For me, just getting older. I was in my 40s when I finally “owned” the sexual abuse (neighbors, not parents that time.) So maybe, time and more time.
And just the other day I was talking to a cousin who reminded me that once, my mother’s father gave her piano away to his mistress. And Momma went over there, beat the crap out of the woman, and got her piano back. Which makes me able to try to understand why she was so hard on us kids. She’d say or do something hurtful and add that she had to toughen us up so we could take care of ourselves against the world. The only thing is I would always think, “Momma, the only thing we need protected from is you.”
This thread reminds me somewhat of middle school where a small group of us would get together sometimes before the bell rang, and somebody would tell the latest bad thing that had happened to them. None of us would offer any comfort or, really, even acknowledge what the person had just said. We just gathered in a circle and whoever needed to talk, did. Then we’d drift away to our various classes.
In the time since the thread was active, I spend some time thinking what was the hardest thing about being a father after having the abuse as a child.
There are a number of books which describe this better than I can, but I’ll try to say in my words.
When the abuse gets to a certain level to where it leaves lingering problems such as PTSD, complex PTSD, borderline personality disorder, severe depression, etc., it’s accompanied with a host of other problems.
In my case, we would never know what would set off my father, so it was like walking in a minefield all the time. Things which don’t bother other people would create a higher degree of anxiety because of the uncertainty.
One of the basic human needs is for love, and growing up without that leaves an incomplete person, who has not developed real trust with others. If you know “The Crazy” from the thread in IMHO a short time ago, you see someone who has little self confidence or basic self-worth, and is desperate for love, but cannot trust it, since love was always conditional and constantly removed.
There is a lack of common sense on what to put up with in others, since if your parents are constantly belittling and bullying you, you assume you deserve it.
People from these environments inevitably wind up with some degree of disassociation. When the abuse gets to a certain stage, then the disassociation takes over and the person is unable to reasonably function in society. As I said earlier, we were just at the borderline, where several of my siblings didn’t make it, and the rest of us have had (or still have) serious problems.
What makes all of this all that much harder to overcome is that you wind up with a diminished set of psychological tools to deal with your issues. Without the comfort of having a since of worth from your parents, there’s nothing to go back on in times of trouble. Healthy coping mechanisms are actively destroyed. Outside friendships with other adults are discouraged, if not forbidden, eliminating healthy role models. Almost inevitably, you wind up being an adult without “growing up” emotionally, and lack the self awareness which others learn in the teens and twenties.
So, you’ve got more problems, and less ability to deal with the problems. The amazing thing is that there are people who had it worse and came out of it by themselves. I’m not that strong. I’ve required years of therapy, and still am not completely out of the woods.
Looking forward, the question is how to raise a healthy child. How do you teach a child how to learn self-disciple which you never learned? How do you teach emotional stability, rational, appropriate responses?
So, I read a lot of parenting books. Talk to friends and see what works and what doesn’t.
I do worry that I won’t be up to the task, and have more than my share of self doubts. I know that’s silly, because rationally if I were to look at someone else doing what I do, I’d call him a good father, but when all you have ever known is rejection and pain, it’s hard to emotionally accept that you can be the source of strength and love for your child.
So, the hardest thing for me to do as a parent is not to control my anger to my kids. That is such an absolute for me that there’s no question I must and can do it. The hardest thing is to continue to be positive. To believe in myself and to trust myself. These are required in order to be the best parent I can be.
There’s no doubt that I won’t be a “perfect” parent. No one is, but I need to keep reminding myself that the type of mistakes “normal” parents make do not cause the long-term damage that fucked up, cruel, sick bastards do.
Please keep posting. It’s hard for me to come to this thread, but I need it.
TLDR of TP’s last post: “not having the most basic of the safety nets a human being should and is supposed to have sucks”. And it sure does.
One of the things that’s made difficult by having a bad situation at home is that assumption: when I tried to ask other adults for help (I wasn’t looking for rescuers, just for clarity and for ways I could defend myself and my brothers), the most common reactions fell in two groups - “go ask your mother” (sure, should I also tell my brother to go give Gramps a hug?) and “why are you/how dare you complain about your parents, who are so absolutely wonderful?”
Going from someone who didn’t know what a safety net looked like to being able to build one with and for your children is simply amazing. Breeding is a matter of luck; being a parent requires work.
Yes, but did she name you Sue?
That is one of the cruelest things people tell themselves - that everyone around you has their shit together and you’re the only one who’s weird and lonely. It isn’t so. It never is, really.
I haven’t been through nearly what some of the others in this thread have survived, but my childhood was no piece of cake (I wasn’t sexually abused - lucky, lucky me! :rolleyes:) and I sometimes wish I could go back and visit my fifteen-year-old self in a dream and assure myself that someday, I will be happier than I could ever imagine.
Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” project applies not just to the GLBT teens out there - anyone slogging through adolescent hell can benefit, I think.
I don’t understand this?
(And I know that you aren’t a boy, but it reminded me of the song.)
Sorry you’re confused, Becky, but for whatever it’s worth, that song jumped to my mind at your post as well. 
My God, but there is a lot of pain and misery in this world. Peaceful thoughts, healing breaths and general rainbow/sprinkles/kittens to everyone in this thread, okay?
Tokyo Player, you’ve mentioned a few times books you’ve read that helped you understand what happened to you and its effects. Would you mind sharing some you found helpful?
Turkey day. Today I’m not thinking about the one where all we had to eat was hot dogs. I’m thinking about the one where about 25-30 of us gathered (weird uncle and all) and ate, watched the game, played pool and listened to records back in the corner. All of us knowing we were cooler than the sum.
This is just so bent.
Our son is a 3.8-4.0 GPA and we do not pressure him. Long before now at 13, he has this drive in him to excel and do well. We usually have to talk him down from the cliff when he thinks he did poorly on a test. What parent would crush that? I want to kick your dad in the balls for doing this to you. Well doing it all to you, but this especially. You and your siblings were robbed of pretty much your lives from the get-go. Only you managed to survive.
The fact you are a successful businessman is testimony to your inner spirit.
Tokyo Player, you have long been one of my favorite dopers. Intelligent, sensitive and thoughtful.
Have you considered writing down the story of your childhood. The good, the bad and the very, very nasty? I strongly suspect once you dive into and purged the dark recesses of your mind, it would a) be very cathartic b) something your children would need to read when they are older. And everyone needs to understand that recovering from something like what you grew up in in never over night or within a year or so. It is the rest of one’s life, essentially.
Peace.
The definitive book is Trauma and Recovery, by Judith Lewis Herman Professor of clinical psychiatry at Harvard University Medical School and Director of Training at the Victims of Violence Program in the Department of Psychiatry at the Cambridge Health Alliance in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a founding member of the Women’s Mental Health Collective. From the Introduction:
She was the first to describeComplex PTSD, which comes from repeated or prolonged exposure to trauma.
She has a chapter on child abuse, and it’s chilling to read. Some of what jumps out at me, including the opening sentence
Other quote which could sum up our household
This last part was particularly true for us. My father used to harangue us and nodding in agreement with him could get your smacked. This is how my mother described it
Back to the book
It goes on to explain why a child then blames him or herself, as “the alternative is utter despair, something no child can bear.”
Of course, when the parent is crazy, then you go crazy trying to keep us with ever changes rules. And finally
I had read a number of books about children of alcoholics and such, but if I were to pick one book, it would be this. You can understand how logical it is to develop the damage.
What people don’t realize is that it’s not just the hurt or the memories, but the internalization of the insanity and what that does to your soul. When your basic human needs of comfort and security are denied, you either go nuts, or close to it. That insanity comes out in a variety of ways.
It’s certainly not trivial, but the alternative is so unhealthy. I remember therapy sessions which were so intense, it would peg the scale. The only way I can really describe it would be to image someone holding a loaded shotgun to your chest, and believing this was going to be your last day on earth. Then pay your $150 and do it again the following week, and the week after, and after as well.
No wonder that even at Tokyo prices, shots of Daniels seem like a more cost efficient solution. But as they say, you can run, but you can’t hide, and I don’t know any other way but to face the demons.
To all who need it.
Damn, I’m turning this into a blog. I apologize.
I’ll give an example which may help demonstrate the insanity of it.
One time, when I was maybe seven or eight, I was helping my father with some yard work in the front yard. It had just gotten dark, and my job was to hold the flashlight while he did whatever he was doing.
Anyway, he needed a saw, so he sent me for one. Normally, they were kept in the shed in the back yard, and he told me to “go get the saw by the shed.” Up to now, this story would probably not be any different than anyone else’s experience, but what happens next is how you can really screw up your child, if that’s what you’ve set out to do.
I take the flashlight, and think he must mean *in *the shed, not by the shed. It never occurred to me to clarify that with my father, because it was so not allowed to clarify with or ask questions to him for anything, no matter how basic or trivial. See my mother’s remarks in the post above to understand why we wouldn’t question him.
Anyway, back to the story. I look in the dark shed, with a flashlight at the empty nail where the saw is normally hung. Look around a bit and don’t see it, so I go and report my failure to my father. He then demands that I show him where I looked and in only what could be described as “marches me back,” to the back yard. Naturally, this is where I’m in the state of hyper vigilance, as he has become highly agitated. No violence yet, but the anticipation of another round of hell is more likely than not to follow. It’s all subconscious for me, as I would not have allowed myself to consciously identify fear, nor dare to allow it to show on my face.
I show him the empty nail, and he explodes. He drags me back outside the shed and over to the peach tree, where the saw is resting in the branches, somewhat above my head level, where he had left it earlier that evening.
I then get the harangue for not following his directions of looking “by” the shed. I’m in complete stressed mode now, bracing for severe physical punishment or possible death but this day, I’m lucky and get off with simply a harangue, being called stupid, disobedient, and reminded of all the specific failures I had committed since I was an infant.
For what? He sent me on a mission to fail. Full well knowing exactly where the saw was, located in a place would could not be easily seen by a child, armed with only a flashlight in the dark, he gave an vague order and expected that I read his mind. When I failed to locate it the first time, he again did not clarify his directions, but interpreted my actions as a direct challenge to his authority, and used his position as the father to punish, humiliate and terrorize his son.
All of which, of course, could have been avoided simply by saying that the saw was in the tree, and would I go get it? But that would have meant that I would have grown up in a normal household with a sane father.
Instead, we internalized a zillion “rules” of how the world works. Such as:
You never clarify your communications.
You can expect others to read your mind.
You can abuse, humiliate and terrorize them if they fail to do so.
You never act in your child’s interests.
And this type on interaction goes on, day after day after day. This is how children develop complex PTSD and wind up unable to function in a world where logic is allowed and many, if not most people are reasonably reasonable.
The first trick is to somehow avoid falling into substance abuse. The next is to find a way to heal, often through therapy. Through this, the person must learn how to develop a healthy self image, and after that, healthy relationships. You have to learn to discard the crazy paradigms of how you thought the world operated and learn new ones. You must learn new tools on how to handle emotions and stress.
If you have children, then you have to learn an entirely new set of behaviors for dealing with them, without swinging completely in the other direction, such as not providing any discipline or over indulging them. You must learn how to build up and to not destroy. To meet their emotional needs, which of course means that you have to learn that others have emotional needs, and what needs there are for what ages. And you must do this on the fly, without any role models.
There are days where crossing the interstate on foot, blindfolded, would seem easier.
But it’s possible, albeit not easy, to understate the work involved. My children seem to be doing reasonably well so far. I still have more areas to work on, and need to continue my journey, but I’m cautiously optimistic that I can continue to be a good father and help them grow and emotionally develop as normal children.
Thanks, I just put it on hold at the library.
Yeah. My experiences were nowhere near as severe as yours, but I remember knowing that I had to change, had to let go of certain beliefs, but also that I would cease to exist if I did so. Healing is damn scary, and I salute everyone who has the courage to do it.
At least most drivers will try not to hit you! I’d try crossing the freeway blindfolded before I’d face some situations from my childhood again. Your father’s insanity is chilling, both in its severity and because it makes a certain crazy kind of sense. They really do think like that.
If I may ask, at this point do you believe that your father was insane to a point where you don’t really hold him responsible for what he did, or do you think he was in control of his behavior to some degree? In my case, I know my father was in the grips of a severe addiction, but I also know that he was neglectful and manipulative because it benefited him. He spent years dancing on the line of how far he could push my mother without her actually divorcing him. IMHO if you’ve got the awareness and self-control to do that (even subconsciously) you don’t get to use the insanity defense to avoid responsibility.