Mary Anns Journal

[Mary Ann]

So, my kids are teenagers, and the oldest is on the autism spectrum.
He's leaving the local school this summer, which is only round the corner from our house (we live in a very small town) and he will be going to college in the next town over.
Because he has special needs, I spend a lot of time trying to teach him the things that my other child just seems ok with doing, automatically.
So stuff like catching busses, speaking on the phone, buying things in shops, it all needs to be taught purposefully  like learning a new language.
He's doing really well with these life skills, making some progress and I'm so proud of my kids.
I find it hard though, because social skills were something I just didn't have as a youngster.
Independence outside the home just wasn't encouraged in my family.
I left school at sixteen, in the grip of an eating disorder, crippled with depression and anxiety, and unable to even maintain eye contact with others.
The eating disorder wasn't all about me being thin, it was more that I didn't want to be alive, but wasn't brave enough to do anything about it.
I hadn't been taught about personal hygiene, and so I was dirty, wearing mens clothes, or old lady ones my Mother got from boot sales or charity shops.
I'd been badly bullied at school and the hygiene really didn't help.
My school trousers were mens, and when I got my period, the seat on those black trousers were stiff and shiny because I'd bleed on them but dry them overnight to wear next day and the next, till they stank. I felt ashamed of myself and dirty, but somehow I didn't make the connection between bathing more or washing my clothes!
Once I left school, I was stuck at home a lot with my controlling, abusive Mother.
I tried to work, but I was consumed by anxiety and the women I worked with looked down on me.
The manager would watch me work, and call me pathetic, and painful, (pretty much confirmed what I learned from my Mother)
The eating disorder was really making me Ill, and I left the job.
Trouble is, I was trapped with my Mother all the time then, with absolutely no way out, no friends, nothing.
She would speak to complete strangers, telling them embarrassing private things like I wasn't there.
She'd tell people how little I'd earned and that she kept me.
My days were spent working in the house with her, cleaning and cooking but only ever feet away from her. If she stood up to do a job like hang washing, then I had to do the same job also, not a different one...but that...alongside her.
When she sat to rest and watch tv, I had to sit next to her as well. When she lay on the sofa for a nap, I would lie on the floor in the same room.
She needed constant company, so if I wanted to spend time alone in my room away from her, she would be very very angry with me, and say I was a *.
It wasn't like my room was private, it had no door anyway, and she would come in to rummage or throw things out, especially while I'd still been in school, or just walk in anytime she liked.
I wasn't allowed to catch a bus, or go to places without her, though to be fair my social anxiety was so bad I couldn't buy a bar of chocolate in a shop without shaking and sweating.
At a time when you are supposed to be learning more independence, finding your own preferences and making friends, I was completely trapped...More dependant, not less.
My Mother told her friends she'd got me some 'help', because people outside the family were saying I was depressed, but she never did.
She wouldn't admit I had any kind of mental health problems at all.
Looking back, all the anxiety and depression was because of emotional and sexual abuse I'd experienced.
Why am I writing this?
Because it's hard to teach my son independence when I wasn't allowed to be a teenager myself.
I was never a child...I certainly wasn't a teenager.
Things like public transport, and banks, or coffee shops terrify me even now.
Every time my teenage daughter picks out an outfit or wears make up, I'm both triggered and proud.
Because she's a teenager, with school friends, and music and art.
Trying to help my son be less anxious about the future, and life skills is uncomfortable, because where it comes to this stuff, I feel like a frightened kid myself, but I'm proud of him.
Writing on a forum is a whole new thing for me.

[Not Alone]

Mary Ann, I felt sad about how you were treated and what you went through. I felt sick to read how controlling your mom was.

[Armee]

Oh my gosh my heart is just breaking for you. It really struck me what you said about connecting so tentatively your anxiety and depression to the abuse you suffered. I wish you had been supported, loved, taught and had been given freedom to be your own person.

You sound like an absolutely amazing mom. It is unfair you were not given this guidance when you needed it but it's such a beautiful thing to be able to break this cycle and give our kids better. That alone is what has given me the courage to seek help. Just wanting to be a really good mom for my kids.

You deserve to heal for you, too, though. Just for you.

Welcome!

[dollyvee]

Hi Mary Ann,

Welcome to the forum  Thank you for sharing, I really resonated with what you wrote and I'm sorry you had to go through that. Your mom had no right to treat you like that and it sounds like she had severe underlying issues going on. How great it is to read though that you're there for your kids and celebrating their achievements in doing things for themselves. It must have taken a lot of strength to go through what you did and come out how you did.

Hope you find the healing you need here,
dolly

[Mary Ann]

Thank you all so much for your kind words.
This really feels like a new chapter for me, and I'm really glad I found this forum.

[Mary Ann]

I really wish I could properly explain what my family was like.
It's like I want to tell people, but even with my T ...it's like I don't have the right words, and it's beyond me to explain, or suddenly my head is empty or my words are young and inadequate...it's so stupid.
But that's the hard part about complex trauma, it's just so flipping complicated, and if you were talking to someone and they said describe your childhood in a couple of sentences, it's just impossible.
I feel guilty about writing about my Mother, because she wasn't evil, or a monster....she definitely had an undiagnosed personality disorder I'd say. I think the worst thing with her was she was so very self centred, everything was definitely about her.
She was the only one allowed to have feelings in the family, she could behave as badly as she liked, and everyone  trod on eggshells to avoid her moods.
Yet my Father coddled and accommodated her like she was a child, and she was oddly childlike...but not in a good way. Rather like a little kid, peevish, indulged and with all the absolute power in the house.
   When I was small my older sister moved away. This was bad news for me, as she was now I'd say my attachment figure, because she was almost twenty years older and my Mother who couldn't be bothered with me left me to her care a lot of the time.
She shouldn't have had to look after a kid, and she was resentful towards me, this often made her quiet cruel and abusive  looking back...but she did at least make sure I ate meals, things like that.
Anyway, when she left, my Mother passed me round to be looked after to just about anyone, whether I was ok with them or not.
She didn't insist I ate proper meals, and let me have any cake or junk I wanted instead because parenting was just too much like work I think.
While she dressed me like a doll, in silly expensive, fussy dresses, my Mother never went so far as to make sure I cleaned my teeth.
So on a diet of cheap shop bought cake, sweets and the occasional apple, and no brushing , my teeth suffered.
I was less than seven when I was taken to the local dentist and needed a couple of fillings.
The dentist said because they were baby teeth, they didn't have nerves and so didn't need any anaesthetic.
I'm writing this as an example of a selfish parent.
So I remember this day, because my Mother was having a great time, chatting away to the nurse, and flirting with the young dentist, and no one noticed that it was hurting me.
Baby teeth or not I could still feel it!
On the way home she admonished me sternly to look after my teeth from now on.
I think this was perhaps common at the time, but she never really took much notice of my distress, certainly not if she was having a nice time.
I hope it's ok for me to write stuff like this on here?
I don't suppose that's much like a 'recovery journal' is it?
The thing is my head feels like it's an anthology of disconnected separate stories, except it's not stories, it's my life, and I'm both scared and want to write about it.
I've spent most of my life crippled by depression and anxiety....it's an absolute monster.
Now I've recently started taking medication I'm hoping I can engage better in therapy, write about/think about/process stuff without the huge level of distress that comes with it.
I wonder why I want to write about it all so much? Sometimes wonder if it's self indulgent, like I'm wallowing in the past? I've spent the first two decades of my life not allowed to acknowledge the abuse, and not allowed to have feelings, and the second two has been given up to flashbacks and constant intrusive memories, and I still didn't talk!
It's only in the past few years I started to seek help.
It's only in the past few years I actually made any  friends, because I wasn't able to till then.
Having friends doesn't feel safe, talking to them about personal stuff doesn't feel safe, but I'm slowly learning. I'm learning stuff as a middle aged woman that my daughter knew at ten!
But I am learning.

[Bach]

Mary Ann, writing about it IS a recovery journal.  It's so important to give voice to these things that have been trapped inside for all these years.

We here all understand, and believe you, and care.  A recovery journal is your space to write about everything you feel a need to express.  This forum is a good place.  I hope that you will feel safe here, and supported. 

[Not Alone]

Mary Ann, writing about it IS a recovery journal.  It's so important to give voice to these things that have been trapped inside for all these years.

We here all understand, and believe you, and care.  A recovery journal is your space to write about everything you feel a need to express.  This forum is a good place.  I hope that you will feel safe here, and supported.

I read what you shared and I hear you, Mary Ann.

[Armee]

It is really important to write and share in ways that feel safe, as part of recovery. Sometimes it helps to read what others have gone through because I recognize in their stories such clear examples of abuse and trauma and my heart just breaks for them, and then I realize: Oh they are describing what happened to me, too, what I have brushed off as being no big deal.

Other times when I share something that I've forced myself to think of as no big deal and people who I know have gone through so much trauma react with strong emotions about what happened to me....it is 100 times more validating than anything a therapist could say to me. I can see: I'm not bad and stupid to be affected by this. And that is healing. Brushing stuff under a rug is not healing. Whatever you write here is for yourself but it also helps any of us who read it, too.

I completely completely relate to what you say about not even being able to talk about or describe or explain what happened. It is very confusing and difficult  and any single example just doesn't really explain what happened and feels so small compared to the whole picture, which just can't be expressed. I once brought my sister to therapy after I had been with my therapist for about a year and a half. I hadn't been able to explain to him what my childhood was like because it was just too confusing and because my memory is so poor. My sister was able to give him an excellent understanding of what things were like. In that 50 minutes he learned more about me and my childhood from her than he has ever heard from me, simply because I just cannot put it into words or remember any details or trust myself enough.  And I always had the same protection as you...always reminding myself before speaking up that my mom wasn't evil and wasn't trying to hurt us she was just really mentally ill.

But your mom was abusive and neglectful. You are not wrong about that. Whether she meant to be or not doesn't make it OK.

[CactusFlower]

You are not alone in having early bad dentist experiences. I was a military dependent and I used to think that any dentist in the military was because they were so bad they couldn't make it in the "real" world. But I'm sorry you went to one that was so... Wow.  ALL teeth have nerve endings. And for them to ignore your pain levels as well... I'm sorry you had to go through that.   

[Mary Ann]

Thank you for reading,
When I read back ...the dentist drilling teeth sounds a bit unbelievable...far fetched, but I remember it vividly. I was doubting myself until my husband told me he had gone to the same dentist as a child.
He had a similar experience, the dentist extracted a baby tooth with no pain relief, the tooth was chipped, but wasn't loose or wobbly so it would've obviously hurt!

[Mary Ann]

So, when I was a child, there was an odd dynamic in my family.
My siblings were in their late teens when I was born, and for long periods of time I was left to the care of my grown up big sister.
My sister was resentful of this, but it was almost like she had a point to prove, she wanted to do things better than my Mother, who she felt was quite permissive with me.
And while my Mother was unstable, and either volatile, or wouldn't put any effort into looking after me, my sister made a point of being firm.
Only her 'firm' was really quite forceful....that's the only way I can describe her.
My sister would often say that my parents shouldn't have had me, that they were too old to have another child, and because my parents were old I wasn't a 'real child'.
She said that's partly why I was bullied so badly at school, the other children could see right through me...that I wasn't normal.
So to make me more like a 'real child " she would often engage in a weird kind of roughhousing, knocking me down, shoving and name calling just out of the blue, totally unexpectedly.
Which if she'd been ten and I'd been eight, would perhaps have been ok, but she was in her mid twenties when I was eight.
She was totally a mother figure, with complete authority, and was the person who made me eat meals and have a bath, or learn my multiplication tables for school (so in this she was better than my Mother)
When I say she was forceful, it was like once she got an idea into her head, there was no changing her mind.
One day, she was sat cracking her knuckles, and she was in a funny mood.
I wandered in and said I wished I could make that noise with my fingers ( I didn't know small kids generally don't)
So she said 'do you want to.....' and she grabbed my wrists forcing my fingers back till the knuckles crunched. I cried and cried because it hurt, but she wouldn't let go of my wrist.
She wouldn't let go till she'd done the same to both hands, and all she'd say was 'it doesn't hurt!....and you wanted to do it'
In the kitchen, she dared me to suck a soaking wet teabag, and because I wouldn't, she held my head in a headlock and forced it in my mouth.... The same with neat lemon juice mixed with water, which was sour but she insisted I'd wanted lemonade, and that's what it was, so she pushed the glass into my mouth and held my nose till I had some.
If she was set on doing something, there was absolutely no way out of it ...at least not for me.
But she was also much better than my Mother, or at least she felt safer, even despite all this.
I absolutely hero worshiped her, and tried my hardest to be like her...I'd have jumped through hoops for her to say 'good girl'
But this business of me not being a 'real child', was really rather damaging looking back.
The bad thing was our Mother was very jealous of my sister.
While she couldn't be bothered looking after me herself while I was small, she resented that I had a relationship with my sister.
So occasionally, I'd be woken up in the night.
One time, my Mother came in while I was fast asleep, and she pulled me upright, she held my arms and was crying and wailing.
She asked me 'who do you love most...me...or HER?'
I tried to say I loved them both, and she was really crying...bawling her head off!
She wouldn't accept this, she insisted I had to choose....who I loved most?
I remember her crying angrily, shaking me by the arms and slapping me round the head, but I don't remember much else of this occasion.
This jealousy was awful..but un acknowledged...and at the same time, my parents both insisted that my sister was jealous of me...
Such a weird dynamic!
My Mother would get angry over things like if I hadn't put some clothes away.
I remember once she came in and started throwing the clothes round my room, slamming wardrobe doors, hurling things into drawers.
I lay in bed with my eyes screwed tight shut pretending to be asleep, stiff as a board.
She pulled me out of bed and started crying and wailing into my hair, and tried to make me put my arms round her to hug her...but I was stiff...I couldn't bend.
She was just bawling 'put your arms round me', and she was shaking me, but I don't remember how that night ended, but I did remember the next day.
I walked home from school, praying that she'd be in a good mood....
And when I got in, she gave me a funny smile and told me she'd left me a surprise in my bedroom!
I was so happy, I thought she must be in a good mood...if she's left me a present!
When I got in my room, I looked up and saw her surprise...
She'd written on the wallpaper that I 'was a dirty pig and lived in a filthy sty.'
It was in pen, so there was no way I could wash it off....
When I went downstairs she said 'well......' like she wanted me to react in some way, but I didn't know what to do...I covered the writing up with a couple of posters, and worried if that might make her angrier....
But really, who writes on a little kids wall?
I never really felt I loved my Mother...I was just wary of her, but I did love my sister.
And that's such a weird PUSH/PULL ...loving a person and being scared of them at the same time.
We shouldn't have to be scared of the people we love.

[Armee]

No child should have been treated like that, Maryann. What both of them did was horribly abusive and sick. I can see why your sister saying you were not normal and the other kids could see that would be such a damaging thing to be told. She was wrong. And your mom was very very mentally ill and that does not excuse what she did at all.

I want to reassure you in case there are doubts in the back of your mind anywhere:

1. It wasn't ok

2. It was abuse

3. You broke the cycle

4. It is ok to not love your mom (or your sister, though I hear you, that you did and that made it all the worse).

5. It is ok to hate them, if you do.

I did not love my mom and she was not nearly as abusive and neglectful as yours. I hated her. A couple times my therapist tried to tell me I could love my mom but not like her and I had to be very clear that I did not love her. All I ever wanted was to get away from her.

[dollyvee]

Hi Mary Ann,

I wanted to say that I too have problems writing things out and getting them down. I think when I begin to write sometimes, it's like my brain automatically distorts it as a way of editing what is coming up; that it's so conditioned to see or think of things in a certain way.

I second what Armee said about your family being abusive and wanted to send you a hug if that's ok  When we're that age and experiencing things like that, I think we will always look for the good in people as a way to make sense of a situation that doesn't make any sense to us, or to most people. The jealousy, blaming, childlike etc sounds like narcissistic abuse although I'm not an expert, just my own experiences and am wondering if your t has mentioned that? Sometimes it's easier to look at the behaviour when we understand what was driving it.

Thank you for sharing with us,
dolly

[MaryAnn]

Yes, I know what you mean...it is easier to understand the behaviour when you see what's underneath it.
I think my Mother had bpd, undiagnosed obviously, though she often told everyone how depressed and anxious she was, she never sought treatment or therapy and she certainly never took any responsibility for her own behaviour, however bad that was.
She would happily tell people about her 'nervous breakdown', and if she did allude to her behaviour being off because of it, she always blamed the menopause for this. (It must've been a seventy year menopause!)
My Dad I think was quietly narcissistic in his way, because he had this attitude of being better than other people, even though there was no basis for it. He would often talk about 'the art of one upmanship'...which was ridiculous to me even as a kid. Looking back he had very poor social skills...absolutely no idea really.
While he was ok to me, because I was his sort of little friend/mascot, I entertained him ...he was awful to my older siblings, especially my sister. He would never ever intervene or even admit that our mother's behaviour was wrong though. Both my parents had sad, abusive, abandoning childhoods themselves.
In particular my Mothers neglect left me really vulnerable to all types of abuse from other people inside the family and out.
When I write stuff, there's always this thing....I tend to forget what I wrote and become repetitive...and it's embarrassing.
But stuff does get repetitive...I once spent time writing a kind of biography (sorta therapeutic)...and even I got fed up, with it....I could've just said 'more of the same'...either that or I could've invented some nicer more interesting stuff!
It's so nice to be able to talk about stuff though, and read other peoples experiences.
I'm really grateful for that.