Childhood Dealing with family denial

[Egg]

Anyone else have experience with family denying what happened to them? Also, having their memories distorted when people deny them having happened?

 

[Movingforward10]

Yep.

I never will tell my mum (my dad died) what happened to me as I know she will just twist it around, not believe me, etc. I am in my mind 40s.
I told a brief outline to my sister's last year. One responded well. The other didn't and twisted it etc.

My family deny things all the time. Their version of what happened in our family is that my middle sister was "naughty" rather than my parents neglected us and left her unsupervised. Or that I make things up.

As much as it hurts: accepting that people are who they are is going to help you.
If someone is going to gaslight you, they don't care enough about your wellbeing and care more about how this impacts their view of themselves.
If you try and try and try to get them to see it from your perspective, you just hurt yourself each time.

The choice you have is accepting them for who they are and then deciding if or what type of relationship you want from them.

 

[Friday]

My (lovely & beloved) mum doesn’t remember 7-9 years of my life. She SKIPS me being 16-24. (I enlisted at 17, and had my child at 23). Those years? She’s just BLOCKED OUT, with a buffer of about a year on either side. It’s effing bizarre. But she still does it.

Memory? Is wacky.

And NONE of those years involved her participating/ignoring terrible things in my life. So it’s not complicated, for me, in her participation/ignoring/condoning/etc.. She just doesn’t like to (or can?) think about the years I was off “galavanting”. They don’t exist for her. It used to drive me to fury. But?

The choice you have is accepting them for who they are and then deciding if or what type of relationship you want from them.

This.

My mum ignores a wide swath of my life.

That’s not as important to me, as who she is, and her value IN my life.

For other people? That answer is very different. Because people are different. And what I need/want from them is different. And their value in my life… yep! Different. Case by case basis.

 

[Ice_Fire]

Lots of denial in my family. From the abusive mother herself who thinks she did nothing wrong (she’s literally insane), through to a cousin who said to me the other week that he doesn’t know whether to believe the ‘stories’.

Before my grandma died, I was living with her as I’d been taken off my parents due to the abuse and even she didn’t think it was that bad. She completely ignored my behaviour as a teen and then pretended it never happened when I went off to uni.

I’ve more or less distanced myself from 70% of my family. Keep the good, ditch the bad. We will never be able to convince those who don’t want to see.

 

[Friday]

Keep the good, ditch the bad.

So much this.