Did My Parents Do This?

[blueyez]

I was reading through playing catch up and i don't mean to bring up a topic which seemed so sensitive to some especially being a newbie but fox......although i have only been through about 3/4th the abuse you have been through or that you have openly spoke of in this forum, if that, .....and just to say this...the fact that you are here to speak of it makes you a true surviver, I will say this.....whether its physical, or emotional, not enough candy, a slap, or molestation....ppls level of tolerance for abuse is different. How they handle it and how they mature from it is different. I have seen people with mental afflictions who have never had a bad childhood day in their life worse off than ppl who have been raped, molested, and so on.

I have been through the grinder and although i came out the other side pretty cut the f*ck up, I do not believe that i am better of or worse than anybody here. I Use to think that having a baby was the worst thing i ever went through until I had an abcess tooth. It was then that i said I would have a million babies before i would want another abcess tooth. Now that I get anxiety attacks that last hours and sometimes days, I say, I would rather have and abcess tooth than to have these anxiety attacks. We all percieve that we are in the worst......we have no shoes.....until we walk down the street and see a man with no feet.....so to all my fellow survivors of physical abuse i give you the praise for still being here and fighting the good fight and for those that havent but have had other kinds of abuse......abuse is abuse no matter how you slice it.....and no one should have to go through it.

As far as understanding the one who is doing the abusing....only the abused either learn to forgive or not and it is up to the individual whether they think the person or persons are worthy of that forgiveness......and that is my 2 centss.

[angelkarmachic]

Better late than never, so they say. Maybe this should have been the first reply in here but I will post it now.........

Source: The American Heritage® Stedman's Medical Dictionary

Copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company.

Main Entry: 1abuse

Pronunciation: &-'byüz

Function: transitive verb

Inflected Forms: abused; abus·ing

1 : to put to a use other than the one intended: as a : to put to a bad or unfair use <abusing the powers of office> b : to put to improper or excessive use <abuse narcotics>

2 a : to inflict physical or emotional mistreatment or injury on (as one's child) purposely or through negligence or neglect and often on a regular basis b : to engage in sexual activity with (a child under an age specified by statute)

3 : to attack harshly with words

Abuse is a huge sliding scale including the emotional abuse of indifference to physical abuse ending in murder with all the fucking shite in between. No two abusers are the same and neither are their victims. Noone can say they feel worse than someone else after abuse. In my opinion, the type of abuse is less important on the psyche than the reaction it invokes in the victim.

Karma.

x

[hopeful48]

Hi everyone,

I've read the messages posted here and I'm rather confused myself. I was diagnosed clinically of having BPD and my doctor was very careful to put the blame on my parents. But I personally told my dad that he was the cause of my BPD. I think I freaked him out. He did apologise to me and we made peace.But this did not lessen my BPD. In fact I got worse and worse and I required more medications and more supervision. I believe that there are more misunderstood causes than putting the blame on one's parents. I felt very bad about putting the blame on my dad. But he seemed to be okay, accepting his part in creating the little monster in me. But I'm no better...

Thanks for sharing...

Happy :)

[sarina5]

In my case my parents are the ones to blame. So much emotional and physical abuse caused me to have BPD. My mum likes the power and control, my dad has always been very distant so I never used to get any support from my parents, just only hate and massive arguments. My parents are very cold emotionally and they can't show any emotions for us (me + two younger sisters) part of anger and hate.

When my grandma died I didn't see my parents crying and on her funerals my mum just told us not to be stupid and cry.

Whatever I do it's always wrong and because I haven't studied anything (because of my condition I can't. My attention span is very short and I get frustrated very easy. Also my self-esteem is non existent) is a good reason for my parents to tell me how stupid I am.

As a result of all this I can't trust anybody. I always think people are there just to use or hate me.

[Alice]

I strongly believe that it's possible to abuse without knowing it. In my case - that's part of the problem. I should state at the outset that I'm not talking about sexual abuse here, but about ignorance.

I'm an adopted child whose adoptive parents were overprotective and almost in denial about their innate inability to have children. My father had a low sperm count and deep issues about 'manliness' that simply weren't talked about in the 1950's and 60's. My mother, always in competition with her younger sister, simply had to have a child - more or less because my aunt had started a family and she felt left behind.

So in their early 30's, they adopted me but amost refused to acknowledge the magnitude of it. They moved to a different part of the country where they tried to pretend that it hadn't happened. The unknowing abuse - if you can call it that, was their continuous, insistent and pummelling devaluation of what I felt to be my own identity. I also strongly believe the nature and nurture ratio to be a random one; some people carry forth their genetic inheritance no matter what the extraneous circumstances may be - others adapt to circumstance, some have a mixture of both. I simply felt that I wasn't, under any circumstances, their child. And I didn't want to be - but the more I detached from them (and I remember doing so as young as five or six) the more resentful they became. My father, particularly, had a horrible temper and couldn't keep out of the pub. My mother seemed inconsistent and untrustworthy. I was forced to separate from friends repeatedly (presumably because my parents were jealous that I preferred to be with friends rather than with them), I was repeatedly called 'mental' and 'thick' (in my 20's I achieved a first in English and an MA in American Literature so tish and pish to that one), I was told 'not to copy everyone else' (i.e 'don't belong') yet 'why can't I be like everyone else'? Back to 'you're mental/odd/frightening' again.

I was diagnosed with BPD in my mid 20's - I'm now 40, but I'm absolutely crippled by it. For me it manifests in not ever being able to tolerate an ordinary workplace (and so I haven't ever felt like 'I belong') - I have a small self employed business, but because I work from home, I hardly go out, I hate socializing, I'm married but would never have children and I'm terrified of being alone, it all feels (like me) illegiimate.

Are my parents to blame - yes definitely - both sets of them. The more interesting question is how far can you blame ignorance? Both sets of my parents believed they were acting in my best interests - and the veiws of society backed them up.

[chrish]

Don't know whether I can take in everything that has been said in this post, I can see both sides. I do believe their is a strong parental influence in the develop OF BPD , but that does not necessarily mean their is a blame.

I am off to see my Dad in a couple of days and have to address these issues with him. I am not looking forward to it, but is is all part of him and me accepting my condition.

wish me luck

[michael walker]

hi flora

my therapist also put my problems down to my parents but i knew about a year ago that is was them that made me feel the way i do but before that i knew something was wrong but didnt know what and it wasnt until i really started looking into my past that i realised what i had been through because when i was young it was just normal to me as everything had happened from a very early age and yes i also found it very hard to cope with and still do but i have just disowned my parents because of what they did and will never be able to forgive them and to be honest i dont want to as they should have been protecting me not causing me more harm than anyone

i am going to see my therapy through to the end as really i know it is painful and sends me very low at times but if im honest i do feel a little better and i wont get better without help yours michael

[Miko]

I identify somewhat with Calyps' situation. My mother (along with some classmates and some authorities)verbally abused me for my physical difficulties. She also verbally abused me and my siblings generally. Being now middle aged, I saw this for what it had been, a couple of decades ago. I have always distanced myself from my mother, it was not ideal. Luckily my father, who had not been there sufficiently for me due to his own physical difficulties, was there for her (and got the full force of her fury). In recent years I appreciated her from a distance for her gifts and achievements and I have also identified her physical difficulties. No professional support was given us for most of our difficulties. Now she has passed on and dad is left, in his 90s, he occasionally lets slip a wry remark that shows he had known what was going on. So I had an insufficiently supportive, distant parenting situation. I think I have got off very lightly from it! Despite going through several very strange episodes some of them caused by me (and some not), I am not in the 'mental illness sytem' and am only diagnosed depressed but can identify with most 'BPD' characteristics when I read about them in certain sources.

One is defi itely going to have to rack one's memory to a greater or lesser extent. One is also going to have to do some pretty hefty or nifty reinterpretation of one's old assumptions.

But somewhere along the line specific concrete details are going to emerge. At the end of the day specific people did specific things to us, or they didn't.

As I say I am middle aged and I haven't had outsiders trying to tell me things about my family during my 20s, 30s and 40s. So I 'can't talk'!

[InnerPeace]

I know this thread was started quite a while ago but the point made about the therapy and having feelings churned up about family members, which then went when the therapist was changed is a really important comment.

We are so vulnerable when we see therapists and so much depends on their skill and which type of therapy they happen to practice. We can so easily be steered into a direction that is wrong e.g. in thinking that our problems MUST be because of such and such simply because this fits in with the therapists views and they may not actually be right. I'm taking Counselling training myself and the responsibility is huge and yet they are only human too.

A therapist I saw once wasn't making much progress with me in the area that I went to see her about and so the focus started to shift to my marriage, which I actually felt ok about. She kept questioning me about whether I was really happy about my husband not working and it really didn't bother me as we had invested years in his art training and he was trying to get his work noticed. But because she kept on about it, I started to believe that it did bother me and this actually destabilised my marriage. It's not BPD related I know but the same principle applies of what damage can be done when we believe a therapist who is wrong about the cause of our problems.