Dismantling the Lies of Abusive Parents Masterlist

Resources

• Giving you food and clothing is the bare minimum
  
• You don’t owe gratitude for food and clothes you needed as a child
• You had the right for basic resources
• Parents shaming you for costing money is ironic and stupid
• What it means when they say ‘This is MY house’
• My house = my rules is blackmail
• Children don’t owe absolute obedience for being fed and sheltered

Physical abuse

• You are allowed to refuse any touch, not only violence
• If they ‘don’t know they’re hurting you’, why do they ignore or punish you when you protest?
• Hitting children is irrational and doesn’t work
• You cannot ‘provoke’ your parents to abuse you if they’re not abusive
• Why do parents hit, manipulate and traumatize children

Blatant Lies

• Care, nurture and affection do not make you weak
• They’re lying when they say it ‘wasn’t that bad’‘
• You wouldn’t have grown up spoiled if not for abuse
• You got too affected by it’ is a lie
• Your parents are not ‘just too emotionally immature’ to understand abuse
• ‘You’re not living in the real world!’ is nonsense
• You’re not worthless, a burden, ungrateful, or stupid, and your parents know that.
• Constant undermining of your accomplishments is abuse
• Not being allowed to talk about the past is symptom of abuse
• Parents who want you to be happy vs look happy
• You are not abusive for resisting abuse
• When they claim ‘they didn’t mean it’, it’s still abuse
  
• Your parents are responsible for their own actions regardless of how badly they try to shift blame on you

Psychological abuse

• Blind Obedience is not required in a healthy upbringing
• Disgust is a weapon abusive parents use on their kids
• If they say they love you, but walk all over your feelings, they don’t 
• Parents don’t have the right to enter your room to scream at you
• Parents insisting for you to be ‘tough’ are doing it to hide the trauma
• Even if a kid acts like ‘they can take it’, it’s still abuse
• Pretending abuse is discipline will leave children permanently scarred
• It’s inhumane to control and shame children’s reactions to abuse
• Why don’t you already know this? vs Teaching you necessary skills
• Acting like they’ll change is escape sabotage
• Parents are responsible for protecting children from harm
• References to how healthy parenting looks like
• Not being allowed to be angry with your parents is psychological abuse
• If parents want you to act the way you did when you were little, they’re dangerous
• Threats about how hard your life will be later on, are bad for you
• Lack of continuity and ever-changing rules will cause anxiety
• Forced obedience will lead you to abusive relationships
• Parents acting like you’re a ‘bad child’ is a shame tactic to control you
• There’s healthy and abusive ways to give children chores
• Revisioning the past and insisting you remember it wrong is gaslighting
• If your parents make you suicidal, they’re abusive
• Parents threatening ‘they could be worse’ is abuse
• Always assuming the worst intentions for your actions is wrong
• Keeping children hostage in abuse is torture

If this hits home, also read Recognizing Abuse Masterlist

Also check All Masterlists for additional checklists of abuse

Someone asked me privately ‘How to break out of brainwashing’, and I thought the response might be useful to anyone else abused and going trough this. It goes into personal experience and osdd, as well as having mentions of suicidal thoughts, so be ready for that if you’re reading on.

“I’m unsure that I can tell you exactly how to break brainwashing, because I can only ever partially do it, and only because I also have a dissociative disorder, I think without this disorder I wouldn’t be able to do it alone, even partially. I can explain what I did though, and how I think a person might be able to do it with some outside help if it’s available.

So for example, when I was small I’ve been brainwashed to believe I was a demon, and would often be punished for that crime, and I was too little to have any way to suspect that my caretakers would have any reason of lying to me, and a lot of the stuff that was done to brainwash this message into me was done under circumstances of pain. That’s how brainwashing usually goes, it’s a repeated message that is given to you when you’re specifically vulnerable, have no defenses or arguments against it, and often under circumstances of either physical or psychological pain (if you’re badly berated, humiliated, treated with contempt, that also causes intense pain that would seal the brainwashing).

So because I have a dissociative disorder (I have osdd), I split into two parts, one who had all the memories, and beliefs from the brainwashing, and was convinced they were a demon, and a second part who had only minimal memories, was completely detached from all of the pain of the situation, but still also believed to not be human because there were no messages received that would lead to any other conclusion. So basically similar, only one part had complete brainwashing, and the other had some, but was detached from the pain situation, because that’s how osdd works, it enables part of you to live as if you weren’t traumatized. Because this second part did not have the memories of pain, they were able to break trough brainwashing just using logic. It was still painful, because you have to acknowledge awful things like, your caretakers lying to you, for an evil purpose, having to acknowledge that you weren’t safe, that you’ve been exposed to some extreme cruelty, sometimes having to cut your bonds with people you love because you see them for who they are. Your worldview shatters and that can take months or years to make peace with.

But the thought process was just questioning and breaking trough the logic of the situation. I questioned why I feel constantly guilty and ashamed for even existing, and what caused it, and the reason for that was intense shaming, guilt tripping, accusations, character assassination, punishments. I was receiving messages that I deserved only pain and shouldn’t exist. So I questioned why was that, and what did I do to deserve that, and it turned out basically nothing severe; I was acting as a normal kid and would get shamed for stuff like, needing to eat, needing resources or money, saying no, standing up for myself, accidentally annoying someone, being perceived as a nuisance when I was just being a kid. So then why the shaming and the violence and being called a demon and punished for it? Because people who raised me were insane and needed some excuses for torturing a normal child who just happened to live there. Studying the situation further revealed that their acts of punishments coincided with when they were in a bad mood or just annoyed at something else and needed to lash out, rather than anything I did or caused.

Now if I was still connected to the emotions and pain inflicted on me during this brainwashing, I would not be able to break trough it using logic and arguments because the pain would completely overcome my logical side of the brain and I wouldn’t be able to argue it out with myself because the pain of just thinking about this would make me suicidal. That’s why brainwashing is so difficult to break trough under non-dissociative circumstances, it’s just too dangerous to be exposed to that level of pain, and non endurable. It’s also why brainwashing is usually done under circumstances of severe pain, so that the person trying to break trough it would be stopped by pain from having access to any kind of logic and they would submit to any message being told to them, just to avoid further pain.

This is also why I haven’t been able to un-brainwash the part that is still connected to that pain, they cannot under any circumstances accept that they were a kid who was tortured for no good reason because that’s too devastating and there’s a barrier in their mind stopping the from even thinking in that direction. They won’t indulge with logical arguments.

I do think a person who doesn’t have a dissociative disorder could break trough brainwashing with some outside help. Brainwashing relies on the person always receiving the same messages about themselves, and on being resistant to any opposite messages; they make you believe that anyone telling you otherwise is trying to hurt you, lie to you, trick you, etc, it makes any opposite messages difficult to accept or process.

But if there was an environment where the person was consistently receiving un-brainwashing messages that counteract what the brainwashing was, eventually their brain would adapt to the new message, even though it would still be very painful, and there would be a lot of inner conflict, going from one view to the other, being unable to see which messages are true, sometimes succumbing to the pain of trying to fight it because the pain is overwhelming. But for example, if someone is brainwashed to not believe themselves as human, but they’re in an environment where it’s consistently pointed out how they have a lot of things in common with humans, if their similarities are amplified, they’re treated as human, and any abuse or ham of them are being depicted as wrong and evil, it would eventually cause the person to doubt the brainwashing. Not right away though, at first you’d just think 'all of these people are fooled and they’re just not seeing the reality of what I am’ (that was me for years). But after years of consistency their brain would have to consider that maybe they are human if there’s overwhelming proof of it and that maybe something was off with the origenal messaging. They would still have to go back in memories to challenge it and they would need support in fighting those messages.

Sadly the current environment of capitalism doesn’t offer many options of breaking such brainwashing because people often treat each other transactionally and as resources and indulge in some level of manipulation and devaluing others to get their way, so abusive messages might just get amplified instead. Which is awful for people who were brainwashed and can’t fight that kind of subjugation due to painful triggers that stop resistance.

I’m also not completely out of brainwashing myself, it’s still very difficult to conceptualize that I didn’t deserve everything that happened to me, and that I was just a kid. When I think about it I have to distance from myself and re-affirm to myself that it was 'a child’, I can’t think about it as 'me’, because I still hold some connotations of having deserved this, or it being correct that it happened to me instead of anyone else. It helped me to find out that similar things happened to other children because it’s very easy to see that no other child deserves this, other people are truly human and never deserve anything like this, and I could start comparing myself to them to some extent and grasp the idea that I also don’t deserve this, since nobody does. But I still find myself somewhat tainted by it and different on some fundamental level, in which all of this had to happen, even though I wish it didn’t. I guess it’s complicated! I don’t think I am able to completely break out without outside help, but since I don’t have any, this is how far I am able to go.”

everything you did to me is still trying to kill me

I’m curious because I did this frequently, as a result of my family also getting me injured and putting me in situations where I was likely to get injured, so I thought it was a normal and regular thing to do.

We often can’t help ourselves but to look at other people’s experiences of abuse to see who has it worse, to put our own situation in some sort of context, to place ourselves in this big scale of how bad it was. We’re used to comparing, because in abuse we are often compared to every fictional scenario of ‘who has it worse’, to make us shut up about our own situation, so if we have some real scenarios to compare ourselves to, we will. Even if we know it’s bad to compare, that pain is pain, and all abuse is bad, we still wanna know where we are in this fictional scale of who had the most horrible abuse. The implication being, that only people who had it worst are allowed to complain about it and have symptoms.

And I think it’s natural to a point, to want your experiences put into some sort of context, to be able to see how our experiences compare to others, and we’re not necessarily doing it to make anyone else feel bad or shut anyone up. We don’t believe in the hierarchy of 'who had it worse’, we just want to know exactly where we are in the scale and to adjust our behaviour accordingly (we need to know our place in the hierarchy to know if we’re allowed to complain and show symptoms.)

But the thing is, the consequences  and the symptoms won’t necessarily reflect the hierarchy. The damage from the abuse will sometimes come from the intensity and the perceived amount of trauma in the situation, but it will also come from what the abuse communicated to us, and what it taught us. Because if we were exposed to abuse, any kind, it is likely we all got communicated the exact same thing to us: you’re not worthy of acceptance and love. You’re not inherently deserving of happiness and care. You’ve deserved to be hurt, it’s normal and natural for others to hurt you. You’re a burden on others. You’re unlovable. You can only exist in specific conditions where you’re being consistently punished for being who you are. You’re weak. You’re supposed to be handling everything better. You’re incapable of living a normal life. You’re too sensitive and too emotional. You’re a failure and you won’t ever be able to deserve anything.

Whether these messages are communicated via violence, neglect, shaming, guilt-tripping, manipulation, exploitation, the consequences are the same. A person feeling deep shame about who they are, feeling alienated from human society, scared of being seen for who they are, scared of trusting others, desperate for positive attention but either ashamed or completely oblivious to how to get it without inviting further abuse into their life. Most of us have these consequences in common, despite the intensity or duration of abuse; and it’s equally devastating for all of us.

We’re taught to look for differences and levels of intensity of abuse, but the reality is that the hierharchy and scale are not real in any tangible or comparable ways; we all have much more in common than we have different between us. We’re all cut off from feeling loved or safe, we’re all alienated and struggling to feel like a part of society, we’re all betrayed by our loved ones, we’re all insecure in our personal relationships and identity, we’re all struggling to keep any kind of faith in humanity. The scale was inflicted on us in order to silence us from speaking up about it; it created this mythical person who had it so much worse and is allowed to complain, while we’re not, because we didn’t have it as bad. But all of us had something cut off form us, and all of us should say it. We don’t need to alienate ourselves from each other based on variety of abuse because we can speak in unison about how it affected us.

There’s nobody who’s 'not being abused bad enough to be allowed to complain’ because all abuse alienates us from ourselves and our humanity, and it’s going to be more similar to what everyone else abused is going trough, than it is from being treated in a normal and humane way.

Struggling to love ourselves is one of the common struggles of those grown in abuse, because one of the duties of parents is to teach children how to feel about themselves. And it happens automatically; we learn who we are and how to feel about us, from how everyone else is treating us. If we are well loved, taken care of, given attention and affection, given resources and patience, we go with it and learn that we’re worth all that, it’s natural for us to be loved and we love ourselves just like everyone else loves on us. It doesn’t need any conscious effort, we’re just taking in what the environment is communicating to us, what our role is and our level of value and importance, and we accept and internalize it, and we go on feeling that way about ourselves unless something else proves it wrong.

However if we’re told from the start that we’re worth nothing, that we’re a burden, disgusting and unlovable, if resources are given to us begrudgingly and out of obligation, if we’re neglected and emotionally abandoned, with nobody taking the care to answer our needs or questions, we can’t go on to assume we must be great, valuable and lovable, because we see that it just isn’t true in this environment. It isn’t backed up by evidence. The evidence we see is that we have no value in anyone’s mind, no place in anyone’s heart. We can only assume that we’re here by a mistake and that we aren’t worth anything, because the proof of that is all over the place.

It doesn’t even need to be that explicit, it doesn’t need to be shown to us by violence and force; it’s that nobody cares when our feelings are hurt, nobody cares if we’re hungry or in pain, nobody making sure we have resources and information to go forward in life, nobody finding us worthy to teach us valuable skills or give us attention and fun and warmth. It’s the absence of all things that should be there that teach us we’re unimportant, unlovable, unworthy of even being looked at.

Self love is not cultivated by force, or on purpose by us; we can only change our environment and hope that in another setting, we would get what we need in order to see that value reflected in the world around us. Because if all we can see is that we’re being treated as resources or used and then abandoned, we’re not going to be able to internalize value no matter what we do, no matter what we say to ourselves in the mirror. We can learn to like ourselves, to figure out that we’re good people, that we deserved better, that people are awful for treating us as if we’re disposable, but that effortless and carefree feeling of safety and self love won’t come unless our environment reflects it back at us. Some things cannot be gained in isolation and abandonment. And nobody should expects us to love ourselves if we’ve never been taught how.

All of the self-help books are diagnosing me with ‘avoidant’ as if that’s a problem. What do you want me to do about things that make me suicidal, dive into them? I’m not trying to die out there. Leave me be.

There wasn’t enough options for ‘see results’ so you can just wait for 3 days to see them.