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Originally Posted by growlithing
I don't even know what I need. No that's a lie. I mostly need someone to help me feel less isolated. I spend most of my time just watching my phone, hoping someone will contact me or at least text me back.
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It's so hard when you are isolated, and other people are just getting on with their own lives. Even harder if you have core beliefs about yourself and others that make it scary to reach out to them. I try, as part of my self-care, to regularly phone a friend; I do it on my mobile, then go for a long walk while talking, which is good for exercise and for getting out of the house. I find single people are the most receptive to long phone chats. Conversations seem a lot more emotionally satisfying than texts, even if I don't talk about what's wrong.
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I still have trouble defining it as abuse or just normal punishment. No one I've ever talked to about it has ever had a problem classifying it as abuse. To them, it's easy. But for some stupid reason, I can't accept that and I just feel like I'm probably lying or exaggerating what I remember for sympathy even though I know that's not the case. That is what my mom tells me I do. That's not reality and I know that, but I still don't accept that 100% of the time. And when I don't accept it and I start questioning what they did really was, I start making excuses for her and I see her as this mother who tried really hard and just didn't know how to properly handle a kid with severe ADHD. But other times, I find myself wanting to completely sabotage my mother and hating her on every single level imaginable with this unquenchable firey rage. I can logically understand that my emotions towards her and the fact that she was an overwhelmed mom don't have to be mutually exclusive but at the same time, I feel like I constantly need to validate myself for the pain I go through. The part of me that empathizes with her makes me feel like I have no right to feel the way I do about her. It's so confusing that sometimes, I wish she were a horrible, conniving **** to me all of the time so I don't have to play these stupid games. Or I'll wish that she just pushed me down the stairs or did something, anything that would have left serious enough marks that maybe someone could have noticed and saved me. Then, maybe I'd feel like I'd be justified in being the crazy person I am.
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I hear you. It doesn't help much, but all of those feelings are a really natural response to what you've been through. I'm struggling with very similar issues at the moment, though my parents seem less bad than yours. I feel like "if my parents were as horrible as growlithing's, well
then it would definitely be abuse and i'd definitely deserve sympathy". But the human mind doesn't work like that. However bad things were, there's still that impulse to minimise and question yourself, because it's a survival instinct, evolutionarily it's safer for the child to attach to their parent than to reject their parent, even if the child needs to twist their whole worldview to make that happen.