Iwanttoheal

This is my first post on this forum.

Hello everyone

I had a lightbulb moment yesterday

I am an adult child of an alcoholic and I want to heal.

I'm 44 years old, I'm halfway through my life and I don't want to be an abused child any longer. There I can say it, I was an emotionally abused child who was neglected. Amongst other things, my parents let me sleep in a room that rats could get into (why is that thought haunting me now, is it because I am finally strong enough to deal with it). My brother was also physically abused. We can be thankful that neither of us were sexually abused.

My dad was an alcoholic. He died 20 years ago, his legacy lives on.

My mother was and still is a codependent and an enabler.

My role in the family was hero and caretaker.

My brother's role in the family was scapegoat.

I have a caring husband whose father was also an alcoholic. I have two wonderful teenage children of my own. I have a wonderful, deep, caring, abiding love for my husband and my two children.

I do not love my mother or my brother - there I said it. They do not love me - there I also said that. We exist in an unhealthy relationship. We are an unhealthy trio who are somehow immersed in and bound together by our past.

I am in the process of walking away (I'm not there yet) and in doing so I want to excerise some of my demons. What do I get out of my sick role with these two people. I am their caretaker, their fixer-upper. I do not enjoy this role, I resent it, I run away from it when I can. So, why do I do it? I have some warped sense of responsibility to these two people. I am NOT their parent, I am their daughter and sister. Why do they put me in the role of parent and why do I accept the role? What do I get out of it?

I hope that you will join me on my journey for answers. I want to heal that abused, neglected child who used to go to sleep petrified, listening to the sounds of rats. I want to still the voice of my mother in my head telling me not to be so melodramatic, that things weren't so bad. I used to believe her but no more - she still has the power to make me doubt though.

I'll stop now before I start to ramble on and look forward to making and reading many more posts.

GiveLove

Hello iwanttoheal,

You are amazing! Thanks for sharing your lightbulb moments, and for the courage that it took to post that.

I had a very similar upbringing - we have quite a lot in common in fact. I am 47 and am still on the road to healing. My father died 15 years ago.

Thanks for joining us on our collective journey.....together, by pooling our courage, our thoughts, and our compassion, I know we can all get through this.

DesertEyes

Hello there Iwanttoheal, and welcome to our quiet little corner of recovery

Your post must have taken a lot of courage to write. It took me many years to have all those awereness that you just wrote in one day, and a few years more to actually share it with another human being.

My family was similar to what you describe, although we had spiders instead of rats. My father died just a few years ago, and his legacy does _not_ live on. I have ended the cycle of abuse in my family. Sounds to me like you are doing the same for your family by starting your own healing.

Your mother is wrong. Things _were_ bad. Very bad. All of us her know that because we have lived thru it as well. And yes, I used to be the "adult" in my biological family too. They put me in the parent role and I accepted it for many years. But no more.

I'm glad you decided to join us, and feel free to ramble as much as you need. We all do that

Mike

Iwanttoheal

Thank you for your compliment GiveLove.

I do not feel amazing. I have spent yesterday and today thinking about what I feel inside when I think someone else is amazing. I feel admiration, awe and respect for that person. I cannot connect with those feelings and apply them to me.

So I will say thankyou again - I hope one day to be able to post that I feel your compliment inside GL.

Iwanttoheal

Hello DesertEyes

I apologise if my post gave the impression that all those lights went on yesterday lol. Like a lot of people here, I've been at this a long time.

However, my most recent lightbulb moment really blew my mind and it brought me here. I finally accepted that I was an abused child and I felt it inside, really felt it and it felt true. I was abused, it happened to me and yes, it was that bad.

You and GiveLove said it took courage to post. I don't feel courageous or brave. I know what the words mean but cannot feel them. I will say thankyou for the compliment though.

Thank you for your affirmation. It brought tears to me eyes - you believe me and I thank you.

GiveLove

One thing I was taught - violently - from a very early age is that It Is Never Okay To Acknowledge My Own Goodness.

Undoubtedly, you were also taught this. Here we have this beautiful, flawed, healing individual. You have done a lot of hard work, you have cried, you have suffered, and you are progressing step by step...yet in those milliseconds before you give yourself any credit, if you are like me, you stop. It is not permitted. The old habits are simply too strong.

Some day you will catch yourself unawares, maybe your inner critic will be still sleeping off a long night of self-punishment , and you will know for just a moment what a good person you are. For just a flash, you will know that you are a valuable, brilliant person fully prepared to throw all of your energies into creating happiness for yourself.

One day, for me, out of the blue, I suddenly realized that while those things happened TO me, they were NOT me. They were just dreadful rooms I had passed through on my way to here.

From that small seed, a strong and healthy self-esteem will begin to grow.

We'll be here for you whenever you could use a different perspective, a kind word, or a sounding board

GingerM

You grew up in horrible circumstances, yet managed to retain enough of "you" to see that how you are behaving is not how the REAL you (as opposed to the old tapes from your childhood) wants to behave. That, by itself, is amazing. Most ACoAs just keep on behaving the way they were conditioned (I won't say "taught" as that implies too much intent - "conditioning" is more of a byproduct of situation).

You then decided to DO something about changing who you were conditioned to be into who you WANT to be. Look at your family, read the posts on this board, in my own family the "tradition" of alcoholism and abuse goes back as many generations as I could get oral history of. No one tried to change it. "That's just how things are," I was told. But YOU decided that things don't HAVE to be that way, and YOU have decided to change them. That is even more amazing. It's scary to change. It's hard work. It's easier to say "That's just the way things are" and perpetuate it down the generations.

Now you are actively seeking assistance in making the changes you want to make. And you've come to this board and, via text, told a whole bunch of people you've never met before about the elephant in the living room. That takes a HUGE amount of courage. That is truly amazing. Most people would pretend the elephant wasn't there, and would never admit it to anyone, let alone mention it to a whole group of people they'd never met before without any idea of how it would be received or responded to. That's amazing.

If you can't feel that you, personally, are amazing, can you at least see how your actions are amazing? Because if you can admit that your actions are pretty darned impressive, then it's only a small sideways glide to you being pretty darned impressive as a person.

Welcome to the forum. Feel free to hang around - I don't post often, but what I lack in frequency, I make up for by being verbose