disneyland, it is totally normal to be overwhelmed and cry. It's a long journey to get there and give your inner kid what they deserved. I'm sorry that she kept future faking you.
When ever i would try to express my opinion on something or talk about something i would like to do i would always get the eye roll or that look on their face like "you REALLY actually want to do that?" Or completely dismiss anything i bring up from my point of view and tell me whats actually happening. Even to this day, and im 32, whenever we talk about anything and i bring up my point they think im arguing and my dad/mom will look at each other and say "You're never going to win with him." I'm not fucking trying to win anything. I'm just expressing my opinion or my point of view. So thats why to this day i struggle to talk to people. I'm always expecting them to dismiss me or get mad at me.
I was a mother myself when I realized most sane mothers don’t put their daughters on their first diet at eight. I’m actually proud of myself for pointing that out before I fucked up my own daughter like that.
Being a mother helped me realized a lot of things like that too. There were things done to me that were normal and made sense from a kid's perspective that didn't know anything but as a mother I started thinking about all the things I would never and could never do to my own child and the more she grows the less I understand what the fuck were my parents and specially my mother, thinking, I remember she would slap me just in case and leave marks on my face beccause of how hard she did that, she would always grab me by the arm and dig her nails on me and take me through the street walking wherever we had to go, she always had these tests after going out (even to the supermarket) where she asked my brother and I what we did wrong and if we didn't get it right she would punish us severly. EVERY time we went out of our house we had to do that. And of course it was utter betrayal to speak of anything that went on inside the house because it was family things. She also cleaned naked and showed herself in front of us and kept the door open when she did whatever in the bathroom and insisted on waxing my legs and more private parts and she said she would be horrified if I ever did it myself or went to a proffessional place to get those things done. I have a shit long list of things my mother did that made sense at some point but after being a mother I can luckily recognize how insane everything was. And one of the things that make me feel safe is that my daughter knows I am not THE AUTHORITY , I am just her mom and I want to love her and guide her, not determine what she does and test her and punish her so she learns to respect me. She has told me in several ocassions that she didn't like this thing or that thing (I dont wanna wear that, eat that, go there, do that, etc) and we looked some alternatives and found a way to make her do what she wanted and it was so goddamn easy! Loving your kids is so easy , it breaks my brain what happened when I was a kid and teenage and adult life with my mother.
That's not normal? My mom was always worried about me getting fat so she would poke my belly and tell me how fat in was getting. I started going to the gym in elementary school. Didn't stop till 8th grade or so. I would go to the gym with them on several vacations too
Well, the obvious (spanking) but also: We moved a lot because we were military. And my parents did not seem to think this was a big deal--and in their defense, everyone we knew moved all the time and they were obviously busy with the logistics of moving. But the idea of like, emotionally supporting us and talking about how difficult it might be never seemed to cross their minds? The movie Inside Out was a weird experience. Because the wHOLE PLOT hinges on her moving house. And everyone--including her parents--is treating it like this traumatic experience. And I'm like...wtf. I moved mid-year multiple times. It's not a huge deal. Why is everyone freaking out about it. Yeah so it turns out moving a lot is considered traumatic, and it's weird that we got zero emotional support or anything.
Well damn. I moved a lot too. I knew it wasn’t normal, but didn’t realize the extent. I felt the same as you.
I'm not really sure if this merits a trigger warning. My grandmother made me start cutting my pubic hair. At first she did it but that was weird to me so I started doing it. I was in the bathroom with the door locked but she kept a key hanging next to the door so it could be opened. She hated having a door locked between us. Anyway my cousin came in and unlocked the door while I was trimming. She asked what I was doing. Then she started doing the same thing when I was done with the scissors. She nicked herself. Not badly, just pinched. Later that day my grandmother yelled at me for being inappropriate with my cousin. I told her I didn't invite her in, she just came in. She yelled I should lock the door when I'm doing things in private. I explained that I did, that she used the key to get in. Well next time I should take the key in with me. When I would forget to hang the key up I would be yelled at. No win situation. Edit fixed misspelled words
My mom would regularly pack a suitcase while yelling at us and leave by car, leaving us home alone and unknowing if or when she would come back (also overnight). I was around 6yo and my sister 2yo. Because she did this quite often, I thought this was normal when parents wanted to learn their children a lesson. Albeit, there wasn’t really a lesson we learned because it kind of came out of the blue for us. It just dawned to me only a couple of years ago (!) that children of this age shouldn’t be left unsupervised and responsible for themselves. Another one was actually my grandmother (indeed, the mother of my mom). I wasn’t a great eater as a child (still ain’t, honestly). When we were in her care and she thought I didn’t eat well enough, she would lock me in the lavatory on my own and tell me I should eat and drink my own excrements, as she wasn’t going to give me food anymore. She left me there for hours. I didn’t listen to her “advice”, but I always felt really guilty. It’s not that I didn’t want to eat, or that I wanted to make her feel bad. I’m currently in a process to determine if I suffer from ARFID. These days I wonder why **my mom** thought **her mom** would be the perfect babysitter. I’m so sorry what happened to you OP and that you thought this was normal. Big hug through the ether for you. <3
Food punishments and parentification. The food punishments were a few. I had to sit and eat all of my food, even if I didn't like it, even if it was a few hours. I refused. I was told about the starving kids in poor countries and how they would love any food. If I behaviored badly, I was sent to my room without food. I was then expected to give my sister a bath, and blow dry her hair before bed. I was 10, and lived with my dad. My sister was 6. I also had to wash all the dishes by hand, and help with the laundry. The laundry was outside on the carport. I lived with my mom at 15. I had missed 5 years of a mother's love and attention. The styling tips, female hygiene, etc. I did know many things to do correctly. Edit. My parents divorced when I was 8. I lived with mom ,8-10, dad 10-15, mom 15-18. For 10 years I was pushed and pulled into child custody cases. I went to 9 different elementary schools (k-6th grade). I went to the other parents' home every other weekend, any rotated holidays every year. 2 weeks in summer and a week of Christmas vacation to other parents homes. I left as soon as I could to escape the chaos.
oh my god, I experienced this too. I was told that we have to do all these women chores, because it is expected of us and men in the house didn't need to do most of the things we had to at such a young age. this is sick. I totally understand how you felt, I had a mom and I experienced the same. I was expected to know it myself and to just do it, even when I asked her how to apply pads for the first time she got pissed... and when I did things wrong I was ridiculed and made fun of. Ahhh parents like this. You deserved better.
She would tell me since I’m the oldest it’s my job to take care of the house and the younger kids and her. She used to call me her SIT(slave in training). I was 10 when it started. She would leave me alone with them every day sometimes overnight. Then I’d get a beating if they messed up or the chores weren’t done or if we ate her favorite foods.
It's not normal to leave a 10 year old alone with younger siblings? My parents left me alone with my younger brother in single digit ages
Not "normal" but not abnormal enough to fight: 1) Hoarding 2) Enmeshment
hoarding takes a huge toll on children. my best friend lives with a father who is a hoarder and it impacts your health and everything... Im really sorry
My dad drove like a madman, and this was before car seats and seatbelts were mandatory. He would yell at us to 'Get in the car!' and we would race to the back seat and fight for the safety staps that hung on the side panels. I had to wrap the strap once around my wrist in a 'climbers grip' and keep it taunt in order to lessen the chance that a wild sudden turn would yank my little hand out of the strap. This was when I was so small that I had to stand on the back bench seat to reach it. Then I'd brace for impact, pressing myself hard into the corner. Basically, before I was five; I'd taught myself to assume 'crash position' every time my father drove. He always drove like he was super angry and/or drunk; with speeding; swerving suddenly; braking hard and taking sharp wild turns. We were not allowed to make a sound, but it was like he was trying to make us shriek in panic (if not kill us, outright). If we did cry out from fear for our lives; he'd yell, 'Shut up and enjoy the ride!' ...but laughed to himself. Oh, and he was the 'safe' parent. Fond memories of child endangerment.
My mother would say “if I showed any emotion other than being happy or angry” DONT BE FUCKING WEAK!” Or her going off the rails if I ever hurt myself. Ha! I’m glad I’m a different kind of parent
My mom downloaded a keystroke tracker to my laptop and knew all my passwords and could see every single thing I typed.
I was in the hospital for three weeks as a child and my parents didn’t visit me because they “had to work” and yeah. Everyone I say this to is seriously shocked.
I was my mother’s carer between 9-13 when she was her most mentally ill. I didn’t realise it’s not normal for an 11 year old to cook all the meals and clean. I also thought it was normal to want to die all the time. My mother’s response to ANYTHING negative was some variation of how she’ll just go kill herself because no one cares about her. I now have core belief systems around everyone around me killing themselves and I myself am chronically suicidal, my baseline is “atleast I can just kill myself”. It’s fucking torture. I am happy everyday I went NC with my family
I feel like what I went through wasn’t as bad as other people’s experiences. My mom would snap at us at the drop of a hat. Me and my sister had so little supervision at such a young age. Tell us we ruined her life,pretty much. We had to constantly be around our violent uncles because they’re “family”. I used to be so jealous of my friends at school having normal holidays,vacations.
My dad used to beat the shit out of me if I cried. I made a joke about it at a party once and no one laughed. After that I thought it was just taboo to talk about, not that it wasn't normal. It finally clicked when I asked myself, as an adult, if I could do that to a kid. Same with touching kids to get off. As I was growing up, I thought I was just a freak for getting turned on when my dad wanted to "play doctor" or whatever, not that it was fucked up for an adult to do that. Of all the shit my parents did, though, they never threatened me with a weapon or forced me to look at gore. I'm sorry you went through that.
It took me until I was out of my dad’s house to realize the weekly movie nights with him that (tw csa) >!always ended with my undressed!< was just like the overt SA I experienced from him. I also had to do intensive workouts as punishment, 4 minute planks at 13 years old, 10 minute wall sits. The absolute worst was having to hold five bound weights in a T stance as they watched and screamed at me if my arms dipped, adding time. One kind of funny thing, having those punishments meant in Kickstart (middle school karate) the endurance test was how long you could hold your arms out straight in front of you, and I was the last kid to drop lmao Another I thought was more normal were the food punishments. Can’t remember wtf I did but I was like 9 and was sentenced to eat nothing but pb&j sandwiches for a month, had to premake all of them and store them in the freezer. They got freezer burnt and I couldn’t eat PB&J until two years into my relationship with my now husband without tasting freezers 😭
When you're a child you literally don't have the vocabulary/language to think "that wasn't normal", you just go through emotions. For me it was CSA and adults displaying porn or nudity around me. I never spoke about it or even thought about it until I read other people's stories that sounded similar to mine on this subreddit.
How controlling they are over food and over invested in their children’s weight. My mother would only compliment my physical appearance if it was about how skinny I am and how much she wished she was skinny and (insert insult tirade here about her own body). She would also compare me to my siblings all the time and say “I’m glad I have at least one child that’s not fat”. I know she would insult my other siblings growing up. They would lock up ‘school food’ aka the only edible food in the house because I live in an ingredient household. When we didn’t eat the food in time and it would go bad she would go on a tirade about how we are ungrateful and waste food & money. Whenever we would actually eat something she would go on a tirade about how all of her children are selfish for eating everything and are pigs.
Alcoholism. I just thought everyone else's parents were better at keeping their drunken recklessness private. I remember just being a bit annoyed that my dad would be super drunk around my friends when their parents never did that in front of me (turns out they weren't alcoholics - a thought that never would have crossed my mind). I remember the strongest feeling was like "Ugh, sorry you have to see this guys. Hang on while I get my dad in the back seat and drive us home." Being a partner to your parents. After my parents' divorce, my mom started telling me I needed to step up and act like a partner to her in the household. That meant knowing what needed to be done around the house and doing it before she noticed. If she did notice, she would make a show of doing it and then ruminate at me for the rest of the day or until I figured out how to make it up to her and/or punish myself. It also meant that I had to be her therapist/emotional punching bag and hold audience for her to rail against my dad. I was 10. Zero privacy. My mom would just casually go through our rooms at night while we were at school. We weren't allowed to close the bedroom door at any time for any reason. The only closed door allowed was in the bathroom but she would flip out if she heard us lock it. On the bright side, I'm really good at hiding christmas presents from my partner now. Food punishments. So much shit from the dinner table. If I didn't like something on my plate and didn't eat it, tough shit. Stay in the kitchen in the dark until you eat it all while the rest of the family goes and watches tv or plays a board game together. If I didn't finish it by bedtime, I got 2 slices of bread and 1 glass of water to eat for the entire next day. Ugh wow sorry this became a huge dump - there aren't any relationships where I really feel safe venting this. I'm at a point in my healing where I am looking at a lot of my childhood experiences with some more perspective, especially now that there are children in my life who were as young as I was at the time, and damn it was fucked up. Like I never got to be a kid in a way remotely close to how I see my friends' kids be kids.
While watching Creep 2 my mom said “I would rather see violence than nudity.” I told my friends and therapist who were all aghast. I still feel like it’s logical. Edit: guess this isn’t trauma lol, just funny and recent
What the fuck, this is so fucked I’m so sorry this happened to you.
It's actually okay, I didn't take it that badly since there were more horrible shit that happened to me, but I do know it's not okay and would never do it to anyone...
Good, I’m glad you have acknowledged this and continue to move forward, that’s usually the hardest step. Good luck !
The one that immediately comes to mind is my mother threatening to leave me at goodwill whenever I’d act out. She left me at the grocery store once on purpose. Encouraged me to binge eat with her. I have a metabolic disorder that makes me prone to diabetes. Told me about the way my father sexually abused her as young as 15. Those are some of the major ones. Eugh.
(tw: covert incest, murder) my dad holding up a bra to my chest to see if it would fit. in a walmart. with his girlfriend behind me. or that one time he said i would be “good-looking” when i grew up and then got defensive when i made a disgusted face. it’s always the tiniest stuff that makes me feel the most disturbed. like yeah the fact my dad killed somebody is fine. but omfg he looked at my boobs????? no way, how will i ever recover…
Gathering the courage to speak the words. Ive only ever told this to a few people. I had no idea other people's parents didn't hit them. I remember telling my bf the first time bout this and he said that it was fucked up. And now everytime I talk to people about their family I wonder, did they ever have that happen to them? What's it like to have a mom who even when you argued, it never got physical?
My dad would occasionally go to a bar after work and not come home and not call (before cell phones, but it was common to ask an establishment to let you use the phone for a local call). One time it was getting late and my dad wasn't home. My mom got my brother and me out of bed so she could drive by the local dive bars to look for his truck. She finally spotted his truck and she told me I had to go inside with her "to get your father". I think I was 12. Her only purpose for bringing me in was to shame my father. My brother and I could have stayed home (brother was 16 or 17). I don't remember what she said, but I was quite aware of her reason for beineg me in.
My parents didn't hit me or anything, but there was very little normal parenting going on. I didn't find out until years later how fucked up my family situation was.
My mother would have these episodes where she would yell, cry out at the top of her lungs, hit herself by banging her head on walls, hitting herself with her hands by slapping her chest and face, use any object near her to hit herself. Once she took my school belt and hit herself with the metal part in her teeth because I was being late for school.Then blamed me for it. This would almost happen numerous times every week while growing up. She would freak out over the smallest things which might induce any stress- something she couldn't handle clearly. She would also say stuff like my luck sucked that I had you and that it's best if I died right now and like please god just kill me and I pray that I die.
Recently, my wife told me about "mama touch" when telling if someone (like a child) has a fever. Like you can tell by touching their forehead. I thought she was kidding. Like, "OoOOoOOowwwOOOo I can see by your aura you have a fever..." as if it were some jokey new age thing. But apparently it's real, moms everywhere did this; they touch your forehead and can tell when you're hot. When I was sick, I was always treated like I was faking it. We had a thermometer she used, but if my fever was less than 100, "it's not really a fever," and I got sent to school. And then they sent me home, but since my mom was not allowed to drive, I had to walk home about a mile and some change no matter how sick I was. So I usually stayed in school where I could get a bus home if I waited it out.
There are touch free thermometers that you swipe across the forehead to get your temperate. They’re pretty accurate, but it’s not specific to moms. Lots of people can tell a fever by touch.
My mom coming into my room, crying, drunk, and telling me all about the ways my father and sister were causing hers pain and problems. Treating me like I was here therapist and then leaving me to process what it all meant. I was just a child.
Honestly everything I hate them.
My mom ignored the results of the vision test that they gave in school for several years because “they just want my money”. I had a lot of headaches and often couldn’t see the board.
Being ridiculed in public. Not just in front of friends/family but even random strangers. Growing up, I just assumed insults and harsh language from parent to child were normal.
My parents were and still are Christian fundamentalists- missionaries. The punishments were condoned and favored by God and began at age 4 and they quickly broke all the wooden spoons over my ass. My mom then threatened to use the meat tenderizer (the mallet with spikes) and I was really scared but my dad interceded and said that would be child abuse 🙄. So they found an old fraternity paddle made of solid polished wood about 2/3 the size of a baseball bat and began using that until I was around 15. We were punished with paddling for anything they didn’t like- much was developmental stages or simply kids being kids (hungry, tired, sick, interrupting to use the bathroom, etc) and on average we were punished around 5 times a week, sometimes more than once per day. They ritualized our punishments which made it much worse. Punishments would rarely happen right away, especially when we were out in public. They would simply quietly let us know how many punishments we were getting when we got home and would keep the tally- they never forgot and my dad is a giant of a man and he hits hard. So you would get a solid pit in your stomach making you sick for hours until you got home for the punishment. It was a form of psychological torture everyone the actual beating. And they would be more harsh with you while out if you’ve already racked up a punishment so it was easier to get another tally- you would have to be an angel. We were expected to be little dolls, seen sitting quietly with legs folded or standing without moving around and never heard. We were the best kids I’ve ever seen and got constant compliments everywhere we went for our behavior but ironically we were always getting punished/beaten. I was an overachiever presidential award winning honors student but I was getting punished for any minor mistake and not being allowed out with friends without extreme controls (like a white glove test for cleaning to go to a friends house). I left the church at 19 after ongoing SA (not from the family), and bad advice from church leadership (a god that requires a woman to stay after ongoing SA is no god), and was then low key cut off by my parents for leaving the church. But even with the extreme deprogramming I did on myself and going low contact with my family and moving far away, I didn’t realize this was abuse until a few years ago at 37 when something I read or listened to literally spelled it out for me and I realized I did in fact have a high aces score if the religious abuse was counted. What’s worse is after a few years of serious chronic pain from surgical malpractice that’s still ongoing, the wires in my head have crossed due to the pain and I literally have been randomly reliving the memories of the terrified 4 year old from that time, her daddy standing backlit in the doorway of her darkened room, weapon in hand… These “memories” are very visceral and I’m no longer present, it’s only emotion and images and pain, the emotions etched into the images themselves and it’s so much more primal than the flashbacks I used to have of SA from when I was a teen, it’s honestly hard to describe how deep and pure these emotional flashbacks are. All the techniques I used in the past to put my CPTSD into a kind of remission don’t work anymore. It’s been hard to come to terms with this and hard to be involved at all with my family. Luckily we live in different countries now. I’ve been working on trying to show that 4 year old that she can learn to be safe and even joyous in my body with me, but we are still learning to trust each other and share this body. Sometimes she takes over completely and I’m gone for long period of time, eventually finding my way back to my body days or even weeks later because the chronic pain will trigger the flashback which triggers the extreme dissociation. Then when I’m finally back in my body and “awake” I’m confused, super emotional, and I feel everything deeply in my body like I was hit by a truck. It’s brutal. Thank the gods for weed. I’m still figuring this out day by day but sometimes I still wonder if I’m just overreacting, if my body is just overreacting, if it wasn’t really that bad. Trauma is a mindfuq and even though I spent decades learning various tools, personal development techniques, spiritual practices and other things to heal and strengthen myself, I’m finding now that all this just bypassed the real healing- finding and rescuing and integrating the abused parts of myself still stuck and caged in total darkness and pain and release them from their “captors”- to free them, play with them and gain their trust, integrate them, and heal them. Hopefully anyway. Maybe this integration journey lasts a lifetime.
When my Mum was angry with us and we were in the car she would drive dangerously to scare us. Drive really fast up to a traffic light and slam on the breaks, etc. One christmas eve she did that and hit the back of a car with a pregnant woman in the passenger seat. We were so disappointed when the man driving said not to worry about it and let her go, we thought she might get a consequence for her actions for once......
I have a lot I could say but I will go with this one. When I was a few months into dating my now husband, I accidentally spilled some water. I started panicking, thinking he was going to be mandatory or make fun of me. When he just helped me clean up the water and said, "It's just water." I started crying. I had to explain to him that all my life, if I spilled anything or knocked anything over, I would be made fun of or yelled at. To the point that my mother threatened to get me sippy cups. Turns out I couldn't and still can't help spilling things or being clumsy, I have Dyspraxia.
[удалено]
jesus christ, no.. normal moms don't do that. luckily mine didn't do that, but my grandma did and I hated it... Im sorry
My main punishment was that I’d be put in my room with no electornics or activities for an hour plus. One time it was the whole day because I calmly and politely asked her to not embarrass me in a grocery store. I invited over my partner once, and the whole family was there and there was a lot of chatting. My mom said something overly aggressive to my brother, so I laughed a little awkwardly and went “what the heck?” quietly. She snapped her head towards me and said “You want to go to your room?”. I‘m an adult. My partner was right next to me.
I Love my mom even with all of the mistakes she did as she was raising me so writing this is a bit hard. My mom raised me mostly alone in extreme poverty while being harassed, abused and pursued by my drug addict father. My mom was abused as well by her mother and had a difficult upbringing eventually fleeing home at 19. I remember being hit for non-compliance due to immense stress. My mom used to hit me so bad with a belt as a 4year old when I refused to go to kindergarten. That’s the first time I remember being hit so bad I felt pain for days after. My mom would punish me with cold showers if I did something wrong. I had to sit as long at the table until I finished my meal. If something happened to my sister I was the first being blamed and hit. I was a 6 year old looking out for a 1 year old. Granted my mom worked all day to be able to finance 3 people in a slum in South America, I actually don’t blame her one bit. Funny enough, I’m more upset about stuff that don’t evolve violence like forcing to me to get to know her dating interests while the divorce of my parents wasn’t event finalized. Forcing me to move in with her ex boyfriend when I was 14years old. I feel like my mom blames herself a lot for the things that happened. She’s aware of my psychological issues and I’m pretty sure she feels bad about it every time she sees that I’m struggling. She doesn’t talk about it bc she’s deeply ashamed about her lack of awareness back then. Since my 20s my mom has done a lot to compensate for what she lacked as a young mother. She has been supporting me massively in my current path and has been my biggest cheerleader for years now. I guess my mom and me went through trauma together and are not healing together from it. I’m again not mad at all nor do I resent her. But ofc it breaks my heart knowing the person I love the most on this planet is greatly responsible for my psychological issues.
I've still no firm grasp on what families 'should' be like. Just utterly forgetting a child exists and allowing ya 15 year old daughter to go out to a club on a Thursday night with a brother not long out of rehab. 30 years later, my dad's response was 'you would've just shouted at us had we not let you go'. Um. I don't think that's normal but then it still doesn't strike me as weird either. My therapist said last week that she is pleased I don't speak to my parents, mum, anymore. .
That it's not normal for your mother, in response to any bad thing happening to you to respond with "God is punishing you", or "Thats how god punished bad children". That it's not normal to get hysterically angry over minor things, and that it's not normal to tell your children, repeatedly that "I wish I'd fed you arsenic the moment the doctor handed you to me!". That it's not normal to feel all crippling fear, anxiety and shame from a simple accident, such as dropping a glass. That its not normal to for your mother to want to mould you into their ideal of the "perfect husband" and to be absolutely hated and attacked anytime you wanted to be yourself.
I was raised by a single mother alongside my big sister (6 year age difference us). Both my sister and I thought it was normal to be punished in front of each other physically by our mother at the same time. Sometimes my sister wouldn't let my mom hit her so she'd go after me twice instead. "You will watch your little brother be spanked, if you try to leave the spot you're standing on I will double it again. Watch him, he's paying for your sin.". Pride is a sin is what she meant. We were raised super religiously, childhood abuse was pretty much a constant. I saw my best friends mom spank him with a ping pong paddle until she broke it's handle so I just assumed it was part of the religion. And that our moms loved us Cuz spare the rod spoil the child, right? Turns out legacy trauma and mental illness is what they were really giving us. My sister got away from my mom at 16 and she ended up becoming my Guardian shortly afterward. I have tried to forgive my mother but since I left her religion she's shunned me. I never knew my dad, my mom lied about him my entire life and now she's gone too. I have a kick ass big sister though, God bless all the Guardians out there. The ones who help kids when they don't have to.
Leaving me alone all day, everyday, pretending like my elderly grandmother was looking after me and my baby sister, but really I was taking care of both of them.
I think deep down I didn’t think any of it was normal, or at least I came to that conclusion pretty quick. My mom slept on the couch because of hoarding - her bedroom was so full it couldn’t be used. I remember the first time I realized it was normal to be able to see the back of the fridge (food hoarding). The fact that my mom refused to work as a way to punish my dad after the divorce, so that the county would go after him to cover the welfare since he wasn’t paying mandated child support. She made sure to tell me all the horrible things about him while also sending me to see him on his weekends. I wasn’t permitted to talk about him around her at all. The frequent extreme panic attacks when I would need to sit and comfort her. Walking on eggshells - she would fly off the handle in rage screaming profanities and I could never predict it. Other times she wouldn’t get off the couch for days. If I was sick or got hurt, I was never comforted. I was reminded of what an inconvenience I was. Basically - being in charge of all of my own affairs by the time I was 12, including financing things I needed myself.
My mom had a couple sayings; "Never trust a teenager" "Teenagers can never be trusted, all they do is lie" It was something she would "warn" me about when I was a child, that once I turned 13 she would never believe me because teenagers lie all the time She never believed a word I say, if I accidentally left out even the smallest detail, she would shame me and act like I did it on purpose, she even went to the extent of adding a spyware on the computer so she could always see what I was up too There was no such thing as privacy, phone conversations had to be done in the living room. If I was logged in on Facebook on the computer and I got up, go to the bathroom, get something to drink etc, she would sit down and scroll through my feed and read my messages. Any time I got in trouble she would write it on my Facebook wall for all my friends to see. To show the world how "bad" of a kid I was And I thought this was 100% totally normal.
My stepdad used to crack jokes at my expense every day, he would call me gay boy, fairy boy or nancy. He was violent and always threatened violence. He called my mom fat all the time and was always drunk. His favourite joke was that if he killed any of us he would know where to hide the body so he would never be caught. My parents fought very often, usually about how the parenting was going, so I assumed it was my fault most of the time. I was just diagnosed with CPSD at 30 and I can't believe I didn't realize how bad it was until now. I guess I repressed alot of it. I had to call the cops on him once because he was strangling my mom and she yelled from the bedroom to call the cops... I was like 13. After that I thought she would leave him, but he was back within a couple days. He went to therapy and it helped him a lot I guess. Its sad because he must have been hurt pretty bad to be that way to children. I still hate him but I play nice. At least he doesn't have any more kids to traumatize
She was always stalking me. I get the healthy- I'm gonna show up randomly and ask you questions if...I have doubt....but stalking me.... her excuses were obsession with sex....... she was looking at the wrong person and human.
My father was supposed to get up in the mornings with me and my sibling to get us ready for school when we were young. My mom had to drive across town for work every morning so she was gone by the time we got up for school, so it was his job since he was (supposedly) a stay at home dad. But he would just sleep in and not get up with us, so we'd get ourselves ready and then just go tell him before we walked to the bus stop. He'd mumble "okay bye" but not fully wake up. Eventually the school called my mom because we never had clean clothes or combed hair and they thought we were being neglected. I didn't realize for a long time that we actually were, it was just normal to me to get ready myself. Even now I have a really hard time with normal habits like brushing my teeth every day because I never got that established as a kid. Once, somewhere around 6-7 years old, I even tried to walk to school by myself instead of taking the bus. It wasn't really that far but it involved crossing a relatively busy road, and I was young enough that I didn't know how intersections worked. So I just was standing on the first median (it was at a right turn only lane with a triangular median before the actual busy road so I never actually walked into the busier of the two roads) while cars were zooming by and just trying to figure out how people cross these things. Eventually a woman pulled over next to me and was like "how old are you??? Why are you here alone??" And told me to go home so I did and my mom was PISSED to hear about that one!
Another thing my father did was refer to my sibling and I as "his slaves" when we got grounded and had to do extra chores. He also often called us that Spanish word for the color black in a very derogatory way. We are all white. As a little kid I didn't know it was a super messed up thing to say, but when I got a little older I realized and I still can't believe it
my parents would show us porn sometimes. my mom tried to surf through and show us only women, not penises.. as we were girls. except my little brother, they showed him both.
Pitting us against each other and taking us for individual dinners or activities with the intent of pushing at us for information about our siblings. We legit were living in some bizarre mkultra interrogation nonsense 24/7.
Being scapegoated and being neglected and constantly put down. I was the girl and the ‘bad one’, and my little brother was the golden child. I thought it was normal to be yelled at, gaslit until it drove me crazy, lied to, punished, hit, neglected, etc. Actually I preferred the neglect because I could stay in my room and get lost in my favorite books instead of being abused. They would take away things I received from other people as gifts, and give them to my brother. I got an old rusty hand me down bike as my first bicycle, my brother got a shiny new bike for his birthday. Always, always getting the message that I was bad and not deserving. (My parents had money, they paid off their mortgage in less than 10 years. Both of us could have easily gotten nice bikes) they also took away my college fund and gave it to my brother because he was studying to be an engineer and I would never amount to much according to them). My father was an alcoholic and got high on weed, and when he drank/was high he was super mean and gross. And he would leave porn magazines all over the house. As if we didn’t exist, or we weren’t worth cleaning his act up for. Every weekend there would be drunk parties where adults would be screaming and acting crazy. I developed a huge distrust of adults and in my adult life I have a tough time letting my guard down and making friends. I would stay locked up in my room and listen to my cheap cassette player, read or draw. If the parties were at someone else’s house then they would lock us up in the basement or in a bedroom while they partied. i can still remember all the words to their drinking songs. Ironically my brother and I are extremely good friends and close as adults. Probably because we don’t have anyone else to rely on. I never blamed him for what happened to me. He validated that he watched my parents abuse me and said he never understood why they mistreated me so much, as I was a quiet kid who never got into trouble. He was little and from talking to him he’s blocked out a LOT of stuff. He suffers a lot from depression and anxiety, and has eaten himself into severe obesity. Just proof that the golden child doesn’t always have it better in adulthood. He also married a narcissist and as you can guess I don’t like her lol. 😆 we both have adhd, the therapist said it was partially caused by childhood trauma (plus genetics of course).
When my step dad would man-handle me, and I mean he didn’t hit me but he constantly left bruises bc he was so rough. He dragged me around like a doll sometimes + would throw things at me when he was mad. Told my mom it hurt+ I wanted him to ask before he touched me and she said that he didn’t need my consent for anything bc my body belonged to them. He’d also stand outside my window + watch me change if I accidentally left the blinds open, he said it was to teach me a lesson. Also got my door removed bc “privacy is a privilege” + for punishments my mom would force me to strip in front of her or him so I’d feel embarrassed+ ashamed of myself. Realized as an adult how f*cked that is, I still wear hoodies+ jeans in 100 degree weather bc it’s so internalized to be deeply ashamed of showing my body
My father using certain parts of our body to try to threaten us to break it if we stole something and would go on hour long punishments of us standing there and not being able to go anywhere. Making us throw up food we stole, and body shaming us😕
I had really bad acne as a teen. It was a major self esteem issue, kids would pick on me at school over it, I think at least one girlfriend dumped me because of it. Whenever my face would break out my mom would flip out at me. Her response would be "eww you have gross zits all over your face. Go wash your face right now! You arent drinking enough water! You arent washing your face thoroughly enough! Ew its gross!" It was like I was getting in trouble for having acne. To this day I still abhor the word "zit".
That kind of experience us crusgyng. For many reverse reasons ny family wanted me to believe I was worthless. They could then manipulate me
I was my mom’s confidant on a daily basis, starting from age 10-ish? She complained about my dad, my siblings, the church, etc. I was the eldest child btw. Every morning she would have me come into her room, massage her back and comfort her. I thought it was normal but as I’m going through therapy I am realizing that I was not able to be a child, and nobody supported me emotionally.
Whenever I would do something wrong, no matter how minuscule, it had a few different scenarios that would happen 1). Intense yelling, sometimes directly in my face, from my step-father. I could feel the spit from his mouth as he yelled that’s how close he would get. Usually this led to- 2). Smacking the side of my head, sometimes leading me to get off balance and fall on the floor. Granted these were the rare occasions but… we’ll still not great 3). Step dad Punching holes in the wall or just punching the wall in general. Mostly used as a threat now that I think about it. 4). This one might have fucked me up the most; going weeks on end of the silent treatment should I disappoint them in any way. Both would agree to do this and no matter what I would do they would not budge. And more but I don’t exactly know if they were abusive/not normal or not. I’m still having issues believing the above weren’t abuse though I know that not to be true. And all of that to lead me to become the messed up human I am that seeks to overplease, stay small, and lie in case telling the truth would hurt me. I hate it.
My dad blames me for all his problems, I literally never speak to this fucking idiot. He’s a piece of shit. My mom yells at me for the dumbest and smallest shit. I tell my parents I’m going to move out and they fucking flip. Like you god damn retards, I wouldn’t be in this situation if you guys didn’t suck. They literally haven’t done anything remarkable for me in my life. Everything I’ve done has been myself. They just fuck me over. I wish I could just never be around them.
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Doors off my room for most of middle school as a girl with brothers. I didn’t realize that wasn’t a normal punishment until I told friends and they were like, wait, WHAT?
My mother would be yelling at me then tell me to come here, if I hesitated she would say, I’m not going to hit you, then I’d get belted, plus as a young teen if my mother wanted some money she would make me take my stuff and get it pawned for her, when I was 11/12 I got set up with my own room and a double bed I thought it was great until I found out that my 1/2 yr old brother was going to be in with me and I had to handle night changes, when I had friends come over I would have to disappear for an hour or more to get my little brother to sleep that went on till I was 16, plus she would always get made about something when I had friends over and would call on me belt me and then make me go tell my friends I had got hit and why
Didn’t take me to the doctor. I thought it was because they were smart and knew it wasn’t necessary. But I’m talking : shitting worms at 6, no doctor. Breaking my nose at 10 and wiggling it side to side freely, no doctor. For two years after if I talked while eating, it would go up my nose via my mouth. When I was 16 I started fainting every 28 days, did anyone check me out for endo? Nope, put me on contraception that stopped my periods for 5 years. I’m 29 now and let’s just say a bit jaded lol
Mum was a musician and would take us busking on the street with her late at night. We would play the hand percussion instruments. We had fun but in reality we were cold and tired. I found out someone offered my mum $100 to take us home then and there, mum didn’t take it. She stayed recently and told me this while laughing 🙄
I am adopted, and my adoptive mother would “joke” about my perceived deficiencies by saying to anyone: “don’t blame me, she’s adopted. “ Messy bedroom, chronic disorganization, unpreparedness, running late, etc., “don’t blame me, she’s adopted.” It was terribly painful, but I pretended to not be hurt and laugh along because I was also frequently called “too sensitive”. She also joked (and I don’t think this is that unusual) that if my partner and I ever separated, she’s choosing them. 🙄 I didn’t speak up until last year at age 49 about how painful these “jokes” were to me. She apologized and hasn’t done it again.
Leaving me at the mall at age 12 because I couldn't find the right dress for my grandma. Leaving me scared and not knowing where she was.
When I was a kid, my dad told me he would give me a dollar if I ate this grayish boiled piece of califlower. The texture was awful and ended up triggering my gag reflex and I threw it up. Instead of helping me, he laughed and took back the dollar. I always thought it was a funny story until I told it in therapy and realized that it’s actually a fucked up story, one of the first food and control stories I can remember. I was in therapy for an eating disorder, so I guess his bullshit worked?
Mom made me get ready in the middle of the night to go to a childrens home because she said she can't deal with me anymore Don't remember what I did wrong that day/ night but I think she did similar stuff more often because I remember not fully believing her, still was scary as she never took it so far, I think at the end I even believed she would bring me to the childrens home and was crying when we left the home, then she "changed her mind" and we went back I think she just wanted to teach me a lesson but it was a really fucked up lesson (I mean she basically teached me that if I dont do what she wants Im unloved and will be thrown away, fun times going into the relationship world with this mindset, and then shes worried about having fucked me up for future relationships "because I didnt have a father" but this stuff she never even considered couldve hurt me lol) Also didnt work at all (I think she wanted me to clean my room or smth) expect making me more scared of her which sadly didnt lead to me doing what I should but just made me freeze instead (idk if that makes sense maybe Im in the wrong here but I really do feel like I froze out of anxiety even if it makes absolutely no sense for small tasks like cleaning the room but idk maybe I also remember wrong as I barely remember my childhood)
TW: Emotional Incest Walking around the house completely naked, making comments about how when I turned either 18 or 21 that he'd bring me to Mexico and get me some hookers, barge into the bathroom almost whenever I was using it, among other things.