darknova

Hey, neeeel. That's a pretty awful and painful history you describe. Your parents sound pretty nasty and abusive. Being spanked until ages 5 or 6 is going to have a pretty big impact on you and it's a truly awful thing to experience. I'm extremely sorry and heartbroken to hear you had to go through that. The second half of your post includes a lot of things I went through as a kid. My family made similar kinds of verbal attacks to each other all the time. Calling someone pretentious for good typing skills? That's an attack. He's not joking when he says that, he's attacking you. It's got nothing to do with you anything you did. I see nothing in what you've written here that indicates you're at fault for any of this. You say: "Throughout my life, I have been constantly labelled, thoughtless, lazy, stupid, silly, uncaring, rude, selfish." Those are all awful and unwarranted attacks designed to isolate you and force you to self attack. No wonder you mention feeling isolated and without friends. It's hard to put yourself out there and interact meaningfully with people when all you know from your history with people is attack.

You made a deliberate and rational decision to join the FDR community and to get into philosophy. Would you characterize those decisions as bad?

Holy hell. Joel, that's horrifying. You've got some incredible strength to survive that hell. I'm so incredibly sorry that you had endure that kind of awful childhood. Sounds like we both developed similar defense mechanisms. My family was distant, emotionally unconnected, and verbally abusive. Around 7th grade, I went into full self-erasure mode: every waking minute at home was spent in front of a tv playing video games or immersing myself in my computer in my bedroom. I'd avoid everyone else in the house as much as possible, and basically became as close to a ghost as I could. That part where you mention your mom becoming and emotional vampire toward you once your dad left; how long did that go on, and has that had any lasting impacts on you?

Journaling can be whatever you want (yeah, that's a pretty broad statement). To me it's a place to write about whatever you want as you search for emotional connections to your past. It's a place to get out all of your concerns about your life and your personality and to search to root causes for your personal defense mechanisms. It can be anything you want, really. It's really just supposed to be a means to an end. The 'end' is self knowledge that helps you denormalize all the shit that happened to you throughout your life. It's supposed to help you get back in touch with your real, true, self. I've been having my own issues with how to practically proceed. It can be really tough. But that's what self knowledge is all about. If it's not easy, you're probably making real progress.

Here's on example of what she does. If I'm looking through a cabinet in the kitchen to find a pot or pan and I don't know where it is, she'll see me looking and ask what I'm looking for. Then she'll roll her eyes, sigh very loudly, says "I'll get it" in a very annoyed/angry tone, opens a cabinet and points to it saying "it's RIGHT here!". Also, randomly she'll go on loud yelly outbursts, triggered by something random that one of us said or did. Then we'll find out later that she was pissed about something else, and just took it out on us. Another thing she does is, if I'm in the living room talking to my dad and one of us states an opinion about the topic we're discussing, she'll yell something completely contradictory from the next room just to cut one of us down. So I basically spent my whole childhood in a hyper vigilant state because I never what I was going to say or do that would invite her passive aggressive, or outright aggressive, attacks. And they wondered why I was so much happier when I moved three hours away to college.

"Not only was it difficult but they offered little to no help and would yell at me for not doing things I couldn't grasp." That statement stands out to me quite strongly after reading the other post you made. Do you remember how you felt when they yelled at you for this? I think this may be something worth exploring, as you mention feeling helplessness a lot in your first post, and I have to imagine a child would feel pretty damn helpless when getting yelled at for not understanding something. Maybe reflecting on that could be a good jumping off point for some journaling. And that's a really shitty thing to do to a child (or anyone, really). If you can't grasp a concept, it's not your fault. To yell at a kid for it... man, that's just pure evil. I'm really sorry you had to experience this. Then you get the Catholic indoctrination on top of it all!

Starsky, thank you so so much for sharing your story. First off, your past sounds so brutal and painful, I'm so sorry you had to go through that. That's so twisted and awful. "She beats you so you don't become an arsehole"... there are no words for how fucking twisted and disgusting those kinds of justifications are. I connect with your story on many levels. My parents never used physical attacks, but my mom was like a surgeon with her verbal assaults. She used her words like a scalpal to cut me down in the most painful ways during my whole childhood. It's likely she never really cared about me other than as a container she could vomit her own poison into. I think the next step for me is to examine the "relationship" I had with her while I was growing up and try to really connect to how I FELT about the whole thing. The emotional connection is what I've always been lacking with myself.

Your main point here hits home quite strongly for me. My mother essentially told me, extremely passive aggressively, throughout my childhood to not think for myself or think or do anything that she didn't like. Basically to erase myself and be a ghost that solely lives to please others at my own expense. It's possible that this is part of the anxiety because exploring myself goes completely against the message I internalized from my mother during my childhood. Thank you so much for the feedback. I think this'll provide a great starting point for another round of journaling. The above quote is an excellent way of describing how I've felt for most of my life. I know the pain of that kind of lonely isolation and abandonment. Thank you for sharing your story. What you wrote has me wondering if maybe I tried moving a bit too fast without truly connecting with my inner child. Emotional connections have always been tough for me. My parents certainly never provided a good model of healthy emotional connection, and I definitely never had any emotional connection with them.

Thanks for the response. I still self censor quite a bit, which is likely why my post is vague. What I mean by "plugging back in" is that I reverted back to all my old bad habits: self censorship, self attack, isolation, self medication (video games and alcohol), and surrounding myself with toxic people that I have to censor myself around (when not isolating myself, though I guess this is also a form of self imposed isolation). The best course of action to benefit me, I think, would be to figure out a way to get past my anxiety that arises when I try to work on myself. Whenever I try to work on my self, be it through journaling, talking with someone, or just talking it over with myeslf, I get really tense and anxious and wind up giving up after accomplishing nothing. I don't know how to proceed at this point. Thanks for the feedback. Your first sentence has me thinking maybe I've made the easy connections already, but there are some deeper onces that part of me is afraid to deal with consciously. It feels like there's this huge wall of anxiety between me and the truth and I feel like I'm just beating my head against it fruitlessly.

Hey folks. This post is in part inspired by two threads started earlier by Violet and Joel in the Self Knowledge section here. They really got me thinking about my own quest for self knowledge, and where I stand these days.I started really digging into my past after about a year of listening to these FDR podcasts. I made some really great breakthroughs and some connections I'd never even considered before. It was eye opening and, honestly, terrifying. Over time the anxiety and fear I felt whenever I sat down to journal or generally explore myself became too much, and roughly 18 months ago I made the decision to abandon it all and go with the "easy path" of plugging back into the Matrix.That was the worst decision I've ever made. About 12 months ago I started having dreams all the time that involved being judged and mocked by zombie-like people. It's usually me surrounded by generic and lifeless people in a bathroom (or some other public place where you're really vulnerable in some way) all staring at me and laughing or saying mocking things. On top of that, in the past 6 months my stomach has started feeling worse and worse (gastritis at 32 years old, wonderful), and my blood pressure has been elevated a lot more often. My decision to just abandon the quest for self knowledge has been horrible and is starting to physically harm me.I want to start digging myself out of this mess, and I thought the first important thing to do would be to acknowledge to people that would understand that I've made a terrible personal decision. Typing this has been terribly gut wrenching. I hope none of you ever makes the same mistake. It's truly awful to experience.

Hey Joel, thank you for posting this. I'm so sorry you were traumatized like you were. Having to revert to self censorship to defend yourself from outside abuses is exceedingly painful.Did you start self censoring at 18 years old, or was that just the realization that you'd been doing it for years? I'm curious when you started censoring yourself.I made a similar realization back in my college days. While I started connecting the dots about my past, I realized that I had been censoring myself since I was about 6 years old. My parents had mentioned in the past that I used to be a really energetic, happy, kid that talked all the time, but I started withdrawing around 6 years old and and finally stopped expressing myself at all around 14. It was so painful to realize this, that I withdrew from thinking about it and surrounded myself with nothing but people that I had to censor myself around.I've been willfully neglecting this aspect of myself for a long time now. This post has helped me realize how much I've been actively ignoring working on myself. Thank you, Joel.

What a horrible way to grow up. Bullied at school. Made fun of at home. No wonder you took refuge in endless gaming. No child should have to deal with that kind of constant abuse. I'm really sorry you were treated so horribly for so long. You deserve way better. It really takes a lot of courage to open up like you did in this post.

This is heartwrenching. That's one of the most horrendous childhoods I've heard of. So much disgusting brutality. Those people that did these things to you and your sister are pure evil. Just fucking disgusting evil. People that don't aknowledge this don't deserve to be in your life. Be proud, though! You survived a lifetime of brutality with the light in your soul still intact. That shows so much strength.

tjt and Rainbow Jamz, those are really awful things to experience. I'm so sorry Thank you for posting this thread. Making the emotional connections to experiences from my past has been very challenging, as I'd assume it is for most folks. Maybe this method of viewing the experience as an outside observer first will help me start breaking through that.

That's a horrendous situation, I'm so sorry JakeN. Would you be able to get out of your father's care if you sued for child support? I really don't know how all of that works. If it would get you into a better situation, using the state's violence to defend yourself from your home's violence seems like simple self-defense to me.

Eating food at a restaurant and leaving without paying is theft, just as walking out of a hardware store with a screwdriver and not paying for it is theft. Restaurants don't have much recourse in the current state-controlled system unless they catch you walking out, which is really easy to avoid if you're even slightly observant, or if they have security cameras watching all the patrons. Lots of places out there will just take the dine-and-dash as a loss, cause it's really tough to get any resolution by going to the cops, and I'd imagine it would be similar in a stateless society. To me, the restaurant example is just another way of describing theft. Walking out of an establishment with food in your stomach that you didn't pay for is no different than walking out of an establishment with a screwdriver in your pocket that you didn't pay for.

What I'm getting from this is a weird disconnect. I don't understand how you can simultaneously not like someone and also love them. It seems to me that it could be a defense mechanism. Basically saying that someone subconsciously doesn't like their family, yet still feels the need to cling to the mythology of the family (hence the "loving feelings towards your family"). Is the phrase "have loving feelings towards your family" yours, or is it the words of your friends? When I read it, I get the sense that it's a deliberate way of NOT saying "loving your family". Do you get that sense, too, or am I reading too much into it?

What is this "self-rule" and "self-government" he keeps talking about? Is that some sleazy way of trying to get folks to believe that they're running their own lives with the Federal Government being some kind of benevolent overseer? Man, this president is brilliantly manipulative.

Morse Code Stutters: thanks for mentioning that podcast. I had missed it, and self esteem and self criticism are things I've been struggling to bring under control for a while now.

Have you listened to podcast 2322 where Stef interviews Dr Faye Snyder about Reactive Attachment Disorder? There's great discussion in there about the role of emotional and physical attachment in early childhood that may help provide you with some answers and (likely) more questions to mull over. Either way, it's some great through provoking material, and helped me view some things differently in my own past.

When you say they were 'cold', what do you mean specifically? I'm guessing emotionally distant/unavailable? I think that this yearning is a pretty natural result of a lack of emotional closeness and connection as a child. Connection is extremely important in our early lives. It seems from what you wrote that you received none/little of this connection, and I think that could easily lead to a yearning for it cause it's a deep void that was never filled. Let me know if anything I've said is off base. If you really did never get that connection as a child, you have my deepest sympathies. That's a pretty terrible thing to withold from a child.

Wow, I found this thread at exactly the right time. I've been working on some issues lately, and one big one that's come up is my constant paralysis about starting or finishing new things. It's frequently a helpless paralysis that just seems to hold me back all the time. The reading/viewing material posted in this thread is giving me some great things to think about and is looking to be quite helpful. Thank you!

It sounds like you've never had any well-modeled loving relationships in your life, and that's a serious tragedy. Would you mind elaborating more on just what these relationships you witnessed were like? What was the disfunction in your dad's relationships with your mother and his second wife that destroyed him? Also, you mention at the beginning of the thread that you've had one serious relationship, the one that lasted 6 years. Could you flesh that one out a bit, too? How did it develop? What kinds of things lead to the relationship falling apart?

Divorces and single parents are disturbingly common these days. What's the history of your parents' relationship, if you don't mind me asking? I'm also curious about why seeing divorces and single parents might lead you to think it's dangerous for you to start a family? Is it a fear that you'll make a wrong decision about what woman you get involved with? That's what comes to my mind when you say you have a hunger but can't discern the food from the poison. Let me know if that's accurate at all.

I'm curious, what do you feel is dangerous about pairing off with a woman and having children?