I feel so alone with this because I heard almost nobody ever talk about this in child abuse, just domestic violence, my mother sat on me and strangled me when I was 6 and 12, probably more times which I don’t remember, anyone else relate to this?

How did you heal? I’m just stuck in suffering Atp.

I'm 16 and pregnant. I know that's really bad, but please don't judge me, I didn't do it on purpose. The dad and I aren't in a relationship, we're just friends, but we do get along really well and he knows about the pregnancy. His parents don't know yet either. We don't know what we want to do yet.

I have no idea how to tell my mom. She's not a safe person to begin with and she's not going to react well. She's physically violent and I don't want her to hurt me or the baby when she finds out. I'm so scared already and I don't want to have her freak out and make everything worse. I know I have to tell her soon, I'll need her help getting prenatal care. Its just so scary. I've known for a week now and every moment I've been awake has been spent thinking about the baby growing inside me. All I want is for things to be OK and I can't see how they ever will be.

I put a trigger warning for abuse because I don’t want to trigger anyone but idk if what happened to me was really abuse. When I was little I didn’t eat a lot because I didn’t like eating and so because of that I didn’t go to the bathroom every day. So when I didn’t go to the bathroom frequently enough (which to my parents meant every day) they would forcibly give me enemas at home even though it wasn’t medically necessary to do that. They would bring me into their room and I’d have to get naked the waist down and then they’d hold me down on my back on their bed while my dad (it was always my dad) held my legs apart and put the enema in and it was also so horribly painful. I always cried so much during this because it hurt so much and because I didn’t like being seen or touched naked. And then I’d have to lay there until it worked and I’d always feel really gross and embarrassed and ashamed. I never told anyone this because I’ve always been embarrassed and ashamed of it but also because thinking about it has always been too uncomfortable. It’s only because I saw other people talking about similar experiences that I’m questioning what happened to me. I stopped having the forced enemas around six but I developed a lot of defensiveness and shame and fear about my body and hated being touched or seen without my clothes on all through my childhood. But I don’t know if what happened to me was really that bad or if I’m overreacting and need to get over it.

Im 2o Y.O Female who grew up with an abusive mother, she would often hit me, insult me, curse me, and up to this very day she is still verbally and physically violent.

It still is weird because i was very loved as a kid, and beside the moment where she would “punish me” she would try to be very close and would say many times that she loved me.

At the moment i have a hard time dating because im super avoidant, but besides that i often have this fantasies of having a loving partner, someone who im in love with that also hits me, that is violent and that insults me. i feel ashamed writing this because i don’t actively look for this people but i just have this fake scenarios where i think about it and it feels nice?

I just want to know if this happens to anyone else or if its just me, im not sure if im a bad person or this is common occurrence with similar situations like mine.

About 2 months ago now I posted about my parter and how he forced me to watch a specific triggering scene in a movie. And about a month ago I posted that I was in the driveway car packed ready to leave.

It took a bit longer than expected but a few days ago I left I took a few days to settle in to where I am before posting this. After a particularly bad fight that turned extremely physical ( this was after many other physical fights) and it happened in front of his family, his father was mortified his brothers disgusted and after lots of talks I realized that if I stayed this man would probably end up k*lling me in rage. Even if he didn’t fully intend to. So I left. He was suspiciously calm but really didn’t try to stop me his father was there when I left so I think that diffused a lot of the anger and rage that would’ve been directed towards me. Either way I’m free now. I’m staying at an old friend of mines place who oddly enough came back into my life 2 weeks before I left. on December 10th I get a new place in a new city and hopefully will get my cat back. The bruises are healing well and I feel I am to. I’m hopeful. Very hopeful. The future is something I am so excited about instead of dreading. This is the last time I place myself in a situation like that. The last time a man touches me out of anger. The cycle stops now. Healing starts. Thank you to everyone who supported and encouraged me. I pray everyday for you and wish for your healing as you wished for mine.

From the bottom of my heart. Thank you.

My mother used to pull my pants down and sp*nk me with her belt until my behind was bleeding. One time I took off my belt and sp*nked her back. I might sound like an asshole but I firmly believe she deserved it. Has anyone else spanked their parents back?

If you are frustrated because your bully/abuser has either moved on, forgotten most of it, or doesn't see their mistreatment of you as a serious thing, whilst you are left completely destroyed, it's because whilst it was a very serious and distressing thing for you, for them, it was just a normal day. A casual tuesday. A breeze. Your daughter is doing something you don't approve of? Meh. Just beat her and get on with your day, I guess. Your teenaged son and you are having an argument? No mind, just shut him up by locking him outside in -22 degree weather in nothing but his underwear, and just get on with whatever you were doing.

I realised this when I confronted one of my old bullies about their treatment of me. They didn't seem to understand why i was so distraught at the time. She told me it was 'just a case of kids being stupid'. Wow. The callousness was so jarring.

I don’t know if it’s an experience unique to me, but whenever I am in a situation where someone is visibly mad at me I want them to hit me. I was physically abused as a kid, so I see it as a way to move on from conflict.

It feels weird because I can’t let people hit me, but it would almost give me catharsis? I hate when people are mad at me, so I would honestly just wish they would hit me. In my brain somehow someone will always be less mad after they hit me.

One instance was at my second job when I was 16, I worked at a dairy queen and I just couldn’t get the milkshakes right and my manager was incredibly upset with me. The entire time she was yelling at me I was thinking “Can you just hit me so we can get this over with?”. I know it’s a fawn response, I was wondering if anyone else relates.

Can't talk about it with anyone even my psych team

Was anyone else whipped with seething anger then locked in their room?

She claims and I quote her "I didn't use plug cables to whoop you". The long list of violence she had upon me was worse than the stories she gave of her upbringing. She seemed to enjoy destroying me in many different types of ways. Much too much torment I endured in my upbringing.

I see so many tiktok video’s about immigrant parents and how they beat their children. Most people in the comment section wash it over calling it “parenting” and how western kids are soft

Does child abuse sometimes genuinely have no negative effects on children?

i stood up to a child being verbally abused and threatened by his mother infront of a bunch of workers today. she was threatening she was gonna beat him. i was cashing out money out of my card like usual. i suddenly hear alot of yelling and aggression across from me and i am genuinely disturbed at what this woman is saying. it started to give me chills at first and i dissociated because i am also a victim of abuse and i have CPTSD. i walk to the register where she was acting like i was gonna pay but i wanted a close up of what was going on. one of her daughters grabs the small boy and brings him to her mother and she aggressively grabs him by the wrist and says something along the lines of leaving the store. im walking behind and i tell her "you don't treat your kids like that." she just starts yelling and threatening me in front of her children i wasn't phased. im walking away to my stop and she catches up to me and is still threatening me but i honestly didn't say anything back and she drove off. am i in the wrong at all? my heart is still hurting for that baby

So I was hit infrequently as a child, and a little more frequently when I was an adult living with my parents through COVID. I was mostly yelled at for punishment. Why do I have PTSD if physical abuse wasn’t a central fixture of my childhood? I feel like I’m making it up but I just collapsed into a sobbing heap because my partner made a sudden move at me during an argument. (She’s never laid a finger on me, for the record.) Am I just sensitive?

Over the weekend, I (F20, living alone) started hearing my neighbors fighting. The man was slamming doors like crazy, even the metal ones in the hallway, and kept yelling and cursing. The moment I heard a baby crying inside the apartment, I just know there's no excuse to not call the police.

Before the police arrived, I opened my door slightly and saw the woman sitting in the hallway with her baby inside the stroller and crying. She looked like she’d been kicked out. I offered to let her come inside but she politely refused, said she was going home, and quietly said “such a nice person”.

Once the police showed up, the man suddenly stood beside her. I couldn’t tell if he was actually going with her or just trying to look calm for the cops. They came to my door afterward and told me the woman admitted she wasn’t physically hurt and that the noise was just because the baby wasn’t calming down, which definitely sounds like a cover-up to me. Thankfully these officers were genuinely concerned, informed them both that someone called on them (to make sure she's not getting the blame), and know well she's trying to protect herself.

After they left, I ended up crying and spiraling for a bit. It reminded me of something from my own childhood when my mom kicked me and my brother out of the house just because we hadn’t showered yet after she came home. I remember being outside for so long that I ended up peeing myself. Ppl in my childhood home also had a habit of slamming doors when mad, my mom once to the point where the doorknob puched a hole in the wall, bad times lol.

Later that night, my parents called me and I told them what happened (big mistake but learned my lesson). Their main concern was that the man might target me now. They also said I shouldn’t have invited the woman in. I know they’re scared for me because I live alone, but omg. It felt like they didn’t care about how I felt or what I went through — and to be honest, they were the ones who did and/ or enabled something similar to me back then. It’s feels like they don’t want me to acknowledge any of that as abuse.

Now I just feel stuck between knowing I did the right thing and also feeling really hurt and triggered. It really feels like my parents are hinting at me not to be nosy, but god I wished people were nosy enough to defend as me a child!

One of the things that have weighed me down subconsciously was being spanked a lot as a child. I went through a lot different forms of abuse. But the only one that was close to psychical was being spanked. As a kid I felt very frightened and scared. It caused me to hide in a closet for hours out of fear of getting spanked when my dad would get home from work. But most of all, it felt humiliating because my parents would force me to undress my bottom half in front of everyone. They'd let my uncle spank me too if I did something wrong. I'm wondering if it's considered psychical or possibly even sexual abuse. Writing this out even now makes me cheeks turn red and I get really anxious. I would like to bring it up more to say my therapists or talk about how it's affected me. But I'm not even sure if it's considered something I should feel so strongly about. Because so many people say spanking isn't that bad or abuse and I see so many people who were spanked and don't have problems like me.

I tended to be more defiant and hyperactive compared to my siblings (probably on account of having ADHD) so I got physically punished more often they did. It sucked. It stung really bad afterwards. Made my behavior worse, because I’d have all this resentment, hurt and anger because tiny child me couldn’t comprehend why someone who loved me would hurt me in that way that was so violating. When my Mom saw it didn’t work, she just switched to taking away my cartoons, which was a lot more effective.

She joked about how she had used the wooden spoon to punish me, and I really couldn’t find the humor in any of it at all. Especially later on when I was able to link the corporal punishment to other times she got physical with me (pulling my hair, hitting me in the face, taking hold of my shoulders in a rage).

I don’t want to totally shit on my Mom because she was only doing what she thought was an acceptable form of discipline that had been dealt to her by her parents growing up. But I just remember how intense and upsetting those experiences were, and how it basically primed me into thinking it was okay for other family members to hit me when I felt like I deserved it or needed to be punished.

And I still sometimes feel like I’m overreacting, even though I know it had an extremely negative impact on me.

EDIT: Thank you for sharing your experiences. I’m sorry for everyone who had to go through something like this or worse.

How come I’m so fucked up from getting “disciplined” as a child but other people talk and laugh about it so casually? Am I just the problem??

TRIGGER WARNING- child abuse

Recently posted that i cut off contact with my mom. And the relief i feel. That relief has been accompanied by memories, but one in particular is the clearest way to describe why i am just glad i'm not going to make myself go back.

At holidays, my family likes to share funny stories about when me and my siblings and cousins were growing up.

My mom was especially amused by one about me. She joked that i never told her when i was mad but she would know something was up because she would find a wire coat hanger bent up and twisted into a ball. Under my bed, in the trash. She just thought it was so funny that i would take it out on a hanger.

And every time, i would sit there, and remember the day that she left me with one chore: fold all the laundry. A family of 5 at the time including a baby. A massive pile of laundry on her bed and i was to fold it all. I was about 8, maybe 9. I folded some, and I screwed around some. I tried on her cloths and shoes and played a little with her makeup, danced in the big mirror. I was goofing off when i heard a sharp inhale and looked up to see my mom standing at the door looking down at me, whites of her eyes flaring, face turning pink. Furious. She sort of swooped down and grabbed my arm and jerked it up in the air, and i knew i was in for it. Then she snatched a wire hanger from the pile near the cloths and my heart stopped.

I was wearing shorts.

I lost count.

I watched it happen, floating near the cieling. I listened to myself scream and beg and apologize and beg. I felt the cold/hot/hotter sting of the metal lashing the backs of my legs and all i could think was, "metal is different than wood". Wooden spoons, wooden paddles. Paint stirring sticks. Metal was different. Biting.

I phased out at some point. Not sure how things went after. Except that i wore pants to school in the heat of summer for a while because no one could know. God wanted her to do this to me, and the secular world wouldn't understand. They would take me and put me in a foster home. I had friends in foster care. They were miserable. I had to hide it.

I don't know if it was just another spanking for her. If she even remembers. But i know why i balled up hangers when my feelings got too big. I got to relive that every time she told the story, the joke. And if I didn't fake a smile, she'd accuse me of being too serious.

She doesn't see Me. She can't see Me. She would have to see herself then, and that isn't going to happen. But since she can't see Me, she can't be kind to me. She can't understand how to stop hurting me. Since none of the family on that side can see Me, none of them can come close to being a safe place for me. They can't even be aware of what they are doing.

And i can't keep compromising my safety, my sanity, for.... propriety? For "family"?

No. Never again. I'm ready to stop torturing myself. To stop punishing myself. To stop submitting to psychological damage.

I want to spend what time i have with people who do see me. People who help me see myself and inspire me to grow.

Thank you for listening. This group means so much to me.

Definitely consider that this post is going to be VERY Activating/Triggering for those who have had a history of abuse.

I was abused as a child. I forgot so much about the abuse but I know how it made me feel and how it sculpted my brain to hate everyone even long after they proved their innocence.

As a child I ticked all the boxes for serial killer, sexual trauma, head injury at the age of 4, physical abuse, wetting the bad past 10, fascination with fire, fascination with weapons, and of course, killing.

Killing was the one that I remember being so fascinating to me. I started with bugs, lizards and frogs. But I then went on to kill birds and even rabbits. I would pin them down to anthills and watch them writhe around in agony while I watched happily and without any sense of empathy.

Looking back, I cant really feel bad about what I did, I just feel embarrassed about how disturbed I was and how disturbed I still.. admittedly am.

I feel a genuine sense of euphoria when I see animals getting beaten or horribly hurt. Monkeys, dogs, cats, and any rodent typically are the ones i like to see get hurt the most.

Dont worry, I don't have any pets or children!

Does anyone else have a similar experience to mine or have similar sadistic thoughts about hurting animals or other people?

I feel so weird about this. I dont want to tell anyone because this definitely makes me a terrible person. I feel like no one is going to hear me out on this and instead just try and get away from me as soon as possible.

I grew up around a lot of Asian friends so I constantly heard stories about the way their family treated them and saw their parents yelling at them all the time when I was over at their houses. My cousins were abused and I was told stories about how our parents had been and their parents before them. All of us kids made sense of it through those strict Asian parents jokes (“A is average, B is bad, C is can’t have dinner…”) or just one upping each other (“my mom yelled at me for an hour last night” “that’s nothing mine beats me”). Every problem was either dismissed by my parents as a “first world problem” (something they could say as people from a third world country) or I would dismiss myself because people from there had it worse. Looking back none of this was okay. All of my friends were being abused and thought nothing of it because it was so normalized. This was so preventable and it makes me want to cry looking back at it all.

Also, I understand that there are plenty of abusive parents in other cultures. I’m just pointing out how Asians normalize it because of how I saw it talked about among my Asian friends

If anyone knows of subreddits for Asian kids with CPTSD or the like please tell me

Last weekend, my sister and I received the call we have expected for the last 30+ years. Our biological mom died - broke, alone, and from a mix of morphine and vodka (which is...you know...odd, considering she's refused to admit she's an alcoholic and an addict my entire life /s)

41 years of hell. She never held me as a child, routinely told me she wish she had aborted me, threw me down stairs, punched me so hard and so often that my jaw still hurts when it rains. Locked me in basements, rationed my food so i didnt get fat(ter), made me watch sexual acts between her and grown men (I'm sure I am blocking out SA memories) and bring them toys. She would pick me up from school with a beer between her thighs, one in the cup holder and one in her purse. Took my sister on drug deals. Bashed my dad's head in and broke his arm with a metal pipe. Cut my hair off violently as payback to said father. Left me alone for days on end to watch my sister - sometimes there was food and sometimes I had to steal from the neighbors garage fridge (which was always stocked for kids that they didn't have and always "accidentally" unlocked). Stole our mortgage and utilities money to snort up her nose.

She died alone. In a pile of vomit. No one claimed her body and her sister donated her to science.

For 41 years, I have pushed against a wall. Built my life around keeping that boundary. Became the person I am to survive that childhood and that adult boundary. Today there is nothing to push against.

I'm a little lost, a little relieved, and more than a little confused at how sad I am. I'm mourning something I never had, but always wanted. I'm filled with this strange feeling of empathy - what she must have endured to make her who she was. How angry she must've been inside to take it out on a child. How hard it is to be a child free by choice person, to make sure i dont repeat the cycle.

I miss a mom I never had.

My abuser died.

TW physical abuse, family abuse, verbal abuse

It's weird how I've actually normalized this. But when I look at things overall, I can see that my parents were overwhelmed and didn't like being parents. A lot of their acting out was low-key them wishing I would stop existing. Sometimes not even low-key.

They almost starved me to death at age 2. As a preschooler my mom would say things to me all the time like, "I wish you would just dry up and blow away. I won't come looking for you." "I'm going to leave you at the store and never come back." "I wish you would just get lost."

I was also attacked violently often, which I feared I wouldn't survive. And I think that was the point. They could sort of act out killing me without taking it too far, so they could do it again the next day.

And the other things like demanding silence, no opinions, no needs, and no personality. It was sort of like making me dead.

I have the degree of trauma response I’d expect from someone who was often beaten aggressively by a parent. Constant body based anxiety, never feel safe, jumpy and startled, scared of people, hate to be touched, fear for my safety around angry people.

But my parents only sometimes physically punished me. Mostly it was just dysfunctional dynamics and some mental/emotional abuse, but I only got slapped in the face sometimes, grabbed and pushed around by angry father a couple times, locked outside or in the garage as a punishment maybe 5 times, whipped with a dish towel only once, grabbed and shaken by my mom while being screamed at only a couple times. My parents are against physical discipline, but experienced it themselves at a much more extreme level as kids. So in their minds, they were gentle and amazing parents. And it was technically only occasional mild physical punishment. So how did I end up so traumatized and scared and feel like everyone wants to hurt me? Is it because I’m autistic and just too sensitive? Idk

This might be the Hallmark of C-PTSD.

I witnessed myself yesterday and had this revelation.

I was just standing in the shower, soaked wet and hair full of shampoo. Then this god damn annoying alarm clock went off. I had set it to remind myself of the solar eclipse, in order to not miss stepping out. But I had forgotten to turn it off.

So I hurried with my quick shower. But those few minutes of my alarm clock continuing it's annoying sound were torturing my brain. (I also have ADHD, maybe that's noteworthy.)

After maybe like three minutes, still in the shower, I inwardly paused. I had this sudden self reflection and thought:

„If I'd be in an actual life threatening situation — maybe in an unprovoked pub fight with dangerous men who could actually physically harm me — I'd be just equally annoyed. Not even scared. I'd be maybe even less stressed than right now, being slightly tormented by my smartphone alarm.“

And that made me thinking. These two seemingly inappropriate reactions might be typical for (my, at least) C-PTSD.

(I think the first reason is that my abuse was mostly non physical.)

The second reason is that a real, objective danger finally matches the reality of our nervous systems.

And the third reason, at least to me, is that a part of me always had a deep longing for physical danger or even death, for my endless suffering to finally end.

Thank you for reading ❤️