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pxrxllel · 6 years

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Talking to the Moon LXII (02/12/17)

Warning: LONG post incoming. Trigger warning for abuse.

I’ve recently come to an extremely harrowing realisation that I could very well have spent my entire life as a victim of mild emotional/psychological abuse. Before I dive into the explanation and the evidence and the aftermath and all that jazz, I’d like to firstly make a disclaimer.

I’m not writing this post to garner pity or put the blame on anyone else or shift the responsibility of the things that happen in my life. I’m simply exploring this theory as a way to put a name to my experiences because doing that allows me to deal with it in the right ways. It’s like how you can’t treat a disease without knowing what it actually is, because all you do is treat the symptoms and that’s never enough. So I’m not crying woe is me my life is shit and everyone treats me badly because that isn’t the point of this at all. I’m just trying to be as honest as I can, based on my perception of reality, which I’m not sure is all that accurate if I have been in a bubble of abuse all my life.

Anyway, back to the real issue.

I’ve always found it difficult to navigate relationships in a healthy way. Every other area of my life is set: I’m not financially anxious, I do well in school, I perform at work, yada yada. The only persistent and major source of anxiety that has always been present in my life is my relationships. This has ranged from my family relationships to my friendships and to my romantic relationships. Each one of these has been a point of tension at some point in my life.

When I was younger, my sister and I were deliberately physically and verbally abusive towards each other - we stopped this behaviour as we got older. My parents have always been emotionally and psychologically abusive to me, although I’m not entirely sure that’s intentional on their part - I’m going to discuss this further down. I have been emotionally abusive to my friends and in my relationships. I have always found it difficult to make friends and connect on an emotional level, and when I got older, this translated into social anxiety. I have cycled through bouts of depression ever since I was 14. I have extremely low self-esteem, and no one believes when I say this because I’m apparently very good at keeping up the image of confidence, but I wholeheartedly see myself as a blemish on the face of the earth. I have been through five relationships in five years, and some of them have been sexually and emotionally abusive.

Those are the symptoms, if you will. Some of them are facts and some of them are claims. Like I said, the claims are only valid as far as my own perspective goes, because other people may disagree with some of them, especially when it comes to intentionality.

I’m going to provide a definition of emotional/psychological abuse: Emotional abuse is an attempt to control. The perpetrator of emotional abuse uses emotion as his/her weapon of choice. Common signs include: criticisms and unfair judgement, mean jokes, shame and guilt on the victim’s part, threats, causing self-doubt/gaslighting, refusing to acknowledge the hurt, financial abuse, undermining and dismissal. All in all, any attempt to control someone else by reducing their self-worth.

For the purposes of my explanation, I’m going to stick to two sections: my family (specifically parents) and my relationships.

Family

In my family, there is my father, mother, and my younger sister (we are nearly three years apart). I grew up mostly with my mother and my sister. My father is constantly working overseas, but he visits for about three months total out of the year. It’s been like this as long as I can remember, and I remember as a child, I used to be pretty sad when he left, so we must have had some good times together although I don’t remember much. It seems that as I got older, I began to realise that the relationship between me and my father was far from what I had wanted it to be, and this has been a source of anxiety for me for a very long time, probably around the past ten years.

Before I dive into this too deep, I should probably detail the family history that may be relevant. My father and his mother have a dysfunctional relationship; they can’t really communicate without fighting. They’re always stepping on each other’s toes. I have not seen his mother in years because my father has isolated us from his family and our cousins.

My mother and my father don’t have what I’d call an ideal relationship either. They don’t really fight, but my father is definitely controlling over her. She doesn’t have a source of income so he has a financial monopoly. He belittles her and calls her names (it makes me sick to hear) and he refuses to help her out. For example, this morning she asked him to take two minutes to wash the dishes, and he replied that he didn’t have time because he needed to be online so he could win an auction on Facebook (this is so immature of him and it happens constantly, it’s ridiculous). He expects her to be at his beck and call, when he’s away he always calls and if she’s busy in the garden or cooking he expects her to drop what she’s doing because she’s not supposed to have a life outside of him and us anyway. He criticises what she spends money on, when he never gets criticised for his frivolous purchases. I could go on, but it’s really saddening that my mother just lets herself be pushed around like this. Sometimes I lose my cool at him and my mother tries to placate me but I stand my ground, even though she says he’s got good intentions deep down and has sacrificed so much for us. I’m not sure where his intentions are at all, especially considering his dysfunctional family, so I can’t say if he’s actually bad or deliberately abusive.

Anyway, as a result of what I’ve seen and how he’s made me feel throughout my life, I try to keep this relationship as distant as possible so it’s healthy for me. That comes with its own set of challenges, but I’ll get to that later. I’m just going to go into a couple of examples that show why I believe he is emotionally abusive (or at least I have felt abused/neglected) towards me.

He likes to make my decisions for me. He criticises me when he disapproves of my choices. I remember when we were deciding what I would study at university, we were looking through the prospectus and I dog-eared quite a few majors and he flipped through and removed the bookmarks of all the ones he didn’t approve of and said I wasn’t allowed to do those. When I was deciding which school to do my exchange at, he did the same thing. He was very passive aggressive for days when I chose San Diego over Berkeley or UCLA. He’s just passive aggressive and sulky in general when things don’t go his way. I’m afraid that he’ll be this way about all my big future life decisions, like moving for jobs and going to grad school.

He objectifies me. This may be in part due to his cultural upbringing, though. My parents grew up in Asia and I grew up in a Western culture, so that conflict has been a source of tension for me at times as well. Ever since I was little, he would talk about me marrying into a good family and learning how to be a good wife. He points out when I’m wearing makeup or revealing clothing and interrogates me about who I’m trying to impress. He shows his colleagues and peers pictures of me and gloats about how ‘good-looking’ I am and basks in the compliments they give me. All of this makes me very uncomfortable. Whenever I try to say something or do something that highlights how I’m more than just a face or a body, he shuts me down and belittles me, “Oh you actually study? I thought all you do was talk to boys. You’re cooking? That’s a good quality, men will like that.” It’s disgusting. Both my parents tell me I need to lose weight and have too much acne. They’re constantly looking at my face to watch for progress in the same way that a scientist would scrutinise bacteria under a microscope. It makes me want to vomit.

He constantly tries to make me feel guilty. Filial piety and respecting your parents’ authority is a really big deal in Asian cultures. So he constantly makes a big deal when he doesn’t get any attention or if he feels like I’m not ‘respecting’ him enough. He firstly starts talking in a baby voice and whining about it like a kid before he gets to the angry stage in which he may explode and yell, or he gets passive aggressive and seethes silently. This comes up in conversations usually about our family, or about what’s going to happen in the future when my parents retire and start getting sick and old. I get the impression that he expects me to give up my goals just to look after them, just like how they (moreso my mother) did in a way. That’s not going to happen, so... Tension alert.

Something that both my parents don’t like for some reason is when I socialise or go out with my friends. They roll their eyes and say, “You’re going out again? You’re always going out. You never spend any time with us.” My father will grovel for days about me not paying them any attention, I’m pretty sure it’s an attempt to make me feel guilty.

They’re both also very oblivious to my mental health issues and are in complete denial. I have alluded to being depressed before and all I have received is judgement. “You are so lucky and you have everything you need and you are so much more privileged than we were at your age, there is nothing to be depressed about. If anything, I should be depressed... blah blah.”

That’s pretty much all I have to say about the issues in my family relationships. There are other little things, such as how my sister ignores me in public, but they don’t hold too much weight in the grand scheme.

I’m just going to quickly take a moment to talk about the effects of these family relationships on me. They’re very stressful and I feel isolated because I can’t talk to anyone about anything that troubles me. I’m expected to sit in my place and behave, basically. The concept of saving face is also paramount to Asian culture, so I’m not allowed to be myself because that’s embarrassing to them. All in all, it’s suffocating and toxic, regardless of whether they are doing it intentionally. Of course, you always hope for the best in people and I doubt they really are doing it deliberately, but either way it’s not a good environment and I’m not sure how to handle it.

Relationships

As a result of having felt alone and neglected and criticised all my life, it’s contributed to my lack of self-esteem. I know I have difficulty with self-validation, but I’m not sure if I’m necessarily more clingy and need more attention than the average girlfriend - but it wouldn’t be a stretch to say I guess. I can say beyond reasonable doubt that I’m more insecure and have lower self-esteem than average, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to begging for validation. This is also probably why I stay in relationships that aren’t good for me.

So I’m twenty years old and have had five relationships of varying lengths. The longest was nearly two years and the shortest was two months. I’ve had about a month’s break in between each of them. All of them have been good people with good intentions, but I’m not sure why some of them have been so toxic.

Looking at this through the lens of abuse, the first one to get out of the way was the sexual abuse one. I was never raped or anything like that, but he pushed my boundaries constantly and asked me to do things I didn’t want to do after I repeatedly said so. This, I can be pretty sure, constitutes sexual abuse loud and clear. I left that one pretty quickly, only to run into a different relationship that was better in all the ways, and I think that one was the healthiest (for the most part).

I’m not going to specify, but I have been insulted and have had it dismissed as me being too sensitive or not being able to take a joke - which sucks because I’d like to think I’m good-humoured. I have been made to feel bad about things I didn’t mean to do. I have been told my feelings aren’t valid and shouldn’t be taken seriously. I have been threatened emotionally: “You will make me feel bad if you do x or y”. I have been made fun of. I have been objectified. I have had past mistakes brought up later as ammunition that I thought was resolved. I have had people try to tell they know me better than I know myself. I have been left hanging.

In general, my relationships have been much more positive than negative, but for the purposes of identifying where these issues come from, it’s important for me to highlight the effects that abuse and neglect have had on me as a person and how that’s affected other contexts such as relationships. I know that I deserve better, but I don’t really know what that looks like, to be honest. I just know that if I allow myself to keep falling into these traps, it’s likely that I’ll never be happy and healthy in a relationship, so this is one of the things that I need to focus on. I know that I’m also guilty of unhealthy behaviours in my friendships and relationships, and I’m very good at being emotionally manipulative, but I think this probably stems from these underlying issues that have permeated my life for as long as I remember.

I could be completely talking out of my ass and catastrophising the situation as depression is wont to do, but this is something that if it’s true, is going to have a very deep impact on my quality of life. This is definitely something that I should probably talk about in therapy, but I’m just laying out all my thoughts here to make sense of them.

#Talking To The Moon #ramblings #personal #abuse #emotional abuse #psychological abuse #family #relationships

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