Child Abuse And Guilt

[freakofnurture]

freak of nature

Nurture ;) I was born perfect and then made into a freak by bad nurture. (No need to apologise, it's totally okay to mis-read that.)

 

[Kintsugi]

CPTSD from sibling sexual abuse.

No remorse.

Other abusers either did not stick around long enough to even get close to saying what they were doing was wrong. The one I confronted (2 years of abuse) said that I liked it. I haven't had any mutual interaction with him since, but it has really hurt my ability to protect myself since then because I am afraid of being blamed when all I want is a little apology.

My brother hasn't even said "I'm sorry." The closest he's come is saying, "It doesn't matter, right?"

 

[shell]

My mother says she's sorry, but then goes on to say how difficult a child I was, how I was extremely strong willed, and that is how she's justifying and excuses the daily bashing and verbal abuse. She even went on to point out that when I was 4, I got my tricycle and got the bleach down from the top self and drank it, like that showed what a bad kid I was. Maybe at 4, I was already looking for a way out?? I don't believe she's really sorry, she just hates people knowing 2 of her 3 kids are now screwed up thanks to her efforts. Do I want her sorry, no, it wouldn't mean anything now.

As for my father who facilitated her daily abuse, not a word. No recognition of blame, but he never acknowledged it was happening or to stop it, except once when the all the neighbours could hear me screaming and she had been beating me for more than 20 minutes. Worried someone would report it, he never even said sorry even when it turned out I hadn't done what I was accused of, and he had locked me in my room all weekend with no food. And I thought he was the good parent, it's funny how differently we see things through adult eyes.

 

[Mercy]

CPTSD from sibling sexual abuse.

My brother hasn't even said "I'm sorry." The closest he's come is saying, "It doesn't matter, right?"

How very sad. Of course it matters. It matters very much. I often wonder if hearing remorse would actually change anything for me. The damage is done and can not be undone. For me, I can only try to go on with life and not let 'them' stand in the way of my healing. For me, needing remorse makes me feel stuck, unable to proceed. I felt as though I was the poor snake being 'charmed' by the tune maker. As long as I needed external affirmation from my abusers, I wasn't ever going to be free.

 

[Spero3]

OMG, Scott, your post could have been written by me. My mother physically abused my dad as well as us. He claims to have never been fully aware of what she did to us. I find this mind blowing considering my mom beat the shit out of him, and he witnessed her abusing us. He left my mom and didn't take me with him!

My mother has been dead since 1993, and she never admitted that she was abusive. After she died, we found several notebooks that she used as diaries. Only once in all the pages did she vaguely elude to the fact that she was hard on us and pushed us away. On top of that, she talked a lot about my sisters in the diaries, but I am only mentioned once in passing.

I am in the middle of writing an autobiography. The first part is about my childhood. The hardest chapter I wrote was about my dad and his total failure to protect us. It was hard, because he is still alive and I am living in his house right now. It does not feel safe to write about him, because I am dependent upon him again. But, I am as angry at him as I was at my mom. I just can't bring myself to confront him.

Spero

 

[freakofnurture]

And I thought he was the good parent, it's funny how differently we see things through adult eyes.

I realised that I was seriously abused when I realised that my m*ther wasn't the good p*rent I had thought she was. I always felt bad for not even liking her. Now I know that it's one of the strongest proves of how bad it really was back then.

 

[a3a2]

Like many of you, my mother is in denial....but I have to believe in the wee hours of the morning when she cannot sleep, she feels guilt....and then tries even harder to forget. My father....once he confronted my older brother. He told him "you are treating your sons just the way I treated you." But as far as apologizing....I haven't heard it. But he, too, I believe feels guilt, or he would not have confronted my brother. That was many years ago, and he has slipped back into "I did the best I could with what I had". And he still LOVES to pick a fight.

 

[a3a2]

OMG, Scott, your post could have been written by me. My mother physically abused my dad as well as us. He claims to have never been fully aware of what she did to us. I find this mind blowing considering my mom beat the shit out of him, and he witnessed her abusing us. He left my mom and didn't take me with him!

My mother has been dead since 1993, and she never admitted that she was abusive. After she died, we found several notebooks that she used as diaries. Only once in all the pages did she vaguely elude to the fact that she was hard on us and pushed us away. On top of that, she talked a lot about my sisters in the diaries, but I am only mentioned once in passing.

I am in the middle of writing an autobiography. The first part is about my childhood. The hardest chapter I wrote was about my dad and his total failure to protect us. It was hard, because he is still alive and I am living in his house right now. It does not feel safe to write about him, because I am dependent upon him again. But, I am as angry at him as I was at my mom. I just can't bring myself to confront him.

Spero

I would love to hear how you dealt with the death of your mother. I am still in contact with my father-because I am afraid I will feel guilty after he is dead if I don't. And he still drives me totally nuts.

 

[a3a2]

As an addendum to my above post, I've told my adoptive mother in adulthood about what my father did to me throughout my childhood. She didn't seem shocked and didn't question whether it had happened, just when. However, she denied having known anything about. I think she genuinely does feel very guilty but can't cope with those feelings of guilt and shuts down.

I don't feel angry towards her anymore. I don't respect her as a parent, though I feel empathy for her as a human being. I don't have a close relationship with her and know that we never can as a result of her lack of ability to deal with this aspect of my history. But I feel that we both accept that now and have moved into a respectful way of being with each other, albeit that we will never be close.

Growing up, I felt like I had to protect her from my feelings and from what was happening to me. I felt very guilty if she got upset about anything at all. I've got rid of that guilt now. She is responsible for her own feelings, just as I am responsible for mine. I will be respectful but I don't need to cushion her.

I may write your last paragraph and post it somewhere I can read it every day....working on getting there.

 

[Kintsugi]

Yes Lucy, your whole post about your mother is EXACTLY how I feel about my relationship with my adoptive mother. I considered sending it to her for a second, actually, and then realized that she couldn't face it.

>.< When will I stop protecting her from my true self?

 

[scott_1971_h]

Dud knew exactly what was going on. i stopped engaging in his denial years ago and now have jack shit to do with it. I last received a phone call 4 years ago. i think even he has the message. He thinks its natural everyone loves their parents. And every mother loves her kiddies (how much shit gets denied with that one?) Just another delusion to add to the list. I dont love him. I don't give a shit if he thinks he loves me coz he doesn't.

 

[ChillyNilly]

Hi Scott. I relate with your post. Thank you for sharing. My parents were/are (Dad's alive and Mom's dead) a righteous mess who lived the "Don't tell, don't think, don't feel" way of life. They both were NPD. They were both alcoholics. They were both chronic and compulsive liars. And I strongly suspect they both had PSTD/C. It took me a long time to get past my (or at least a lot of it) anger to get curious about what created them. The way I saw it, they were a large part of the forces that created me (PSTD and all), so what were the forces that created them? I found a history of narcissism, alcoholism, and multiple transgenerational PSTD symptoms. I got it the worst of we three siblings (I'm the only girl), in a big way, and something I also found was transgenerational neglect and abuse of females on my mother's side, and mentally unstable, cruel women on my father's side.

One of the tenants of my recovery is to remind myself all the time, especially when my bitterness returns, that we are all made in the image of the events in our lives (my own wisdom), and that we are all normal for what we have survived. (I credit the part on normalcy to the trauma/PSTD/recovery writings of Patience Moran.) I respect the trauma and I respect the trauma survivor, regardless of who it is.

Does any of this make what my parents did right? Absolutely not. They were more captors than parents. They failed themselves and they failed me.

My adult younger brother's a compulsive liar, narcissist, uses drugs, and is a drinker (I don't know if he's an alcoholic). I suspect he has PSTD/C. My adult older brother killed himself. My mother killed herself a little more than 3 years later. Do I know what drove these suicides? No. I can sit here and posit, consider, theorize, whatever, but I can only know their experience of the world if I am them, and I am not; I am me. I'll never know if Mom felt any guilt, shame, or remorse. I'll never know if she ever knew what she did was wrong. I'll never know if she enjoyed abusing me, like I believed for many years, or if it was the only way she could find to relieve the stress inside her from her own life, through reliving it as the one with power instead of being the powerless one. Will my father ever recognize his own NPD? I doubt it. Does he know what he did was wrong? I don't know. He's a dry drunk who takes antidepressants now and he treats his new wife like crap (she's a nice gal with big codependancy issues) pulling the same passive-aggressive tricks he pulled with my mother, and she him. (My Dad once told me after I'd moved out that he wasn't responsible for anything he did when he was drunk because he was drunk, and that since he was a blackout drunk he couldn't remember it anyway, but if it were that bad he would have remembered it so I must be lying. I kid you not. I didn't speak to him for 3 years I was so pissed.)

So, I've come to a place in my own heart where I've surrendered to never being able to understand what drove them. I can theorize only and theory's just words, and words are spoken thoughts. I feel for my family, for the pain, shame, and fear that destroyed it, that crippled its members long before we were a family. I forgive because I had to so that I could have my freedom, so that I could grow beyond my family and live the life I was born to live.

This was my path to peace. I hope you find yours.

Best wishes,
Nilly