Emotional/Verbal Abuse is Abuse

I have expressed a hatred of teasing and emotional/verbal abuse to my parents and my siblings all of my life. My parents and some of my older siblings gave us children very abusive nicknames. Some were given to my older siblings when they were teenagers. Mine was given to me when I was three. My siblings around my age were given their nicknames when they were older children. Just based on the age when abusive nicknames were given,  you can see they started after mine in age and in time. I was named two nicknames filthy and abusive and my siblings had very less damaging and abusive nicknames and they were done when they were much older than I was

My mother, who I used to confront often on this issue, would gaslight me and say, well all your siblings have nicknames they don’t like either, like well they are all being treated like shit and I am normalizing shit, so you can’t complain and have no right to complain and have no rights  that you can appeal to, because this is normal, they are all treated like you are treated, it is not mistreatment, it is normal, it is okay, no one is going to stop. And if you want to stop them, if you want this to end, then what you have to do is not be hurt or complain or say anything. They are getting a reaction and that is why you are to blame for the perpetuation of their treatment of you. My mother was a master at blaming victims for being abused, even while she abused them.

When the only person that I could go to for relief from emotional and verbal abuse against me by my siblings was my mother, who was my sexual abuser and my emotional/verbal abuser and who encouraged and perpetuated sibling emotional and verbal abuse against me , that made life very hard for me. Still, I was very determined that they should stop and that I deserved better treatment by my siblings, that I persisted. I don’t know where I got this strong belief in myself and that I deserved good treatment, but I had it, all my childhood. I think that is very strong of me and I am very proud of myself.

I knew that I deserved better from them all, even though none of them agreed with me. I knew that none of them should be called nasty and vicious and filthy nicknames. Some of the nicknames were not very bad, compared to mine, though they were all emotional and verbal abuse.

I didn’t just ask my mother to intervene and stop abuse. I asked other siblings as well. I don’t recall any of them trying to stop.

I don’t remember ever asking my father to stop. I don’t believe that I thought that he would, since he was the one who gave me the nicknames and the one who spread it all around the family and who allowed it to continue without ever once commenting about it or ever once trying to stop it.

When I was ten years old my father retired and was at home all the time, all day long and all night long. That was when the two nicknames about me stopped. I know that he did nothing to stop it. I just think that having him around, as a witness, is what stopped others from abusing me as much as they were. I suppose it was a shock to him to see how bad it was, how much of a scapegoat that I was, and how much I was being verbally abused.

I know that he enjoyed mistreating others, especially with words, especially with his children, but the bad nicknames stopped. I don’t believe that he ever lifted a hand to stop it. In fact, he started verbally abusing my brother more directly, who is 18 months older than I, during that time period.

It’s hard when this is the closest man in your life; someone who cruelly enjoys mistreating you with words and mistreating your emotions. It’s horrible that this was the closest example of an adult man that I had. It’s sad and pathetic that this is the best that he could be for his own children. I didn’t have a male teacher in my life until sixth grade, and that was a physical education teacher who was verbally and emotionally abusive to students. So not a good man or a good human being either.

I never felt that my father was on my side. I never believed that he would protect me. never felt that he loved me, though there was a time in my childhood when he would say that, though that had been some time before that.

If only there had been one person in my family who loved me and was good to me through my childhood. That would have changed my life so much. But none of them were willing to stand up for me and to suffer the consequences. With my mother, there was always consequences. I know that I deserved their love and loyalty.

My Creative/Artistic Self and Dysfunctional Family Stuff

My family has never been supportive of my artistic or creative work. After a long period of that, being diminished and ignored, I really would not look to them to be supportive, loving, kind, or good about anything that I really care about. I tend to share less and less as the years have gone by and I have to say they don’t seem to notice that I don’t share about my heart and what fills me with joy with them. Since that is so important to me and to my life, it makes it hard a lot of the time to find something to talk about, since so much of it is private and needs to be protected from them.

One time I did try to describe the inner creative process to one of my brothers and he burst out laughing and after my asking him repeatedly to share what he found funny and why, he made fun of me and the way that I had chosen to talk about my collage artwork.

I really have to admit that he broke my heart. That’s my family… and that in no way is diminishing how much he and they have hurt me and hurt my heart. That’s my family… they break my heart. Interacting with them means being self-protective of my life, myself, my creative self, my thoughts, my emotions, my beliefs, and so much more.

Sometimes it just leaks out of me, and I can’t stop myself from sharing, and it doesn’t go good and it doesn’t lead to good. It’s sad to me that sometimes I can’t stop myself or us from sharing things with our family and that it leads to more pain, more hurt, and more of a broken heart. It’s so sad to me that this is my family.

I don’t tolerate anything from my sister and when I started seeing her again almost three years ago, after not associating with her for almost ten years,  I promised myself that I was not going to endure another incident of emotional/verbal abuse from her and that if it happened I would never see her again. She hasn’t. Bizarrely she hasn’t. But I can’t talk to her about all the pain that she has caused me and how all that pain is still inside of me/us and how much it still hurts and how she derailed my life, many times, and made it so hard for me to have self-respect or self-love, because she undermined and humiliated me and verbally/emotionally abused me all my life and how my mother was my primary abuser and bully and how my sister was her toady, until I cut her out of my life. Part of her doesn’t know, part of her doesn’t care, part of her loves being clueless, part of her loved and still loves being both of our parents favorite little girl, part of her has cut me off when I’ve tried to explain in the past, and part of her would hurt if I tried to talk to her about it all now. I know, because I have tried.

One of my other brothers routinely makes fun of me, the things that I say, my politics, my beliefs, facts that I relate from studies, if I have to pause while finding the right words, etc, etc, etc. I limit him in my life, but even a little bit means emotional and verbal abuse. He only gets a little bit of me. After a few conversations in the last couple months I have decided to start hanging up on him again, it is the only way to have a healthy boundary with him.

The worst part of this all is that these are the two brothers who have the most interactions with me in my life right now. They have collectively done the most for me and at different times been my best support. They wound me and that is the best I am getting. Saying no means absolutely nothing.

My brother that shouts at me on the phone refuses to stop shouting at me, insulting me, demeaning me, misrepresenting me, and mischaracterizing me, no matter what I say to him. If I thought the things about him that he thinks about me, I would never have anything to do with that kind of person, I would hate that kind of person, I certainly would not have even one phone conversation with them.

I know all of it is lies, but it makes me wonder why he feels the need to be thinking so little of me and still associate with me. I don’t want to have anything to do with him, but then he acts like he cares about me, but then turns around and treats me like excrement. I know he finds it highly enjoyable, but I don’t. He is going to get the click on the phone line the next time we talk, if he goes there.

Life is Flipped Upside Down Again

I’ve been wide awake all night and sleeping all day again. I suppose that really doesn’t matter much, since I’ve been keeping my bike inside this winter, for probably the first time in more than twenty years. Since having my operation and having so many ear and sinus issues this winter I just don’t feel much like going out in the  cold either. I’ve been trying to flip myself back to being awake during the daytime, but for the most part that fails after about a day or two, and I end up feeling even more tired. I tried to flip back two days ago and ended up sleeping all afternoon and evening yesterday. Oh well.

It only really ever matters once or twice a week when I have to be awake during the day. Since I don’t have any friends to hang out with or places to go I suppose I should just not try to fight it. I love being awake late at night and into the early morning hours. As an intuitive I feel my brain being soothed rather than rattled. I feel and enjoy the silences so much; both the outer silences and the intuitive silences.

Considering that I was abused for years late at night, I have always felt more comfortable being awake late at night. I knew where I was and I felt safe knowing that I wasn’t being abused. This has been a thing that I do ever since I was a teenager and could stay up late at night, during the summers, and sleep far into the day without being disturbed by my family. I don’t know exactly why they decided not to interfere with my sleeping, but they didn’t bother me. My parents always equated getting up early with being industrious and hard working and sleeping late being used to describe laziness and being a sloth, and I’ve been verbally attacked for that all of my life.

I don’t really accept that stereotype, but it also affects me and how I value myself and my level of self-esteem. My family of origin’s rigid opinions and verbal abuses still hold too much sway in my life.

My alcoholic dad was an early morning person and he absolutely believed it made him a better person for it. He was quite opinionated in that view and I never agreed with him. He had a job that was only done during the day, so in a way I understand why he thought it was important, just not why he decided to shame all his children over it. But then again he loved to shame his children, on every topic he could find.

Living in a family with many morning people made it so much more difficult, especially since so many of them cannot still understand or empathize with someone who is not like them. As I’ve said to my family all my life; you either are or you aren’t an early morning person.

When you think about it really it sounds ridiculous and stupid in our day and age to describe someone up early in the morning as a good and better person that someone who prefers to sleep then. It might have been a more valid point hundreds of years ago, before electricity and all the ways someone can be alive and productive any time of the day or night.

I was talking recently to my great niece, who is in elementary school. We are very much similar in our interests and passions, except as I found out recently, in one important respect. She said she was an early morning person and I told her I was a late night person. We both extolled the virtues of the early mornings; her upon waking up and me just before going to bed. Even though we were far apart in our early morning/late night fandoms at least we shared a love of the world/nature in the early morning, so we have that in common too..

She Refused to Apologize

Several years ago an aunt told me, on the phone, that she used to emotionally abuse me with filthy name calling when I was a child. She was an adult. She had her own girl. She did not treat her own daughter the way that she treated me. She did not live with us. She did not take care of me or babysit me. She never bought me gifts or spent time with me or treated me as though I mattered to her or that I was special or that I was loved. She just visited and treated me the same way that my parents and siblings did, she called me filthy names that my parents started and encouraged my siblings to do.  She came into my own home, as an adult, and was vicious and cruel to me when I was a child.

I have to say that I was shocked. I never remembered that from my early childhood. I did remember that while she seemingly worshiped my older sister, treating her like the golden girl, she never seemed to express or demonstrate love for me. I remembered that for no reasons that I could see she would make fun of me, she would invade my space or life, even to the point of reading my private diary or evaluating a hobby or activity that I would do and enjoy. She would enjoy making fun of me. She would grab my belongings and wave them around, shouting, making fun of me, and laughing at me. I remember those times. I remember the kind of aunt that she had been to me.

We were never really close for decades. But over a number of years we had become kind of friends, talking on the phone late at night from states far, far away. She knew a number of issues that I was dealing with because I was an abused child. She knew that I had been sexually abused as a child and emotionally abused as a child. She knew that my father had been an alcoholic and that my mother had been a sexual offender against me. She had heard me talk at length over several years about how painful it all was. There were specific times that I had recalled telling her how painful it was to be the scapegoat child in my family of origin, especially with all the filthy names that I was called. She never told me she did the same thing to me.

So I was shocked and flabbergasted when she finally admitted it to me on Christmas Eve one year. I told her immediately that she owed me an apology for treating me like that when I was a child and she was an adult.

She started making excuses. I was shocked and appalled. I was sickened. I thought how dare she excuse her malicious and cruel behavior by acting like she could do anything that abusive parents and siblings were doing to me.

I explained to her that as an outsider in my home she knew that there were different rules of conduct, as an adult and not one of my siblings she was held to a different standard of behavior, that she was not my alcoholic father nor my sexual abuser mother and as such not my parent and that she had no right to do that to me, no right at all, and that I knew for sure that she had never treated her own daughter that way. Even so her daughter has a very antagonistic relationship with her mother, my aunt and considering the kinds of abandonment issues and emotional abuses she went through, I am hardly surprised.

I told her I am not filth and she doesn’t get to tell me that I am filth, then or now. I told her that no matter what my family did to me in my home that does not make it okay for her to do, and I told her that I know that you knew that as an adult. I told her that what my siblings did to me when I was a small child was when they were children as well. That I understand they were abusive, but that they were also children and that I hold them to a different standard than I do to my parents, to any adult. I told her that she knew it was wrong then and she never said word one to stand up for me, to try to stop the abuses or to be on my side. I told her I know you knew it was wrong because you never did that to your own daughter. I know you saw what kind of lovely little girl I was and your response, instead of to be loving and good and kind to me, was to crush me, to try to crush my soul and my spirit and to make me hate myself, my body, my life.

I told her she gives me an apology or I am out of her life for the rest of my life. She refused, she continued to deny wrongdoing with a number of excuses. I sent her a letter later outlining exactly why again and that she owed me an apology if she ever wanted to be in my life and it has been more than five years and nothing from her. I am fine with that. I never miss her. I hardly ever think of her. I have never refused to apologize to someone. I have always forgiven someone when they have asked for forgiveness. I’m nothing like her. I’m nothing like my mother.