Boyo Jim, I went to counseling one time and was like, “nah, I don’t need this, I’m a pretty self sustaining person, I’m tough” and in about 3 minutes I was spilling my guts to this lady like there was no tomorrow. haha. We sat there and talked and talked for a whole hour and it seemed like ten minutes. Before I knew it, I had to go.
I walked out of there like, “wow, boy did I ever need that.” I felt so much better. Try it, you’ll be surprised what will come out.
This seems as good a thread as any to ask this question in. I know that therapy would be of benefit for me, and maybe some other folks on this page. But is there not some kind of stigma attached to having gone to a psychiatrist, that can have negative impact on a person’s career or other professional endeavors? I ask only because I’ve heard something like this in the past.
There’s also the thing about not wanting to keep reliving my past, which I would have to do for a long time in an office with a doctor. I never used to dwell on it. I was getting on with my life. Now that I participate in this message board, where other people have had similar situations and want to talk about it, I’ve talked more about it here than I ever have with anyone. It’s on my mind a lot now, and I wish it would just go away. I suppose I tell my story here because maybe somebody will glean something from it that could help them. I don’t know. It isn’t making me feel any better, that’s for sure.
Boyo Jim, while I may not have been in your shoes, I’ve been in the same shoe store. We have something in common that isn’t any fun to explore. I know what it’s like to be despondent about how things worked out, and I wish I could tell you something that would fix at least a small part of what you have to go through. But I can’t. I’m not an expert on anything, least of all familial relationships and how to recover from terrible ones. I sincerely hope you can find what you need. Life isn’t all crap. I have proof.
So many other people have spoken, with much more knowledge/experience than I have.
Get a counselor. Someone you can talk to, who you’re unlikely to meet in a social situation.
Don’t be alone unless you want to be.
fishbicycle, there is not as much stigma attached to seeing a therapist as there used to be. You might be surprised how many people do see someone at one time or another. And you always have the option of not discussing it with anyone else if you choose. It’s no one’s business but yours.
That’s not necessarily true. When you are choosing a therapist, share this concern. In my own therapy my doctor and I have focused on the present and how to deal with my day to day life with family, friends, and responsibilities. I’m sure there is a name for this kind of therapy. I just don’t know it.
One thing that has helped me to heal from the rage of an abusive mother is that I have become a nurturing mother to myself. I have made it a point to make up for all of the things that were missing when I was growing up. I have plenty of time to sit and think and be by myself. And sleep. Enough sleep. I can cry when I hurt and speak my anger. I can be age inappropriate. There is such a long list.
Thanks, Zoe. Well, you see, I’m not having any trouble functioning. I am not one of the walking wounded. I don’t play the victim role. I’m not sad anymore, and I haven’t been in ages. I’ve probably mentioned it so many times now that people want to barf, but I’m having a very nice life, actually. In the eight years I’ve been married, my life has done a 180. Eleven years ago, I couldn’t have imagined that I could be having such a nice time. It’s what I always wanted, but I could not have known it would come to pass.
I’m just this guy, and all that stuff happened to me, a long time ago. I’ve used this analogy before, I hope you don’t think it’s too stupid - it all seems like a scratchy, black and white movie I saw once. Nearly all the people who caused my misery are dead, and the rest are out of my life; I’ll never see them again. Whatever quirks in my personality were caused by my experiences, they don’t prevent me from having an absolutely normal life now. Nobody would ever know this stuff if I never mentioned it. IRL, I never mention it. I recognize that it’s not all about me. I don’t need extra attention. I’m not more important than anyone, and I don’t deserve any more regard than I already get. I had an excess of nasty. Now I just want a lot of nice. I’ve got it.
But there are still all those questions that I have, which can’t be answered. I could be wrong, but I think I have sufficient intellect to be able to rationalize that a doctor couldn’t help me understand the parade of weirdos in my life any better than I could do myself, from all the thinking and writing I’ve done about it. I can’t ask anybody involved why they were like that. There are things about those people and those events that I will never be able to fathom. It feels like I’m missing something that everybody else seems to have, and I don’t know how to get it. I function anyway. I don’t have a choice. I’ve been to the bottom, and I’m not going back. Not for anything. I have no tears left to cry about it. Only questions with no answers.
My father. He rarely ranted, his anger was controlled and calculating. The dread of my childhood was “go get my belt”. This wasn’t an everyday occurrence, but it was often enough to teach me to live in fear of him. Ironically I strived to please him, although I never felt that I succeeded. Whatever my accomplishments, his reaction was always that I could do better. It wasn’t all bad. There were occasions when he would take me on a camping weekend, or a days fishing on the lake. There were trips to the swimming hole on the river where he and my mom went when they were young, but these were just enough to make me hungry for more. When I got older he stopped the beatings, but they were replaced w/ other punishment. Standing at attention w/ my arms extended out from my sides until I couldn’t hold them up, when they started to droop he would demand that I get
them back up, berating me for being weak, girlish, unmanly. There were other “lessons”, but you get the idea. By my teenage years I just wanted to get away from him, which I did by joining the Navy. More irony, he was in the Navy during W.W.II and my choice was just another attempt to measure up to, what I perceived as, his expectations. In a way I was lucky, when I was growing up the future must have looked bright to him, he was advancing and gaining a better life. My three siblings were born about two years apart, starting when I was ten. I left home at seventeen and shortly after he developed some medical problems that affected his ability to work in his craft, he tried but it was too much for him. My mother went to work and he stewed, unable to cope w/ his circumstances. Life must have been hell for my brothers and sister, because I know that he took his bitterness out on them. He could be violent at times, but the worst part was the constant threat of what might happen, you just
never knew when his anger might emerge.I learned to be self sufficient, to not ask for help or expect any praise. I learned to work hard, play hard, and live hard, because that’s the way he did it. I went through three marriages and three divorces. Like my father, I believed that tenderness and compassion were signs of weakness.
We had little contact for many years. I would visit, on leave from the military, hoping to get some recognition for my successes, but that never happened and, after a few days, I’d find an excuse to get back to my life.
My mother died of cancer in the early 70’s. He took care of her and it was terrible. She underwent early chemo and radiation therapy. She would hallucinate and fight him. He would change her bed when she messed it and then start over when she immediately did it again. This was very hard on him emotionally, but, after she died, he still had to maintain his control over any show of compassion, at my mothers memorial service I took a yellow rose, her favorite. When we got out to the parking lot he said, “What the fuck do you want that for, throw the damn thing away”, so I did, because I knew that seeing the rose caused him pain, even if he couldn’t admit it.
He remarried about a year later, because he could cope w/o someone to help him.When he was in his early 60’s we reestablished close contact. It was good for both of us. There was no dramatic breakthrough, he didn’t suddenly become a loving father, but there were small signs. I’d thought about, why he was the way he was, many
times over the years and I really began to understand. He believed that the discipline was necessary, that life was hard and he had to be hard and teach me to be hard, in order to survive. That doesn’t excuse everything he did, because sometimes he was just mean, but it helps a lot to understand how he saw the world. In more irony, it was his mother who taught him that. His father was a gentle man, despite working on the railroad. His mother was the hardcase and he had to live up to her example.
He was tough to the end. About a week, or so, before he died, I talked to him on the phone. I told him I was planning on stopping for a visit and he said, matter of factly, “If you want to see me you’d better hurry it up.”, by this time he was in a wheelchair and on oxygen, he had emphysema. I got a call from my stepmother about a week later, telling me he was in the hospital, in bad shape. When I got there I sat w/ him and held his hand, something I probably hadn’t done since childhood. He was in a coma and I doubt he was aware of my presence. His breathing was very labored and, after awhile, I said to him, “it’s OK Pop, you can let go now”. My stepmother walked into the room as I was saying this and she rebuked me for saying it, but I just ignored her. He died a few minutes later.
My brothers and my sister are still full of resentment and I’m sorry that they didn’t get to understand him better before he died, I guess they never will. He was a son of a bitch, but he was my Pop and I loved him.
A final irony, some time after his death, my brother told me that he’d ocassionally heard the old man brag about his son, who was a Chief in the Navy.
That’d be me.
My dad was–and as far as I know is an angry man. I didn’t know my paternal grandfather very well before he passed on, but from what I gather, he was an ugly violent man, and my dad was a physically and mentally weaker version of him. We got the belt, we got yelled at. It wasn’t that he was calculating, it was just that he had this . . . disorganized capricious mindset about him. He just couldn’t hold it together. We got a tour of half the shitty farm towns and coal cracking villages in Pennsylvania courtesy of his abysmal people skills and inability to hold down a job.
So it was the belt, the yelling, the punching, when we kids screwed up–which, I’ll admit, was fairly often, and that lasted until high school when I joined the wrestling team and started lifting weights. One night, to make a point, I invited him to an arm-wrestling match and won easily. He got a lot more merciful after that. About a year later, he was walking over the room to hit my kid sister, and I blocked his path and told him that if he touched her, I was going to kill him. That marked the end of all beatings under our roof.
I finally broke off all contact with him after he hurt our mother emotionally for no real reason. I don’t want to see him in this life, and I don’t want to talk to him in this life. The last I heard, he’s still fucking up in some shitty farmtown somewhere I never heard of, and that suits me fine.
Therapy? Nahh, never went. I’m not going to lie to you and say that it hasn’t affected me, but I think I do OK enough on my own. Yes, I’m still angry. Everyone in my immediate family is angry beyond belief, which I don’t think helped the situation one bit. That said, I control it now, and if I had kids, I would never in a million years hit them or spank them, because I just don’t trust myself to hold back.
My wife and I talk a lot, and I think I’ve worked the worst of the emotional baggage out of my system. I was lucky enough to marry a tough broad from a tough town, and she knows how to keep me in line (Mrs. Fresh is very intelligent). I don’t really keep in touch with my family, and that kind of rankles, but I dunno . . . I just can’t. I consider my wife and her family my family now, and all I have from my old relatives are bad memories.
Meh, sometimes you just have to embrace the damage and get on with your life.
A lot of good advice here.
I got a lot of it from my mother. Other people have told their stories here, and I’ve told my story elsewhere, so I’ll just say that this particular statement from the OP:
is pretty close to me, too. A good part of me is determined that I am NOT MY MOTHER. And I constantly change my behavior to avoid becoming like her.
You’re definitely not alone.
I’ve only personally seen any kind of stigma with the insurance industry. My sister wasn’t employed and was trying to get her own insurance, but got refused once or twice because she had been on antidepressants. Nothing like that has ever happened to me, though. Since my current insurance doesn’t cover mental health treatment (bastards), I pay for it myself and they don’t even know about it. It’s not cheap but totally worth it.
And I too am in therapy just working on today. Sometimes we talk about my mother, but even then my therapist isn’t so much concerned with what happened but how it’s still affecting me.
Therapy is a very personal thing and if you don’t want to do it, it probably won’t help you. But just because you’re able to function doesn’t mean you couldn’t benefit from it. I do okay at my job and I have friends, but I still feel all messed up inside. I want to be happy and at peace with myself. Sometimes that feels selfish when there are starving and homeless people and I can technically care for myself, but I’ve been emotionally stalled for a long time and if I’m going to move forward, I need this help.
I’m learning that you have to care for yourself before you can make a difference in the world. It sounds so very Oprah-ish but it’s true. You just have to acknowledge that you are worth the effort. For me that’s still the hardest part.
Not as much as you’d think, at least in most jobs.
The OP sounds quite familiar to me, my Dad was quite similar, although not to that degree. There’s some kind of stereotype about Sicilians being like that, and he fit that stereotype, I guess.
One of the reasons I’ve decided not to have kids is the thought that this might be genetic. If I had a kid like me, that wouldn’t be so bad, but what if the kid is like my Dad? And has kids? It’s not worth the risk, especially since I don’t particularly want kids, anyway.
There’s not too much more I can add to this thread–not too much more that I can say that hasn’t already been said by one person or another. Add my father to the list of WTF Fathers. I recall being about 7 or so when Elvis died. My father (who never showed a favor to one thing over another) talked about it constantly–what a great singer Elvis had been, how gifted he’d been musically, etc. Being insanely jealous that something could garner a reaction that wasn’t violent from my father, I made the offhand comment, “Well, I’m glad Elvis died, because he’s the only thing on the news!” (Keep in mind, I was about 7 years old.) My father’s response? A slap with the words, “Well, I’ll be glad when you’re dead!”
My father’s anger originated from when he was treated pretty much the same as a kid. He could never do anything right in his father’s eyes, and as a result, he parented my brother and I pretty much the same way. Years later, he did get treatment for his depression, however, stopped treatment when he got into a bad relationship with a woman. He never went back to treatment, and eventually slipped back into being a SOB.
I went through years of therapy, and a long event of parenting classes after I found myself screaming and slamming doors as my main method of communicating to my children. It changed my life. I will never be the same person my father is, and I will never be like him, but only because I made the conscious decision not to be like him in any way possible.
My brother on the other hand, is just like my father is/was. Unfortunately, he’s doing the same damage to his boys and our father did to us. It’s a horrible feeling to know that as their aunt, there’s not a damn thing I can do…
Can I just get on my high horse for a moment? A lot of people out there, both people who had happy childhoods and people who were beaten or sexually abused will look at children who were emotionally abused and tell them to their face “That’s nothing.” Ok. I hate this behavior. No, we were not beaten or molested and we thank every last one of our lucky stars for that. But that does not mean our experiences are “nothing”. I’ve particularly found that from people from healthy homes, who flat-out refuse to believe someone’s mother told them every day they were ugly, or that parents can just go in an insane rage for no reason. This is not really an attackon those people, though, it’s more like…if you’re out there, and you were emotionally abused, you know it. Don’t listen when people tell you it was nothing. Don’t listen when they say “You’re overexaggerating”. Get help all the same.
My grandfather. He is and always has been an emotionally abusive bully. Last month, my grandmother died. It wasn’t that unexpected-she had been sick since January with various things, and then she sort of had a mental breakdown-she stopped eating and doing anything to the point that she lost all of her muscle and fat and she couldn’t even walk anymore. She stopped bathing and fixing her hair, and she even stopped going to church (my grandmother was a very devout Catholic).
After some time in physical rehab and then about a week after she entered a nursing home, she started having trouble breathing and was sent to the hospital-she died two days later.
What does this have to do with my grandfather? For years, he was a bully, probably from the day they got married, but in the past couple of years he had gotten worse. His driver’s license was suspended because he has epilepsy and his seizures started getting worse-triggering several small strokes. Well, that did it-everyone was against him. It was Grandma’s fault he couldn’t drive-he was a caged animal, had no independence. He hated having to take his pills-it was the doctor’s fault, he didn’t have epilepsy, he had a brain tumor, no one would listen.
It was Grandma’s fault my Aunt Janet (or Gigi, as we called her) died because Grandma’s sister was an alcoholic-it runs in her family, so it’s all her fault. On and on and on he just bitched and screamed at her-in public too. Even a friend of her’s at church noticed it one night-as they were walking out, he was just screaming at her and she was hurrying to get out, she was too ashamed and embarassed to face anyone.
And he’s always treated my dad like shit. My dad’s a loser, he’s a failure, he doesn’t have what it takes to “be a man”, or whatever. Growing up, my dad and his sisters could never do anything right-they were always failures, no matter what.
My father, for the record, is none of those things-he’s a VERY successful funeral director with an EXCELLENT reputation, a devoted husband and father, very active in the church and his community. My grandmother, at least, showed pride in him and my aunts. For example-a week before my grandmother went into rehab, my dad took them to their doctor. My grandmother was bragging about my dad to the nurses, saying, Oh, this is my son, he’s a funeral director-yes, he runs Such and Such Funeral Home, blah blah-she was always so proud of all of us. And my grandfather walks in and what does he say?
“Oh, yeah, well, his mother’s proud of him, but he ain’t amounted to much.” What the FUCK? And my dad is standing RIGHT THERE. When I heard that, all I could think was, “Yeah, well, he’s sure AS hell a better father than you ever were.” Oh, and did I mention the doctor also told him that he’s no longer allowed to drive-that he’ll never get his license back? Yeah, my dad had to be there for THAT.
It’s just-he has so much. He has a big beautiful family, he’s financially comfortable, he and my grandmother would have celebrated their 59th anniversary, etc. But he’s so bitter about his epilepsy, the fact that he grew up poor during the depression and couldn’t go to college, that he can’t drive, that he can’t do this, can’t do that, etc. And he takes it out on everyone else around him. It pisses me off to see him go to church and pray, and then come home and treat everyone around him like so much dog shit sticking to his shoe.
Recently, he had to see a shrink (he was in the hospital after a bad fall, and not taking his meds, and my dad had him committed on a temporary basis for evaluation-my dad’s got power of attourney). And the stupid asshole psychiatrist refused to see the problem-he just said this was my grandfather’s way of grieving. Even after my father told him, no, he’s always been this way. So my dad has to deal with this shit, and it’s DEFINITELY wearing on him.
And even as I’m typing this, I just want to cry, because my grandmother deserved so much better than she got. No, she was no saint-in fact, she could be rather bitter and sometimes nasty, but that was after my aunt died-and I think that was a symptom of what she was going through.
Sorry this is so long and rambling, but it just makes me so pissed off.
A lot of these posts are long and rambling, incluging my OP, because, I think, our stories don’t have easily recognizeable beginnings or endings. We’re born into these pre-existing situations whose orgins we will most likely never know. We are mystified and terrified by the behavior as we witness it, and even decades layer as we recall it. And we blame out failures on them. But we also know at some point sfter we’ve gained an appreciation of what we really went through, resolving our problems is one of our problems, not one of their problems. We know we’re different because of these people, but we’re not sure how. We imagine that some of these experiences ended up making us stronger or better, but we worry that some unknown amount of potential was lost.
I see so many echoes of my experiences, and my musings, in these posts. Several have mentioned that the abuser is often as much a victim as the abused, simply striking out uncontrollably. I wonder about that with my father – though he seemed unable to control his anger WITHN the family, I never saw him behave similarly to co-workers, neighbors, etc. Nor did he act out that way to us in the presence outsiders. He understood that his family behavior was unacceptable in public, and he COULD control it there.
And I haven’t managed to forgive him yet, though my anger is way down from what it used to be.
I went so far today as to get a reccommendation of a therapist from one of my co-wokers who is a psych nurse. She did some additional research on my behalf to find out what was required for my insurance coverage.
So now I have two phone numbers, one for the therapist and one for a referral nurse who has to okay the treatment. And some advice from my nurse on how to speak to the referral nurse so I won’t get denied.
And at the moment I can’t say whether or not I will make the call. The nirse who gave me the numbers later asked if I had made a call, and I told her I wasn’t quite there yet, didn’t feel ready.
This makes Mr. Stuff nuts. He read somewhere that emotional abuse is perhaps harder to work through than physical, because there aren’t any physical marks, and it’s hard to define the emotional ones. Outsiders are less likely to see it and either sympathize or help. Please note that I’m not saying emotional abuse is worse, and neither is Mr. Stuff. Just that it’s less acknowledged.
I see that several people here are considering getting counseling, which I wholeheartedly support. Can I tell you something, though? If you’re getting anywhere, it might get worse before it gets better. You will go to your Xth session and think, “Why am I here? I feel worse than before I started coming!” You’re digging up stuff from the past, and it feels AWFUL. Put your head down and plow through, my friends. Coming out the other side is worth it. Really, really worth it.
As always, YMMV.
First, it’s important to remember that going to a psychiatrist and a therapist are entirely different endeavours - I know, because I spent a lot of time going to psychiatrists when I should have been going to therapists (Medicare covers the former but not the latter; I finally found an excellent therapist whom I can see because I’m a student).
Second, if you were to see a therapist, I don’t understand how your professional milieu would get wind of it. I imagine it could, if people are going to pry and be prejudiced, but that could apply to anything in life, and my supposition would be that the help you need will do much more to improve your life and functioning - and by extension, your work - than its being revealed could harm it.
Well, in my case, I’m lucky, as it’s my grandfather, not my father-growing up, we were pretty much shielded from that side of him. But seeing what happened to my grandmother and now what my dad’s going through just breaks my heart.
My other grandfather died when I was seven and I still miss him terribly. I know it’s awful to say, but sometimes I feel that the wrong grandfather died.
This is very true.
How many women end up marrying a guy just like dad ( who was a drunk/abusive/womanizer/emotionally distant/whatever Really Bad Habit) because it is all she knows. To be treated in a decent fashion with kindness would be harder than to deal with some guy who drinks down his paycheck in her own twisted way and they cannot imagine another way of life.
They endure the situation because in the back of their mind their mothers endured all the abuse and really, it boils down to self esteem issues and *constantly looking for approval from the outside, when really, all approval comes from inside of you. *
This goes both ways with men dating women who turn into their own pyscotic mothers. All moms are physcotic at one time or another. It’s called menopause.
There is also that little bon mot of pure evil that a person isn’t complete unless they are married and have kids. and the evil twin of that * If you divorce you are a failure/didn’t try hard enough/will be all alone/all alone is bad-bad-bad/what about the children?* Excuse me, but what a crock of doo doo. As if keeping children in such a toxic enviroment is healthy.
It is all baggage handed down from generation to generation. It use to be skills like carpentry, cooking, farming, sewing and knitting that were handed down Father to Son, Mother to Daughter. In todays modern age, we are passing down co-dependency. People go through the motions in a zombie like state or they focus on the problem instead of the resolution.
Another issue is the fact of the Uncontrolled Rages, which back then (really until the last 15 years or so) were accepted. What we now know is it is essentially a combination of either mental illness, abuse in the childhood and inherited from their own parental unit. A cyclical pattern, no?
Mental illness , like it or not, is still very much in the closet - especially with the Greatest Generation Evah. You just don’t talk about things like that. It is a Black Mark on the Family. It would bring shame to the family to have someone defective. Much like having an unwed pregnant teenager. Your standing in the community was everything and to lose it over mental issues ( or a pregnant teenager) was never discussed. The problem went away to go live with an Aunt somewhere out of state.
The Greatest Generation did some great, great things and endured a buttload of hardships, but they did a disservice to all of us ( their children) by homogenizing America. All One Big White Bread Mind, which still has a big fat tentacle across America and squeezing hard.
Unlike nowadays, where everyone and their brother seems to want to be diagnosed with Such and Such. It’s trendy in the middle to upper class to have ‘issues’. (Good insurance plans with RX coverage is vital, yanno.) Personally I think eveyrone should take prozac, except then all my personal entertainment would suddenly disappear.
Whenever these threads pop up it makes me extremely happy for my own family, as disfunctional as it is with disease, death and depression. ( I’m dysfunctional like that.)
Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to kill this thread.
I’ll shut up now.
I once read that women marry men who are like their own mothers more than their own fathers. Don’t know if that’s generally true, but it was in my case.
My dad was everyone’s friend and extremely easy going. My mother was ruled by her emotions- when she was angry (which was a great deal of the time) she didn’t care who knew about it or who she hurt. {I found out later in life that her outbursts were the subject of much gossip in the local PTA and that most of the parents of other kids in my school felt sorry for me and my siblings}.
I married a man who also could become angry at the drop of a hat and spent most of his time seething over some inane thing or the other. He was nice when we were first courting, but when his true personality came out it felt very familiar. There was a such a been there/done that quality to it all that it never occured to me that his temper was a legitimate reason to dump him.
I went through with the marriage because of something my mother told me frequently - that all men change as soon as they’ve got the ring on you and turn into jerks. (Although as near as I can tell, my father always treated my mother quite well). So I thought, “Yeah, he’s a s.o.b. now, but I know him warts and all. Someone else would surprise me when they turned.”
The more I think about it, the more I realize that my ex husband and mother are extremely similar in many respects.