Quadrewple

Good points all around, and I've had some of those thoughts in passing that it might cause more harm than good if I approach it the wrong way. And I was generally horrible to her as well, I was coercive and often mocked her tone of voice and anger towards me when we were kids. It wasn't until I found FDR that we started to have any kind of real relationship. If I do bring this up with her, the thought comes up that she is now in a happy situation (I'm not) and me bringing this up is more to ease my own inner demons than to help her. I don't know what to think about that thought. I've apologized to her before, but we never really discussed in depth the specific things that happened - many of these memories were repressed by me, but I remember bullying her into getting off the shared family computer, I remember that there were a few separate occassions where we were bathing together and I manipulated her into kissing my genitals. I'm curious how you handled your history with your sister in terms of apologizing and working things out and where things stand between you and her now.

Wow that is fucked up and I'm sorry to hear that happened. I can only imagine how enraging it would have been to mirror the behavior your sister engaged with you back at her (I assume she was older?) and YOU were the one who got in trouble and were put in a position where you had to carry that secret. "I cannot really give advice for your situation. However, I think a bit more info would be helpful. For example, how did you at the age of 8-9 understand that mouth to penis was even a thing? It seems like this would not be the beginning of the story. Also, was it just the one time? Obviously to coerce somebody into doing something they do not want to do is wrong. However, without more info, I would not necessarily regard that as sexual in terms of you accountability." Thanks so much for responding, and your question brings back another memory I like to forget, where I found child pornography on my dad's computer, which was shared by the family. I don't remember what age I was, but it could have been anywhere from 11-15. It was a few disgusting pictures of naked prepubescent teenage girls that was part of some web series along the lines of "Teenage Pageant" or some other terrible series produced by terrible people. I have no memories of being sexually abused, except for a LOT of bare-bottom spanking for which the case can be made that that is sexual abuse. As for the fact that I understood mouth to penis at age 8 or 9, I had a friend a couple years older who introduced me to masturbation and pornography at something like age 7 and I was compulsively masturbating long before I could ejaculate, and definitely have had an addiction to masturbation for most of my life. I know it was an addiction because sometimes the skin on my genitals would get raw from the friction, it would often be several times in one day, and I was caught masturbating at one point or another by every family member and it was never discussed. This same guy who introduced me to masturbation would sleep over at my house with me and my brother and we did sexual experiments with each other even though my brother and I are not gay or bisexual (me and my brother performed oral sex on him, but not each other IIRC, and he did on us and I remember performing oral sex on him while he was sleeping, with his permission). I know that me and my brother practically worshipped this guy, and so I probably unconsciously saw performing sex acts on him as an act of subservience. I also know that my father was barely around even when he wasn't working and that I was the most involved male in my sister's life, and that I loved the amount of influence I had over her because of all this because it gave me a sense of power I couldn't get elsewhere. Now that I've written this out, it doesn't sound like I had a sexual intent (and I don't remember having one at the time), but rather that me manipulating her into doing it was an act of dominance more than anything else. And regardless of my intent, this was likely her first memory involving the opposite sex's genitals. Definitely. I never meant to imply that it wasn't my parents responsibility to provide the kids with what they needed - only that his excuse was obviously bullshit even if we assumed that it was for financial reasons. And I was thinking that it is probably not inherently problematic for people to see their family members naked - but that since we live in a society where genitals are a private thing except for sexual encounters, to put a kid in a situation where they are bathing with their siblings would only serve to create confusion, shame, and potentially problematic situations like this one and the one you experienced which was obviously problematic. To be fair, the fact that your sister was okay with molesting you and I was okay with manipulating my sister says a lot about both sets of parents so I think we have to take the mistreatment of the children by adults into account when assessing the negativity of family bathing.

I was posting on a recent thread about a user who has cuckold fantasies and it reminded me of a very disturbing memory which I have never shared with anyone. My parents sometimes had me, my younger brother, and my younger sister sometimes would bathe in the same tub. I was born in 1991, my younger brother in 1993, and my younger sister in 1996. I have memories of trying to get my little sister to kiss my penis in the bathtub. I called it my "little man" as a euphemism and I remember manipulating her into doing it, and that she never wanted to do it. If I remember correctly, I was 8 or 9, which would make her 3 or 4 and my brother 6 or 7. Even though I know that my parents are to blame for having us in the same bathtub, there is the shame of having to keep the secret (because I had no bond with either parent), the shame of imprinting my younger sister who I love with this inappropriate and humiliating sexual memory (she moved in with a friend, and we don't speak very often, and it will be very humiliating to bring up to her). My mom may as well be dead because she is on so many anti-depressants and anti-psychotics that she is like a zombie, and she was the one around the most for raising us (and lives out of state in a group home) - so I can never really gain closure by asking her why we were put in that situation. My dad's excuse was "We needed to save hot water," which is obvious bullshit because in 10 seconds I thought of the fact that our parents could have had us set timers for showers and I KNOW we had enough disposable income to pay for the heating of the water. But then he told me that his parents had him and his younger sister bathe in the same tub, and so it became obvious that he was just repeating what was done to him without examining whether or not it was necessary or healthy (the same way he beat and ignored me the way his father did to him). I haven't brought this up with my therapist yet, but there's just so much trauma I have to deal with from my past that this isn't necessarily that high on the list. That being said, it is important enough to me to reach out to this community for some insight and feedback on how to bring it up with my sister, who is now 17.

http://www.whale.to/a/johnson.html I'd recommend you check out this article on spanking. I think Stef has touched on this before, but there are strong arguments to be made that spanking is sexual abuse which are encapsulated quite well in this article. You never detailed how these spankings occured - i.e. if it was your mom or dad, if one parent convinced the other to spank you, etc, what you were spanked for, if it was bare bottom, etc (perhaps none of this is irrelevant though). No matter what the circumstances surrounding the spankings, I can definitely see how there could be a connection between being humiliated in a sexual way and having cuckold fantasies later in life. For example, if it was your dad spanking you and it was your mom instigating it, then it would be a woman getting a bigger, stronger male to sexually humiliate you (same as a cuckold situation) and also, if it was your mom spanking you and your dad instigating it, it would be a bigger, stronger man getting a woman to sexually humiliate you (same as the verbal abuse from the female to the weak male in the stereotypical cuckold situation). And if either parent spanked you without goading from the other, I would assume that the other parent would still find out and would be sleeping with someone who advocated the sexual shaming of a child. No matter how you slice it, there's plenty of shame involved and an area which is associated with sexuality was involved. By the way, it's terrible that you were abused as a child and for that and all the aftereffects of that, whatever they may be, I'm sorry that those were your experiences.

My first thought when reading the thread title was a bit different than the other posts I'm reading here, and what I'm about to say is mostly speculation, but I think it makes good sense. If there is no male who in the family who is focused on providing the child with resources, that child's perception of their safety is greatly lessened (because of the importance of having a strong male hunter/gatherer around for basically all of human history) and so it makes sense that the child would anticipate having a shortened lifespan. This would theoretically lead to hypersexuality, and a very short-term, reproduce as fast as possible type of mindset for either gender. Thinking back, most of the kids who I knew who were sexually active in junior high and early high school didn't have fathers around, or at least had step-parents, so there's some personal anecdotal evidence for this idea. I have no idea what effect fatherless could/would have on sexual orientation though.

From the wiki page on dissociation: dissociation describes a wide array of experiences from mild detachment from immediate surroundings to more severe detachment from physical and emotional experience. It seems to me that self-erasure would just be severe dissociation. To me whether or not dissociation is harmful to the person engaging in it all depends on the situation. If you've abused or neglected someone else and dissociate yourself emotionally when they bring it up, you're in a sense pretending that they don't have feelings and engaging in behavior which if they mirrored would end the conflict (in the short term) and help you avoid a nasty, inconvenient truth about yourself. However if someone is trying to manipulate you, it's obviously a good thing to be able to dissociate yourself from their feelings of neediness and shame and not allow their emotions to cloud the truth of the situation. Theoretically, in a perfect world, dissociation would make no sense because you wouldn't have manipulative people around and you wouldn't be engaged in any unpleasant activities (like doing work you hated).

(Hiphop) Love this song, it has a very positive message as well.

"I am not looking for the support of anyone who wants a book, or wants to see me put stick figure comics on the internet. I do not need the support of anyone who thinks that I will deserve to eat and sleep only after I have fulfilled some standard they’ve chosen to hold me to. I am looking for people who believe that if you spend your life in a small room thinking, you deserve to live and breathe the same amount as someone who spends their life doing intense physical or mental labor, or who has money that “makes money." Because his parents didn't meet his needs, he now feels entitled to having his needs met by others.

Can you tell me more about your abusive situation that you were in? Could you tell me more about your PTSD? I would like to know more about it and maybe compare what i am experiencing.. I have a thread entitled Public School Horror Stories in the Self Knowledge thread where I detail some really bad stuff I saw in public school which contributed to my anxiety, but the real start of it was with my parents. The few memories I have of my father when growing up mostly involved me trying to pry his attention away from the computer so he'd play with me. He'd ignore me so eventually I'd resort to annoying him just to get his attention, but that would only get me yelled at for a brief moment or my hand swatted away when I tried to reach for the mouse. Eventually I gave up trying to connect with him. The only other memories I have of him growing up were him hitting me with paddles on the bare ass - wooden or hard plastic. Every time he hit me he'd get pumped up from it - likely hitting me as hard as he could in an attempt to turn me into a rage-filled, hate-filled man. If I started crying before he hit me, he'd say things like "I'll give you something to cry about!" and on several occassions after the spanking, I'd scream "I hate you!" at him and he'd mock me saying I didn't hate him, which I fucking did. In summary, I only ever experienced neglect or abuse by his hands. My mom homeschooled me for a while so she was very involved in my life early on, but for the most part she was just trying to turn me into a emasculated man completely subservient to women (turn me into my father). She'd often sick my dad on me when I disobeyed her. She indoctrinated me with endless amounts of crazy Christian propaganda - straight from the Bible, and both my parents used the Bible to justify their abuse of me. I never knew this as a child but she was on medication for bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. She was never fit to have kids, but by the time I was in 5th grade, she had lost touch with reality and I realized she was completely incompetent and irrational. This was VERY humiliating because it meant I had to normalize or dismiss her behavior anytime she said or did something crazy when I had friends over. She also took me along with her for a couple of door-to-door evangelical visits to neighbors - which was also incredibly humiliating because I didn't want to be there, and once the guy at the door yelled at her to get off his property which obviously scared me and showed me how out-of-touch she was. Her mental state worsened until she took me, my brother and sister on a cross-country road trip, telling us our father had died at the hands of demons and we had to go to the Bible Belt (Midwest and Southern States) to be safe. Eventually my father and his father found us by tracking her credit card purchases, and we returned home. It's only continued to worsen, and she now lives in a group home in Alabama where the care of mentally unfit people is subsidized. As far as the PTSD symptoms go, they were most pronounced a couple years after she moved from California to the group home. I was severely depressed for about 3 years. I went from being somewhat popular at my high school one year to eating lunch in the bathroom the next year. I started to become extremely paranoid about other people, and secretly hateful towards them. I avoided eye contact and was basically constantly living in fear of being attacked by others - no one was acknowledging all the crazy terrible shit that had happened in my family, and if they did, it was always to manage my perception of my mother and father - "Oh, it's really amazing that he's able to support you kids!" and "You know she loves you right?" and other nonsense which was completely irrelevant to me and aimed at squashing my feelings. All of this shit made me feel less than worthless - so I started to take other peoples' perceptions to heart, and projected them onto humanity in general, because that was less painful than dealing with the fact that the people around me were fucking narcissists. These are a list of symptoms off a website about PTSD which I definitely experienced: Feeling emotionally numb Feeling strong guilt, depression, or worry Being easily startled Feeling tense or “on edge” Staying away from places, events, or objects that are reminders of the experience http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/post-traumatic-stress-disorder-ptsd/index.shtml Because I never got to experience any of these emotions during the abuse and neglect, I trapped them in my body. When my dad hit me, I'd be in the fetal position and I unconsciously trapped the tension in the left side of my body because muscular tension helps the body ignore pain caused elsewhere. Also, because I was in the fetal position and he was hitting me on backside, I had no way of knowing when he was going to hit me, so I'd brace myself by flexing as hard as I could. A few days ago I had my brother use a massager on my back and ribs and the only way for me to release the tension was to scream and yell and cry and scream out "No!" This is the bioenergetic release that Elliot Hulse talks about - for me to relax my left side requires my ability to feel secure enough that no one's going to hit me. The tension traps the anxiety in our heads as well. Also, my dad would be hitting me really hard and so to keep myself from biting my tongue, I'd keep my jaw as tense as possible. There were all these things that went through my head after being hit which I'd contemplate: "If I cry louder, maybe he'll feel some sympathy and stop hitting me." That didn't work, and I remember a couple of times after he'd left the room he'd yell out from the living room "Oh, stop being such a crybaby!" So when I figured out that he fed off the pain I was feeling, in my resentment I tried to keep myself from crying. The only way I could do that was to stifle my breathing and make my jaw and left side as tense as possible.

OP, I recently became conscious of the fact that I've been living my whole life in fear of punishment, and my environment, while very abusive, was not nearly as abusive as yours was/is. It could be that when you are about to fill out the job application you are feeling fear of asserting your own way in the world, a desire which was severely beaten out of you early on, as well as rage at the fact that your abusers crippled your ability to be your own man (though thankfully not 100%, as is evidenced by you reaching out), and now you're expected to live the rest of your life in society as if you don't have these demons in your past. Other than finding some way to get away from your mother and getting into therapy, my best advice would be to get a couple of lacrosse balls and use them to massage yourself. I suffer from PTSD (not officially diagnosed, but almost all of the symptoms I've experienced at some point, including the thousand-yard stare) and I know that people who've experienced a lot of violence have extreme tension patterns built up in their nervous systems and muscles from constantly being in fight-or-flight mode. Self-massage can allow you to at least have some management of your anxiety until you can leave your current environment and get a therapist who is not interested in you erasing your past for the sake of abusive people - and is probably the best bang for your buck you'll get for anxiety relief right now. Also, check out Elliot Hulse's videos on bioenergetics - he's been interviewed by Stef before and I recommend also watching that if you haven't already.

This pretty mirrors what I experienced when my mother lost touch with reality and could no longer function in society. My grandmother (her mother) at the time didn't focus on any of my emotions, but rather tried to rationalize the actions of my mother which led to her not being there for me and my brother and sister, and had the agenda of me not holding anything against my mother the few times we even talked about it. The fact that your mother is trying to convince you to see your father in my opinion proves that she knows he doesn't deserve to see you - the same as the fact that my grandmother tried to convince me not to be angry and sad at my mother no longer being there was because she knew I deserved to be angry at my mother and sad. I'm sorry that you were dealt this shitty hand and are being manipulated after the fact. Obviously I didn't hear her apology and the context which brought it about so it's hard for any us to comment on that, but here are some (I think) important facts: He came to see you (presumably without telling you or asking your permission) with her support. When you refused, she tried to bully you into seeing him. After that didn't work, she apologized. Her actions as you've stated so far have not indicated anything to me other than the fact that she's manipulative enough to shame a person whose painful childhood she is responsible for, but smart enough to know how far she can take it before she has to apologize.

I did a quick search and didn't find any threads on this topic so I figured I'd start one myself. As the title suggests, this is a thread to share any traumatic experiences you experienced in public schools, though obviously if you saw bad things in a private school, it's totally appropriate to share those here as well. The transition between elementary school and junior high (which started at 7th grade) was really mindblowing in retrospect. There were 4 elementary schools in my city, and only one junior high school, so there were essentially 4x the kids going to the same school in grade 7 as were in grade 6. I hung out with nice kids in elementary school - we played videogames, joked around, imitated cartoon characters, the usual stuff for kids our age. This all changed when I got to junior high. The amount of kids who dressed and acted like thugs was exponentially higher - there were only a few kids like that in my elementary school and they only dressed the part. I never once saw a fight in elementary school, but saw 5 or 6 during the 2 years of junior high school. Looking back, I believe I stopped hanging out with my previous friends because I perceived the junior high environment to be dangerous and violent - and the kids I was hanging out with before were not the "cool kids." They would've been classified as nerds and I had been told scare stories by a "friend" of mine who was in 8th grade at the time about kids getting trash-canned (which is being thrown in a trash can by a bigger kid), and that it was really only the nerdy kids who got bullied. Again, looking back, the label of "cool" was actually just an ex-post facto label for kids who had a high capacity for verbal and physical abuse. In fear of being bullied, as I was not only a year younger, but far shorter and weaker than 99% of the other kids, I did anything I possibly could to prevent being bullied. This meant changing my speech patterns to sound less intelligent - I always had a gift for verbal communication and was well above my peers in that regard (credit goes to my mom for homeschooling me) but since that was not valued in my environment any longer, I stopped enunciating clearly, stopped using "big words," and started swearing frequently. There was a very distinct way that the "tough" kids carried themselves through their body language that I also adapted. Head held high, eyes downcast.....jaw clenched, a hateful look in the eyes which was a warning for people not to mess with you.....I picked up that you're not supposed to show enthusiasm for ANYTHING. By the way, pretty much all of these characteristics are symptoms of PTSD. I saw opposing anyone else's viewpoint as dangerous, as there was never anything positive to be gained from it (in my mind), and only potential negative repercussions. Once, me and two of my "friends" were walking to our next class and they were arguing with each other (I of course stayed silent). One of them had a large, hairy mole on his face as a birthmark and the other guy made a hurtful remark involving that mole. They dropped their backpacks and the kid with the mole hit him in the face. It was over quickly. On another incident, I was with a guy who I was friends with in elementary (really great guy) and another kid who I'd befriended in junior high (loudmouth asshole) called out the first guy for a fight in front of a crowd of kids as we were all headed to our next class. Apparently my real friend had called his girlfriend a bitch (from what I remember that wasn't an inaccurate statement), and he wanted to fight. My friend continued walking and essentially told him to fuck off and he wasn't going to fight him. As he continued walking I was thinking, "What the hell are you doing! Everyone's going to see you as weak now! What you're doing is dangerous!" Nothing violent ended up happening, but my friend asked me "Why do you even hang out with that kid?" and that was the first time I was really confronted with the fact that I was fundamentally weak and broken and an empty receptacle to be filled up by the narcissists around me. But this was too much for me to process without significant help, and I never shared this story with anyone until now. The kid from my first story who got hit in the face ended up getting in a fight with someone else in 8th grade and I held his glasses. He ended up winning the fight, and I'll never forget the other kid screaming "Fuck you, I'll fucking kill you!" as his sweatshirt was over his head and he was being pummeled. Another time in 8th grade, a "friend" of mine got into an argument with some kid who was much bigger than him. They agreed to fight outside the cafeteria. My friend ended up getting beat up by the other kid....and few things are worse than seeing someone you know get hurt and not having the power to do anything about it, even if it's someone you have a dysfunctional relationship with. I'll never forget that morning - the song that was playing on the radio on my way to school was Westside Connection's Gangster Nation - a song which played over and over and over in my head as I recalled my friend getting beat up. Fast-forward to high school, there were less fights per year, but I still saw some extremely disturbing things. There was this kid named Denim who hung out with the "UFC crowd" and he was like a entrepreneur of violence. Rather than fight on campus where it would get broken up, kids would go to his house after school to fight and it would often be videotaped. These fights weren't always out of disagreements - sometimes it was just kids wanting to box. Anyways, me and many other kids had to walk (about 1.5 miles) from the high school to the junior high to catch our buses. Denim and his circle of fight enthusiasts also took the bus. One day on my way over, I saw Denim point out a kid and tell one of his younger "groupies" to pick a fight with him. This poor kid was minding his own business and he was pushed by the groupie and called a pussy and a faggot until finally he tried to defend himself. He ended up getting hit a couple of times and eventually picked his backpack back up and walked away. One time in my junior year of high school, I was waiting in the cafeteria line and it was just me and the kid in front of me. Denim and one of his friends (his friend was 6'4" at least 220) came to the line and walked right in front of me. I didn't say anything. The cafeteria door was about to open and Denim and the giant guy were about to move to the very front of the line but the kid in front objected. He told the two guys they couldn't cut and stood in the middle of the path. The giant guy said "You believe this kid?!" and looked towards Denim for approval. Again, the giant tried to move to the front but this time the kid pushed him back (by the way, this kid was maybe 5'8" 130) so it wasn't exactly threatening to the giant. The giant guy said "Don't fucking touch me" and hit the kid once in the face, giving him a black eye and bruise which instantly covered half his face. I'll never forget the look of pure rage and hatred on that kid's face as he pointed out the giant to campus security. It was the look I imagine someone would have before going on a killing spree. It's important to note that I did not live in a city with gang violence or a city which has a lot of crime (average 1 murder per year in a city of 30,000), and it was a middle-class to lower-middle class city. These were all "good" schools which I witnessed all these terrible things. What I must also note is that I was attracted to all this violence, which normalized the abuse I suffered at the hands of my parents. I could have walked away and not watched people getting beat up but I chose not to. My strategy was to stay as close to the violent people as possible so I wouldn't be victimized by them and so I could normalize their behavior.