Sometimes I'll have anecdata to share with @seebs but don't want to fill up her inbox, and I don't want to start a whole thread just for whatever it is that's being talked about today. I thought maybe a general thread to dump such things might be useful.
Then, relevant to the current discussion of people recognizing certain forms of abuse done to them but perpetuating others: an ex-friend of mine had an emotionally abusive mom who was one of the leading anti-abuse activists in her area. Because Mom had been physically abused and would never dream of doing that to her daughter, but shame and insults and telling people they were worthless? A-okay in her head. And just for the hat trick, the reason this person is an ex-friend is that she also got abusive in her own, original way.
abusive behavior and recognizing the same anecdata: my grandmother is a narcissist who did her best to ruin my mother's life, maintaining the whole time that she was a devoted, hard-working parent who suffered because of her irresponsible husband but still did her best for her children. (the irresponsible husband had a gambling problem and trusted the wrong people but somehow managed not to be emotionally abusive to his kids.) she's well-liked by almost everyone she meets, because she's friendly and funny and charming. it's only when you're in her immediate family and don't push back hard enough that she forgets that you're a different person and gets angry because your sense of humor is different from hers, or ignores everything you do unless she can figure out a way to take credit for it. a while ago she started having trouble with someone at work - i'll call her bella. her report of the trouble boils down to "bella notices when i make a mistake and she points it out and tells me to correct it and that hurts my feelings, she's so mean, also she thinks she's in charge of me but she's not." (bella may or may not be in charge of her, but is absolutely in charge of the projects that my grandmother participates in, and has every right to complain when she does something wrong. she also has a firm, pushy attitude that can be abrasive, but is not malicious, as far as i can tell.) she's spent around a year complaining about it to anyone who would sit still and listen. i was sitting with her and a friend a few months ago while the friend talked about her abusive ex. the friend described the ex as a narcissist, and then explained what that was, because my grandmother didn't know. as she explained, my grandmother's expression became one of comprehension, and then one of enlightenment. it was clear she was having a lightbulb moment. after the friend finished, my grandmother clued us in to what she had just figured out. "i think bella's a narcissist," she said.
Since this thread was spawned about the "abusive parent" thing, I'll offer anecdata. My parents knew I was going to be visibly deformed before I was born - so left the country they called home because it would be a "bad thing" to have a deformed child there. Long story is here - My mother fought for me. My parents have always been on my side. I don't grasp the idea of parents that aren't. I just can't.
So re: this post: I admit, my reaction to the original post included, "Wait, having your bedroom door removed is something that happened to a statistically significant number of people besides me?"
(Mine got taken off because I had a spectacular meltdown over feeling like my parents invaded my privacy. Because, you know, that's the best way to respond to your kid being so upset by you digging around in her room that the next morning she locks the door and leaves through the window instead.)
i met a family once that didn't have doors, period. except on the outside of the house and the bathroom, i think? iirc even the parents didn't have a door. the idea was that you weren't supposed to be able to shut your family out. and i think the doorways were still treated like doors--that is, if you wanted to come in you knocked on the doorframe and waited for permission to enter. they seemed like nice people but i found the whole thing a bit alarming.
So, since an anon mentioned it on seebs's blog: Disney movie villains and abuse! My stepmom didn't keep me from watching movies or anything (although she was pretty obsessed with regulating how sexy my books were allowed to be) but still, seeing how Gothel treated Rapunzel was. Hoo boy. Hm. I think that was the moment I actually realized that I wasn't afraid of my stepmom for no reason, I was actually in a toxic situation. It still took me another year and half to get out, but it helped keep me from blamign myself for taking everything she said to heart and trying to remake myself into something that would suit her better. (It helped, also, that once I was back living with my mom one of the first things she said was "what the fuck did that woman do to my child say the word and I will destroy her") edit: Actually, since I'm thinking about it, privacy anecdata too: Stepmom wanted my computer facing the door, the door could never be closed, and she wanted to skim every book I'd ever picked up. I had to tell her exactly where I was going and for how long, and had to text her to let her know when I was leaving or coming home. I don't think I ever told her about being anxious, and even though I ended up making out with two different girls in her house, I never told her I might be gay. The first time she found out was when I called my dad to tell him I was engaged. (Gender? What gender. There is not gender here.) My mom not only let me close my doors, she provided me with a room area that had a bedroom, bathroom, and small sitting room attached that could all be separated with a pair of glass doors. We even fogged out the glass, so no one could peek. She always knocked (and waited for permission) before coming in, didn't care if she couldn't see the computer screen, and let me loose on her library without supervision because she trusted me to come talk to her about anything I read if I had questions. As long as I mentioned I was going out, she trusted me to be home by a reasonable time (i.e., before she went to bed so we could say goodnight; if I was going to be out later, she just wanted a text to let her know.) So about two days after the first time I kissed a girl, I told my mom I might be gay. When I started dating Moony, I told her that they were trans. (She also did her best to research what 'transgender' was, and ended up asking me if I was agender. Which I confirmed, and she accepted and moved on with the conversation.) I literally called her the evening they proposed, because I was so excited and I wanted to share. When my aunt's suicide attempt shook me up, I talked to her about being anxious and depressed, and she recommended medications to mention to the psych I chose to visit based on her own history of depression. The thing about privacy and respect is that if you treat kids like people, they will trust you infinitely more. My mom's history of knocking and assuming I could self-regulate my own entertainment (within reason-- she didn't let me watch R rated movies at 8) extends back to before elementary school. That sense of respect for my personal space and feelings was well enough entrenched that I didn't even consider for a second that it would be unsafe to confide in her about anything and everything.
am i the only one who, upon seeing seebs post something about having a full inbox and no spoons, immediately has the urge to send in an ask commiserating over the load of asks? because i do, like every single time. "gee seebs, sorry about all the asks, btw here's another one to deal with lol." stop it, brain, that's not helpful.
re: the discussion on maturity levels in relationships It gets even weirder because while maturity levels and life experience gaps are often correlated with age, they can also exist independent of it! Like, I'm 21, and since I'm just finishing up university, I have a peer group of 20-21 year-olds in my fellow students. But since this is mainly a rich-people-university, a large majority of those people have spent the last three years having their fees paid by their parents, having their parents as financial and moral support if anything goes wrong, going home to their parents on holidays and going on luxurious vacations because lol what's financial worries - and given the amount of shit I've gone through and done in the last three years, I actually do have a huge life experience gap with this peer group. It would be weird as shit to date someone in that position - I don't necessarily know that it would automatically be creepy, but it would definitely be super weird and have much more potential to be creepy, because of that massive life experience gap. But we're the same age!
It's becoming more and more apparent that @seebs, and perhaps all of Tumblr, is trapped in a time loop.
Anecdata on people assuming older people in unhealthy age-gap relationships are always the bad guy: I've got an aunt who's pretty dang awful (she abused my mom as a kid, who's older than her, so consistently steals things she thinks other people value that last time we were at my grandma's house Mom assigned me to park in my room once when she was there to make sure she didn't steal a box of old family photos we found, and is generally a family-wide missing stair) and keeps getting into relationships with men 20-30 years older than her. I can't 100% confirm how she treated her latest ex-husband, but given her history I'd bet that if there was really bad behavior, it wasn't on his side.
this doesn't stop from keep happening. anecdata on being terrified of seebs: i find seebs pretty comfortable to be around, that's why i'm here. i think i have the opposite thing that people normally have where they find psycho/sociopaths terrifying because they don't have empathy--i tend to feel uncomfortable around people i read as... not more empathetic, actually, but as more emotionally expressive. hmm. anyway, i don't have a lot of (anec)data, but in general, if there is a person that other people are frightened or wary of because they do not have enough emotions, i will find them interesting and fun to be around instead. i've met one person that i read as both high-empathy and high-emotional-expression, and she made me mildly uncomfortable at first but now i mostly feel protective. i mean, she can't keep from feeling distress based on stuff happening to other people, even in movies, and she also can't conceal it! this makes me worry.
I think some people find people who loudly and analytically argue their opinions intimidating, especially if it's combined with pulling in lots of knowledge and standard spelling and grammar in an environment where that's not all that universal. I've had people tell me they think I'm scary for that, and I'm a lot higher on the empathy-meters than Seebs and do not have a blog that's largely dedicated to heavy discussion of abuse, trauma, and mental illness (the scariest thing I do is occasionally post sad Radiant Historia headcanons and complain about inaccurately-labeled science gifs).
Yeah. I tend to find that I can trust low-empathy people more, if I end up trusting them, because I can trust that their morality/ethics system is based on something, and I can find out what that is, and it won't change. Whereas if someone is normal- or high-empathy, and bases their morality/ethics system at least partly on empathy (which seems common, given how many people go 'but if you don't have empathy you'll do evil things, because the only thing that stops you from hurting people is feeling bad for them!!'), then I cannot trust as much that they will still be a decent person to me if they stop liking me/seeing me as a person.
I think I found both luka and Seebs comforting because they weren't lying. Please infer anything you want about my parents from that.
