Adult Children…

Chapter 2 Thoughts

While I can recognize many of the emotionally immature hallmarks in my parents, I also recognize them in myself. It stands to reason that I also have these characteristics since I was raised by people who didn’t teach me emotional maturity. Out of the 15 identifiers of emotionally immature people, I identified my parents having 12 of them. I go into detail on a lot of them, providing examples that I can remember from my childhood.

[My parents often overreacted to relatively minor things.] I forgot my keys at my husband’s house early in our relationship. I cried when I told him because I felt that I had monumentally failed as a person and was worried about him becoming upset at me. That of course didn’t happen but I recognized in the moment those feelings stemmed from the fact that my parents would have berated me and yelled, making a huge deal out of the accident.

[My parents didn’t express much empathy or emotional awareness.] If we ever cried as kids, it was seen as an inconvenience and a ploy for getting better treatment. It was never seen as a child expressing their natural emotions, just a tool to be utilized to not to be yelled or screamed at. I’m not sure why it was seen that way though, considering it never worked that way. I recall the pivotal moment when I didn’t cry after being paddled for taking sodas and drinking them in the woods rather than working, and then getting paddled again to make me cry because dad wanted to ensure it had an effect on me.

[When it came to emotional closeness and feelings, my parents seemed uncomfortable and didn’t go there.] My father still hasn’t acknowledged my breakdown or talked to me about it. The one time I was bullied in middle school and came home crying and I got a hug and a brief question if I was okay but they never probed further or spoke about it to me. Not even a check-in later to see if I had actually processed and gotten over it. Not to mention the time when I had the RA training on emotional abuse and confronted mom when she picked me up from college my sophomore year. I recall telling her that dad has emotionally abused us and continues to do so with his explosive anger and all she had to say was that I should talk to him about it. Why couldn’t you talk to him about it? Was it because you had and nothing ever changed?

[My parents were often irritated by individual differences or different points of view.] When each of us kids reached late middle school/early high school we went through individual expressions of our personality and tried different things with clothes and make up. Mom had so much hatred and negative comments about what my oldest sister had chosen to wear, listen to, read, and how she expressed herself. Mom never considered that she went through those phases as a rebellion on the stifling and abusive environment that she grew up in.

[When I was growing up, my parents used me as a confidant but wasn’t a confidant for me.] My oldest sister told me a number of times growing up that our mother told her things about my mother and father fighting and talked to her about it. I even remember being told numerous times that dad was the way he was and because of that we had to keep certain things to ourselves so as to not anger or upset him. She taught us early to lie to protect the peace and our emotional and mental safety but will deny it to this day. I never felt like I could talk to thereabout my own problems though. And I know my sisters all felt the same way. That is part of the reason I had my beak down, I didn’t feel like I could talk to anyone about it.

[My parents often said and did things without thinking about people’s feelings].
When I first told my dad about being in a relationship with my husband he called me trash and worse. My father would get angry and call my sisters bitches and whores to their faces. He does it to this day without getting angry and without any regard to how it makes anyone feel.

[I didn’t get much attention or sympathy from my parents, except maybe when I was really sick.] As children, it was always go away and play somewhere out of sight when we were not working or expected to clean. Often times there would only be negative attention paid to us when we were not cleaning or working. And I can’t count the amount of times I heard “I’ll give you something to cry about.” We were hardly ever given consideration for being upset and instead expected to grow-up and get over it.

[My parents were inconsistent-sometimes wise, sometimes unreasonable.] Even small mistakes were met with explosive anger from dad, or being iced out by mom. Despite falling on hard times through some personal mistakes, threatening to or actually kicking your kid and grandchild out of the house, when they can’t afford to live anywhere else, is heartless and cruel. But sometimes if we needed something physical, like soil for raised garden beds, it would be met with generosity. The emotional needs were never met, but few and far between a physical need or want would be doled out. How many times were we told that they were responsible for feeing, clothing, and housing us but nothing else? The answer is more than I can count. Then there was the entirety of our childhood where we had to walk on egg shells and gauge their moods to ensure we knew when it was safe to be around and engage with them verses just avoiding them and trying to remain out of site so we wouldn’t suffer in the fallout of their emotions.

[Facts and logic were no match for my parent’s opinions.] When each if us kids reached the age that we were old enough to try to start pushing back against the blind obedience expected of us, it didn’t matter if we had logic or facts on our side. Dad’s anger was all there was and all that mattered and we had to capitulate to it or else. It was “his way or the highway.” And mom was the biggest capitulator. She expected us to tolerate the abuse and excuse it because “he can’t help it, it’s who he is.” She claimed to speak to him in private and that was how she got through to him but that made no difference to the mental and emotional abuse we had to endure to our faces.

[My parents weren’t self-reflective and rarely looked at their role in the problem.] It was a rare and extraordinary time that we ever got an apology for their poor behavior. The normal course of action was to avoid each other for a few hours and then they would pretend that everything was fine and expect us to have moved on as well.

All of these examples have had a devastating effect on my self-esteem. I feel like I have to always push myself to the extreme limit to where I break mentally, emotionally, or physically because if I do not then I feel like I am not doing enough and there will be a negative outcome from someone I love. If something bad happens I automatically think it’s my fault and I am the problem, even if it’s obvious that isn’t the case. I constantly worry I am not doing enough or I’m not good enough in a myriad of ways. That’s part of the reason why I try to control things so fiercely. I feel like if I can control them then they can’t go wrong and I will avoid feeling badly about myself. I’m also so focused on trying to figure myself out and maintain my homeostasis of safety that I don’t give others the attention or consideration that I think I should. It’s part of the reason I feel so disconnected with people, even my family and friends. I don’t want to look too closely at myself for fear of finding how much I lack, so much so that I also don’t have the capacity to look closely at others and be interested in their lives. I’m so fearful of my own emotions that I have trouble expressing anything that could be deemed negative, and not being able to hold space and express the negative emotions has also made it difficult to do the same for the positive ones. There’s hardly ever strong negative or positive emotions, it’s mostly neutral with sightly negative or positive aspects. I want to work on all of this and I hope this book and strong, persistent self-reflection can help me improve.