The Desk

[Depression = 72% of members]

one of the registration questions is a question about the opposite of yes being ... .?  My knee jerk response was in whose family?

My story is typical.  Both parents abusive.  My recovery belated. Life wasted. Life about to be found. I have it in me to be happy. I have seen it before.  But, it is that periodic guilt thing that unwinds my progress.  I am trying to deal with that and it seems to me if I could write it out... .

[MyThreeDawgs]

one of the registration questions is a question about the opposite of yes being ... .?  My knee jerk response was in whose family?

My story is typical.  Both parents abusive.  My recovery belated. Life wasted. Life about to be found. I have it in me to be happy. I have seen it before.  But, it is that periodic guilt thing that unwinds my progress.  I am trying to deal with that and it seems to me if I could write it out... .

[MyThreeDawgs]

The Desk

As a child, I studied and did my homework on my bed alternating between sitting on my bed hunched over books and note paper. I didn’t even have a clipboard to use and I knew, by God, that I had better not get any ink on the bedspread.  What I had was a mattress and no help. Sometimes I would try to do my homework at the kitchen table but that never lasted long.  Eventually I gave up on that location because somehow, some way I was a problem for her. How can a child learn with a snarling beast in the room?  I tried moving to the formal, never used, dining room with its big cherry table and a quiet that came from being closed up and unused. “If you think you are going to scratch my new table you have another think coming.”  It didn’t go un-noticed by me when my younger brother, her golden child, got a store bought desk and chair with shelves and special lighting and all a child would need to learn.  For years I have thought of this and it has made me angry with her. Recently, and to my surprise, I find myself considering my dad’s role in this. He bought the desk and chairs.  He picked them up.  He took out his drill and erected shelving and lighting.  He participated in something a good parent might do for a child.  I got nothing except lower back pain and the memory of being hit in the head with a hairbrush by my mother when I couldn’t do basic third grade math. Now, I remember how he did nothing.  I see his role in this and he disgusts me.

I can’t love someone like that.  Neither of them.

[Struggles]

Hi MyThreeDawgs,

I'm so sorry for what you went through growing up, and it shows us that how we are treated as children effects our lives greatly in our adult years. 

You wrote about something horrible, but wrote it so beautifully I might add.  I am proud that you are standing up and saying "I have it in me to be happy".  That is hard for a lot of people to do. 

My MIL is undiagnosed BPD.  My husband and I are now NC with her.  With the recent events, my husband has also thought a lot on his past.  Things I think he has tucked away as to not remember.  He loves his father dearly, but is now starting to see him as the enabler.  The one that didn't take a stand. With my husband and his siblings, the golden child was never one specific child.  It would be one at a time, one would be the best and the others faults were shined like a light for the others to see.  Then the bad child would become the good child and the good child would become the bad.  It's still like that to this day.  But now that my husband has gone NC, he is the one painted black. 

My mother was abused as a child, the only one of 4 children that was abused.  She struggles with the same as you, guilt.  She has often asked her mother why she allowed it to happen, but has never recieved a straight answer. 

It is so hard to understand why the other parent goes along with these abuses.  Is it out of fear? 

[Enabler]

Hiya, I should start getting kickbacks for the amount I have recommended this book but read 'Toxic Parents' even if it's the preview on google books. It covers the silent complicit parent who perpetuated the abuse and never stood up for the innocent child. There's some pretty harrowing stuff in the book covering incest as well. It deals with how to recover from these kinds of wounds and also deals with how some people try and fail to shortcut the process.

After reading the book I found myself very angry with my FIL who never defended my uBPDw against her my BPD MIL. To this day I have yet to hear him say "stop that, it's utterly inappropriate and you are bang out of order". It does not go unnoticed by W.

[Struggles]

Hiya, I should start getting kickbacks for the amount I have recommended this book but read 'Toxic Parents' even if it's the preview on google books. It covers the silent complicit parent who perpetuated the abuse and never stood up for the innocent child. There's some pretty harrowing stuff in the book covering incest as well. It deals with how to recover from these kinds of wounds and also deals with how some people try and fail to shortcut the process.

After reading the book I found myself very angry with my FIL who never defended my uBPDw against her my BPD MIL. To this day I have yet to hear him say "stop that, it's utterly inappropriate and you are bang out of order". It does not go unnoticed by W.

Thank you for the suggestion!  I will be reading and getting this for my mom.  Since she won't see a T to help her cope with the abuse from childhood, this sounds like it will show her some ways to cope.  I really want to read the stop walking on eggshells book as well. 

[MyThreeDawgs]

Thank you.  It is comforting to hear that others understand.  Right now, I am going down for the last time but I am fighting back by putting it writing exactly the way it was and exactly how I felt it.  I do this to save my own skin.

What does it mean when I say going down for the last time?  Every time I let them back in my life it takes longer to get out.  I come away more damaged.  Writing it out now helps with some sort of clarity.  I just want the truth.  My truth.  I am tired of hearing people let those monsters off the hook.  They did the best they could.  No.  They most certainly did not.  I feel I must write these things out.  Thank you for listening and caring to write.

[MyThreeDawgs]

It is so hard to understand why the other parent goes along with these abuses.  Is it out of fear?  

I think it could be fear of the perpetrator but they are still an adult and CHOOSE to abandon their child to a person behaving like a demon.  Sure. Maybe we could write it off if it were only an occasional incidence but the consistency of it all I find enlightening and disturbing.  Consistency of it all.  Consistency.  Repeat it.  Consistency says a lot.  

I don't know if it was fear my dad experienced so much as just wanting to be left alone.  If she was raging at us there was a good chance he would be left alone.  I think in my case, he was just utterly lazy and disinterested in his children.  Periodically he added his own cruelty topping by joining in and eating his own young.

Evil.

[Struggles]

I think it could be fear of the perpetrator but they are still an adult and CHOOSE to abandon their child to a person behaving like a demon.  Sure. Maybe we could write it off if it were only an occasional incidence but the consistency of it all I find enlightening and disturbing.  Consistency of it all.  Consistency.  Repeat it.  Consistency says a lot.  

I don't know if it was fear my dad experienced so much as just wanting to be left alone.  If she was raging at us there was a good chance he would be left alone.  I think in my case, he was just utterly lazy and disinterested in his children.  Periodically he added his own cruelty topping by joining in and eating his own young.

Evil.

I couldn't agree more.  I think the same thing is true for my FIL, if she is raging at their children, he is left alone.  Standing by, watching the emotional abuse take place and quietly saying to himself "thank God it's not me this time." I will never get it. 

[Enabler]

I'm not so sure it's that simple or black and white. In my FIL case I believe there's a couple of things going on. Firstly yes, I think there's something to be said for him wanting to stay out of the firing line and keep his head down, secondly and in the case of BPD most things have some elements of truth to them... .hear me out... .say for example a young child is clumsy and drops a cup of OJ on the floor, the BPD mother starts screaming at the child that this is an abomination, "how could you do this to me, adding to my already hectic life (there's the lie), you never pay attention (black and white thinking), my life is a disaster and I'd be better off without you (projection because she thinks they would be better off without her)"... .now where in this is FIL supposed to stick his neck out and say "hey you crazy btch, what's you're problem? Can you not see she's just a kid, you've totally overreacted  and are emotionally abusing her now!"?

My FIL is clearly non confrontational and has likely spent so many years moving 'the line' in his own personal acceptance of what is and isn't okay that he's now unaware of what is and isn't acceptable for others. Also, what is acceptable for him as an adult is not acceptable for a child due to how they take things personally as to an attack on their entirety. "She does mean it, I am bad, I am wrong".

How sexual and physical abuse is overlooked is just an extension of this with more perversions and greater inability to say this is wrong. We must also take into consideration that acts like that are often not overtly on public display to can be ignored and mentally pushed under the carpet. I see my wife have behaviours that could increase the likelihood of my children progressing to develop BPD every day, can I do anything, say anything or halt it, no. If she got them, maybe yes... .but since when has being a person who always turns everything around to being a victim, everything the children do to being personal or being emotionally unavailable illegal... .she will still get custody of the children in a divorce... .and imagine if I didn't know about BPD!