Generation After Generation...

[elizabethnueve]

I would be interested to hear anyone's ideas about how to stop the cycle.

 

[anthony]

You stop the cycle by choice... by choosing to change to what you deem a more positive approach, or socially acceptable, aka. normal by societies and cultural viewpoints.

 

[sea]

My great-grandfather was an alcoholic, ran out on his family. Great-great grandfather was very stern. Don't know much about him. Grandfather was absolutely batshit totally completely f*cking insane. Ted Bundy insane. I wouldn't be surprised if he has killed people in the past. My father was insane, drug addict, psychotic, mentally ill etc. Wouldn't be surprised if he has killed in the past either. My mother was probably a typical battered woman, I think she might have had depression from the descriptions I have heard about her.

Her father was pretty severe, I think he beat her as punishment but not really out of sadism. He wasn't really a mean person. He immigrated and completely cut ties with his biological family. Great maternal grandmother was a lunatic but not in a necessarily bad way, just bizarre. She grew up with an alcoholic father and 12 brothers, and I'm not sure of their family dynamics. I know she was raped, but I don't know what that was about. Great-uncle on my father's side had schizophrenia, in and out of hospitals, but very nice. Other great-uncle was abusive, his wife was abusive, his son turned out to be abusive to his children and his wife.

I think my father's mother might have been abusive as well. I know she slept around with a lot of men and cheated on a lot of them, and then would throw it in their faces, and had a child out of wedlock as well which was apparently bad in those days. I'm mentally ill and drug addict and shit but I wasn't abusive. I was pretty emotionally distant though to my son. Not a lot of praise or hugs/touch or I love you's or anything. I think kids need things like that, and so that has probably affected him. He did get it quite a bit from his mother though so I hope that has made up for it. He will probably break the cycle for good if he has a family when he gets older.

I think I did the best I could but I probably didn't do as well as I should have. He doesn't have PTSD and doesn't hate me, which I am thankful for. He is confident in himself and his abilities and able to stand up for himself. He is very smart as well. Hopefully he knows that I'm just a nutbar and he is not responsible for any of it or that it means I somehow don't love him. I've explained it to him as best I could. Figure either he will grow up to hate me or to maybe understand a bit more.

Think the best way to break the cycle is to be aware of your behavior and of the origins of your behavior and to learn more appropriate and healthier behaviors and to try and include those instead. I used to ask people at the supermarket for parenting advice when my wife was pregnant. I would see their kids throwing temper tantrums and come up with white lies, like, "Oh I have a kid and they throw all kinds of temper tantrums, how do you deal with that?" And it was interesting because things like grounding and time-out were so alien to me. At that point all I knew was that if I hit my kid he would stop screaming and I wondered why nobody else did that.

I remember blurting out once "So you don't just hit them?" And making a fist and putting it against my hand. "You just tell them to sit in the corner? What does that do?" They stared at me like I had a gun and was holding up the store. It was a reality check. I was completely terrified I would end up abusing my kid and damaging him completely. So I wasn't afraid to be embarrassing and awkward I just needed to figure out what normal parents did. Then eventually figured out what worked for him and did that. I went to a bunch of parenting classes as well which I stuck out like a sore thumb. It was full of mostly pregnant women and I was hulking in the background.

It helped though. Even though there were a lot of close calls. That is why I think I probably severed a lot of the issues in my family with my son but that I didn't completely cut them out. When David had a temper tantrum in the store I would pick him up, storm out without paying anything, and pace around the parking lot while he was put in the car so I wouldn't get angry and do something "stupid". I wasn't mad at him, I was mad because I didn't know how to handle it and people were staring at me like your kid is too old to have temper tantrums, can't you control him? God, shut him up! And sometimes I just wanted to yell DAVID, SHUT THE f*ck UP! You know? But, you can't, you can't say things like that to your kids.

Yelling at your kids damages them, saying things like that to them damages their self-esteem. It was really mind-bending to learn things like that. I didn't even realize those kind of concepts existed. Like that people are individuals and that people should, when healthy, feel like they are worthful and good and decent and worthy of love. Just because it's so foreign as a concept, and the idea that I could behave in a way that would make my kid feel all of those things instead of feeling like a piece of shit. It's all the parent's shit, and abusive parents pile all of their shit onto their kids and blame their kids for what emotional issues they have. I think if you are not a naturally abusive person you will be able to learn the right way to do things, or at least, learn how to not royally f*ck your kids up beyond recognition.

If I had a therapist back then I would have learned healthier boundaries and what was acceptable or not (a big issue in why I was emotionally distant, because I thought any emotional expression at all would be considered abusive) and probably done a better job. It's self-awareness and responsibility.

Remember the big thing in my past was these half-assed apologies, "I wouldn't hit you if you didn't make me hit you." Nobody makes you do anything, you choose to do whatever you do and those actions are your responsibility. There is nothing my kid could do that could make me hit him. If I ever hit him that would be my responsibility, not his. And the idea that my thought processes were so f*cked up I didn't even realize that hitting and yelling and shit weren't normal, or okay, so having the self-awareness to realize that I am f*cked up and to take responsibility and try to change it. f*ck I'm still a wreck but at least my kid isn't.

So it is possible definitely to break the cycle. Sorry went a little off topic about me there for a second. But I think the reason that it's so intergenerational is because the steps required to breaking the cycle pretty much suck. It's not like anybody here who has broken the cycle is particularly happy, you know? It means recognizing your shit sucks, not denying it, being responsible for all the shit you do or have the potential to do, realizing you're f*cked up. It sucks, I think a lot of people can't handle it, so they just "do what they know." And they end up abusing again and again until someone decides to go through all the painful shit and stop it.

 

[mamachick]

There is so many good people here with the ambition, motivation, insight, knowledge, and dedication to change the family cycle. It is very inspiring and so good to hear. Although much content is saddening to hear the suffering, its very real stuff. I can relate so strongly, as back in the late 80's, my life goal -if I could only accomplish one thing in life, was, "to change the family cycle". My own experience is that it got easier, but also has had many bumps in the road, although my kids have never been abused. Its like taking the road less traveled.