There’s A Difference Between Parents Who Want You To Be Happy, And Parents Who Want You To Look Happy.

On Isolation

“I wasn’t an easy child”/“I was a bad child and hard to love” is such an upsetting thing to hear people say. I used to believe it about myself before I got my autism diagnosis and reevaluated my childhood behavior and realized most of it wasn’t born out of a desire to be a difficult little monster. but even if you were an evil child on purpose 24/7, it’s fucked up that your parents/caregivers made you feel that that was just an innate part of you, a literal actual child.

Abusive parents just love entering our rooms uninvited and then yelling “WHY IS THAT ON THE FLOOR”, thus creating the illusion that it’s perfectly fine and acceptable to intrude in another person’s space and then find any excuse to yell and berate them. Parents will act as if this is because you should be neat, but no, they’re not yelling at us because they want us to be neat, they’re yelling because they want to yell, and (1) object on the floor is excuse enough. Random lash-outs don’t help us be more organized. Random yelling doesn’t inspire us to be neat.

What it does is makes sure that we cannot relax in our own space, that we cannot feel at ease and justified sitting in our own room, or lying on our own bed, without expecting someone to burst in with intention to lash out at us. Our need to be able to relax and rest in our own space is higher priority than us being neat, and to force us to fret over every single object in our room when we should be tending to our own needs, resting our minds and feeling safe, is cruel and harmful.

We should be able to rest and relax, even if we’re in a mess. Our own piece of mind and the needs of our body are more important than maintaining the perfect order. Humans are messy sometimes, it can mean we’re stressed, upset, sick, busy with something else, chasing a dream, chasing little bit of happiness, overwhelmed, function better in mess, desire some creative disorder, or thousand other things, and none of these things is a reason to lash out or berate us. Mess isn’t a crime, it’s not a sin, it doesn’t cause mental illness, it could sooner be a symptom of one. To lash out at a kid for not keeping order is nothing but evil. Let children keep their space as they like. If you want them to know how to be neat then teach them how to organize Without Ever Yelling, and without taking their own little functional space that can be just how they like and prefer, away from them. Does the price of your child’s neatness have to be their mental health? Is it worth forcing a kid to keep perfect order, to take their ability to be calm and safe in their own room? The answer is no. Have some goddamn limit to how far you would sink to lash out at your children.

“Resisting your abusers is not abuse. Talking back to your abusers is not abuse. Screaming and fighting back to save yourself is not abuse. Trying to escape from them is not abuse. Calling them out is not abuse. Hurting them is not abuse.”

— only if you had tremendous amount of power over them, it could be called abuse, but in that case, they would never dare to abuse you in the first place because their life would depend on you, and not the reverse. You do not have the power to trap or abuse them, and if they pretend otherwise, they’re lying. (via furiousgoldfish)

Abusive parents force you to hide things you would otherwise never have to worry about hiding, because you learn that they can flip out about anything, make a scene from anything, misunderstand one detail and go insane over it. So you don’t tell them about anything you can avoid, and you try to deal with things yourself as much as humanely possible, which takes the burden of taking care of you from them, and onto your shoulders.

This is dangerous as well because you don’t tell them about a friend who did something horrible to you, you don’t tell them about a sociopath who tried to groom or touch you, you don’t tell them about horrifying heartbreak you feel when someone abandons you, you don’t tell them when your world is falling apart because you know that at best, they’ll be uninterested, at worst, they will tell you it was your fault and you deserved it.

Living in secrecy becomes normal and when you develop trauma symptoms it once again feels like it’s your fault because you never said anything, you never told them how much they were hurting you, you didn’t speak up and open up about your problems. But how in the world would you? You know if you had, all that you would get is insults, blame, threats, guilt and shame thrown in your face, how could you possibly take that on top of having trauma symptoms? You can’t, it’s not worth risking. Suffering in silence becomes your only survival option, and you watch your heart break a little more every day that nobody cares that you’re breaking apart.

There’s this really specific experience in growing up with abusive parents, because they act so emotionally immature at all times. And when you’re a kid, it just feels normal, right? You’re emotionally immature, they’re immature, you’re on the same level, you don’t know any better, you think that’s how humans are. 

But then later, you actually develop some empathy, awareness of other people’s feelings and their inner worlds and thoughts and situations, and you outgrow your parent’s maturity. And at that point you’re just so used to tolerating their shit you don’t even think twice, you’re the adult now, you let them have their way, you forgive and forget, clean their messes, take care of their feelings and make it all okay for them.

But then at one point, you realize you have adults acting like literal spoiled children, when you’ve outgrown this a while ago, and you ask yourself, when they gonna grow? When they gonna develop some self awareness? And then you go and assume they just never had a mature presence in their life so they had no way to learn (which isn’t true because then how did you learn it?), and you go and try to teach them by showing them a good example. You become extra nice, patient, explain things to them, cater to their inner worlds, try to explain to them that there’s people other than them on this world, who have feelings and hearts and deep inner world and this is significant and needs to be respected. But all they ever respond with is “yes I am those people now cater to me”. 

It is impossible to teach abusive parents by showing them a good example. They will insist you do it over and over again, and then exploit your kindness to the max. Literally the kinder you get, the worse they get. They soon expect you to run after their every need, to jump at their every whim, and in return they insult you for a good measure, call you worthless and lazy, then they go to sleep without a care in the world. 

Do not do this. They’re not growing up because they benefit so strongly from acting like a kid. Once all of their immaturity privileges and tolerations are suspended, and they’re forced to act like a proper human being in order to keep gettinng what they want, suddenly they’ll know exactly how to do it. 

Your parents are not immature, they’re abusive. They’re not childish, they’re manipulative. They’re not silly, they’re self obsessed, selfish and forceful. You gave them enough benefit of the doubt, you do not have to wait all your life for them to grow up. Their due for that was long time ago and they have no business expecting you to be their parent.

Abusive parents keep making you feel like you’ll miss out on something if you leave, like they’re just waiting to become this loving, supportive person the second you turn away from them, it’s maddening how far they’re willing to go to, just to make sure you can’t leave. When a parent changes their face constantly, being loving and nice in one second, and then cruel and terrifying in another, the only “reward” you can get from enduring all the pain and fear is by actually being around for those 5 minutes they might be nice to you! And if you’re not, it feels like you endured all this for nothing, almost like you’re missing out. It hurts.

You’re not supposed to only feel safe around people when they’re in a good mood and when they don’t have specific motives for hurting and manipulating you, you’re not supposed to be enduring horrific tantrums and emotional abuse just to see if in next half hour they’ll decide to turn nice again, it is not humane or normal to act in this way. Good people are good all the time, bad people make you feel confused about who they are so they could keep getting away with all the bad.