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[Dochartaigh]

Hello, I'm a soon to be 72 year old man and I believe my story is fairly basic and not as bad as many. My parents and three year old sister wanted a little sister and when I was born a boy I ruined a perfectly good family. My parents wanted nothing to do with me and girls on our block came in to take care of me until my maternal grandmother came from Canada to takeover. She fed me, bathed me, and dressed me, but was very restful of being in the situation and despised my father. My father told my three year old sister that I was not part of the family and that she didn't have to be nice to me. This is something that years later she would tell the children on our block. Growing up my father avoided eye contact with me and only "yelled" at me through my mother. I was everything my mother didn't want and she made certain to tell me growing up. She often then told me about my birth and the doctor's saying, "You're the mother of a healthy baby boy and how she said, "You've got to be kidding me!" She told me often how she apologized to my father for my being a boy. When I was three years and three months my mother's arms were paralyzed by polio and spent seven months in an iron lung. I have clear memories of her before polio and clear memories of her when she came home from the hospital, but no memories at all of my home life during the period when I was home with my father, grandmother and sister.

My mother yelled at me often and when I was four years old she was yelling at me in the kitchen and I looked up at her and yelled,"Stop!" She suddenly straightened up and in a different voice said, "Oh my God, he's insane..." Now, talking to me in the third person she said, "I didn't know we had an insane boy living in this house. You don't think the neighbors know. Oh how terrible it would be if the neighbors knew an insane boy lived in our house!" She went to the living room and looked out the window, then turned to me and said, "You must never tell anyone an insane boy lives in this house!" Somewhere along the line she told my sister I was insane and she often repeated it to the kids on the block that our mother said I was insane.

I have been a nervous wreck since childhood and all I've wanted is to be by myself. Before sleep I would often visualize walking home from school and seeing that the house on either side of our house were now together and our house was gone. I would ask people about our house and no one knew of it or any family by our name. I can still feel the thrill and relief as I'd walk away. The visualization ended there as nothing else mattered other than I was free. I had no idea where I'd go or what I'd do, but I was alone and free. I'll end for now. Thank you.

[TheBigBlue]

Hi Dochartaigh, 

I'm so sorry for what you went through. What you described is not "basic" or small — it's exactly the kind of early psychological maltreatment the "Death by a Thousand Cuts" article talks about (link is below).

Those tiny, constant wounds: being unwanted, shamed, called "insane," treated as if you didn't belong, are relational traumas that cut the deepest because they come from the people meant to protect us.

Minimizing it is something so many of us do after early maltreatment ... but what happened to you was real, and it mattered.

The way you longed to be alone and imagined freedom makes so much sense as a child trying to survive the unbearable.

I'm really glad you're here.
You deserved so much better — and you're not alone anymore. 

... There's a good article here I found today that explains why this is so, how those of us who cannot describe our abuse as horrific and in some cases as abuse itself end up with Complex PTSD.
https://www.complextrauma.org/complex-trauma/death-by-a-thousand-cuts/
...