Unhappy Families

I am 51 years of age. I have a wonderful son, of whom I am immensely proud, a fabulous partner I adore, a well-paid job that is both stimulating and rewarding, not to mention a range of hobbies that are deeply fulfilling. Ostensibly, I seem to possess all I could wish for in early middle age. However a constant, debilitating fug of depression and self-loathing has hung over my life, to the extent that I have suffered 3 serious episodes of mental ill-health; firstly when aged 16 in 1981, then between 1994 and 1999, as well as the current bout, from which I am steadily recuperating. My recovery from each episode has made me a stronger, more resilient, though perhaps introspective person.

I have recently received an emphatic medical opinion which unequivocally states that I ought to be covered by the provisions of the Equality Act, as my condition is “profound, enduring, likely to continue for the foreseeable future and impinges severely” on my ability to lead a normal, worthwhile life. I would never seek to describe myself as disabled; all I want from life is to be happy and content. In time, with treatment and medication, I feel certain this modest aim may be achieved, once I have successfully come to terms with the causes of my depression that lie in my past. What is the reason for my mental health problems? Plainly speaking, throughout my entire childhood, for most of my adolescence and during large parts of my adulthood I have suffered from an array of differing levels of emotional, physical and sexual abuse from both of my parents.

The emotional variety, which has mainly consisted of relentless waves of negative comments designed to destroy my self-confidence and undermine any attempts at personal independence or feelings of self-worth, has chronologically been the most enduring form of abuse. I have never drawn praise from my parents at any time in my life, only criticism. The very idea that words can never harm me is a sick joke from my personal experience, as I have zero self-esteem and suffer from long-standing implacable feelings of self-loathing. I hate myself. Basically, I have never felt safe, or loved in a healthy way by anyone, in my family. The emotional abuse was originally perpetrated by both my father, who died 6 years ago, and my mother in almost equal measures on a regular, if not daily, basis, though her continued existence has allowed her to surge ahead in the production of pain from this category.

His words were threatening and intimidatory; hers were and are more pointedly personal.  The constant iteration of insulting, hurtful and contemptuous statements by my mother that I am “a huge disappointment,” “a disgrace,” “a total failure as a human being” and have “no experience of life” have had a profound and lifelong effect on me, more so than the promises by my father that he would punch me in the mouth or break my legs if I disobeyed him again. Because of my father’s hectoring, judgemental bullying, I am terrified of confident, aggressive, Alpha Males, while my relationships with women have been characterised by my inability to maintain emotional warmth, as a result of an utter absence of self-esteem precipitated by my mother’s insidious barrage of hurtful barbs.

My two longest personal relationships, a 9 year marriage and a 10 year relationship with my current partner, have seen me fail to adequately reciprocate the love and care these two wonderful women have shown me. I met my ex-wife when I was 26 and she was 22; I simply could not accept how close she was to her family and that it was normal to love your siblings and parents and to be loved in return. Eventually, my repeatedly negative and fearful response to this state of affairs became a serious problem for my wife and her family, as regards my attitudes to them, especially after our son was born. Because I came from a dysfunctional background, where I lacked safety and was never nurtured, I couldn’t begin to comprehend how happy families operated. In a sense, I was doomed to fail in my marriage as I did not know how to love or be loved properly. Though, in an uncharacteristic nod to a belated recognition of my own worth, I do feel I’ve ultimately been a good dad to my son, as I was always there for him. I tried to offer him the love, respect and support I was denied and I hope that is part of the reason why he has developed into the fine young man he is now. Certainly, he has never been terrified of me in the way I was of my father.

My partner and I met when we were both in our early 40s; after some initial difficulties in my level of comprehension how healthy, mutually supportive relationships work, we have been very happy over the years. It is my earnest hope that we will grow old together. I am still learning at my age exactly what it means and how it is possible to be loved, as unlike in a professional setting, where I can easily accept and internalise praise for being good at my job, most positive and affectionate comments about the personal “me” from those closest to me have hitherto often made me feel deeply uncomfortable, if not an utter fraud. Undoubtedly, this is because I have been conditioned by my background to believe I am both worthless and evil.

Significantly, because of the incomplete development of my emotional intelligence, other than these 2 relationships, almost all of the other women I have been involved with on a personal level have been unsuitable, having effected some kind of negative or potentially destructive impact on me. It has almost been the case that I sought the company of women who would make me miserable as we were completely ill-suited, on account of my warped understanding of how relationships work. I believe this mind-set to be a direct result of the emotional abuse I endured, which continues until the present day from my mother, even as she lives out her last days in the care home to which she has been confined under a Deprivation of Liberty Order, as her dementia is so advanced that she was a danger to herself and could no longer live alone. As a consequence of the attritional effect of my mother’s bitter, rancorous and humiliating words, I constantly feel worthless, inadequate, a failure and believe I’d be better off dead. Even as she drifts through the last part of her life, unstuck in time and divorced from reality, she still finds the strength to tell me, on the occasions I visit her, I am “pathetic” or “stupid,” providing she has the necessary audience to ensure my humiliation is both public and complete.

The physical abuse I suffered was entirely the preserve of my father. Unlike many other children who grew up in the 1970s, the method of parental chastisement I was most familiar with was not simply characterised by smacking, though this did take place; rather, it was the case I endured repeated assaults, comprising punches, kicks and attacks with blunt weapons. There is no doubt in my mind that had my father behaved in such a fashion in the present day; he would have been in prison for the injuries he inflicted on me. Yes I had cuts. Yes I had bruises. Yes I made excuses and told lies when asked to explain their presence by teachers, often under parental instruction to do so. No, I did not merit further investigation by any outside agency. I do not necessarily feel I was failed by the authorities, but I was by my parents and my extended family.

I have absolutely no happy memories of my early life. Until I began to establish strong friendships based on shared social interests, in music, football, politics and literature for example, around the age of 14, life was an unending, miserable hell. My childhood recollections are a confusing, asynchronous blur of half-remembered memories of relentless savage attacks on me, performed on the slightest pretext. As a little boy, all I knew from my father was fury and anger. He was a weak bully and his relationship with my mother was, I see in retrospect, a deeply disturbed and unhealthy one, whereby I was a human punch bag for him to work out all of the rage and frustration occasioned by his attempts to satisfy the unrealistic and uncompromising demands of my vain, cruel and narcissistic mother. Every memory I have of a situation with my father was of me unsuccessfully begging for his mercy. No doubt my seeming cowardice only served to sharpen his wrath at such times. I am in no doubt that he had dehumanised me to the extent that he saw me not as his son, but as a legitimate vehicle for the exorcism of his personal demons. Even worse is the fact I am sure that my mother found it sexually arousing to see the power she held over my father, which is why she encouraged him to hit me as hard as he could, on numerous occasions for her own sordid gratification. I was a child. A boy, not yet of school age. I did not deserve the abuse served on me. No child ever does.

The only way I have managed to cope is to attempt to blot out the memories of these childhood attacks, to the extent they have all blended together, though the less frequent, but considerably more sustained, assaults upon me after I reached young adulthood are fresh in my mind to this day as clearly defined individual incidents. In February 1981, my despair at my domestic situation, with particular reference to the parental violence meted out on me, was such that I attempted suicide by taking an overdose of tablets. It was a cry for help I suppose, as it took place not in secret but at Sixth Form College. All I wanted was for someone to save me. Nobody did. I would have been content with a friendly, sympathetic ear. There wasn’t one.

After being found, then having my stomach pumped and being detained in hospital overnight, my father responded to this series of events, not with love, much less concern or any desire to comprehend, but by beating me up in the car park of the hospital when he came to collect me. Later that year, one notably savage beating saw him hit me in the genital area with a golf putter, then repeatedly smash my head off the legs of a metal television stand, following which attack I bear a scar on the right temple as a reminder of the twisted concept of parenting, deemed as acceptable in my deeply dysfunctional family.

On New Year’s Day in 1984, my father threw me out of our house in the middle of a family gathering and assaulted me in the front garden, punching me so hard he knocked me over a rotten fence that broke when I landed on it. As I lay dazed on the ground, he stood over me and, responding to my mother’s frenzied urgings, kicked me repeatedly. What I remember far more than the pain are those screams of encouragement of my mother and the mute indifference of members of my extended family who witnessed this attack. Sadly, these people, who were the brothers and sisters of my father and their attendant spouses, had witnessed many such prior assaults by my father on me and never once, in my entire childhood and adolescence, sought to intervene in the whole sorry mess of my upbringing. Some of them would use recollections of my father’s attacks on me as the basis for jokes and jibes at my expense. I felt ashamed, humiliated, despised and utterly without worth. I don’t hold the extended family as responsible as I do my parents for my horrific childhood, but their cowardly inaction means I regard those that are still living with complete contempt. With perhaps only one exception, I have zero contact with any of them. They were part of a large, tight-knit Irish immigrant family, who profoundly distrusted the authorities on every level, avoiding engagement whenever possible. I was never going to be protected by these fundamentally ignorant and selfish people, especially as two distinct scions of the family were members of differing cults; one quasi-religious and one quasi-political, whereby the control of and resultant unquestioning obedience by adherents was required at all times. These people did not care what I suffered.  Their loyalties were to their masters.

The last time my father beat me up, on Thursday July 3^rd 1986, I was almost 22. It was in a hotel restaurant, where we’d gone to eat after I had graduated from university that same afternoon. There was no discernible reason for the flurry of blows he unleashed on me over our starters, which is possibly why none of the staff or the other diners in the packed room sought to intervene. Of course they could simply have been stunned by what unfolded. Their classmate in a suit, crumpling on the carpet beneath a dining table, begging for mercy, while a middle aged man rained blows upon his prostrate form.  The saddest thing for me is that many people who I’d been students with, who I’ve never seen in the 30 years since that day, have that scene as their last memory of me. Incredible and appalling as it may seem, I then climbed up from the floor, dusted myself down and ate a meal with the sociopathic monsters I called Mam and Dad. As far as I was concerned, this situation was completely normal, or at least it was in our family.

My father never hit me again after that. Perhaps the final attack was his version of an initiation rite, essential before he could acknowledge my passage into adulthood? More likely he was simply getting old and couldn’t effortlessly produce the level of violence he’d always aspired to and that my mother required for her sexual gratification. Certainly it wasn’t because he was worried I’d stand up to him. I’ve never hit anyone in my life. I don’t even know how to make a fist properly. All I knew how to do was to cower and sob. However, these formative experiences are why I’ve always stood up, verbally, to bullying in every aspect of my life, which is one of the reasons why I became a union branch officer; to protect the weak and powerless from the contemptuous puissance of the strong. I may not have been successful in my fight (which I often view as a crusade) and I may have intervened at inappropriate times and in inappropriately voluble ways, but I have always done what I believed to be right to try and protect victims.

My father died in 2009 and we were reconciled during the latter part of his life. When my son was born in 1995, my father was delighted to become a grandfather and confided in me that he knew he hadn’t been a good dad, but would strive to be the best grandad in the world. I’m sure he came pretty close in that aim. My son adored him and misses him still. My partner only knew my father as an avuncular, kindly old man and initially had trouble reconciling the stories of my upbringing with the reality of the elderly bloke who affectionately called her “flower.” I so wish he had not chosen to behave in the way he did towards me, though his actions were his choice and his fault, not mine. I believe he knew this and had accepted both responsibility and regret, which is why he said to me two days after my son’s birth, “let’s move on from the past” A noble wish. If only he’d asked if we could move on and ceded responsibility for such a decision to me, I’d have forgiven him for almost all he did to me. As it is, I am reconciled with him and his memory, seeking to focus more on the last 15 years I knew him than on the previous 30.

That is not the case with my mother. As yet, my psychological wounds are raw and weeping sores that remain impossible to salve. I cannot and will not forgive her for the emotional and sexual abuse she was responsible for, which has blighted my life, though I realise the key to my ultimate recovery and the best chance I have of living a satisfying remainder of my life, is to deal with what she did to me by finding a way to achieve some sort of resolution.  Ironically, in the period after my father died and my estranged sister withdrew from any contact with my mother, it was left to my partner and I to provide precisely the kind of support, care and reassurance that was entirely absent from my upbringing. This was the only time in my life that my mother and I enjoyed any kind of a healthy, mutually admiring relationship. The onset of her dementia meant it was not to last and she has now regressed to a pale, chimerical version of the domineering and wicked bully of my childhood, cursing me from beneath a blanket in an overstuffed armchair in the antiseptic day room of her care home. As she has seemingly reverted to type, I am as yet unable to see how I could focus on those 3 brief, happy years, rather than the previous 47 unendingly painful ones.  

I mentioned that I have endured 3 bouts of prolonged mental illness in my life; the first aged 16 was in response to the relentless physical intimidation meted out to me. The second in 1994 began almost immediately after my ex-wife told me she was pregnant with our son. While for many potential parents, such news could be seen as daunting, the predominant mood would, in most instances, be joy mixed with excitement. For me, the response was sheer panic mingled with profound fear. I was absolutely terrified of becoming a parent, simply because the accepted narrative of the time was that all abuse victims become abusers, as the effects of abuse were regarded as being so severe that it was impossible to break the cycle. However, to confound the nature beats nurture adherents, I did. I may not have been the father I am now back then, and it cost me my marriage to get to the point where I was a decent dad, but I tried my very best to bring my boy up in a loving, supportive environment, free of judgemental contempt or physical intimidation. Sure I shouted at him a few times, but I always protected and nurtured my son. Never once did I raise my hand to him. Unlike me, my son grew up without fear, which is how it should be.

My third and current episode of mental ill health was triggered by my mother’s rapidly advancing dementia. Close friends, who know of my traumatic upbringing, have asked me how I could bear to maintain any contact with her once I’d left home for university, especially considering all I had endured at her hands. The response was simple; I hoped at some subliminal level that she would eventually show the same level of self-awareness my father did and apologise for her actions. This has never been the case. In adulthood, whenever I asked my mother to explain her conduct towards me, her response was the typical denial of guilt by an abuser; she deflected all blame onto me. Her reasoning was deceitful yet consistent; I was a difficult child and needed to be kept in check. As parents, they were left with no choice by my unruly behaviour. She consistently lacked any insight into the effects, comprehension of the illegality or felt any sense of responsibility for her actions. When she was confined to the care home, I felt as if my life had disintegrated. Many of my friends and associates saw this as me grieving for someone who was still living. In truth, my despair was actually caused by the knowledge that the extent of her dementia ensured I would never be granted a proper explanation or any semblance of an apology from my mother for all the years of abuse she had inflicted on me. I imagine there is also an elemental yearning for her to show me some love and affection, though I have never experienced that in a sustained way. Even during the 3 good years, I still sensed I was being exploited by my mother, who lacked any insight into my needs.

Perhaps the most personally distressing thing about the sexual abuse I endured was that it was performed not for reasons of her sexual gratification, which I firmly believe she obtained from watching my father physically assault me, but because of her need to have control and coercion over me. She sought to establish dominion through desperately humiliating actions that I feel deeply ashamed to even think about to this day. While my father’s abuse was highly public, in the sense he wasn’t bothered who saw him knocking me about, on account of the fact that his extended family were tacitly complicit in the attacks I suffered in front of them, my mother’s abuse was all done in secret. Literally behind closed doors, in either our bathroom or my bedroom.

From my earliest days, I was made aware that my private parts were not private. They belonged to my mother. I recall her repeatedly inserting slices of soap up my rectum, for reasons involving both pain and shame, to punish me for not being perfectly toilet trained by the age of 3, despite me begging her not to. The hurt caused by her finger nails scratching and drawing blood from my sphincter, followed by the ensuing persistent stinging sensation and the dreadful, invasive, psychologically wounding, nature of the punishment is still almost too horrifying to recall. Whenever I wet the bed, or my underwear showed signs of soiling, her response was to put soap under my foreskin as well, to give me another lasting painful reminder and to “train” me. As a result, I continually suffered from thrush throughout my childhood. These days you’d buy some wet wipes to help kids clean themselves and be prepared to wash their bedclothes on a regular basis. You would support, encourage and love them, not stigmatise and demonise a 3 year old for the slightest accident and impose a regime of such unyielding, sadistic control for several years, even after the child had become fully continent.  

Once I started school and could prove I was properly toilet trained, she stopped inserting soap in me. However, if the physical pain of the stinging had ended, I now had to become accustomed to an even more humiliating routine, whereby my mother took to grasping my penis and testicles and painfully squeezing them, especially when I woke up, to prevent me from urinating. She claimed this was done to train my bladder, but I simply recall the sneering look of contempt she gave me, as she wielded power over me. She insisted I look her in the eyes as she spat out “go to the toilet before you need to” in a harsh monotone. This routine continued almost on a daily basis until I was ready to start secondary school.

I seek to call what she did to me sexual not physical abuse, despite the lack of arousal on her part, because it involved my genitals. When I was 12, she caught me masturbating in my room (privacy was non-existent in our house) and announced it was behaviour that “would not be tolerated amongst dogs.” As a result, she insisted on being in the room whenever I took a bath, to make sure “everything is alright” and to deny me the opportunity for pleasuring myself, unlike adolescent males the world over. I found the lack of privacy and respect crushingly humiliating. This monitoring of my bath time continued until November 1977 when we moved to a house with a shower, at which point the sexual element to her abuse began to manifest itself more as a series of relentless, embarrassing personal questions about my developing sexuality. She asked me about erections, whether I was producing semen and if I had wet dreams. This was demeaning to the point of utter degradation. Clearly, this line of questioning was for reasons of control by means of the utter destruction of my self-image. The irony of her mantra “you’ll never find anyone to love you, if you don’t love yourself” has resonated throughout my life.  

The sexual element to my mother’s abusive behaviour ended abruptly on Monday 18^th May 1981, when I finally found the strength to stand up to her. The night before, I’d been out quite late with a gang of friends from sixth form to see The Cure on their “Faith” tour. I loved The Cure at the time and we’d all had a splendid night. As I didn’t have any lessons until 11, I decided on a lie-in and so I switched my alarm off. As usual, if I hadn’t surfaced for breakfast by 8, my mother shouted upstairs for me. I was quite an assiduous student, so I made it my business to go in for 9 every day and do some reading or make notes before classes started. That morning though, I turned over and went back to sleep. A short while later, my sister came in the room to shake me awake, but I told her I wasn’t getting up. She went to leave the room, but my mother, who was stood in the doorway, sent her back, instructing her to place her hands under the duvet and “pull his willy off.”

For the first time ever, I swore at my mother and sister, telling them both to “fuck off,” before storming into the bathroom. Coming home from college that afternoon, it immediately became apparent my mother had told my father about my foul language, as it was that evening when he hit me in the testicles with a golf putter and smashed my head off the television stand. I presume that at some point later that night he asked my mother why I’d sworn at her and she’d explained the story in full. I’d like to think this was why the sexual abuse never happened again. I am convinced it is also the kernel of my sister’s hatred for me, because in her eyes, I failed to protect her from our mother. My sister appears not to realise or accept that I was a victim in that situation, controlled and dominated by a wicked abuser, who was the one woman who ought to have protected us. I feel that my sister is still in denial and though she re-established communication, for whatever reason, and now plays the role of the conspicuously dutiful daughter, visiting the care home on a daily basis, she is still unable to face up to the magnitude of the abuse perpetrated by my mother.

I hope my sister is able to deal with her demons and realise I am not to blame for the tatty wreckage of her life. She deserves to live without anger, guilt or shame, as do we all. My personal goal is to come to terms with my mother’s abuse. It may not be in her lifetime, but that does not essentially matter. The rest of my family conspicuously failed to love me so, as my mother said, I must learn to love myself. On my terms.

I wish you all a long and happy life.