Did anyone have the misfortune in childhood of having a "non-nurturing parent"? I've been told early in psychiatric treatment that my mother was not really adequate as a parent and that had much to do with my feelings in childhood. And I was told by the same psychiatrist that all I really needed was to be around healthy people.
What?

I always thought it was a sister who made it tough on me and let me know straight-away that I was an adopted child (not true) and that my parents intended to leave me. Can you imagine what that does to a two or three-year-old? I can remember crying my eyes out one night when they left to attend a bridge party. (My sister was nowhere in sight.)

I've spent a lifetime trying to get to the bottom of all of it, and I think I have finally come to the conclusion that some parents have many of the necessary skills and some don't, and so we take our bumps and knocks and spend our lives trying to overcome them and maybe we overcompensate by trying to do too much.

I don't know. The thoughts have just been occurring to me recently.

Anybody else feel that we missed something in early childhood that could still be affecting us at times?

[unaluna]

What???..

What? (Meaning how can you need only to be around healthy people when you've spent the most formative years of childhood under less than nurturing love?)

Thank goodness for the good psychiatrists along the way who prepared us so that we knew what was expected in parenting our own children.

[comicgeek007]

My mother is untreated bipolar and is probably the reason the disorder gets such a bad rep. She actively tried to convince me to kill myself so she could take custody of my sisters from my dad. And she was part of the reason my dad was depressed and so not really emotionally available for a few years.

Originally Posted by comicgeek007

My mother is untreated bipolar and is probably the reason the disorder gets such a bad rep. She actively tried to convince me to kill myself so she could take custody of my sisters from my dad. And she was part of the reason my dad was depressed and so not really emotionally available for a few years.

Have you undergone psychotherapy yourself to recover from the blow
from your mother? I hope so, and I hope you are stronger for having
overcome it. You really had a mom who needed help, and I'm so sorry she didn't get it.

You are strong, I think, for being able to manage it.

Thanks for sharing.

[Victoria'smom]

I have trouble believing anything my parents did or did not do gave me an inadequate childhood. Now saying that they both were / are very sick and genetically completely screwed me up.

[comicgeek007]

Originally Posted by genetic

Have you undergone psychotherapy yourself to recover from the blow
from your mother? I hope so, and I hope you are stronger for having
overcome it. You really had a mom who needed help, and I'm so sorry she didn't get it.

You are strong, I think, for being able to manage it.

Thanks for sharing.

Thanks.

I'm in the process of it. This only happened about two years ago and I'm finally in a place where I can get help without her interfering. I don't know why, but not long after it happened and I stopped seeing her completely, part of my brain shut off for months and I couldn't remember any time I had spent with her at all and that was okay with me. It was like, I knew bad stuff was there, but my brain was like 'nope. you don't need to see that.' and kept the door shut.

I don't really think I'm that strong, though. I freaked out and started crying when I saw she had looked me up on Linkedin and so many people had endorsed her for all sorts of qualities that she never had around her children. CPS was finally called two weeks ago on her when her new husband physically abused one of my little sisters. Hopefully they'll actually take this case seriously and not do a bunch of bureaucratic bull crap.

These things really are difficult to overcome, in my view. I somehow get very angry
when I see a child not treated with care and gentleness. Those qualities are absolutely essential, I think, for a secure childhood.

I see such gentleness in my grandchildren and am so grateful for it. You can imagine, I feel sure. For me, that's all-important.

Originally Posted by Miguel'smom

I have trouble believing anything my parents did or did not do gave me an inadequate childhood. Now saying that they both were / are very sick and genetically completely screwed me up.

__________________________________________

Did a psychiatrist help you to understand it? I was amazed at how quickly my psychiatrist spotted it almost within minutes. I guess the effects had been seared into me pretty strongly.

[Victoria'smom]

Did a psychiatrist help you to understand it? Understand what??

[Victoria'smom]

I quickly understood that as a young child because adults were openly afraid of my mom. I don't believe that understanding has to go back through your childhood. I think I fully understood the severity when they would rather disown me than go to therapy.

As my whole family has grown into adults and I have a family of my own I'm more understanding of what it means to raise a family riddled with mental illness. I couldn't imagine dealing with 4-5 un-dx'd MI kids. while having untreated MI, keeping house and working full time. I appreciate what they attempted to accomplish. I do remember the horrifying things that happened but that's part of fully accepting who they are. Yes people can do horrid things but that is a small part of who they are. There are many good qualities to everyone, yes I do mean everyone. If my "tragic" life taught me anything it's to be accepting and humans are inherently good.

I made it very clear to my son by the time he was 3 that I have a "head boo-boo". So he knew that before he realized all mom's didn't have cerebral palsy. Both illnesses he mourned over but I don't feel being young means you don't understand.

When you're two and three years old, Miguel's mom, it's not likely that any child of that age is going to grasp the full nature of not being loved unconditionally. That's what this thread started out to be, but is somehow being sidetracked into later years of family abuse. I did not know at 2 years of age that sibling rivalry had a lot to do with the problem, nor did I know that my mother was not a woman who ever wanted children. Those things do influence little ones unconsciously more than many realize.

I suppose your difficulty affected you in your own way, too, and I'm glad that you took care to see that your child was reared with love and knowledge. Your answer that your parents "screwed up ... life" for you is sufficient to say that you were aware at some point of the injuries you sustained, whether you knew it in very early childhood or not may be questionable based on your answer.

By 4 years of age, most children are able to grasp more maturely what's happening in their treatment, and much younger than that they do not grasp fully the depth of the problem, in my view. For example, I can remember my sister's throwing a cup of hot coffee in my face at the table for breakfast when I was still in my highchair. I remember my mother's disciplining her, but not much more about it except that I wondered what the #$%^ was wrong with her that made her do that.

I respected my mother and father, despite their lack of knowledge about how to rear children. They were not uneducated people, and they did the best they knew how, in my view, and I loved them; in fact, I took care of my mother during the last years of her life following a stroke. But that is not to say that I did not suffer (as all children do to some extent from childhood mistakes in discipline, nurturing, understanding and patience). They are overcome by being made conscious and aware and working on them, according to most people in-the-know about handling the psychic hurts of young childhood.

I suspect that a large part of healing in psychotherapy relates to the work done on
the little child within.

I agree that all people have good things about them--some more than others, however. And some have far more problems in life than we have experienced in our
childhood years. Nevertheless, those impressions in childhood do have a bearing on
our mature years, and often psychotherapy is helpful in resolving them. Depression
is in large part due to unmet needs of childhood that are emerging.

[Darth Bane]

when you are child you are taught that you are supposed to love your parents unconditionally. that they cant do anything wrong. my mom has mood swings so she would yell at me daily. it continued till i became 16 after that i started yelling back. and now i speak to her just once a month. my both parents they are stupid and i was talented. also they are not much educated . but i remember yelling i got when i didnt score first rank in my class in high school. after that i studied hard and kind of achieved miracles in next semester but my parents had no clue of what exactly i achieved. after that i started to think - actually i looked around in my class and thought these all my classmate are going to be mom and dad. some of these are totally horrible. she will make worse mom and he will make worse dad. so i concluded my mom and dad are worse mom and dad. today i hate my father there is no middle ground i simply hate him and i wont shed tear if he died. its worse when you are sensitive and your parents are stupid. they interfere in your life too much.

[newtus]

right there wif you.

it was mainly my mother that was highly dysfunctional.

besides being ignored as an infant by her. she routinely gave me beer as a child and sleeping pills to make me goto sleep. i had severe insomnia always have still do. i remember at nine she tested diff beers on me. yea i got the adopted thing too and im not even! she used to spray me with the water hose to "teach me a lesson" shed said.

i had severe mental health problems since 9 years old.
!!!and at around 9 as much as i regret it and always will (no matter how bad i felt at the time) things had just gotten so bad that i remember finding a...lets just say a loaded something in my parents closet and pointing it at both my mom and sis and then me and saying some things.

i dont wanna get graphic or scare anyone. i just want to share my story. and find some solace. im pretty desperate to find solace about my childhood.

lots of sh_t happened but i feel i need to stop here.

Getting it out helps a lot, I hope. It did for me. Today is much brighter and kinder for it all. Thanks so much.

[Anika.]

I had two unnuturing parents and was abandoned and emotionally and physically abused by both. And I am so sure that this lead to much of my emotional instability. Lead to being an adult who was still emotionally not grown up. My psychiatrist did not help with this but I searched and looked inward a lot to see how I could help myself mature emotionally and heal.

My sistes and I were very close and we would discuss our parents actions in private amd support each other. We knew that is was not right and looking back we were pretty aware of the potential damage. If we didn't have each other then I am not sure how we would have looked at it. So we tried to help heal each other.

Thing is we can heal and we can grow. Now I didnt have psycotherapy, at best I had minimal therapy. Evem when psychotherapy is not available we still have it within us to heal and mature. And when we become adults we have a responsability to ourselves...where do we go from here? And knowing that was probably the biggest motivator for me to work on myself.

I think that's true for all of us. It can be a big motivator for us to heal our little child
within. And all of us have the little child inside; that's where some depressions get their origins. All of the needs of the little one are not being met adequately.

The adult may recognize that and work on it; that's why loving oneself is so important, I think. I just finished earlier saying to someone who couldn't love others and consequently had strong self-hatred, she needed to learn to love herself so that she could love others and resolve the hatred.

And love is the willingness to extend oneself for the benefit of others.