What will the outcome be?

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Slownsteady
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Posts: 3
Joined: Tue Feb 08, 2022 7:38 am

What will the outcome be?

Post by Slownsteady »

Hi everyone,

I've taken a very big step today by writing a letter (below) but it's killing me at the same time. I know they will have things to say and I'm worried that my mom will threaten to kill herself as she has done this for years.

I have decided not to reply if the response is filled with guilt, trivialisation or anger.
Can anyone tell me what a good response to this would be? I'm struggling to think of anything positive and I feel like I'm going to explode.


"Dear Papa, mama, and didi

I write to you with a heavy heart. I went to therapy over the course of last year which has shaken things and changed quite a lot in me. I need to take some time away from you all. I know I'll speak to you again but for now, I need to heal and it's difficult to heal when you can't speak about what's hurting you. I am not in a place where I can joke and talk about trivial things with you all.
I know I've tired to share the contents of my trauma with you in the past which has resulted in more fights and I see the urgency of needing to do this for me.
I need to unlearn all the fear to express myself and the voicelessness I experience as a result of my childhood.

I worry that this is going to be seen as drama, that I'm ungrateful, that there are many who had life worse than me, worry that you'll think I'm doing think because I'm in a foreign country and think I'm better. The truth, my truth is that this has been on my mind for years and I've never really had the courage or the support to take a stand for myself. You might've noticed that I preferred being away from home and by myself if I were at home. Its because I never felt like I could be myself without it turning into a vile incident of yelling, throwing things, getting kicked out of the house. My memory has always been good but I regret that my mind has stored all of this. But the truth is, it's real and I need to move through it.

I'm currently experiencing anger and resentment which I wouldn't want to incite upon you. It stems from being beaten, abused, not trusted, trivialised, made to question my own intentions, bullied and made to lie to a hospital about my injury.

I regretfully remember large parts of my childhood and adulthood. It makes me envious of people who have had the fortune of blocking things from their mind entirely. I remember being beaten for not being able to remember alphabets to math, I also remember being stripped and made to face a wall for reasons I still don't understand. I remember trying to strangle myself in the bathroom for trying to find love. I remember being told that I was horny and that's why I "chased" boys. I remember being questioned if I was pregnant when I was still a Virgin. I remember being very frightened. Frightened to tell the truth, frightened to share the things that would happen in my life. Frightened to take help because I didn't want to be indebted. Although I know I am. I will be repaying the financial aspects of the debt. No Ma, I'm not doing what you said I'd do - lose touch and make you all pay my debt. However it'll be taking a bit of time because starting a life in a foreign country is not easy especially during a pandemic.

I have thought about all of the incidents from all of your perspectives. About how our society is, our culture expects women to be, family name, respect and honour, the fact that somehow us being an interreligious family and who believes and performs healings for a living would bring more peering eyes from the relentless society we lived in.
While I understand why you did what you did and in your minds it was for my best, it has done a lot of damage to me internally.

I've been good at ignoring it all my life but I've come to a point where I want to release and move forward from it and for that I need to heal which involves acknowledging the emotions that arise.

I would appreciate if you respect my wishes to be left alone for sometime. I am safe here and well taken care. My friends have always been my support. I'm lucky to have them in the same place as me. My emotions are validated and people are not using my issues against me as I was always led to believe.
I hope that this does not cause you all to fight amongst yourselves or with yourselves but rather to take time to access and address your emotions around everything from a less triggered state.

I share this with you now because I see that being the dark about what's happening can be hard. It causes doubt and panic. I also see that I'm unable to keep up this charade of being nice for the sake of being nice. I do not like being inauthentic. I request you all to respect my wishes.

While I love you all, I need this for me. I need you to remember that I have a great deal of affection for all of you and that I'm not abandoning you all or any other story your mind might like to create. I have to address the elephant in my room. I have to understand why I did the things I did and nurture the frightened child inside that never stopped fighting for me.

Take care of yourselves. I will be in touch when I'm ready. Thank you for understanding.

Your daughter "

Help me please :cry:
Scars
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Posts: 833
Joined: Wed Jan 19, 2022 2:59 pm

Re: What will the outcome be?

Post by Scars »

what an awesome letter, Slownsteady!

hold your ground even if you get unwanted replies from your family.
you are taking care of yourself and you deserve respect and admiration for that
you have mine

take gentle, compassionate care of yourself,
scars
A scar is the tattoo of a triumph to be proud of. It says the hurt is over and the wound is closed. It means you conquered the pain, learned a lesson, grew stronger, and moved forward. There is a beauty in my scars that I can see now.
Progress
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Posts: 882
Joined: Wed Jul 28, 2021 10:18 pm

Re: What will the outcome be?

Post by Progress »

Slownsteady,
Brava! Such a well thought out, heartfelt letter. It has to be cathartic in many ways- to write and read your own truth in the words before you. To know you are once and for all going to spell out your truth to your abusers/family. That’s such an enormous step!

When it comes to getting a response, there is always hope. I suppose somewhere out there there must exist abusive families who were apologetic. I know for me, there was a time when what I wanted most in the world was for my abusers/parents to acknowledge what they’d done and ask me for forgiveness.

Unfortunately, my parents are more of the typical abuser variety. They denied, gaslit, twisted and spun the facts, diverted, dodged, and pinned the blame somehow on me.

They got a coffee table book called “False Memories” and displayed it in the living room. They tried a scare tactic with one of my siblings, a brother, in order to divide and conquer us, and said to him “watch your back, she’ll come after you next”, and in one of their greatest acts of deflecting blame, threw scripture at me and said “let ye among us who is blameless cast the first stone”. Um, what did *I* do that was sinful exactly?

Oh Slownsteady, I hope that you get a response to your letter that you deserve. It might happen, but it also might not. You might get the old abusive patterns. If that’s how it plays out, like how my situation did, there is a massive amount of painful grieving to do.

If there is a silver lining, it is that in the end, either way, it is a step towards more healing. If your family can respect you and apologize, you may reconcile, which would be healing. And if they continue to be abusive, it is deeply painful, but sloshing through that pain and accepting they may never change, is still a movement forward towards healing.

Cheers to your courage, you are not alone.

Progress
Slownsteady
Member
Posts: 3
Joined: Tue Feb 08, 2022 7:38 am

Re: What will the outcome be?

Post by Slownsteady »

Thank you so much for your replies
Scars and Progress

It brought me to tears. You reminded me why I was doing what I was doing. It's so easy to start blaming yourself for having emotions and taking a stand for yourself.

My so sorry you had to experience that with your abusers, Progress. You seem so amazing and for what it's worth, I'm proud of you for standing your ground irrespective of how they reacted to you too. You have given me more strength to work through this.

My mother was the only one that responded. She started off apologising but gradually began to minimise and ask me to get over things and stop playing a victim. She missed what I was trying to say and made it about herself and making her proud in front of her family (my maternal relatives).
I told her I couldn't have a relationship where we play out our hurt patterns over and over and that I need to heal from all of what has happened.
She started to blackmail me saying she'll die and I got tired. So I told her this was not the end of the relationship but a break for all of us to look within ourselves.
I have now blocked my family completely.
As I'm in a different country, they are unable to reach me through other means.

I went back on it thinking I was overreacting as she suggested but your replies brought me back to perspective. That healing is required and this is what I'm feeling and I should never have to put anyone else above feeling safe and happy in myself.

So thank you so much again.

Warmest of regards,
Slownsteady
heavenlydove
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Posts: 74
Joined: Tue Jul 28, 2020 2:14 pm

Re: What will the outcome be?

Post by heavenlydove »

Hi Slownsteady,

Sorry - I do not know you, but I read what you wrote to your folks, which was powerful and well articulated.

It is good that you mother responded so promptly to your letter, as sometimes it can take a long while to process a letter like that and know how to respond back - men particularly can find it hard to process their feelings quickly in regards to things so it can take them awhile to know how to respond. But in any case, the response more often then not is not quite what one may have wished for, especially if parents were abusive.

It is good for you to have been able to write something so authentic, for your own healing process, however your folks might react to it. People will react as they react and you really do not have much power over that. Even apologies, like the one your mother gave you, often do not go far enough to heal all the hurt one has endured. As you state, there are established patterns in your family and relationship with loved ones that are hard to break and which may never be broken, unless they seek therapy to address them.

When I was younger I also confronted my parents about their abuse and bad behaviour. I stated that I would only have a relationship with them if they chose to go to therapy, to break their old patterns of behaviour - but they refused to do that. I threatened to leave but did not in the end, as my dad got a serious stroke and then was needing care from me. He stopped being able to hit me and my brother in the way he did before but in other ways he did not really change all that much. Then he got a second stroke and his speech became too bad for him to contemplate something as worthwhile as therapy. But had that not that happened I am pretty sure i would not have stuck around my parents as I did until they passed. In any case, sticking around them was the worst mistake of my life in hindsight, as they never really broke their patterns of behaviour. I only really ever got one apology from my dad regarding his beatings since childhood, and that was more to say he was sorry that his beatings had the opposite effect to what he wanted ie, that they fucked us up instead of making us successful in life. The apology was more about that fact than about him being sorry for the extent to which his beatings hurt and destroyed us. My brother never even got an apology.

I speak only for myself but I can tell you, I spent my whole life trying to please my parents, busting my gut to make them happy, which even if I did achieve to some small degree towards the end of their life perhaps - it was never enough to make me feel good enough about myself. They never really showed me the level of appreciation that I deserved as they were too messed up themselves to see what damage they inflicted on me day to day. And even if they had shown more appreciation late in life, in many ways it was too late for them to fix my seriously damaged self. In the end, only you can work on making yourself happy and healing yourself - if you are relying on them making to make you happy, you will be forever dependent on their whims and day to day dealings with you. I turned into a people pleaser in regards to my folks, trying to make them happy all the time at my expense, which contributed to my present very bad burnout because I was running around them like a lost person, not listening to my inner self and how much I was tired out and hurting. The truth it, however much it hurts, you were not created to prop up your parents and lighten their moods and solve their anger or depression problems, especially if they have serious self-esteem issues of their own to resolve and heal from. if they are unwilling to be on the same page as you in regards to going to therapy and self-healing, then it is clear that sooner or later you will have to choose what is best for your own progress and sanity. Keeping them at arm's length may be your only true salvation.

In my case, I devoted everything to my parents who really didn't deserve all my love and dedication (because of their unwillingness to work on their own issues), and now I am left with nothing at the end of the day. My mum always stated that I should be nice to her or else I will regret it one day when she is gone, but I can tell you I am not missing her all that much at all in retrospect. Had I known how little I would really miss and truly grieve my parents at the end of it all, I would not have believed it. You cannot really fool your inner self in regards to how you really feel about your parents deep down. It seems you Slownsteady are doing all the work you can be doing to get to a better place and make a changes in your life as well as patterns of behaviour with those around you. I wish you much luck with that, whatever your next steps are. Sometimes therapy is about you finding where your true limits are in regards to what you will or will not put up with - because abuse screws with your ability to set healthy limits in close relationships. May you find the right path for yourself and realize that at the end of the day, you and your happiness is the ultimate priority to focus on and to seek to improve. Good luck with everything.
Last edited by Serenity on Sat Apr 23, 2022 11:18 am, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Changed NT to MT for profanity
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