To this day, after 30 years, I shy away from relationships. As you did, I grew up with parents fighting, accusations of cheating, tension in the air, picking up the pieces and comforting a parent as a child. I found that I prefer to be alone, not to talk too much, and generally fade into the background. Relationships, especially romantic ones, scare me as I don’t know if I’ll run into the same problem my parents did so I never searched for a romantic one. I don’t know if I’ll be the one making the accusations. I generally think I’m chill and trusting, but I’m scared that the cycle will continue with me and my mind will go to stupid places and I’ll create a relationship not built on trust and love, but suspicion, deciept, and lies. So, now I make a conscious effort to not allow those thoughts to enter. I build every relationship I have, only friendships, on mutual respect for one another and caring for each other. I don’t want to be the accuser in a relationship and repeat the cycle, so I try to be the best friend I can be.

I don’t know.

Both of my parents were alcoholic at the time, and were young (23 and 24 when I was born). The worst problem was neglect. Both of them had to work, and I was a stereotypical gen-X latchkey kid. I’ve seen millennial kids and zoomer kids suffering from the same circumstances in which their parents are exhausted all the time and just don’t have the energy to parent.

There was also domestic violence. I’ve also been sexually abused as a kid by more than one relative. Those are factors.

But then I was a weird sad kid at seven and was seeing school psychologists even in early grade school. I wouldn’t be diagnosed with major depression until I was an adult.

And I wouldn’t be diagnosed ASD until I was around 50. An assessment in April of this year returned that I am spectrum AF. But the symptoms were there even as a child. It’s just no one recognized it for what it was.

Also, I’ve just been diagnosed with low testosterone, and considering symptoms I’ve experienced all my life, I’ve probably been low-T for my entire adulthood. One of the potential symptoms is: severe depression. But again, I was sad as a kid.

So yeah, I might have grown up more functional had I gotten the support I needed. I’m pretty bright, and might have been able to get a degree with the right accommodations. Curiously, I’m not the kind of bright that my Dad is (a literal rocket scientist who worked for NASA and did sophisticated space math), so I felt like a dunce as a child. There’s definitely potential there that might have been unlocked if I had an awesome home. But I was definitely a fixer-upper from the day I was born.

Similar situation with a dad that suddenly started working hard for his kids later.

They know they are getting old and they know we will be taking full care of them soon, hence the sudden compassion.

He still gets very irritable on smallest “mistakes” but holds back physical stuff in my case.

Dad beat the every loving fuck out of me for the simplest mistakes, refused to ever explain how or what I did wrong, just straight to hitting me. Then he left, so Mom had to take care of 4 kids on her own, so she was never home, too busy working to provide.

Dad came back at times, but he was always a horrid piece of shit to me until I was maybe a teen.

I cut him off this year, and started therapy (I’m 35 now). Turns out my sister and I were also sexually abused by him, she and I corroborated some memories that I always thought were bad dreams.

I’m healing, and getting past it, but in a lot of ways I feel like I’m starting from behind in life, never having had structure or order or someone to look up to till much later in life. But therapy is helping and little me is healing now. It’s a journey and I’m glad I’m taking it, and I’m glad to not be that horrid man to my children (though I definitely was too rough to begin with, having no idea what to do and only having my childhood to have learned from). I’m the calmest I’ve ever been. Find a good therapist and start healing. Talk through it with someone, it really does wonders to say all the shit you want and tell the names and things at an empty chair.

Next time I see the sperm donor will be at his funeral, to make sure he’s actually dead and gone. I think that’ll be really cathartic.

There was no abuse or violence or aggression or anything like that, so I guess I got off lightly compared to some other commenters.

But there was also little to no displays of love or affection. We kind of just cohabited. I don’t remember my parents ever telling me they loved me. I don’t remember either of them ever hugging me.

That’s left me as something of an emotional cripple. More than one of my exes has used that exact term to describe me: ‘emotional cripple’.

But now I have a wife (who saw enough of my family to understand what made me the way I am) who’s powered through all of that. And kids. Kids who I show my love to (not like that you filthy minded perverts). I tell them I love them and hug them and will probably fuck them up a whole different way.

I have complicated feelings about my upbringing. I am a Pakistani American that grew up in a Midwestern suburb. My dad’s family has anger problems. My dad used to beat the hell out of me and my brother. My mom was a young mom of 2 angry boys, so she yelled and hit us too. My aunt’s and uncles on my dad’s side had anger problems and my uncle’s used to hit me and my brother too.

I used to get into a lot of fights as a kid. I got suspended from school once for beating up a kid. I broke a million things as a kid. My brother and I got into a million fights.

But at the same time, my parents bought every book, video game, computer, whatever. My parents are both very educated and their parents were very educated. We had access to every educational thing you could ever hope for. I was always ahead of my classmates in school. My dad bought an rc helicopter and tore the engine out with me to install in a model car. I had build your own alarm clock kits, build your own radio kits, grow your own bacteria petri dish kits. I learned multiplication tables a full year ahead of my classmates. I was always a straight A student without trying. I got into college with enough AP credits to graduate in 2 years. I grew up to be a doctor and my brother is an engineer. My sister is also a doctor.

My mom had to sit me down when I was 14 to explain to me that if I kept fighting kids, I was going to end up in jail.

As a young adult, I felt like a failure and I was always angry at myself. I hated everything I used to do. I once was too aggressive with a girl in high school. I didn’t know that the world was not as angry as the house I grew up in.

I still carry the anger around with me. I haven’t gotten into a fight since high school, but I still think about it all the time. I don’t yell at people, but I want to. I’ve gotten really good at controlling it.

I finally went to therapy 7 years ago. Just to sort through all my feelings and all the problems. My mom offered to pay for it. It was the best thing she’s ever done for me.

I was given every advantage you could ever hope to give your children, but I also inherited the temper that makes it feel sometimes like I’m a psychopath. Therapy was the thing that finally helped me move past all the complicated feelings. Your parents can only do what they know how to do. They can only model behavior that was modelled to them. They love you and they tried their best. But sometimes their best isn’t the best thing for you. Life is weird like that sometimes. When you learn enough about the world, you get to decide if you’re going to carry that baggage for the rest of your life or if you’re going to do something about it. Most people decide to carry it forever, but you don’t have to.

I think as you get older, you realize that there’s no such thing as “normal” and so even if you grew up with trauma or just general dysfunction, you eventually realize that it shaped you more than it “held you back” if that makes sense.

And then you kind of learn where you have certain tendencies, how to catch things and not let them run your life, etc.

As an example, highly empathetic people tend to come from high trauma families…kids who have to watch their parents closely to know when to avoid them, or avoid doing certain things around them… they just get really good at tuning in to other people’s radios. That’s a huge boon for working in helping professions like support work, nursing, service, etc.

Totally just anecdotal based on my life and what I’ve learned, but I do feel like every year that passes I’m able to identify not just what held me back but what kind of benefits I gained from the trauma.

Hope that helps in some way!

Oh yep. Big time. I was raised in a very Catholic household in a quite conservative community. Religion aside, I think my parents were overall pretty good, despite being quite strict, other than their insistence on having surveillance over all Internet access at all times. Knowing your parents are constantly watching fucks with your head.

But what I’m still working through in therapy are all the myriad lessons I internalized through my conservative religious upbringing. There wasn’t any one particular thing, but that was 100% not the right environment for a trans girl who didn’t know it yet to grow up in. I barely knew trans people existed until I went to college, and I was pretty homophobic in high school. It wasn’t until I was out of grad school, living and working in another state, that I had the distance to finally do the self-reflection and therapy work to realize that I’m trans and pan and accept that about myself.

I had a moment after my egg cracked of “oh no, I’m the kind of person everyone I grew up around hates”. Jury is still out on how my family will react when I come out to them. I haven’t said anything because I’m afraid of how they’ll respond, given that I’m the only one who is no longer Catholic.

Anyway, I could ramble on. Short answer: yeah, my upbringing fucked me up real good, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be done working through it.

Well I’m funny.

I don’t think anyone has a perfect childhood. Anyway, mine’s was pretty bad in my opinion (my mom was an alcoholic, aggressive type, and my dad was addict to casinos and shit).

I think that when I was growing I knew something was bad, like, I had to help my mom to walk, or we had a lot of money and then nothing. They even did coke and shit “hiding” from me but… You know, kids are not stupid. When it got really bad, I knew I would never be “normal”, I had anxiety and panic attacks every day, I couldn’t attend school and I tried to stop my life.

Now I live w my girlfriend, and I noticed some patterns, I know I have to be far away from drugs (I tried them, tho) because I just feel I’m proned to be addicted really fast. I noticed myself sometimes thinking into just deal my problems w alcohol, even if I remind myself that’s not the way. I always feel like I have to earn love by doing something (chores, giving money, anything)…

So yeah, I think is going to be like this forever, but you can manage it, I went to therapy, and I have my ways to deal with it… So if everyone is a bad moment rn, don’t worry, you can do this, I’m sure, even if you aren’t.

Fighting parents are some of my earliest memories. Then abusive stepfather. I’m in my mid 40s and still have what I’m guessing is something like PTSD. Neurodivergence and possibly OCD aren’t helping anything here. If I had all the money in the world, I’d go to therapy, but I don’t have any good options now (not covered by japanese insurance and I’d be much more effective in English with nuance and understanding)

Did you notice the effects on yourself right away, or did it take years to even recognize the pattern?

Both. A lot of knowing something was really fucked up, eventuslly deciding it wasn’t because i was conditioned to it, and then re-realising later down the line. That said i had more subtle and less severe forms of abuse than most people, and i wouldn’t usually even speak about my childhood experiences as being ‘abusive.’ But i think any decent shrink would agree they were and be able to pick up in whst ways they were.

Does it ever fully go away, or does it just become something you manage better over time?

In some cases it will go right away when you manage to cut off your family for good. I guess i would advise that you see severing a connection with them as being spiritually akin to actually cutting that pain out of your life and your memory.

If you suffered something like sexual abuse then no, it’ll be harder to forget about. For me though, one thing i was subject to was verbal abuse and conditioning and i am at least confident enough in my own intelligence to not actually take that verbal abuse to heart.

You know what though? Whenever it happens with someone else, like a friend a romantic partner or a complete stranger, it’s all the more worse. Because of what i’ve already experienced. I got harassed and stalked in university and i couldn’t stop saying to myself “i hope they fucking die” et cetera. I’ve not had that before, but as a teenager i did have sleepless nights because i was so angry at the bullying and manipulative people i was surrounded by in society.

I think we get stronger and weaker from day to day in so manyways we don’t notice. Thinking about it now, i’m so past some of the symptoms of mental torment i used to have and i haven’t thought about the triggers in months. Psychologists/psychiatrists say that actuslly thinking and feeling through your trauma is what heals you and allows you to move on so i guess that’s it.

I think it stuck with me. We were always moving, I’ve had 2 step fathers, both were absolute shitbags. I never had a name in the house with the last stepfather, it was always jerk off, moron, idiot, etc but then always “God I’m only kidding” when confronted. Now I have literally 0 self esteem, I joke that Hitler has more redeeming qualities than I do.

As far as the always moving goes, even after leaving the house at 17, I’ve never known stability. Because of my lack of self esteem and general stupidity I ended up being uneducated working shit jobs, and am now a worthless factory schmuck in yet another precarious living situation.

As for the wondering what a happy normal life looked like, I had my mirror image to grow up with. My friend from highschool had the exact opposite life as me, happy family that gave him job opportunities, let him live rent free after highschool so he could go to college, and now he works for Intel and literally sent me a message the other day worried about how he should invest since his company issued stock grew so much he became a millionaire overnight. I’m happy for him, but it’s a real kick in the teeth to see how our lives are so different constantly. He has a house and a family and wants more property, I’m living in a garage and my retirement plan is to eat a shotgun shell deep in the woods somewhere.

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Whatever happened in the past will remain as memories. Though I has moulded me into the person today.

The physical place, I inherited mine, so I changed the layout to suit me.

Now it’s my fortress of solitude, to escape from this crazy world.