Did you have a bad childhood? Have you dealt with it?

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It's time for me to move out of looking into the past, I am now sixteen and I can't let it hold me back whilst I need to be focused on my life.

Well my Mum and Dad got together, married and had a daughter together, everything seemed fine and loving until the stress came and my Dad became handy with his fists, this continued through the next two pregnancies (I'm the youngest), whilst I was around three I remember having a good time with my Dad playing on computer games but I was totally naive to there situation, then they split up and I stayed at my Dad's, then he told social services that my Mum was physically abusing me and poisoning my elder sister which wasn't true and the social services qickly realised that. When I was about five I remember having a bad dream, it was midnight and my Dad wasn't in bed (I was too scared to sleep on my own), I remember being really scared and crying, then he came up the stairs wearing a black leather jacket with a paper under his arm, I said "Where did you go"? and he told me he had just gone to fetch a paper; as a naive child I would have just took his word for it. I didn't know he had gone to my Mum's to try and kill her, wearing a balacava, tying her up, gagging her and drowning her in scalding water but she could smell his aftershave and once he knew she recognized him he left and told her not to tell anybody about what happened, I obivoulsy did not know this at the time.
We went back to bed, some time after that I remember being in the living room with my Dad and he was hastily walking up and down like he was waiting for something, then two guys came in and one of them started headbutting him, I stood up and told him to leave my Dad alone but the other guy sa me back down, I remember the mirror smashing and then they left, I didn't know at the time that one of the guys was my half-brother and he knew about what he did to my Mum.
Next thing I know my Dad has gone and my Mum had a mental breakdown,I had a nightmare about my Dad and started crying and screaming for my Mum to come up and she shook the bed, she went mental which was scary.
My two sisters went off to live with my Grandma and I stayed with my mentally unstable mother and then went to a Foster home but after a while I went back when my mother was feeling better, I distnctly remember waking up in the middle of the night at the Foster carers and I heard the Tv on downstairs so I crept down and there was a stereotypical family watching the football, the Mum was ironing and they looked so content and normal, I remember feeling rejection. BAck to home; my Gran had to look after all of us including my Mum becuase of her state and because I looked like my Dad she locked me in a cupboard under the stairs and punished me for little things, I was stigmatized. We visited him in prison and we were glad to see him (still naive to what had happened). After his two year sentence when I was around nine or ten me and my sister would go to his flat to visit, but I remember resenting him, I must have known what he had done.
My Dad has seven children altogether, four with his previous wife who he had also abused, and three with my Mum, he now only sees one of them, he lets's his kids walk out of his life just as easy as they walk out of his house.
He was negelcted as a child so I can udnerstand why he doesnt understand how to love.



I don't know whether I have dealt with this in my own way, if it'll bite me in the future or if I have some supressed memories that would explode in the future.
I don't know what I feel about it anymore but I have never felt really that upset about my past even though it was totally turned upside down, can somebody give me advice?
It has probably moulded me into the persdon I am today...

I feel hardly any hatred towards him anymore, I guess I'm probably excusing what he's done with his neglected childhood?, but I've never really felt the need to cry about it.

I need to move on but my brain is just curious, and I've never been an angry person althought I have alot of it turnd inwards but I can't seem to express it, maybe when my brain has matured more it will change, because you hear about things haunting you ot flashbacks etc.

Somebody Please Relate!!

thankyou

Hi, I relate.

I've done a lot of therapy to work through the abuse. I didn't think I was particularly angry either, but then I had a boyfriend who said I was seething with rage, and he was right. It was directed inward. That's when I started getting help.

Your everyday therapist isn't a big help around AS issues, but can be a very big help around abuse and family violence issues. If you can find a therapist who also knows about AS, I think that would be the best course, since they will know how to work with your particular cognitive strengths and weaknesses. You want to make sure that you've got some kind of handle on your feelings about your history so that you don't repeat your family dynamic.

You've had a very rough start, and you've had no one to depend on other than yourself. I can relate to that, too. It was a relief for me to reach out to people who could help me in RL. I hope it will be for you, too.

Last edited by neshamaruach on 30 Dec 2008, 8:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Thankyou, I don't feel so alone with my feelings now,
I think it is time to move on, still it is what makes us who we are so I won't be able to stop thinking about it at times, he is out of my life now so that's a good start

Yes, getting the abuser out of your life is a wonderful start. I didn't manage that till I was in my 30s!

And yes, what happens to us definitely has its impact, but remember, you are not the same as the things that have happened to you. You have your own soul and your own light.

For me, the abuse isn't something I've moved on from. I've just managed to carry it more lightly and integrate its lessons into my psyche. It's taught me compassion, resilience, tenacity--all kinds of things. I've always taken the approach that in order to bring light to the darkness, you have to bring the blessings out of whatever you've gone through.

Feel free to PM me if you want to talk more.

Thanks again and I may do if I'm feeiling low about it if that's alright, and the same goes to you aswel

I'm currently doing voluntary work for the elderly and the homeless so that's a positive thing to start and I'm feeling hopeful about it, only the future will determine how it has effected my life...

You seem to be able to get on with your life and it doesn't seem like it has turned you bitter and you don't let it get in your way of what you're doing, I repect you for that.

Thanks. I've worked hard on that and I appreciate the kudos.

And the volunteer work you're doing, that's great. It makes a big difference to shine your light out there in the world. Keep on going....You sound like you're taking a lot of positive steps.

I was severly abused as a child. I have got over it, I think. Maybe you don't ever really and get counselling on-going because it will come back to you.
I have a daughter in foster care. She has been through some tough experiences. Fortunately she hasn't experienced any severe abuse and she is loved and cared for. What I think is so sad is children who feel like they are not loved. That is a form of neglect and can be emotional abuse at it's worse. The best outcome for a child irrespective of circumstance is; as long as they have atleast one person that really cares about them or loves them.
You can PM me if you want too

Thankyou DonnaBella
Good luck to you too

not a nice start to life. worked at it a lot - went to therapy for years and dealt with a lot and have grown incredibly as a reuslt. got STUCk the past few years and went to an AS speicalist after a nephew was dx'ed with autism and the rest - shall we say - is like a clear and fathomable jugsaw puzzle that it almost complete.

good luck on your journey.

i suppose this is where i should now stop making points, stop opinionating, and start sharing the more personal stuff -
the stuff i have possible never really spoken about, to anyone... maybe...

not particularly because of the topic, i'll admit, and thanks neshamaruach for 'your' thread, the topic is just one other way to start lining up all the loose things of my life

NO, i did NOT have a bad childhood. Actually, that has created so many of the problems i am still dealing with. I have always presented with more female behaviour, at least for as long as i can remember. So, by the time i started being confronted with problems and facing up to the reality that it could actually be more related to memyselfandi than i might care, i opened up to the possibility that there was something wrong with ME, which sort of opened up my awareness for psychology.

i said 'can remember' and meant CAN. That is my only true problem, and i have always identified it as such. For some reason (that's the way anyone thinks: there is a problem, there must be a reason, a cause), i have very poor memory. There are no more than a couple of very vague imagy things in my mind from before age 6. There is little from the period of primary school. We all know how unreliable witness accounts are - the memory is also to be taken very sceptically. Our interpretations ARE fed & coloured by personal need & desire. Not only do i have few real memories, i am fundamentally sceptical in respect of myself. This, of course, could be explained as an autistic need to stick to objective truth - partly forgetting (wanting to forget) that we are dealing with subjective experience; and out of some 'scientifically' minded (sub)consciousness.

anyway - i need to be extremely careful when dealing with myself.

i have also always 'assumed' i would become a writer.
at an early age, i had discovered literature (and therefore art) in it's 'deeper' meaning function.
it is not even a matter of opinion to me, it is a matter of form: the one absolute any writer has to follow is to remain true to himself (sorry girls) -
i am my only judge, i can only be in language on the precondition of sticking to self-truth.

with that in mind, and in the knowledge that 'an unhappy childhood is a writer's goldmine' i became aware of my poor memory.
remember, i said 'assumed', i never 'wanted' to become a writer - so i was never looking to have had a bad childhood -
i was just, even way before i had become aware of my life becoming problematic, let's see ... preparing to become a writer, which automatically meant (to me) that i had to know myself, understand myself first, if i was to stand any chance of making proper sense of the world

the first 'trait' then to be explained was that poor memory - and why only stills and never 'live' moving pictures???

FACTS OF MY CHILDHOOD:
- born April 27, 1956, in The Hague, Netherland
- winter 1956-7 (nine months) moved to Belgian Kongo (not in Leopoldville, but really in the jungle)
- April 24, 1958; brother Peter is born, virtually on the equator (it is said i doted on him, can't remember)
- winter 1958 (?) return to The Hague for short while before back to Africa
- 1959; Liberia, at the perimeter of an American compound from an ore-delving company, just by a 'negro' settlement outside - on the verge of the bush

there was a small improvised 'american' kindergarten, attended by both Peter and Big Brother me. No 'memories', but i know i have been in a nativity play, and i've been Tom Thumb.
linguistically, i now speak dutch, french (the colonialist elite was wallonian rather than flemish), a little bit of swahili (i am famed for making up my own word in swahili ('tululu' for some tuby thingy that made such a noise when blown through) - and, obviously, 'english'.

according to my mother (who'd had an abortion two years before me), the marriage was already dodgy by the time i was 'set up' - from her perspective with the possibility that maybe then a baby would turn things better.
i am pretty sure my father must have had other concerns - presumably in terms of reproducing himself; plus, one might surmise, doing a better job at bringing up a genius than his parents had done with him (mind you: i feel & consider myself as virtually totally self-taught and absolutely uncoached - if anything it is 'neglect' and empty words that have (not) structured my life, and my deep deep anger)

off-topic:
in dutch the word is 'boos', pronounced [bo:s] so rhymes with goes, but dutch long vowels are really only semi-long and short vowels really only semi-short so you might mistakingly hear [boss]

'boos', to me as it should to any dutch speaker, has nothing to do with the emotion it claims to convey, bloody hell, it even rhymes with 'rose';
'anger' is a much better word - to physically produce the sound [ang(er)] requires bodily functioning that fits some of the functioning that comes with the emotion called anger

although objectively 'better' in dutch, i have always felt more at home in english (which, remarkably, has also always been my own version of uk-english rather than the american english of the liberian kindergarten - but that has much to do with originally the beatles & the stones, rather); personally, i do deem american english a different language, maybe just not altogether

back on-topic FACTS:
my parents got separated in liberia, my mother decided that the children needed a european upbringing and returned to holland - not The Hague, but almost symbolically as far away from her mother as possible (this is not fact but my interpretation), in the east.

- winter 1962/3; stay with friends of my mother's in Enschede ([enskeday] gets you close enough) half a year of 'lower school', i.e. primary or elementary school
despite some feeble attempts at dutch education by my mother in Liberia, i was found way behind, and was refused by one school;
not to worry, who cares about level of education; in the other school, my mother was enthusiastically told by a very unworried lady teacher (as my mother will tell you): "ooh madam, he's not learning anything, but he's having such a good time just staring at all the other kids"

i don't think my mother had ever truly worried; and i wonder about the 'happy' interpretation of my staring

- 1963; move more centrally east: other friends in Zwolle; friends actually from the The Hague days up to our departing to Kongo; they have three daughters, at soon 7 i am almost of the age of the middle one, logical choice to go to the same elementary school, The Parkschool, in Zwolle

[in terms of FACTS, this means little, in retrospect it is the worst decision my mother ever made, apart maybe from marrying my father]

- 1963, after another six months, my mother had found a 'the wooden houslet' in medieval town Hattem, just across the bridge over the river IJssel [so easy yet unpronouncable to you lot, lol], in the subtownia on the verge of the Veluwe forestation, and with a toe in the door at the 'gold coast', i.e. where professional money lives - we have in that sense always been sort of like the notsowelltodo relatives of the better class;
this was not even ten kilometers removed from the Zwolle friends, so my future was set: i have grown a deep traumatic hatred for riding a bicyle (any non-motored means of transportation, really), especially when it involves riding on a dyke (levy) along the river and climbing a bridge, knowing that while at school the wind SHALL change direction and confront you once more on the way home.
Peter only had to start doing that at age 11, when, as any Hattem kid with half a brain, he was taken from the Hattem school after class 4 and sent to the Park School for class five, to add some proper level finishing to the elementary education.

- 1963 - 1969; home: Hattem; elementary Park School, Zwolle (this has created a deep sense of living separate lives)

though not fiercely, i was indeed bullied (there will be more on the subject, presumably elsewhere; i need a break); i soon learned how not to stand out, how not to draw attetion, and sort unconsciously disappeared hidden in the crowd; i had very few friends (if one at all); you could say i lost contact with my brother; school life and home life had nothing to do with each other; free time was spent at home where i had noone i went to school with (until lateish)

i have always been an american in paris, from out of town &c - that was, obviously, what the facts of life were

i'd been a little white blonde prince in the darkest and sweatiest of africa, i am a provincial in The Hague or Amsterdam, a distant intellectual from Hattem in Zwolle, not from here in Hattem

there is a sharp emotional - behavioural divide in the passage from elementary to secondary school, so this is my chance for some pause

you tell me: did i have a 'bad' childhood?

I am still dealing with it. I am still kicking ass and taking numbers.

I'll relate mostly with school.

Kindergarten - It was suggested that I be held back a year, because I wasn't "socially mature" enough to go into the first grade.

Third grade - I was assigned a councilor after whatever problems (lacking details) with students and teachers. I would visit her every day and she was supposed to help me with my problems.

Fifth grade - I've always been teased, but this year took the cake. I stopped doing my school work because the teacher refused to do her job and tell the kids to leave me alone. I would be the one who got in trouble too, when they did tease me. Eventually I pissed her off to the point of her pulling my hair, and my parents pulled me out of the last month of school.

Sixth grade - The kids in my neighborhood were transferred to another school. I was upset with this idea, and didn't want another school. I rebelled, and stopped doing school work entirely. I started purposely missing school. At the end of that year, the court ordered me to go to school, otherwise I'd get juvenile detention center time.

Seventh grade - I still purposely missed a lot of school, but did some work in classes. I had gotten sent to the detention center eventually for missing too much school. It was around this year too that my parents had me attend an anger management group. That group was pretty ret*d. I quit the second I was told I could.

Eight grade - Still missing school, still doing only a little work. I forget if it was this year or the next that I got sent to the detention center again. Both times were for two weeks, mind you.

Ninth grade - Missing school still, hardly doing any work. This time I got sentenced community service instead.

Tenth grade - I was sixteen then, and I dropped out.

Yeah, I had my share of problems, and that was just a SMALL part of my problems as a child with school. There is a lot more that doesn't need to be disclosed to get the point across! But you all understand that!

I have since gotten my GED, two years ago now, and have a year of college under my belt. So, yes, things have gotten "better". My problems still remain though.

yes and no

I can't say my childhood was bad but it’s had its low points like everyone else. If I do a long overview I'll be here all night so basically here is a short rundown.

- Was ostracized in school due to my quirks so never really had a real social life till I'd say after I got over my depression at 16-17.

- My mother and I lived with one of her ex's who was an alcoholic. One time I and he almost got into a fistfight. Everyday there was more screaming and yelling and my mother never thought it bad enough to leave until my grandfather not only was pissed about it but told my mother flat out he would rather be in a nursing home then live in the house.

- My first ex and I had a rocky relationship after meeting outside the walls of the hospital. She had bipolar and went into a control spree. At the very end my mother had went to the hospital for the first time and during this period she told me she had a miscarriage with my child. I later found this was a lie but only through pursuing things with logic.

- My grandfather died who taught me a lot in the very short time he lived with me and my mother. My mother blamed me for his leaving when it was more due to her alcoholic ex. He was diagnosed with Emphysema from his smoking and he worked till the last 3 months of his life and quit smoking while keeping a full pack right next to him. I mean cold turkey like he got diagnosed and said well that’s it and kept the pack next to him. He asked to be put in a nursing home disgusted by the living situation between me and Ron and how I was treated.

- My mother claimed to doctors I abused her which is more likely that she has misinterpretations on her memories since she has AS. I was told by the people at the school I went to which was for children with mental problems, that I could either have on file that I took myself off of medication (the medicine made me sleep 16 to 20 hours a day) or have that I abused my mother. I was pretty done with psychology after that day due to the pseudoscience like nature of it. Yes I do believe it’s a pseudoscience and I'm not a scientologist.

- Had severe depression and tried to take my life 3 times. Everything at that time was dark and I saw no light at all in the world. I had to reprogram my thoughts so I don't see the world in that light anymore that took a few years after my last suicide attempt. With it I had a sense of inferiority due to my perceived looks and lack of motor skills.

- Was hospitalized 3 times for the aforementioned suicide attempts to be kept an eye on:

First Time: my mother refused to visit because she was told I said she beat me (Psych asked has your mother ever hit you? and I answered yes and then magically my mother would not visit me). I had to be watched because another patient threatened my life because he asked me to throw a ball back to him and by the time I even thought about it, it was over near the other wall. The patient took it as I was being a prick and threatened to stab me. I met my first ex (more on that later).

Second Time: Had fight with the alcoholic ex of my mother. I left because it was the first time I thought of killing him so I knew my head wasn't right in that moment. First day my mother came to visit I got yelled at for not cleaning a dish. She didn't understand the issue and instead thought it was when me and him fought after school it was really during my lunch where I come home eat and leave. After I explained the story and my grandparents got involved she talked to her ex and he yelled at her when she had no voice (she recently had surgery). It is generally remembered about what happened to my mother even though she screamed and cursed me out in a room full of other patients.

Third Time: I had an extreme "black day" as I called it and made an agreement that I would either really kill myself or change my life to what I wanted it to be. The next 2 or 3 years I focused extensively on reprogramming myself and my outlook.

It was all needed though it made me a stronger person. It made me take away the flaws in my family that have been there for generations. It taught me how mindset changes the world and makes everything available to you. So while I had low points they were all blessings because they made me a better person then most.

A great deal of my childhood I've been depressed because of my bad circomstances at home and at school. I dealt with it, though sometimes I hear the voice of my father in my head screaming how worthless I am and that I can't do anything right. I dealt with it by remembering all of it, even if it emotionally really hurted and cried about it. At the time I was in these situations I tried to become a robot, just a machine that eats and functions, but without any emotion since actually not surpressing my emotions hurted so bad I almost had to cry.