I'm going to just tell what this is about.
Many of us have struggled with abusive childhoods. We often still have issues with being pushed around and belittled by our families yet we don't know what to do. After all, this is family, right? We HAVE to love and be loved by our family or we are bad people who deserve to be kicked to the curb.
We are sharing ideas of how to overcome these feelings of NEEDING to have the approval of our mothers, our fathers, our aunts, our kissing cousins, our siblngs, etc. We DON'T have to, but some times we feel like we do. We can even blow abusive relatives up to be gigantic so that they are bogeymen who make us cower in fear with just a cross look. We feel we have to make them love us, which often will never happen and has never been.
A brief history on my FOO to start it off and we'll see if it flies.
I had an absent dad, who I love very much, and believe was absent because my mother was so abusive to him. I have a grandmother who kind of took up for me, but she had a rather iffy relationship with her own daughter, my mother, and my mother always told her that she favored my uncle (her brother) which was blatant and true, however uncle caused me some angst too.Very horrible, narcissistic man who juggled girlfriends and hurt them and laughed about it. He heard one girlfriend so much that when she found he as cheating, she left the city and he could never find out where shse went.LUCKY HER. I admire her. My uncle was also always tied to his mother's umbilical cord until she died. No exaggeration. I have one disturbing memory of him when I was under four and it always makes me wonder if this memory is just because he called me "the brat" and scared me or if there was more. I don't think there was sexual abuse. But he sure has a lot of space rented in my head for the little I knew him. I never did like him. He made me feel like nothing.
My mother told me that when she first held me in her arms in the hospital she felt "nothing, absolutely nothing." And she wouldn't hold me because I "stiffened" in her arms. I was put in my crib where I drank chocolate (yes chocolate) milk for years. I didn't live in my crib. I was let out, of course. But there was no hugging and loving and it was all my fault because I didn't like to cuddle. So she didn't try. It's always an infant's fault, right?
I was allowed to drink chocolate milk in a bottle until age five. She didn't want to deal with me since I cried a lot. She was very lazy. As long as I can remember, she mocked me, called me abusive names and made me think I was a bad girl. This continued into adulthood. In the very end she disowned and disinherited me. Although much happened between us, I am puzzled. Nothing happened that was so bad it would have come to that in a normal family, but we were more like the Addams Family. Hey, I like that! YES!!!! The Addams family!!!!! My mother took her dislike of me out on my kids and never sent them birthday cards or talked to them and she never even saw my youngest two kids. Of course, that was my fault too or so she once said when I had my first child.
I tried hard to make amends while she was alive, calling her and sending her nice cards and apologizing for all the horrible things I thought I'd done, although, truthfully, I did not know what they were and did not feel she was innocent. I just wanted her to love me. It never happened. But she wanted me to think it might so she never hung up on me, although she never called me. I always did the calling, 100% of the time. So in a way I knew.But I held out hope because she didn't hang up. I would have been better off if she had told me she hated me, because she did, and had stopped any hope I had. But she liked to drag it out knowing how she really felt without spselling it out to me. Trust me, had she told me, Iwould had left her alone forever. I wish I had.
That she disinherited me hurt a lot, but was not the money...she didn't have much. It was the total rejection. So, after years of therapy, I don't love her memory. I think after realizing she did not consider me her daughter, that's when the love halted. Even a bonehead like me finally saw the light and I refuse to love somebody who not only doesn't love me back, but loathes me. So I really don't. I even threw out my family picture book. I'm not sorry. I don't want to see pictures of her holding me when I was little, although she claimed she couldn't hold me because I wouldn't let her. I don't want to see my childhood. It was too hurtful. I don't miss not having a family picture book.
I see her clearly now without the pictures. I only wish I'd seen her clearly way before I was older. I suffered a lot, of my own making, by wanting somebody who truly haed me to love me. Folks, it doesn't work. I wish I had better news.
My two siblings I call Thing 1 (brother) and Thing 2 (Sis).
Thing 1 is brilliant, but damaged. He has never had a live in relationship in his entire life. When he writes on his FB about our mom, it sounds as if he is writing her love letters. She adored him. He was her Golden Child, which often happens in a dysfunctional family...there is a good child who can do no wrong and a scapegoat who is blamed for everything and is the outsider and ostracized. Well, he was GC (Golden Child). Although he has lived in the East for thirty years and I live in Wisconsin and never see him, he once wrote me a long letter out of the blue (we had not been talking) listing all the things about me that bother him. I'm sure they were "mother" oriented, but I'll never know.. For once I was smart and tore it up and never read it. He also has had iffy relationships with some clients. He has a picture of a client who was sixteen at the time and he sent it to everyone and talked about the kid like he loved him. I do not and never will believe he did anything inappropriate with this child. I am NOT accusing him. But I do believe he was in love with him. Romantically. He is definitely different, as am I, as are all adults from the kinds of family I come from.
Thing 2 was very damaged by our upbringing and had eating disorders (still does), cut off every family member except our mother at least once in her life and liked to play that cut off game with me. It's over now. I'm done. I wish I'd been done the first time she did it. She liked to call the cops if I called to try to find out what I did wrong. Can't tell you how many times she called the cops on me. The cops started to kind of act embarrassed when they had to visit. I'm angry that she ever got back in touch with me. The first time she did it, it lasted three years. It would have been better for both of us if sh e had let it last forever.
She did not invite my brother to her wedding because he was too ugly and her frat sisters, well, he would embarrass her. Yet now they (Thing 1 and 2) are best buddies. I wonder how she got out of that one. She used to make fun of his appearance non-stop. I'm sure he heard her. She wasn't quiet about it.
Recently she got divorced and turned to me to tell her boyfriend problems too and maybe she didn't like what I told her so she got mad again. She dated married man and has been in a bad relationship with an abusive man for five years and never cut him off once. In fact, we'd talk about how she should do it, but she said "I can't. I can't." Hah. But she could cut me off because I said something she didn't like or posted sometimes she personally didn't like on her FB.Which brings me to the FOO issue...the cuts off were for my grandma and my brother early on, but later, after she hung out with my mother who had abused her as a kid, the cut offs were just for me.
I've come to realize that this is simply familial in nature and that it's not that she cuts me off because she thinks I abuse her. If s he was taking a strong stand for herself, her boyfriend would have been gone. Plus I don't abuse her. She may not like my opinion, but I don't abuse her. But that's another issue.
Both of these siblings say I was not abused by my mother. I was the abuser. I had to make peace with that so I could move on. I no longer care what they talk about or think. I have no contact with them, which means I try very hard not to check their facebooks or any other sort of social media on top of not talking to either and my father knows not to talk about them to me. It has been a freeing experience.
I am fortunate in my life that I have a wonderful husband of twenty years and four nice adult children and two grands. I had a good life in spite of fighting (on top of FOO), a severe mood disorder and neurological differences. I am stronger because of having to come to grips with my FOO and who they are to me. And I have to accept that if they think I have not been abused, then that is their prerogative. I know that most of the time Mother did her worst while I was alone. They couldn't have known what they didn't see. Whatever.
It is time to have a wonderful rest-of-our-lives, all of us. We are not bad. We are good hearted people who survived bad situations, many much worse than mine. I was never hit or sexually abused.
But those tapes with my mother's voice on it are there when I have to see FOO. Fortunately, I will only have to see them them one more time and I hope it's in the far future and I will not speak to them. They can't hurt me anymore.
I have been feeling great since going Operation Oblivion (not seeing or peaking at FOO). Ok, I cheated twice, but not really...I checked to see what Sis was writing, but controlled myself from reading the words and left first. So that's a victory. She was stalking me here. I have no idea if she still is.
That's my story in a very short version. And, of course, if you talked to them they'd have their own version. What I've learned is that our perception, unless we are hallucinating, is our reality and nobody has a right to tell us that our reality isn't real. I also learned that it is common for siblings to deny that abusive parents were abusive.
A sibling of David Pelzer, the favored one, claims it wasn't "that bad" for David, even though he was found in a state of starvation when finally taken away by social services.
In dysfunctional families we learn divide/conquer. We don't learn that a family means loyalty and love.
And that just makes it so hard to do everything, especially parent.
I am lucky I had an angel who was my parenting mentor, my ex-husbands mother. She was my mother in my heart and I thank God for her teaching every single day.