Hello guys I’m so sorry I haven’t been on forum for days so only now have a chance to thank you for replying.

Tatyana - thanks for the encouragement. You wrote a pretty significant sentence there when you said

I wonder how many abused people actually repeat the same treatment they got as kids to themselves as adults. I know for sure that I internalized the whole I don’t matter message so that throughout my life I not only expected not to matter to anyone, but actually treat myself as if I don’t matter. Hmmm. Bit of a catch-22 though because unless someone else treats you like you do matter, you don’t really get the experience to know what it’s like to matter, so it’s pretty hard to matter to yourself. (For ‘matter’ substitute or add any of the following: love, liking, admiration, sympathy, respect, being important, being wanted, accepted etc etc)

Sugahorse that’s an interesting question! That’s sort of why I struggle with seeing what happened to me as abuse, because it seems to me a lot more to do with not getting, with not being treated in a good way - rather than someone openly doing something bad to me. And it gets even trickier when you’re an adult because the assumption is you are free enough to walk away from negative relationships. And also as you pointed out, it tends to be seen as ‘selfish’ or at least ‘expecting too much’. I suppose in your case you have to ask yourself why are you accepting his negating and uncaring behaviour towards you? What’s stopping you realizing that you ARE worth being considered and treated with respect and therefore deserve more than you are getting? These are just hypothetical questions, me musing aloud (but if you want to answer them, please do…)

Lovemist it sounds like you’ve done really well getting yourself into a good place. I agree with you about pointing the finger where it belongs but I have a question - how did you take control back from those who abused you? I find it really hard to confine the negative messages I’ve got to where they originally came from, because my life experiences just seem to have reinforced and proved my negative perceptions of myself. It’s just so hard recognizing negative stuff from people when it’s all an absence, a not giving - rather than something obviously bad (like verbal abuse for instance, of which I had a shedload as well, with a fair bit of physical abuse too - not that at the time hitting children was considered abuse). But even verbal abuse is hard to counter, because how many of us are able to not be at least initially hooked into accepting that we’ve done something wrong to warrant the verbal attack? It’s such a nightmare because it’s just not straightforward, as I said before it’s like trying to pin down smoke and mists.

Torn