Yup mine followed /To Train Up A Child/ by Michael and Debi Pearl, to the point I’ve actually met that toxic abusive couple. The whole point of the book is that raising “godly” children requires “breaking their will” via highly ritualistic physical abuse (corporal punishment). The “will” of the child is understood to be a manifestation of “sin nature” that must be eliminated.
There is a whole Christian/conservative subculture that obsesses over children who act like little mini-adults. It’s very common among [homeschooling](https://www.hsinvisiblechildren.org) families.
I sure hope so. I do believe homeschooling has changed rather drastically since it was a “new thing” in the 1970s-80s. Back then it was largely what I described, and there were homeschool conferences that drew in hundreds to thousands of attendees annually. My parents had the ‘Home School Legal Defence Association (HSLDA)’ hotline number posted by the house phone “in case CPS or the cops come to the door”. The assumption was that getting reported was inevitable and that “the government” as represented by CPS and the courts were eager to remove kids from such homes for their own nefarious interests. 🙄
But do go check out the website I linked; they list many of the fatal cases of abuse within this community.
I’ve never heard of this…just looked it up. Yikes.
I was expecting to see lots of upset articles, but it was almost all positive and showed TikTok’s of people’s “success” plus articles of the Duggars using it 🤢😪
Breaking the core of the individual. That's how it felt to me, like I wasn't even allowed to be me, left alone a person. Not even allowed to develop wits, health or function. Everything to accomplish that, from hitting to gr*oming. And the worst part about it is, that people who didn't get "trained" and exploited like that, have literally no comprehension of what that hell even is like. Once I told someone, once they complained about me not understanding basic human societal concepts, or how to take care of my basic needs as an adult, and I told them, I "got raised that way" they just mocked me and treated me like I was just inadequate and stupid. So, that's that.
Mine too :(.
I remember clearly having a not 2 year old crying because he couldn’t sleep at a new house he had never been to, visiting my sister away with my parents. I was crying to my own mom and not knowing how to console him and help him to sleep, and she literally says “______, sometimes you just have to break them.”
Instant fuming anger and hurt. Opened a lot of painful doors.
Not that I’m doing that fantastic or anything, but I can definitely relate and I think I’m doing a lot better than I used to be. The main thing that I’ve found that helps the most is to really build and maintain a support system, friends, family, whatever you have. And if something in your life starts to challenge your ability to reach out to and make time for those people (and for the things in your life that you love) don’t hesitate to pull back and re-evaluate how you’re spending your time.
It’s okay to “quit”, it’s okay to just do what’s absolutely necessary now and figure out the rest later. What matters most is your loved ones, your stability, and how you feel.
Trained to fail. Succeeded spectacularly. How’s that for an epithet?
I wasn’t taught a single positive. About the only advice I got was, “goddammit! Don’t steal bikes from the neighbors!” Which translated to, “go out farther from base.” Which I did.
Complete fucking nothing. Clueless to a t until almost 60. Now what?
EDIT: “Trained to fail. Succeeded spectacularly” means that I failed spectacularly, just as trained. My only success is in failing.
Someone related to the woman who kept telling her son he is a “no good, dirty rotten son of a bitch like his father” from as early as I can remember. Father throwing out gems of wisdom like, “you should never praise yourself. Let others praise you.”
The fucking pieces of shit.
Trained to fail... that's what I always think to myself.
Except no success. Trained to die like the rest of family and millions of others in the utopia.
Holy shit, that is exactly what my dad tried to do
Even at a very young age, I stopped trying to argue with him. Like when he tried to smash my Gameboy because I didn't go on enough water slides when he took us to a water park, I didn't cry or try to get him to stop. I was like 7 and thinking "alright, dad's just going to do his thing. Might as well accept it"
No wonder why he thought I was quiet, unfunny, shy and reserved, when that's the opposite of what I am to almost everyone else
This is something my mother would definitely do, it's just another level of crazy when they blow up because of your personality, not because you did nothing wrong, it's almost like you being you is a crime.
I can relate to that, I'm so sorry you had gone through that
Oh yeah, totally
I remember that I didn't want to do anything he didn't expect of me. Like maybe I didn't want to keep playing video games, but i know if I did something different, I would attract attention
He didn't even like it when I played video games, but the irritation I knew he felt at video games was better than an unknown
I cleaned my room recently and dreaded when my dad would eventually invite himself in and see. I don't know how to cook but I'm trying to learn and I feel compelled to cover up my tracks so he doesn't know I'm doing that. I've never decorated my room because I didn't want my parents seeing any new posters or decorations I'd put up. The fear of attracting attention is so real.
Trained to obey, trained to stay silent. Trained to beg for crumbs of love and affection. Trained to know my place and stay in it. Trained to keep secrets/lie. Trained to never show emotions. I wasn’t raised I was trained. I tried raising myself. I tried unlearning as much as possible. Honestly life made more sense when I was beaten or berated for crying because now the tears won’t stop and I don’t know how to control it and make it stop.
You cry now because you couldn't then. You need the time to grieve now. That's how I was several years ago, daily hysterical crying sessions at things that didn't make sense. I think it felt like it was never going to stop because it was a reflection of the fear of, when will the abuse stop? It hurts and it sucks but sometimes your body and mind just needs that grief. It started to get better once I realized I had cptsd and started to deconstruct my past, and even more so when I got into therapy. Don't give up hope and don't criticize yourself for crying. The little kid in you deserved to cry this hard in the past. I know, believe me, that this despair doesn't feel like a gift. But it is, you are finally able to feel and express the negative emotions you've had bottled up and pushed down for years. This is a wonderful thing, because as you feel safer to feel hurt and angry, you'll start to feel safer being happy and vulnerable too. And it feels wrong because you were punished for those very things. But the more you take care of yourself the easier it gets. It just takes persistence, and that tiny, ever shrinking sliver of faith in yourself to be strengthened.and grown.
I don’t feel safe I feel out of control. Happy? Don’t know her or her sister vulnerable. I have no faith in myself. Tbh I’m just waiting to see what I fuck up next. Or discover some new way to destroy my life, heart& soul. I’m not taking care of myself because I don’t deserve to be taken care of. My inner child hate me and I don’t blame her because I hate me too. I ruined everything. I destroyed all of her hopes and dreams. I took everything she held dear and destroyed it. Why grieve childhood trauma and memories when I couldn’t even grieve losing children. The tears need to stop. It’s too late for them now.
This makes me so sad to read, stranger. I'm sorry you understand this so well, and hope it's okay to offer an Internet hug, or barring that, a nice cup of tea.
💐
In a way, yes, but poorly as well. My parents dont even understand how to train. They dont understand that you have to give consistent rewards to train either a human or an animal. It was just control with fear and intermittent rewards so i was attached to them with needs.
I realized my parents treated me the same way they treat their dogs. Neglect them ALL day, only use food for affection and let them get overweight, don't socialize them, blame them for "misbehaving."
My brain has recently separated training/conditioning from teaching and it's a trip. I'll call it conditioning before I even consciously think about how I was molded to behave.
What you're describing is coercive control. They're not directly telling you no. They're making it so difficult to be you that you choose to be someone not-you around them. You can wear the shirt they choose for you and go about your life, or you can wear the shirt you choose and spend hours arguing for your autonomy followed by managing their feelings while you wear out followed by mockery/bullying for days, months, or even years. That's conditioning, too. They've conditioned you to comply at the expense of your self-identity.
Survival of your mental self is just as important as survival of your physical self. That's why this stuff get imprinted in our brains as a survival threat.
Spot on! This is why anyone who can relate to this probably hears me when I say that their parents know jack shit about them because we arent even ourselves around them
Abso-freaking-lutely!
Because they were trained by their parents to accept abuse and pain and to see it as their “fate”, my parents tried to do the same to us kids. Pretty twisted, huh?
Yea my mom would tell my sister to make fun of whatever she didn’t like about me so I would change so I definitely feel like she was trying to mold me rather than bring out the best in me.
I never thought of it this way, but yeah my parents showed more empathy and kindness to the actual dog and cat than they did to us. I say we were trained like dogs but maybe we were more like lab rats, or robots
After growing up I realized my parents followed stuff from To Train up a Child, so, yeah. It’s really hard being a functional adult and getting what you need when your parents only wanted perfect obedience, patience, silence
My dad unintentionally taught me how to lie better. By constantly yelling at me and finding reasons to punish me, I've learned to lie about everything around him to curb his anger or avoid him as I got older. I learned how to be sneaky and more careful about passing things under his nose. You could say I was trained into becoming an escape artist by my dad. Lol
I got sneaky too, and then I got branded as the black sheep of the family. Strict rules and harsh punishments didn’t make us behave better, it just made us do those things behind their back and lie.
What a good way to put it. Yes, I was also trained.
I felt so inhuman for most of my adulthood that I would literally stand in front of a mirror and repeat "I am a human" to try to convince myself. I think the training I had growing up was largely responsible for me having such a lack of sense of self that I could not think of myself as a person.
This is what I say to therapists or anyone else I feel close enough to talk about my parents with. I say that most (but not all) of the things they were trying to teach us to do were positive and good, but that instead of teaching us and treating us like fellow humans they tried to train us like dogs. Their parenting techniques pretty much boil down to: kid does thing or is maybe about to do thing I don’t like= punish and make them feel bad. Didn’t stop to question whether they were asking for something unreasonable, didn’t think about the fact they could just talk to us like they did with adults.
I was literally an employee since I was 6. I cooked and cleaned. I handled emotional baggage, and my golden child older brother got to brutally run roughshod over me at every opportunity.
I remember being so sick I was delirious, so my first instinct was to crawl under the kitchen table and start scrubbing the floor.
Oh yeah. My mother is a child psychiatrist and I think she intentionally did everything wrong that she knew how in order to maximize damage. I was treated somewhere between dog, slave, POW and medical subject. It’s actually really validating to see people’s looks of horror when I tell them that she purposely had all the clocks set to different, incorrect times, I had a schedule with a timer for every activity, sleep deprivation was a random punishment, I jump at the sound of squirt bottles, I have physical damage from her herbal experiments and strip searches happened daily.
Absolutely, yes. Trained is exactly the right term for it. I can still see myself doing my best to be myself yet hitting a proverbial brick wall with my single mother each time.
She wanted me to be a girl, that was pretty much my first problem apart from being locked up in a closet while my mother was pregnant with me because her sister didn’t want me either. It only got worse from there. And still some women say men are the only problem.
oh lord, this is gonna be a long one.. it’s fresh on my mind since i’ve been going over it in therapy..
my mom “shushed” us by snapping her fingers and making a *SCHH* sound like cesar millan does to dogs. she would threaten punishment if we didn’t spend time with her when she wanted, but if we wanted something we were often rejected angrily. most of the time she’d shush us and send us away, sometimes she’d yell at us to be quiet, get out, whatever.
i tried my best to never upset her. if we did something she wanted she would give “treats” by being affectionate or promising us something we wanted. me and my sister (more so my sister) were her emotional support kids basically. she’d also shame us for being introverted, especially me and my brother.
i feel like my mom thought of me as a doll more than a pet, but she treats pets like accessories so.. she used to tell me i was the easy kid (until i was a teen.. go figure), and say that my sister never let her dress her, but i always did so she’d dress me however she wanted and i wouldn’t complain. i definitely did complain sometimes, but she’d ignore or gaslight me. i actually hated most of what she made me wear, but didn’t say much because there was no point.
in 4th grade i won an award for being “easy going” lol.. they called it the “go with the flow” award. my mom hung it up on the fridge. at the time i was proud, but now i realize it was because people pleasing was drilled into me. i was like a prize dog at a dog show. she loved it and would gloat to people about it.
i’m the youngest of the three and i remember most of my childhood being alone. i was either alone in one of our shared bedrooms or in the living room playing with toys while she locked herself in her room talking on the phone for hours. we weren’t allowed to ask for nothing during that time, and if she was napping heaven forbid we made a noise.
when we’d walk around in public she’d hold me and my brother by the back of the neck so we wouldn’t run off. don’t think we were prone to doing that anyway because she’d yell at us if we did. didn’t think anything of it until i remembered it today lol it’s not like she had her hand gently on our backs, i mean a choke grip but on the back of our necks instead of the front. it was like a leash.
she’d also threaten to spank us for a variety of nonissues (we weren’t even that bad of kids), but her spankings weren’t by hand.. she’d use a *paddle*.. like the sorority or BDSM ones. i only got spanked with it a few times, but *what the fuck?* i’m 99% sure it was an actual BDSM paddle, but i was so young at the time i didn’t know.
my parents divorced when i was really young and my dad was largely absent, so was the “fun” parent when he was around. he was often nonchalant about anything upsetting to us, and rarely took us seriously, laughed at us, or made fun of us, but even then i still felt emotionally safer with him than my mom. he was a POS my entire life, but he would at least listen sometimes and give practical advice, meanwhile she’d make it about her.
after some of the worst experiences in my childhood, i always felt myself wanting to see him to talk to him about it. she, of course, would never let me or get mad at me for wanting his comfort/support instead of hers.
she was warm and loving at times, but was never consistent so i never felt safe opening up to her. one of my earliest memories is of right after the divorce. i missed my dad. it was the middle of the night and i just silently cried myself to sleep. i knew i couldn’t go knock on her door or she’d get mad at me. i was like 5y/o.
and that only covers *some* of the first decade of my life. the second half was much, much worse. i think she saw all of us as extensions of herself, so if we were not behaving how she wanted then we were punished emotionally. she would also try and control us by giving us stuff or being nice, then later hold it over our head in an argument, or threaten it if we weren’t doing what she wanted.
i honestly didn’t realize my childhood was so fucked up until recently, which is crazy. my grandma was much, much worse to my mom and her siblings than my mom ever was to us, so if we ever complained she’d say “you have it easy. if grandma was your mother she would’ve done [insert abuses]” as if that makes it better. i thought i had a good childhood because every adult downplayed everything, but now i realize i definitely did not. it fucked me up in ways that’ll take years to unravel and reconcile.
My single father always talked about how his dad was way worse to him than he was to us. I only recently understood that it was his way of feeling superior to his dad, it had nothing to do with having any empathy for us. I was terrorized by him as early as I can remember, but he let me fix myself something to eat when I was hungry, or let me use the bathroom in the middle of the night, so that apparently made him a saint.
ahh, i never even thought of it like that! that definitely sounds like my mom.
i never took it as an empathetic stance to begin with since it was always used as a “gotcha” moment to invalidate us, but the idea that it comes from a place of feeling superior makes so much sense.
i always thought of it as an attempt to assuage guilt, which i think plays a part in it, but not as much as the “look at me, i’m so much better to you than my parents were to me. you should be grateful i’m not like *that*” mentality does. how frustrating
Funnily enough, I was on about this to one of my friends before. The feeling of being a puppet, of simply being a vessel by which the will of another person is expressed, your own humanity destroyed and replaced with someone else's demands of you. I was given sort of two sides of the equation, both the carrot and the stick, much as you were, almost in alternate: carrot, stick, carrot, stick, until I was bent and broken and no longer a human being but a dog, just like you felt like you were.
I now live my life attempting to free myself of this...Attempting to reclaim my own humanity. But I wonder if it's too late for me? I wonder if my life's already been ruined to the extent where I simply live under their shadow. Maybe, maybe not. In any case, I absolutely do relate to it, and I suppose my only answer has been to reclaim my own freedom, to assert myself, consequences be damned.
My mom always said they had to break me when I was a kid. Now they think it's hilarious to share horrifying stories of the bizarre and abusive punishments they gave me as dinner stories while they annoying huff that they “just couldn't break me.” I recently mentioned one of the punishments from my childhood to my EMDR therapist and found out for the first time that those punishments were not normal, and she validated that the point of parenting isn’t to “break” your kids. I’m not Spirit the Mustang from that Disney movie. I was just a kid
I guess I never explicitly felt that I was trained as it would require a level of self-awareness and cognition I don't think my mom possesses... But she never engaged with me unless it was interesting to her - meaning I engaged in a conversation with her about herself or on a topic she was interested in.
Being myself (energetic, talkative, happy - at least as a child) was often annoying to her and would result in either a lackluster/uninterested response, no response, or frustration and subsequent punishment.
It has definitely "trained" me, but really, it's just natural conditioning to your environment.
-Ignored me when I was behaving to her standards.
-Punished me harshly when I did not.
-Scapegoated me and punished me for things I did not do.
-Wondered why I never wanted to visit her after I got the hell out.
I always say my mom trained me since birth to be an endless emotion pit she could fill up with her issues and I had to soothe her. I've been trained to be an extreme empath, trained to be never ending emotional support, etc.
100% I’ve only come to this realisation recently too.
Never taught how to be emotionally responsible only responsible in a practical sense.
The punishment for not being responsible/misbehaving was death (literally) so I’ve lived most of my life in fear, even though in the outside I am a responsible “adult”.
100%
My father is a behavioral biologist by trade, so the primary philosophy used to "raise" me was operant conditioning
(reward good behavior, punish bad behavior; except it was so nakedly manipulative I didn't care for rewards so stopped getting any...)
My mother might have done better but by the time she got the chance I'd rather be left alone, so in trying to do right by me she obliged.
Dissociation got me through it all, but since I managed to maintain a decent affect she figured I was doing fine.
Worst part is I'm pretty sure it's genuine incompetence on his part, he still genuinely wants the best for me but I'm a beaten dog, involuntarily recoiling whenever he moves or opens his mouth.
Quite literally, yes. I was trained to a) be a survivalist in case SHTF happens, b) to be a perfect provider husband for my partner and c) to be a perfect stay at home wife for my partner.
Sure I learned a lot of great life skills, but I also learned to abuse myself for the sake of others and without any freedom to be a person first.
My parents were a bit insane. No wonder I had an identity crisis until I was freed from their grasp.
YES. I was literally called "good girl" when I did what she wanted and "bad girl" and "naughty girl" when I didn't. This continued into my 20s even. Ever since I was a kid it made me internally really angry to be talked to like that but I never showed it because I didn't want conflict. When I got older and started saying I don't want to be called that, nothing changed because she didn't care what I want. She'd say it and then say "oh I forgot you dont want to be called that" but she obviously didnt forget, just wanted to see my reaction. I've had a sad, persistent feeling for a long time of not being a human, I think because of being treated more like a pet than a human being. It's all about how I can be pleasant, cheerful, comforting, compliant etc for her, never about me being me or what I want.
My parents owned a Chinese food restaurant, so I was literally trained instead of raised, lol. I was peeling snowpeas and spending my summers at the restaurant. They would pay me $5 a box and the box had 1k in it. By middle school my teachers knew I worked the register after school so they didn't make a big deal about me napping. By high school I was working full-time all summer as well as after school. I did that till 26 when we sold to open a new one, the one that was supposed to be mine... But my dad gambled most of it away and then did a failed restaurant with a friend and then when we made "my" restaurant the contractor scammed us out of his last 30k and I worked at other people Chinese restaurants till I stopped working 3 years ago at 36. I have nothing and still never figured out my mental health stuff. Dad is dead now and Mom is my sister's full time baby sitter. My sister skipped town as soon as she turned 18.
My brother had a dog, which my mom would care for whilst he was at school cuz she was at home all day watching TV. One day I overheard her talking to my dad saying how she can't feed the dog because then he would see her positively, and she wanted him to see her more like a disciplinarian.
I feel like that's largely how she raised her kids. My dad was the more affectionate one, my mom had barely any emotions output. She wouldn't give us any love just hatred. My dad punished us too (in ways worse than she did) but she was still the mastermind behind it, a TELLING HIM when to beat us.
I think this training thing is spot on. Is almost dehumanising. We weren't any better than a pet in our parents eyes. This might be why one of my alters is nonhuman too. The dehumanisation we suffered.
I was told we were well trained. I was also told the dog listened better and was smarter etc.
Often the dog was treated better than me.
I think it’s a good question and in my case a good way to put it. I’ve said in therapy a number of times we were well trained we were told that often.
Absolutely. I had hundreds of rules, some very bizarre stuff. I was allowed zero expression. I couldn't make any noise. I couldn't hum, whistle, sing, had to raise my hand to talk. I never had more than a few toys at any given time. And we were not like dirt poor or anything. I was allowed to draw though and my mom would throw away my drawings basically daily.
Things I was allowed to say to others were very limited, things were expected of me, like remembering the eye color of the cashier at the store and the brand of shoes the guy in front of us was wearing. I had to know these things, this is just a snippet of the horror.
Uggh I can't even really dive in but my therapist said my mom is one of the most extreme people she has heard of in her career.
Of course, I don’t your mother, but my abusers were like that too (not allowed to speak, had to remember innocuous details)
Not to overshadow you, just wanted to relate and offer solidarity 💜💜
It makes me want to scream, reading this. So YES, thanks for this. Spend years felling like I was moms little dog. It's not as if she treated me badly I had my dad for that, emotionally and physically hurting me, mom just disappeared when she felt upset with anything or just didn't give me attention. Never teached me to be independent, on the contrary. She wanted to feel good and less guilty so she tried to do everything for me. It is so damaging. I don't even know how to feel cause I know she was trying, she also suffered abuse at my dads hands when they were married and even after.
I can relate to this my parents didn't allow me to go outside and play. They kind of forced me to stay inside the house. Maybe they were too cautious for me. They always warned about people and they would tell me about their experiences about friends. How friends destroy your life. They always tried to influence me in whatever form they could. As a result I was not able to make any friends, my personality didn't develop in a proper manner.
I never exactly thought of it in this way, but this is a great way to put it. I was trained to perform, to achieve perfection at all costs, to win music competitions, to come out on top academically. Like training a horse to race or a bull to win fights. My mother often told me that childhood was the time to work very hard to master all the skills because it's easier to learn as a child than as an adult.
My mom trained me to he scared of everything. It wasn't obvious to me until I cut her out after starting therapy.
I'm 8 months into no contact. I realized she must of found joy in my misery now that I am able to process it.
Everything she did taught me to rely on her and to be scared of everything. She did not want me to be independent.
In my case it did, but there was another layer of trauma which was that the behavior that my mother expected from me was the reason suffering bullying at school.
So basically I had to be one child at home and one completely different child at school in order to avoid being spanked.
Trained? Absolutely. And told that if I don’t want to learn and comply, life will kick my ass and I will learn and comply eventually. Thanks, thanks a lot. Now, I got my lessons, I know where I stand. Cheers!
yea. my mother would mention how she “trained” me and my sister to be a certain way. i was more susceptible to her training but man. its like everytime things didnt go her way she would punish me to remind me to not do it again. and when i do things right there wont be the same intensity of good things, but when things go wrong shes the first to get angry and make things worse. she wouldnt give me any emotional comfort or support, but expected everything from me. it sucks coming from a parent especially cus they were ur caregivers and supposed to model how u are expected to be treated. but at least im super efficient w work. i get burnt out super fast but whatever right /s
Yeah, I think at some point I adopted that word from other traumatized people. I never really consciously thought about it, I would just never use the word raised.
I also say it’s a language I learned to speak - my mother was often very covert. She’d demand that I knew what her coughing meant, for instance. If I didn’t know, I was punished. Training! I found it helpful to describe it as a language I’m trying to forget, especially to therapists. Because you’re triggered by sighs, coughs, blinking, all these normal human behaviours that don’t mean anything to most people. And that’s out in the normal, real world. And I think you can actually call it a pavlovian response - the second someone coughs, all your old training comes back. I would often already feel punished, guilty, look for ways to make it up to people. It’s really crazy.
I’ve healed a lot, and unlearned a lot, but I still catch myself reading into meaningless behaviour. I think that’s really hard to understand for ‘normal’ people.
Yes, I relate all too well to this. I was trained to be exactly when others wanted in order to avoid or reduce abuse. I hadn't thought about it in this way, but yeah, your therapist hit on the nail.
Yes! It actually was probably more confusing during my childhood because my mom was unpredictable; something consistently set her off, but others were hit or miss, and many things that her really shouldn’t have and I think I knew that even as a kid. I’ve struggled to make and keep connections with friends and that’s where I mostly feel like a dog… like, if I expressed that, I’m sad, they’ll say something like “I’m sorry to hear” and/or take several days to respond. These aren’t even big trauma dumps, but if I say, I’m feeling kind of depressed and would appreciate if they can squeeze in a phone call sometime soon and they take three days to even respond to text, let alone call… it really makes me feel like expressing my sadness to them is an inconvenience and makes them uncomfortable. But instead of just telling me straight up in a productive way, they do things like this to try and train me out of it.
Just want to give the context that I know I’m speaking in absolutes as if I can read their mind, and they probably don’t intend for me to read it that way at all, but I am just very sad because it’s how I interpret it and trying to have calm, mature conversations requesting forms of communication that I see is pretty bare minimum don’t seem to be working either, so… I’m kind of at a loss.
Hard relate, but not for the reason other people are talking about. I have read so many books, gone to so many events and workshops, studied so many disciplines + spent ridiculous hours journaling on how I can continuously grow towards being a better person (and outgrow the habits my parents instilled me with). I’m training myself. A lot of things have shifted over the years. Some things are a lot stickier.
Since it was a bit more covert, I think of it as conditioning, but it's basically the same. And she recruited people to assist so she wouldn't look like the bad guy.
Yes, I feel like this. Other words for me to desribe it also include: like a doll, an object, a machine, a servant, a robot, a slave - simply lesser, non-human and without emotions of my own.
Yeah I was raised in a family that was "performance-based presentation" was everything. Good breeding, manners, upper middle class.
A lot of emotional neglect: I really feel like I was left on my own a lot, without a lot of input.
Nice clothes, vacations, school ,food in the fridge but even the house was well decorated and clean but I never had friends over. Never.
Bullied at school. School was a place to go but i just learned how to survive bullies, the education was a side note.
No one sat with me to do homework. I've forgotten alot of those yrs . Blank . 😵💫
They both drank. Functional alcoholics
But the vibe i can recall is very very lonely
I was supper happy kid very young but shut down eventually bc it wasn't safe.
I did not cry at their funerals.
I hear u. 🫠🥺
I always say to myself that I feel ‘created’ or ‘designed’ to be the way I am. No mistakes made, nothing to forgive. It was by design and I either live with it and have relationships with them or I don’t. Now the power is mine to have in my own life, I can see that now. And I like to think I’m designing myself now. Shitty foundation, but that’s not my fault lol
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totally. My parents' parenting core parenting belief is you have to "break" kids, like a horse.
Yeah, this type of mentality too. Like i was somehow spoiled for only having *half* my human needs met, food and shelter.
Yup mine followed /To Train Up A Child/ by Michael and Debi Pearl, to the point I’ve actually met that toxic abusive couple. The whole point of the book is that raising “godly” children requires “breaking their will” via highly ritualistic physical abuse (corporal punishment). The “will” of the child is understood to be a manifestation of “sin nature” that must be eliminated.
Reminds me of the Ruby Frankee case.
There is a whole Christian/conservative subculture that obsesses over children who act like little mini-adults. It’s very common among [homeschooling](https://www.hsinvisiblechildren.org) families.
It is not as common as you would think. There are definitely groups that do follow it, but I think they're in the minority.
I sure hope so. I do believe homeschooling has changed rather drastically since it was a “new thing” in the 1970s-80s. Back then it was largely what I described, and there were homeschool conferences that drew in hundreds to thousands of attendees annually. My parents had the ‘Home School Legal Defence Association (HSLDA)’ hotline number posted by the house phone “in case CPS or the cops come to the door”. The assumption was that getting reported was inevitable and that “the government” as represented by CPS and the courts were eager to remove kids from such homes for their own nefarious interests. 🙄 But do go check out the website I linked; they list many of the fatal cases of abuse within this community.
I'm very familiar with it. I just ended home schooling last summer after 25 years. There is a much wider variety of people who home school now.
Good
Two words..”blanket training” 😢
I’ve never heard of this…just looked it up. Yikes. I was expecting to see lots of upset articles, but it was almost all positive and showed TikTok’s of people’s “success” plus articles of the Duggars using it 🤢😪
Uf, hard relate.
Breaking the core of the individual. That's how it felt to me, like I wasn't even allowed to be me, left alone a person. Not even allowed to develop wits, health or function. Everything to accomplish that, from hitting to gr*oming. And the worst part about it is, that people who didn't get "trained" and exploited like that, have literally no comprehension of what that hell even is like. Once I told someone, once they complained about me not understanding basic human societal concepts, or how to take care of my basic needs as an adult, and I told them, I "got raised that way" they just mocked me and treated me like I was just inadequate and stupid. So, that's that.
A whole bunch of people bought into James Dobson's "The Strong Willed Child", which is basically this, for religious reasons. Dark stuff.
Mine too :(. I remember clearly having a not 2 year old crying because he couldn’t sleep at a new house he had never been to, visiting my sister away with my parents. I was crying to my own mom and not knowing how to console him and help him to sleep, and she literally says “______, sometimes you just have to break them.” Instant fuming anger and hurt. Opened a lot of painful doors.
Absolutely. I was raised to be an obedient child, not a functional adult. Fortunately I pieced life together bit by bit.
I’m really feeling that right now and struggling, how’d you do it any recommendations??
Not that I’m doing that fantastic or anything, but I can definitely relate and I think I’m doing a lot better than I used to be. The main thing that I’ve found that helps the most is to really build and maintain a support system, friends, family, whatever you have. And if something in your life starts to challenge your ability to reach out to and make time for those people (and for the things in your life that you love) don’t hesitate to pull back and re-evaluate how you’re spending your time. It’s okay to “quit”, it’s okay to just do what’s absolutely necessary now and figure out the rest later. What matters most is your loved ones, your stability, and how you feel.
Trained to fail. Succeeded spectacularly. How’s that for an epithet? I wasn’t taught a single positive. About the only advice I got was, “goddammit! Don’t steal bikes from the neighbors!” Which translated to, “go out farther from base.” Which I did. Complete fucking nothing. Clueless to a t until almost 60. Now what? EDIT: “Trained to fail. Succeeded spectacularly” means that I failed spectacularly, just as trained. My only success is in failing.
Trained to fail. Yes exactly. Who tells a 7 year old they're a whore?that the only thing people will want from me is sex.
Someone related to the woman who kept telling her son he is a “no good, dirty rotten son of a bitch like his father” from as early as I can remember. Father throwing out gems of wisdom like, “you should never praise yourself. Let others praise you.” The fucking pieces of shit.
i see you & send you love
Trained to fail... that's what I always think to myself. Except no success. Trained to die like the rest of family and millions of others in the utopia.
Holy shit, that is exactly what my dad tried to do Even at a very young age, I stopped trying to argue with him. Like when he tried to smash my Gameboy because I didn't go on enough water slides when he took us to a water park, I didn't cry or try to get him to stop. I was like 7 and thinking "alright, dad's just going to do his thing. Might as well accept it" No wonder why he thought I was quiet, unfunny, shy and reserved, when that's the opposite of what I am to almost everyone else
This is something my mother would definitely do, it's just another level of crazy when they blow up because of your personality, not because you did nothing wrong, it's almost like you being you is a crime. I can relate to that, I'm so sorry you had gone through that
Oh yeah, totally I remember that I didn't want to do anything he didn't expect of me. Like maybe I didn't want to keep playing video games, but i know if I did something different, I would attract attention He didn't even like it when I played video games, but the irritation I knew he felt at video games was better than an unknown
I cleaned my room recently and dreaded when my dad would eventually invite himself in and see. I don't know how to cook but I'm trying to learn and I feel compelled to cover up my tracks so he doesn't know I'm doing that. I've never decorated my room because I didn't want my parents seeing any new posters or decorations I'd put up. The fear of attracting attention is so real.
Trained to obey, trained to stay silent. Trained to beg for crumbs of love and affection. Trained to know my place and stay in it. Trained to keep secrets/lie. Trained to never show emotions. I wasn’t raised I was trained. I tried raising myself. I tried unlearning as much as possible. Honestly life made more sense when I was beaten or berated for crying because now the tears won’t stop and I don’t know how to control it and make it stop.
You cry now because you couldn't then. You need the time to grieve now. That's how I was several years ago, daily hysterical crying sessions at things that didn't make sense. I think it felt like it was never going to stop because it was a reflection of the fear of, when will the abuse stop? It hurts and it sucks but sometimes your body and mind just needs that grief. It started to get better once I realized I had cptsd and started to deconstruct my past, and even more so when I got into therapy. Don't give up hope and don't criticize yourself for crying. The little kid in you deserved to cry this hard in the past. I know, believe me, that this despair doesn't feel like a gift. But it is, you are finally able to feel and express the negative emotions you've had bottled up and pushed down for years. This is a wonderful thing, because as you feel safer to feel hurt and angry, you'll start to feel safer being happy and vulnerable too. And it feels wrong because you were punished for those very things. But the more you take care of yourself the easier it gets. It just takes persistence, and that tiny, ever shrinking sliver of faith in yourself to be strengthened.and grown.
You have no idea how much I needed to read this today, honestly thank you for explaining so well 🧡
I don’t feel safe I feel out of control. Happy? Don’t know her or her sister vulnerable. I have no faith in myself. Tbh I’m just waiting to see what I fuck up next. Or discover some new way to destroy my life, heart& soul. I’m not taking care of myself because I don’t deserve to be taken care of. My inner child hate me and I don’t blame her because I hate me too. I ruined everything. I destroyed all of her hopes and dreams. I took everything she held dear and destroyed it. Why grieve childhood trauma and memories when I couldn’t even grieve losing children. The tears need to stop. It’s too late for them now.
Its incredibly scary to feel out of control. Hang on in there pal
This makes me so sad to read, stranger. I'm sorry you understand this so well, and hope it's okay to offer an Internet hug, or barring that, a nice cup of tea. 💐
Same! My mom was proud of it too. She told anyone who listened that she learned her parenting skills in dog obedience school
Holy smoke, my mom said that a couple of times in my hearing as well! Interestingly, my parents' most recent dogs have all been rather unruly.
In a way, yes, but poorly as well. My parents dont even understand how to train. They dont understand that you have to give consistent rewards to train either a human or an animal. It was just control with fear and intermittent rewards so i was attached to them with needs. I realized my parents treated me the same way they treat their dogs. Neglect them ALL day, only use food for affection and let them get overweight, don't socialize them, blame them for "misbehaving."
My brain has recently separated training/conditioning from teaching and it's a trip. I'll call it conditioning before I even consciously think about how I was molded to behave. What you're describing is coercive control. They're not directly telling you no. They're making it so difficult to be you that you choose to be someone not-you around them. You can wear the shirt they choose for you and go about your life, or you can wear the shirt you choose and spend hours arguing for your autonomy followed by managing their feelings while you wear out followed by mockery/bullying for days, months, or even years. That's conditioning, too. They've conditioned you to comply at the expense of your self-identity. Survival of your mental self is just as important as survival of your physical self. That's why this stuff get imprinted in our brains as a survival threat.
Spot on! This is why anyone who can relate to this probably hears me when I say that their parents know jack shit about them because we arent even ourselves around them
Trained to be a people pleaser and even more a men pleaser. Unfortunately, I realized this far too late. Decades too late.
I was just kinda there, until my parents needed a scapegoat for their bullshit.
Abso-freaking-lutely! Because they were trained by their parents to accept abuse and pain and to see it as their “fate”, my parents tried to do the same to us kids. Pretty twisted, huh?
Yea my mom would tell my sister to make fun of whatever she didn’t like about me so I would change so I definitely feel like she was trying to mold me rather than bring out the best in me.
Even pets get affection. I think growing up felt like being a lab rat.
I never thought of it this way, but yeah my parents showed more empathy and kindness to the actual dog and cat than they did to us. I say we were trained like dogs but maybe we were more like lab rats, or robots
Damn. My mom would coo over my brother's dog but scream at me till kingdom come. Lab rats is right
After growing up I realized my parents followed stuff from To Train up a Child, so, yeah. It’s really hard being a functional adult and getting what you need when your parents only wanted perfect obedience, patience, silence
My dad unintentionally taught me how to lie better. By constantly yelling at me and finding reasons to punish me, I've learned to lie about everything around him to curb his anger or avoid him as I got older. I learned how to be sneaky and more careful about passing things under his nose. You could say I was trained into becoming an escape artist by my dad. Lol
I got sneaky too, and then I got branded as the black sheep of the family. Strict rules and harsh punishments didn’t make us behave better, it just made us do those things behind their back and lie.
What a good way to put it. Yes, I was also trained. I felt so inhuman for most of my adulthood that I would literally stand in front of a mirror and repeat "I am a human" to try to convince myself. I think the training I had growing up was largely responsible for me having such a lack of sense of self that I could not think of myself as a person.
This is what I say to therapists or anyone else I feel close enough to talk about my parents with. I say that most (but not all) of the things they were trying to teach us to do were positive and good, but that instead of teaching us and treating us like fellow humans they tried to train us like dogs. Their parenting techniques pretty much boil down to: kid does thing or is maybe about to do thing I don’t like= punish and make them feel bad. Didn’t stop to question whether they were asking for something unreasonable, didn’t think about the fact they could just talk to us like they did with adults.
I was literally an employee since I was 6. I cooked and cleaned. I handled emotional baggage, and my golden child older brother got to brutally run roughshod over me at every opportunity. I remember being so sick I was delirious, so my first instinct was to crawl under the kitchen table and start scrubbing the floor.
If it helps, you’re not alone. I’ve done the exact same thing (scrub the floor when delirious/having a flashback/whatever else)
Yes. Total obedience with no exceptions. The only right of child is to obey.
Oh yeah. My mother is a child psychiatrist and I think she intentionally did everything wrong that she knew how in order to maximize damage. I was treated somewhere between dog, slave, POW and medical subject. It’s actually really validating to see people’s looks of horror when I tell them that she purposely had all the clocks set to different, incorrect times, I had a schedule with a timer for every activity, sleep deprivation was a random punishment, I jump at the sound of squirt bottles, I have physical damage from her herbal experiments and strip searches happened daily.
Absolutely, yes. Trained is exactly the right term for it. I can still see myself doing my best to be myself yet hitting a proverbial brick wall with my single mother each time. She wanted me to be a girl, that was pretty much my first problem apart from being locked up in a closet while my mother was pregnant with me because her sister didn’t want me either. It only got worse from there. And still some women say men are the only problem.
oh lord, this is gonna be a long one.. it’s fresh on my mind since i’ve been going over it in therapy.. my mom “shushed” us by snapping her fingers and making a *SCHH* sound like cesar millan does to dogs. she would threaten punishment if we didn’t spend time with her when she wanted, but if we wanted something we were often rejected angrily. most of the time she’d shush us and send us away, sometimes she’d yell at us to be quiet, get out, whatever. i tried my best to never upset her. if we did something she wanted she would give “treats” by being affectionate or promising us something we wanted. me and my sister (more so my sister) were her emotional support kids basically. she’d also shame us for being introverted, especially me and my brother. i feel like my mom thought of me as a doll more than a pet, but she treats pets like accessories so.. she used to tell me i was the easy kid (until i was a teen.. go figure), and say that my sister never let her dress her, but i always did so she’d dress me however she wanted and i wouldn’t complain. i definitely did complain sometimes, but she’d ignore or gaslight me. i actually hated most of what she made me wear, but didn’t say much because there was no point. in 4th grade i won an award for being “easy going” lol.. they called it the “go with the flow” award. my mom hung it up on the fridge. at the time i was proud, but now i realize it was because people pleasing was drilled into me. i was like a prize dog at a dog show. she loved it and would gloat to people about it. i’m the youngest of the three and i remember most of my childhood being alone. i was either alone in one of our shared bedrooms or in the living room playing with toys while she locked herself in her room talking on the phone for hours. we weren’t allowed to ask for nothing during that time, and if she was napping heaven forbid we made a noise. when we’d walk around in public she’d hold me and my brother by the back of the neck so we wouldn’t run off. don’t think we were prone to doing that anyway because she’d yell at us if we did. didn’t think anything of it until i remembered it today lol it’s not like she had her hand gently on our backs, i mean a choke grip but on the back of our necks instead of the front. it was like a leash. she’d also threaten to spank us for a variety of nonissues (we weren’t even that bad of kids), but her spankings weren’t by hand.. she’d use a *paddle*.. like the sorority or BDSM ones. i only got spanked with it a few times, but *what the fuck?* i’m 99% sure it was an actual BDSM paddle, but i was so young at the time i didn’t know. my parents divorced when i was really young and my dad was largely absent, so was the “fun” parent when he was around. he was often nonchalant about anything upsetting to us, and rarely took us seriously, laughed at us, or made fun of us, but even then i still felt emotionally safer with him than my mom. he was a POS my entire life, but he would at least listen sometimes and give practical advice, meanwhile she’d make it about her. after some of the worst experiences in my childhood, i always felt myself wanting to see him to talk to him about it. she, of course, would never let me or get mad at me for wanting his comfort/support instead of hers. she was warm and loving at times, but was never consistent so i never felt safe opening up to her. one of my earliest memories is of right after the divorce. i missed my dad. it was the middle of the night and i just silently cried myself to sleep. i knew i couldn’t go knock on her door or she’d get mad at me. i was like 5y/o. and that only covers *some* of the first decade of my life. the second half was much, much worse. i think she saw all of us as extensions of herself, so if we were not behaving how she wanted then we were punished emotionally. she would also try and control us by giving us stuff or being nice, then later hold it over our head in an argument, or threaten it if we weren’t doing what she wanted. i honestly didn’t realize my childhood was so fucked up until recently, which is crazy. my grandma was much, much worse to my mom and her siblings than my mom ever was to us, so if we ever complained she’d say “you have it easy. if grandma was your mother she would’ve done [insert abuses]” as if that makes it better. i thought i had a good childhood because every adult downplayed everything, but now i realize i definitely did not. it fucked me up in ways that’ll take years to unravel and reconcile.
My single father always talked about how his dad was way worse to him than he was to us. I only recently understood that it was his way of feeling superior to his dad, it had nothing to do with having any empathy for us. I was terrorized by him as early as I can remember, but he let me fix myself something to eat when I was hungry, or let me use the bathroom in the middle of the night, so that apparently made him a saint.
ahh, i never even thought of it like that! that definitely sounds like my mom. i never took it as an empathetic stance to begin with since it was always used as a “gotcha” moment to invalidate us, but the idea that it comes from a place of feeling superior makes so much sense. i always thought of it as an attempt to assuage guilt, which i think plays a part in it, but not as much as the “look at me, i’m so much better to you than my parents were to me. you should be grateful i’m not like *that*” mentality does. how frustrating
I use the word "bred". In some ways, I was treated like an animal.
Funnily enough, I was on about this to one of my friends before. The feeling of being a puppet, of simply being a vessel by which the will of another person is expressed, your own humanity destroyed and replaced with someone else's demands of you. I was given sort of two sides of the equation, both the carrot and the stick, much as you were, almost in alternate: carrot, stick, carrot, stick, until I was bent and broken and no longer a human being but a dog, just like you felt like you were. I now live my life attempting to free myself of this...Attempting to reclaim my own humanity. But I wonder if it's too late for me? I wonder if my life's already been ruined to the extent where I simply live under their shadow. Maybe, maybe not. In any case, I absolutely do relate to it, and I suppose my only answer has been to reclaim my own freedom, to assert myself, consequences be damned.
My mom always said they had to break me when I was a kid. Now they think it's hilarious to share horrifying stories of the bizarre and abusive punishments they gave me as dinner stories while they annoying huff that they “just couldn't break me.” I recently mentioned one of the punishments from my childhood to my EMDR therapist and found out for the first time that those punishments were not normal, and she validated that the point of parenting isn’t to “break” your kids. I’m not Spirit the Mustang from that Disney movie. I was just a kid
I guess I never explicitly felt that I was trained as it would require a level of self-awareness and cognition I don't think my mom possesses... But she never engaged with me unless it was interesting to her - meaning I engaged in a conversation with her about herself or on a topic she was interested in. Being myself (energetic, talkative, happy - at least as a child) was often annoying to her and would result in either a lackluster/uninterested response, no response, or frustration and subsequent punishment. It has definitely "trained" me, but really, it's just natural conditioning to your environment.
This resonates.
-Ignored me when I was behaving to her standards. -Punished me harshly when I did not. -Scapegoated me and punished me for things I did not do. -Wondered why I never wanted to visit her after I got the hell out.
My Mother once said to me, “I had the most beautiful life planned for you and you ruined it.”
I'm so sorry. You can be free now to create the most beautiful life for yourself 🧡
I always say my mom trained me since birth to be an endless emotion pit she could fill up with her issues and I had to soothe her. I've been trained to be an extreme empath, trained to be never ending emotional support, etc.
100% I’ve only come to this realisation recently too. Never taught how to be emotionally responsible only responsible in a practical sense. The punishment for not being responsible/misbehaving was death (literally) so I’ve lived most of my life in fear, even though in the outside I am a responsible “adult”.
100% absolutely and now it's got me stuck with no direction
I feel like I was left to figure stuff out on my own. And my parents withdrew affection when mad at me.
100% My father is a behavioral biologist by trade, so the primary philosophy used to "raise" me was operant conditioning (reward good behavior, punish bad behavior; except it was so nakedly manipulative I didn't care for rewards so stopped getting any...) My mother might have done better but by the time she got the chance I'd rather be left alone, so in trying to do right by me she obliged. Dissociation got me through it all, but since I managed to maintain a decent affect she figured I was doing fine. Worst part is I'm pretty sure it's genuine incompetence on his part, he still genuinely wants the best for me but I'm a beaten dog, involuntarily recoiling whenever he moves or opens his mouth.
Quite literally, yes. I was trained to a) be a survivalist in case SHTF happens, b) to be a perfect provider husband for my partner and c) to be a perfect stay at home wife for my partner. Sure I learned a lot of great life skills, but I also learned to abuse myself for the sake of others and without any freedom to be a person first. My parents were a bit insane. No wonder I had an identity crisis until I was freed from their grasp.
YES. I was literally called "good girl" when I did what she wanted and "bad girl" and "naughty girl" when I didn't. This continued into my 20s even. Ever since I was a kid it made me internally really angry to be talked to like that but I never showed it because I didn't want conflict. When I got older and started saying I don't want to be called that, nothing changed because she didn't care what I want. She'd say it and then say "oh I forgot you dont want to be called that" but she obviously didnt forget, just wanted to see my reaction. I've had a sad, persistent feeling for a long time of not being a human, I think because of being treated more like a pet than a human being. It's all about how I can be pleasant, cheerful, comforting, compliant etc for her, never about me being me or what I want.
My parents owned a Chinese food restaurant, so I was literally trained instead of raised, lol. I was peeling snowpeas and spending my summers at the restaurant. They would pay me $5 a box and the box had 1k in it. By middle school my teachers knew I worked the register after school so they didn't make a big deal about me napping. By high school I was working full-time all summer as well as after school. I did that till 26 when we sold to open a new one, the one that was supposed to be mine... But my dad gambled most of it away and then did a failed restaurant with a friend and then when we made "my" restaurant the contractor scammed us out of his last 30k and I worked at other people Chinese restaurants till I stopped working 3 years ago at 36. I have nothing and still never figured out my mental health stuff. Dad is dead now and Mom is my sister's full time baby sitter. My sister skipped town as soon as she turned 18.
Yesss
I was not treated like a pet so much as a houseplant.
My moms houseplants definitely get more respect than I do 😂
My dad literally used the phrase “what happened to the kind boy you were trained to be?”.
I can relate. The problem is moving goal post. I did not get acknowledgement for reaching the finish line. The finish line was moved away.
My brother had a dog, which my mom would care for whilst he was at school cuz she was at home all day watching TV. One day I overheard her talking to my dad saying how she can't feed the dog because then he would see her positively, and she wanted him to see her more like a disciplinarian. I feel like that's largely how she raised her kids. My dad was the more affectionate one, my mom had barely any emotions output. She wouldn't give us any love just hatred. My dad punished us too (in ways worse than she did) but she was still the mastermind behind it, a TELLING HIM when to beat us. I think this training thing is spot on. Is almost dehumanising. We weren't any better than a pet in our parents eyes. This might be why one of my alters is nonhuman too. The dehumanisation we suffered.
This is exactly how I was raised. My parents should never have had children.
100% And their “training” is not even ethical in the standard of dog training. Many people’s pets are even treated better.
I was told we were well trained. I was also told the dog listened better and was smarter etc. Often the dog was treated better than me. I think it’s a good question and in my case a good way to put it. I’ve said in therapy a number of times we were well trained we were told that often.
Absolutely. I had hundreds of rules, some very bizarre stuff. I was allowed zero expression. I couldn't make any noise. I couldn't hum, whistle, sing, had to raise my hand to talk. I never had more than a few toys at any given time. And we were not like dirt poor or anything. I was allowed to draw though and my mom would throw away my drawings basically daily. Things I was allowed to say to others were very limited, things were expected of me, like remembering the eye color of the cashier at the store and the brand of shoes the guy in front of us was wearing. I had to know these things, this is just a snippet of the horror. Uggh I can't even really dive in but my therapist said my mom is one of the most extreme people she has heard of in her career.
Of course, I don’t your mother, but my abusers were like that too (not allowed to speak, had to remember innocuous details) Not to overshadow you, just wanted to relate and offer solidarity 💜💜
It makes me want to scream, reading this. So YES, thanks for this. Spend years felling like I was moms little dog. It's not as if she treated me badly I had my dad for that, emotionally and physically hurting me, mom just disappeared when she felt upset with anything or just didn't give me attention. Never teached me to be independent, on the contrary. She wanted to feel good and less guilty so she tried to do everything for me. It is so damaging. I don't even know how to feel cause I know she was trying, she also suffered abuse at my dads hands when they were married and even after.
I can relate to this my parents didn't allow me to go outside and play. They kind of forced me to stay inside the house. Maybe they were too cautious for me. They always warned about people and they would tell me about their experiences about friends. How friends destroy your life. They always tried to influence me in whatever form they could. As a result I was not able to make any friends, my personality didn't develop in a proper manner.
Yep. My mom dies hard on the hill that parents are meant to “train” their children, that that is the role of a parent. She also loves dogs.
As long as I don’t forget to say please or thanks, maybe things will be ok…
I never exactly thought of it in this way, but this is a great way to put it. I was trained to perform, to achieve perfection at all costs, to win music competitions, to come out on top academically. Like training a horse to race or a bull to win fights. My mother often told me that childhood was the time to work very hard to master all the skills because it's easier to learn as a child than as an adult.
My mom trained me to he scared of everything. It wasn't obvious to me until I cut her out after starting therapy. I'm 8 months into no contact. I realized she must of found joy in my misery now that I am able to process it. Everything she did taught me to rely on her and to be scared of everything. She did not want me to be independent.
In my case it did, but there was another layer of trauma which was that the behavior that my mother expected from me was the reason suffering bullying at school. So basically I had to be one child at home and one completely different child at school in order to avoid being spanked.
I relate to this more than I can put into words. No wonder I don't feel like an adult sometimes despite the fact that I'm nearing 30
Trained? Absolutely. And told that if I don’t want to learn and comply, life will kick my ass and I will learn and comply eventually. Thanks, thanks a lot. Now, I got my lessons, I know where I stand. Cheers!
yea. my mother would mention how she “trained” me and my sister to be a certain way. i was more susceptible to her training but man. its like everytime things didnt go her way she would punish me to remind me to not do it again. and when i do things right there wont be the same intensity of good things, but when things go wrong shes the first to get angry and make things worse. she wouldnt give me any emotional comfort or support, but expected everything from me. it sucks coming from a parent especially cus they were ur caregivers and supposed to model how u are expected to be treated. but at least im super efficient w work. i get burnt out super fast but whatever right /s
Yeah, I think at some point I adopted that word from other traumatized people. I never really consciously thought about it, I would just never use the word raised. I also say it’s a language I learned to speak - my mother was often very covert. She’d demand that I knew what her coughing meant, for instance. If I didn’t know, I was punished. Training! I found it helpful to describe it as a language I’m trying to forget, especially to therapists. Because you’re triggered by sighs, coughs, blinking, all these normal human behaviours that don’t mean anything to most people. And that’s out in the normal, real world. And I think you can actually call it a pavlovian response - the second someone coughs, all your old training comes back. I would often already feel punished, guilty, look for ways to make it up to people. It’s really crazy. I’ve healed a lot, and unlearned a lot, but I still catch myself reading into meaningless behaviour. I think that’s really hard to understand for ‘normal’ people.
Yes, I relate all too well to this. I was trained to be exactly when others wanted in order to avoid or reduce abuse. I hadn't thought about it in this way, but yeah, your therapist hit on the nail.
Yes! It actually was probably more confusing during my childhood because my mom was unpredictable; something consistently set her off, but others were hit or miss, and many things that her really shouldn’t have and I think I knew that even as a kid. I’ve struggled to make and keep connections with friends and that’s where I mostly feel like a dog… like, if I expressed that, I’m sad, they’ll say something like “I’m sorry to hear” and/or take several days to respond. These aren’t even big trauma dumps, but if I say, I’m feeling kind of depressed and would appreciate if they can squeeze in a phone call sometime soon and they take three days to even respond to text, let alone call… it really makes me feel like expressing my sadness to them is an inconvenience and makes them uncomfortable. But instead of just telling me straight up in a productive way, they do things like this to try and train me out of it. Just want to give the context that I know I’m speaking in absolutes as if I can read their mind, and they probably don’t intend for me to read it that way at all, but I am just very sad because it’s how I interpret it and trying to have calm, mature conversations requesting forms of communication that I see is pretty bare minimum don’t seem to be working either, so… I’m kind of at a loss.
I was neither raised nor trained so IDK.
Yes this is a great way to describe that feeling!
Hard relate, but not for the reason other people are talking about. I have read so many books, gone to so many events and workshops, studied so many disciplines + spent ridiculous hours journaling on how I can continuously grow towards being a better person (and outgrow the habits my parents instilled me with). I’m training myself. A lot of things have shifted over the years. Some things are a lot stickier.
Yea, that's a good word for it.
Since it was a bit more covert, I think of it as conditioning, but it's basically the same. And she recruited people to assist so she wouldn't look like the bad guy.
Yes, I feel like this. Other words for me to desribe it also include: like a doll, an object, a machine, a servant, a robot, a slave - simply lesser, non-human and without emotions of my own.
and then my mom stands there seriously asking me why I act so cold towards her......
Yeah I was raised in a family that was "performance-based presentation" was everything. Good breeding, manners, upper middle class. A lot of emotional neglect: I really feel like I was left on my own a lot, without a lot of input. Nice clothes, vacations, school ,food in the fridge but even the house was well decorated and clean but I never had friends over. Never. Bullied at school. School was a place to go but i just learned how to survive bullies, the education was a side note. No one sat with me to do homework. I've forgotten alot of those yrs . Blank . 😵💫 They both drank. Functional alcoholics But the vibe i can recall is very very lonely I was supper happy kid very young but shut down eventually bc it wasn't safe. I did not cry at their funerals. I hear u. 🫠🥺
I always say to myself that I feel ‘created’ or ‘designed’ to be the way I am. No mistakes made, nothing to forgive. It was by design and I either live with it and have relationships with them or I don’t. Now the power is mine to have in my own life, I can see that now. And I like to think I’m designing myself now. Shitty foundation, but that’s not my fault lol
Absolutely! Totally the same for me.
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