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Being inordinately hung up on past abuse/bullying

Started by madhair60, September 06, 2019, 02:17:43 PM

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madhair60

Anyone else incredibly hung up on abuse/bullying from their youth, or just me? Lately found myself wondering how successful/happy I might have been without four years of derisory treatment from shitheads. Just thinking about it now and how if I ever ran into any of those people I would definitely hurt them as much as I could as quickly as I could. Does anyone else get like this? I'm thinking about fully grown men here with families who likely don't actually remember me in the slightest, but made sure I was miserable and bleeding every day for about four years. I think kids know well enough when they're doing something bad, I know everyone's grown up and moved on but I honestly don't feel as though there's any measure of personal development that could make up for it. I think if it were brought up I'd get a "sorry, I was just a kid". That's not good enough. That isn't a good enough excuse. I think about these people and their new lives and I just think, well, I honestly, genuinely, not affecting this for a bit of gallows humour, hope they lose everything and die in squalid misery. People who if I saw their obituary I'd be brought very real joy. I have further, darker thoughts on all this but I suppose I wonder how you lot deal with this. Everyone experiences some measure of bullying/cruelty but they move on. I don't see how or why I should forget about it. I don't have anything to look forward to here, just more drudgery and work. Could make stuff but there's no point. Meanwhile people who basically took away all the promise I ever had are living in LA and running sports bars and rich. I want to buy a plane ticket and burn their cunty sports bar to the ground.

Anyway hope you're all keeping well, I am absolutely fucked, CaB. Cheers.

Cuellar


bgmnts

Yep. It's pretty much ruined my entire life hahaha.

madhair60

Quote from: bgmnts on September 06, 2019, 02:24:20 PM
Yep. It's pretty much ruined my entire life hahaha.

Yeah basically. Went from properly good student, really switched-on, clever, got shit done, to just a miserable docile waste of space who didn't care about anything. No recompense, no justice whatsoever.

I think about it so much. I could blind these people and feel nothing. I mean it.


madhair60

I am glad it's not just me because it's fucking scary sometimes.


Kryton

Quote from: madhair60 on September 06, 2019, 02:27:35 PM
I am glad it's not just me because it's fucking scary sometimes.

Yeah it's affected my life for a long time. General anxiety led to a lot of other shitty things. It's taken me a long time to recover.



QDRPHNC

I was not raised very well, and for a period in my 20s I was very angry at my parents. Then it passed. Now, twenty or so years later, I find myself thinking about the most unhappy parts of my childhood. And while I'm not angry in the sense I used to be, uncomfortable thoughts and feelings have been coming to the surface, to the point I've considered just not speaking to my family any more.

I'm not sure why it's come up now, but I put it down to a few things. The first is that my son is now 11, which is around the time that things got bad for me. It's hard for me not to look at him and compare him to me at his age. The second is that, after 2 divorces, I'm as settled and as content as I've ever been in my life, so maybe I finally have the peace and stability to look objectively at the past. And I think part of getting out of chaotic and unstable relationships is that my view of myself has stabilized too. I don't know.

Jerzy Bondov

I'm on drugs for my brain but they work so!

Also having a son has put a marker down on my life's timeline, and if anything before that point had been different, I'd have a different kid. I don't want a different kid, they're tossers. So I just have to accept that anything bad that happened in the past is set in stone for better or worse, and if I could go back and change it I wouldn't. So you need to have a kid, but make sure it's a good one or that'll just be another regret.

Paul Calf

No. They're just thick, boring cunts who've mostly led dull, miserable lives. Some of them have had extensive prison careers.

I'm just glad I never have to see the dull, lowbrow cock-ends ever again. I'm even gladder that I'm not them.

madhair60

Shouldn't have read those school threads. I've been well and truly #triggered. Gonna go to Hunstanton this weekend for one last go on the bowling, stuff my face with colourful rock and annihilate myself off a cliff I reckon. Finally live out that sunny hunny annihilation dream. Go Sea Life centre first and hark at a starfish cos their good.

Elderly Sumo Prophecy


The Culture Bunker

It played on me through a lot of my 20s, and led to some behaviour I might describe as "over-compensating". As a child, my home/family life couldn't have been better in any way - school, on the other hand, particularly secondary, was absolute hell. Some arsehole teachers who thought I was special needs as I was too shy to speak and plenty of prick lads who liked to beat on the lanky kid who wouldn't bunch back. Until I did, but that was five years in. There was a lot of homophobic bullying, based on me not liking rugby league (thus, not a proper lad) and being caught reading in my free time, which left me a bit fucked up for some years until I realised a) nowt wrong with fancying other lads and b) I quite liked the opposite sex anyways. 

I'm not sure if it's related, but I've had problems with social anxiety since I was 11/12 (may well be my brain getting fucked by puberty).

Sometime in my early 30s, the resentment part began to erode as I'd go home and see some of these bellends still in the shite old town, except now bald and fat, dragging around their equally ugly children and looking for all the world like their lifeforce had been sucked out of them. One time, I swapped glances with someone we'll call Kris (because that's his name) and I swear his expression was one of absolute despair and the feeling he'd rather have been in my shoes.

H-O-W-L


Beagle 2

Yeah definitely, getting picked on between the ages of 12 and 15, having to take different routes to the bus stop, to school and to the shop to avoid certain people, dreading getting on public transport etc - it still affects the way I am to this day. Nobody ever bullied me again after that, but this is the legacy I think - I always sort of assume that they will.

madhair60


Blue Jam

Yes, but mainly my family, and from being singled out as Bad Daughter who couldn't do anything right while my sister was Good Daughter who could do no wrong, and who joined in with the abuse of Bad Daughter. Reading about narcissistic parenting I had a proper scales-falling-from-eyes moment and it has helped me to understand the family dynamic and explained why my family behaved the way they did, but it hasn't done anything to take away the pain.

I do often wonder how my life would have turned out had I not been the family scapegoat, and if I'd be less neurotic, with a healthy level of self-esteem and without my recurring depressive episodes, but I often feel like my family have broken me beyond repair and I'll never be normal. My sister meanwhile has seering confidence and self-belief, but it's deluded confidence- she is broken too, in many ways I'm the lucky one and she has it much worse.

As for school bullies, I've mostly blocked school out, but I can't forget the main one at my primary school. She was a girl in the year above who barely knew me,but one day just decided to tell all my friends that they had to hang out with her instead and if she caught them talking to me  she'd beat them up. My so-called friends all gravitated towards her and abandoned me over the space of about two weeks, and my last two years at school until the bully left were very lonely.

Thankfully we went to different secondary schools and then I'd see her hanging about the village with a posse of younger boys, trying hard to be cock o' the village like Kerry from This Country. I realised she had no friends her own age, and no female friends like most teenage girls. I then started to pity her- I realised she was just very lonely and the only way she knew how to make "friends" was to threaten younger kids.

She popped up on my Facebook under "People You May Know" a couple of years back and I couldn't resist having a look. She seems pretty miserable- she never left the village, had kids young and seems to be constantly ranting about how much she hates her job, how tight money is, how her kids are going off the rails and how their dad is a bastard. Also she looks dog-rough, she looks about 15 years older than me rather than just a year older. Possibly the saddest thing is the way her posts are almost unintelligible, written in text speak half the time- if only she'd used her time at school more constructively, eh...

Mwahahaahaha...and then I looked at her page again last week and accientally clicked "Add Friend". Errrrrk... I cancelled the request immediately but wondered if she'd had an email alert or a notification email so I blocked her. Phew...

Lesson learned: Don't Facebook-stalk people from school, it isn't healthy.

Bently Sheds

In answer to the original question, yes.

Madhair: have a few goes on the Slippery Dip, that usually cheers me up when I go to Hunstanton.

sponk

Weirdly enough, no. I was bullied pretty badly (or goodly depending on your pov) by my two brothers. This led, I think, to my severe shyness and self loathing during school which ofc made me a target for bullying there. This led to a depressed rut directly after school where I didn't work, go to college, or even leave the house much for a few years. Still recovering from that and I feel like I'm now at a stage in my late 20s where I could have been in my early teens if it hadn't happened.

Not angry at my brothers because they were just POTE (products of their environment) as much as I became, and they were only taking cues from my dad, who I did genuinely despise for years. Didn't do anything proactive to get past that hatred, think I just burned myself out and couldn't be bothered anymore.



Flouncer

I got some shit at school that really adversely affected me; made me realise that a lot of people are callous cunts who will hurt you to make themselves feel better, but as far as continuing anger and bitterness go, it's my parents (specifically my dad though my mum aided and abetted him in his abuse at some crucial points). I'm doing a bit better now and consequently I find it easier to avoid falling into abject resentment and continually questioning why I was treated in such an appalling way when they knew I was so vulnerable...

Just talking about it brings it all back to me; I'm not going to go into it in any depth, but the point is that you're the who suffers - in all likelihood, the people who did this to you are never even going to acknowledge that they're the ones responsible, let alone feel bad about it. You simply aren't going to get that from them, so you need to somehow find it within yourself to deal with it and move forward in a way that doesn't eat you up.

I think being in a position where you're not happy or aren't growing or proceeding as you think you should, serves to compound matters and so probably the most healthy thing you can do is try to change the things you're not content with and move on - when you achieve this you might find that you have a different perspective. This happened to me when I removed myself from the intial abusive environment and got better: I managed to develop some insight into various situations in which I got hurt, and even developed some understanding and sympathy towards the people who hurt me. My problem ended up being that I forgave the people in question and put myself in a position where they could hurt me again. Don't count on other people having the same capacity for change as you, because some are always going to be spiteful, twisted cunts no matter what.

JesusAndYourBush

No, they were all thick as pigshit and and if they didn't end up in prison they'd have ended up picking on someone bigger than them and getting the shit beaten out of them.

Buelligan

I had a fucking dreadful time as a kid/teen.  My father was insanely controlling.  To a seriously weird degree, I am not joking.  Obsessive about my virginity too - which didn't help (literally dragging me by the hair, screaming that I was a prostitute and a whore - I was a fifteen year old virgin - in broad daylight across the front lawns of our neighbourhood on one occasion, without any reason or provocation whatsoever, if you need an illustration.  He also used to attack me physically, really punching and the like).  So I had shit at school (because I was an outsider, liked reading, knew big words, had the wrong accent, the wrong clothes and my father was at war with the school and most of the people in our community) and shit at home.

I decided not to break but to serve my time and do what the fuck I liked and fuck the world but it took its toll (and probably did break me in some ways).  However, looking back, I genuinely feel that those that made my life a living fucking hell (even my father) were themselves chased down the narrow corridors of their lives by demons of stupidity and convention that I had the weapons to destroy.  They were victims too.  I genuinely mean this.  It's taken me a lot of walking the earth to arrive, mind.

I'm extremely sorry to hear of your sorrow, Maddo (and everyone).  It will pass eventually.  It is past. 

I send you hugs and the advice not to read school threads, I never do.

bgmnts

Why don't we all do a Strangers on a Train kind of thing?

Cardenio I

Quote from: madhair60 on September 06, 2019, 02:17:43 PM
Anyone else incredibly hung up on abuse/bullying from their youth, or just me? Lately found myself wondering how successful/happy I might have been without four years of derisory treatment from shitheads. Just thinking about it now and how if I ever ran into any of those people I would definitely hurt them as much as I could as quickly as I could. Does anyone else get like this? I'm thinking about fully grown men here with families who likely don't actually remember me in the slightest, but made sure I was miserable and bleeding every day for about four years. I think kids know well enough when they're doing something bad, I know everyone's grown up and moved on but I honestly don't feel as though there's any measure of personal development that could make up for it. I think if it were brought up I'd get a "sorry, I was just a kid". That's not good enough. That isn't a good enough excuse. I think about these people and their new lives and I just think, well, I honestly, genuinely, not affecting this for a bit of gallows humour, hope they lose everything and die in squalid misery. People who if I saw their obituary I'd be brought very real joy. I have further, darker thoughts on all this but I suppose I wonder how you lot deal with this. Everyone experiences some measure of bullying/cruelty but they move on. I don't see how or why I should forget about it. I don't have anything to look forward to here, just more drudgery and work. Could make stuff but there's no point. Meanwhile people who basically took away all the promise I ever had are living in LA and running sports bars and rich. I want to buy a plane ticket and burn their cunty sports bar to the ground.

Anyway hope you're all keeping well, I am absolutely fucked, CaB. Cheers.

I know this is very obvious and a bit pat but you're still giving these people way too much power, and in so doing condemning yourself.

Lisa Jesusandmarychain

Yeah, if you're still giving those fuckers house room in your head, then they've won; and they don't deserve to win. They're losers. Ugly, twisted individuals who don't deserve the slightest contemplation. They could be running a sports bar or they could be in prison or dead or whatever, it dunt matter. They're still cunts. Fuck 'em.

sponk


madhair60

Quote from: Lisa Jesusandmarychain on September 06, 2019, 03:48:44 PM
Yeah, if you're still giving those fuckers house room in your head, then they've won; and they don't deserve to win. They're losers. Ugly, twisted individuals who don't deserve the slightest contemplation. They could be running a sports bar or they could be in prison or dead or whatever, it dunt matter. They're still cunts. Fuck 'em.

Apologies in advance for the dramatics, but they won in 2002. My current situation - everything about my mindset, my unhappiness, my general consistent failure, my struggles in my job, relationships collapsing, anxiety, depression - it's their fault. It's because of what they did. I've thought about this a lot. There's no further revelation to come. I only have one life and the formative years of it - because of these people - are lost. There will never be any candour, never be any retribution, justice, satisfaction to be gained. There is no reasonable course of action I can take that will make up for any of it. Crippling pain inflicted on them, life-shattering grief, permanent disability. Those would be a good start.

Obviously I've fucked up my life off my own back many times, but it all boils down that four-year erosion of self-worth, confidence and ability. I don't see why I should be held accountable anymore. None of this would have happened if not for them. As far as I'm concerned it's black and white.

madhair60

It could be worse. I'm grateful for the personal successes I have enjoyed. I should probably make that clear.

Buelligan

Point is madhair, you do have value.  People genuinely like and admire you - including me.