Reply to Now in our forties, why are many people around me just discovering the mistakes their parents made?

Forum Index » Off-Topic

Reply to "Now in our forties, why are many people around me just discovering the mistakes their parents made? "

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]Your family was identifiably dysfunctional when you were young, in a way that was easy for you and others to grasp. Your dad abandoned you. You had a parent who was an addict and abusive in a way you recognized as abuse as a child. You processed that pain early. Even in young adulthood, if someone asked about your family, you could probably articulate what was wrong.

I grew up in a family that externally looked like it had no problems. My parents were not divorced. My dad had a successful business. We lived in a nice middle class home, took vacations, had enough to eat. I grew up believing I was fortunate and had a "good childhood." But there was always this bagging feeling if emptiness. My parents would say my siblings and I were just ungrateful or "want to be unhappy" so I though that was true.

My parents were both physically and verbally abusive but it was totally normalized as "corporal punishment." My parents (who were both raised by alcoholics) would say "you don't know how good you have it" when they'd hit us and scream at us. So I thought that was how parents were. I didn't find out until I was an adult that there are many parents who don't hit and scream at their kids.

Addiction runs on my family but my parents weren't alcoholics or drug users so I thought I was lucky I'm that respect. A few years ago in a support group I learned about the concept of a "dry drunk" which is someone who has stopped drinking but engages in all the same abusive behaviors of alcoholism -- the lying, narcissism, even "blacking out" bad behavior and pretending it didn't happen. I realized my mom, whose own mother was an alcoholic and whose dad left her family and mom died when she was a teen, has the behaviors of a dry drunk. But I didn't figure this out until I was early 40s.

You and I both grew up with neglect, abuse, addiction, abandonment. But you understood that's what you were dealing with by your teens. Back then I was still being brainwashed into thinking it was normal, that everyone's family was like that. It took me decades, and having my own kids, to understand how dysfunctional and abnormal it was. And now my parents are old and sick and there's no way to repair, I just have to pretend with them until they go because there's no reconciliation over old hurts to be had with two 75+ people with dementia.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics