What is with N parents thinking that after they abuse you mentally , physically & verbally , that a gift will somehow make all of the trauma you just experienced vanish? Just because you bought me a cute present does not excuse you saying that my middle name should be fuck up DAD!
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My mom has done this my entire life. Most of her gifts were things she wanted me to wear (that I didn’t like) or just money. One was a mini globe that I actually wanted, but she shamed me so bad for wanting to buy that I cried. I wasn’t a kid either. I was 27 and just wanted to buy a $1 globe from the thrift store. I was effectively kidnapped by her at the time (she had committed identity theft to freeze my credit, stole my money, and took the battery from my car), and all I had was a little money that she had given me. After she shamed me, she went back and secretly bought it, hid it for weeks, and gave it to me for my birthday. I had to praise her for weeks for that for the “thoughtful gift.”
Yeah in my family gifts were always a replacement for love or caring.
I also stared to notice as I got older gifts were things she liked rather than anything I would use or like.
Gifts are the love bombing phase in the cycle of abuse.
What would they have to hold over our heads otherwise? I have you this…you owe me!!
FOG
Fear, Obligation or Guilt
If they can’t use one, they use the other
Ours did exactly the same
“oh, but he gave you so much stuff” 🤓🤓🤓
Including life long trauma, self hatred, low self esteem, and suicidal thoughts. But I appreciate the laptop, I guess.
This was my dad’s go to. He physically assaulted me and bought me a record album so I wouldn’t tell my mom. Stay classy.
Ugh, I’m waiting for my dad and stepmom to send me a guilt-trip gift. 🙄
Yall got gifts?! Anyone who got me anything was shoved out of our life for trying to “buy my love” – I think having very little was part of my moms control tactics
My parents don’t even give gifts – they just send money. Or pay for dinner. Like, thanks but I want apologies, accountability and connection more than anything.
My mom never buys me gifts, she gives me the credit card when she makes me upset, tells me to buy whatever i want and when i do, gets mad and holds it over my head or returns it and asks me to get something else..
My dad tacked my name onto a house for my mom that’s 3 doors down from her nFamily. Her and my aunt used it to abuse me and try to keep my son from me. I never hear the end of it. Well, until I stopped hearing anything he has to say to me
I didn’t get gifts, he gave me weed. Started when I was 12 or 13 (can’t remember, duh) would give me a few grams after letting me back in after kicking me out or after fighting and arguing, started a very long addiction
“You guys get gifts?”
Anytime I really do love a gift mine has given me, I feel so deeply conflicted about deserving to enjoy it. It makes me feel guilty about being VLC. Sometimes I just remind myself that gifts can take the place of a lawsuit award for pain and suffering.
My dad treats my daughter (14 months) and I horribly. He basically bullies me for my mental illness and tries to parent my child. He threatens to kick us out and make us homeless often. I’m constantly having to not react in front of my kid to not scare her. Then like last month he bought me a new (used)car. I still don’t really understand except that I’m being pressured now to sell the old one. I have social phobia and he’s got fb as well so I’m not sure why he can’t do it but that’s where we are.
My mom always bought me shit to show her love and emotionally neglected me. As a child, I thought this was awesome and that I was so lucky to have a mom so generous.
I don’t know why they’relike that. Mine tried to tell me that it was “bullshit” that I called them racist after they said racist things because “we let him [my husband, who isn’t white] stay at our house!”
What, you’re not racist because you didn’t make him sleep outside? How progressive of you, thank you so much. s/
My partner always said that “gift” translates to “poison” in German. That was a lifesaver for me because I had a sibling who used gifts to ruin lives.
exactly
my mom randomly stood on a chair and started furiously throwing objects in my direction and then she wanted to buy me something after – it’s like – bitch – were you not just throwing items at me???
but the bigger the gifts – the bigger the guilt and i only ever received one big gift so my suspicion antennae perked up and everytime the gifts were small so they were never really guilty or sorry – it was all just a fun sick game to them on a tuesday, but for us it was the abuse cycle 🔁
besides that there’s always hidden agendas or a desire to shame or control – that’s why i never want or need anything from them except the bare minimum
And once you call them out and try to break free, suddenly they have a tally of “all the money they spent on you” and a record of everything they gave you. They start breaking things in retaliation and telling you that you “owe them” for everything they bought for you. When you finally leave, they start demanding “compensation” for all the money they spent on you or they demand to have everything they gave you returned to them. In their eyes, you are supposed to be “agreeable”, “grateful”, and “compliant” in the face of all the mistreatment and abuse.
What are these gifts you speak of? I got Christmas and birthday and that was basically it.
My dad likes to fix stuff for me. My car, electronics, any broken items to tinker with. It’s a present after making me want to die.
My parents don’t give me anything and abuse me regardless. If they did give me anything it would just be used to manipulate me, though.
For those who understandably wish they got gifts, if it’s any relief I genuinely wish I didn’t. 90% of the time they’re dumb/terrible and I know they are totally self serving and they feed their narrative that they are “good” and have done their part to “heal” things. I have tried various ways of getting rid of their gifts, even no longer attending our big Christmas family vacations, which leads to boatloads of backlash/attacks.
They exist only to support the phrase “after all I’ve done for you!”
My mom who was abusive my entire childhood and then kicked me out now buys me random shit to try and win back my love. Last episode on “what did my mother buy me to try and win back my love and affection” (my friends love this game) we have evil eye earings. :
At least it’s a good start , you’re right it’s not an excuse, but it does show willingness to accept being wrong. There are far worse circumstances than receiving a gift from bad behaviors, at the same time don’t you just wish you could receive gifts out of love? Cus those are the only gifts that matter and are way more special. Gifts that are givin after being treated horribly just get thrown away in my book, anything that comes from a trashy human there gifts get thrown in the trash.
To me they think gifts are some kind of bribe or blackmail to make their kids shut up from speaking up
I had two narcissists, one an aunt on the maternal side. She would be horribly abusive, reduce me to tears and panic, then later try to dump one of her many (MANY) impulse purchases in ‘apology’. She also tallied every gift and nice thing she ever did for my mother, and tried to reabsorb all those items once my mother had died, including things regifted to me.
For my parents as well it was a way to make sure I wasn’t believed by other people.
“Look at all your parents do for you! All the things they gift you! How can you say such terrible things about them?”
Plus my mum would buy stuff she liked under the guise of a gift for me, so I learnt quickly it wasn’t really my gift at all.
I gave my father $10k back for a house deposit, because I didn’t want it hanging over my head.
For me that’s a substantial amount of money, especially since I’m precariously employed. Just can’t deal with the unspoken conditions, especially now I am NC
My dad is literally like this, we’re very financially well off so he gives me gifts quite often (I usually just secretly end up selling them), which apparently means he can’t be “that bad” 🙄
My parents were total gift-bombers. So many Christmas presents!! My “favorite” was when my siblings got iPads and I got a chipped cookie serving plate 😂
Good times.
After enduring an abusive and chaotic upbringing, my parents tried to buy their way back into my life with a yacht—offering it as my “first home” instead of taking accountability for the damage they caused. I accepted the boat, not the contact. I lived quietly, worked remotely, and kept nearly entirely to myself. But that didn’t matter.
As a young woman living alone on a beautiful boat, I became a lightning rod for resentment—especially from some of the older women on the docks and the harbor hags (the women in the office). Though I never engaged with anyone’s husband (many of whom had smaller boats than I did, ironically), rumors began to swirl. They decided I must be a problem simply for existing—attractive, self-sufficient, and unavailable.
Instead of defending me, my parents took the opportunity to collude with the harbormasters when the jealousy escalated. They backed the vague complaints, twisted the story, and ultimately contributed to me losing my home. I went from quiet autonomy to homelessness—all because I refused to kiss the ring of the harbor hags or to play along with a toxic family dynamic, and because I didn’t apologize for living well in a space where I wasn’t supposed to.
There is a note of poetic retribution in all of this. Shortly after colluding, my mother was diagnosed with stage 3 cancer. The treatments and surgery have not been very effective. The marina’s management turned out to be as inept as they were petty—and let’s just say, their house wasn’t exactly in order. While I now face a massive renovation on my boat due to the access they deliberately restricted, I made sure their negligence didn’t go unnoticed. I reported their many violations to the appropriate regulatory bodies, and in the end, they racked up several hundred thousand dollars in fines and mandatory corrections. The marina has many empty slips, is operating in the red, and while the owner is trying to sell it, the red tape nightmare of it isn’t exactly making anyone interested in dealing with it.
So yes, I lost a lot—but they lost much more, and they earned every bit of it.
I never got gifts in that sense, occasionally she’d treat me to something that would be fun in a functional family but that she managed to ruin the fun for