Growing up in an abusive household is a fucking trip dude……If you’ve never had someone angrily wash a dish at you or fold a sock in your direction then how are you gonna understand why I get nervous when you quietly do the laundry, or why I ask “are you mad at me?” when you set the bag of groceries down too hard? It’s a totally different way of living and it impacts you long after you’ve left the situation.
This is so important.
Abused kids speak a language you can’t learn
My heart races when I hear someone sigh and then the adrenaline takes forever to wear off. I hate having these reactions even when I know I am safe.
this is why i get so defensive and upset whenever my roommate does chores, even if she isn’t mad at me
23 years of living with people who do exactly what OP is talking about
Child abusers don’t let children know they’re victims. Survivors of child abuse by large don’t know they’ve been abused. Abusive parents raise the child to have great compassion for them, to always view them as humane as possible, they make sure children are grateful to them, they point out every single thing they did for the child, such as “paid for your stuff” or “financed your schooling” or “gave you a roof over your head and fed you all these years” (even though to not do these things would be straight illegal, but they don’t mention that part, do they) as a proof of how good and generous they are, they make sure to recite all possible excuses to why they’re acting so abusive, they had a hard life, they have a lot on their plate, they’re good people they just make mistakes, they’ve been badly treated too, they don’t even know they’re hurting you, they’re insisting you’re too sensitive and get hurt from nothing, they don’t let the child hold them accountable or hold them guilty for any of their abuse. Abused child will be ashamed of themselves and hardly ever consider themselves a victim, they will be taught to repress and ignore trauma symptoms, to find a way to blame themselves for everything, to feel guilty just for how awful they feel all the time.
Emotionally abused child strongly believes that their parent is inherently good and deserves all the compassion in the world, all the excuses, all forgiveness and none of the blame for their actions (parents make sure children know that the blame would hurt them so children must never blame them) and will fight to defend the parent and point out why abuse was not really abuse, why children deserved it, why nobody is to blame, except maybe themselves, because “they weren’t good enough” to appease the parent which would then hopefully be a bit more kind (of course not). They often wont even admit how badly they’re scared of their parents.
To have an abused child realize they’ve been exploited, lied to, betrayed, systematically destroyed and dehumanized by their parent, their entire world needs to break down, everything they’ve been taught has to be acknowledged as a lie, what they considered right and fair needs to change to wrong, who they trusted the most needs to change to be least trust-worthy, who in their head, made sure they survive up to that point, needs to turn into a person who almost cost them their life, and destroyed it rather than held it safe. It’s not a fun ride. It’s devastating to go through, it breaks a person apart completely and forces them to re-construct their entire reality. And it’s the only way to have a chance to really recover, to validate themselves and their pain, to understand to what depth they’ve been damaged, and by who and why. It’s the only way to realize that they’re entitled to life, to food, to roof, to nurturing, to everything that was held against them, they’ve been required to feel grateful that they weren’t left to die.
For those who still have to face this, or are facing it right now, you are going through the worst of your life right now. For those who have no empathy or patience for survivors to figure their lives out, fuck you, try living their life for a few years, see if you survive it. For abusers, I hope someone figures out how to force you to feel every single bit of pain you’ve inflicted on your children, I hope you fucking scream yourself to death from pain you’ve caused.
• Your abuser will never be able to take responsibility for anything they do i.e., YOU are the reason they are acting or speaking a certain way
• You will constantly find yourself apologizing even when every fiber of your being is telling you “I’ve done nothing wrong”
• In the rare circumstance they do you a favor, your abuser will continously make a point that you better “appreciate” what they’re doing for you. If it’s a big one, in the end, they’ll use it as a manipulation tactic.
• Even once you’ve gotten out of an abusive relationship and begin a healthy one, the thought process can stick with you and memories can haunt you. You will have a hard time believing there can be a truly good person in this world capable of loving you.
A man is driving down the road and breaks down near a monastery. He goes to the monastery, knocks on the door, and says, “My car broke down. Do you think I could stay the night?”
The monks graciously accept him, feed him dinner, even fix his car. As the man tries to fall asleep, he hears a strange sound.
The next morning, he asks the monks what the sound was, but they say, “We can’t tell you. You’re not a monk.”
The man is disappointed but thanks them anyway and goes about his merry way.
Some years later, the same man breaks down in front of the same monastery.
The monks accept him, feed him, even fix his car. That night, he hears the same strange noise that he had heard years earlier.
The next morning, he asks what it is, but the monks reply, “We can’t tell you. You’re not a monk.”
The man says, “All right, all right. I’m *dying* to know. If the only way I can find out what that sound was is to become a monk, how do I become a monk?”
The monks reply, “You must travel the earth and tell us how many blades of grass there are and the exact number of sand pebbles. When you find these numbers, you will become a monk.”
The man sets about his task. Forty-five years later, he returns and knocks on the door of the monastery. He says, “I have traveled the earth and have found what you have asked for. There are 145,236,284,232 blades of grass and 231,281,219,999,129,382 sand pebbles on the earth.”
The monks reply, “Congratulations. You are now a monk. We shall now show you the way to the sound.”
The monks lead the man to a wooden door, where the head monk says, “The sound is right behind that door.”
The man reaches for the knob, but the door is locked. He says, “Real funny. May I have the key?”
The monks give him the key, and he opens the door.
Behind the wooden door is another door made of stone.
The man demands the key to the stone door.
The monks give him the key, and he opens it, only to find a door made of ruby.
He demands another key from the monks, who provide it.
Behind that door is another door, this one made of sapphire.
So it went until the man had gone through doors of emerald, silver, topaz, and amethyst.
Finally, the monks say, “This is the last key to the last door.”
The man is relieved to no end.
He unlocks the door, turns the knob, and behind that door he is amazed to find the source of that strange sound.
But I can’t tell you what it is because you’re not a monk
the way i learned this, it was always told through spoken word. And you’d do the door thing for ages. AGES. literally just making up any old material. ‘behind the foam door is a door made of spinach’ that kind of shit. Go on until whoever is listening has already begged you to stop and has now gone on to pleading, clutching your shirt on their knees pleading. And when you finally said the last line? People went fucking nuts Like there was a good chance of just getting the teeth knocked out of you after telling that joke.
A friend of mine did that shit for 30 minutes on a camp once. The entire fucking bus just exploded in anger when she finished. It was a fucking massacre.
I did this for an entire fucking hour while hiking through the Adirondack. I’m surprised I made it out alive.
I hate to be This Guy, but I’m in debt to both the bank and my emotionally abusive parents.
I need to pay just over $3000 total, and my work currently is not allowing me to work as they’ve decided that they need to send me on an enforced mental health leave.
Not being allowed to work + being in debt + being mentally ill = not a great situation.
Paying these debts will take a huge load off of my mind, improving my mental health, and I’ll be back at work soon and I can start saving to get the hell out of here.
My parents are paying the bank for me, so I am over $3000 in debt to them. Tonight or tomorrow, they will be removing the doors from my room. If each of my followers donated $3, I’d be out of debt. Please help.
As a parent, you don’t get privacy until you are on your own. My house, my rules, my money, my decision.
Don’t like it?
Too bad.
I am the parent here. I’m not your friend. I’m your father.
Literally kids are not your prisoner??? There’s a difference between being protective and being controlling.
“You don’t get privacy until you’re an adult” like what the fuck. You’re one of those piece of shit parents that thinks taking away bedroom doors and making their kids hold sandwich board signs on busy roads is appropriate punishment aren’t you? Children and teens are still fucking people and still deserve respect. If you can’t even respect your child how do you expect to teach them to respect others?
The mindset parents have of “my house my rules / I bought you that phonecomputertabletetc so I can go through it” is a huge contributer to anxiety, depression, self harm, and suicide in kids and teens and if anyone is defending, condoning, or practicing that behavior I hope to god they get their kids taken away from them. Nobody deserves to grow up under an iron fist of emotional abuse.
So my dad took away my laptop because I wouldn’t give him the password. I wasn’t even allowed to type it in, he demanded to know the password to my personal computer because he thinks I’m “ doing things I’m not supposed to do. ” My sister is not, and never has been, held to the same standard when it came to passwords on her own phone etc. But my parents always suspect me of being “up to something” and will randomly ask to use my computer/ know the password, and when I say no, they get mad at me. In the past, they have taken away my devices and looked through them, which cased me a lot of anxiety and is part of the reason I don’t like it when people use my computer or go through the camera roll on my phone. Even as I type this, I’m being asked what I’m doing. If you think parents demanding to know the passwords to their child’s personal devices is a breach of privacy please reblog
My dad threatens to take my door away from me for having it closed. I’m a seventeen year old female, and he has threatened to take away my door.
when i was a teenager, i wasn’t allowed to have a cellphone, so my father would hand me a little bag of change and force me to call home from a payphone every single time i left somewhere and again when i arrived at the next place. that means if i went to the mall, i called when i got there. then if i wanted to go across the street to the Walmart i had to call and tell him so. then i had to call again when i got to the Walmart! if i had a bunch of stuff to do, i could go through the entire bag of change in one weekend – if i could even find enough payphones to call him from. his explanation for this lunacy was that he wanted to be able to find me anytime, anywhere. he also liked to randomly show up at my job to make sure i was there, and the first time i spent the night at my best friend’s after i got a car, he drove past the house no less than eight times, and called no less than four times. one of those calls was to ask where i was because my car wasn’t visible from the road – and when i explained the turnaround i was parked in was behind the house, he told me we’d “better not go anywhere or have friends over”. like, what the hell were we going to do? have a drunken orgy while my friend’s grandma was sitting in the next room? we ended up playing chess in the front parlor all night with all the lights on and the curtains open so he could see us if he drove by.
and what, exactly, did i do to deserve this? not a fucking thing. i didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, didn’t sneak out, didn’t do drugs, didn’t skip school, nothing. in 13 years of public school, i had one detention – for being late too many times. that’s it. i never did a single thing to make him think i was untrustworthy and i got stalked for it.
when i graduated high school, my father told me if i was going to go to art college on his dime, he was going to have a say in the classes i took and what i did with my free time – he even went so far as to tell me if he ever dropped by the campus, i’d better be in my dorm doing homework or in class, and if i got a grade he didn’t like, he was going to pull me out of school, bring me home, and basically keep me a prisoner with no phone, no tv, no visits with friends until i graduated from the local community college. faced with another four years of stalking and abuse, i moved out and worked in a factory until i could be considered an independent student, then went to the art college i’d always wanted to – on my terms.
my father died last May and i hadn’t talked to him for a year, hadn’t seen him for two, and before that i hadn’t had any communication with him at all forfour.
the moral of the story for you “my house, my rules, you don’t get any rights” parents is: stop treating your children like shit or you’re going to die alone, and you’ll deserve it.
My father didn’t do it to this extreme but he listened in on my calls, he constantly accused me of having sex or doing pot.
Guess what parents?
Most kids that got constantly accused of bullshit that I KNEW? INCLUDING MYSELF? Ended up doing those things because “Fuck it, might as well if they’re not going to believe me!”
For me, I had sex way before I planned to (19. I was planning on waiting til marriage). Why? Because fuck it, he acted like I was trying to be a whore all the damn time, I was going to do whatever I damn well pleased.
I moved out at age 19. I have never moved back in. I barely talk to him. I talk almost exclusively to my mom.
When I moved out he said I’d be pregnant by the end of the year.
I’m 30. I have no kids. I don’t plan on having kids. Ever. Because I watched every other person in my family have kids when they couldn’t afford them and I’m not doing that to a child.
When I lived with my parents I had nearly all A’s, I had an 8pm curfew at the age of 19, I was never allowed to leave town, leave state, anything like that for school trips or what have you. When I was in college I wasn’t allowed to go to any colleges more than 30 minutes away. My parents didn’t trust others and they instilled that in me and it took me YEARS to fix it.
My therapist pinned down exactly what that does to it a kid too. It’s isolating. You’re isolating your kid. You’re telling them you don’t trust them. You’re telling them you inherently think they’re bad.
And that has huge ramifications on your bond with them.
Hope you’re ready for it.
Dear Parents who approve of the lack of privacy until a certain age: You are engaging in child abuse. Emotional child abuse.
Preventing a child from having privacy is a punishable offense in the United States (many countries actually) and you can be penalized for it.
What is that?
Rejecting or ignoring: telling a child he or she is unwanted or unloved, showing little interest in child, not initiating or returning affection, not listening to the child, not validating the child’s feelings, breaking promises, cutting child off in conversation
Shaming or humiliating: calling a child names, criticizing, belittling, demeaning, berating, mocking, using language or taking action that takes aim at child’s feelings of self-worth
Terrorizing: accusing, blaming, insulting, punishing with or threatening abandonment, harm or death, setting a child up for failure, manipulating, taking advantage of a child’s weakness or reliance on adults, slandering; screaming; yelling
Isolating: keeping child from peers and positive activities, confining child to small area, forbidding play or other stimulating experiences
Corrupting: engaging child in criminal acts, telling lies to justify actions or ideas, encouraging misbehavior
If you are an abusive parent, you probably have one of these (if not all) of these red flags:
Routinely ignores, criticizes, yells at or blames child
Plays favorites with one sibling over another
Poor anger management or emotional self-regulation
Stormy relationships with other adults, disrespect for authority
History of violence or abuse
Untreated mental illness, alcoholism or substance abuse
Children who suffer from your abuse, experience these emotional and behavioral issues:
Habits like sucking, biting, rocking
Learning disabilities and developmental delays
Overly compliant or defensive
Extreme emotions, aggression, withdrawal
Anxieties, phobias, sleep disorders
Destructive or anti-social behaviors (violence, cruelty, vandalism, stealing, cheating, lying)
Behavior that is inappropriate for age (too adult, too infantile)
Suicidal thoughts and behaviors
In summary, there is no “my house, my rules”. If you actively promote this type of behavior as parents, you are committing a crime, and you can be fined and imprisoned for it, as well as having your kids taken away, which, if they are experiencing this behavior from you, shouldn’t be your kids to begin with.
Children are not your property, regardless of relation.
If you want to guarantee your children never consider you a part of their life or interact with you ever again, continuing these behaviors will absolutely do that.
As someone who has a support group of nearly 80 kids ranging from the ages of 14 to 27, I can tell you so many horror stories of parental abuse and the shit it fucks up the kids with as a result. My wife experienced and survived her own form of parental abuse, as have I.
We do not tolerate it, and neither should your kids.
I am so very thankful I had reasonable, understanding parents.
Literally all you’re doing with this shit is making ABSOLUTELY DAMNED SURE that, when your child eventually has a problem they could use your help with, they will do everything in their power to keep you from finding out. You’re destroying their trust in you.
It terrifies me how most people going through this aren’t aware it’s happening.
I encourage everyone to research Emotional Abuse and make sure you’re not subject to it, or unknowingly abusing others. Either one is going to be practically impossible to believe, so I need you to be 100% absolutely honest with yourself.
It’s so insidious and profoundly damaging on such a personal level. It’s the worst. I can’t even fathom how someone can do this to someone they allegedly love, and believe they’re helping them. Fuck.
JainaSolo1994 