Isn’t “preferring that anger not exist” normal? I’ve known a few people who revelled in their anger, but they were complete assholes. I mean, I get that feeling guilty about your emotions is bad, specially if you end up guilt-tripping yourself, but I thought that most people aren’t fond of negative emotions, and that this is part of the reason we refer to those emotions as “negative”. The other reason for the name is that they tend to not be very useful.
I’ve had times I was glad I got angry, but that’s because when someone is trying to fuck me up and I realize it, my reaction is anger and that anger gives me the fuel I need to get out of the bad situation. That was useful anger, it was about as positive as anger can be. But even in those cases, I would much rather not have needed the anger.
Have you talked with your therapists about what would be considered “normal” reactions to your own anger?
I have a very different relationship with anger than with other negative emotions. I’m generally fine with sadness, grief, to some extent, even fear.
I feel somewhat like I’m describing an older version of myself, because I’m more comfortable with my anger now than I was six weeks ago, and it was much more intense, then. And I think that’s been part of my aversion, the sheer intensity of my anger about some of the stuff that’s happened to me. It’s physically uncomfortable and interfered with my sleep. I’m learning that I have to feel it in order to really grasp the way I deserve to be treated (you know, when I’m pissed at Mom, it’s because she’s treating me like shit, not because I just enjoy being pissed off.)
I wish I had words to describe what this therapy has been like. It’s been strange, emotional, and effective.
I need to do something like this for myself and my daughter, for very different reasons. It sounds like it is helping. I’m going to start looking around for local resources.
The good news is, it’s easier to find EMDR than exposure therapy. It is my sense that the treatment has become more and more accessible and mainstream.
It is helping, on a level I’ve never been helped before. If the only thing I ever get out of it is being less emotionally invested in what happens on this message board, it will be worth it. But it’s changed me in a lot of other ways too. For example, I recently encountered an awkward situation where the best course of action was not immediately clear. It would be my habit to run off to my friends and ask them for advice, essentially seeking approval for the choice before I made it. This time around I was like, ‘‘No, I’m pretty sure I got this.’’ I dealt with it using my own judgment, and it worked out fine.
The problem is, I can never predict how I’m going to feel immediately afterward or now it might affect my week as I process things. I’m not blaming the lack of sleep entirely on EMDR because I also recently started exercising vigorously and I’m just an insomniac in general. But it sure ain’t helping. I can tell I need to sit down and bawl at some point today, but I don’t really want to make the time.
I’m hitting a kind of downturn but I am sticking with the process. Therapy itself is generally pretty good, but we’ve ventured into some really difficult territory for me, talking about stuff I haven’t talked about in therapy before and it’s not stuff that can be resolved overnight. I knew this would be hard, but I hadn’t anticipated how much it would fuck with me. I haven’t slept normally in about a month. I can’t totally blame EMDR because there have been other changes in my life too, but it’s clearly a contributing factor. I haven’t slept and I’m really stressed out about my life. I took a week off work and I feel like I’m no better off now than I was a week ago. I’m still tired and physically ill. I think I would be fine if it weren’t for the relentless sleep deprivation.
I’ve felt like having a good cry for the last two weeks, and I finally started crying tonight but I couldn’t let myself go completely. It was the same old bullshit, ''Why didn’t she love me?" Why? I don’t know. I’m so angry and hurt about all the bullshit. And it’s important for me to get in touch with that and realize the full unfairness of how I was treated, but it’s emotionally difficult to do. I wouldn’t say I have rage like before, but more like a low-level anger that feels totally justified. In the sense that, I’ve toyed with the idea of having her back in my life once we have kids, but the deeper I get the less I want anything to do with her.
The shit with my adopted father is a lot more regressed. I seem emotionally stuck in this state of confusion about how to process it. As I explained to my husband, with my Mom I at least understood the context of what she was doing, and I know she did her best given her mental illness. With him it was just vile, intentional manipulation, and I have a lot of corroborating evidence for that belief. He tried to have my mother put away so he could have me to himself, some real Lolita shit. There was a heavy emotional enmeshment on top of the abuse. I’m not angry with him any more than I could be angry at a natural disaster. But I’m having a difficult time wrapping my head around it. As I explained to my therapist, I don’t think even he knows who he is. He is whoever he needs to be to get what he wants in the moment. He has no moral center.
I couldn’t have articulated it as a child, but I knew something was not right with him, because when we were alone he talked some crazy serial-killer sounding shit, and I was afraid my body was going to get dumped in the woods somewhere. I’m not sure that was a rational fear, but I was a kid and he talked sometimes about the high of killing animals, about the human flaw of remorse, about how friends are like socks that you throw out when they are no longer useful to you. Then I found out later he tried to blackmail his own stepfather into giving him some land - by threatening to reveal the location of bodies my grandfather had allegedly killed during his stint in the KKK. Leaving aside the terribleness of that little factoid about my grandfather, if you know that someone killed another person, you report that shit, you don’t try to use it to get stuff. That’s insane. That is sociopathology. I’m just as confused now as I was then. I’m struggling to reconcile this obviously vile person with the loving father I thought I had.
Was he really that fantastic in his treatment of me, or was I just so desperate for a father’s love I was lapping up any scraps I could get? I worshipped a fucking sociopath. It’s pathetic and horrible. I have a hard time forgiving myself that. How on earth could I trust my own judgment ever again?
I probably should write a memoir but for now it goes here, because I can’t sleep and I have to put it somewhere.
I’m really sorry. This is very brave of you. You are doing something which is horribly difficult and it’s no wonder that it’s fucking with you.
Your adopted father is quite the piece. That must have been insane living with him.
I don’t understand my father, either. Why sexually abuse my sisters and then tell me in detail about what he did (when I was 12 and they were 13 and 14).
When one is exposed to the level of abuse we had, as well as the lack of love and security, it does leave scars which are difficult to heal.
Don’t try to rush the healing. Take it as you can.
It’s not even my parents, it’s also the whole fucking family context. Like I was explaining to my therapist about how I was forced to disclose the abuse long before I was ready, and how my grandmother, who was one of the few supportive people in my family, made me sit down and tell my grandfather. And I said offhandedly to my therapist, ‘‘It was really fucking awkward considering I knew he molested my mother.’’
My therapist visibly cringed. The extent to which I just took that fact for granted is beyond fucked.
It’s like the deeper we go the more undeniably fucked it is. I mean, I know intellectually that it is fucked, but feeling it is another thing.
There was this one moment with my extended family that was completely surreal in its level of dysfunction, like it was so ridiculous I was tempted to reach out and pinch myself. When i was in my mid-twenties, my thirty year old uncle died of a heroine overdose. He had two kids aged seven and ten, it was awful. So my mother, my grandfather and me go to visit my other uncle, who was schizoaffective, to deliver the news that his brother had passed. In response to the news of this tragic death, my uncle starts weeping and babbling in vivid detail about how he molested my Aunt as a child. i have to assume it’s the first my grandfather ever heard of this. Though my Aunt had already told me, it was still quite shocking.
Meanwhile the ex-girlfriend/baby mama of my deceased uncle is trying to get into the house and get her hands on his prescription drugs, and my grandmother is having a nervous breakdown while we attempt to plan the funeral. My Aunt was in another state at the time, so I called her and basically said, ‘‘I can’t handle this shit.’’ She is really protective of me, so she offered to come help out with the funeral and stuff. My grandpa said he didn’t want her there because the house was a mess, but my grandmother talked to her on the phone and told her to come, and my grandfather was standing right there and said nothing in protest. So, my Aunt drove twelve hours by herself to get to grandpa’s house. She cleaned the shit out of the kitchen so that if people stopped by unnannounced after the funeral it wouldn’t be a disaster area (this house was hoarder levels of bad.) I helped her. We worked on the kitchen for eight hours straight. Nobody told us not to.
My grandfather disappears for hours with no explanation, calls my Mom, apparently, to bitch about what a disrespectful child my Aunt is for daring to come clean his kitchen. He was humiliated, I guess. I don’t know, but when he called my mother to vent his private frustration, she went full crazy bitch on both me and my Aunt. We were terrible, horrible people who were so disrespectful. She started this shit in the middle of a fucking funeral. I can’t remember if she threatened not to even go to the funeral, or what, but she basically hijacked the death of her brother with her bullshit drama – a brother, by the way, whom she despised. It resulted in a telephone screaming match with my mother after the funeral, whose priorities are so fucked, I can’t even. At one point I made a comment like, ‘‘Grandpa and I are pretty close so he should feel free to talk to me if he has a problem,’’ and she said something like, ‘‘Well I guarantee you’re not as close to him as I am.’’ Like a snotty little child, like who the fuck cares who he’s closest to?
There is no situation so bad that my mother cannot make it eight times worse. But there’s an interesting dynamic at play here, because this situation was so incredibly fucked, but she was the one freaking out, so everybody could point to her and say, ‘‘Wow, look how crazy she is.’’ No, the whole situation was crazy. With the exception of my Aunt, nobody in that scenario was behaving normally. But Mom made an easy scapegoat as the sole cause of dysfunction. This, right here, is where my mother’s illness comes from. I have always understood this and it’s why I can’t hate her.
My grandfather is now cool with me, but he has pretty much disowned my Aunt as a result of her driving twelve hours to come home and clean his kitchen after the death of his son. I think we all know the real reason he wants nothing to do with her anymore is that he can’t cope with the fact that my uncle molested her. Maybe it reminds him too much of how he molested my mother.
And that is why I want to punch people who say, ‘‘Every family is dysfunctional.’’
Now I remember. Mom said she wasn’t going to the funeral if my Aunt was there, prompting my other grandma to have a nervous breakdown and call my Aunt in hysterics. :mad:
Reading that article, there were points that had my head spinning. Details that I’d thought were peculiar to my mother turn out to be common among bad mothers (well, bad Xparents, it’s not as if bad fathers, and grandparents, and aunts and uncles didn’t exist). One detail mentioned is something which made the psychologist I took last year worth every penny: envy. Well, to be accurate, the word Mar used was “jealousy”. Why would a mother be envious of her child, jealous of her child? Well, for starters, because she (the mother) is wrong inna head, but I’ve seen quite a few parents and grandparents be jealous of a little kid. How dare his mother go change the baby’s diapers instead of paying attention to me, her father. How dare my daughter go to college when I could not. How dare she be… taller, or shorter, or have bigger boobs, or smaller ones, or have inherited my hair color or her father’s, or her grandmother’s nose.
It is Not Your Fault. And it is not something you can fix. Sorry. I wish it was.
Yeah, my Mom was always insanely jealous of my Aunt, to the point of having the deluded idea that my Aunt had it so much better than she did growing up. And she was jealous of my relationship with my Aunt, and she treated my Aunt like utter shit for no good reason. And as a result, my Aunt has her own trauma around my mother and wants nothing to do with her any more. She said she’d be supportive of me no matter what, but really doesn’t want me to resume a relationship with my mother, because she never wants to have to deal with my mother again. As for the fact that I’ve even considered it, she said, ‘‘As far as I am concerned, you’re a saint.’’
I also didn’t reaiize jealousy was a part of it.
I read the article. It actually made me cry, maybe especially because it was in Spanish, so it drove home the universality of this experience. I was particularly moved by this mention of inversion of roles, as I have come to reconcile the fact that was a huge part of what happened. My Mom made it so she was the child, and I was the adult, so that I felt responsible for her happiness. The feeling I have that I need to fix her all the time, to attend to her needs at the cost of my own, that was a part of how I was raised.
Oh yes, the reversal of roles and the insanity of having to emotionally parent your parent, even as a child. Bonus insanity: since you’re still a child yourself, you can’t parent them well, so it fucks you up while you’re attempting it.
I’m trying to work through through some things myself now, so I’m going through the insomnia as well.
I didn’t have crazy parents, just very young ones. Mostly absent. I ended up with three step-parents as well; those were a mixed bag.
You were a child. Children want love and approval. People who want to exploit children know this, and they tend to be good at sowing confusion, justifications and self-doubt, I’m sure you know all of that. That child deserves nothing but kindness and understanding.
She grew up, became educated, and built a new life for herself, while sorting out her issues and helping others along the way. I would be proud of her.
People who have never had a parent come after them with a gun will never get it. Sure, all parents have imperfections, but there are normal issues and then there is craziness.
My cousin is a therapist and used to work with CPS interviewing families where parents were in legal trouble because of the abuse. She would write reports on the necessity of incarceration, possible visitation or termination of parental rights. I also had a therapist who worked with such fathers who were in prison. Both of them said that the level of abuse in dysfunction in my family was as bad as they’ve seen. We were just lucky that when my father would bounce us off walls that our heads didn’t happen to hit at the wrong angle, or that we were able to get away when he had the gun.
Kids just go crazy in an environment like that. Two of my siblings did to an extent even greater than I did.
Some fun tales! My father failed the theory of mind. He believed that if he thought things, we should understand that and act accordingly, and would severely punish us for transgressions.
A typical example. My parents got a full sized upright freezer and put it in the front hall by the stairs. It didn’t take long for the five children to discover you could go over the banister, climb on it and get down from there. As a parent now, I can see not being happy about that. What was different was that one morning my father caught me doing it and physically attacked me. The reason he was most upset was because “that very morning” he had laid down the law that this wasn’t to continue. Except, he hadn’t. He had just decided that and then expected us to somehow know that and obey.
Since we weren’t allowed to “talk back” then I couldn’t tell him that I hadn’t been told about the new rule. I was forced to admit that I knew I was doing wrong and was purposely disobeying him and was a terrible person. It was my fault and he was only punishing me because I was a horrible person. That’s a lot for a seven-year-old for simply doing something all the kids had been doing for a week.
Another typical example. I was helping him clean up in the front yard. It had gotten dark and my father needed the hand saw. It was normally in the shed in the back yard. He sent me with a flashlight with the instructions “Get the saw by the shed.” Since we weren’t allowed to ask questions for clarification (see the “no talk back” rule) you did the best you could.
I decided he may have made a mistake and said “by” when he meant “in” and looked in the normal spot. When I reported I couldn’t find it, he marched me back to a tree by the shed. That resulted in severe punishment for failure to follow instructions because I couldn’t read his mind and find a saw hidden in a tree in the dark, where he had left it earlier in the day.
One difference with normal families, is that while they also have examples of parents acting crazy at times, perhaps even something like this, the punishment wasn’t going to possibly result in a fatality. Children need security and without that, all sorts of issues result.
I spent far too long in conventional therapy until I realized that most therapists just aren’t equipped to handle this degree of problems. My current therapist said that normal techniques just don’t cut it. Most therapists just don’t have the experience of seeing enough clients with this background in order to get sufficient experience. Their experience is with normal people and normal people’s problems.
If one is lucky the therapist recognizes that and doesn’t attempt to treat a third degree burn with a Band-aid. If not, there is a lot of frustration involved.
I had to take a break from EMDR to address some health problems, just as we were getting into the hard stuff. It’s been a couple of months since I’ve seen my therapist. I do intend to return once the health problems are resolved. There is some speculation that the health problems may be PTSD related and I’ve also begun physical therapy. But there’s also a possibility of diagnostic surgery. It’s not really clear what’s going on but EMDR is just a bit much on top of it all so I took a break.
The change with regard to the ground we did cover so far in EMDR has been really something. I thought of my mother for the first time the other day in like, two months. Prior to treatment, I thought of her every day. The crazy seething rage I once had is replaced by a very matter-of-fact anger and disappointment. And yeah I got a little down about her the other day but my coping skills have improved dramatically. I ended up whining about her on Quora of all places and when I saw I was doing that, I thought ‘‘Oh, okay, it appears I’m getting mentally stuck. I think I’m going to go run some errands now.’’ I bought myself a burger and then did a dress-shopping errand I dreaded and in the process forgot I was sad about my Mom.
And the guilt? Shit. It’s increasingly more difficult to guilt me. Stuff you would think was unrelated, like my worries about underperforming at my job due to illness, or not putting in enough time, I just stopped feeling bad about things.
We’re going into October and my PTSD tends to be at its worst, seasonally, in October and November. My PTSD is getting worse but it’s all stuff we didn’t address yet in EMDR. I did start seeing my regular talk therapist again to help me cope in the meantime.
The general upshot is that the positive results of EMDR seem to be holding strong! And just generally speaking my husband notes I’m way better at coping with depression than I used to be. I mean, in all honesty, I’ve been physically sick for three months straight and have only had two or three days of bad depression. And in every case, I found a way to interrupt the thought train and go do something helpful.