I’m not really all that surprised you feel hostile towards your parents. But this doesn’t seem like it’s just about touching but rather is about a lot of other issues.
I also just wanted to say that Thudlow, I really liked your post–well expressed and nicely put.
Diamonds02, this isn’t just about touch. It’s about control. Apparently, your parents don’t want you to grow up. They didn’t want you to move out. They didn’t want you to cut your hair. They didn’t want you to get a job. They don’t want to let you pick out your own clothes.
Your parents are sabotaging your efforts to gain adult independence. For the sake of your own sanity, I think you need to put some distance between yourself and them.
Diamonds02 - I feel your pain. No really, I have felt your pain, up to and including the fact that even though I am considerably older than you, my Mom found it necessary as recently as last month to bring up the hair issue to me, and even lie to me in order to press her point.
In spite of this, I currently have a good relationship with my parents. I love them, they love me, we all know it and can spend reasonable amounts of time together without fighting. The key here is that you cannot change them. The only thing you can do is change you – your attitudes, your approach to them, the way you set your boundaries, and the way their behavior affects you. Therapy can be a really effective way to make those changes happen. It sounds counterintuitive – you just want them to stop touching you, and instead you have to work on your own issues. But it’s clear that just telling them what you want them to do (or not do) isn’t working. You need to get to a place where you can figure out how to set appropriate boundaries and make them stick. This is exactly the kind of situation for which therapy was designed.
The alternative is to cut off contact with them, and it’s very clear to me that that is not what you want. I just want you to know that it is possible to come from exactly the kind of situation you describe and build a healthy relationship with your parents, with or without hugging. I wish you luck.
Umm, I think the main thing here is that it seems like Diamonds02 is still in the closet or just come out, and the whole relationship is there fore seriously strained.
Diamonds, I think Anaamika has given you excellent advice - those are indeed some toxic parents you have there. Are they perhaps immigrants, and they’re treating you with their cultural background, and you’re reacting as someone who’s grown up in America? Cultural differences would explain some of the problems you’re having. If not, I’m going to have to go with “nuts.”
I am really disliking the idea that someone who is touch averse must get to therapy RFN! Sure, it falls on the thin end of the bell curve for normal human behaviour, but if it isn’t causing a problem, and the person who is touch averse is happy with themselves and their life and the people in their life are happy with them, I don’t see a pathology.
I used to have a similar problem with my dad about this kind of thing. When I was much younger, he liked to pat my head and stroke my hair. Now that I’ve grown up, I realize it’s not that big of a deal, but when I was younger, it really irritated me. I wasn’t (and still not) a touchy-feely person, but I didn’t mind hugs as much. It was the petting me like I was a dog that really annoyed me. Any requests, calm or otherwise would be met with “I’m your father, I’ll pet you anyway I want.”
I specifically remember one time my parents were at the bank and my mom needed to get to her safety deposit box. I wanted to wait out in the lobby, but they didn’t want me standing out in the lobby alone, so the three of us had to squish inside this tiny room while my mother looked through her jewelry to pick out which one she wanted to take out. My dad started with the petting thing again, and this time it was met with angry protests. My mother actually snapped at me and told me to keep quiet because other people might hear and think my dad was doing something bad. Without missing a beat, I shouted out “BUT HE IS!!! He’s touching me and I don’t WANT to be touched!!!” My mother was mortified and I got a beating when I got home. I still resent them for that memory today, even though things have simmered down since I’ve moved out with my sister. So to sum it up, I think initially my dad tried to show affection by the petting, but when he saw how resistant I was to it, he amped it up just to show me that he’s the boss and as long as I was under his roof, my needs have absolutely no merit.
People exist in social groups and people should try get along with others, but if my individual needs aren’t respected, then damn it all if I can be peaceful. There’s a difference between sitting quietly and putting up with eating grilled vegetables while everyone scarfs down a steak, but if someone derived pleasure from throwing chewed up steak in my face I wouldn’t sit quietly and say “Oh, okay, do it because it’s for the greater good.”
There’s that profound self-absorbtion I was talking about. I think some people need to learn the difference between what they want and what is a “need.”
Wait, you think Grapefruit is the one being self absorbed? His/her dad was petting him/her just because he could and then when GF protested, there was a beating? That’s not love, that’s a power struggle.
What kind of person “needs” to touch someone else against their will?
Don’t we lock people up for that?
Grapegruit humiliated her parents in public because her father was showing an innocent bit of affection.
It’s humiliating for a teenager to bitch at you??
What kind of person thinks that they have a personal “need” to not be touched by their parents.
Take a tack and stick to it, right, Dio?
No, actually. We don’t.
Having a teenager scream “stop touching me” in a public place? Yes.
I just don’t see why it’s a need. Some people aren’t into touching.
I don’t know if you answered this earlier, but would you think it’s so far out of line for a person who does want to get over any touching problems but feels they need time/therapy to ask for their parents to hold off on touching them while they come to deal with it? Or is that just going to be met with, “Self-absorption.” I don’t see how expressing your needs=self-absorbed.
I also don’t get your hostility here. You’ve accused the OP and people who have taken her side or sympathized with her as expressing hostility and yet in this thread as in many others you’re usually the only one who’s hostile. You use sweeping statements and deliberately act as provocative as possible to the point where even if I agree with your stance, I usually wish I didn’t. I don’t get it–why do you feel you have to put people’s backs up as much as possible?
Why wouldn’t I stick to it? I’m right. I don’t see anybody else moving off this idea that would should empathize with their disgust that their parents give a shit a bout them.
If they want to live in an antisocial bubble of non-human connection, with no regard for the feelings of those who love them, that’s their prrogative, but I don’t have to feel sorry for them.
Answering a question with a question. What other compelling arguments do you have up your sleeve?
I’ll be less elusive than you’re trying to be, so to answer your question: someone who has a sense of self-worth and does not bend over backwards just to appease someone else, whether it’s stranger, friend, or parent. Sharing the same genetic material does not automatically give them rights to disregard my boundaries. It’s the same as when my sister and I were young and I’d do the whole hand-in-the-face-but-I’m-not-touching-you. She made it very clear that it was annoying and it was not tolerated and I learned not to do it anymore because I cared about her and I didn’t want her to be upset. I was invading her space and despite the antics we’d employ to annoy each other, we grew up to respect each other’s wishes. My parents were adults and they couldn’t comprehend that.
Didn’t happen when I was a teenager, by the way. I was about ten or eleven.
Dio, I think you and some of the others in the thread are looking at this through the lens of your own relationship to your own parents (or to your own children as a parent). For some of us, our parents do clearly love us, and their touch is a way of showing it. But not all parental touch falls into this category; with some parents, it isn’t just “an innocent bit of affection.”