For me it was adults/authority figures screaming at children in full voice.
My parents hated each other so much I was actually confused when I went to my friends house and his parents seemed to actually love each other.
Practically everything lol. I grew up in a 3 room cabin with a single mom and a dad who had been totally fucked by his longtime employer who was supposedly paying him under the table but somehow had his SSN and left him with 70k in unpaid taxes.
My kindergarten was full of children of Nazis who harassed me for being a long haired hippie kid and my only friend whose the only black kid in the district because he was black. I stood up for us finally and broke a bully’s nose at recess and the school response was to make me go through kindergarten again which separated us by a grade and left us with nobody to have our backs.
Helping my mom clean houses because she could not afford child care. I attended my first college lecture when I was 6 years old for the same reason.
I dropped out of high school because I kept getting in fights with crackers larping as crips and bloods.
One of my first jobs one of my coworkers was murdered in the building and they opened up again within 8 hours.
My whole life has been one radicalizing traumatic experience after another.
I stood up for us finally and broke a bully’s nose at recess and the school response was to make me go through kindergarten again which separated us by a grade and left us with nobody to have our backs.
Zero tolerance policies in a nutshell. They lock you up in a place with horrible abusive people and then punish you for fighting back.
Wait a minute…
Got a few suspensions for that. Jokes on them cause my parents didnt think I did anything wrong so I just had fun time off. If I didnt start it I was allowed to finish it.
Yeah they pulled me out of that school and I didn’t go back to a public school till high-school where I immediately got kicked out again for fighting.
Pro tip don’t start shit with a skater girl. We hurled ourselves at pavement and fought God and gravity for fun.
They never pulled me out and I doubt it was ever considered. The fights I was in were pretty few and far between. Plus I won the fights so my safety wasnt a concern. I was in the French immersion program, which means I was mostly in classes with rich kids, you could pay your way in or stand in line for the very few free spots. I was the last line kid around after a few years. Most switch to English cause the French immersion program is deeply classist between the limited amount of poor people who can get in, the fucking MATH work was 2 years ahead of what the standard program kids were doing, so we had harder work in general and in a language we were learning at the same time. That’s gonna be harder to deal with for a poorer family on average. However the schools that had the programs were always in the bad areas I grew up in and the rich kids got bussed in. So most of my fights were with kids who tried to fight like they were playing hockey, outside of school was where I would lose fights cause the kids in my neighborhood were waaaay tougher than the ones in my class so when rich kids came at me I was the one who could actually fight. Jr high and high school were more specifically in my neighborhood and a lot of the people knew outside of school suddenly went to the same school and preppy kids wouldnt fucking dare after that. I was never really targeted at any point either, I was a consistently middle popularity guy, I never had any long term beefs, just kids having tempers
On the one hand I envy that but on the other I am glad. It made me stronger and more resilient. There is little I fear in the coming struggle. I was born for this shit.
On the positive side I dedicated my earliest years of activism helping guide what was an actually good charter/continuation school that is now the nature academy which my little brother got to attend.
I was in one of those zero tolerance places. A kid broke my finger, but I didn’t fight back (weird notions about pacifism and I really am not a good fighter anyway) and nothing happened, but I was acutely aware if I had fought back I would’ve gotten in trouble. The principal was ready to point out that it was essentially my fault because I was bigger than him and he hurt me, though, so that’s fun.
Where I grew up, all of society was divided into hostile, irreconcilable classes. One owned the means of production and through that ownership captured all of the value produced. The other class worked at productive labor, but had to sell their labor power to the owning class in order to do so. This caused all kinds of other problems for many years.
In hindsight, its fall was inevitable.
Someone seeing my post and not upbearing it
Tell me whom
The smoking section at restaurants. The only difference when you sat in the non-smoking section was that you couldn’t see people smoking while you ate.
It was about as effective as having a non-peeing section in a pool
Something something no right life in a wrong one
Well this is more a broad social environment thing than a household thing, but when I was eight I moved from an east coast suburb to rural America. I was an outsider for multiple reasons, one of which being that I had no extended family in the area whereas most of my classmates had lots of family.
In particular, on grandparents day pretty much every kid had their grandparents come to school, except me. It wasn’t that aspect of it, though, rather just how many of them had great-grandparents show up. And not all of them were fossils. This always made me go “aww man, I never knew my great-grandparents, I wish mine were still around.”
It wasn’t until I got to high school and saw what was happening with a lot of my classmates that I realized, “Oh, a lot of them had living great-grandparents because of how many people get knocked up in high school around here.”
ok I normally say I dont have any trauma but this all sounds kinda bad when I write it out like this....
Wait, other parents dont take their kids with them on vacations that are just a thinly veiled excuse to have a fuckfest with their vaguely poly nonmonagomous friends?
Wait, other parents dont have screaming arguments with each other all the time?
Wait, other parents dont make up by having very loud and obvious sex?
Wait, other parents dont show their kids not-porn-but-incredibly-adult-films when theyre 9? Other kids dont know about the horrors of the milking machine? Or that ropes are really, really fun? Or that cannibalism isnt good but is kinda ok sometimes?
Wait, other parents dont chase you around with spiders?
Wait, other parents dont revoke love for you when you dont agree with them?
Wait, other parents let you disengage when you need a break and dont follow you around screaming about how theyre a horrible parent and should never have had a kid? I mean they shouldn’t have, but thats beside the point.
Wait, other parents dont scream at you about your intelligence and lack thereof?
Wait, other parents dont consider the mere possibility of neurodivergence to be “something wrong with you”? Sad really given that the parent in question is very clearly autistic.
My family was mostly nuts but it was all kept out on the surface. Every other family seemed normal to me and I didn’t understand why mine was so different.
Turns out everybody else’s families were faking it and they’re all way more fucked up than me in adulthood. Maybe something similar happened with you; in any case I’m glad you don’t feel traumatized by all your wacky shit either.
deleted by creator
Or that cannibalism isnt good but is kinda ok sometimes?
Could just be catholic though
I was really blindsided once I realized that some people actually enjoyed spending time with their parents. I thought that kind of stuff was performative.
deleted by creator
As it turns out, most parents don’t have a 12 pack behind the driver’s seat.
This actually ties into something I properly appreciate only in retrospect - before I was born, my father drank regularly, but after I was born, he was fully committed to never having alcohol in the house.
Oh yeah lol having my dad ask me to carry the OTHER case of beer to the truck after going to work landscaping with him.
Love my dad though for all his faults he’s actually 💯 a comrade.
yeah, the drink driving and an open can on the freeway
it only dawned on me that this might be no bueno on the new year’s eve where mum and dad had a fight in a public park waiting for midnight fireworks, dad dragged me off and forced me to get in the car, and he proceeded to do like 100km/h up suburban streets and sideswiped like 5 cars. when we got home, my brother screamed at him brandishing like the only steak knife we had.
I learned it was not normal to fear the sound of a car door slamming (since it meant my parents were coming home) and it is certainly not normal for a child to think that they are some horrible person who has been reincarnated and this life is their punishment for the last one, or for a child to think that maybe this is just what hell is like and part of being in hell is not knowing that you’re in hell and your existence is punishment.
and it is certainly not normal for a child to think that they are some horrible person who has been reincarnated and this life is their punishment for the last one, or for a child to think that maybe this is just what hell is like and part of being in hell is not knowing that you’re in hell and your existence is punishment.
Oh
do you have to do anything about that?
Also thought the 2nd and 3rd thing as a child , just thought about that for the first time in a while when I was trauma dumping to my gf last night so youre not alone in that
My mom taking me with her to work and her bosses asking “Will your kid be alright just sitting by herself?” to which mom replied “Just give her a pen and a sheet of paper and she’ll be happy for hours” and she was always right.
Now, looking back, I think I should get tested for autism. I have a feeling there might be a connection.
My mom did that a few times as well with the going to work with her and bring pens and paper to keep me quiet and it always working. She always stole a shitload of printer paper from work so I always had lots and she kept folded up sheets in her purse for basically any period where waiting was involved. They probably also should have looked into the autism thing, but meh. I got real good at drawing
So there was a good outcome after all!
I never got into drawing, even back then. It was still when I was a kindergartner, but I could not find any joy in drawing. So a pen and paper seemed like a waste of time, but I started doodling something that vaguely resembled writing (to my young eyes). Nowadays, if I need to fill time, I just start writing little stories. I wouldn’t say they’re good, but I can write a lot in a short amount of time, so there’s that :)
They have been hella supportive in my arts and crafts endeavors and still are. They buy me a gunpla every once in a while and hook me up with tool restocks here and there. I cant remember not being good at drawing. They still have my fingerpaintings from when I was 3 and while crude, you can tell what everything is at a glance. I have actually gotten a lot worse at anime style drawing, in 2nd grade my ability to draw Digimon super on model and knowing what was gonna happen in the show in advance led to a kid saying I had the equivalent to an uncle who works at Nintendo but for Digimon. I was just good at drawing and went on fansites who had fan subtitled Japanese episodes over a year before they aired if you ordered the vhs tapes. I should get an autism diagnosis just to prove the obvious.
Calling my parents by their first names at like age 11
Is that really a sign of dysfunction?
It sure can be. My best friend growing up called his parents by their first names because they wouldn’t respond to mom/dad in public. He got lost in public as like an 8 year old and couldn’t find them when he yelled for his mom and dad, so he learned to call them by their first names if he wanted them to respond. Idk because I was a kid too, but it never seemed intentional on their part. Like they weren’t intentionally ignoring him, they were just the type of parents that didn’t really seem to want to have kids in the first place and struggled with their role
For a different perspective. I love my parents and have a very chill relationship with them. But I do call them with their real name and not mom or dad.
Not always. With me it was mostly my mom putting me in the emotional place of a partner because I was the only one who was there consistently
Loud noises in another room
Being stessed about new clothes.
Being alert when I hear a door handle.
Loud pops that sound like gunshots.
Scared of cities for a bit there.
Not being able to relax when someone else is doing a chore. Not being able to relax during the day period even if I’m having a flair up.
Fear if I accidentally break something or let something go bad.
Fear about talking about my needs IRL. Fear of going to the doctor too much and it driving my loved ones away.
Unable to fit in to society and not knowing how to play with children after a long young life in complete isolation.
Probably more.
I resonate with some of these
There’s a term for some of these: ‘hyper awareness’. Where you’re essentially tought to walk on tiptoes (figuratively) around someone to minimise conflict. But it looks like more than that.
Hope you’re doing well today.Aw thank you!
Yeah that tracks.
Thankfully I’m doing a lot better now a days. The relaxing thing is still a pain, but it has a little bit more of untangling that needs done cause of other elements as well.
One of my friends and how he was towards me growing up. Well I really should say “friend” because he was anything but. He was very emotionally abusive towards me and psychologically bullied me. I hung out with him because I didn’t know anyone else growing up that liked sega and pc games. I just thought it was normal for him to be such an asshole towards me. Eventually I got fed up with him and his bullying and and stopped talking to him around sophomore year. He died of an overdose a couple years ago.
I thought it was alright that I’d hide from guests, in order to avoid embarrassing my family. I rarely have felt being mistreated, it just seemed like what I thought was “legitimate critique”.
It’s only much later I’d realize that maybe a child shouldn’t be responsible for parenting her parents.
