by Band Back Together | Nov 12, 2015 | Abuse, Child Abuse, Child Sexual Abuse, Coping With Domestic Abuse, Domestic Abuse, Family |
My mother might be one of the strongest people I have ever encountered. That woman has been through more in her 50 years than most people have in a lifetime. She isn’t perfect, by any means, but she is mine and I am furiously protective of her.
My mother was raped by her stepfather when she was 11 years old. She never told a soul (except for me) so no charges were ever brought against him. My grandmother did end up leaving him because he threw her through a glass door.
It’s amazing how much you can hate someone you’ve never met.
I hate him for what he did to her. I hate him for the pain it still causes her. I hate him with every fiber of my being.
I recently came across his name while doing some family tree research and low and behold, there was his family’s information – even his address.
Now all I can think about are ways hurt him. Not physically of course, but emotionally. I want to spray paint “child rapist” all over his house. I want to contact his entire family and tell them just what kind of man he is. I want to ruin his life. I just hate the thought of him living a normal life when my mother has had to live with the pain and scars he caused.
What do I do? No pain I inflict on him will make what my mother went through any less traumatic, or help her – or I – forget.
by Band Back Together | Nov 2, 2015 | Abuse, Child Abuse, Childhood Bullying, Domestic Abuse, Emotional Abuse, Fear, Passive/Aggressive Behavior |
Not a word I ever thought I’d associate with myself. And yet here I am, writing this post.
It’s a little confusing; it didn’t always feel like it does now. I’m the eldest of four kids, and I remember my dad, for the most part of my early years as a different person. He was sweet and funny, he taught art and gave us drawing lessons on weekends. We lived on one farm, then moved to another. He sang this song about a little baby duck. He watched movies with us. He bought us watercolor paints.
Unfortunately, that’s ancient history. And it stops somewhere – I’m not for sure of the date, but I do know that it stops around the time I was seven.
It’s been a long time coming, or it feels like it, but that’s not my dad anymore.
These days, he has almost constant migraines, he treats his kids like something that should be “useful” to him, is critical, cruel-worded, and dismissive.
It’s eggshell territory – I’m always stepping on them, can hear them crunch under my feet when he’s around. He’s not friendly and there’s no camaraderie and joking. There’s only what we’re supposed to be doing, and that we’re not doing good enough.
I don’t know if that was always his personality or if it’s a new thing. I do know that he’s gotten progressively worse, so much so that now, if I didn’t know him before, I wouldn’t realize it used to be different.
My sister, who’s 12, doesn’t realize it. And I remember what it was like the first time I realized that not only was he being abusive in an emotional way, but that I was scared of it.
It was Father’s Day, 2014.
He had a headache, which wasn’t news, and everyone was done with breakfast and scattered around the house. Some tiny thing flipped him out – and it was my fault. I’d been in my room, reading quietly out loud because it helps me concentrate.
My family calls me out on it and doesn’t like it, so I try not to do it often, but for the most part they ignore it.
This time he didn’t.
I guess it was the straw that broke the camel’s back, or something. He blew up, stormed around, slammed stuff on the kitchen counters, screamed his fucking head off at my mom.
Normally when he’s angry, critical, trying to correct something, or give us a job or order, he doesn’t shout. He uses this *reasonable* and patronizing tone that says he’s disappointed in you, that you’ve really just been incredibly incompetent and useless THIS time, and he hopes you’re happy with yourself.
It’s the worst thing in the world.
Well, the shouting was worse.
My sister ran into my room and we hid under my desk until he left the house and my mom found us there. She was half-laughing, half-crying, like she wanted it to not be as big of a deal as it was.
I ran out and hid in the field crying for the better part of an hour, not wanting to be in the same airspace as him. When I got back, he was waiting on the front porch. I remembered that he wanted to talk to me. I sat there feeling sick as he went on and on, this self-victimizing speech I couldn’t stand hearing.
I wanted to tell him it didn’t excuse his actions, but I started crying instead. He put his arm around me, which just made it worse. I wanted to get out of the entire situation, and he wasn’t trying to comfort me. He was using me as a way to comfort himself.
Since I’m at school, I don’t see as much of him. I think my second-youngest brother realized that, because he got a job away from home this year and his own apartment. I don’t have a license, so I couldn’t make that happen, and when I’m not working I’m home all the time. It’s not much different that it was that day or before that day, except that now, I notice it.
Today, it was towels in the bathroom. He called all of us in to see how there was a towel on the floor and another one *improperly* draped over the rack. He gave us this lecture on the *correct* bathroom procedures, and as we were leaving I said something to my sister, which I’ve been using to comfort myself and get myself through the constant tension in my household:
I’m a spy, just witnessing and gathering data.
He heard it and asked me what I said, so I said I hadn’t spoken. He told me I was being childish, acting like a “whipped puppy.”
And the thing is?
That’s EXACTLY how I feel, and I can’t stop it.
I don’t even know if it’s as bad as I think it is. Nobody else in my family goes on crying jags about it. My sister’s a feisty little fireball and fights back. My younger brother doesn’t give a shit. My mom doesn’t like his attitude, but also she defends him and sympathizes somehow.
It’s just me, hiding in the bathroom choking on tears. Because every day in this house I feel judged and afraid and anxious. I don’t like to go anywhere with my father.
I don’t feel I HAVE the same father I did when I was six and loved him. I don’t feel like I love him now. I don’t respect him anymore, and I don’t even particularly LIKE him.
And for some reason the same thought keeps going around and around in my head.
Someday, if I get married, he’s going to want to walk me down the aisle, this person I don’t respect or even particularly like.
And I won’t be able to tell him “no.”
by Band Back Together | Oct 26, 2015 | Adult Children of Narcissistic Parents, Bipolar Disorder, Child Abuse, Child Sexual Abuse, Grief, Loss, Murder, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder |
I had a younger aunt that was like a sister to me.
My sophomore year in college, I took her on spring break with me. When I moved out of state, and I would come home to visit, I didn’t stay at my parents, I would stay at her house. We were that close.
Then it all was gone. I got a call from my mother at 1AM one morning and my world stopped.
My aunt had been brutally tortured, murdered.
She was gone.
Murder brings out intense emotional reactions.
The emotional pain and anguish of murder seem unbearable. I feel an overwhelming sense of loss and deep, deep sorrow. I constantly experience thoughts about the circumstances of her death.
I relieve what I think happened and I see her being tortured and killed. I imagine the pleas for her life she was making.
Grieving for a murder victim is unlike any other grief. The murder of a loved one results in the survivors grieving not only the death, but how the person died.
I have intrusive visualizations of the murder and I see her suffering. I have flashbacks of the moment when I was notified of her death. I have flashbacks of the last time I saw her alive.
I dream of her knocking at my door and, when I open it, I see her, and she tells me, “It was a mistake! It wasn’t me.”
I never got to see her dead body, so I think part of me has denial about her gruesome death.
Her life was cut short through an act of sick cruelty. The disregard for human life adds overwhelming feelings of anger, distrust, injustice, and helplessness to the normal sense of loss and sorrow. Sometimes, I cry like I am never going to stop.
I don’t think a person can rebound from this.
I have suffered lots of childhood abuse, both childhood sexual abuse and childhood emotional abuse. I suffer from bipolar disorder and PTSD. My mother has narcissistic personality disorder.
I’ve got my hands full, but dealing with a murder is a baffling head game.
I don’t think I will ever come to terms with it.
by Band Back Together | Oct 14, 2015 | Asperger's Syndrome, Child Abuse, Child Sexual Abuse, Childhood Bullying, Divorce, Domestic Abuse, Emotional Abuse, Suicide |
I did it again.
While I didn’t yell at my wife, or make any physical advances, No, what I did was worse.
I made her cry and hide in a corner. My own wife.
And it keeps happening; it’s becoming more frequent.
I grew up in an abusive household in the United Kingdom. My mother, sister, and I lived under my father’s proverbial gun. My mother and sister were sexually assaulted by him.
His control ruled my life and dictated that anything I ever did wasn’t good enough. When I’d get straight A’s, I was told they should have been A+’s. Eventually, I rebelled a little which was for my own good.
We’d gone out for a walk in the forest and I needed a rest, so I hung back and sat down to catch my breath. He came thundering down, and with no no one else around, he knocked me down, and started to kick the living daylights out of me. I lost all control. I began to bleed from my head. Then, he picked me up and dragged me in front of a crowd of people.
Not a single person tried to stop him, not a single word of dissent.
From that point on, I decided I should be alone. Beside my mother, no one cared about me, and eventually she began to abuse me as well. It was a vicious cycle that eventually broke down when he divorced her and moved away with his mistress.
But after the incident in the forest, I just wanted to be alone, not exist at all. It was compounded by the fact that I was bullied every day at school at school as well. When I went to counselors or my mother, I was usually told, “you’re just being stupid,” and was written off.
Eventually I went to University, during which time I almost managed suicide with an overdose of painkillers. The next morning, I went to the doctor and was sent straight to the ER. It was no comfort when I was told that the amount I’d taken was enough to kill a “normal” person. Around this time, I’d disowned my father and there were threats that he and some of his brothers planned to descend upon the University to “correct” me.
I saw killing myself as the only option.
My now-wife has stood by me no matter what. We met playing games on the Internet, and eventually I moved to the USA to marry her. We’ve been married over a year, I’m doing the job I always wanted, and we’re expecting our first child.
She suffers from Asperger’s Syndrome and sometimes, as is the case with autism spectrum disorders, doesn’t know how to act or respond appropriately. It feels like I have to organize our daily lives because she can’t or won’t.
I love her to pieces and wouldn’t give her up for the world. Recently, however, I’ve started to make snide comments to her or vent at her about stuff over which she has no control.
For example, we’d just had our apartment building set on fire by some careless fuckwits, and while the apartment wasn’t damaged, it did smell like smoke. The Red Cross had us stay in a hotel, and when we returned home, we both set about organizing our apartment.
When I ask her what else we needed to do, she says that we need to grab CDs from the car so she can rip them onto her laptop. I’m thinking,
“What the fuck? We need to inspect the apartment in case we need to make any claims, and you want me to go downstairs and grab CDs? Seriously?”
Then I say it aloud. I berate her. I berate her because I now have to be her eyes and ears. That I have to organize her day for her. How much it all stresses me out.
And then it hits me like a ton of bricks.
The one thing I swore I’d never do – abuse my own wife or kids like I was abused – I’m doing.
And now, I feel like scum for breaking such an important promise to myself and undermining, hurting her.
There’s a big part of me that feels I should leave quietly and not return so I don’t hurt her anymore. Maybe go somewhere, be alone, and die in a corner quietly. Because that’s what I deserve. And she deserves so much better than me, a broken person who doesn’t know whether he’s coming or going.
I just don’t know anymore. I don’t know whether I should fight it, give up trying to change my fate, or remove myself from the equation permanently.
by Band Back Together | Sep 2, 2015 | Adult Children of Narcissistic Parents, Anger, Bullying, Child Abuse, Fear, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Therapy |
I am the daughter of a Narcissicistic father.
From my earliest memories, I recall a lot of fighting between my parents. It was very violent, and oftentimes, I would curl into a ball and put a pillow over my ears to drown out the noise. When I was about eight years old, I swore that I would become educated, so that I would never be trapped like my mother was.
We lived out in the country and had only one car, which my father used for work. My father had a hair-trigger temper, especially when criticized. I recall him asking my opinion once, and I gave him my honest answer. He became enraged and flew off the handle. While he never punched me, I got thrown around a lot, pinned to the ground and wall quite often. I was deathly afraid all the time.
As I grew, his rage turned away from my mother and focused on me. In a way, I was glad because I adored my mother and wanted to protect her. I also knew instinctively that I was much stronger than she was. So …I was the Scapegoat.
I was criticized and picked on every day of my life. I could not go unnoticed; he even yelled about my sitting posture, my clothes, or the way I held my head. It was constant. I tried hard not to cause trouble, became an A student, but he still was not happy with me.
He was uber sensitive about his personal appearance and also very nosy. He’d ask anyone he met how much they made, what kind of car they had, or what church they went to. Although he was a blue-ciollar worker, he passed himself off as an executive, and people believed him. He had an air of authority and superiority.
My mother was co-dependent; whenever he and I had a row, she would come to my room and say, ” Your dad really loves you. He doesn’t show it, but that’s how he is. He would never hurt you.” Total BS.
I left the home as soon as I turned 18 and lived with friends to finish high school. He’d already made it clear that I should not get educated, as women were meant to stay home and care for their husbands in a submissive role. I attended a community college for two years and then transferred to a university, not getting my degree until I was 25. I worked two jobs, had an apartment and car. No matter what, I was always criticized, and he would not butt out of my life.
I went on to earn a Masters Degree at one of the nation’s best universities and got a great job that I loved. I met the man if my dreams, who is the complete opposite of my father, and we had four fabulous children, who are now all grown. I never once behaved as my father. I took great care to be a loving mother, and with the help of my husband, was very successful in that.
My father criticized our parenting, interfered with our marriage and exploited our children. For this, we decided to cut off all ties. We have been estranged for seven years now, and it was the best decision of my life. I still love them, pray for them and want the best for them. I am powerless to change my father, whose temper has lessened, but his criticisms and overall negativity have grown much worse. He is in his 80’s now, so he probably doesn’t have long to live.
I did have psychotherapy years ago, and that’s when I learned the name for his problem: Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Happily, I did not repeat or inherit this. But I do have one sibling who has some characteristics, despite being the Golden Child. I accept that I will never be 100% healed, but I do my very best each day and my father’s voice no longer sounds in my head. I’m free!
by Band Back Together | Aug 26, 2015 | Anxiety, Child Neglect, Fear, Help with Parenting, Parenting |
When I was a little boy, only around four or five years old, we lived near a river in Colorado. My brothers and sister would swim in the river, sometimes diving off the bridge that was near our home. In order to keep me away from the river, my mother told me that there were alligators living in the water. Okay ma, there are alligators in the river.
We would take my dad’s work clothing into town to the laundromat. Now, I remember this day very clearly. We pulled up in our old blue truck, my Orange Crush clutched in my little hands. The day was warm and clear. Next to our parking spot was another truck with a very old man in the driver’s seat. As he got out, I noticed that he was missing an arm. I think I asked my mom why the man’s arm was gone. She said, “Well, that’s what happens to people who go swimming in the river.” I was shocked by this.
A few days, perhaps weeks went by, and mom decided that we would go swimming with my brothers and sister. She’d got a float tube for me. I don’t really remember much about the lead up, but as they pushed me out into the river, I remember clearly that I was terrified. I screamed and yelled to be taken back to shore. I remember that they were laughing as they took me back to the bank of the river.
I love the water, but to this day, if I’m in a river or lake, I can only swim for so long before feelings of panic begin to build up.
My mother, to this day, is terrified of strangers. I remember the first trip I went on with my parents to a big city. I was just ten or so. I was excited and curious, peering about at all the people, buildings and busy streets. As we pulled up to an intersection, the car next to us had some Hispanic people inside. My mother noticed that I was looking at them. She said, in all seriousness, “Don’t make eye contact with them! They will shoot us if you do!” This theme is recurrent in my childhood. Strangers are bad. Period.
Years ago, I asked my mom why she told me that story about the alligators. I explained that I couldn’t swim for more than ten or fifteen minutes at a time without anxiety. She laughed, saying that she was just keeping her little boy safe. I really didn’t know what to say about that. I never really asked any more questions about it.
I have been deconstructing my upbringing, trying to find the ‘roots,’ as it were, to my problems. When describing my childhood to people, I would say that my parents left me to my own devices for the most part, making it sound as if I was afforded some kind of special privilege. Shedding the light of my current knowledge onto the events of my childhood, I was rather shocked to find that I was being neglected. I never really thought about it in quite that way, but it was quite the shock when I realized that.
Not that I blame them too much. They did what we all do – the best we know how. Apparently, the best my mother knew was to saddle her children with neuroses. The litany of fright that my mother used as a catechism to ward off harm, simply made it extraordinarily difficult for me to make any friends. After all, making eye contact could be deadly.
I make a conscious effort to not instill irrational fears into my children. Caution and skepticism about strangers, yes. Strangers as a likely source of murder, no. Caution and respect for water, yes. The lurking places of alligators …well, not where I live.
People, please don’t make your kids scared of life. The things that kids get from the adults in their lives, stick with them, right or wrong. We are omnipotent and omniscient to them. Guide them with wisdom, not fear!
