hi tea, idk who to ask so i thought id give it a shot asking you but you dont have to answer if you dont want to o7
i was wondering, as an adult now, how do i know if i was abused/neglected as a child? lot of stuff was Not Normal but it wasnt anything super obvious like physical abuse, so im struggling to wrap my head around what used to happen vs the nice ppl my parents are now (mellowed a lot), to the point im questioning if i made some stuff up… does a therapist "confirm" if it was bad? where do i go from here? any words would be appreciated,, thanks in advance and much love, you (and ollie!!!) have brought me a lot of joy scrolling tumblr o777
Oof.
Okay so MY primary issue im this was gaslighting and neglect, which of course is difficult to identify as the ‘victim’ because it’s the ABSENCE of a thing combined with a determined effort to reduce your confidence in your own ability to perceive and retain accurate data.
While it was happening, writing things down IMMEDIATELY after experiencing them and then holding on to notes helped me retain an account that I could refer to later when I was doubting myself.
AFTER…. Yeah, that’s hard.
What I learned from MY therapist is… well, a few things.
First off, depending on what issues you want to address and what goals you’re aiming for, there’s a limit to how much “real or imagined” matters. Like… if nobody is in danger anymore, and you aren’t pursuing legal action, “did my dad flush a hamster down the toilet or was that a dream” may be as simple as, “You feel as though you experienced it, and real or not it was traumatic, so let’s handle it like any other experienced trauma”. Again, though, that’s just my experience IN therapy, I’m no therapist myself.
As for “what is normal”- I myself HAVE asked my therapist to confirm if certain behaviours are universal or just things that happened in my family, and they were helpful with that. Again though, whether it was “normal” or not (most was not) we focused more on how I was affected by it and how to handle how I was impacted, why it was causing me distress NOW.
And some things fall into a weird grey area there. For example, spanking- there is still a decent amount of the population who are adamant that it’s not abuse. Legally, it isn’t recognized as abuse im a lot of areas. But studies have repeatedly shown that spanking your kids is just as traumatizing as hitting them. So is it “normal”? Kinda. Is it healthy? No. Can it fuck you up? Yes. So… stuff like that happens, too.
So like. Again, just my uneducated opinion and personal experience, but a therapist CAN help you figure out what is normal and what isn’t, or what’s healthy and what isn’t, but after that I’d let go of the social idea of “normal” á but and ask- regardless of if it’s normal, was it healthy for me, and how is it affecting me NOW?
(also. One thing that helped me a bit was knowing that most of the time if you’re questioning the normality of weird childhood shit,?- lot of the time that’s a sign.)
