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Cake day: March 11th, 2025

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  • Great question!

    I was stuck in the abusive patterns from my upbringing well into my 30s, including getting in one abusive relationship after another. Unfortunately, due to my own reactivity from trauma, I ended up with some pretty toxic mindsets and behaviours as well.

    That’s when I finally got in a healthy relationship, and that was when I finally found a therapist who knew to tell me that my upbringing had NOT been normal, in fact it had been horribly abusive. I knew something was “off” before then because I had been the scapegoat but I never realized the scope of it. It led me to challenge my discomfort with being treated with respect (crazy but true) and to challenge my own dysregulation and subsequent behaviours.

    I had always figured I was mostly the problem, as I had been led to believe. And in all my years of therapy I had also been treated as if the problem existed solely within ME (which I consider a serious flaw in conventional therapy tbh) and not with my environment.

    These days I’m fairly low contact with my parents, who mellowed out a great deal after I moved out, and I live a pretty good life but I’m still working very hard to heal. Despite there being little to no physical abuse, my childhood truly felt like hell. I mostly survived by dissociating, which got so bad I ended up dissociated throughout pretty much my whole life. It’s really hard to get out of that state.