Fugitivus Discussion Forum

I was gonna put this in the hindsight is 20/20 thread, but then decided it could stand on it's own.
Would anyone else here characterize their relationship with one or more parent as abusive?
When did you realize? What forms did it take? Did you ever get out? How is your relationship with your parents now? Did you ever confront them? How did you cope? If you ever got a better relationship with your parents how did that happen?
Of course answer or don't answer as comfort level dictates.

As for me:
it's not like my parents ever used physical force, or were super incredibly stereotypically bad, and I feel apprehensive about using the word abuse (hence all the qualifiers!), but there was some very bad stuff (this is going to get a little ranty, I'll try not to, but I suppose there's a risk I might slip into parent-shaming, apologies if I do):
Spoilered for size, and just in case, bad stuff follows
It took me a long time (and reading the feminist blog-o-sphere!) to recognize how bad some of this stuff was. And like I said, I still hesitate to call it abuse. My coping mechanism as a kid was to hide up in a room with a good book and pretend nothing was wrong. My coping mechanism now is to hide up in my room with the internet! I plan to move out ASAP (probably after next semester, as my grades will be hopefully be high enough to get student loans).

<_<

Oi, that's pretty bad. I'm sorry to hear you've had to go through that- and I'm hoping you do move out ASAP. About how old were you when your parents got divorced? My parents got divorced when I was eleven years old. I remember not being surprised or upset at all, because my dad had already been taking off for weeks at a time without telling anyone where he was for years before the divorce- but my dad starting crying when he told me and his tears made me cry.

What follows below is going to get pretty long winded, and I hope that's okay.

Both of my parents were abusive. My mom has some serious rage issues. She has a low threshold for frustration, and anything that frustrates her, she'll end up channeling into an attack against someone else, finding reasons for why this or that is THEIR fault, even when the thing that initially made her angry had nothing to do with that person. She used to stay up from midnight to three in the morning yelling and ranting at my dad about this or that, sometimes about how I was acting up in school.

She was critical and perfectionistic, too. I see strong links between the torture I had to go through while trying to learn math and my current aversion to attempting anything too difficult. I was physically abused, as well- being whacked with a belt, choked, slapped in the face.

My dad was like a volcano. He'd be silent and self-contained for a good while, and then something you did would suddenly set him off in a violent outburst. He was very caustic and sarcastic, too. And very authoritarian and controlling. But he's better now. When I was ten, after my mom slapped me around for being written up in school, he called Child Protective Services on her. After that, she didn't hit me as much, I don't think, but she still yelled and manipulated and belittled. My dad realized that he would never get better as long as he was stuck with my mom, so after he divorced her he set off on a journey of self-healing. He's been to multiple therapists, attended Co-Dependents Anonymous meetings, read self-help books. He's done very well for himself, and while I wouldn't call my relationship with him perfect, he's become someone I can really trust and depend on.

My mom's a little bit better, too. She's still a bit fucked up, and she still does little power trips and yells and is verbally abusive, but we have a lot more periods of peace than usual. I've confronted her multiple times about her abuse, and on some level she seems to understand that she used to be pretty fucking bad, but on another she doesn't understand how what she did effects the way I behave towards her and the problems I have today, and gets defensive if I try to point it out to her. I'm still living with her, and it hasn't been easy. Just in the past year or so I've stabbed walls, cut myself, talked about suicide, punched her in the face hard enough to give her a bloody nose, been committed to a mental institution, almost been committed again... but year 2010 is looking a lot more stable. I still can't wait to move out, though. I think my relationship with her would improve drastically if we didn't have this fucking power dynamic going on where she still treats me like a child/an object/an extension of herself, and didn't hold the fact she supports me over my head and use it as an excuse to deny me basic human rights and a voice.

Whew, that was a mouthful. But I'd like to thank you for sharing your own story, and for giving me a chance to share, as well, because my abuse is not something I've been able to talk to other people about in depth. Most of my friends know generally that I had an abusive, rocky past, but they don't know the full of it.

I can't remember when my parents got divorced. I was young though, probably somewhere around seven or eight years old. I can't remember it that well, or how well I took it, or how they acted initially (my memory's not that great about anything though)

Anyway, sorry to hear about your situation, it sounds unpleasant D: (understatement!)
Glad things are looking up, and I hope you are able to move out soon and forge a healthier relationship and get some healthy distance.
Good luck!

Yeah, that's fairly young. And it sounds like it was handled very badly, too. The bills wrapped up as a Christmas gift thing really got to me for some reason... e.e

Well, thank you. I appreciate it. <3 My mom's getting therapy soon, so hopefully even before I get to move out things will improve a bit.

I hope you don't mind me not really reading the thread, here - I feel for all of you, and I am sorry for your experiences, but I'm not in a place to read about other people's abuse tonight, because I've been thinking about my mother's treatment of me today and that's put me in a bad mindset.



I'm currently still living with her, and we currently have a cordial-at-best, screaming-match-at-worst relationship, but she's about to move out of state and hopefully I will be FREE.

My parents are....I dunno. I hesitate to say abusive, sometimes. Emotionally they fucked me up a lot. Most of the time I it doesn't affect me, but sometimes I'll get in a funk and end up with a snowball effect (one bad memory leads to another, and another and another and its like a cartoon snowball going down a mountain and getting faster and bigger til it crashes somewhere). I don't remember large parts of my life between the ages of 11 and 14 (These are the years I lived at home with my mom and stepdad full time. For reference I am currently 22). I don't wish to remember this time.

I'm out of there now just finished university, and can cope with a week at home, but no longer than that. My partner knows that in no uncertain terms that I am never moving home again. I'm mostly good. I feel guilty for leaving my younger siblings in that environment, and they're the only reason I don't break contact with my family altogether. My parents seem to believe they've done nothing wrong and I like being there. Oh, yeah, they're also responsible for the fact I can hide my emotions like a Vulcan if I need to.

*Hugs* (if they're welcome. Other forms of comfort if they're not) to everyone. Like I said, I hesitate to call it abuse, but it feels good to write it all out.

EDIT: bloody hell, I've clicked submit instead of preview three times now. This is why I shouldn't be allowed on the the internet without tea, folks.

Wow. I'd never heard anyone else describe their relationship with their parents the way I describe mine with my dad. I guess I'm glad I'm not alone, though it sucks that anyone has to deal with this kind of shit. I'm in the lab so I don't currently have time to ennumerate the emotional abuse I endure/d, but I will say that whenever I start to tell myself it isn't/wasn't that bad, I remind myself that my dad told me, to my face, in so many words, that he hoped I'd never have children because I'm too much like my mom (parents are divorced, btw, and he blames her). Then I remember that I'm perfectly within my rights to call him an asshole.

I was debating whether or not I should start a new thread for this, but my reason basically amounts to grading, so whatever.

My family is very dysfunctional- always has been. Mistakes and accidents were met with yelling, and rules were never laid out and had little rhyme or reason to them. The earlier bits of my childhood aren't at all clear, but I do remember that as early as age five I had suicidal thoughts - I would grab a kitchen knife and say to myself, "Just do it."

My dad would always say that my older sister was his favorite. She had perfect grades, never started fights, etc. My brother and I did terribly in school, and he made a great effort to impress upon us what failures we were, how stupid and lazy we must have been. If I ever started crying in front of either parent, I would be sent to my room for being noisy. One year, my mom forbade me from using the computer, from listening to music, or even *reading* until I finished all of my missed assignments from the entire semester. The various schools I've attended have certainly never helped to make me feel valued. I was always told, "Sure, you're smart, but you'll never be successful if you won't get good grades." Somehow my parents thought it was a good idea to make anything beyond basic necessities a privilege contingent on my grades.

After an insane two-year court battle precipitated by my dad beating my brother, my parents have finally gotten a long-due divorce. My dad is failing to pay alimony, though - he's pretty much doing his best to make everyone's lives hell.

There's actually a lot that they've gotten right. They instilled in all of us a healthy skepticism and a love of knowledge. In recent years, my mom has gotten much better and been very supportive. I guess it just helps, though, to try to understand that my lack of confidence and my anxiety and whatnot didn't come up in a vacuum.

There's much more, of course, but that's about the gist of it.

My mother was emotionally abusive when I was a kid. She's a classic narcissist in a lot of ways, though she has some borderline personality disorder symptoms as well. Cut for length...



Years and years of therapy have finally gotten me to the point that I can roll my eyes at her and not spiral into a mini panic attack when she says something nasty to me. That and reading books about daughters of narcissistic mothers. Will I Ever Be Good Enough? in particular has been FANTASTICALLY helpful.

Karalyn - did your friend live?





Ohhh yeah, this is definitely me, too.



Yup. I realized fairly early on on multiple conscious and semi-conscious levels, but not consciously enough to actually use "the A word" until fairly recently. They did pretty much everything that wasn't sexual abuse or denial of food/clothing/shelter at one point or another. I've been mostly out since I was a month away from turning 18, with probably a cumulative total of six to eight months that I've lived with them in those three years since, because I bounced around a lot and ended up staying there in between places for a while. My relationship with my parents is... mostly financial and otherwise superficial, but we speak once every week or two. It happened by moving out, really. Luckily they were able to make the switch from parent-child to adult-adult dynamics for the most part.

I don't really feel like talking about the abuse in detail right now, but I figured I might as well answer the questions. I might post a wall here later about a lot of what happened.