behavioural and emotional patterns of living in abuse:
you spend most of your time shut in your room
you’re scared of footsteps approaching your door
you prefer not to come out unless there’s nobody home
when they come back you run to your room/safe place
you’re nervous and anxious if you have to spend time in presence of others
you try to get away from your home, you wish you could live somewhere else
your self-confidence is very low
you worry about making too much noise (have a feeling you’ll get yellet at
or abused for it)
you try to move around as silently as possible and try to not be noticed by
anyone
you feel uncomfortable and uneasy sitting at the same table as rest of
family/housemates
you don’t feel like you belong here
you feel like a burden to your housemates
you don’t feel like you’re worth having around or supporting in any way
you don’t feel like anyone will ever love you or believe in you
you don’t feel like anything you do is good enough
you can’t stand someone watching you do things like cleaning or anything
else you need to get done
you try really hard to still find good points about your life and cling to
them
you strongly worry that you are somehow worse than anyone else
you feel like you’re behind on everyone and that you’re failing to live
your life properly
you don’t feel like anything would have changed if you died, or even that
it would be better if you did
if you’re experiencing most of this, you’re going through abuse. Your value
isn’t in any way less than other humans, and you are absolutely not any kind of
burden. You are human who is forced to live in a way humans aren’t meant to
live. You are in living conditions that disable you from feeling happy,
fulfilled, or even seeing yourself as a human being. You are suffering. What is being done to you
is not okay. You deserve better than this.
A few I’d like to add
Intense paranoia when someone is looking over your shoulder while you using your phone/PC
Being startled by a knock on the door
Anxiety from receiving texts/phone calls from your house mates
Feeling that expressing your true thoughts will be invalidated
Abusive parents constantly undermining your accomplishments until you no longer believe in yourself is such a specific and insane experience. You’re going thru life and you’re doing what you’re supposed to do, you work hard, you try to do your best and get acknowledged for at least something, and it’s already hard because your confidence is awful and you don’t feel yourself able of much, but then you do something for what everyone else is celebrated for! You win an award, or you finish school, or you win a contest, or you gain a title, or you learn to drive a car, you get thru a difficult course, you start creating something people like and admire, you get a job, you manage to get something done despite huge obstacles and low resources, you get thru exams even tho you’re all sick and stressed, you actually manage to do all the things your parents were telling you from the day one you wouldn’t be able to do, and then what happens?
Nothing. Your parents skim across it as if it was nothing. They refuse to pay attention to it at all, and act like it didn’t even happen. Or even worse, they immediately create a diversion, some family drama or start celebrating some dumb accomplishment of their own to make it all about them, and completely bury anything you’ve done. If you dare remind them that they acted like you could never do it, they act like you still didn’t do it, you just got lucky, it must have not been hard at all if even “you” have managed to get it done. You see your friends, other people you know, being congratulated, being thrown parties, given presents, patted on the back, being told they’ll go far and accomplish much, them getting it done is a Big Deal! But why not you? How come when you do it, it suddenly doesn’t count? How come when someone else finishes school or a difficult course they’re being regarded as smart and capable, but you’re still proclaimed dumb and incapable of anything? What it is about you that makes even your accomplishment invisible, unworthy of attention of praise, unable to reclaim you from the supposed dumbness and incapability you’re always accused of? What are you supposed to do then, to no longer be stupid and inadequate? And you chase bigger things, bigger accomplishments, maybe if you’re the best, the best of everyone, they’ll be forced to acknowledge you, they wont be able to pretend anymore that you’re nothing. But no matter what you do, it’s just snorted upon, and you’re brutally reminded how you’re nothing, how you wouldn’t even be able to live if your parents didn’t feed you. As if everyone else wasn’t fed by their parents.
This pushes you either into insane perfectionism and feeling like nothing you do is ever good enough, or into helplessness, no longer wanting to even try anything because it’s painful, and scary to do so much and still not move from one spot. You end up believing what they tell you, that it’s impossible to redeem yourself, that nothing you could do could make you not dumb, not incapable, not unworthy of praise.
It’s infuriating because the reason parents do this is nowhere near “trying to help you be better” or “because they know you the best and can tell you the truth about you”, most often it’s precisely to put you in the state of helplesness so you would stay dependent on them! They want you in the state of belief that there’s nothing you can do right, and that you’re only alive because of them, and cannot survive on your own, because then they can control you and blackmail you with your life on line! And there’s two more reasons and they’re disgusting, the first is jealousy, abusive parents are actively jealous if their child manages to succeed where they couldn’t! They will readily bury and humiliate a child just to feel better about their own capabilities, to convince themselves that they’re still better, superior, that their accomplishments count more than children’s ever will, they do it to reassure themselves that the child is dumb compared to them, when the reality is everything but.
And the last reason is, to push the child so far into achievement it destroys the child, but then they can take credit. They can brag to everyone how their child’s incredible results are of parent’s making! They get to act like they’re amazing parents and that’s why their child is achieving high results! If they can, they will even make money and gain fame from a talented child, and if they can’t, then the talent is worthless and should be repressed and insulted for not bringing anything to them.
Your parents lied. Even they know your accomplishments aren’t nothing. If they were nothing, they would never be a threat to them. They would never have to talk them down. They would never try to take credit. They would never spend time convincing you that you’re dumb or inadequate. They would never have to convince you that you cannot live independently. They would never feel the need to out-shine you or to make it all about themselves. Their actions show they knew. They consciously tried to keep you down, not because you were down, but because you were going up. And they didn’t like that.
Even as I write this, I know it wont make it better, not until you get proper acknowledgment, credit, congratulations and praise from people you believe in, you wont be able to believe in yourself. We are social creatures who need social feedback to believe in ourselves. We should get it. And those who deny it to us do not want us good things.
Oh and don’t let me started on abusive parents timing their outbursts and tantrums to the exact timing when you’re trying to finish something stressful on a deadline / studying for exams / working on an important project to make sure you’re no fit state to finish it, and then using it as a proof that you’re inadequate and a failure. One of their long-term tactics is to make you mentally ill and sick with trauma to the point where you are no longer functional, and then using that against you, to imply they’ve been right about you entire time, even though you could have been doing any job in the world if they had just left you well alone. If you were incapable and inadequate, they would never have to sabotage or traumatize you to make a point out of it, they would never have to spend a second making sure you don’t get anything done. And even if you really weren’t capable of surviving in the world, it would be their fucking job to help you and make your life worth living, not rubbing everything you’re struggling with in your face and using it for blackmail.
Admitting you were abused is hard for whole multitude of reasons, but one that hit me most was the fact that I had to admit to myself that abusers have managed to really, really hurt me. Really badly. That all their efforts to get to me, to make me doubt myself, to make me hate myself, were successful, no matter how much I fought, and pretended not to be hit by it all. I didn’t manage to defend myself. I didn’t beat them. I got hurt. I couldn’t get out of there. I couldn’t get away from them. I continued to get hurt. For a long long time. I was at their mercy. They could have done anything to me. They did anything to me. Nobody stopped them. Nobody fought for me. Despite all my efforts to keep myself sane, to keep myself okay, I am filled with wounds and trauma and damage too vast to even asses. They got what they wanted. And I lost big parts of myself to it. I’ve been lying to myself when I tried to be okay. I wasn’t okay. I needed help. I wasn’t unbeatable. I wasn’t quite that strong. Humans aren’t made to be that strong. Humans aren’t made to survive in environment where they’re tortured and abandoned completely. I wasn’t made to withstand that either. I got broken. I lived in an illusion that this was okay. It wasn’t. I was scared. I was alone. I thought it was my fault. I could have died. It’s a miracle I’m still around.
