Transcending My Father's Abuse

This hit too close to home that I couldn't finish reading it in a sitting. I had to walk around my apartment a couple of times waiting to relax before coming back to my computer.

I have blanks in my memories too, where my dad told me he hit me (he apologized for it, like in OP). And I remember nothing after "the triggering incident", like in OP.

I also have very bad trust issues now, to the point where it is hard for me to make friends if they insist on having opinions on my life. Relationships have never worked for me, because it takes me forever to open up.

Childhood trauma sucks. Why people take their anger out on innocent kids just trying to understand how the world works in their own ways, is just beyond me.

There's SOO many more positive and healthy ways to raise a child. And realizing that now makes me genuinely teary eyed about all the neural pathways in my brain that were formed or not formed as a result of my parents decisions.

But I'm kind of glad to see so many of my friends being awesome parents, really caring for and listening to their kids. I'm lowkey excited for the next generation, who will be much more open about their thoughts and feelings, and probably more well adjusted as humans.

My pet hypothesis is this will also why the current/next generation is much more open about sexuality / gender / identity, and I expect this to get only more nuanced as science understands more and as people learn to express more. But that's just something I cooked up. Anyone else feel this way?

I always felt pretty different. I was never really "abused," but I grew up always feeling more connected with people who have divorced parents or with an absent father. Mine was right there, he drove me to soccer, how could I listen to Everclear and Linkin Park and feel emotionally attached to it? I was the model of middle America. As I grew older I always felt closer to "outcasts" and misfits. My general feeling of disconnected-ness and being different followed me wherever I went. I always felt different. I always felt like there was something wrong with me. I never understood why.

After reading online about what a great book Running on Empty: Overcoming your childhood emotional neglect was, while also feeling like I was running on empty, I decided to read the book. It felt like a biography. It made so much make sense and helped me understand why I've had the feelings I've had most of my life.

Abuse almost always comes with emotional neglect. As time moves forward I imagine most physical wounds heal, but the emotional ones are the wounds that don't heal so easily.

Here is the authors website with a relatively short read and I think anyone resonating with this HN article will probably feel "seen" by it: https://drjonicewebb.com/the-painful-secret-many-people-live...

My dad would make me pick, the belt or the wooden spoon. I'd pick the belt because a) fuck him and b) it would be over faster.

I used to think this was normal, that every kid got this.

He'd punch me in the arm, in the chest, smack the back of my head to 'toughen me up'.

One night I had a car accident, I called him from hospital (I was fine) he asked how the car was, how bad was the car? Who did I hit? It dawned on me that he'd never asked if I was ok. I hadn't said anything but "Dad I crashed the car".

Years of abuse that I would hide and no one would know about, except my mother who put up with it and never stopped him.

Now he has very serious dementia, in a care facility on his own, still healthy but completely not himself. He cries and my heart breaks. He asks me to help him die because he forgets who I am, but I remember everything.

The scariest thing about having abusive parents is that you end up becoming like them. It took me many years to understand why my relationships would all fail. In hindsight, I was emotionally abusive to a lot of my partners. I will not offer an apology for it, as that just feels hollow and empty. All I can say is that I am trying to be better.

My father was quite abusive to myself and siblings, and now we all cut off contact, but he refuses to accept any responsibility for his actions. Everything is someone else’s fault, he’s the victim, everyone is teaming up against him, etc. If you take the checklist for narcissistic personality disorder he hits all of them spot-on. Really nothing you can do but become estranged and raise your own children better.

I am in no way trying to invalidate the anguish that the author or people in this thread have suffered. I simply want to share my experience with having parents that beat me in a culture where it is commonplace.

I grew up in a Muslim country where I and everyone else I knew received the same level of physical punishment as part of the general parenting strategy. Some call this normalized child abuse - when I moved to a Western country for work and discussed this type of upbringing with others, they claimed I was abused and oblivious ("repressing"), and they seemed shocked at the fact that it didn't bother me or that it hasn't affected my relationship with my family. If I had been the only person receiving beatings and everyone else at my school was telling me I was being abused, I may have also deemed my father to be a monster, but I assumed the punishments were justified.

Someone may take this to imply that whether you see your parent as a monster or not depends on the context (on whether it is culturally acceptable or not) and that there is nothing inherently damaging about receiving beatings. Others may conclude that cultures where beating children is acceptable are barbaric and their children do indeed suffer lifelong trauma but manage to cope (if they do not seem to have been affected). I don't have enough data to draw any conclusions myself.

However, and this is my man point, a charitable view of the issue may at least make a distinction between parents who are intentionally hurting their children because of their own issues, and parents who believe physical punishment (or any form of a strict, stern upbringing) is a valid method for raising your children. Is it possible that the father of the OP, being Chinese, thought he was doing the right thing at the time?

One interesting thing I noted is that even in Western countries, beatings are more common and accepted in certain groups. Some Black and Hispanic friends of mine have joked about how hard their parents beat them, but I have yet to meet a White person who thinks of beating children as anything more than abuse.

As someone who similarly has Asian parents that have gone through their own trauma in life, this resonates with me. As a younger child, my parents would hit us with clothes hangers, as this was the only method of discipline that they knew at the time. I don't feel like they realize or acknowledge the effects of that.

While interactions nowadays are rarely negative, I've resolved to cut of communication at some point in the future, after I've alleviated my own guilt by "repaying" them monetarily for all they've done in raising me.

I get yelled at most days still, though.

Most of the electronic devices I've owned over the years have been broken by my dad smashing it after getting frustrated over some aspect of schoolwork related to my usage of such devices. Curiously, this seems to happen after he's had a few drinks.

I lost my mom in my late teens. My parents were wonderful. Definitely well above average. I owe them so much.

Something that I’ve been discovering is that I have two sections of blanks in my memory: the anguish of her being so sick for years, and the times she lost her cool with me.

Both sets of memories have been trickling back decades later. I’m not sure what to share about it in particular, but in general it has been a fascinating and oftentimes horrible sensation. To suddenly have a memory activate for no apparent reason.

I’m incredibly thankful that my wife is the person she is. I’ll randomly come into the room holding back tears and she immediately knows what it is and what to do.

I think it’s important to speak these things aloud to help further normalize our talking about them.

i think several decades ago, a lot of people didn't really want kids but had them anyway due to societal/family pressure. my parents were immigrants so the pressure was probably double. mentally both weak, and strong. a paradox.

my dad used to hit me until one day i realized i was heavier than him, and threw him onto the couch and raised my fist to hit him, but didn't. he never tried again.

my relationship with them is fine now (i'm middle aged) but i still don't listen to a god damn thing they say about life advice. quite frankly they don't know their ass from their elbow about how america really works and less than zero about growing up here. most immigrant parents don't, even though they pretend to, for some insane reason.

as for me i'm not having kids, and i don't really do long-term monogamous relationships either (i date plenty). i'm sure my parents are disappointed but quite frankly i don't give a shit.

To the one who said he was sinking, in a post that was deleted[1]:

First thing: Your condition is not your fault. I'm going to say that again, because you may need to hear it more than once: Your condition is not your fault. You don't need to feel shame for what it not your fault. It's misplaced.

Please, overcome your reluctance to see a therapist. You deserve more than slowly sinking until you drown. You deserve to heal, to live a life that is actually living.

Is there anyone at all, from work or a bar or a church or a neighbor or anyone you can turn to, and say, "Please help me find the strength to go to a therapist. Please go with me to the office the first time so I don't back out. Please help me remember that this is not my fault, and that I don't need to feel shame in seeking help."

If there's nobody else, tell us your location. Someone here will probably be around, and willing to go with you, if you're willing to accept help in that way.

Please, please, please. Find a way to get help. You're worth more than this.

[1] Yes, I remember the author's username. I'm withholding it out of respect for their privacy.

One of the hardest truths I've had to accept is that pointing things out to them doesn't help. I have spend a lot of time and energy trying to rationalize their thinking in some way, but I think it's a fool's errand.

I would similarly struggle to remember specific events, and at one point I even started voice recording them yelling. But showing them later only lead to more attempts at gaslighting and victim blaming. However, it was eye opening to see 3+ hour long runtimes on the voice memos that I couldn't remember anything about.

Emotional abuse is every bit as harmful and affects your brain in the same way as other kinds of abuse.

I hate people that try to apologize or convince you that they deserve forgiveness because they meant well or "they're your parents/family". It gets hard to push back without being disrespectful. And regardless of how old you get, the power dynamic of parent and child follows you. After a while you stop sharing completely.

Separating their behavior from who they are as a person is the hardest thing I've had to do. But it's the first milestone in rebuilding a relationship and helped me seperate myself from their behavior. Being aware that their behavior is a consequence of their upbringing earned empathy from me, but I think forgiveness requires empathy in both directions. I think it's equally hard to accept that you hurt someone you love.

Cultural norms can cause a lot of people to stay quiet, even if they decided to cut all contact, because talking poorly about your parents is seen as one of the worst things you can do. Regardless of what that thing was. I couldn't finish reading it in one sitting and I still had to skim parts of it. But I appreciate this being writted and shared publicly.

If this post resonates with you, there are two books I highly recommend, both by the renowned psychologist Alice Miller [1].

The first is For Your Own Good (1981), in which she describes the "poisonous pedagogy" of emotional and physical abuse passed down from generation to generation, and how we minimize and turn a blind eye to it because we want to follow the 4th commandment "Honor thy father and thy mother" (or in this case, a Confucian equivalent) -- at tremendous cost to ourselves, our own children, and society at large. It is one of the most eye-opening books I have ever read.

The second is her more recent The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Cruel Parenting (2005), which is more therapeutic and focused on how people's physical pain and sickness can dissipate when they are able to finally stand up for themselves and their own emotional needs, rather than continue to pretend their abusive parents were actually good.

Alice Miller's first book, The Drama of the Gifted Child (1979) is her best-known, but in my opinion, the above two books show her understanding evolving to become even more sophisticated.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Miller_(psychologist)

To the folks here, do you remember your childhoods at all?

Of the memories you have gathered up, do the vivid ones center around loud, violent interactions (like yelling)?

I ask because I don't remember a lot of my childhood, except some vivid memories around things being my fault. Being blamed for things.

I love my parents. They did everything for me. But my memories of happiness are in photos and more recent events. Decades ago are just, well, empty. Take lots of pictures, y'all--and recordings!

Thank-you.

I'm sorry but I couldn't finish the article. Every incident described in the article is so similar to my childhood, that I was becoming restless, agitated and getting tears of anger and frustration in my eyes frequently. Even as I'm writing this, I'm half crying because I'm revisiting my childhood memories. My step father was almost exactly like the one described in the article. Always yelling at me, hitting me, threatening to kill me, beat me, kick me out of the house, starve me, lock me in a room. He'd even tell me that he wished I'd die. And every time I protested, I'd get my teeth kicked in. And my mother was right there, watching. She didn't raise a finger to protect me. Sometimes she'd blame me for this, telling me that I make him angry and that's why he hits me. She was also abusive towards me. I didn't know what I had to do to keep her from getting angry at me and hitting me. My protests were also met with "You're ungrateful" or something similar as well. My step father would constantly make mistakes and then blame me when consequences hit him. And my mother would actually take his side. I clearly remember several instances where he gave me incorrect information by mistake and then blamed me for not doing what he asked properly. This would then lead to him calling me useless, a burden, leach etc.

But, thankfully, I got out. And I am never going back. The only person in my entire family that I trust is my eldest sister. She's the only reason I tolerate the rest (from far away). Otherwise I'd have left the country and cut all ties with them. All I needed to hear was "It's ok to go against the wishes of your parents". My counsellor told me that in the second of our 8 sessions when I voluntarily checked myself in a psychiatric hospital because I'd been depressed and suicidal for the last decade (since I was 14). I've never looked back since.

My childhood has left a massive imprint on my personality. I have severe trust issues, generalized anxiety, repressed emotions. But I can say with absolute certainty that my life has exponentially improved since I left my home behind.

I have a similar father and while I never expect to get an apology, I've found peace knowing it's about him and not me. I stopped personalizing it. He's still trapped in the craziness of the world and those who raised him, while I've found a way to manage it so I am not similarly crazy.

The crazy thing about this, is growing up and realizing that not everybody was raised like this.

I sometimes see kids screaming back at there parents. If I had ever done something like that there would be a funeral.

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had

And add some extra, just for you.

-Philip Larkin, This Be The Verse

Trauma and Recovery by Judith Lewis Herman is the standard academic psychology reference text for understanding CPTSD.

It is worth 5000 self help books.

My parents didn't like me as a person, I don't remember why.

My mother once said to me "When you were a child I thought you'd grow up to be the next Adolph Hitler.".

My father's version was "You couldn't have had a brother because we couldn't have another one of you.".

Both punished me for not being the person they wanted me to be, not only was there very little overlap between my personality and what they wanted, there was bugger all overlap between what the two of them wanted individually.

I ended up with a compromised façade of a personality that I'm still trying to peel away.

> After all, I had no right to chastise him for yelling when I was screaming at him myself. Maybe I had the temper problem, not him.

I don’t know what I want to call this fallacy. Maybe tit-for-tat fallacy.

One person’s bad behavior doesn’t “annihilate” or vacate the other’s. They don't “cancel out”.

The tactic is (reflexively) used to derail the interrogator and change subject.

“Yes, it is true I am also verbally abusive but right now we're talking about your verbal abuse.”

It's not that this line of reasoning works with the abuser but at least it's a reminder to oneself what's being attempted.

The apology she gets from her dad is extraordinary. I'm quite sure my parents will not apologize even on their deathbeds.

Kids are like puppies, in that they will start following any pair of feet they see, since they don't have a frame of reference. You could argue that giving them a good frame of reference is the most important job of a parent.

My mom hit me badly for not being able to write 2 properly. It has been 40 years and I have not yet forgotten.

"Of course this is Asian parents," I thought as I saw the Chinese characters.

Every time I read something like this, it's a wave of sadness and empathy, then it's a wave of anger. I'm a generation older than the author, and went through a similar experience with my mother. I witnessed my cousin be thrown against the drywall so hard, he broke it. I'm convinced he has permanent brain damage today due to the abuse he suffered.

I learned from my uncle recently that my aunt and my mother were the product of horrendous and similar abuse from my grandmother. My grandmother, who my mother made out to be a saint.

Every fucking generation, this filial piety bullshit repeats itself.

My parents aren't Asian (I'm not even from the US), but, still, this resonates with me.

My conundrum is that I simply don't feel like I'd be able to cut off my parents, especially my mom. I simply can't imagine a world without her. I would feel lost without her. Even though she may have sexually abused me. Because in the end, who else do I have?

Thanks to the author for taking the time and effort to have a very heartfelt and deep dive into their personal life - especially on subjects this nuanced.

Their comments on "hurt" rather than bad, and their feeling that they couldn't fight back unless they became "dirty", or just as bad as them, were especially resonant.

Their comments about their dad living through the cultural revolution made me remember the scene in the Three Body Problem where Ye Wenjie confronts the three communist youths that had killed her father many years after the revolution, and they explain that their own suffering and how it brought along her fathers death.

This sort of childhood trauma occurs in many societies, among people with varying backgrounds. But I think it is more prevalent in societies with more sacred cows, where eg fathers, and elders, are told they are in an elevated position by dint of who they are, and thus they must be obeyed, and must seek not to lose face. When you foster these pockets of power, one should not be surprised that power often corrupts. Until Chinese (by here I mean the ethnicity, and not the nationality) society (and other societies with similar power structures) can look at itself critically and understand the full implications of such cultural imperatives, tackling the epidemic of abuse will be an uphill battle.

Haven’t read the post yet but I think Bessel van der Kolk’s book The Body Keeps The Score is related reading. I just finished it. Amazing book, it has helped me in understanding that I need to go back to my memories and see if I can feel a sense of agency and safety over them

tldr; Author should find a therapist if they haven't already.

I can perfectly imagine that friend saying "you're making excuses for him," and the frustration both the friend and author have at not seeing the situation from the same vantage point. I can feel the friend's frustration at the gravity of the situation somehow not getting through fully to the author. (As well as the author's frustration for the friend not grokking the complexity of the relationship!)

The thing is, there may well be feelings and contradictions that the author must-- when they are ready and willing-- sit with and somehow start to confront and understand, regardless of what those feelings are. As someone who hasn't dealt with physical abuse, not only would be it difficult to know how to help a close friend through those feelings, but there's a good chance I'd actively guide them away from confronting them. "You're nothing like him," or, "but you were just defending your sister," etc. I don't want a friend to feel those things! And even if I knew they need to go there, how in the world would I know when it's time or how to safely encourage them to confront them?

There are things that feel wrong that are part of the right process, and plenty of things that feel right which don't help you heal. A therapist who specializes in child abuse can help the author by guiding them through this, with practical experience and without judgment.

Anybody know about the innards of traumatic memory and flashes?

> At another point, he said that he’d truly changed and hadn’t hit anyone in the past ten years. “That’s literally not true!” I responded. “You hit me in 2020.”

> “But I promise you, your mom and I never wanted to hurt you. I thought I was trying my best. I’m truly sorry.”

This is when you have to realize that the person is a sociopath who will say anything to get what they want, even pretending to apologize. When they seem earnest they're still pathologically lying because the malice goes beyond intentional but becomes casual, as that's just who they are. And people wonder why we have trust issues.

The unfortunate reality is that these sort of people also get very far in life, since nature and society love go getters without morals or conscience.

Just an observation : The apology text from the father was unconditional. The reply from the daughter was conditional appreciation.

This was very hard to read through, and it brought up so many difficult memories from not just childhood but well into adulthood.

My father would alternate between verbal abuse, physical abuse and the worst, emotional abuse. This started when I was very young, in primary school. Coming from an Asian family, we were all expected to be our best and to do our best in school, and getting anything less than the best grades was considered unacceptable. The consequences would often be harsh verbal beatdowns, curfews and extra classes.

Physical punishments were common, and they would usually involve a cane, stick, or belt. I was convinced I was getting away easy because the 'crime' I had committed was always super-serious, a grave and punishable offence, something like telling a lie or not doing my chores, so yeah it would be the death penalty were it not for the large-hearted compassion of the man administering the punishment.

It later turned more to emotional abuse as I had learned to start tuning out the pain and feelings and switch to a sort of zombie-mode when it came to the punishments. The emotional abuse would pain a lot longer and eventually started triggering mild to severe depressive episodes. As a male child we were told to tough it out and be a man.

As an example, the expectation on me was that I would study in a particular medical program after school. I was not remotely interested in medicine, I didn't do well, and did not get through. I chose another discipline that I liked. I am in my fifties now, but I still remember this incident very well. The summary of the comments was "I am ashamed of you, you are a failure, you have made me lose face." That stung harder than I would have expected, and it still takes a bit of effort to let go.

He had this way of changing his personality depending on the audience. To our close relatives, he would appear as the model father doing everything in his capacity (and beyond) to do good for his family, and that narrative was unquestioned and accepted by all. This was not completely without a basis, since he had supported his four siblings through a difficult childhood. The mask would drop when there were no outsiders around. Even after he died, everyone who came to pay their respects had good words to say.

As I graduated, I decided to quickly move out of home and leave the country, so I took the first chance I got and left. The abuse turned mostly emotional after that, and there's a lot I am leaving out here. I still had to keep in touch with family due to other reasons but by then I had evolved my way of coping.

The man is now dead and gone, I have not a single photo of him, nor any of the letters he had written to me. Later when I hit my late forties and would have a few deep conversations with mom, she would slowly tell me how hard it was to have lived with him for nearly six decades. She had many career opportunities that she was made to give up in order to "be the mother that a family needs", it was for the sake of external appearances. There was no physical abuse towards mom, but there was so much emotional abuse I couldn't deal with. Perhaps I took the cowards' way out and left the country, but in my early twenties I didn't know what to do.

I still have dreams (nightmares?) where he and I are face to face, arguing vigorously, stirring up all the wrong emotions, but there's not much I can do about that except to remind myself that it's just a dream, and to let it go.

So yeah, this type of abuse can really mess a person up. I'm coping now with proper guidance, letting go, meditating, and staying aware of unwholesome thoughts as they come up. It is a hard journey but I (we) need to make that decision and take charge of our feelings and actions.

One of the cruel ironies of the human experience is that making children is almost as easy as breathing.

Not everyone that can procreate, should. Stories of parental abuse enrage me to hyperventilation and I had a good childhood.