I Am A Victim of Abuse (TW)

I have been subjected to varying degrees of�abuse for nearly 20 years and I am currently going the difficult stages of reprogramming myself to be a strong and independent young adult. Most of this abuse has been conducted by my mother, and much of it has been blamed on my sexuality. I have been openly lesbian for only four years but in that time, rather than improve our relationship, as I have tried so many times to achieve, my mother has contributed to an increase in distance, to the point that we barely speak.�

I came out in my second year of my bachelors degree and because I was so scared of my mother I decided to try and break the news over the phone. My mother has always been a very strong-minded individual subject to shouting and throwing tantrums if things don't go the way she wanted them to. She adopted me when I was 18 months old and from that moment had tried to plan out my entire life the way she would have liked it, that is, get an education, work hard, meet a nice young man, get married and so on. When she found out that I was lesbian, she slammed the phone down and refused to speak to me for a month which only fortified�my fears of how she would react. She had done this to me before on many ocassions; the silent treatment really upset me because as a child, being ignored is one of the hardest things to deal with.�

In an effort to regain some common ground between us, I would visit her and my father at least 3 weekends a month to spend quality time with them and make amends. In that time she would pretend that nothing had happened. When she wished to speak about it, it wouldn't take long for her to raise her voice, and in the long-run�things deteriorated. She started to say things such as "I could kill you and bury you in the fields behind the house. Nobody would know any better. I'd say you'd run off..." and "you are a serpent". Then one day, things spiraled fast, and she was shouting at my dad to kill me. He refused. She then chased me upstairs and proceeded to hit and scratch me, pulling my hair and shouting. I grabbed her arms, and pinned her down, trying to stop her from attacking me, at which point she screamed for my dad to come up and restrain me. He dragged me out of the house by my neck. This was the last day I spent in that house, and since then I have felt nothing but disdain for the place.�

I moved in with my girlfriend 2 years ago and since then I have set up a new life for myself here. The problem is my parents have insisted on being a part of my life. They would phone constantly and argue with us for 4 hours at a time about how it wasn't fair that I wouldn't come home. To make matters worse, I have a horse with them and I can't go back to see him. Knowing this they use him as an object to lure me in.�

Before all of this, I was subjected to subtle reprogramming on my mother's part. She brought me up in the way she wanted. If I didn't wear certain things that she liked me to wear she would make fun of me and call me things such as�"slut" and at one point she grounded me for wearing a V-neck jumper to a non-uniform day at school because it showed to much chest, when actually it showed very little. She would punish me for telling the truth even though she promised she wouldn't hurt me if I was honest. When I say punishment, I would be exposed to 3 hour lectures about how bad I was, in which she would dredge up past events as if they had happened yesterday, she would then send me to my room without any food or water, and then by the next day she had "forgotten" all about it and acting all loving and talking about doing things together. Her behavior constantly threw me because I would remember what she had said or done when she didn't, and if I brought it up she would deny all occurrences, which in turn made me question myself. If I consulted friends about this, they would always say it wasn't right, but being exposed to such issues for so long had made it difficult for me to see beyond them, and their subtle ways of stating "all families are like this", "all families argue like this", etc covered up any hint of it being unusual. On my own, if I complained about how she sometimes treated me she would call me a "spoilt little bitch" and then lecture me, till my self-esteem broke down completely. Her favorite way of doing this was to say that I was fat even though I am 5"8 and weigh 10 stone but whilst I may not have actually been fat this made me very uncomfortable with my identity and appearance to others. My friends were always there to encourage me to think differently and some of the bolder ones even tried to help.�If my friends said anything she didn't like when they came to stay over or visit, she would deny it, or argue that their opinions should be kept to themselves as she was being kind to them and they were insulting her hospitality. If I tried to talk diplomatically about it she would warn that if I continued, she would take something away from me be it television for a week, or not riding or seeing my horse for a few days, something that frightened me because they were my ways of winding down. In the end I took to ignoring all that was in plain sight because it was easier to deal with when not directly looked at.�

[Edited by QuietMagic] For my mother, it wasn't right at all if it wasn't her way. My dad was used to argue her thoughts/opinions but eventually she even had him wrapped round her little finger -�I caught her hitting him and pulling his hair when he wouldn't submit. He would usually stand up for me before then, saying that she was being too harsh or too hard with her punishments for such little things. Now he stands up for her, saying I am mentally unstable (apparently adoption is to blame for that - but�nobody else seems to say that to me) and that he will act on my mother's wishes as they are a unit. It's sickening to see how she has overpowered him. I could have been the same but I was fortunate enough to find out what was happening before it got any worse.�

This can affect a young victim for the rest of their lives, to the point where they are narcisisstic themselves. But for me, friends and my relationship helped me to see otherwise. I am now going through a very difficult stage of cognitive dissonance, where everything I have been told my by mother or father is challenged by the normal way of thinking which I am being introduced to by my girlfriend.�

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_{[Edited by @QuietMagic 11/20/21 to remove stigmatizing content]}