Search the Community

I'm a male, 21 years old. Living in Sweden where I grew up with my mom and dad, older brother who is mentally and physically handicapped (dyskinetic cerebral palsy + mental disability I do not know the name for), and younger sister. At 13-14 I cut myself, and at 15 I started doing drugs. Things were all right as far as my earliest memories go, maybe that's because there aren't that many of them. The ones of my brother are happy and with parts of our extended family around helping out. My brother can not talk with words, he does not have that kind of control over his muscles. He does communicate though, like an infant. Crying when upset, making sounds to hint at something, blinking for yes and almost pronouncing a "no" when he means "no". As I grew past him I never realized the situation, my parents never talked about it. It was 100% normal until I started being away from my family and hanging out in friends houses without wheelchairs at around age 7-8. That's when I first noticed things were off in our family. I never had trouble with kids teasing me or him for it, but I would be scared having girls over when it came to that. My friends got to know who he was but they never got close. He was mostly in another room if we were playing in our house. They never/very rarely asked about him. If there was an option to play at someone elses house, I would fight for that. When my brother was around 14 years old and I was about 10, he started having problems with his hips and back. There were many surgeries and trips to hospitals in different cities for many years. We never talked about it. We went there, said comforting things to my brother like "it's going to be better soon" "you can go home soon" etc. He understands these things to an extent... After 10 minutes he'll be asking "when can I go home?". Very annoying for parents who does not want to talk about anything. My parents never asked me or my sister about our experiences of any of this. My brother stopped eating around this time. My parents would mix "regular food" into a mush like the ones for babies because chewing was hard, but even this got too hard for my brother to eat. So naturally, my mother got mad. It escalates quickly and soon she is full on yelling at his face, he's crying and there me and my sister are sitting across the table, watching. So is dad. In these intense moments of action he's passive. My brother has gotten nutrition through gavage ever since (I'm not sure if that's the right word. Food through feeding tube in stomach to bypass the throat). Then he stopped sleeping. So now my mothers screaming would not end after dinner, it would carry on into most of the nights when I was around 13-19 years old, until I moved out. I asked my sister earlier today how the nights are now, she said "he still wakes up, but I guess mom is less mad". She would scream so loud, and so would he. "You have to sleep, don't you understand?! I'm tired of this, it's *enough*!". The worst thing she ever said was "if you don't shut up I'll throw you out of this window". That stuck with me, you could say. Then the next morning, she and dad is acting like nothing has happened, smiling and ready for the day. My brother was happy too, but he can't really help it. I thought I was going insane, I obviously couldn't process reality. There's lots more, but I guess that is enough. I've been to counseling for a few months, once every 2 weeks which is not enough for me I feel. I've told my parents all of this, how I feel they abused all of us. But they do not get it. Just today I told my mother that I do not want to come to the birthday dinner, because I'm afraid I will burst into tears. She replies with the usual "but I've said I'm sorry already! What do you want me to do? It's in the past... I can't go back in time, and change what is done! I'm sorry!". I've invited them to a meeting with my counsler in 2 weeks, looking forward to that. I work as a personal assistant for my brother, have done for 2 years. He didn't have anyone else at the "daycare" he went to after school. My parents report good times in school, and when he left at age 19 for something called "day center" (roughly translated) he was miserable. He cried every morning, he did not want to go. He would cry until he puked. Right, I forgot to mention he would average vomiting something like 2-3 times a day for the later half of his life. I have a lot of gross memories of him and vomit running down his chest, me and my sister panicking yelling for mom or dad to help... He's 26 now and I believe it's getting better on that aspect. To be honest I think it's my communication with him that has made this improvment (among other things, like going out for wheelchair dances and hanging out at a café for handicapped people). He is always looking forward to going there with me, he has lots of friends who want to be with him, I help him communicate through translating his body language to others, and he has only puked 3-4 times during my 2 years working with him. I have to start the day with going home to him, and he still lives with my parents. Then we take a taxi to the Day Center, when the day is done we take a taxi back and my parents take over the role of "personal assistant". This makes me very sad. I don't want them to take care of him, and I don't want to meet them every day. I don't know why I made this post. I originally called it "feeling guilt over not going to dads birthday dinner" but it turned out a lot bigger than that. Don't think I have a question for anyone to answer, I just wanted to express how I feel and maybe have someone listen.

I'm pissed. I'm feeling something I haven't felt in a looong time. I'm really angry at my parents, and I'm happy that I'm this mad. I was listening to http://www.fdrpodcasts.com/#/766/maternal-suffocationand I just had this amazing awakening moment. I just felt all the rage from the listener towards his parents and it made me remind myself of all the rage I felt during my teens. I thought about suicide for a year. I counted every minute in school. I felt like shit for not studying stupid subjects. I was bullied. I was pressured by everyone to get a girlfriend. I felt like a big failure with no future. I was put in the worst school in the city under the pretext that it would teach me life. I felt my life threatened among kids whose parents have been in jail. There were cases of rape in the bathrooms. If a kid from 5th grade asked me for my money I had to give it to him even though I was 4 years older, because if I didn't and escalated, his family and friends would be waiting for me outside. I was put in this situation by the people who are supposed to take care of me. The people I should be able to trust. Writing this made me feel really sad and even angrier! All this inside a 16 year old mind, who had no one to share it with. I could never ever trust my parents with this. I would never share it with them. They made fun of me when I talked about this girl I liked when I was about 6. My parents and grandmother, at the table, laughing at me for liking this girl. Mocking me... BAH IM SO PISSED!! So with this all inside my mind I got super pissed at them but I repressed it... until now. All this time I've been trying to get work done and be productive only to find myself procrastinating. It was like my brain was saying "There are more important stuff for you to deal with!". And I ignored it and played videogames. And then I felt like shit because I was being really unproductive, so i go work and the cycle continues... Today I figured out what my feelings were trying to tell me. Why I couldn't work for more than 30 minutes without going back to videogames. Why I wasted over 7000 hours playing fucking video games!!!! I'm so fucking pissed I wasted ALL THAT TIME. I could be living alone far from this hellhole getting a good salary. I denied job offers because I would feel depressed when i thought of working. Maybe because I had all this rage built up inside of me! I repressed all that I felt towards my parents and didn't face it! I hid behind videogames to waste time purposefully! I probably thought that work would be videogames 2.0 to repress my feelings towards my parents, since at leaste while playing I can listen to podcasts and think about my life. I'm starting to feel less anger and it's probably because I'm disconnecting emotionally... I'm super scared of letting this general feeling go away, and go back to where I was. I am afraid of continuing to live a unproductive life, feeling inferior when other people ask me what i've been up to.. "Oh you know just played 100h of league of legends, what about you?" I'm feeling sad and scared now and stopped feeling anger. All this time growing up i've had little to none emotional support and useful life lessons. I've never trusted my parents advice (thank god) and was going in a really bad direction until I found FDR. Thank you Stef Mike and Stoyan for doing this. You are literally saving lives. Thank you so so much. I wanted to share this with all of you and if anyone can help me out I'd be very very grateful..

Recently (about a week from now) I began feeling depressed and anxious about my work, which right now is being an intern in a furniture store, developing their website. I feel really confused about where these feelings come from, and I'd love some feedback from the FDR community about this. This last year i decided to take a one year course on web development, which here in Portugal is the (and I think Europe) is level 5 education (lvl 4 is highschool and 6 is college, i think). I was very excited in the beggining and really loved programming, and although there were some really useless classes, the course was a overall positive, and I was enjoying my time there. In the end of the school year, came all the exams and i was really under stress for two weeks. I needed to build a webstore from ground up as evaluation for multiple classes. I was really enjoying building this website in the start, and it made me very happy since I've had problems finding motivation in the past, and i was building a website that was really exceeding everyone's expectations, and I was also going to sell it to a friend. But in the end of programing it I started getting really annoyed with all the bug fixing and testing and working on it started to be really boring, like I didn't want to finish it. During the last 3 months I also started interning. It was ok in the start, but quickly turned boring because I wasn't programming, I was adding products to the furniture webstore I'm interning for. I was always thinking I'd have fun programing for the webstore i work for, and i was really looking forward to start since I was tired of the repetitive work. After some time interning, we finally started programming a website, to generate traffic to the webstore (a gallery of furniture to attract new customers). The planning was fun in the beggining, but almost as soon as me and my 2 friends also interning there got to work, I felt really unmotivated, and finishing the website felt more like a obligation and less like the job i wanted to have 6 months ago... I started feeling deep sadness and anxiety, mainly in the bug fixing and testing. During this period one of my colleagues asked the supervisor to start interning from home, which is doable given the nature of the job, and since it's almost 1h to get to work. He started being much less productive and everytime we'd have disagreements he'd respond with passive agressive comments, which was really annoying. My other colleague and I also started having problems and getting upset at eachother, for reasons that I won't go into here, but if you need details I'll respond to. To top off this combination of being upset at the job i was doing and my colleagues, the place i was working at was a badly lit cubicle, with barely any natural light. This is when I started to feel really bad. Everyday I went to work i felt so sad I had to take breaks to cry. I was counting every minute to go home. Even writing this made me tear up. I decided to ask my supervisor if i could work from home two days a week, and he agreed, while hearing me crying about it. I felt sad and anxious. Every day I worked there I was hoping for when I could stay home. Every day I worked home I was sad that the next day i'd have to go work there. Today is monday, and I decided to not go to work because i'm feeling too anxious and almost depressed. I didn't feel like eating (I'm a bit overweight), I didn't feel like doing my morning routine, I feel like ****. *I forgot to mention my girlfriend has been helping me through these tough times. ** Also yesterday my cat (he's very important to me) got really sick and the vet told me he could have the feline equivelent of leukemia or aids.

I wrote this article a year ago, and since it's this time of the year perhaps some of you may find this helpful. Holiday Depression and Stress

I am not sure how to start this. For quite some time now, I have felt ambiguous towards the FDR community. On one hand, I see the community as one of the most beautiful things on this planet, if not the most beautiful. The honest, kind people it is inhabitated by. The flourishing of ideas, the unwavering support to eachother, is beyond words. But, on the other hand, I feel like I am not part of it. That I am alien to it. That my interactions here, from my side, are false, self-serving, vain, evil. Sure, some of it has been self-serving, and yes, some vanity has driven me here. But it isn't core to WHY I am here, it is a sandcastle on a beach, that I am certain of. But, a part of me blows these acts of vanity and self-serving out of porportion, judging me as sinister, as not worthy of being in this community. Although, I think to myself, I am not engaging a whole lot with the community. Is it then really that weird if I don't feel like I am a part of it? And then I realize, after a while, something I have concluded before: I am afraid of trying to connect with people, both in real life and here on the boards. Several factors play into this. For one, I find it hard to empathize with people. Like, sometimes, if I hear of something terrible someone has been through, I feel next to nothing. And I understand that others DO feel something in response to hearing the same thing I am hearing (happens a lot when Stef is talking with callers). And I hear a voice say ''You are a broken human being! Disgusting.'' Based on that, I deduct that I will have a harder time connecting with people, because I cannot fully sympathize with them. Another part of it, is me fearing to talk with people in general. When I think of doing just that, I hear inside myself, that I will not bring anything of worth to the table. That I will waste the other persons time. This is reflected greatly in my life, where I might want to engage in conversation with someone I know or want to get to know, but I do not dare. ''Maybe they are busy, I shouldn't disturb.'' Or, ''If they wanted to talk with me, they'd start talking to me''. Anyway, it really hit me yesternight. I broke down into absolute despair, crying like I have never cried in my life before, for an hour, truly realizing that I want to be part of this community, so badly. But that I feel like I am unable to acomplish it. That either I will keep myself from trying to be a part of the community, or attack myself when I try to be a part of the community. And it was tearing me apart, still is. Because I want it so badly. I connection, real, deep connection, with this community. Because, the people that it is made out of, are so wonderful, so brave, so honest. And I so want to be a part of that. I can feel the tears well up behind my eyes as I am writing this. I want it so much. And the thought of never feeling like I was connected to this oasis of human goodness, going to the grave without having had that, is so grim, is so terrifying. Before, when I have experienced these feelings, heard these thoughts, I have 99% of the time, went into solitude. Tried to find my answers in logic, in books. Numbed the pain with video games, and with embracing the voices telling me that I am broken, that I am forever lost. That strategy, of isolating when feeling isolated, has not worked so far. So that's why, I now reach out, put out my emotional state, my thoughts, and my feelings. Hoping that I can break my loneliness. Something that has crossed my mind, is that ''Maybe I don't know how to connect with people? Maybe I don't speak that language. That I can only connect if others engage me first, that I just know how to be passive and reactionary?'' I don't know whether this is true or not. The title just came to me. Yesternight, in my despair, something came to me: Maybe, I am having a Simon the boxer experience, but instead of boxing, I am isolating myself from others? It makes some sense to me. For 10 years of my life, from the age 6 to 16, I was bullied, both verbally and physically, but mostly verbally. From age 10, I started to actively avoid people. I worked hard to make as little noise as possible, to avoid being noticed by bullies. And home was my sanctuary, where I was free from school-bullies, free to numb the pain with hours upon hours of video games. But no connection. My mom was, and still is, a selfish, cruel, sadistic, evil women, who'd make fun of me, make fun of my preferences, and yell at me. And my father, he acted as if I didn't exist. Unless he felt like I needed to be put to work, because he thought In was lazy. I have known, for all of my existence, there has been only one thing that has been a constant for my father: That he has always, always been a disapointment to him. That I have always failed him. it's always been there, in the background, in his eyes and in his voice. I noticed that I didn't describe my feelings for my father as I did with my mother. Or, rather, the truth about who he is. I don't know why. Maybe I am still chained to him emotionally in some way, because the words don't seem to come as easy to me when I am writing about him. I am sorry if this post is confusing. I am, myself, feeling all over the place while I am writing this. If you have made it this far, thank you. Really. It's a lot of text. I hope that this can set me on the path of understanding this part of my being. If you feel that I have missed an obvious important point/connection/contradiction, whatever it might be, please, feel free to be as honest with me as you possibly can. This is me, breaking my emotional isolation.

Hello everyone! I had some thoughts that I wanted to share. Since I started pursuing self-knowledge last year, I have had the thought in the back of my mind, that if I just get enough self-knowledge, if I just get over x obstacles in my mind, if I just put the right amount of blame on this parent, it will all work out on it's own. That I won't really have to do anything, that all my anxieties, all my pain will go away. That I'll emerge a superhero from the smoking rubble of my childhood. That's the thought I have had in my mind since day 1 of self-knowledge. I am asking myself, and you incredibly kind and intelligent people, is this fantasy? Is there, in fact, no point in self-knowledge, where you can feel free from your anxieties? Free from your pain? That no matter how much you grieve, how much you cry out in anger, you will never really be free from your anxieties. That instead, self-knowledge and grieving makes you understand, that you are not a defenseless child at the mercy of cruel parents anymore. And that you simply need to grit your teeth through your everyday anxieties. Because living like you hadn't been abused, is the only thing you can do. That turned out way more depressing than I intended. What I mean to say is, is perhaps one of the biggest parts of self-knowledge, to trust yourself to know, that your anxieties where useful in the past, but just something you have to challenge to get through your life, in the present? To take a strong stand for yourself in the face of your past traumas. Or am I wrong? Is there a real light at the end of the tunnel? Or is that something one has to imagine there being, to push on through life? I feel like I am calling people liars when I am writing this... I am sorry if that is indeed the case, I don't think people would lie about something like that... Maybe it's because I am feeling down at the moment. I didn't even realise that until now. If what I am saying is correct, that you just have to march on despite feeling anxious about things, maybe that personal responsability is just really hitting me now. Maybe that's why I feel down. I don't mean any harm with what I just wrote. But, if there is harm in it, please let me know! Any comment would be highly appriciated, as always.

I was born to drug addicts, crack for mom, heroin for dad. Dad was in and out (so to speak) for the early years of my life, he didn't become a concrete fixture until I was probably 5. One of my earliest memories was being sent with money into a crackhouse across the street from our apartment (we lived in subsidized housing aka Da projects) to get my moms drugs for her. "dont tell dad and dont look inside the package he gives you." It seems ridiculous to even try to defend that kind of a situation but I knew the house, my friend TJ lived there with his dad and his dads girlfriend. His dad was a crack dealer. My father as I said was strung out most of the time, he worked as a carpenter and also he beat people up for a small time loan shark. Another lovely childhood memory was sitting in my mothers lap in my dads car while he went to collect and the guy he was collecting from pulled a gun and traced it on my mother and I in the car. It was the 1st time I ever saw my father beat someone into the ground and take his wallet and gun. Then my brother Ricky was born, roughly around 6 or 7 months premature. Open heart surgery, collapsed lungs, messed up eardrums, so on and so forth, I was 4 or 5. All I knew was that my mother was dying, my new brother was sure to die, and my dad just dropped my off at random relatives homes. They tried to push religion on me at that time and even back then I could tell how incredibly bullshit it was. If there was a god, he would not be murdering my mom and my brother. Even now I think back on this stuff and I am overwhelmed with grief, christ help me when I hear the song "Over the rainbow" Which played in its awful 8bit glory on some crappy windup toy my Memere bought for Ricky. So much pain, so much misery. It was like I was collecting the interest off of the misery my parents bore. They both grew up in broken homes without fathers. My mothers father an alcoholic womanizer left the family when she was barely 8 and my fathers father an alcoholic WW2 veteran who bombed his mothers home city in Germany committed suicide by putting his head in a gas oven when my father was 10. My father and his brother my Uncle Dan, found him there dead. And these things of course terminally stained my parents minds. That is no excuse, just some background info. Ricky and mom did survive just barely, but we still all bear the scars. I feel traumatized by these things. Even now just nearly 33 years old. I feel helpless in the dark in the broken silent moments of night as I lay awake. Swimming in these memories and thoughts, love, anger, hatred and then guilt. SO much guilt. Guilt for the things I suffered, guilt for the things I have done in response. Guilt for being cold and hard towards my fellow man and my family after I survived such insane fucking reality. I could probably reduce most people along with myself to tears, there is so much of this shit. I recall vividly still being molested by a neighbor who lived next door. Another sadistic fucked up depraved drug addict. These are the kind of people our culture produced. I held that in for 30 years before I told anybody, by the time I told my mother she cried... she cried and cried and I stood there, cool and indifferent. Feeling guilty that this data would make her cry. Its why I didn't ever want to tell anybody, but the secret was literally tearing my mind apart after holding it for 20+ years. And in heated angry moments, shouting at my mother as she stared at me, eyes aghast in denial and incredulity all she could mutter was that life didn't come with instructions. Which is of course true, and also part manipulation. She is incapable of being responsible, and that only enrages me further. To the point where I will be standing over her berating her like her own mother should have been back then. Mom was stuck on illegal drugs at least until she began doctor shopping, and it is my belief that she had been on prescription drugs for the majority of my life. Dad got clean, I remember when it happened. I don't know what sparked it, no one ever told me. But one day I was sent off to live with my insane aunt Cindy in another ghetto, Ricky was sent off to stay with my aunt Sally and Colby our younger brother was sent off to stay with our fathers best friend and the only "Uncle" i ever knew Chuck. I dont remember how long it took but during this time I got really into my 1st real addiction. Nintendo. Well living in the ghetto is bad, not to a childs mind. There was certainly a lot of other kids to play with and being the 80s crack epidemic there was no shortage of skinny teenagers with pillow sacks filled with 5 dollar NES carts. I plunged head 1st into the 8 bit realities Miyamoto had constructed for me and it was there that I found some sort of semblance of normalcy. Mom and dad are fighting? Mario Brothers, Mom tried to stab dad with a kitchen knife? Legend of Zelda, Ricky nearly dead? Metroid. It was then I believe that I learned to pacify myself with fantasy and imagination. There wasnt much else to do. **** At this point I am very well aware dear readers how much jumping around I am doing, and I will try to bring this to a head in a bit, but I apologize in advance for the jittery nature... there is SO SO much dysfunction that its hard to just lay it all out in order, especially when much of this stuff happened to me before the age of 10. I was cursed / blessed with a very deep and vivid memory. All my life people have called me an information sponge. Anyway... Folks ended up getting clean, well sort of. Dad was and is still an Alcoholic and mom has been on narcotic prescriptions. They never got rid of the addictions, just the illegal aspect of fulfilling them. Thanks government! We ended up moving when I was in 3rd grade to a very nice town. They still live there to this day. It was a move I dont think I ever recovered from. I recall in the old hood having more friends than I could count. And while yes most of them are now dead or in jail i at least had people to talk to. In our new town I had a very very difficult time making friends. They just didn't get me. They all had cold lunches packed with care, and cute fluffy dogs and parents without drug addictions and solid jobs, they sat around and talked about the future and how their days went. Their moms and dads did their homework with them, they reminded me of everything I never had. Although I learned how to lie quite well about those things. How to deny to myself and others how horrible broken my family was. I even had people convinced that my life was better. but I secretly hated them, I despised them. I thought they were weak, and self centered. They wished their mothers and fathers dead for not buying them gameboys or for taking them on long boring trips to Florida to the beach... I have still never been to Florida. I became isolated. Obsessed with dark things, horror movies, monsters, demons, guns, and death. I projected myself into dark antihero roles like the Punisher, Blade or Ghost Rider. Because Superman was a bitch, when the hell did superman ever suffer? He was not a real hero. Its not hard to be a hero when you're indestructible. I liked antiheroes. Dark heroes. People who were broken like me who didn't just want to save the innocents like children from dark forces but who wanted to take those dark forces and torture them. Not jail them. Torture them. Cut their skin off piece by piece, give them an IV so they wouldn't die so I could prolong the torture. I realized I was sick. I kept myself, to myself. Even today, if I ever came across that guy who molested me as a kid. I would kidnap him and torture him until he begged me to end his life, and then I would prolong it even longer. This is the result of holding in anger like poison for an entire life. You stare into the void and eventually the void stares back into you. I cannot deny this part of myself. It is a stain that has lasted all my life. And it has spilled into every facet of that life. People know me as dark minded, maybe evil. But not chaotic evil, more of a lawful evil. Its not true of course, in fact I don't want to hurt anybody and it was those feelings that made me cling to rationality. Like benchmarks of land in a sea of molten fiery emotions that I could navigate from. Bless Marcus Aurelius for introducing me to Stoicism. If I hadn't figured out how to get my feelings in check, I would have turned mass murderer long ago. It didn't help that talking was just something we didn't do at home. To my parents talking meant they talked and I did what they said. Which lead me to my 1st survival instinct in life. Never tell mom or dad anything. I still abide by this. ***** Now to the crux of this screed, I am fully aware now of how broken my emotional background is. I haven't even let but a drip of the hellish soul crushing damnation of my life out here... in fact I don't even know how I could. We would need 33 years worth of text to get a scope of my life. But I come to the conclusion that my feelings are out of control. Which is why I so tightly clamp down on them. But the clampage manifests in other ways, anxiety, rage, random crying etc. And hatred... so much hatred, the wounded broken heart of a small boy who was failed by every institution that was supposed to protect him. How do you square with the toxic cocktail of hatred and love? The love of consciousness, the love of what little family I had, the longing for a time when things were simpler, when were were broken but together. Now that we are all older and rarely see one and other it weighs heavily on me. We all love each other but cannot say it, we hate each other but wont say it... I don't know how I should feel anymore. Once I broke free from the mind mold of my control freak parents especially Dad, I felt adrift in an ocean of confusion. Is this just adulthood? Why do I hate and love everything? Why do I want to see everything burn but fight these feelings back in the name of reason? I feel like a collapsing star being held up by that last bastion of nuclear forces as the gravity of reality crushes me in all directions. I am paralyzed with thoughts and indecision. Thanks for reading.

So, not feeling so high at the moment. Just had a talk with a former friend, that had found out that I have spoken about her with other friends, concerning her and her future romantic relationships. I had expressed my opinion to my other friends, that I thought that this girl would have trouble getting into a romantic relationship, because I had gotten the impression from being with her that she had a lot of emotional baggage. Anyways, me and this girl, agreed to only spend time with each other when we are in our social group, because she felt that it was wrong of me to judge her, and she felt that she could not trust me. She was really sad and angry with me, because her finding out what I had said had brought up tragic things from her past. She also told me that some of my other friends are annoyed with me, for the reason that they think it is not right for me to judge their personal relationships. I think I know who they are. I have contemplated this for a few months now. That I am too quick to judge, and that I shouldn't tell people what I think they are doing wrong, or that I disagree with their course of action. And I am starting to doubt myself, about judging the relationships of others. That I am doing something wrong. But, when I have been judging, I have always done it because I have felt that I have been trying to help my friends, from harming themselves in what could be bad relationships. So yeah. Not feeling good at all right now. Mentally, I feel lonely. Physically, I feel sick to my stomach, breathing heavily and feeling like I have a cold.(freezing and feeling like I have a fever). Have I been wrong to judge their relationships? Am I bad person? I am ever grateful for anyones perspective.