Were you abused as a child?

[Lana]

While most of us were never abused as children, we did receive our fair share of physical punishment for our mis-behavings. That was the accepted way of parental correction at that time and I am here to say didn't take more than once or twice and you didn't mis-behave again.
But there is something deeper here than just the question of abuse. When we have problems later in adulthood, with communjications, socialization, hatred and so on, there may be an underlying issue of abuse that we have suppressed all memory of whether it be physical, mental or sexual. Maybe having this topic brought up in an open, nonthreatening, more or less anonymous format, we can step back and hopefully open up our inner feelings long enough to come to terms with those feelings we have been hiding for so long and seek any necessary help in becoming whole as caring non abusing adults.

Lana

[Absaroka]

I wouldn't say I was abused but I was confused. The comment that it only took once or twice and then we didn't do it again did not ring true. My brother and I got hit a lot-just spankings which were normal at the time. The problem I think was my mom had had only sisters and did not understand boys. As a result we were constantly punished for normal boy stuff, and were at a loss to figure out what we had done wrong.

Later on someone must have explained something to her, because her mantra changed from "stop that or you'll get a spanking" to "go outside and kill each other" which suited us just fine.

In my teenage years however, long after the cding thing was alive and well, my parents both became active alcoholics. My brother and I were big enough and old enough that we were not physically abused, and in fact eventually decided to impose order on our parents and not allow them to physically fight in our prescence. This meant both of us had physical altercations which we won. However in reading about this later I came across the term "emotional incest" and that describes very well what happened. It's one thing to become the caretaker and authority figure in later life as your elderly parents develop Alzheimers or have a stroke or something. It's another thing when you are 15 and your parents are violent and suicidal drunks. Restraining your mom when she is in a drunken rage as you bring her to the ER after she has slit her wrists in an attempt to strike back at your father is not something anyone should have to do. I can not even bring myself to type some of the things that were said at times like this.

[Paula G]

no abuse, a loving caring "normal" suburban background, maybe a bit short on afection, but hey that was the 60s in England.

[Andrea Elise]

My father was an alcoholic. When he was drunk he was mean.

His answer for all that did not suit him was physical violence and temper tantrums. He beat my mother and anyone else he could get his hands on.

Nothing I did suited him. Anything I tried to do always fell short of his impossible expectations. I lived in constant fear of him and did my very best to stay out of his sight and reach.

My mother stayed with him and loved him, even though she wanted to leave him she did not. She shielded my sister ans myself as much as she could. She still wears her wedding rings to this day.

Later in life he quit drinking. He became a wonderful person and we became good friends. There was hardly a day that passed by that we did not talk over coffee. I miss him very much.

He died nearly 30 years ago.

I realize this is far later than you needed. So, posting just for the record.

Andrea

[Anthony Simon]

I don't know what you consider being a child but I was sexually abused by older men when I was a young teenager and then at 15 I could take no more and ran away from home, then when about 19 I was beaten and raped by some guys in a hotel. Soon after that I tried to kill myself.


This is why I am always angry, this is why I hate most people including people on this forum. Hate is one way I can deal with the mental pain. Nowadays I am a cutter, I have DID and severe depression, and I live most of my life alone so I don't hurt too many people like I did to Virginia on this forum. With cutting, I only hurt myself. I have never lived without the feeling of hate and anger but soon that will change,, I don't need no stinkin' groups,, I got plans.

sorry Virginia for what I did.

bye

The thing about being so angry you have to keep away from people I understand perfectly. Like that's been a kind of organising principle for much of my life. But there's also a part of me that hangs onto the anger. I mean I like being in a towering rage because it gives me some sort of sense of potency I don't have in the rest of my life. But, at the same time, I kind of feel it's a trap - like I'm playing someone else's game by getting so self-righteous and raging.

The thing about the CDing is (often) it allows me to stop tearing myself apart with the rage when it has nowhere else to go. I just get engrossed with trying to make myself as much like a woman as possible and the rage just evaporates.

But that isn't where the CDing comes from. I got put in a nightgown by my grandmother after I wet the bed when I was 4. The next day was the first time I remember myself being in a towering rage - like the potency of that was a way of denying the implied feminisation (=demasculinization) I had allowed myself to undergo (half-asleep and as a child).

My mother said that people (by which I think she means other kids, my relatives) would go over there (to my grandmother - my mother's mother) and come away different and that it was "creepy". So my construction is that my grandmother was a serial abuser of children (though not necessarily physically, the effect was mental). When I confronted her years later, she did remember putting me in a nightgown and did so fondly. So then I said it had a "certain effect" on me at which point the conversation ended.

I didn't see her again until a few days later. There was me and maybe 8 or 10 of my relatives, all mid or early 20s, sitting in a room. She came in and immediately launched into a tirade where she was saying that some people (i.e me) would take a good thing and turn it round and make it out to be something evil. We all looked at each other - and with a degree of delight - as though we were all small children, as though to say "Wow, she's lost it!"(like she never, ever, did lose it). Because it seems like she had some sort of hold over us, the lot of us, young adults, which reduced us to small children. And, in that small moment, she lost her hold.

As far as I can make out she expected me to take her admission that she's put me in a nightgown and use it against her - kind of shed in a poor light. And she thought she'd be walking into a room full of people buzzing with that information because, presumably, she would have done that (used thr information in that way). So the way I look at that is she would have used it for (family) political purposes because that is what she was - a (family) politician. If that is so maybe the purpose of putting me in a nightgown was in part to set me against myself - give me a conflict. Because people who are in confict with themselves are less of a threat in (family) politics. This may also be why other of my relatives came away from her "different".

The thing about being in a towering rage at her, and others in my life, is that somehow you never let go of the wrong. Which means you never let go of the people who did it to you. Not good, given the sort of people they are. Maybe that's the point.