Sorry if this isn’t the right place to ask, I don’t frequent reddit enough to know where to go.
I’ve been spending the last few years doing a lot of thinking. I’ve been neglected and abused throughout my childhood, and due to this, I became very narcissistic. I’ve been doing my best to figure out why I am the way I am and what exactly is wrong with how I think, because this isn’t what I want to be. I think I’ve been making some good progress on my own, but it’s hard to come to terms with the fact that everything I believed and how I saw myself as a person, and my entire life, was all just a massive lie, because I couldn’t cope with my childhood without adding layers and layers of delusion until I was too far gone to know how to think at all.
It’s a lot for me to take in, so I don’t know how to cope with being at fault for who I am, or how to forgive myself for all the people I’ve hurt (if I deserve it at all). I’m using causality to rationalize it, but I don’t want to make the same mistake as before and I don’t want to make excuses. So, do you guys think it can be reasonable to blame your problems on your parents? Feel free to be brutally honest, I might need to hear it.
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I don’t blame my parents for anything. They did the best they could with what they had. My mother was just broken by her own upbringing. My dad’s sole priority was protecting her. I am sure they both had some regrets at the end.
Personally, I don’t blame my parents for WHO I am, since I am my own person with thoughts and feelings and I can make my own choices. I do however blame them for WHERE I am.
I blame them for the trauma that is engraved in my body. I blame them for my attachment styles. I blame them for my physical chronic health issues due to the neglect I went through as a child.
Although I blame them in my head, I do understand that who I am as a person is not a reflection of them, and I try my best every day to heal those parts of me that were damaged under their care.
I don’t necessarily blame them but I am honest in my reflection about how their issues and shortcoming impacted me and shaped who I was. It’s the first step in unwinding all off it.
A lot.
Every fucking thing I’m dealing with now is because of them dumbasses.
Lemme paint a scene. 11 years old, first day of school.
I only have a goddamn notebook.
That night dad has beer and both him and mom have cigs. Oh wanna bag of chips? We can get that.
How the fuck do you have money for that but not fucking school supplies?
I highly encourage you to work this out with a therapist, not on your own. Your description of yourself – that you became a narcissist – is probably extremely inaccurate. A good therapist will guide you and help examine your behaviors and feelings.
You can blame them. But it’s up to you to become who you want to be.
I wouldn’t say you’re genuinely narcissistic however, as I’ve never heard of one being self reflective, like, at all. Go to therapy to heal the wounds your parents left you, but you’re already taking the right steps by acknowledging your own bad behaviour.
I’m sorry to hear about your past op, I was an abused child too and it is not easy to move past, but you’re already doing a good job! Don’t give up.
Do parent decisions and actions affect children? Absolutely. But at a certain point you have to take the responsibility for your own choices. At some point it becomes what you do with what you have.
I blame them for making be have to worry about everyone on my own. Literally I can’t even cry in front of them or they will yell at me even more, I was always quiet so no one asks me because they think I am doing perfectly fine even though I am not
Hurt people hurt people… but healed people can heal people. Use your hurt for good and not for blame, your calling is to transmute it into something that will make the world a better place when you leave it. End the cycle, look within. Blame is a losing game.
Here’s the way I think about it: you’re allowed to feel traumatized by your trauma/abuse, but you’re not allowed to traumatize/abuse other people just because of your trauma. Your parents’ abuse can affect you in many ways, but it cannot force you to hurt others
I blame them a bit because they had a rough hand, and I think that made me develop into a confused adult. But I’m healing. It was very “tough love”, with minimal award. I had ice cold water dumped on me as a punishment along with being dragged and cornered and beaten. Like I was a dog. I’m learning how to love through my boyfriend. He likes that I’m abrasive, I do think men around me respect this. But, do I like this about myself? Not really. I would love to be as soft as possible. I think the purpose of life is to give love to everyone, especially the disadvantaged. I think I can be lazy which is my own issue. Maybe not lazy but a procrastinator.
You aren’t responsible for the way people treated you, but eventually you will become responsible for the way you let it affect it.
This really hits, I won’t go into details only to say that thinking about being a kid feels like looking into the abyss. However I’m older, have a brilliant partner and 2 amazing kids. I think deeply about it and I am glad I get to invent my own life, I get to create healthy boundaries and also know that things that were out of my control when I was little weren’t my fault. If it sneaks up on me and I feel like crying, then I cry….
Honestly the older you get the more you realise that you create your own world.
My motto in life is “Don’t be a dick” and I live by that. Also I don’t sweat the small stuff anymore I’ve been through worse and nothing really phases me anymore.
There’s some good advice here already, particularly the folks who recommend working with a therapist, which can be massively helpful for unpacking and making sense of your journey so far and mapping out the destination you want to get to.
The only extra thing I wanted to say is to be kind to yourself as you work through these things and acknowledge that changing fundamental things about yourself takes time.
You have the time though, and it sounds like you’re already making massive steps by becoming self-aware of things you want to improve on. Also, it doesn’t hurt to look to others (friends, colleagues, etc) for inspiration. We become who we are partially by modeling behavior from those around us. If you identify someone that exemplifies the change you seek, try and spend more time with them. You don’t need to try and “be them”, but you may find it naturally makes it easier to adapt and embrace the change you seek.
A lot of who we are is from upbringing but we can still change.
Therapy. Self reflection and more importantly constant mindfulness.
Honestly I think mindfulness is kind of the key to everything. If you always react and then reflect later that’s a habit. You’ve got to train yourself to be in the moment and assess before you react. It takes time.
I cut my family off decades ago, from a combination of physical and emotional abuse.
I’m working on it still at 52 years old , but I am jaded. I keep my friend group small. I don’t trust people easily.
I am also not a second chances type of person. I am great at having mental funeral for people, and never thinking of them again. I like the phrase “I won’t hate you, but I will never think about you, again”
My parents made a lot of mistakes, and passed on some shitty neurochemistry, but I am an adult. Blaming them would only keep me focused on the past and avoiding growth.
I don’t blame them.
I used to. But at a certain point I realised that I was an adult now and fully capable of making better decisions for myself.
It took going to prison for 2 years, and drinking myself into oblivion for awhile, but those were all choices I made, not them. So, I let go.
I cleaned up, met my amazing husband and moved to a new country. Life is now mostly better.
The tl:dr is it probably depends on how old you are, and how long and hard have you been working to change the responses they instilled in you.
I grew up with parents who were abusive in every way. It gave me some (non) coping skills, and some harmful ways to react as an adult.
I then got on the train labelled pills and booze, because I didn’t have enough emotional intelligence to be a grown up, a parent, and a wife without having a crutch. I regret that greatly, and I know it’s given my kids reactive behaviours.
However there is so much more info available readily now about, for example, parenting your inner child, or CBT. CBT was a big help for me. I know I’d be a very different parent now than I was 30 years ago. It wasn’t as easy to see a cycle as it is now, and there were very different parenting styles.
My kids have told me I was 50% of the time a wonderful mother, and the rest of the time was a total fuck up. I’ll own that, and I’ll do whatever my now adult kids need to help them. But they’re nearly 40, they’ve been adults for 20 years, it’s time they learnt to be responsible for their own emotions. So we switch between extremely affectionate and dependent to toxic often, and there’s times I’ve thought it’s easier n safer to just be LC. But we can never follow through on that.
So I can see their blame, and even see it’s justified to an extent.
But they’re grown ups now In their late 30s.
If you’re figuring this stuff out for the first time, then yes, you need to be gentle with yourself. You’ll have many lightbulb” moments, and the best thing is to acknowledge, oh maybe that’s* why I overreact when people….. Then you think, okay, so that’s why, and I don’t want to keep doing that or pass it on through generations, so how do I handle it.
A learned reaction to a repeated assault, whether physical, or mental, is not your fault….at first. If it’s a behaviour that negatively affects your life and relationships, it’s time to forget whose fault it is, and just learn how to deal with it. Even if there was magic, and you could absolutely force your parents to genuinely regret things they’ve done, what would you do after that? What difference will it make, as you go through life, to have an excuse, and how often can you use those excuses as an adult?Your boss doesn’t care why you started yelling at them or crying when they were discussing KPI.
So…..acknowledge that [this] thing happened when you were a child, and that it’s left you feeling a certain way. You might have to parent your inner child, and there’s plenty of resources out there for that. Patrick Tehoe(?maybe) has a YT channel focussing on that.
Even though that behaviour was a good thing to protect you when you were a child and needed protection more than anything, it’s not helping the adult you. And that’s where you will stop “blaming” and start fixing.
The times when something happens, and later you realise “Wow last year I would have had a total melt down. Now I can discuss it. And I was able to catch my triggers before they shot me. I think I’m growing up!” You feel a real buzz. And even if the actual circumstances don’t change, at least you can know you’ve made progress. I still feel that sometimes now, at 70ish.
I think what I’m getting at is that it’s fine to acknowledge a reaction or behaviour you have is because of things your parents did. But now you know, so are you going to keep having that reaction or behaviour? Because that’s on you, then. There’s lots of ways we protect ourselves as children, and there’s lots of ways parents can make that protection necessary but once you aren’t that little kid anymore you need to function in your own best interests.
That may mean realising that Mum n Dad sucked at being parents and should never have done the things they did. But if you can see that, you can also see you need to take the responsibility for your actions and reactions now. Yes they sucked, but hey, I’m different. I can be better. I can see the child’s hurt, but it doesn’t have to hurt me now.
For me, I’ve come to the resolution that my parents’ choices and behavior have substantially impacted me, how I think, how I act, etc. And that is not my fault in any way.
But it is my responsibility to deal with how it affected me, which isn’t fair, but it’s just how it is, I’m afraid. I hold my parents somewhat responsible for my actions until I was around 19-20, when I realized how much they had messed me up and how messed up I was being to others because of that.
So prior to that, I’m gentler with myself for the decisions I made and things I did, but I don’t deny I did them and don’t excuse my behavior to others, either.
It’s a delicate balance. You can acknowledge why you developed a behavior while also taking accountability for it, and then working to change.
I’m of the opinion that you are entitled to your feelings entirely and owe your parents nothing as you had no choice in your conception. Therefore, you are welcome to blame them all you want.
Therefore question then becomes: And do what? Why blame them?
My father passed a couple years back and I’m still kind of on a huge kick blaming him and mom for everything.
Honestly…it’s helping me realize origins of problems…and it’s not ALL them. And even being able to happily know it’s not all my fault……just leaves more empty problems and questions. And the few I chased down have been hollow.
So really the main point is to go ahead and blame them all you want. But at some point you gotta move on and just try to grow and get better. AND DON’T GIVE UP.
Yes. They influence our outcome. But, if you sit on the throne of blaming others, that’s narcissistic. You have to accept responsibility for you, and they for them. Otherwise they can just blame their parents, and no one holds themselves accountable.
So, stop blaming your parents for who you are. Find sliding scale therapy if price is an issue. Be honest with your therapist, and what your goals are.
Delusions are like surrounded yourself with a transparent globe that takes reality and filters it so it reflects back to you the version you want to believe. Your inner self can’t accept fault or blame, so everything becomes you as the victim and distorting others into all good or all evil.
Now your delusional state can blame the evil ones as needed, Rather than allowing you to reflect on things and owning your own responsibility in things.
This is how delusional individuals become dangerous to others. If someone just points out a fact that would ruin your delusion, your mind convinces you they’re evil, lying, responsible, so you blame and target them, and you avoid blame, shame, responsibility.
People can’t blame their parents at all. A person can acknowledge that the ways they were raised caused them to have unusual behaviors and change those behaviors though. But blaming them so that the person doesn’t have to take accountability for what they do is a cop out. So their parents weren’t good parents, what will blaming them for their behaviors as an adult do for them?
You can’t blame them. It’s up to you to develop your own life.
I blame my parents for where I am, mentally, physically, emotionally, now I have to figure it all out, feeling behind everyone else due to their neglect, but i refuse to wallow in self pity (…completely lol)
I think a lot of young people significantly underrate the impact of our parents. In particular, your upbringing dictates a lot of your behaviors, mental models, etc. that you take for granted and aren’t really aware of. As humans we don’t have the ability to step back and look objectively at our lives and make big changes to our behaviors to solve problems — it’s a slow and incremental process where you periodically have an epiphany that you’re doing something wrong, then exert effort over time to fix it.
I feel this so much. I also had a terrible childhood. I’m now an adult with bpd. Here in my present I have put those memories behind me. I think I turned out pretty ok. But there’s a part of me that wonders how my life could have been. Instead I’m in therapy and take medications daily.
I try to not let it define me but deep down I don’t think it will ever go away