Voicelessness and Emotional Survival > What Helps?

Sam Vaknin: 'guru wannabee'

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Argusina:
PS Of course I am talking only about adults (children are helpless in the face of abuse)!

Anonymous:
before I had children I would definitely have thought this- however they are NOT abused or showing any signs of neglect or abuse, but thriving and happy.

They don't particularly care whether Dad and Mom are happy! They don't even look at us in the context of separate adults yet, they are just happy in their little world and definitely do not want me to break it up.

Maybe they are more protected from the n-ism than in other families, we don't argue in front of them and we both listen carefully and respect- they definitely have their 'voice'.

My N partner is able to see them as separate, and to be a good father in many ways.
It's me who he doesn't see as separate, and to a lesser extent people who work for him.

the Stockholm Syndrome may apply to some abused women, but for me it's just a question of trying to make a good life for children; most good parents have to make sacrifices for the sake of their children.
If it was the other way and I had to sacrifice my marriage to save or protect my children- I'd do that too.

With a big big sigh, like now!

Titi:
I was not overtly abused by my dysfunctional parents - but I did inherit many faulty ways of relating and ended up choosing disordered partners when I grew up...

I beleive chances are small that children grow up to become emotionally healthy when something as serious as personality disorders are involved...

Children are very acute and do as we do, not as we say...

 :cry:

write:
No family is perfect though, is it.

Many perfectly happy people grew up in strange set-ups, with alcoholic parents, mentally ill parents, sick parents, poverty...life is damned hard for most of the world's population.

We are lucky when our children get nutrition, warm safe home, books and learning, medicine, toys, holidays AND love.

But even the children who don't get all these things are not all permanently damaged in the way that a child whose self is denied or rejected from early days is, and sometimes I feel the more NORMAL and non-abusive from the outside that family appeared to others and to that child maybe the harder it is to understand or accept they were abused.

I believe that what affects children most is the level of honesty and genuine feeling around them, for ( extreme ) example, a drug-user could be a better parent by providing the child with genuine affection and letting them be themself, than say a christian environment where a child is told what to believe ( even if they don't believe it ) or a household where everything looks perfect but actually the mother resents and dislikes her children and gets at them in small imperceptable ways.

It is the denial of the child's real self, and the forcing on a developing mind of another's reality- effectively not allowing someone to develop their own reality- that does the harm to many people whose posts I have been reading.

that they can say to their parents angrily: these are my boundaries! or this is important to me! and STILL NOT BE HEARD, be dismissed, laughed at, even as middle-aged adults who have spent years educating themselves and often their families -inside their buried-child-self is unheard and disappointed each time it is ignored.

It is the fact that they grow up unable to trust their own feelings or even to know when they are in agony, for all the times someone has told them the opposite or insisted they should not feel and certainly not express those feelings.

I could go on about this at length, for injustices are often done by social workers who perceive children living in poor, smoky, cramped conditions to uneducated parents as obviously neglected even where they are loved and happy where a child like me- who could see what was done to me? It was as invisible as I subsequently became.

And my kids sure ain't that!

Argusina:
Many relevant points, write, and I agree that many factors come into play...

But having a personality disordered parent (not in healing) DOES mean that the family environment & lack of true self in the parent will undoubtedly injure the child more than in a "normal" population.

Some kids are "sturdier" and will survive it, while more sensitive ones will sometimes become severely disturbed themselves...

Rationalizations may help against the shame/guilt the non-disordered parent feel, but I do not beleive it is in the childrens' best interest...  :cry:

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