"Just" emotional abuse

[spryte]

Not much that I can add here. It really still amazes me how...no matter what the abuse, we all still end up in the same place. The emotional abuse though...I've been dealing with lot of anger and feelings of injustice around the fact that it's so ignored, so downplayed. How easily they get away with it. Especially the cases where PD's come into play.

And it's funny, last night I was watching an episode of Son's of Anarchy...and after all I've recently learned about PD's, I'm seeing all a lot of BPD traits in the Gemma character. And it made me wonder how many other characters on TV "normalize" that kind of behavior.

Anyway, what I did want to post was something interesting that I came across recently about CEN or Childhood Emotional Neglect. The way this woman puts it, there is a difference between neglect and abuse. Those who were abused were absolutely neglected, because they're mutually exclusive states...but not all neglected children were abused. She explains more on her website. I haven't checked out her book yet.

http://www.emotionalneglect.com/

[spryte]

Oh, Rain, I did want to say though that with the physical manifestations of all of this stuffed emotional "stuff", I think it's different for everyone. I think it's really a normal extension of all this for a lot of us to be disconnected from our bodies. There are so many ways for that to happen. The numbing, the discounting and doubting of our own experiences - for me, and I don't know if similar things are common for men...but serious body image issues - ignoring my body or downright hating on my body because my mother used to criticize it when I was a teen - and then later...trading sex for "love" which created a really unhealthy relationship with sex...my body used as a tool, mind completely disconnected from it...on and on.

My body and I aren't "friends", we're working on it though.

But, the day that I found this board and started reading...I had an interesting reaction to it that it took me a bit to figure out. Real high anxiety...and a stomach ache. For as much work as I've done on myself, it's been a long time since I've been able to talk about my experiences with any kind of emotion...and I've been doing a lot of talking lately. I think that was my body telling me that I was having Feels about what I was reading and talking about. I seriously had to meditate, and "talk" to my stomach, sending it messages that I was "safe" before it went away. By the time I was done, I was definitely getting "inner child" kinds of images...so, all of it definitely sparked some "not safe" feelings that I'm not sure I've ever had...or haven't had in a long time. Sucky, but definitely progress for me.

[spryte]

I think maybe I didn't explain it right. She does consider neglect to be abuse. She is just making a distinction I think between the two. She began talking about and studying neglect abuse because people kept lumping them all together...what she was saying was that they are different, have different symptoms and that neglect abuse is always present with physical/emotional abuse...(specific - I can't remember how she put it but like...active? abuse? but that even if there wasn't specific active abuse present, that neglect was an abuse all on it's own. You can check out some articles that she's written about it on psych central.

[spryte]

Rain - well, I would be interested to see what you think about it once you read any of it. I'm always interested in talking about that stuff. And it's so interesting to me that there really are two different fronts that it needs to be addressed from. Healing from what was DONE to us (active abuse), and filling the void/hole from what WASN'T done to us (neglect abuse). It's the second one that I feel like I suffered with for so long without knowing what it was. Carrying this ache around my heart that felt like such a sucking wound. There have been a lot of behavioral things that I have been able to fix on my own...the co-dependency, my attachment style, learning boundaries...but that damn hole....it was always the neglect and I didn't realize it. I spent YEARS...*, my whole life doing things to fill that hole, without success. And now it feels like THOSE are the behaviors that I'm having to root through and disconnect. Unhealthy relationships to food, my escapist activities, relationships with other people...and heal what I had come to believe which was that that hole was never going to go away, and that I was irrevocably broken...that I would carry that pain with me until I died. When I become depressed, that was where that depression welled from. When I became so horribly addicted to a person and couldn't get my "fix" that's where the pain centered.

Since realizing that, and doing my own work with self-care, nurturing myself, self-soothing, getting to know myself - make friends with myself...that hole has noticeably shrunk. I was a little shocked actually, I did not expect that.

"I'm sorry what you have gone through, spryte ...the trading sex for "love" ....my heart hearts for the pain in your Journey."

Thank you. I'm still sad for that girl, and for how my relationship with sex is still being affected. It impacts my relationship, although we've found ways around it. That is very slow healing. Much as I am so very impatient with all of this...want to just...dive into all of it, rip it all out of me, I am only now coming to learn that I can't handle it all at once. I can only handle tiny little bites. And that might be what's been holding up my progress all along...trying to take on too much at once. Overwhelming myself, and shutting down. Just now noticing that. 

I like your ideas for how you've been reconnecting with your body. I've been having "conversations" with lots of different body parts. I have had SO MANY health problems these last 10 years, and I'm convinced that it all started with this buried stuff. I  may have specific physiological issues now, but I know they all started with my emotions...so, I have actually felt like I've been at war with my body for a long time. I realized at the beginning of the year that my poor body has actually been in an abusive relationship with my mind for...well, for ever. I'm cultivating compassion for it, asking it for forgiveness, and trying to rebuild trust. It isn't easy. Especially when I turn around and do things like escape into unhealthy food.

[bee]

Rain- this helped me so much just now.

I read two of the Peter Levine books, like Waking the Tiger.   It took a while, but I finally got his point on the HUGE importance of our bodies in emotional healing.   The stuffed emotions have a ton to do with our bodies.  So, I have been doing a ton of the physical nurturing that I did NOT receive as a child.   Self-hugging, patting the knee for reassurance, doing "high fives" with one hand to the other hand when I did get something cool done in the day ...celebrating my Adult Self with my Child Self.   Letting the trembling happen ...when "micro movements" happen in my body, I now do them slowly and to completion.

I've read one of Peter Levine's books, and it was an eye opener. I borrowed it from the library, but plan on getting my own copy, as it deserves a re-read with highlighting. I do see how reconnecting with our bodies is essential to the healing process. What I bolded in your post is what I had not understood before.

I've always described my family as "we're not huggers." Read that with a heaping pile of mid-western terseness/stoicism/dry wit. I've made great strides in getting more comfortable with touch, but even with that I still get tense when meeting someone and they do a small hug. I never received any physical nurturing of my emotions. So much so, that it is completely foreign to me. I didn't know to try these things, because they were not part of my world. When I read your post I felt a deep yearning. I went and got a warm cup of tea and gave it to my inner child to hold. It was wonderful. I see how physically connecting with a child, can connect the body to the emotion. A warm soft touch when sad. An exuberant high five when happy. A comforting hug when scared, maybe rocking in a rocking chair(I had to look up that one). The touch validates the feeling, and helps us to feel it in our body.

Thank you Rain.

[Rain]

Like you said bee, "The touch validates the feeling, and helps us to feel it in our body."  I love your phrase.

[Milarepa]

I vibe with so much of what is being said here. It is incredibly easy to minimize one's abuse / neglect because it didn't take physical form.

I'll never forget a recent conversation with my father. He was going on about some friends of mine who had chosen to give their baby daughter a whimsical name; he said that it was the adult's responsibility to name their child something that wouldn't get them teased on the playground.

I pointed out to him that (TRIGGER WARNING) through all ten years that I was in a school where I was being bullied ceaselessly by my classmates, he and my mother took no effective action to make it stop.

He asked me why I couldn't just get over my childhood, since "you weren't beaten or abused," and why I couldn't balance his slip-ups with his many kindnesses. It's amazing to have your own parents so casually invalidate years of emotional abuse and neglect just because they left no physical scars.

I'm past the point where I'm looking for awareness, acknowledgement, or apology from my parents (though my father has been able to partially do this, bless him), but it's still jarring to experience the total invalidation this way.

Rain, your abuse experience was totally valid and so is mine.  (if wanted)

[Rain]

Hi Milarepa ...thank you for the  ....and here is one in return 

I enjoy your writing.   Your father actually meant that you were not physically beaten or abused.  But, he was wrong.   You were emotionally abused, and your parents leaving you for 10 years of being physically and emotionally hit and taunted at school IS the parents abusing you.

Here is an analogy of what I mean.   If I take my pet to a vet where I know they hit animals, then I am just as responsible for hitting my pet as the people at the vet's office.    I would be paying people to hit my animal.    Of course, my vet does NOT hit my pets!

My parents left me in a school for many years where they knew I was hit daily, burned, taunted.  My parents are guilty of physically abusing me for knowingly leaving me in that situation.

Emotional abuse is violence towards a child that leaves an invisble scar ...it is the lifelong wound under and beyond physical and sexual abuse as well.

I'm glad your father somewhat apologized, but he clearly does not understand the depth of the harmful parenting they delivered.   He just says that classic, "can't you just get over it" bit ...like there is something wrong with you.

Can you imagine going to work, getting abused like this at work, as we were at home and at school, and people just saying, "get over it, what's your problem"?

Hugs instead of Hits.   

[Milarepa]

You were emotionally abused, and your parents leaving you for 10 years of being physically and emotionally hit and taunted at school IS the parents abusing you.

Here is an analogy of what I mean.   If I take my pet to a vet where I know they hit animals, then I am just as responsible for hitting my pet as the people at the vet's office.    I would be paying people to hit my animal.    Of course, my vet does NOT hit my pets!

My parents left me in a school for many years where they knew I was hit daily, burned, taunted.  My parents are guilty of physically abusing me for knowingly leaving me in that situation.

I am so sorry that happened to you too, Rain.

What is the actual deal with CPTSD engendering parents leaving us at the mercy of school bullies? It's like you said about the hypothetical Veterinarian from *; they were outsourcing their dirty work.

At one point, my mother told me, "just keep your head down for a couple of years" and the bullying would stop. The problem was that I was incapable of keeping my head down. I was the kid who would play "Opera House" at morning recess, bursting into "O Mio Babbino Caro" on top of the Big Toy while the other kids were busy playing freeze tag. I used to wear my Starfleet uniform to school one day, and then a black velvet dress with zebra print tights and a velvet top hat with a rose in it the next.

Head down? Not happening. 

Even now, my inner critic likes to point out that of course I was bullied with behavior like that. I was practically asking for it...

What. The Actual. F***?   

I wonder who else on this list has that experience of having parents do nothing (nothing effective, anyway) to protect you from school bullies and then re-enforcing the bullies' message that you deserved it or that there was something wrong with you.

Can you imagine going to work, getting abused like this at work, as we were at home and at school, and people just saying, "get over it, what's your problem"?

I love this analogy. It's astonishing what we expect small children to put up with that we wouldn't inflict on grown adults...

[schrödinger's cat]

Hm, my mother simply told me to grow a thicker skin. She said it's just kids being kids. She told me to do the mature thing and change my own behaviour instead of being so childish as to go "the others did this, the others did that, those evil evil others".

When my own kid was bullied, I called her teacher straight away. The teacher stopped it the morning after that. My kid wasn't bullied again.

That floored me. I had expected every single case of bullying to be impossible to end. I had excused my parents' behaviour: "there's simply nothing they could have done." Not any more.

What hurt me the most back then, I think, wasn't so much the emotional abuse at school - it was that my mother just shrugged me off, that she seemed to think it was my fault. I felt completely abandoned.

To end on a less gloomy note - it's improved my own parenting skills, because I'm now convinced that the most important thing I can do for my kids is to be on their side, and to make sure they know that I really see them. Less knee-jerk responses, more active listening. It's devastatingly easy to just slip into a routine with one's kids. So working through my past has made it a lot easier to remember to really pay attention.

Here's an article you might find interesting. It's about emotional neglect - very short, but illuminating.

I was the kid who would play "Opera House" at morning recess, bursting into "O Mio Babbino Caro" on top of the Big Toy while the other kids were busy playing freeze tag. I used to wear my Starfleet uniform to school one day, and then a black velvet dress with zebra print tights and a velvet top hat with a rose in it the next.

Head down? Not happening.

Perfect.