For all of you who posted and have experienced abuse, you really are angles on earth. You all have really given me a lot of advice and said things that i’m going to try to make my own. And youre all so right about everything you’ve said. I think support is extremely important in healing. To know that people who’ve gone through what i have and people who just care, want to support me is very unexpected and greatly appreciated.
Again, thank you.
tanookie - I very much remember reading about your situation - as someone who did not go through abuse, but grew up with a parent who did, it was seared into my brain, and I was that much more appreciative that my parents broke that chain. Thank you for sharing your situation in a positive, constructive way.
jackelope - it sounds like you are getting the type of support from Dopers with similar situations that is helpful. Continued strength and please continue to seek out the help you need.
Wordman, you mentioned something very important in your last post. Your parent broke the chain! I believe a lot of why people are afraid to tell their stories is because they fear that everyone will then look at them and wonder when they will ‘snap.’
There are so many stories on the news these days where someone kills someone or beats their kids or drinks themselves into a stupor and hits a schoolbus and the announcer says something about how that person was abused as a child and everyone just accepts that abused people become abusers themselves! In talking to people (like so many here on the board) most abuse survivors are just people… we may carry a bit of baggage… but we want to find mates and have families and we work hard! My abuse is not a crutch for me to not have to function in society and is no excuse for hurting anyone else. I know I hated the pain caused me by my parents and I am certainly not going to make anyone else feel that way!
This is another reason I try and tell my story. Past abuse is not an automatic marker for a life of crime!
I’m glad you’re reaching out for support jackelope. I wish you lots of success!
Well I have an appointment next week to see someone.
Sincerely hope everything turns out ok for you Jackalope. You seem to be a really decent guy. This won’t be an overnight thing. But the important thing is that you feel there is some progress on a regular basis. The scars will never disappear. But I think they can become more bearable, less hurtful with time. And you just can’t put a price on that.
I meant really decent GAL!. Sorry about that…My mind must have been roaming elsewhere at the time. 
jackalope, as others have said, therapy will probably hurt you very much for a while, and you may start making up excuses to not go. But unless your therapist is a complete jerk in some fashion, keep going. It takes effort to face the past and work through it. I was not abused but needed therapy for a traumatic event, and speak from experience. It will take time, it will be painful, but it will help you move on and work towards really living again.
Jackalope just want you to know you are in my prayers. I’m so glad other Dopers have come forward to help you though this. Big hug too to my friend tanookie.
jackalope, I was also an abused child. My abuse was different from yours, but you know, I think abuse survivors have more in common than not.
Woo hoo! You rock!!!
I wouldn’t care that I lied, either! You broke the pattern! Go you!!!
That’s great that he feels he can also not visit – but he’s letting her visit him? Is he on good terms with her?
As Vixenation said, you don’t have to put up with the guilt. You simply don’t have to feel it. I know, that seems impossible. It can happen, eventually. Because you don’t deserve that guilt! It’s completely ridiculous that your parents would even try to guilt you into anything, given their history with you!
I feel that I should forgive my parents, too, but sometimes forgiveness takes a very long time. I’m 47, and I’ve understood the full extent of what they did for ten years or so, and I still haven’t forgiven them. I’m getting closer, though.
As for “getting it” – don’t count on it. And even if they do, don’t count on that being a watershed moment for you. There’s still enough garbage there that you simply may never be able to trust them and will always have to have your guard up if you choose to be around them. They might very well follow “getting it” with nasty verbal attacks or snide comments. Face it, neither one of them is a very nice person!
{{{{jackalope}}}} Yep. Been there, done that, designed the stupid T-shirt and threw it away.
The good news is that you can eventually learn to set aside this struggle. It doesn’t have to concern you any more. Your parents frankly don’t deserve to be the subject of such agony for you – I don’t mean that you are wrong to feel so torn up but that they aren’t worth the power that you have been giving them. Again, that takes a very long time to learn. One thing that I constantly remind myself is that I have made my own life; I have broken the cycle of abuse; I never have to go back to my childhood – I won!
I’m not on the boards very often, so if I don’t respond to any more of your posts, please don’t be offended. I hope that this post helps, though.
Hey, are you sure you aren’t in my family? LOL!
Right! I was abused, and DH was abused – oh my goodness, what his parents and grandparents did to him and his many siblings – and we refused to abuse our kids. Now, are we perfect? Good grief, no! But we’ve shaken so much of our pasts loose!
Another reason to tell the story of abuse is that it was not our fault. The stigma that prevents many of us from telling our story is the same stigma that protects our abusers. I refuse to protect them.
Jackalope, I’m so glad you got an appointment to see someone much sooner than you originally thought. I didn’t go through anything like you or tanookie or cadolphin did, but I also experienced physical and verbal abuse from my father, while my mother didn’t want to listen because she was too tired from working all day and having to do everything when she got home too. I’m also genetically predisposed to clinical depression. Like you, I was a highly intelligent child, reading at a very early age. I’ve often wondered if the two were connected somehow. Was the abuse because I wasn’t a “normal” kid? Was I just more conscious of how wrong it was because I wasn’t a typical toddler? Or, did the abuse somehow make me completely bypass childhood?
I’ve only been able to establish a semi-normal relationship with my father because he’s now pretty severely handicapped. He has a neurological disorder that inhibits both his motor skills and his mental capacity; a lot of why he was so abusive toward me is because of this. (That and the fact that his mother was a grade-A nutjob, but since she’s been gone for some ten years, so has her influence.) He’s no longer capable of beating me up, and watching him degenerate, I now feel more pity than anger. I’ve also spent some time listening to my mother as well as getting her to listen to me, and we went to a few therapy sessions together at one point.
But, I know I’m really lucky in this regard. Not only was my abuse not as horrifying as what has happened to others, but the fact that I can see that my father’s problem stems from a serious medical condition makes it a lot easier to forgive him. It helps that I no longer have a reason to be afraid of him. (Good thing, because with my roommate going into drug rehab, I have to move back into my parents’ house because I can’t afford an apartment on my own.)
Jackalope, it sounds like your parents are a couple of sick people who got off on what they were doing to you, and still get off on the way they treat you even now. As a lot of other people have said: You don’t have to feel guilty if you don’t want to see them. You don’t owe them an explanation. You’re an adult, and you can make your own decisions about it - if they press you for a reason, just tell them that your schedule doesn’t allow it right now. It’s true, because the most important thing on your schedule is taking care of yourself, and putting yourself into that situation will very likely set you back in your therapy. A good therapist and/or clergy person should also help you understand that while your religion may include the commandment to “honor thy mother and father,” a loving God does not require you to suffer for anyone else’s twisted games. A loving God will understand that donating genetic material doesn’t necessarily make one a true mother or father to a child, and that God is going to go on loving you whether you are able to forgive them for what they did to you or not, and will understand that even if you do forgive them in your heart, you don’t have to have a relationship with them. It IS possible to feel forgiveness and still not allow them the opportunity to hurt you again.
As for confronting them as some have recommended… I certainly wouldn’t do it without a lot of therapy already having taken place, and I don’t know that I recommend it at all. Your therapist will help you know when and if it’s a good decision for you.
Take care and work on getting yourself well above all else. If your parents wonder what happened because they never hear from you again, maybe that’s the best thing for them. (I’d put money on them not figuring it out though.) And if you ever need someone to talk to, add my name to the list of those who are willing to listen… that goes for anyone else out there too whether they have told their story or not.
jackalope, I found that the thing that helped me the very most when I was working through the things that happened to me was to write it all down. Even if it didn’t make sense, or was too jumbled, or I didn’t remember it all - I would just write it down.
A big part of the problems that I was left with was a sort of emotional shut-down. I wasn’t sexually abused, and there was no reoccuring physical abuse, but the emotional abuse in my family left me so limp and wrung out that for a long time I couldn’t feel my own emotions. When someone asked my oppinion, I really didn’t have one to give them. I didn’t feel anything about anything. Things are what they are, no sense in feeling about them. Writing helped me figure out that I really did have feelings about the things that happened, and that it’s not bad to know what’s going on in my own head.
My mother married my stepfather when I was 13. This was the only guy that us four kids had really seen other than my mom’s dad since she divorced my dad five years before. He was tall and scary and loud and alcoholic and controlling. He thought that she was swell, but didn’t want kids. So he put rules into effect.
Keep in mind that at this time, we four kids were 13, 8, 7, and 6. The rules were harshly enforced by withholding food and basic necessities.
…I remember when I was about 15. I had been moved out of my bedroom into the smaller bedroom. About a year later, I was moved into the dining room downstairs. This consisted of putting an old, rickety bunk bed into the dining room, and a curtain across the doorways (one to the kitchen and one to the living room.) Everyone was still allowed to walk in whenever they wanted because it was still the dining room, first and foremost. I had to keep the curtains open when I wasn’t sleeping. I had a small wardrobe and one bookshelf where I could keep my stuff, and I wasn’t allowed to set anything on the table.
The…constant dispair was so grinding. I wasn’t suicidal, I just didn’t want to exist. I half suspected that I didn’t exist. I decided to do an experiment. An experiment to prove to myself that my mother still loved me. I was going to see how long it took her to notice that I had stopped talking. I never said a word outside of school.
I gave up the experiment after two and a half weeks. She never noticed. Nothing changed
Anyway, writing things out helped me to see my own feelings that I had burried so deep as to think that I didn’t have any. I had plenty of feelings, I just buried them because they were “bad” and “wrong.” Because I wanted to be happy, not sad. Because girls aren’t supposed to be angry, they’re supposed to be bidable and sweet and accepting.
I used to comfort myself at night with day dreams that I was a king’s daughter. I never thought that I’d be taken away to live my “real life” or something. I just wanted to have one thing - just one - that was real or special or worth something. Even if it was a secret thing that never showed on the outside, even if it was something that nobody knew but me. Even the wording of that day dream was telling. I was never a princess in my own right, but at least I was a king’s daughter.
Thank you all for sharing. And Jackalope, I hope you continue to just talk about your feelings and experiences with people. The talking means you exist.
People have mentioned the degree to which they were abused, I just wanted to say that abuse is abuse. Having your self-worth systemmatically torn apart by someone like a parent can happen in many ways. But in the end, all of these abuses need to be delt with so the survivor can move on. Even if, as some say, “it was only emotional abuse.”
For me, it was emotional abuse from my mother and then my first serious boyfriend who I dated from 17-20. And in the grand scheme of these things, what they did wasn’t even that bad. But it still hurt me, changed me and made things very difficult for awhile.
It took me a long time to even admit that what my mom did was abuse. It was only through long conversations with a friend who’d been sexually abused did I start to see how, that although the ways we were abused were different, what we felt and did were very similar. I was 25 before I could even begin to think of abuse as something that happened to me.
For me, much of what my mother did was designed, intentionally or unintentionally, to get the message across to me that life is about her and that I didn’t get to have any feelings that reflected badly upon her or weren’t about her. I may have a genetic disposition towards depression, but her parenting skills definitely contributed to my overall mental health. I remember being depressed at age four. I was depressed cyclically throughout grade school. I was extrememly anxious ans socially phobic, as well. I developed OCD in grade school, which I hid so as not to bother my parents. By middle school I was mildly depressed all of the time, with winters being worst. This pattern continued until my early and middle twenties when my usual mild depression got heavier and blacker. Although I did have a Seasonal Affective Disorder compenent to my early depessive years, as I got older, summer was the worst time for me. I was suicidal every summer – the kind of suicidal where you’re not going to kill yourself, but you think of ways you could. Why summers? Because I was home and being controlled by my mother again.
Once I graduated from college and went to grad school, you’d think I’d’ve been better because there was less contact with my mom. But, I think so many years of not being able to have my own feelings had given me a legacy of an inability to feel. Not sociopathic lack of feeling, but depression lack of feeling, as Gravity describes in her post. To feel, I started eating.
At this point, I’ve done a lot of work with therapists. It’s helped, too. I feel things now. I try to live my life, not my mother’s.
In fact, through an odd series of coincidences, my parents have spent several weekend in a row with me recently. I did pretty well with them until the last weekend. I woke up Sunday and remembered two dreams I’d had. (I almost never remember my dreams, so this was unusual.) Both were about people being abusive to me. In the worst, I knew my old boyfriend would kill me if he found me, and I watched as he yelled for me to come out of the restaurant I was hiding in. It was terrifying. Anyway, I realized as I was waking up that I had these dreams because of all the contact I’d been having with my mother recently, and I was telling myself through the dreams that it wasn’t as easy on me as I’d thought. She’d behaved badly towards me a little, but worse towards others. So, now, she and my dad want me to come visit them this summer. I won’t. I will lie, ignore them or anything necessary, but I’m not seeing them until September. That’s the amount of time I feel I need to detox from their visits. And then my visit will be very short. You do what you have to, to be ok. You are entitled to be ok.
I’m starting up again with therapy, though, in a few weeks. I’m still depressed, still very overweight and still feeling stuck on something. But I refuse to give up. No matter how easy it is to just stop doing things, stop feeling, etc, I don’t. That’s why my dog is so important to me. I love her everyday, and I care for her everyday. She is proof that I can feel, and that I can care for others.
Bit by bit my life will get better. And, Jackalope, yours will, too. You’re strong enough to talk about it today and that’s better than last week. Good luck, and please keep trying.
Gravity I wasnt allowed laughing either!!! That was so weird to read that. I’m in shock, i thought i was the only one who wasnt allowed laughing. In my case it was my mom who said no laughing. I didnt like to bring friends home because when I did I’d always have to say “ok, we arent allowed laughing”. She was so manipulative with it too. She’d make it seem like it was my idea.
Oh and I also had the “toilet paper police” only that was my dad.
wolfgrrl , on a sillier note. I had forgotten that I could read at such a young age. I remembered just this year, in fact. What i remembered was riding my green tricycle around the cul du sac and reading a bumper sticker “save gas, fart in a jar”. I just thought that was hillarious. It even had a picture of a bum and when you’re three it doesnt get better than that Then it came back to me that my teacher would get me to read to the class while she did paperwork. My parents had and have NO IDEA that I could read. How can you not know that your toddler can read??
Take care all.
I’ve had a lot of emotional abuse from my father. I have a feeling there were probably a few terrible things that happened, but I cannot remember them. When something traumatic happens to me, I get this kind of amnesia- I totally forget every aspect of what happened. For example, when I was ten years old, I was going to a therapist and taking medication for depression. I remember that, but I have no memory of why. Only recently did I find out that at the time, my father was having an affair. I had apparently eavesdropped on someone’s conversation and discovered what happened, and I flipped out. I started acting irregularly in school, and they had me have appointments with the school counselor. The counselor asked a lot of questions about my family. Questions I had though were mundane. He also often asked me to draw pictures- of my family, and of just my parents. At the time I was very confused why this was happening. The counselor suggested I get medical counseling.
So I had a personal counselor who would spend an hour a week talking about what I felt was mundane stuff. I wasn’t able to understand it at the time, but the counseling did help greatly. I can thank my mother for having the awareness to see a disturbed child and handling the situation quickly. And yet, the affair my father had still sounds foreign. I don’t remember being aware of it at that age. Because of that, I fear there are other, even more terrible things my father did to me, that are similarly blocked out. I occasionally have nightmares in which I am molested, which makes me think other things went on.
The worst thing my dad did to me was rob me of any sense of self-esteem. If I failed at something, he would berate me for it over and over again. He’d bring it up years after it happened. The greatest guilt I could ever have was disappointing him, which happened often because he was a man impossible to please. Standing up to him was just asking for a beating; I avoided most physical abuse by spending the first 14 years of my life being timid and submissive around him. I believe he may have been bipolar- he could be fine for a while, then all of the sudden he’s like a completely different person. This could happen at unpredictable moments. It made me very scared of him. When I was 14 he cheated on my mom again, and this time she drew the line. He moved far away and got remarried and had 2 more kids. He became a born-again Christian and acted like his past life (including a morphene addiction which devastated my family) had never happened. These days, he acts like I don’t exist. After he moved away, I got zero support from him. He felt that the child support payments he gave my mom were enough. Later he used the excuse of being the father of 2 new children and how would he support them? That was his excuse for not contributing to my college education.
Unfortunately, this affected my behavior. Timid, submissive boys are not treated mercifully on the playground. I was bullied quite a lot and had a bladder/bedwetting problem which persisted for an embarassingly long number of years. Even today I have trouble with self-esteem and assertiveness. I’m very non-confrontational, and I tend to get very nervous when someone is angry with me (even over something stupid/irrelevent). I have had more counseling since my parents divorce, which has helped, but what my dad did to me cannot be un-done. It is something I have to live with. I had a lot of anger toward my father, and still do, but right now I am trying to not let the past keep me down.
My oldest sister (five years younger than me) can’t remember anything but the barest sketchy details of anything between the ages of 8 and 17. She went to counciling for a while, but decided that she’d rather NOT know what happened, so she stopped. She is still on antidepressants, it’s unlikely that she will ever be okay without them.
I never had a friend over. Not once. I never dated. Never had friends in school deeper than nodding aquaintances. Never went to the movies or out to eat. I Never had enough to eat, and I often went hungry so that my sisters or brother could have a little more. The ammount of food that we were served for supper never increased as the kids grew - it was one box of mac & cheese and 4 hot dogs. I never did my homework and read voraciously to escape my reality - upwards of 2 books a day on school days, more on weekends.
Of course all this has made me the person that I am, and I’m grateful for that, because I’m a good person. I am very strong inside, and I’m empathetic to my very core. There are problems that came from it, too, of course. For a lot of years, I could not help but wolf down my food, and ate more than I needed. I am even still prone to bouts of depression that can be triggered by reading a sad book or seeing a sad movie. They can last a week or more before I’m ok again. I just get caught up in the sadness or dispair that the main character felt, and it takes a while for me to shake it off.
Just last year I found out that the reason that my grandmother refused to speak to her sister Pat again was because Pat works for social services and she wanted to have us taken away. My sister works with Aunt Pat now, and Pat appologised to her a couple of months ago for not being able to take it far enough that they took us, or even investigated. She was almost crying, and she doesn’t know anything about what really happened at home, just what she saw, what happened in public.
It makes me a little sad that my great aunt, who I saw once a year or less, tried to get some help for us, and the only thing that she ended up doing is losing several of her sisters, with no benefit to us in the end.
It seems so long ago, but it was only 13 years ago that I left. I’m a whole different person now. It was a lot of work sometimes, but now I hardly think of it at all.
Of course, jackalope or anyone else, if you want somebody to talk to, I’m available by e-mail.
what’s wrong with me, that I can read about these happenings and not break down crying?
i sort of think I should have been there to prevent all this, even though its sort of irrational.
on the other hand, considering what would occur if that were possible, that makes me a murderer.
And I dont deserve to feel more down than the people in here who suffered through this stuff and who have coped with it, yet I do.
i’d hug you all too except that I dont feel like I have enough empathy to do it whole-heartedly.
I guess I can be a good brother to my kid sister (even though thats not enough at all), but she’s 120 miles away. And its not my job to bring her up even though her dad ran away and left my mom with no child support or visits to her. And yes, she has thankfully not been touched by any of the shite in this thread: her dad was stupid and uncaring, but not abusive.
(when my mom asked me to do an internet search for predators in the neighborhood I could find nothing. but I did suggest she take down external indications that my sisters bedroom was occupied by a child but she didnt listen. She only took them down when they became unfashionable. Hey, my mom didnt believe me when I visited some relative for X-mas party when I was 12 and one family’s children was very defensive and wouldnt even talk to me, and were very scared when their stepdad addressed them. Later they were taken away by the state so I assume I was right. Of course now she works as a psych assistant with children, so she runs firsthand into instances of this, for some reason that makes me feel better, in a told-you-so way, and I feel bad about that.)
Every time I try to make things better or even to make people feel there is at least one decent person out there I come across as a total pretentious blowhard.
So I won’t try. But at least know someone would be praying for you, if he weren’t agnostic.
My parents didn’t know that I could read either. My mom read to me a lot - I have an older brother who was raised by my grandparents (Mom had him when she was 19 and my grandparents adopted him), and I got a lot of his books as he outgrew them. When I started reading, she thought I had memorized the words that went with the pictures. Since there were a LOT of books, that would have been quite a feat in itself.
They found out that I was reading for real when I got to kindergarten. We went to meet the school librarian and I picked up a book I’d never seen before and started reading. First they had me read it to my class, then they had me go up and read it to the 6th graders. Mind you, since my birthday falls at the end of the year, I was 4 at the time. I found out years later that the school had wanted to skip me to at least 3rd grade, and possibly as high as 6th, which is why they had me go read to the class. My parents wouldn’t let them. They were afraid I’d get picked on. What really happened was that the other kids never forgot that I was a freak, and I got picked on anyway. At least I could have had a few years less of it.
The funny thing is, my mom got a blender for the Christmas right after my third birthday. I read the manual and put it together for her, so they should have known I could read from that. Guess they thought I did that from pictures too.
I like the bumper sticker, btw. Bums and farts are still funny sometimes. 
I also have those little bits of memory that float up from time to time for no reason.
I have been asked to change my name as someone else has a similar name so now i’m ArtyDooDoo.
Anyway I have my appointment on tuesday evening. For some reason i was thinking that wasn’t for another couple of weeks untill i looked at the calandar!
~the Arty formerly known as Jackalope.