While I wasn't adopted or fostered, I had 2 serious attachment disruptions in my childhood that made me feel like an interloper in my own family. My parents left our country of origin when I was a year and a half, leaving my older brother and me with an aunt and uncle. I was 3 years old when I was reunited with my parents. The only problem was that by then I'd bonded to my aunt/uncle and didn't recognize my parents (my older brother was 2 years older and remembered everything).
I remember my mom once casually mentioning that it took me about six months to get back to 'normal'. I take that to mean that I was in shock after having my 'parents' (aunt/uncle) abandon me and leave me with these strangers who by then had a 3rd infant (my sister was only months old when we showed up), and then a 4th one a year later. It was all downhill from there.
It boggles my mind as to WHY they had more kids, when they knew their first 2 were waiting. To me that's a reflection of how unconscious they were, and the massive irony was that my mum was a highly competent nurse, so it's not as if she'd never heard of birth control.
My parents turned out to be reasonably civil human beings to my 2 younger siblings, reserving their frustration, rage, bile, criticism, violent spankings that bruised us all over our legs/backside, and emotional neglect for my brother and me. This harsh environment that lacked any genuine emotional attunement really f*cked up my relational skills and I'm still dealing with the repercussions now.
It was a miracle that I established a relationship with my sister, who was my sole experience of object constancy and emotional reliability during my childhood (I had no other friends bc I was petrified of other people and had piss-poor social skills). Later in life, I also established a decent relationship with my younger brother who was very open to talking about what had happened in our family. He'd been my personality-disordered mother's 'golden child' and oblivious to the way his older siblings had been treated; she was exceptionally careful NOT to treat me like shit in front of my father or the 2 younger kids. When they weren't around, it was open season on my brother and me.
The upshot is that the 2 attachment disruptions + a childhood of emotional abandonment and physical fear of my parents resulted in the protective creation of an ideal self of magnificently fake proportions. My authentic being suffocated in layers of dissimulation, obliviousness, codependency, excessive busy-ness, and time squandered on everyone else at my expense..it was all a horrendous farrago of insecurity and fear.
I'm still sorting through the rubble of c-ptsd/desnos, mostly in terms of trust, vulnerability, shame, and the grief of what I lost on so many levels. I have zero contact with my parents (my choice) who live on the other side of the country, even though my younger siblings do have a relationship with them. I've accepted that there will be no parental accountability - my dad's been in a home for dementia patients for years, and my mum, while highly functional, is incapable of understanding the damage she inflicted. My 3 siblings are my family base and it's up to me to make the best of my life in the time I have left.
gucci
