Aldebe,
I am sorry that you were treated so harshly when you deserved to be loved and protected.
My view of my childhood has changed drastically. I used to say that my parents loved me and that we were very very poor and that some bad things happened (dad drank, mom died etc.)
After about 4 years of psychotherapy I realize that I was abused. At first I ignored the psychologists when they told me that because I remember what my life was like and the psychologists weren't even there. But one peice at a time it begins to make sense. My parents allowed my sister to physically and psychologically abuse me because they felt helpless when they tried to stop her and they just gave up trying. In fact, letting her mistreat me meant that she would take out all her agression on me and then their lives were better - so they actually put her 'in charge of me'. Which means my abuser was given the right to mistreat me and they would not help.
I used to be amazed that my mother managed to survive her own childhood given the fact that both her parents hated her. And yet my mother was so often very loving. But now that I am focusing on finding out the truth, setting the record straight, I can see my mother did cause alot of emotional damage that destroyed my self esteem - and she just didn't know any other way to act. She was a wounded person herself and she did her very best.
I realize now that my father did not love her or us, and he was emotionally cruel.
Now this is so drastically different then how I used to feel! Sometimes I wonder which version of my past is right. But as I learn more, I realize that my parents were, at times when it was comfortable for them, loving. And other times, they really believed my feelings and needs were wrong and so they trained me to believe that my feelings and emotional needs did not matter (I was being selfish or weak) or that I was wrong about my own feelings (so they would insist that my feelings were very different than they were). So my whole family kept correcting me, telling me I was wrong about most of what I saw, thought, heard, or said so I really believed I was incredibly stupid and unable to be 'normal'.
To people old enough to be posting on this board - these issues probably seem fairly harmless. I say that because I keep going back over things in my mind and thinking that it doesn't seem that bad. It sounds like they disagreed with me and then I make a big deal out of it. But a young child looks to their parents to teach them about life, how to trust, how to handle their own emotions and how the child should feel about himself. So my parents accidentally taught me not to trust my own feelings, that my feelings are wrong/bad and that my beliefs and feelings make other people sad (cry etc.) and that I am not very loveable unless I make my own thoughts and feelings disappear and focus on how other people (theirs) and make them feel better, that I should be cheerful and grateful even when I am depressed, and that I jsut can't think.
Again this sounds mild, especially compared with more terrible physical abuse we read about in the newspapers but to a young child - this can be like a near death experience. A young child needs much more from parents. This behavior from my parents may be a big reason why my sister has BPD and NPD and it resulted in my having such low self esteem, strong feelings of hopelessness, and SA which I am just now beginning to recover from.
When I tell my psycholgist that my childhood just didn't seem 'that bad' because I wasn't set on fire and locked in a closet, she reminds me that though physical violence is horrific and damaging, it's the meaning behind the violence that hurts the child even more (every scar and bruise is brutal rejection), and therefore verbal abuse and emotional abuse are just as damaging because of the meaning behind the words and deds. Two books that help me begin to see the 'invisible' problems in my childhood were
Boundaries: Where You Begin and I End written by Anne Katherine and
Prisoners of Childhood By Alice Miller
These two books help me see the part of my childhood that seemed pretty good actually was missing things that children need to have to feel secure and have a good self esteem. My family tried to erase parts of my mind and person that made them uncomfortable and they almost suceeded in erasing me completely. The part where I was physically abused was obviously bad for any child but it took me a few years to figure out that my parents let it happen and that when I was young, I believed that the let me be punched and hit because I wasn't worth protecting.
It is possible to heal - I just wish that you weren't hurt in the first place.