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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I have a sibling with what would now be diagnosed as developmental delays and mental illness, but were ignored in the 80s. My late father probably had autism and my mother was and is severely depressed. They did not have coping skills to manage the challenges of everyday adult life. On the outside, my mother went to great lengths to make us look like a clean-cut, preppy, perfect family. At home, she did everything to try to cover my brother’s deficits and mold me into the daughter she wanted versus who I actually was. She hit and slapped me and the slightest deviations from what she saw as an ideal child resulted in physical and verbal abuse. However, I don’t think anyone ever witnessed her behavior toward me in public.

Once in a while, though, things would leak out and neighbors would see my brother and I in violent physical fights and screaming matches. That was how we learned to deal with frustration, disappointment, disagreement, etc. I’m sure the neighbors wondered what was going on.

There is always something going on.[/quote]

Aaaaaaall of this. I had a very similar upbringing, similar parent profile. Both my brothers have ADHD, but diagnosed as adults. We definitely presents as perfect, functional, middle class American family to the public but were a total mess at home. My sister and I both became perfectionists and people pleasers because we were always working so hard to both avoid provoking our parents and to not take up resources needed to deal with my brothers, who had much more dramatic behavioral issues due to ADHD wiring (which my dad also definitely has).

One reason my husband and I work as a couple is that he was the first boyfriend I had (and honestly first friend I had) who saw the cracks in what happens with my family. Before him, if I told anyone what my house was like growing up they simply did not believe me because they were fooled by how nice and friendly my parents, but especially my mom, are to outsiders. But my DH almost immediately picked up on little stuff, like the way my mom physically picks at me even in public (fixing my hair, my clothes, touching my face without asking, making comments about posture and appearance, etc.) and the way my dad never actually looks at me or listens to anything I say. DH notice how my parents treated me, more than he was taken in by how they treated him (which is welcoming and kind, as always). A real testament to how much DH loves me, actually.

I have sometimes wished my family's dysfunction had been more visible and obvious when I was a kid, even though I know this would also have resulted in lots of negative attention from people as well (if people had known, some of them would have called us trashy and not let their kids be friends with me). But instead I spent my childhood being gaslit and also participating in gaslighting everyone else and it made it a lot harder to figure out how to undo that damage later on because for years I was like "oh no, my family was totally normal and healthy, what are you talking about" even as therapist after therapist gently suggested that the way our parents treated us was not normal or healthy. I was 30 before I really started to understand.[/quote]

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