I’ve heard anecdotal accounts of children being hated for:
[ul]
[li]possibly not being conceived within a marriage (like it’s the kid’s fault?)[/li][li]failing to measure up in some way (not an athlete, for example)[/li][li]being the wrong gender (wanted a boy!)[/li][li]reminding the parent of someone else they hated (like a parent or grandparent)[/li][/ul]
And frankly, while I’ve heard these and others, it completely boggles my mind–and I don’t particularly like kids and can’t imagine hating one of your own.
applause Thank you, you said all this better than I could have.
The other thing that came to mind is that a lot of people seemed to be decrying his story as false because he’s “a professional victim.” And I’ve got to wonder, if he had a healthy childhood, where on earth do you think he learned the “professional victim” behavior?
I’m also not too surprised that he’s not attempting to understand his mother. A traumatized child becomes a traumatized adult. Attempting to focus that much energy on remembering or understanding his mother is probably extremely painful for him, and I wouldn’t blame him at all for choosing to avoid it. Sometimes the cost just isn’t worth whatever reward he might get from it. He probably hates her, and his emotions surrounding her are probably stuck in nearly the same place as when he was an abused and helpless child. That may never get better for him, no matter how long he spends in therapy. “Some things get broke, can’t be fixed.”
(I have my own tales of parental hatred, but I’ve got to get going so I’ll have to catch up later.)
It’s that kind of behavior that doesn’t necessarily make me doubt him, but just skeeves me. Other than the fact he was abused, what does Dave Pelzer have to offer? A litany of woe and emotional scars? I started a thread on this in GD, though, so don’t mean to hijack my own thread too much.
I just can’t see it that way. He has no obligation to offer any of us anything. If any one of us wants to take away a realization that sometimes really shitty things happen to kids, that’s great, but that’s also on us. Or not, if we decide not to take anything from it. That’s fine too.
He’s just a guy doing the best he can with the really shitty hand he’s been dealt. And when dealt a shitty hand, it’s unsurprising if you play a shitty game.
His learned professional victim behavior is what he was able to come up with for coping skills. Maybe being in the public eye was ultimately helpful to him. Maybe it wasn’t. I hope he finds some sort of peace, but it’ll be a long time if it happens at all, and I really doubt he’s ever going to be a ‘non-skeevy’ healthy adult. It’s just too late for that. And that’s heartbreaking.
All this talk of “how did you overcome it?” Sometimes you can’t.
I missed this earlier. {{{{Omega}}}} Maybe you did some bad things or maybe you are being too hard on yourself. Either way, I fully believe in redemption. You have stood for nothing but love as long as I’ve known you on this board, and you deserve nothing but love in return.
Agent Foxtrot, I will try to address your question in a single post though I could easily write a novel (and probably have, elsewhere on the Dope.)
As far as the makeup of the abuse, I experienced all three – physical, emotional, and sexual, but to varying degrees at various times. She never beat me–always hit me with an open hand–but she would hold me down and slap me repeatedly in the face, shove me into walls, once scratched my face and made me bleed. She broke things on a weekly basis --windows, telephones, dishes. She threw hangers at me, knocked crap off my shelves, punched holes in my wall. She once destroyed our living room sofa with a butcher knife. Then there was the time she deliberately drove her car into the side of my stepdad’s leased office building–twice in a row. Once I tried to stop her from driving away when she said she was going to go kill herself and she damn near ran me over with her truck.
She’s threatened to kill me twice–once with my stepdad’s shotgun and another time with a glass bottle she was waving about a foot away from my head. Was it the most egregious physical abuse ever? No. But I believed that she could have killed me, on accident, if I hadn’t shut my mouth. People in my family have always been terrified of my mother, and I had more than one childhood friend who spent the night and left traumatized the next morning, never to return again. And I will say that they were traumatized over little piddly stuff that was pretty status quo in my household.
As far as the emotional stuff goes, if any of the above made me upset enough to cry, she would mock me while I cried and tell me I was a big fucking baby and a spoiled fucking brat. I can still hear her voice, right down to to the pitch, as she screamed, ‘‘Waaah waah waaah! I’m a big fucking baby who never gets my way! Waaah waaah waaah!’’ Then she would call up everyone in our family and bitch for hours, within earshot, about what a terrible child I was and how she didn’t know what was wrong with me. She was fond of telling me I would never make it in life, that I was lazy, irresponsible, thoughtless, selfish, whiny, etc. And sometimes she would just flat-out say she hated me and wished I was never born. She also micromanaged my life. I was not permitted to get so much as a drink of water without her permission, well into my teens. She would drag me from an overnight stay at my Aunt’s just because I left a pencil on the futon. In sixth grade she pulled me out of class and drove me home to put away her scissors which I had left on my bedroom desk. Living with her was an exquisite kind of hell I cannot describe in words. Basically imagine that everything you could possibly ever do might fathomably set someone off at any given second, and you will get the idea.
So I had some depression and anxiety problems when I was growing up. I remember once at age 15 coming very close to killing myself. The phone rang just as I was about to swallow the first pill, and it was my favorite person on earth, my Aunt, so I decided to live. I also got a hernia in my esophagus, most likely from the anxiety. I knew things weren’t right at home, but I didn’t realize how wrong they were. I thought the biggest problem in my family was me.
And as I mentioned before, I emancipated at 17, and when I left home I pretty much became an adult overnight. I had to get a full-time job to support myself while attending high school. I was also sitting at #2 rank in my class, and since I pretty much viewed academic success as my ticket out of hell, I was determined to keep the #2 spot. I kept doing dual enrollment courses, I was assistant editor of the yearbook, I was secretary of NHS, all while this shit was going on, while my mother called me up on the phone to scream at me about what an ungrateful horrible child I was for coming out about my stepfather’s abuse, I was just determined to make it. So I went to class, I usually skipped first period to talk to the school counselor, I occasionally excused myself to cry in the bathroom or ran out to the parking lot and cried in my car, but damn it I got straight As and I graduated Salutatorian and made a speech and everything so fuck you, Mom.
It wasn’t until I got to college that everything fell apart. Since I was at a competitive school, the academic recognition pretty much stopped instantly thus leaving me with nothing to confirm my sense of self-worth. I had my first flashback and it scared the shit out of me, so I went to see a counselor. At 19 I was diagnosed by a clinical psychologist and a psychiatrist with Complex-Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and not a single one of my therapists has ever challenged this diagnosis. I was unaware my condition had a name–I just thought I was born horrible inside. I was in talk therapy for four years, which helped in some ways but made things worse in some ways. The litany of medications started, along with the litany of horrible side-effects. My past was all I ever thought about. I ended up hospitalized for depression, and I had to withdraw twice from college as I went from missing days to weeks to months due to agoraphobia and panic disorder.
Honestly, I was fucking worthless. I nearly got fired from my job at the cafeteria for fuck’s sake. I could barely bathe. I wanted to die all of the time. It was bad.
The turning point consisted of three key things:
Refusing to speak to my mother until she divorced my stepfather.
Withdrawing from school temporarily and getting a job.
Cognitive Behavior Therapy, and oddly enough, exposure therapy for my fear of heights (this helped with everything else I was afraid of.)
After two years of slowly rebuilding my strength like this I married, went back to school, aced my final two semesters, graduated With Honors, and celebrated by spending an amazing summer volunteering in a rural Mexican farming community.
I still have some major issues about my Senior Year, which to be perfectly honest really screwed me up. Every October/November, the season of emancipation, I kind of freak out a little bit. I think overall the biggest result of this experience is that I know for a fact that 99.99% of the people in the world who claim they love you would probably abandon you in a heartbeat if it meant saving their own ass. Of the 30 or so friends and family members I loved and trusted when I was 17, I still trust 3 of them. The rest either completely abandoned or betrayed me in some humiliating way. Honestly? All I remember from that year is endless pain and humiliation, and how completely apathetic the rest of the world was to my agony.
I have been med-and-therapy free for over a year now. I have chronic depression and anxiety but I’ve learned not to let it interfere with my life too much. I have learned to avoid things that cause flashbacks–like torture scenes in movies, but I still have periods of time where I get them regardless. Sometimes I have nightmares that I’m back at home. I consider myself deeply content. I am very highly functional, I just applied to graduate school at some very competitive schools and I’m very optimistic about my odds of acceptance. I’ve still got some work to do. For some reason this Christmas is really hard. I have been obsessing about it to tell you the truth. I spent six years in therapy and only cried once, and lately I want to cry every day. I am going to start therapy again next year. Healing is something that happens in phases I guess.
Sometimes I feel cursed, but other times I feel very blessed, to know how free I really am now. I bet many adults don’t realize how free they really are. But every day of my adult life is the most amazing miracle, because I never have to go back and live in that house ever again.
I’m sorry that is long but I can’t answer your question honestly any other way.
olivesmarch4th, you’ve posted some of that in fragments since you started here, but I don’t think I remember reading as detailed a record as this. I know other people have said this, but I just really wanted to say how much I admire your resilience and your strength.
I think the wisest thing you posted was this: “Healing is something that happens in phases.” This is absolutely true. The fact that you are currently feeling weepy and emotional and having a difficult time is not an indication that your previous treatment failed, or that you’ve failed. It’s simply time for a booster shot of therapy for you, I think.
And never forget your own words. You never have to live there again, and you are in control of how much contact you have with your mother. You get to dictate the terms of your own life. That in itself is a fabulous opportunity.
Having lived through circumstances that differ in details but are similar in themes to yours, Olives, I will say that my healing has come in waves. While I think I’m through the majority of it now at 48, I would never say I’m healed. The first time I returned to therapy, I thought I was (again) a failure but that’s not the case. I look back now at each stage as having been a sort of triage with each stage tackling the immediate need. Other issues emerged as the more urgent issues were addressed.
Thank you. It is a fabulous opportunity, and I have been blessed in ways that others haven’t been, for sure. I have friends with equally sad stories but less opportunity and self-awareness. I really didn’t realize that until I came to New York. When I talk about my hopes for the next year – acceptance into grad school, which will of course require me to leave my job in the Spring so I can spend four more months volunteering in Mexico – people just say, ‘‘Wow. I wish I could afford to do that.’’ Many of them must go to school part-time and take care of their families. So really I am lucky. And sometimes I really believe the reason things were so rough in the beginning is so I would never take for granted all of the blessings to follow. As an adult, I’ve had some really extraordinary experiences, I’ve got a very happy marriage, and I have no problems I can’t fix myself.
Contrary I appreciate your words, especially because you are 48. Last night I was complaining to my husband that I’m 25 and I should be over this by now and how silly I feel getting upset about it all over again. But I think you are right–it is a kind of psychological triage. I put it as far from my mind as possible when I was focusing on learning to function, so far I had convinced myself it didn’t matter and had nothing to do with my life. Lately I’ve begun to see it more as a part of me that will always be–not all of me, not my entire identity–but experiences that have informed the person I am today. And yeah, it’s time for a booster shot. As I put it to my husband, ‘‘I never used to have actual feelings about this… I knew how I was supposed to feel, but I didn’t feel comfortable losing control enough to actually feel… and now I’m just so really angry and sad and want to go sit down with someone objective and dump it all over them.’’
I grew up to be a remarkable copy of my Mom, in appearance and in nature. Unfortunately my Mom had some severe mental health issues and oceans of self loathing. She just really couldn’t love me. My Dad soon learned that it would only be worse for me should he openly exhibit any caring. Even emotionally stunted from alcoholism, he did care, he was just too withdrawn to express it. It’s very sad, but I got past it, eventually.
Years pass, maturity comes, what was once a curse sometimes proves to be a blessing. As I watch my siblings lives unravel in tragic ways I realize I was largely spared their issues as I was effectively out of the family loop and largely ignored.
I’ve learned that life can either grind you down or polish you up, like a diamond. Though I’ve never determined whether survival of such traumas is the result of what you bring to the experience or what you take away from it?
Olives, an abusive childhood is not something a person just “gets over”, especially not when you’re only 25. I am not a therapist, but I think more than one therapist would agree that you didn’t have actual feelings about it before because you weren’t psychologically ready to deal with those feelings. Now you are ready. The unhealthiest thing you could do is never deal with it.
You and many others in this thread were literally robbed of your childhoods (childrenhood? Would some liternazi correct me?). That is pretty much the most unfair thing you can possibly do to a person… worse than rape, in my opinion.
Pshaw! I asked you and everyone else to talk about it. And many of us use this forum to dump, so dump away!
ETA:
I assume the sexual abuse was at the hands of your stepfather, and the physical your mother, and the emotional both? I just wasn’t clear.
This is exactly what I believe. I am not defined by what happened to me but I was and am still shaped by it. I do not consider myself a victim because if I were a victim now, I would still be allowing my abuser to hold power over me, in this case from the grave. No thank you. And nowadays, I don’t even claim survivor as a tag. Yes, I am one but it’s no longer central to who I am.
As far as feeling your feelings, yes that was later in my process as well. I had to get to a place of safety so to speak to be able to feel everything. That was not fun at all, and I will say my default position when things go south is to revert to not feeling (which is a trigger I look for these days).
Feel free to drop me a PM if you need to dump–as I said, my path wasn’t the exact same as yours but elements were definitely the same.
Nietzsche has said man can survive any “How” so long as he has a suitable “Why?” Viktor Frankl has said, “What is to give light must endure burning.” What they meant is that we, all of us, have the opportunity to find meaning in our suffering. For me that has included using my own experience to develop empathy and understanding for the suffering of other beings. We do, all of us, suffer. And we all have choices about what we take from that, and whether we decide to give anything back.
Sorry, I completely missed some of these posts (that’s what you get for posting on a commuter train.) The abuse breakdown is complicated. Mom was married 4 times. Two of my stepfathers sexually abused me (my Mom’s 2nd and 4th husbands), but the first happened when I was too young to remember. I remember only testifying in court (he confessed to my mother and was convicted.) Then there was my biological father, who was neglectful due to his severe alcohol addiction but not overtly abusive. His parental rights were terminated at my request when I was 13.
My Mom was married the longest to her fourth husband, who actually adopted me and became my legal guardian. We were very close, and he is the one who sexually abused me from probably age 10 or 11 to the time I left home at 17. The one time he had the nerve to call social services on my mother, he told me I was going to come live with him and I would be ‘‘more like a wife than a daughter.’’ He didn’t rape me, but things were so frequent and so progressively worse as time went by that I lived in constant fear this would happen. Also, something very bad did happen once, when he took me out hunting and we stayed in a cabin in the woods. I don’t believe in repressed memories but there is one spot in my mind like a gaping black hole and whenever I go there it ends very badly for me. My flashbacks from that one event are almost purely emotional and physical–no visual imagery whatsoever, just overwhelming fear and… well, alarming physical sensation. When they happen I have a very hard time verbally articulating to my husband what I am feeling; I am a stuttering mess. The only way I know to cope with these flashbacks is to go into the bathroom, turn off the lights, lie facedown on the floor and wait for it to go away. My Mom has questioned this event as well, as she remembers me coming to her afterward and trying to talk to her about it. It doesn’t make sense to me, however, that I would remember years and years of abuse but not that one time. I have pretty much given up on ever understanding. The most important thing to know is that there was a deep loss there–the loss of a father, someone I trusted to have my best interests in mind–and that I spent a lot of time feeling alone and afraid.
(Augh, I just realized we were in the dark! Oh my god. This is really disturbing. I just realized this is a complete memory that lacks visual imagery because there was no visual imagery to remember. I have solved a decade-old mystery while posting on The Dope. I still can’t tell you what happened because it was dark for chrissakes and I was trying not to pay attention to be perfectly honest. Do you understand now? Do you understand how narrative memory is not like traumatic memory?)
The emotional abuse was almost purely my mother, yeah. Other than her poor, desperate taste in men, she was somewhat normal up until I was 8 or 9, then her temper problems started. I remember the person she was before. Maybe that’s why I tend to be forgiving. My stepfather was occasionally a jerk but more often than not he pretended to be on my side (or maybe really was on my side? I can’t figure out if he was sociopath or just really bad at coping with the way my Mom was.) He was very emotionally manipulative but under a very positive, encouraging guise. He was my hero. I called him Dad, he was the only person I considered to be my father. This is why the loss cut so deep. I always thought he would be the one stable fixture in my family, but I didn’t realize what he did was undermining all that trust and love… didn’t realize until much later.
This all sounds like complete unreality to me. I know it’s confusing, and it’s confusing to me too. Sometimes I have to sit myself down and say, ‘‘This was really my life.’’ I remember all of this happening. I grew up thinking this was normal. I remember reading books about victims of abuse and thinking, ‘‘God, how horrible they have to go through all that.’’ It rarely occurred to me to make the connection. I would always quiet the tiny dissenting voice by reminding myself, Well, yes, it may seem similar on the surface. But this doesn’t count. For one thing, this is all your responsibility.
So yes, I was robbed of my childhood in a way, because I always felt like I was the one holding my family together. When I related that anecdote to a therapist about trying to stop my mother from driving away and killing herself, my therapist said, ‘‘Where was your stepdad in all this?’’ ‘‘Well,’’ I said, ‘‘He was inside sulking.’’ ‘‘Let me get this straight,’’ she says, ‘‘You’re 14 years old and you’re the one standing outside trying to talk Mom down from the proverbial window ledge?’’ I completely took this for granted. It never occurred to me the adults had any obligation to act in any of this.
Gosh, I must sound like such a mess.
I appreciate your kind words, Agent Foxtrot. As Bill Watterson’s delightful character Calvin says, ‘‘There’s nothing so bad you can’t add a little guilt to it and make it worse.’’ My Christmas gift to myself is not to feel guilty for having to talk about this right now. Contrary is right. Sometimes the feelings come later. If now, why not? I’ll come out better and stronger for it in the long run.
**Olives,**Each time I read your story, I’m struck by some of the similarities in our backgrounds had how we coped (or didn’t). It sounds rough. I think you did well go get out with what you did.
You’re doing very well, please don’t worry. My mother is still dealing with things and she’s in her 70s. She finally found a good counselor, and is just now looking into stuff from her childhood. If you are getting a handle on it in your 20s, you’re much further ahead of the game.
I wish I had more time to write more, but lunch is finishing and this is the last day of work for the year.
Thanks TP. You’re a real sweetheart and I have always admired you for what you have overcome. I think sometimes the hardest thing is not giving into hate… for me, to life a life of love is the greatest triumph. Happy Holidays.
There’s a lot of things that my mother has hated about me for over 30 years. I wasn’t the daughter she had pictured (so bloody sorry). She was angry at me for something I did at age 5 (religion related) until I was 17, the ancient story came up during a visit from one of the church’s foremost theologians… and he told her I’d been right :smack: I came back from college (having gone too far to come back every Saturday and do the ironing) to find that I’d been moved to the smallest and darkest room in the house in punishment (I’m mildly claustrophobic). She sees my refusal to become a nurse (to take care of her) or a teacher (like her) as stubbornness: I’m 40 and she still says I went for engineering out of spite (a love of chemistry and interest in factory work could not have factored in at all, apparently).
My sister in law is a lot like the daughter my mother wanted. Seeing how the things she’d wished for can actually be defects (Mom and SiL both care a lot about clothes… and it’s a contest to see which one is going to be later to anything), Mom is now backhandedly forgiving me some of my unacceptable traits.
Omegaman, I don’t know what have you done to others. But while you can’t go back and pull Humpty Dumpty up to the wall, you can do better going forward. I do hope you find that better path forward and can stay on it.