Hi Jones

Hey well done you for saying you are proud of yourself and NOT deleting it - that’s real bravery. And it’s good to read that your life is pretty good in lots of ways - it’s so important to have some good to rest in to balance out all the hard black stuff.

Must say that your having been able to observe your parents acting in that critical totally negative way to someone else is SO useful - being able to see behaviour and its consequences enacted on someone else makes such a difference to being able to validate one’s own perceptions. Ha ha which just goes to reinforce how difficult it is to work out our own perspectives and reality if you have to do it in the vacuum of your own feelings alone. That’s where I so relate to your saying that your assumption is always that you are wrong. This is the biggest legacy of my past, although I can’t pin it down to something specific, just the sense that I was always wrong, wasn’t getting something obvious to everyone else, was seeing things all wrongly, to the point where I stopped seeing things through my eyes altogether (if I ever did see things from my point of view in the first place that is.) I’m exactly the same now, still. :sigh:

But also I would have thought that by seeing their emotional abuse in action so to speak, did that allow you to see that it wasn’t something bad or wrong with you that made them treat you in the same way? I guess every little piece of the puzzle helps, though I’m guessing that had you been blaming yourself for years for how they treated you, it would take more than one or two incidents of proof to undo all the negative beliefs?

I ask because I know my set up is so entrenched, the self blame so set in concrete that even had I witnessed something similar, I’d still manage to keep my self blame intact. Sorry I’m being presumptious here, I’m just assuming that you blamed yourself but you don’t actually say that. Sorry.

Have to say the obvious here too - these are NOT pathetic excuses. The fact that you feel that way makes me wonder whether you didn’t also get messages that negated your bad feelings as somehow ‘making it up’ or worse, things like ‘you have it so good you don’t know how lucky you are’ that sort of thing? Don’t know, because I feel the same, that by trying to see things in the past as having been responsible for the mess I’m in now, it’s somehow passing the buck, not taking responsibility for it myself like I’m supposed to (and there speaks a should, so guaranteed to come from somewhere outside of myself lol).

What amazes me, especially reading the threads on this forum, is how so many people end up with very similar negative beliefs and messages in their heads, yet the specific instances of their pasts are so different. Makes me think that there is some sort of common global effect that emotional abuse has on children.

And Jones I’m with you in what you wish for yourself and others - I wish that for you too, and for me, and everyone else :smile:

Hi LL,
(warning - novel ahead!)

Yes, to pretty much everything you say above! My life is pretty good, and I am proud of myself, but it is also true that even in saying that stuff all of the negativity is still playing as I say it (how dare I, what a show-off, don't deserve it, not true, etc). It's just that all the bits of therapy, writing and self healing I've done have now got me to a place where I don't believe that stuff so strongly anymore, and I know it doesn't serve me. I'm NOT saying this to show off - I'm saying it because it gives me relief. I want it to be there for other people who are on their way to that relief, and who need to know that it is there and you can get to it.

You are right: as I watched my parents do that I spent the whole time thinking I might be just interpreting the situation according to my 'filters', that I just wanted to believe my own pity story, was 'using' the situation, etc, etc.

But it was an unusual situation. Someone I deeply loved and had a caregiving role for was being badly hurt, one way or another her life was in danger, and I just had to intervene and keep intervening on what was obviously a source of harm. When it came down to it I had to make a call on which story to believe, and I found I believed that she was not asking for this and did not deserve it. Because I closely identified with her and the situation it just reverberated back through my beliefs about myself.

And then the other component was that as I watched it happening it was so extremely consistent and apparent. The automatic, untempered criticism and assigning of blame. The constant attitude of disappointment. And that attitude came with some great self-protecting defenses: "we only feel this way because of the way she is." To speak up against it I had to be, in my own head and the words of others, wrong, interfering, a busybody and so on. But it was worth it and several years later I know it helped. I couldn't live with myself now if I hadn't done it.

The thing is, growing up that way trained me with a GREAT critical faculty, and I use it in my work all the time. I can see the holes in an argument anytime, and I bet you can too. But I've had to learn to turn it off or away from myself sometimes, so that I can even put a set of thoughts together. I'm still learning how to do this when the pressure's on and my self-doubt (to put it mildly) is in full flight. But the point is that at some level I protected my parents' belief system from that my own critical gaze. It took an extreme situation to help me see that all that stuff they were peddling (and I do actually really love them) was bull, and it always was.

Yes, I got the negations too. I was struck by your comment that children were supposed to be "seen and not heard" in your family, because my stepdad used to say that too. Apparently in jest, but not really. Complaints, sadness, physical pain were taken as self-pity, drama and shirking. Anger was cause for attack.

One of the tough things I think is that these messages don't even need to be articulated to be there and real and to mould a child. It really is there in the attitude. In the last few years I've watched my parents LEARN (painfully, slowly, lots of therapy and meditation) how to take responsibility for their own attitudes and actions. Now I see them choose not to react sometimes, to apologize sometimes, to be peaceful and forgiving of others. Seeing the difference I know that they weren't always like that, and that I grew up in a house of people who were so fragile that they could never admit wrong (my stepdad) or rarely (my mum), and who would manipulate reality to support that without even knowing it.

If I think about what kind of child would be produced by that environment, it would be a child without room to believe in their own reality, and that's pretty much where I ended up.

I love my parents, I'm also proud of all the work they've done and the changes they've made. I have yet to feel and work through the anger about the way things were. But I'm not trying to pass the buck. I've been given lots of good things in my life too, and I know I'm lucky in some important ways. But not in others. I do know that of all people, THEY can't take responsibility for me now and heaven knows I don't want them to!!

But looking for answers in the past, to me, is about understanding and even cherishing the story of MY life. I believe I'll only have one, and that it's mine and mine alone to make sense of and to work with. So I want to say loud and clear to you LL that it is NOT passing the buck to do this. You are allowed an interpretation and a reality. You are allowed to make sense of things in a way that works for you. You are allowed a story that is different to the one you were told and to connect your past with your present.

I suspect emotional abuse is pretty common in our society. If you are a self-negater, that's another reason not to counteract it - "everyone feels like this, it's normal lots have it worse than me, etc". But not everyone does get consistently crippled by doubt. It's not fair and it's not what anyone deserves.

Ok, hopping off the soapbox now... thanks for listening!

Wow you 2,
How do you know so much Jones I think you are a therapist; you sound like one. You sound like a therapist that has homework to do, and you are doing it.

quote:

I think these two (emotional abuse and the difficulty in putting a narrative together) are closely intertwined because they are in my own experience, and that's the experience I know best! I find therapy hard because I'm constantly, constantly in doubt about what I'm thinking and feeling, what I remember, whether I deserve my feelings or am thinking the right thing. I have to have at least one other way of seeing things always at the ready. If something big happens, it often takes me days to figure out what I feel about it or that I feel anything at all - it's like some connection between impact and reaction is faulty.

That's me- clearly. although I would never be able to put it into words like you have. It is frustrating.

quote:

But it was an unusual situation. Someone I deeply loved and had a caregiving role for was being badly hurt, one way or another her life was in danger, and I just had to intervene and keep intervening on what was obviously a source of harm. When it came down to it I had to make a call on which story to believe, and I found I believed that she was not asking for this and did not deserve it

This sounds similiar to my experience. The experience that sevred as the trigger to put me in therapy in the first place. The abuse I witnessed triggered all sorts of stuff that I had witnessed and experiences as a child. I am taking a back seat because this is very interesting and I am sure I will learn much from this thread. Thanks.

Jones
Thank you for sharing your thoughts so well. Despite all your questions and self doubt you sound settled and in a safe and secure enough place to reflect. BTW, I LOVED to see you say you were proud of yourself - sometimes I feel proud of myself but quickly the shame tumbles in and tells me I have no right to.

My thought on this thread concerns parenting. Jones you say how you love your parents and are proud of the work they are doing - that's wonderful for you to be able to feel that but still ackowledge past hurts. We talk a bit in therapy about one of my parents who is still alive, but I feel this intense loyalty to her still and dread saying anything egative and have awful guilt feelings if I do. My T has never said anything negative about this parent -just accepts there were problems for me as a result of behaviours that I know were totally unacceptable. I totally trust my T, so why can't I talk in any detail about this? The other things (the stuff I mostly work on in sessions) that happened to me were not connected to a family member, so I haven't got that loyalty bind thing. But it does all get confused in memories and I need to talk about the parenting issues I know. My other parent died when I was young and I cannot talk about that at all - a complete no go. My T tells me that one day we will, I don't know about that. Not sure again if it is the loyalty thing, the manner of death and the devastation to me, or the fear of grieving (I don't think I have at all)and even writing this feels really really scary.
Perhaps it's the 'don't talk' about it thing that seems to have been drummed into us all from such an early age that instantly minimises everything we think of feel and is so hard to undo.

starfish

Hiya,

Helle, thank you for listening... I'm not a therapist, don't want to be one, but I did kind of grow up around therapy - despite all the crap things that went on in our house. And one of my ex-partners (still a close friend) was a clinical psychologist, so I think I absorbed a lot of concepts from her as she was learning.

So that stuff probably makes it easier to articulate some things. Also writing is part of my profession. But often I just can't put words, in session or out of it, to what I am feeling or thinking - I can't speak. And that's a bit of a problem in my job. So I totally get your frustration. I would say, though, that whether or not you say it perfectly or well or whatever, you are the only one who can put words to YOUR exact experience - and that is your gift, your treasure, to work with. So I hope I get to hear more of your story when you feel ready - it sounds like we have some things in common.

Starfish, yeah, I'm getting there! The last couple of months have been mostly grumbling from me, so it's nice to feel like I'm moving a bit. I sort of had to stop resisting the process....

As for parents - I can acknowledge them and love them from a distance. I live in a different country, and have for a lot of my adult life, and believe me, that makes it easier. I'm starting to think it's not a coincidence. When I'm at home with them I feel uptight, irritable, on edge and on guard. It's hard because they are really loving and want to be close, partly because they've processed a lot of their own trouble, and partly because they are a lot nicer to other adults than to kids. Sometimes I feel just at the tip of the iceberg on the anger front, and there is a whole lot of stuff that I will NOT talk to them about.

I used to feel that intense loyalty and protectiveness of my mum, but things changed as I saw the stuff I described above, and as I started processing some historical stuff. I realised that she was an active part of the family system that hurt me, even though she was the 'silent partner'. I can't talk to her about the past, although she is eager to, because I very easily start feeling like I have to take care of her and protect her feelings, even if it means lying about what I'm thinking and feeling. I first remember doing that when I was about four years old, and I really don't want to now. So it's easier not to talk.

I wonder if your dread and guilt is about feeling like you're hurting/betraying your parent? Maybe there's also some sense that you need an image of a 'good' parent in your head. Russ wrote or contributed to a really good thread about this - wish I could find it, but maybe someone else knows where it is.

I have no-go areas too - divorce/my dad - maybe when the right resources are there to help you deal with that stuff it stops being quite so off-limits - but that might just be about enough time with the T.

Take care,
J

quote:

Russ wrote or contributed to a really good thread about this - wish I could find it, but maybe someone else knows where it is.

Hi Jones, the thread you're looking for is here: How would you know...

AG

Jones hello again

Wow your parents are going through the process of sorting themselves out! That is pretty amazing, and it’s great that they are changing for the better - it’s also great that you can say you love them and are proud of them, that says to me that you are able to feel good towards them despite the hurt and damage they did to you. That’s a pretty big deal.

For me I’m a bit the opposite - totally unable to access any positive feelings about any of my family, because I’m stuck in trying to offload the blame I’ve lived with all my life, back onto them. But I can’t find anything concrete to get genuinely angry at them about, so I’m kind of steaming around full of self blame and self loathing at the same time frustrated as hell because I just KNOW it’s got to be their fault but I can’t prove it to myself. Somewhere in this stuckness I’m looking for the good clean on-my-side anger that will release both me and them from this black mess - because I have an instinctive sense that getting genuinely and legitimately angry will dispense with the need for any kind of blame altogether. I live in hope.

quote:

If I think about what kind of child would be produced by that environment, it would be a child without room to believe in their own reality, and that's pretty much where I ended up.

You describe exactly my problem - I can’t believe in my own reality. I really struggle to trust what I feel and even worse, what I think. My perceptions seem so out of kilter with external reality that I rely mostly on an intellectual awareness of what to think what to feel even what to say and how to behave. It’s actually not even that I can’t believe in my own reality as that my ability to perceive reality got so warped that I live in permanent doubt and uncertainty and mostly, fear.

But I am getting better at holding my ground on behalf of my own perceptions, some of the time (doesn’t take much to throw me though.)

On the whole it sounds as if you have come a long way already - good on you, you deserve to be proud of yourself!