My verbal and emotional abuser was really messed up

[captain jigglypuff]

I didn’t know where else to put this but as the title says, my abuser was an extremely messed up person with really insane ideas and viewpoints about life in general. I’m going to be go over some of the most messed up things she ever did as a way to keep me in line and how it’s affected me.

1.) Telling me that my own mother never wanted me or to have a son and said that she would have wanted another daughter over me- This lie started when I was only four and of course I believed it for the longest time. I didn’t know that adults could lie to children and I was led to believe that my abuser would never “hurt” me or “lie” to me and I had no reason to think otherwise. This led me to becoming incredibly estranged from my mom and me not opening up to her whenever I went to visit because I believed that she only loved my sister and I was jealous of that. Only after I became an adult did I find out the truth that I was gaslit into thinking that she never wanted me..

2.) My abuser would literally point at physically handicapped kids out in public and tell me that I’m so ungrateful for my life and how the handicapped kids had it far worse- I always knew that this was incredibly messed up. There was one time a girl in my year who used crutches because of her disability was entering the school for some open house or tour of the high school before the school year began and my abuser purposely stopped walking and made me stand beside her while she pointed at the girl and said in a passive aggressive voice, “You don’t have it so bad! Look at her! She has to use crutches to walk! You should appreciate your life more!” I was obviously left speechless that she did this and it felt even worse because this girl was one of the few kids that never bullied me and was always really nice towards me so I didn’t have any negative emotions or thoughts associated with her. I couldn’t believe that my abuser would say something like that where anyone could have heard her!

3.) She made me meet one of the more severely autistic kids she worked with at the autistic school on purpose so that I would “appreciate” my life more and actually admitted that was her plan all along- Again, it was extremely messed up and I felt disgusted that she saw this poor kid who never hurt anyone as nothing more than a teaching tool. She literally admitted that she made me meet him to force me to appreciate my life better. She’d keep dragging his name into anything that I didn’t do or whenever she felt like it. She’d say stuff like “B can’t brush his own teeth. He can’t do anything for himself. Yet you can’t even hang up this shirt properly and are so ungrateful for how good your life is!” At times I’d be standing there and thinking to myself “What the heck does he have to do with anything right now?!”

4.) She’d make me swear to God on the lives of literally anyone or anything including her own dog and my grandma- She’d do this to make sure that I wasn’t lying hoping something bad would happen just so she could say that I lied. Nothing ever did happen and she’d still say that I had lied and that I somehow found a way to lie to God Himself. I tried drawing the line once she tried bringing in her poor dog into this messed up situation and also my grandma because I knew she was going way too far at that point. It didn’t matter anyway as she always believed that I did nothing but lie and it’s not like she was ever going to believe me anyway.

5.) She’d actively complain nonstop if I gave her a gift that she didn’t like or think was good enough- During my first trip to Taiwan, I saw this nice CD of Pavarotti’s best performances and I remembered how my abuser said she really enjoyed his singing and performances and so I bought the CD specifically for her and it cost $30 USD and this wasn’t a multi CD set either. It was just one CD. So I gave her the CD when I got home expecting her to be happy and excited that I actually listened to her say that she liked someone’s work and thank me for such a thoughtful gift but instead she made this face of disgust and said, “Is this what you think I’m worth?! A CD?! I DESERVE SOMETHING BETTER THAN THIS!” She then threw aside CD and never removed the plastic or even listened to it during the last two years I was forced to live under her control over me. And remember that I bought a single CD for $30 USD in the year 2008. That was very expensive for just a Cd with a cardboard casing. Needless to say I never really got her anything after that mostly because she kept using my money to buy bottles of wine for herself.

6.) Worst thing she ever did was gaslight me into thinking I had a sex and porn addiction when I didn’t and convincing everyone around us that it was true- This really became a serious problem once I was told that what I supposedly was doing that “proved” I had an addiction was in fact perfectly normal for someone my age and also I realized that I didn’t have a problem when I was forced to join and use this online forum for sex addiction. The therapist at the time even thought my abuser was taking things too far and was horrified that one of my final Christmas gifts from this woman was this awful sex addiction workbook that talked about some really messed up stuff like child prostitution and businessmen paying for it in Thailand or men who flash women in broad daylight in the park. I was made to do all of the horrible exercises inside that thing and it made me feel awful about myself and then I was forced to show what I wrote down to my therapist under the threat of being punished if I didn’t talk to her about the workbook. We obviously didn’t and we’re coming up with an escape plan from the abuse. As soon as I had escaped from my abuser and knew she couldn’t get to me in my apartment, I immediately threw that horrible sex addiction workbook away in the dumpster behind my apartment and never looked back. I wish that the forum I was forced to use was still active because I really want to tell everyone there the truth behind my reasoning for being on there and apologize for actually lying and pretending to have a problem just to avoid being punished and hit by my abuser and explain why I didn’t secretly write a cry for help. I just feel so bad that I had to make up extremely believable stories of a nonexistent porn addiction because my abuser threatened me to do it our else be punished for it.

 

[Muttly]

All of that sounds really awful and damaging. I am so sorry you experienced that. There's a lot I can relate to.

he’d actively complain nonstop if I gave her a gift that she didn’t like or think was good enough

yep. Experienced this many times. Gifts apparently related to love and getting the "Wrong" gift or not giving gifts proved I was selfish. Also, if I got a gift (like for my birthday) I had better be properly grateful.

My abuser would literally point at physically handicapped kids out in public and tell me that I’m so ungrateful for my life and how the handicapped kids had it far worse-

I experienced something similar. Adding to that, my abuser herself was disabled. So I was constantly being reminded how much better I had it than her. And how hard I made her life.

And the sexual stuff. I have processed a lot, but this piece still gets me. I wasn't told I had sexual addiction but I was fully sexualized, told I was a tease, that I was very sexual and sexually advanced.

It's so hard when you are young and someone shapes your perceptions of yourself and the world. Changing that to try to get healthy means you have to shift parts of who you are, in a way.

 

[captain jigglypuff]

Yeah. My abuser was extremely weird when it came to sex. She did everything that she could to shield me from it and sort acted like a prude whenever nudity was in a book or movie yet made me sit in her bathroom while she took a shower as a form of controlling me and “making sure” I wasn’t doing anything that I wasn’t supposed to do and so I was forced to see her naked. And she did have she and talked to me about the subject but refused to let me explore my own sexuality for myself. Of course I wasn’t going to sell myself out to anyone or pay for sex but I could have at least been allowed to try to date some people. It was like she was this prude yet not a prude at the very same time. Nude paintings and statues counted as “pornography” in her eyes and she’d freak out if I was reading an art book and literally look through it to make sure there was no nudity in it. She even thought that one scene from Law Abiding Citizen where the guy is arrested naked would give me ideas to do the same thing.

 

[Movingforward10]

I second @Muttly, the way abusers manipulate that sense of who you are is really damaging.
And like you say @captain jigglypuff there is that conflicting and confusing side where they are both one thing and then the complete opposite. I had that too with my mother: on the one hand she was/is obvious to the harm she caused and on the other seemingly acutely aware. And also the sexual element of prudish but also invasive.
All a heady mix of confusion.

It's good that you can see what her behaviour is and are working through it. That's the path to healing.

 

[captain jigglypuff]

The worst part about my abuser’s obsession with convincing everyone that I had a “porn addiction” was her buying me that horrible sex addiction workbook and making me do the exercises in it! I became extremely depressed after doing one exercise which I was supposed to write down all of my hopes and dreams I had as a kid and I realized just how many of them were crushed and destroyed mainly by my abuser and one or two crushed by the education system itself. The examples they had of men who had a sex addiction were extremely graphic and disturbing. It went into great detail about businessmen who went to Thailand every few months for the rampant underage sex workers (I really don’t know how else to put it nicely) and how some guy was flashing himself to women in broad daylight while he waited for his girlfriend or wife to meet him in the park. I think that book actually traumatized me in a small way because of just how awful the examples they gave were. Honestly all I was doing was looking at photos online and keeping to myself and I always made sure that I was looking at adult men. That’s actually rather quite harmless and tame compared to what the men in the workbook were doing. I wasn’t exposing any of the photos to minors and I wasn’t doing anything inappropriate in public like touching myself in plain sight.

As I said before, the exercise where I had to write all of my hopes and dreams made me really depressed. The guy they used as an example said his dreams would never come true and that he “should continue going to Thailand and paying for sex with minors.” That made me realize the dreams I had that were crushed and I knew would never come true because they applied to me only when I was a kid and I had repressed the hurt I had whenever I realized that they’d never come true. The two biggest dreams I had only applied to me when I was in elementary school. The first major crushed dream I had was being considered to be gifted and be part of the gifted program because of the one project that they did every year and got to present to the entire school. Every year the gifted program did an International Day where the students in the program gave presentations on different nations and every year there’d always be at least two groups doing Germany. Every so often a student would talk about a unique country like India or Haiti. Well I really wanted to do a presentation on Taiwan because that is where my family is from and I just wanted to talk about my heritage. It was something that felt really important to me and I just wanted to educate everyone about what Taiwan was like and some of its traditions. The elementary school went from kindergarten to sixth grade and very few kids were considered to be gifted below the third grade and as the years went by, I was still not considered to be gifted and it was soul crushing for me but I continued to hope that I would be seen as being gifted. By sixth grade, I realized that dream was completely over. It made me feel miserable that something I had wanted to do for so long would never happen.

The other major dream that was destroyed for me was playing the saxophone and my abuser is to blame for that one. I had wanted to play that instrument since I was five and in elementary school, kids could join the school band in the fourth grade. My fingers were too small at the time to play 5he saxophone and that devastated me and the teacher had a compromise which I didn’t like but accepted because it was the only way I might have had a chance to play the saxophone the following year. I had to play the clarinet which ended up getting me severely bullied by all the boys in my grade because I was literally the only boy who played that instrument in the entire school and it was so humiliating for me that I’d literally come home crying because I played the clarinet. It made me develop a huge dislike for that instrument and I never talked about that particular year that I had yo play it. During this time I kept getting this specific type of sore throat which I forgot the name of but it really hurt and I had to take antibiotics for it and the infection would make me throw up instantly if I didn’t eat a popsicle first to numb my throat. Well my abuser made me practice even though I was sick and it really hurts trying to blow into a musical instrument and sustaining a long note without choking. I put up with this pain because I really wanted to play the saxophone. I kept getting this type of sore throat over a period of a year and a half. Anyway the following year, my fingers were finally large enough to play the saxophone and I was proud that I didn’t give up on my dream. I was forced to practice every single day for an hour which I did until the weekend after the big yearly concert during which I thought that I had deserved to take a break from practicing after continuously practicing every single day for over a year and a half. My abuser got mad just because I took a break for two days to be a regular kid and forced me to quit the band because I “didn’t want to play the saxophone bad enough” just because I took two days off from practicing. I remember crying hysterically over her demands that I quit playing the saxophone and giving up on my dream and begging her to let me continue but she refused and I had repressed all the hurt feelings and the humiliation I went through to try to achieve my dream. It made me basically stop having dreams because there was no point in having any if they were all going to be crushed and destroyed and I was shielding myself from that pain.