Mental Health Don't disregard childhood abuse when searching for ental health answers

Middleway

Ex-Bluelighter
Joined
Apr 10, 2007
Messages
1,033
Location
Melbourne
I had a big eye opener yesterday...

I have intractable anxiety, panic attacks and depression.

I have taken literally almost every psych drug in existence.

I thought I had come to terms with the abuse I received as a child, but I havnt at all.
At 35 years old, I am still the little boy, desperately seek approval from a father who is an abuser.

It is too easy to take a pill and try to medicate your feelings away. To confront the abuse is painful,

There is no chemical imbalance, there is no genetic problem.
Being abused by a care taker during your childhood leaves you feeling like nothing, less than nothing. it opens a hole inside you that can never be filled.

Worse, it leaves you with guilt and self blame. This feeling as though you deserved it or that the abuse wasn't that bad and that your problems are just a further indication of how little value you hold as a human being.

It leaves you with a rage inside you that has no focus, so you turn it in on yourself and it consumes you.

Somehow you can never get your head quite around it. Somehow I always made excuses for him while never sparing myself. You want to keep the family happy, so you bury it, rationalise it, dismiss it, you push it down down down and search for answers anywhere but there.



And because it hurts so much to go back there, because you feel guilt at the thought of upsetting him and the family you push it down down down, and you become complicit in your own abuse.

To go to that place is to go back to the abuse, to go back to being a powerless child.

Facing down this man today when he started his.screaming and yelling over a triviality ( as it always was) made me realise that this is exactly what you need to do

He won't admit what he did, he would rather keep the fiction going , to keep the fragile father/son adult relationship in its current form than ever be honest with himself let alone me.

Now he is weak and I am strong. I don't owe him anything just because he bares the title "Dad".
He is an unrepentant child abuser and no matter what I do or say, he will never change and never be a father and I will never get what I need from him.



There will never be closure, not even on his death and there will continue to be a scar that runs through my life from what I had to endure. I will never get over it, not fully.

But I hope that I can move forward from here
 
I don't know why I read your post -- I don't even come into this part of the forum.

But every word of your post is so completely true of me too. Except I'd be a 28 year old terrified little girl if I ever found myself in the same room as my dad again. Part of me thinks that when he dies I'll dance on his grave and be happy. Part of me knows that I'll regret that I never confronted him. I don't think it'd serve any purpose though -- for all the confidence I've acquired over the years, I don't think I could face him and not crumble. He also has constructed a fantasy world where he didn't do anything wrong. I'd like to think it's because he can't stand what he did -- but truthfully I think he's mentally ill. I can't believe that anyone would behave the way he did without something being wrong in his brain.

I've tried to stop looking back and start moving forward, but sometimes I'm still overcome with fury. I don't know how to face it, and I don't want to.

Good luck and be strong. Don't let him win. It takes more than sperm to be a father, and some of us are better off without ours.
 
that really hit home for me. i'm sure it is going to hit home for a lot of other people that read it as well.

abuse fucks with our heads. well, at least it fucked with mine. i haven't been able to get over my childhood abuse yet, and i can accept that. but i need to get over it. in order to attain happiness i believe i need to find a way to deal with the past abuse that i have dealt with. it scarred me emotionally and i don't doubt to say that it played a part in my addiction, depression, and anxiety. the feelings that it leaves us with are so broad and many that it's hard to even begin to classify them.

once we deal with what happened we're 1 step closer to winning. *we* have to win this battle. we can and we will.
 
I do not think it is any accident that there are so many people on Bluelight that were abused as children. You are so right to acknowledge that you will bear the scar of this for the rest of your life, but that is very different from an open wound that you keep re-opening. By facing it openly, whether your family will or not, you have taken a very powerful step towards integrating your childhood into your present. Have you read any of the books that are out now about forgiveness? I have found them to be so helpful. For the longest time I confused forgiveness with excusing. Forgiveness is nothing more than saying, "I will not continue your abuse of me."

I have been working on changing some old and deep patterns in myself. It takes hard work and so much patience but I am beginning to see little changes in awareness (when I start slipping back into the old familiar thought loops) and that feels promising.Keep going in the direction you are going and I think you will find freedom from the past.<3
 
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