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My mother gave up everything to move to a foreign country with my dad, her career, social circle, her happiness. She was, and still is, deeply unhappy and my first bully. I grew up with the idea that love is conditional. She will make jabs at me all the time, calling fat, telling me I'll get fired if I make a mistake at work, etc. It's like she hates me for being single and free.
My dad was working non-stop and just poured money into me. He would get random anger attacks.
I feel like this was the perfect recipe for ne to become a pickme, something I am still trying to fight. Also the reason for me to never want kids. Generational trauma is a bitch.
My parents actually called me names for "allowing my ex to abuse me". Anyway, I can't ever win with them.
You could have repeated my same story verbatim 💗 My mothers as pickme as they come and covert narcissist, she was definitely my first bully! Father also was a covert coward and they were both my enemies since day 1. So glad I'm no contact with both and they'll definitely never have anyone around to help them wipe their as* in their old age! Both of them left me when I was 3 years old. My mother also did stupid things like put men before her children. They are deeply envious of happily single women and narc mothers are in a competition with their own daughters, it's sick. I think it's smart you decided no kids. I'm also childfree and due to trauma and it's sick so many men have no empathy for our childhood trauma yet want us to empathize with theirs and force us to have unwanted babies. I'm actively working on destroying my inner pickmeism caused by both abusive parents that never loved me, and also healing CPTSD they also caused in therapy. Our pickme mothers are 100% to blame why we keep attracting sociopathic men that just want to use and abuse us and treat us like trash. They represent our useless absentee fathers.
100%. Most people in this world are fucked up because they come from fucked up families, etc. All it does is groom us for more abuse and chasing male attention/validation.
I can't fathom a single holistic reason to reproduce or find a circumstance of reproduction that isn't questionable--arranged marriage, sexual assault, loneliness hoping a child will cure that, narcissism over having a small child who you created that might look just like you and you can feel superior to, try to get them to change the world rather than teach them to enjoy it...Makes me wonder if humans cannot exist without toxicity since we literally come from it.
Your story with your parents is probably the norm, not the exception, unfortunately. Before this age of information, predators benefitted by shaming victims into silence so we have a very romanticized idea of what life used to be like or how it "should" be.
It makes us second-guess ourselves all the time, especially when having no meaningful support system...I literally don't know what I would do, who I would be or where I would end up if it weren't for my friends. They are the support I've always wanted and needed and give me hope and reinvigorate my desire to live life and remind me that I deserve happiness.
And I do the same for them. I try to pay it forward by posting a lot of advice on threads like these for people who are still building up their support system, too.
...And sometimes building a proper support foundation can't happen until you remove yourself from the faulty one. Isolating yourself from toxic people at least means you won't have negative reinforcements whispering in your ear all the time and clouding your self perception.
And isolation is not fun, because even though the negativity has stopped, it hasn't finished echoing emotionally, and it might never fully stop echoing...But the less time you spend in toxic company, the less new and evil rebranding of the same abusive concepts they can throw at you, before you're filled to to brim and have no more room for positivity
My mother has also been very abusive towards me over the years. I can definately relate to your comment about your mother being your first bully. The abuse was more physical when I was young but once I became a teenager, my mother switched to abusing me emotionally. She was so devious about it that I didn't recognise a lot of it as abuse until recently.
My father wasn't abusive but he was very checked out. He took the attitude that his only role as a father was to work and support the family financially, and that everything else was my mother's job.
My mother is a total pick me and misogynist. I'm frequently shocked at how misogynistic she is. She absolutely hates that I am in my 40s and single and childfree. What she fails to realise is, she's partly to blame. When I was growing up, my mother would constantly complain that motherhood was such a burden. Little me heard all these complaints and thought "Motherhood sounds like a rough deal. Maybe I won't bother with it". It's actually laughable that my mother can't make the association between the two things but self-awareness has never been her strong suit.
My mother tried very hard to make me into a pick me when I was young. She brought me up to be a low-maintanance doormat. She brought me up to believe that expressing any kind of a need was being "demanding". This didn't just affect my romantic relationships, it also left me vulnerable to toxic friendships as well. In recent years I've been trying to unlearn a lot of what my mother taught me and I feel I've made a good bit of progress.
Yes the multi daters are often times unkempt losers with scraggly unhygienic beards that stink and think they're the prize. Then circle back around to you but then they realize they're blocked even on LinkedIn 😂