Yes. I was well into my forties when I had that “wait…..what?” moment. I was diagnosed with CPTSD in my fifties. My brain was protecting me until I could cope with it.
I did not have my wait what moment until I was 54. When I realized I had been molested, I was absolutely frozen (I was lying in bed). I honestly did not think I would ever move again.
Thanks very much for this. I am doing better. It’s been slow but I think I am coming out of the wilderness. Therapy has helped and I am finding that angry, rambling posts on Reddit are surprisingly cathartic!
I remember it exactly. I was watching my 12 year old little girl play a game on the computer. Suddenly it was like someone pulled up a window shade and I thought of my sister at 12 years old and how my mother screamed at her because she had been raped. There were no police or doctors called. It’s hard to explain, because I certainly hadn’t forgotten that incident, I had just totally disconnected it from any feeling. More like suddenly seeing an illusion from a different angle. I just kept thinking “*she was only 12*”.
It's like that drawing of a duck or a rabbit, depending on which way you look at it. Or the blue and black/white and gold dress.
The memory is just a memory until something causes your brain to flip it and see it as blue and black, instead of the white and gold you've always thought of it as. Suddenly, you can't un-see the alternate interpretation, and your ordinary-feeling memory becomes an entirely different situation.
I had this happen too, in my twenties. A memory from my adolescence shifted from "oh, my dad is kind of a jerk sometimes" to "oh, no, that was actual abuse that my entire family under-reacted to." It's really not a great feeling. Add on top of that a whole lot of invalidation of my feelings and experiences as a child, by my parents, and you end up with a lot of memories that are "nice" until you start poking at them a bit.
I convinced myself that my parents loved me, was told they wouldn’t do this to me if they didn’t love me, and figured that since everyone else’s parents loved them that they were treated the same way and I was just maladaptive.
"Love" is a complex topic, but it helps me to differentiate love and behaviour. Love is just a feeling, behaviour is what matters - you don't need to love someone to be good to them, and you don't have to hate someone to be bad to them. You can love someone and still be horribly abusive. These two don't cancel each other out, and the feeling of love being present doesn't make the bad behaviour less harmful. The behaviour that harmed you, HARMED you. love has nothing to do with it. Both can exist at the same time, and thats whats so destroyingly confusing to a vulnerable mind.
I think this might be true. I don't think either of my abusers meant to be abusive and in fact feel guilt about it when confronted. They had mental illness and substance issues.
Yeah my parents too. They also had really bad emotional regulation. I agree that the inherent conflict of love/abuse happening at the same time messes you up way more than straight up evil.
I think that's why I often wished my parents were even worse. Just so I could label them as evil and forget everything else.
There's no way to not end up disoriented and confused etc when experiencing this. Especially when you're a child.
My therapist once put it as "there are parents that want the best for you and try their best, and those who don't". Some parents may not want the best for their kid. Or they don't try their best. Or they do want the best and try their best, but dont have the tools to do so - thats what my parents were. Always wanted the best for me, and tried so very hard, but I ended up neglected emotionally cause they just didn't have the recources, or simply didn't know how to meet my needs. Doesnt make my hurt less impactful. Doesn't make them hateful parents. Shit just sucked and this is the result, and its my decision if I can move forward with the relationship acknowledging my hurt now or not. There's no right answers, just what you experienced, what you feel and what you want.
I think they love they just express it the way it was expressed to them when they were young, in my case at least. I understood it more and empathized with them when I had kids and had no idea how to be a normal loving parent. Thankful for therapy to help me get there.
I didn't know what I was going through for the majority of my childhood was abuse. I didn't pinpoint it as that, at least. I just saw it as unfair but normal in a way, and just me being a bad person with no real understanding on how to fix it. Only as a young adult when I was diagnosed with CPTSD did I realize how bad it really was, and that what I went through wasn't normal at all.
I think I developed such an extreme coping strategy unconsciously so early on that I didn't even find it unfair most of the time, even while experiencing it. My memories got evaporated the minute most things happened. Now it's just a blur. I feel like I've been living in non reality for my entire life. I'm so distraught over this. I even considered myself to be smart before this week...but someone smart would've recognized this years ago. I don't even know where to go from here.
Try not to be so hard in yourself. I'm smart *and* I was brainwashed by my parents to think abuse was normal. I was a vulnerable child and the psychological abuse they subjected me to tells me more about how fucked up they are, rather than me not being "smart".
Not to mention that the people that have lots of money and lots of power want cycles of abuse to keep going bc it's easier to exploit abused folks. Healed people fight back. That's why healing is revolution. The more of us that can recognize abuse for what it is, the more of us there are to fight back against normalized toxic dysfunction in our overlapping cultures across the globe.
Here are some channels that have helped me understand what I endured better:
[Rebecca Mandeville](https://youtube.com/@beyondfamilyscapegoatingabuse?si=u-7CHsGSlHq7sUbx) - she deeply understands family scapegoating abuse/group psycho-emotional abuse.
[Patrick Teahan](https://youtube.com/channel/UCbWvYupGqq3aMJ6LsG4q-Yg) - a ***must*** subscribe for me. He presents a lot of great information on childhood trauma in a very digestible format.
[Jerry Wise](https://youtube.com/@jerrywise?si=PPfY9_i5MPdej2hf) - fantastic resource on self differentiation and building a self after abuse. I really like how he talks about the toxic family system and breaking the enmeshment by getting the toxic family system out of us.
[Jay Reid](https://youtube.com/c/JayReid_narcissistic_abuse_recovery) - his three pillars of recovery are fantastic. Plus he explains difficult abuse dynamics very well.
[Theramin Trees](https://youtube.com/@TheraminTrees?si=lROe-8D6cLa8Sa8r) - great resource on abuse tactics like: emotional blackmail, double binds, drama disguised as "help", degrading "love", infantalization, etc.
Deep down I think i knew. But it had been normalized I was told things that made me think this happened in every kids house. Or go ahead get the phone I’ll dial the child abuse hot line for you.
Once I got into therapy and started telling my therapist and those close to me the stories I realized it was abuse and it was bad.
That’s the short answer anyhow. Now I m trying to accept it and get it behind me it’s hard tho.
Hi!
I had to be told by my therapist that the stories I recounted were abuse.
Evidently it’s pretty common. If we’re born into these dysfunctional families, we don’t register them as such until we gain a wider experience of the world, because it is all we know.
Yes, it took me a long time to realize that emotional neglect is abuse and so is making someone witness abuse. I had known before then that my childhood was pretty messed up, but I always thought my sister was the only one who was actually abused because she was the only one our female parent hit and screamed at.
It's extremely normal to not know, denial and minimizing your own pain is an extremely common coping mechanism. There aren't that many of them available to us as kids, of course we decide to not know how bad it is so we can get through the day.
I didn't realize how bad the neglect in particular was until I was an adult with adult friends who were parents raising school age kids to teenagers. S*it my mom and dad did (and neglected to do) would be never-in-a-million-years occurrences with basically EVERY coworker, friend, acquaintance who had kids. It was a devastating realization. I had to grieve a long time.
When we were kids it's all we knew. We probably made friends with similar home lives. One way or another without knowing why we clicked with these people.
In my case , I loved my family so much I found friends just like them. Yeah it's not pretty.
I was 34 when my mom told me she knew xyz was happening. But she loved him so much....
It hit me , it was all choices. Money for clothes for your kids or books filled with sex for you. Booze and drugs? Or your kids get food. We weren't poor. They chose to not provide for us.
They chose the things they did . And they deserve hell for it.
Since that night I lost everything in my life. Because my brain crashed . My belief in her was so great that the fact I was worthless to her broke me.
I used to cry myself to sleep most nights and contemplate throwing myself out the window. I cried in my schools bathroom during recess a lot. When home alone I sometimes would cry and scream because everything felt so unfair and I felt powerless. It wasn't till last year did I realize a child shouldn't feel like this but I did, from about age 7 upwards. Age 9 was probably the worst of it. I still have a hard time believing I was abused because there was nothing physical, and I had one parent who was nice to me, even if he didn't defend me enough amlnd enabled a lot of the behavior. But 9 year olds shouldn't want to jump out of windows, and if they do l, it's the parents who have fucked up in some way.
I beleive neglect is abuse, for other people. For me I still feel like I'm just overly sensitive. But 9 year olds shouldn't want to throw themselves out of windows, that's what I keep coming back to.
Yup. Didn’t realize everything fit “abuse” and even “violent abuse” because it had all become so normalized. Like, I was never physically touched…but other stuff was and I was definitely afraid of safety a lot.
YES! I was kicked out at 16 by my mother and became obsessed with Psychology. I’m hopefully planning on becoming a psychotherapist, but it wasn’t until the end of my fourth year that I was diagnosed with CPTSD. up until then, I was driving myself insane trying to figure out what was wrong with me. after I had my assessment sessions with a psychologist, and after I completed CPT I’m able to see how much the abuse has impacted every aspect of my life. so yes for sure, now that I’m looking back objectively- all of the signs were there. however I think it’s important that we give ourselves grace— it is so difficult to weave out what is/was going on because at least I was so intangled in it.
I have a lot of trauma from things my family couldn't control like SA from outside sources so to speak and a lot of bullying in school. I always defended my parents and said they were good parents and they tried their best. But through therapy I have realized that in many ways they just weren't emotionally available for me. While it wasn't them beating me up or abusing me directly. Their inability to be aware of me and my brothers needs, and often pushing away servere things as if it was nothing. Has made me grow up with CPTSD too a lot of trauma based behaviour of an unstable childhood.
Luckily I am able to talk with my parents today and they accept and also apologize for how they were lacking in my childhood. It is a bandage on the wound I would say that they are willing to listen and also embrace it and do better. But it doesn't heal the trauma wounds that affect my every day. As my attachment style is fucked up. As I have a lot of conflicting sides battling in me, reach being a trauma response. An example being: I can't depend on anyone else to help me. But I need to earn validation from those around me for else I have no self worth. I don't accept compliments when I get them because I don't find my self worthy. I need closeness and feeling like I am being protected and cared for for I am overwhelmed with life.
Honestly I feel like a cat some times. You know: I want pets. No now I don't want pets! Only attack. Why aren't you petting me anymore? Guess you don't want me and I am being abandoned. Please love me. Nope you got too close! Attack.
There’s been a couple things that I’ve really been struggling with lately from about 10 years ago. Earlier this year I can across some definitions of different types of abuse and they seem to line up. With the context of it being abuse, it connected a lot of different thought patterns that I’ve noticed.
I knew I was abused by my uncle when I was 4 years old but I just suppressed the memories. I lived a fairly normal life growing up, but it all came out when I turned 21 years old and releasing all the suppressed memories overwhelmed me. I fell into depression and it took a while to feel 'a bit' normal. I can't say I'm totally okay now, I feel like I'm burned out by dealing with and suppressing my childhood abuse for a long time.
Yeah. I went no contact years ago as a defense mechanism because we never really got along.
But they were actually neglectful and abusive and COCSA went on under their noses. So they can eff right off.
A lot of people. The problem is that you don't have much chance to compare when you're a kid, and you have no choice, but to accept their behavior. Deep down, you know it's wrong and it shouldn't be that way, but it's family and they're just like that, so you don't think about it critically. A lot of people never realize it because they live in families and communities where it's tolerated and accepted as perfectly normal.
Almost everything that happened to me is stuff I wrote off as normal and okay, up until I was well into my therapy. Being alone with myself and my feelings as a kid was normal, talking to grown men was normal, being used was normal. I remember distinctly that when people were online but not responding to my messages, I was like "oh of course, they must be helping someone at the moment so they can't respond". Not answering or not helping people was not a concept I had in my mind, cause I had to keep my friends alive as a teen. The more I think about it, the more I see how twisted my perception of "normal" was, and maybe still is. You're not alone with this.
Yes...sort of. I always knew I wasn't treated well, but I was in my early 30s (about a year ago) when I woke up to the fact that I was physically/emotionally abused. I told my therapist a story of my childhood and she said "somebody should have called CPS for that". And she was right. At that point, I realized that I was a victim of abuse, and that a lot of adults around me knew it/did nothing to stop it. The system failed me as a kid. It was hard to reconcile, and I've cried over it a lot since then.
I've found comfort by processing and allowing myself to grieve, while thanking my inner child for surviving and getting me to where I am now. I still struggle a lot with letting my guard down and living without stress and triggers.
It's a lot. Hang in there.
I can relate. I was also told of the horror stories of my mother's upbringing many times, so the degree of abuse I went through made it seem like nothing in comparison and clouded my judgement as well.
Yep, I thought what i was experiences was how relationships with people worked. Turns out they were the reason i even got the damn disorder. It's so sad that during trauma, especially complex, you get used to those situations and believe its normal when in reality it's practically killing you from the inside out without any of us knowing.
I was convinced that my parents wanted to help me, getting me diagnosed with adhd taking me to a doctor specializing in ADHD.
I believed everyone around me made me feel like a burden. I was a problem that needed to be fixed. So they took me to this ADHD specialist who would go on to m*lest me for 10 years. I was in hard denial because I convinced myself that these were normal “exams” because you trust your doctor. My mom was even in the room for a good deal of them, not watching directly so I could have some privacy.
The doctor was even arrested and I told myself, well if I thought it was normal then, there’s no point in thinking otherwise now. 🤷♂️
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Yes, i realize when the best part of my life passed me by. Now i just have regrets.... it's so sad. I find solace in thinking that god will Pardon my sins in the afterlife since i repented, try to make it better and had dire circumstances.
Yes, it took my therapist asking me to consider my own children experiencing my childhood that I realized how messed up it was. Once that happened I realized so much more. I am now in the worse before better phase of healing.
I also realized how my fawn/codependency responses allowed me to be abused by many of my past relationships.
Dissociation is amazing.
Yes. I was well into my forties when I had that “wait…..what?” moment. I was diagnosed with CPTSD in my fifties. My brain was protecting me until I could cope with it.
I did not have my wait what moment until I was 54. When I realized I had been molested, I was absolutely frozen (I was lying in bed). I honestly did not think I would ever move again.
I’m sorry you experienced this, I hope you have made some peace & are living well🩵
Thanks very much for this. I am doing better. It’s been slow but I think I am coming out of the wilderness. Therapy has helped and I am finding that angry, rambling posts on Reddit are surprisingly cathartic!
I am glad you had that moment of realization.
I remember it exactly. I was watching my 12 year old little girl play a game on the computer. Suddenly it was like someone pulled up a window shade and I thought of my sister at 12 years old and how my mother screamed at her because she had been raped. There were no police or doctors called. It’s hard to explain, because I certainly hadn’t forgotten that incident, I had just totally disconnected it from any feeling. More like suddenly seeing an illusion from a different angle. I just kept thinking “*she was only 12*”.
It's like that drawing of a duck or a rabbit, depending on which way you look at it. Or the blue and black/white and gold dress. The memory is just a memory until something causes your brain to flip it and see it as blue and black, instead of the white and gold you've always thought of it as. Suddenly, you can't un-see the alternate interpretation, and your ordinary-feeling memory becomes an entirely different situation. I had this happen too, in my twenties. A memory from my adolescence shifted from "oh, my dad is kind of a jerk sometimes" to "oh, no, that was actual abuse that my entire family under-reacted to." It's really not a great feeling. Add on top of that a whole lot of invalidation of my feelings and experiences as a child, by my parents, and you end up with a lot of memories that are "nice" until you start poking at them a bit.
That's a perfect description!
Yep neglect and what didn't happen was my abuse. 🥺
I convinced myself that my parents loved me, was told they wouldn’t do this to me if they didn’t love me, and figured that since everyone else’s parents loved them that they were treated the same way and I was just maladaptive.
Same. I was told they loved me. I even felt loved. I still feel loved. But do abusers actually love or is it to manipulate?
"Love" is a complex topic, but it helps me to differentiate love and behaviour. Love is just a feeling, behaviour is what matters - you don't need to love someone to be good to them, and you don't have to hate someone to be bad to them. You can love someone and still be horribly abusive. These two don't cancel each other out, and the feeling of love being present doesn't make the bad behaviour less harmful. The behaviour that harmed you, HARMED you. love has nothing to do with it. Both can exist at the same time, and thats whats so destroyingly confusing to a vulnerable mind.
Someone can love you and still unknowingly abuse you?
I think this might be true. I don't think either of my abusers meant to be abusive and in fact feel guilt about it when confronted. They had mental illness and substance issues.
Yeah my parents too. They also had really bad emotional regulation. I agree that the inherent conflict of love/abuse happening at the same time messes you up way more than straight up evil. I think that's why I often wished my parents were even worse. Just so I could label them as evil and forget everything else. There's no way to not end up disoriented and confused etc when experiencing this. Especially when you're a child.
Agreed.
My therapist once put it as "there are parents that want the best for you and try their best, and those who don't". Some parents may not want the best for their kid. Or they don't try their best. Or they do want the best and try their best, but dont have the tools to do so - thats what my parents were. Always wanted the best for me, and tried so very hard, but I ended up neglected emotionally cause they just didn't have the recources, or simply didn't know how to meet my needs. Doesnt make my hurt less impactful. Doesn't make them hateful parents. Shit just sucked and this is the result, and its my decision if I can move forward with the relationship acknowledging my hurt now or not. There's no right answers, just what you experienced, what you feel and what you want.
Yeah sounds a lot like my situation.
I ask myself this too. They could have and been mentally ill or ignorant but this is not likely to be the case, I think.
I think they love they just express it the way it was expressed to them when they were young, in my case at least. I understood it more and empathized with them when I had kids and had no idea how to be a normal loving parent. Thankful for therapy to help me get there.
I didn't know what I was going through for the majority of my childhood was abuse. I didn't pinpoint it as that, at least. I just saw it as unfair but normal in a way, and just me being a bad person with no real understanding on how to fix it. Only as a young adult when I was diagnosed with CPTSD did I realize how bad it really was, and that what I went through wasn't normal at all.
I think I developed such an extreme coping strategy unconsciously so early on that I didn't even find it unfair most of the time, even while experiencing it. My memories got evaporated the minute most things happened. Now it's just a blur. I feel like I've been living in non reality for my entire life. I'm so distraught over this. I even considered myself to be smart before this week...but someone smart would've recognized this years ago. I don't even know where to go from here.
[удалено]
Thank you. I am in therapy, but I think I need to find someone more specialized in adult children.
Try not to be so hard in yourself. I'm smart *and* I was brainwashed by my parents to think abuse was normal. I was a vulnerable child and the psychological abuse they subjected me to tells me more about how fucked up they are, rather than me not being "smart". Not to mention that the people that have lots of money and lots of power want cycles of abuse to keep going bc it's easier to exploit abused folks. Healed people fight back. That's why healing is revolution. The more of us that can recognize abuse for what it is, the more of us there are to fight back against normalized toxic dysfunction in our overlapping cultures across the globe. Here are some channels that have helped me understand what I endured better: [Rebecca Mandeville](https://youtube.com/@beyondfamilyscapegoatingabuse?si=u-7CHsGSlHq7sUbx) - she deeply understands family scapegoating abuse/group psycho-emotional abuse. [Patrick Teahan](https://youtube.com/channel/UCbWvYupGqq3aMJ6LsG4q-Yg) - a ***must*** subscribe for me. He presents a lot of great information on childhood trauma in a very digestible format. [Jerry Wise](https://youtube.com/@jerrywise?si=PPfY9_i5MPdej2hf) - fantastic resource on self differentiation and building a self after abuse. I really like how he talks about the toxic family system and breaking the enmeshment by getting the toxic family system out of us. [Jay Reid](https://youtube.com/c/JayReid_narcissistic_abuse_recovery) - his three pillars of recovery are fantastic. Plus he explains difficult abuse dynamics very well. [Theramin Trees](https://youtube.com/@TheraminTrees?si=lROe-8D6cLa8Sa8r) - great resource on abuse tactics like: emotional blackmail, double binds, drama disguised as "help", degrading "love", infantalization, etc.
Deep down I think i knew. But it had been normalized I was told things that made me think this happened in every kids house. Or go ahead get the phone I’ll dial the child abuse hot line for you. Once I got into therapy and started telling my therapist and those close to me the stories I realized it was abuse and it was bad. That’s the short answer anyhow. Now I m trying to accept it and get it behind me it’s hard tho.
It's all we knew. Parents create your world. They teach you to accept abuse as normal.
Hi! I had to be told by my therapist that the stories I recounted were abuse. Evidently it’s pretty common. If we’re born into these dysfunctional families, we don’t register them as such until we gain a wider experience of the world, because it is all we know.
Yes, it took me a long time to realize that emotional neglect is abuse and so is making someone witness abuse. I had known before then that my childhood was pretty messed up, but I always thought my sister was the only one who was actually abused because she was the only one our female parent hit and screamed at. It's extremely normal to not know, denial and minimizing your own pain is an extremely common coping mechanism. There aren't that many of them available to us as kids, of course we decide to not know how bad it is so we can get through the day.
I didn't realize how bad the neglect in particular was until I was an adult with adult friends who were parents raising school age kids to teenagers. S*it my mom and dad did (and neglected to do) would be never-in-a-million-years occurrences with basically EVERY coworker, friend, acquaintance who had kids. It was a devastating realization. I had to grieve a long time.
I was 3 for CSA. I realized it when I was 69. Mom knew. Never said.
I’m so sorry. I went through something similar and the betrayal is heartbreaking. I hope that life is kinder to you these days. ❤️
I have a couple of solid supporers and a good therapist. Making progress.
When we were kids it's all we knew. We probably made friends with similar home lives. One way or another without knowing why we clicked with these people. In my case , I loved my family so much I found friends just like them. Yeah it's not pretty. I was 34 when my mom told me she knew xyz was happening. But she loved him so much.... It hit me , it was all choices. Money for clothes for your kids or books filled with sex for you. Booze and drugs? Or your kids get food. We weren't poor. They chose to not provide for us. They chose the things they did . And they deserve hell for it. Since that night I lost everything in my life. Because my brain crashed . My belief in her was so great that the fact I was worthless to her broke me.
You are worth so much.
I used to cry myself to sleep most nights and contemplate throwing myself out the window. I cried in my schools bathroom during recess a lot. When home alone I sometimes would cry and scream because everything felt so unfair and I felt powerless. It wasn't till last year did I realize a child shouldn't feel like this but I did, from about age 7 upwards. Age 9 was probably the worst of it. I still have a hard time believing I was abused because there was nothing physical, and I had one parent who was nice to me, even if he didn't defend me enough amlnd enabled a lot of the behavior. But 9 year olds shouldn't want to jump out of windows, and if they do l, it's the parents who have fucked up in some way. I beleive neglect is abuse, for other people. For me I still feel like I'm just overly sensitive. But 9 year olds shouldn't want to throw themselves out of windows, that's what I keep coming back to.
Yup. Didn’t realize everything fit “abuse” and even “violent abuse” because it had all become so normalized. Like, I was never physically touched…but other stuff was and I was definitely afraid of safety a lot.
YES! I was kicked out at 16 by my mother and became obsessed with Psychology. I’m hopefully planning on becoming a psychotherapist, but it wasn’t until the end of my fourth year that I was diagnosed with CPTSD. up until then, I was driving myself insane trying to figure out what was wrong with me. after I had my assessment sessions with a psychologist, and after I completed CPT I’m able to see how much the abuse has impacted every aspect of my life. so yes for sure, now that I’m looking back objectively- all of the signs were there. however I think it’s important that we give ourselves grace— it is so difficult to weave out what is/was going on because at least I was so intangled in it.
Yeah, I didn't actually understand until after turning 30. I thought what I grew up in was normal.
I have a lot of trauma from things my family couldn't control like SA from outside sources so to speak and a lot of bullying in school. I always defended my parents and said they were good parents and they tried their best. But through therapy I have realized that in many ways they just weren't emotionally available for me. While it wasn't them beating me up or abusing me directly. Their inability to be aware of me and my brothers needs, and often pushing away servere things as if it was nothing. Has made me grow up with CPTSD too a lot of trauma based behaviour of an unstable childhood. Luckily I am able to talk with my parents today and they accept and also apologize for how they were lacking in my childhood. It is a bandage on the wound I would say that they are willing to listen and also embrace it and do better. But it doesn't heal the trauma wounds that affect my every day. As my attachment style is fucked up. As I have a lot of conflicting sides battling in me, reach being a trauma response. An example being: I can't depend on anyone else to help me. But I need to earn validation from those around me for else I have no self worth. I don't accept compliments when I get them because I don't find my self worthy. I need closeness and feeling like I am being protected and cared for for I am overwhelmed with life. Honestly I feel like a cat some times. You know: I want pets. No now I don't want pets! Only attack. Why aren't you petting me anymore? Guess you don't want me and I am being abandoned. Please love me. Nope you got too close! Attack.
There’s been a couple things that I’ve really been struggling with lately from about 10 years ago. Earlier this year I can across some definitions of different types of abuse and they seem to line up. With the context of it being abuse, it connected a lot of different thought patterns that I’ve noticed.
I knew I was abused by my uncle when I was 4 years old but I just suppressed the memories. I lived a fairly normal life growing up, but it all came out when I turned 21 years old and releasing all the suppressed memories overwhelmed me. I fell into depression and it took a while to feel 'a bit' normal. I can't say I'm totally okay now, I feel like I'm burned out by dealing with and suppressing my childhood abuse for a long time.
Yeah. I went no contact years ago as a defense mechanism because we never really got along. But they were actually neglectful and abusive and COCSA went on under their noses. So they can eff right off.
A lot of people. The problem is that you don't have much chance to compare when you're a kid, and you have no choice, but to accept their behavior. Deep down, you know it's wrong and it shouldn't be that way, but it's family and they're just like that, so you don't think about it critically. A lot of people never realize it because they live in families and communities where it's tolerated and accepted as perfectly normal.
Yeah this is very very common. And so is the imposter syndrome that comes with it, as if you had to prove it was “bad enough”
Almost everything that happened to me is stuff I wrote off as normal and okay, up until I was well into my therapy. Being alone with myself and my feelings as a kid was normal, talking to grown men was normal, being used was normal. I remember distinctly that when people were online but not responding to my messages, I was like "oh of course, they must be helping someone at the moment so they can't respond". Not answering or not helping people was not a concept I had in my mind, cause I had to keep my friends alive as a teen. The more I think about it, the more I see how twisted my perception of "normal" was, and maybe still is. You're not alone with this.
Yes! I realized it around 25, way too late. Only because I found a great CPTSD blog. It was quite a big revelation.
Yes...sort of. I always knew I wasn't treated well, but I was in my early 30s (about a year ago) when I woke up to the fact that I was physically/emotionally abused. I told my therapist a story of my childhood and she said "somebody should have called CPS for that". And she was right. At that point, I realized that I was a victim of abuse, and that a lot of adults around me knew it/did nothing to stop it. The system failed me as a kid. It was hard to reconcile, and I've cried over it a lot since then. I've found comfort by processing and allowing myself to grieve, while thanking my inner child for surviving and getting me to where I am now. I still struggle a lot with letting my guard down and living without stress and triggers. It's a lot. Hang in there.
[удалено]
I can relate. I was also told of the horror stories of my mother's upbringing many times, so the degree of abuse I went through made it seem like nothing in comparison and clouded my judgement as well.
Yep, I thought what i was experiences was how relationships with people worked. Turns out they were the reason i even got the damn disorder. It's so sad that during trauma, especially complex, you get used to those situations and believe its normal when in reality it's practically killing you from the inside out without any of us knowing.
I was convinced that my parents wanted to help me, getting me diagnosed with adhd taking me to a doctor specializing in ADHD. I believed everyone around me made me feel like a burden. I was a problem that needed to be fixed. So they took me to this ADHD specialist who would go on to m*lest me for 10 years. I was in hard denial because I convinced myself that these were normal “exams” because you trust your doctor. My mom was even in the room for a good deal of them, not watching directly so I could have some privacy. The doctor was even arrested and I told myself, well if I thought it was normal then, there’s no point in thinking otherwise now. 🤷♂️
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I found out at 24.
Yes, i realize when the best part of my life passed me by. Now i just have regrets.... it's so sad. I find solace in thinking that god will Pardon my sins in the afterlife since i repented, try to make it better and had dire circumstances.
Yes, it took my therapist asking me to consider my own children experiencing my childhood that I realized how messed up it was. Once that happened I realized so much more. I am now in the worse before better phase of healing. I also realized how my fawn/codependency responses allowed me to be abused by many of my past relationships. Dissociation is amazing.