Crap childhood ?

Loneliness, Depression & Relationship Forum

Help Support Loneliness, Depression & Relationship Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

BadGuy

Well-known member
Joined
Jan 23, 2015
Messages
3,839
Reaction score
5
Anybody connect their childhood to how they interact now as adults

I think my need to make everyone else happy before myself is a direct result
My Mom often threatened to put me up for adoption for being a kid :(
 
BadGuy said:
Anybody connect their childhood to how they interact now as adults

I think my need to make everyone else happy before myself is a direct result
My Mom often threatened to put me up for adoption for being a kid :(

Absolutely, my mom was always threatening to have me put into care. Unknown to her at the time I had anxiety. Her threats made it astronomically worse. When it got bad I'd hide in my head in a fantasy world I'd create and to a big extent that's something I fight against still now.
 
Yes, I had a crap childhood with a strange, dysfunctional family that believed children should be seen and never heard.

Hence I developed a crippling anxiety about being seen and struggled to develop my own personality throughout my teenage years and beyond.

It's something I'm still struggling with since I cannot forget my past, no matter how much I'd like to.
 
BadGuy said:
Anybody connect their childhood to how they interact now as adults

I think my need to make everyone else happy before myself is a direct result
My Mom often threatened to put me up for adoption for being a kid :(

I thought only my mom said horrid things like that. She would threaten to send me to a foster home or a "shrink". I was probably 10ish at the time and I had no idea what a foster home was - I had a classmate with the last name Foster so thought it would be a home like theirs. One time I pushed back on having to wear a bra, again around age 11 or 12, and she threatened to send me to a shrink.
I didn't know what that was either so I thought it was someone who would shrink my boobs.
I found out later what it all meant and it bothers me to this day that she would say that. I wasn't a bad kid by any means. Those kinds of words have never passed my lips with my own child. I'm hoping to break the cycle of crappy child-rearing.

-Teresa
 
As I've mentioned in other topics, I was heavily bullied during most of my school years (some during 1-3, a LOT during 4-10, finally stopping for 11 and 12), and I feel it absolutely crippled my social development and maturity during those years. When I graduated at 18, I was more akin to a 12-14 year old, mentally. Even now at 30, I feel like I'm only really 24 or 25. I've always gotten along with people younger or older than me, possibly because people close to my age were the ones bullying me (or ignoring me, for fear of being bullied along with me).

Oddly enough, the magic number seems to be 3. People 3 years older or younger are who I'm most compatible with, and many key friends in my life have fit that rule (while few haven't). First friend where I lived until I was 12 was 3 years older, friend when I was 13-14 was 3 years younger. First girlfriend was 3 years older, good online friend who I founded a video game discussion forum with was 3 years older. Friend who I met via that site and eventually got to know irl (he lives an hour away) is 3 years younger. A romantic interest I met on Xbox Live (who sadly will probably never turn into anything serious due to extreme distance, despite that we have mutual feelings) is, again, 3 years older.

I also don't make friends easily, despite wanting more social interaction in general. But at the same time, I'm so used to living so relatively isolated (internet excluded, of course) that the fact I can regularly go 3+ days without any real social interaction doesn't bother me as much as it might others. But I also don't like that I don't really have a group of close friends, even a small group (2-4 people maybe) I can actually hang out with on anything resembling a regular basis. Hell, the friend who's only an hour away is really the ONLY person I've seen in a social capacity anytime in the past few years, excluding a couple of parties with coworkers (which are nice, but I never quite feel like I really belong, even though they're mostly all nice and accepting of me).

I'm also a very generous person, which I think stems from the fact I used to bribe people to be my 'friends,' by letting them play my video games and stuff. My mo always worried (and still does) that I let people walk all over me and stuff, and that may have been true at one point, but I don't think it is anymore. I enjoy sharing things with people that they like. I enjoy that they enjoy it, and that I'm able to be the one to make it possible. Maybe that tendency and desire evolved from feeling like I had to bribe people just to superficially act like they're my friend and let them use me, but even if that's true, it still evolved and thus is no longer that.

All of the bullying and social exclusion also makes me feel like I don't fit in, I'll never fit in, and there's no place for me, while (almost) everyone else has a place given to them. That I need to struggle and suffer to obtain even a fraction of what other people take for granted. It's not the feeling that I'm worthless, but rather, that people don't regard me as worth much in general, irrespective of how much I'm actually worth. While that may seem like pedantic, it leaves me with very few feelings of self-hatred (which I see a lot of people here expressing), and a lot of feelings of anger and hatred for the society and world that allowed it to happen to me. I guess having that anger directed outward is better than inward, I suppose.

I'm also an only child, which probably doesn't help matters.
 
my sunday morning routine is usually get my weeks groceries when the store opens

This morning I over heard a Mom scolding her young boys for goofing around in the store
She said to them ...thats why people come so early for groceries ...so they dont have to put up with kids

I wish I would have corrected her
 
I moved back to my home country when I was 7. Before that, I remember being happy, having lots of toys, having lots of friends. After that though, everything changed. I was bullied. It was mostly verbal. They all ganged up on me, laughed at me, said I acted like a baby, took advantage of the fact that I was physically slow by stealing my stuff. Of course, I was a kid, I wasn't the witty savage ******* I am now. I had no idea how to react or defend myself, so I did the only thing I could, I attacked my bullies. I've lost count of how many times I got into a fight. It's definitely in the dozens. So, those ******** always got away with it, not least because our teacher was ******* useless, only saying "Oh darlings, that's not a nice thing to do". I was the problem child, because I was bullied, not because I WAS the bully. Once I was taking a shower in the changing room after PE. They locked me in and stole all my clothes. I panicked, I was freaking out, and they all just... laughed. The worse I got the harder they laughed. My mom, she's the sweetest woman in the world 99% of the time. But that 1% of time, she's can act completely insane. I had to stop her from killing herself as a small childhood multiple times. She'd yell at the smallest stuff, cry, threaten to leave. If you stood up to her, even just a little, she would act like YOU were the one freaking out, threaten to call the ambulance, take you to a psychiatrist. I still avoid talking to her about serious stuff to this day, and am honestly a bit scared of her. My dad was way too focused on work to ever care, and when he did try to bond with me, it was just too awkward. He's trying to make up for it now, but I'm afraid it's a bit too late, even though I am trying my best too.

All those experiences have made me into someone who views people in a negative light. When I see a group of friends hanging out, I don't think "fun time with my buddies". I think rejection, people ganging up on me, alienation. Words like community have a negative connotation with me. I will probably never be socially normal because of it. I will never belong anywhere, I'll always do things my own way, because it's the only way I know how. I just wish I had... something. Maybe find a nice girl who's a bit like me, a few good friends, even just some people to have a drink with or go see a movie every now and again. But I'll probably never even have any of that considering how messed up my experiences have made me.
 
When I was seven, my older brother was supposed to pick me up after school one day but never showed, so I ended up following a friend and his mother home. They left me with a neighbour who called the police. The policemen came and took me to the station where they managed to get a hold of my father. He finally came to get me four hours after I should have been picked up from school. It turned out that my brother decided he'd rather go hang out with his friends than do as he'd been asked and collect me from school and nobody thought to check if I'd gotten home safely.

That one experience basically sums up my childhood: always an afterthought, never a priority for my family, pawned off onto anyone who happened to wander by.
 
My mother got so drunk that she passed out and forgot to come pick me up at pre-school. My dad couldn't be reached because he wasn't at work like he was supposed to be.... i also ended up at the police station until my grandmother was finally reached and came to bring me home..... many hours later.

If I held on to ALL the crappy things that happened to me as a child growing up, I'd be one F-ed up adult. It is hard work to forgive, its hard work to learn that only you can chose how you behave and how you react to things. Its all hard work, but it can be done. You will have days/ months where you slip and fall back into old patterns of thinking, but is it really worth all that emotional energy to hash it out over and over again?

Make peace with your past, its so freeing once you do...
 
Yes, another crap childhood here. Parents divorced when I was really young, got bullied for 10 years, no friends, some other family issues etc. Childhood is so important, it's the base of your whole life, your whole adulthood. When you're a little kid, you build the sense of the self, your identity ''who you are'' and what other people think about you. If childhood is damaged as in my case, when becoming an adult, life will be even harder in some cases because you have no tools to make it better. There's no base to even start building it.
 
Like this^^ I feel like I have no secure identity, nothing there, just a lot of neurotic fears. Threatened up until the age of 4, bullied mercilessly during intermediate school, a joke in secondary school. Always a few years behind my peers. I seem to have a low stress tolerance, the smallest things sets me in a disproportionate state of panic and insomnia and I have to put that down to my childhood. Now as I age I’m looking more and more like that abominable man who started the process.

My mother was a decent person and good parent though. Never wanted for the essentials so obviously I’ve had it easier than some.
 
I suffer panic disorder and depression... all the fun things, But its manageable now that I have the tools and the medication to cope with it. Therapy is so important in these situations, in many situations. This is where you can get the tools to learn, cope and begin to forgive the past.... did I mention Medication is also really helpful? :p
 
My childhood wasn't crappy really, just a few instances and situations of crappy things against a backdrop of a mostly good life. My home life was pretty good, I always had food to eat, clothes to wear, plenty of toys and games and books. But I had a hard time fitting in with my peers and I suppose in some ways I still do. Socializing appears to be second nature for most people, but I feel like an alien. I remember being a new kid in kindergarten and nobody was friendly. This went on for the entirety of grade school. To this day, I don't know if that's how people really are, or if I just had the bad luck of winding up in a class of mostly mean people. I wasn't into the things that most people were into, specifically most guys. I also didn't act like them either. Most of them were into sports and being aggressive and cocky, and I was this shy guy that liked to read and make up stories and play with toys and make-believe. They also later liked to drink, smoke weed, swear and say vulgar sexual things, and I did not like that stuff at all. Sometimes I would be asked things like if I knew what stuff meant and I didn't know and I just didn't want to, because it wasn't fun for me. I didn't care about that stuff and didn't care to be good at witty comebacks or any of that stuff, I just wanted to be left alone. Most of them seemed into being disrespectful and unpleasant for its own sake, mouthing off to teachers or to other classmates where as I didn't want problems with anyone and just wanted to have a pleasant life. I had some instances of bullying, but it was only by a few people and only verbal abuse, I was never really beaten up or anything like that. With most people though, it was mostly just a sense of being unwelcome. A sense of always being watched to see when I would slip up and say or do something not up to the standard of "coolness" or masculinity, so that I could be judged as stupid, weak, uncool, "less than". I always felt like everyone was in on some kind of big inside joke, and I was not. I never felt like I knew what to say or do, and of course I didn't want to say or do something that would get me laughed at, so I mostly didn't say or express or pursue anything. I never felt good at anything or that anything was easy for me, and I also didn't want to do something, fail at it, then be told "you suck!", so I didn't really pursue any interests. I reasoned that you can't be mocked for failing if you don't try, which obviously isn't a good idea either because you'll never do anything, but that's what I thought at the time.

I think this is where a lot of my self-doubt comes from, particularly as it relates to doubting my ability to get good at anything or doubting my ability to be interesting or "cool" enough for someone.

It took me a long time to make any friends, and as I've said many times before, I don't and have never had a girlfriend or even been on something that was confirmed as a date. I think for a long time, I told myself that I didn't want to be social and that I didn't like people because I didn't want to act like those macho, cocky, vulgar, elitist, and all-around unpleasant guys. I thought being social meant acting like them, and that liking people meant liking them and approving of how they were. Now I see that those things are not necessarily the same, but I have to get out of the habit of complaining and seeing myself as a victim, and I feel like I have to catch up on cultivating my identity, from my years of indecision.
 
To tell the truth, I'm PRETTY sure that low self-esteem and social behaviour problems have some kind of relation to childhood in general... but if I think back to the past, I WAS always like that. I mean, my parent's couldn't even take me to the playgrounds because I didn't interact with anyone at all, and I'd rather play by myself. The same goes for school: I didn't even know how to interact with others and immediately had a problem when we had to find someone to sit next to (we had those double tables in school).

Sooo... yeah, I'm pretty sure it has some kind of relation to how the parents behave with and next to their children (trust me, I know this feeling really well), but I also have the feeling that it's NOT the only reason, and we're born this way. We born to be like this, and the best we can do is accept ourself as we are, with all of our mistakes.

We may want to be like the others, but do we really know what other people really want? Maybe they struggle with completely different problems that we don't even care about.
 
I've connected the panic disorder I formed in my 20's as a direct result of being bullied in middle school and high school.

I was actively bullied from ages 12-19. When I turned 17, it got a bit easier, but I still was looked at as the social outcast, and got physical and emotional abuse, even though some of the popular kids liked me. It also wasn't easy with my family. I've always been treated badly by them, because I was the result of an out of wedlock "accident" (or at least that's how I was treated.) My uncle wanted me aborted. This is what Christians treat out of wedlock babies like, and one of the reasons why I'm an atheist.

At age 22, I went off to college, and it seemed like things were going well. Then at age 23 (2006), I had a complete and total nervous breakdown, and ended up in the hospital.

But, the way I see it, is I can blame my childhood for the past 10 years of being and feeling absolutely helpless. Or I can take steps to manage it. I've already gotten better; I can walk into a store and have a conversation with a cashier without going to pieces. And I had a job two years ago that, while stressful, didn't cause me to lose it in public like in the past.

I can't blame ******** for destroying my life. There will always be ********. The only person you can control is yourself, and I want my life to be better than it was before, so I have to work on myself.
 
I had kids tell me their goal in life was to get me to commit suicide.
Unfortunately they failed at their goal.
 
^Unfortunately, they live sad enough lives that they would treat someone in such a way. If their goals revolve around bringing people misery and wanting death on them, well there is a hot place in hell for them. You are a strong person to have come away from that. You are a precious life in this world, and it is very fortunate that you had the strength to get through your child hood. And I am sorry that there are dumbasses on this planet that would stoop that low.

I think my biggest issue with growing up, is I didn't try to grow into a better person at the time. I just tried to evade the situations. Mind you, I couldn't change a lot of the crappy parts, but I could have dedicated myself to something better. I didn't listen to the people that wanted better for me.
 
blackdot said:
I had kids tell me their goal in life was to get me to commit suicide.
Unfortunately they failed at their goal.

That's messed up. Very glad you didn't. F### those guys.

Got picked on myself but not nearly as badly as some. Was moreso (intentionally) left out and ignored my whole life. Or just never good enough. If I spoke up people just kind of looked at me like I was crazy. As a kid it didn't bother me because I was always kind of in my own world anyway. Adulthood was a whole other story.

I think continuous isolation caused me to develop poor social skills. I can't connect to anyone and seem to make most people feel uncomfortable. Some part of me feels bad and wants to fix it but feels it's too late and I'm a hopeless case. The other part of me is bitter and says f*** everybody. Guess all I can do is try to be a better person and be polite. I dunno....
 
AmytheTemperamental said:
I think my biggest issue with growing up, is I didn't try to grow into a better person at the time. I just tried to evade the situations. Mind you, I couldn't change a lot of the crappy parts, but I could have dedicated myself to something better. I didn't listen to the people that wanted better for me.

True. Always felt this is where addiction -in its many forms- can weasel it's way into a person's life.
 
AmytheTemperamental said:
I think my biggest issue with growing up, is I didn't try to grow into a better person at the time. I just tried to evade the situations. Mind you, I couldn't change a lot of the crappy parts, but I could have dedicated myself to something better. I didn't listen to the people that wanted better for me.

My biggest regret is that I wasted the past 10 years feeling sorry for myself, instead of getting right to work on myself.

If I had taken therapy seriously back in 2006-2007, maybe I would actually have a social life right now.

But I don't regret spending more time with myself, because I've discovered that I don't really care much for most people. I would be happy on a desert island or in a cabin in the woods, away from most people, and only include like maybe 10 people to interact with.
 

Latest posts

Back
Top