My mother was unmarried and into drugs. She wound up on welfare after becoming handicapped and dating violent pedophiles.Yeah, she smoked/drank/used. I wound up being abused as a kid in all the ways you don’t want to talk about in public and it went on until I was a tween. They gave me drugs to make me more manageable during the abuse. I wound up as an alcoholic and drug user in my teens.
Do I love my mom? Nope. I love that she’s dead and hope she stays in her damn hole.
Are all of my problems her fault? Maybe some, maybe not all. I don’t know if I can blame the crippled heart I was born with on her. Don’t really know if the SZ is her fault. I’d say the alcoholism and drug use are mine because I kept going for years after knowing I was hurting others and not caring.
Anyhow, none of that matters. I decided for myself I wanted a better life and took steps to get there. I sobered up and cleaned up (two weeks shy of 31 years). I made a commitment to overcome my SZ and really worked with my doctors, developed a positive attitude about it. I did extra things above and beyond meds to help myself (therapy!). I’ve never stopped trying to improve from the day I made that commitment (some days I do slide back, full honesty). All in all I’m considered a success and living a life I enjoy now.
Keep blaming others if you want, but every time you do you kick your own recovery and happiness farther down the road. If you want to live a good life then you had better cowboy up and go for it yourself. No one is going to hand it to you.
This is the kind of mentality the younger amongst us almost universally have to grapple with. I feel you. I really, really do. My dad was an emotionally abusive narcissist. When he wasn’t screaming at me, he was telling me what an embarrassment I was and how he had no son. When I was a tween he told me how amazing heroine was and would leave me alone at home for days while he stayed with the woman he cheated on my mom with. My mom was innocent as far as intentions go but she was neurotic and frantic and incredibly fragile. She would slap me in the face for making the wrong facial expression or for burping. The thing is, dwelling on how you were hurt without guidance isn’t just useless, it’s dangerous. Im 31 now, and am praying that this kind of thinking is mostly behind me, or at least moving forward, effectively managed. Everyone’s telling you how useless this kind of thinking is, and it is, but for those of us who weren’t handled with care it’s mostly inevitable.
Plenty of people had rough childhood’s with unimaginable suffering, physical, mental and sexual abuse, poverty and anything else you could imagine a parent putting a child through. But plenty of people succeed despite a rough childhood or overcome their childhood.
Why don’t you look at instances of people who overcame tough childhoods and went on to be successful adults and use them as examples?
I don’t have any horror stories from my childhood except I missed out on life because I was painfully shy and withdrawn and wouldn’t talk to my peers. I was in my own little world all through high school and missed out on having friends or a girlfriend. For years I only talked to a few people I knew and was mute around anyone I didn’t know. It wasn’t a fun way to grow up as a teenager. but despite getting schizophrenia at age 19 I have been almost steadily employed for the last 38 years, I just got my degree and I’ve always had a car since 1997. Also I had many good years where I was social and did a bunch of fun stuff and now I talk enough at work.
I’m a good example of overcoming a little adversity. I’ve never been sexually abused and was only the victim of a smattering of violence but my self made prison of being withdrawn and shy was bad enough. I’m lucky as to what I’ve done but plenty of other people faced way worse hardships than me and overcame them. You can’t change the past but you can start in the present and work on a good future. Good luck.
It is similar with me. My dad he was loving but he had narcissistic paranoid idiations he would also have religious delusions and take it out on my mum who is sort of an atheist. He would invite jahovis witnesses in our house and have them indoctrinate him over things. He now beleives my mum is cheating on him and gos on and on about it. He would beleive would see things and that they were messages from god. My dad is not diagnosed schizophrenic but me and my mum have suspected he could have genes for it my mum is passive she doesnt say much .
