I’m dealing with major childhood trauma without professional help, AMA.

First and foremost: I do not recommend this, please get professional psychological help if you feel like you need it.

TW for child abuse etc.

Now let’s get into it. I (m24) have a history of major physical, emotional and religious childhood abuse. My alcoholic father was the main instigator in the sense that he’d beat my mother senseless basically daily. In hindsight as an adult, I’m pretty sure that worse things also happened, but I wasn’t able to pinpoint those noises as a child.

My father never laid hands on us kids unless we interfered between him and our mom and tried to take beatings for her. Instead he got our mother, who was completely under his thumb, to beat us. I have a lot of memories of her hysterically crying and begging both us and God for forgiveness whenever she hurt us.

My father passed away last September which lead my mother to a complete psychological break and resulted in her losing custody of my younger siblings.

My older sister, who essentially raised me, fled the house as soon as she was of age, got married quickly and is now educated, working and is still happily married with now 3 children. We’re all very close.

I also made something of myself. I rebelled starting at 17, partying, drugs, sleeping around etc.. I was really struggling with my mental health during that time, which lead to 2 suicide attempts at 18. Initially after those attempts was also the only time I was ever in psychological treatment. Maybe 15 weeks in total. That was a wakeup call I needed. I’m now happily married, expecting our first child and I’m about to finish med school. I wouldn’t call myself “healed”, but I do well living with what happened. I still struggle with sleep issues and self worth.

If anyone has questions, I’d be happy to answer. 🙂