Moderator Note
This is something you also should not say outside of the Pit. Attack the post, not the poster. If you want to attack the poster, you know where the Pit is.
I wonder sometimes if a normal, happy childhood is abnormal. It seems that dysfunctional families are actually more common.
This question has arisen as I find out more about the people I grew up with.
We were shown a video at work that moved virtually everyone who viewed it. It contains ordinary footage, taken inside a medical facility, of random folks going about their business. A pop-up bubble appeared over many of the people with captions like “just learned his biopsy is suspicious”, “going to meet her new grandson”, “on his way to an end-of-life meeting about his wife”, etc.
This was years ago and I still think about that video now and then.
ETA: I found it Well worth watching.
mmm
For attention, money, or to get oneself off the hook for murder (see Lyle and Erik Mendez, whose tales of woe would’ve been a bit more convincing if they hadn’t gone on a huge spending spree after bumping off their parents).
That’s not to say that the person cited in the OP is making stuff up, though the girlfriend held in the basement sounds a bit over the top.
No kidding. The more I find out about the secrets of my childhood freinds’ families, the more i agree.
My support group is ACNP: Adult Children of Normal Parents. it’s a small group.
On a bit of a tangent, there’s an autistic writer who has written an essay whose title includes the phrase “Nobody Is Normal.”
Wasn’t it the book “Anna Karenina” that had the line “All happy families are happy in the same way, but all unhappy families are unhappy in different ways”?
Like I said, however, it was the girlfriend in the basement that made it sound genuine to me. One wonders if the neighbors knew, or how they explained it. Do remember she said that the rest of the family was told that he would kill them if an outsider found out the truth.
My brother’s undergrad degree was criminal justice. He did an internship one summer with the county prosecutor’s office of the big city containing his Uni. I later asked him what real-world knowledge he gained from that experience. His rueful reply:
Statistically speaking, incest is normal human behavior.
Rocked me back a bit.
Funny, because that’s the over-the-top detail that tripped my and @running_coach’s BS-o-meter.
Not to say who’s right here, and ref ekedolphin’s complaint, I did read the ambiguities in your explanation of who was benefiting from what public campaign differently than you probably meant.
For darn sure lots of people live through, and are deeply damaged by, craptacular childhoods under evilly defective parents or others.
When I was in college, I worked with a woman who also worked at a group home for teenage boys who had been in various kinds of trouble with the law, and one thing that all of them had was a history of sexual abuse. The most common perpetrator? Teenage female babysitters! Of course, most of them didn’t think they were abused, but they were because of the age and power imbalance, and she said that if she ever had children, she would NEVER hire teenage girls to watch them, and would be less worried about her daughters being molested than she would her sons.
I think I’ve seen that; IIRC it was a commercial, although I don’t remember for what.
Shortly after I got my cancer diagnosis, I was sitting in church and looking around the small congregation and thinking, “OK, her husband committed suicide and her son recently died from a heart attack, he’s still dealing with the fallout from a divorce that happened more than 10 years ago, that couple found out that the only grandchildren they will ever have were not fathered by their son, etc.”
In the early 90s, I teamed with a friend coding legal software as a side-hustle. We worked with partners in a family law practice, mainly divorce, custody, and CPS cases. Eventually we were tasked with importing the actual case files into the database to do real-world testing in their law practice. We signed many disclosure agreements and they did background checks on us. Once we began seeing details of actual cases we understood why. It was like reading all the stories Steven King considered too horrifying to publish. Some evenings I wanted to shower in bleach when I got home. I don’t know how people in family court deal with this every day.
Yeah. I took a child welfare class in grad school. The stuff I learned about made my childhood look like a walk in the park. The one story I could never get out of my head was Daniael Kelly, who was failed as much by the system as her own parents.
That was powerful, 
Yeah. One of my high school chums went on to become a child psychologist. After not seeing him for about 10 years we reconnected when we were in our early 30s.
I asked him how child psychology was working out and he said he’d had to give it up after less than 3 years and switch to working on/with adults. He’d see a kid for a court-ordered 1 hour a week knowing the other 24 * 7 - 1 = 167 hours the parents would be doing their damnedness to break the kid. He just couldn’t face it.
FYI: Your link doesn’t work.
I’ve read both of the books by the Cleveland hostages, and while the two girls who wrote the book together (and have remained friends) grew up in low-income homes where they nonetheless knew they were loved, the third one (IIRC Michelle) was failed by society from the day she was born. She did marry recently, and I hope she can find happiness in her life. They all certainly deserve it.
(Makes me wonder if the “girlfriend” I mentioned in the OP might have come to their house under similar circumstances?)
I know a woman who, many years ago, was contemplating law school, and while working in a law office, decided not to. As she put it, “The things that ex-spouses do to each other! Yeesht!”
In the meantime, she posted a lengthy story of her own, about her lifelong battle with depression. Among other things, she said it contributed heavily to the demise of her marriage (no kids) and that a combination of this and Type 1 diabetes (which was the main reason she decided not to have children) led to her applying for disability, and being approved the first time around.
I wouldn’t have guessed that about her either.
That’s weird. It works for me. Daniael Kelly was a 14-year old girl with cerebral palsy left to starve to death in her own filth by a mother who refused to care for her. The “social workers” who were responsible for following up on her case falsified reports and lied about checking up on her when they hadn’t visited the home in months. They were indicted along with her mother after the girl’s death.
Going back to the OP’s story, being “stuck up” is often a teen’s way of hiding their real life. If no one gets close, no one finds out what is going on. It’s a defensive move. And that is what makes me think her story is real.
I had a good high school friend with divorced parents and the stories she eventually told me were damn scary. Mom was a drunk. Dad sexually abused both her older sister and her. She let him to keep him away from youngest sister. Mom figured it out (or older sister told her after moving out, not sure) and mom dried out, left dad and got on with life (I knew all but dad and liked them all). This had all happened by the time my friend was in 10th grade and was almost through with therapy when I met her.
Most people never knew what hell she had been through.
Yeah, she was a very attractive girl who hung with the cheerleader-and-football-player crowd and was quite vocal that anyone who wasn’t like them should be banned from the planet.
[quote=“nearwildheaven, post:30, topic:922301, full:true”]
I think I’ve seen that; IIRC it was a commercial, although I don’t remember for what…[/quote]
I don’t think it was a commercial, although I could be wrong. I think it was produced as a corporate team-building exercise in empathy.
mmm