@recoveringfromptsd thanks for this thread.
I'm battling this myself right now and well and truly confused.
When my therapist describes my childhood as abusive, it makes me baulk, but I understand it's true logically and I understand that not being able to tell what was abusive and what was not is probably what created a lot of trauma in my life.
Part of me still wants to hang on to the denial - that my parents were just young and crazy and quirky. My father was a very creative man and successful in his field, my mother was his muse.
My fathers success and my mothers beauty were glamorous to me and a more palatable reality than the unpalatable truth that my father was a misogynist really and my mother suffered chronic mental illness most probably as a result of that.
The truth really hurts!!! But I kind of know I have to accept it if I want to wake up!
In this present time, I avoid intimacy even with friends. I am so scared of the past repeating itself - and yet, I have a handful of friends that I know are true friends.
But still the fear.
I struggle with the truth, maybe because I don't want to feel the anger that resides within it.
I don't want to feel that anger towards my upbringing but maybe I have to, at least for a while, to remember that I matter too.
And I want to matter too because without that there is no chance for real intimacy that is not abusive, and tbh living without intimacy has been lonely and hard.
So I'm fighting to accept the truth so that I can live my own life and be free of the faulty programming put in me by my upbringing.
I never wanted to investigate my family of origin but I can see now that's where it all starts, the seeds of destruction.
I think it takes s lot of bravery to change your core values. It's almost like looking down on your life from above instead of being involved in it, and lifting the train off the old set of tracks that lead nowhere good into a new set of tracks that have hope embedded in them.
I think it takes that kind of strength! The kind of strength to lift a train up (emotional strength)
Plenty of spinach needed!
I'm battling this myself right now and well and truly confused.
When my therapist describes my childhood as abusive, it makes me baulk, but I understand it's true logically and I understand that not being able to tell what was abusive and what was not is probably what created a lot of trauma in my life.
Part of me still wants to hang on to the denial - that my parents were just young and crazy and quirky. My father was a very creative man and successful in his field, my mother was his muse.
My fathers success and my mothers beauty were glamorous to me and a more palatable reality than the unpalatable truth that my father was a misogynist really and my mother suffered chronic mental illness most probably as a result of that.
The truth really hurts!!! But I kind of know I have to accept it if I want to wake up!
In this present time, I avoid intimacy even with friends. I am so scared of the past repeating itself - and yet, I have a handful of friends that I know are true friends.
But still the fear.
I struggle with the truth, maybe because I don't want to feel the anger that resides within it.
I don't want to feel that anger towards my upbringing but maybe I have to, at least for a while, to remember that I matter too.
And I want to matter too because without that there is no chance for real intimacy that is not abusive, and tbh living without intimacy has been lonely and hard.
So I'm fighting to accept the truth so that I can live my own life and be free of the faulty programming put in me by my upbringing.
I never wanted to investigate my family of origin but I can see now that's where it all starts, the seeds of destruction.
I think it takes s lot of bravery to change your core values. It's almost like looking down on your life from above instead of being involved in it, and lifting the train off the old set of tracks that lead nowhere good into a new set of tracks that have hope embedded in them.
I think it takes that kind of strength! The kind of strength to lift a train up (emotional strength)
Plenty of spinach needed!
