One nuclear family....

[nancylebov]

doesn't have to ruin your whole life, I hope.

My family was subtly off. I don't think a sociologist would find anything to complain about--physically and economically secure and stable, no overt abuse, or at least nothing that any adult within range seemed to notice, and nothing that my brother, sister, and I can put a finger on that explains the aftereffects. However, all three of us kids have serious problems with self-esteem/inertia/depression and have spent untold hours trying to figure out what was wrong. At least in my case, I think it was decades before that wasn't the primary topic every time I talked with my brother or sister.

Last night, my sister mentioned the reasonable idea that it isn't a solvable problem, and the best thing is to figure out how to move on. While I've made a large dent in some of the aftereffects of my upbringing, I can't say that a lot is solved.

I'm quite interested in what anyone who's reading this has done that's worked to get over the effects of an abusive upbringing. I'm interested in any stories about getting past overt abuse as well as the subtle stuff. And about finding out that you're more like your parents than you hoped, and dealing with *that*.

If anyone wants to comment anonymously, that's fine with me. (I'll be deleting anything I consider trolling, of course. If you think people should be over their issues with their parents by the time they're 25, it's your problem, not mine.) If you'd rather email me, I'm nancy netaxs com.

One more thing--if you take this to your own lj or blog, could you let me know? As you may gather, I'm interested in whatever further thoughts can be gathered.

Comments

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Thanks for telling me about this.

I don't think there's anything like that in my history--I suspect my family was unusually fortunate in terms of health. My mother had occasional migraines. My brother broke a bone once (his arm, I think). We had a house fire, but no one was hurt and the damage was mostly limited to the kitchen and covered by insurance. I had appendicitis. The last great-grandparent died when I was a kid, but all my grandparents were alive and at least reasonably healthy till I was 25 or so.

If you've had aftereffects, have you found anything that's helped you tone them down or get rid of them?

You know, I've never seen a self-help book about how to stay conscious when it's urgent to do so. I'm talking about situations like your dad's--they aren't especially rare, and they're exactly when it's both crucial to be able to ask "is what I'm doing making sense?" and incredibly difficult to do so. And then look around enough so that you have a chance of finding out whether what you're doing is making sense and taking appropriate action. There's the advice to get professional help, but not everyone can afford it, and not everyone who can afford it happens to have competent professional help when they need it.

The nearest thing I can think of is a book called _Deep Survival_--it's an overview of what people do (for good and ill) in wilderness/emergency situations, and quite fascinating--but not quite the same topic.

The other thing that comes to mind is that I can't think of anything in art about an ordinary low status person (not a court jester) pointing out something important and obvious and getting heard.

[nellorat.livejournal.com]

The other thing that comes to mind is that I can't think of anything in art about an ordinary low status person (not a court jester) pointing out something important and obvious and getting heard.

I can't think of anything in which this is the major focus, but it does show up, especially in fiction/drama/memoir of illness. For instance, in "W;t," the dying literature professor learns a lot from her night nurse, although it's less in term of definable keen insights and more in terms of what matters in life.

[aiglet.livejournal.com]

About the only thing I've found that helped at all was to be able to say "Yeah, that was fucked up, it wasn't my fault, and I did the best I could." It doesn't always help, but knowing that it was a screwed up situation and I was just a kid when it happened makes a big difference. You can only expect so much from someone who's essentially reliant on the people around her for everything, up to and including basic survival needs.

I've found that the main after effect has been to give me a lot of "common sense" -- an ability to look at something that's going on and say "okay, we're going about this the wrong way, it would make more sense to do it *this* way." Unfortunately, that doesn't always work, and it makes me very short with stupid situations.

I think the problem with advice to get competent professional help is that it requires you to have enough awareness of what's going on (and ability to admit that there's something wrong with it) to know that you ought to *get* the help. My stepdad was in such deep denial that even though I said we needed the help, he firmly maintainted that everything was under control, because admitting it wasn't would have meant admitting my mom was going to die and there was nothing he could do about it. I think there are a lot of mental issues that people have that cause that sort of problem -- the thing they need to get help for prevents them from knowing that they should, and it creates this sort of spiraling situation where nothing but a short, sharp shock is going to get them out of it, no matter how bad it really gets.

I can't really think of an example of low status people being heard either, even though I'm sitting here looking at my bookcase. If you find one, do let me know.