Florence

I feel this too. I was the family scapegoat and I'm in my thirties and only just starting to realize, internalize and understand that maybe I wasn't a "bad" kid, maybe I lived in a bad family system. It was brought home this past month when my sister and I got into a huge argument and she basically said outright that she liked being the golden child and that I was a crazy loser who should leave the family, even if my leaving the family would "break Mom's heart." (What?) I realized for the first time that she would do anything that would keep her at my parents' side, and I realized what my mom's manipulation and triangulation have done to damage my relationship with the family. Some recent conversations here on SR and really hammering it home -- I thought about it all last night.

One of the grossest things I discovered is that when my mom's emotional abuse of me was the worst, she turned my other family support away from me by telling them that I was a bad kid, that she couldn't parent me, and that it was all a mystery -- I was just inherently bad. The truth was that I was raped as a kid and she and my dad chose to deny me care for it and pretended that nothing happened. It began a downward spiral that lasted through my teen years, and ended when I got pregnant with my son at 18. I turned my life around, but no one trusted me or believed I could do well. They abandoned me financially, or held all their help and support over my head. My job was to graciously receive all their support as favors, and to scrape and bow in thanks. I was trained to accept crumbs and call them love. They accepted my son and rejected me. They stopped inviting me on family vacations, and left me out of gift exchanges, and then resented me for not participating. I also found out recently that that was also my mom's doing, and that my sisters were told I didn't want to participate.

This is the one real area I can't seem to get over, abandonment of children by their parents. Abandonment of me by my parents. You should see me get verklempt every time I read or see a story about children being saved and protected by adults. I regret all the time and energy spent trying to make them love me when they were not able or willing to see and accept me -- and all the time I spent sabotaging my own life when they didn't.

I don't have alcoholism in my immediate family, but there is a ton of untreated and/or under-treated mental illness in my family, including narcissism, anxiety, and depression. This, I think, more than anything, lead me to be the kind of person who was permissive about AH's alcohol abuse, willing to live in denial about friends and family members unacceptable behavior, and willing to blame myself as per their using manipulative emotional abuse. When I got serious about my AH's situation and committed to getting myself out, I also got very serious about treating my own depression and anxiety and becoming free of this abuse. I know my mental health has affected my children, especially my son, but I plan to do everything in my power to be the best parent I can be from today forward, to parent with transparency, to be honest and loving and kind, and to kill the dysfunctional methods of parenting that I inherited. I will no longer joke that "I'll pay for their therapy later." No more family secrets, no more kowtowing to family lies, no more angry outbursts because I'm parenting on an empty tank, no more ignoring my kids because I want to crawl in a hole and disappear. This is how it used to be when things were at their worst, but I don't want to live this way anymore, and I can't do that to my kids. This is how my childhood worked, and I don't want it to be this way for my children.