Hello I am new....help!

Old 12-21-2012, 05:26 PM
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Hello I am new....help!

Hello, This is my first post. I'm my family scapegoat. My father is an alcoholic.I don't know if my mum is aswell....I can't work her out. I'm in my 30's now. I'm not sure where to begin with my past. But I can tell you when my future started. It was 18 months ago when I tried but failed to kill myself. I spent alot of my life being depressed and suffering with scary psychotic anxiety. At the same time doing a typical acoa thing....no one had a clue ...ever...how bad things were. I didn't even realise myself. Anyway, since the day I tried to end it, i've tried to make big big changes. Im trying to deal with all the acoa issues. I'm also on medication which i love cos it keeps me going and allows me to be relatively normal My friends mean so much to me but what i'm finding the hardest is some of my best friends who have met my mum and dad think they are so lovely and just don't get why i have cut them off. That's the hardest thing. Because my friends are now my family. Alot of my friends get it. But my best friend who was there for me after my 'attempt' thinks my family are so nice and i think she thinks i'm more than a bit mad for cutting off these lovely people. This post may seem not that bad, but I will go into more detail later, and I feel pretty rubbish right now. Anyway, thanks for listening
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Old 12-21-2012, 06:26 PM
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Welcome, Tamsin. You'll find many, many people here who can relate to all you've experienced.

Like you, I'm the family scapegoat. And like you, there are some who can't understand the problem because my parents and siblings are soooo niiiiiice. My children, sadly, are among those. The ugliness all happens in private--in phone calls and e-mails--where nobody sees.

I've found it very healing to be where people understand and know and reassure me, that I'm not crazy. Because it sounds crazy to those who haven't seen it first hand.
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Old 12-21-2012, 06:43 PM
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hmm

Hello Evening Rose,

Thank you so much for welcoming me. I have spent a few weeks reading the forums before getting the courage to actually join and post. I have to say that I totally relate to alot of your posts. I find you quite inspiring (sorry bad spelling!) It's the most frustrating thing ever. I mean how would I ever expect my friends to realise what my mum is like and say "oh yeah tamsin we understand where your coming from!" when to this day after all she has said and done to me I still think...."Oh maybe I got her wrong! Maybe she is a nice lady!" (Guilt Guilt Guilt).
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Old 12-21-2012, 06:51 PM
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And to add to that 90% of the time I think I am insane. I don't even know what my own truth is and I have zero confidence in my own perceptions.... lol!....it's not a good place to be! Whereas neither my mum or dad or any of my brothers or sisters have ever been diagnosed with a mental health problem or been admitted to hospital or anything. It's so frustrating
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Old 12-21-2012, 06:53 PM
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and i have and everyone knows that
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Old 12-21-2012, 07:06 PM
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Originally Posted by Tamsin View Post
And to add to that 90% of the time I think I am insane. I don't even know what my own truth is and I have zero confidence in my own perceptions.... lol!....it's not a good place to be! Whereas neither my mum or dad or any of my brothers or sisters have ever been diagnosed with a mental health problem or been admitted to hospital or anything. It's so frustrating
Originally Posted by Tamsin View Post
and i have and everyone knows that
I have found in the past that I, too, mistrusted my own perceptions. If anybody (including my kids) ever told me I was wrong and I should see it their way, I always doubted myself. Ironically, I think what finally helped me was when things got so bad with my (now ex) husband's lying and hiding, when I found proof and bit by bit realized I could trust my own perceptions. ...when I went to a priest and he strongly validated there was something terribly wrong in my marriage, that it wasn't just my misperception.

No, it's not a good place to be.

My advice is to spend your time with friends and co-workers who treat you with respect and as a worthwhile human being. Spend time alone. I find prayer has helped a great deal because eventually, although I didn't trust myself much, I did trust God and figured after that much prayer, if I were really causing problems, He would have clued me in by then! I've found gratitude lists and focusing on my own life very helpful. There's a site called 43things.com that really helped me a lot.

I also highly recommend EMDR therapy if you can find someone who practices it. It's for post traumatic stress disorder, which frankly, I think many of us have.

I also found it helpful to finally see why I mistrusted my own perceptions. It's a natural result of years of being told nothing is what I think it is, being told I'm wrong again, being told I messed up and am at fault again, even being told that the reason I said I did something really wasn't the reason--my mother truly acted like she knew my heart and mind better than I did, and as a child, we trust our parents, we believe they really know everything. So I kept trying to learn from her (ha!) and do better.

It helped to see there was a reason for the way I was, and to start unraveling those threads.

I personally think that if any of us here have been diagnosed with mental issues, it's a result of what was done to us. I know that I am only slowly overcoming a slight degree of paranoia, which is a very natural result of years of my ex-husband's mind games. I know the truth, I don't feel a need to convince anyone else it's his fault, and I just keep moving down the road of healing.
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Old 12-22-2012, 06:53 AM
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Originally Posted by Tamsin View Post
what i'm finding the hardest is some of my best friends who have met my mum and dad think they are so lovely and just don't get why i have cut them off.
I get that. All. The. Time.

My parents -- especially my Dad (and you guys know what I have to say about him ) were very popular with their friends and most of my relatives. And the truth is, they were very intelligent, funny in social settings, and generally interesting people.

Nobody gets it when I try to tell them how tough it was, being my Dad's kid. "Oh, he loved you," they'll say. "And he was smart, he could fix anything, always kept us in stitches at family gatherings," etc. About the fighting between my Dad and his siblings, and my Mom? "Oh, you can't take that personally, that's just how they were." What are you going to say to someone who thinks that? "That's just how they were."

They have no clue what things were like at home. They have no clue about the fact that nothing I did was ever good enough, why were we doing this, why weren't we doing that. They didn't see the fits of rage, the constant belittling, etc., etc., etc. I don't have to tell you guys, because you know how it goes.

So basically, I tune out most of my family (not going to see ANY of them for Christmas, for example), and I avoid most of my parents' old friends. These people don't get it, and they aren't going to get it.

I even have to minimize contact with my sister, because she is in a state of abject denial about our childhood -- she thinks it was this Norman Rockwell scene. I have to remember that I am not crazy, that the stuff I remember was real -- I mean, give me a break, who would make it up?

People who weren't there to see what your home life was like... aren't going to understand. It's not really their fault, because all they saw was the public face. The private one, we know about that, but they don't....

T
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Old 12-22-2012, 08:50 AM
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Originally Posted by Tamsin View Post
My friends mean so much to me but what i'm finding the hardest is some of my best friends who have met my mum and dad think they are so lovely and just don't get why i have cut them off. That's the hardest thing. Because my friends are now my family. Alot of my friends get it. But my best friend who was there for me after my 'attempt' thinks my family are so nice and i think she thinks i'm more than a bit mad for cutting off these lovely people.
:ghug3

Welcome. So true. Well who cares what they think, you know the truth and she doesn't. Some people will never know the truth even if they lived it. My sister refuses to admit that our dad was an abusive drunk even though she saw me get beat every day. We had to split ways and I miss her very much, but she isn't living in reality and denies mine. At my dad's funeral hundreds of people were crying and telling me what a great guy he was, my cousins all thought the world of him. Duh. They didn't know him.

Detaching emotionally is the survival skill we have all learned, some it takes longer to learn than others.

You can do this, keep reading and working on yourself. The stickies above are great. And look at my blog if you like, the link is right under my name on the left here, it has a number with an underline.
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