Thank you for the replies.
It was a lot like being in a maximum security facility! I was even "kidnapped" by my mother once and spent about 6 weeks living in hotel rooms with her, with almost no contact with the outside world. She'd been having emotional and marital problems, and that was her solution. She told me about all of her problems and we cried a lot. I went with her willingly... but I was only 10 and "brainwashed" and very tightly controlled - I really had no choice. She told me that she was doing it to help me. I should have been in school at the time... (it wasn't until very recently that I realized that I hadn't really gone with her willingly and that it was more or less kidnapping).
I'm so glad I got out of their house when I was 20. I'm still amazed that I was able to.
I think I still haven't been able to find things that interest me. I've found a few but for the most part it is a huge mystery to me. On the rare occasion that I do find something that interests me, it usually seems like I have too many things blocking me to pursue it (like not having any emotional support, not having someone to go places with me, depression, anxiety, etc). I'm trying to give myself permission to find things that interest me. I'm still getting used to giving myself permission to feel ok instead of depressed all the time.
I did find things in common with the abuse survivor group I was in. Emotional abuse is present in every other kind of abuse, so I did have some common ground with people there. But since my abuse was mostly emotional (only once or twice that I know of I was somewhat physically abused. My mom would get angry and give me hard spankings because she thought I'd done something wrong when really I hadn't done anything wrong. She just never gave me a chance to explain or defend myself... more voicelessness) and I was also taken good care of financially it just seems like I have a lot of different issues than people who went through repeated physical abuse.
Oh, Mighty Mouse, my mom was just like that with "dirty" things. I never knew when she'd flip out over something in a movie or TV show I was watching (and it would be my fault for watching something bad). She'd also get angry and accuse me of using sexual slang words or saying things that had a sexual meaning or making sexual gestures when I was really young, like 6 or 7. She acted like I knew exactly what I was doing and was doing it just to be bad. Looking back now I can see that I wasn't even doing the things she was accusing me of - she was just reading the worst possible meaning into things. She was also so out of touch with the rest of the world that she didn't even know current slang... so she would assume the worst. I got so scared of her... because I had no idea what was "bad" and what wasn't... I got really, really careful about how I talked around her and I stopped even asking to see movies or TV shows that I wanted to see, because I had no idea what might be in them. She used religion as her excuse for restricting me, but it was really just about control. More voicelessness for me... more of me having to suppress myself.
Thanks for reading. I'm finding that I have a lot to say. That was a problem for me in the abuse survivors group I was using before, because a lot of people there just won't read long posts. So it was either... write everything that I have to say and don't expect many people to read and reply... or keep it short and get some replies. I don't mean to say negative things about that place because I appreciate it very much and it seems to work for a lot of people... but it felt like sometimes the only way I could get support was to get right to the point and keep it short instead of writing what I wanted to. I notice that the posts tend to be longer here, so, I'm hopeful...
Yuki
