For me it was adults/authority figures screaming at children in full voice.
punching people. not like, full-on hauling back and decking someone, but like casually socking someone in the arm. my mom did it to me and my dad, and i did it to most of my friends. i was in college before someone took me aside and said “i don’t like being hit, please stop” and i actually blue screened for a minute while i realised that yes, actually, i was in fact hitting people and it was kinda mean. 🤦 i still think about that sometimes, like how casual not just my family but pretty much everyone i grew up around was about violence. parents spanked their kids, oldest siblings would spank younger siblings, some parents would casually whack each other, kids would hit each other and if you told you were a crybaby tattletale. To my knowledge, nobody in my immediate circle had parents who actually straight up beat each other (or their kids) but in retrospect there was a lot of casual violence.
Violence
Holes punched in bedroom doors…
I was really blindsided once I realized that some people actually enjoyed spending time with their parents. I thought that kind of stuff was performative.
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The insanelly improvisational and long-hours heavy way of work in my country - Portugal - which I figured out was disfunctional as fuck after I went to live and work in The Netherlands as a young adult.
More in general, going to live abroad is a good way to discover that a lot of ways of doing things and assumptions you have one people’s behaviours aren’t actually “just the way things are” but instead are “the way thing are were I grew up”. This applies to all kinds of things, not necessarilly showing them as disfunctional, just as non-universal.
PS: Oh, yeah, also I only realised the casual homophobia I grew up with when I moved to The Netherlands.
The thing I miss most about Vietnam from my visit there is that every public restroom had a bidet. Toilet paper alone is so inefficient by comparison and it frustrates me to no end that it’s how things are done here in the US.
A few years ago I moved into a place with a bidet and it’s been life changing. The comparison I always come back to is “Would you rather wash your hands with a dry paper towel, or with soap and water?”
And now whenever I am in a swimming pool I can’t help but dwell on how many unwashed asses I am surrounded by.
same with shouting/screaming in the house, frustrated adults at kids newr daily. thought it was normal. as an adult, i learned it’s not.
a lot of sad ones i have a funny one:
when my sister and i were super little my mom put an empty bowl on top of the fridge. both my sister and i were at a very scatalogical humor stage of our little lives and when we’d act up or get out of control my mom would swear there was poop in the bowl and if we didnt behave she was “going to get the poop bowl” and make us smell it. once or twice she actually took it down but we’d giggle and scream and behave
My parents hated each other so much I was actually confused when I went to my friends house and his parents seemed to actually love each other.
Family dinners that would be either totally silent, or a continuous show of contempt directed at whoever the most vulnerable target was.
Constantly wanting to be somewhere, anywhere, except home.
Sneaking around everywhere, not making a sound and staying out of sight.
Going to bed feeling utterly defeated and humiliated, every day for months on end.
Practically everything lol. I grew up in a 3 room cabin with a single mom and a dad who had been totally fucked by his longtime employer who was supposedly paying him under the table but somehow had his SSN and left him with 70k in unpaid taxes.
My kindergarten was full of children of Nazis who harassed me for being a long haired hippie kid and my only friend whose the only black kid in the district because he was black. I stood up for us finally and broke a bully’s nose at recess and the school response was to make me go through kindergarten again which separated us by a grade and left us with nobody to have our backs.
Helping my mom clean houses because she could not afford child care. I attended my first college lecture when I was 6 years old for the same reason.
I dropped out of high school because I kept getting in fights with crackers larping as crips and bloods.
One of my first jobs one of my coworkers was murdered in the building and they opened up again within 8 hours.
My whole life has been one radicalizing traumatic experience after another.
I stood up for us finally and broke a bully’s nose at recess and the school response was to make me go through kindergarten again which separated us by a grade and left us with nobody to have our backs.
Zero tolerance policies in a nutshell. They lock you up in a place with horrible abusive people and then punish you for fighting back.
Wait a minute…
Got a few suspensions for that. Jokes on them cause my parents didnt think I did anything wrong so I just had fun time off. If I didnt start it I was allowed to finish it.
Yeah they pulled me out of that school and I didn’t go back to a public school till high-school where I immediately got kicked out again for fighting.
Pro tip don’t start shit with a skater girl. We hurled ourselves at pavement and fought God and gravity for fun.
They never pulled me out and I doubt it was ever considered. The fights I was in were pretty few and far between. Plus I won the fights so my safety wasnt a concern. I was in the French immersion program, which means I was mostly in classes with rich kids, you could pay your way in or stand in line for the very few free spots. I was the last line kid around after a few years. Most switch to English cause the French immersion program is deeply classist between the limited amount of poor people who can get in, the fucking MATH work was 2 years ahead of what the standard program kids were doing, so we had harder work in general and in a language we were learning at the same time. That’s gonna be harder to deal with for a poorer family on average. However the schools that had the programs were always in the bad areas I grew up in and the rich kids got bussed in. So most of my fights were with kids who tried to fight like they were playing hockey, outside of school was where I would lose fights cause the kids in my neighborhood were waaaay tougher than the ones in my class so when rich kids came at me I was the one who could actually fight. Jr high and high school were more specifically in my neighborhood and a lot of the people knew outside of school suddenly went to the same school and preppy kids wouldnt fucking dare after that. I was never really targeted at any point either, I was a consistently middle popularity guy, I never had any long term beefs, just kids having tempers
On the one hand I envy that but on the other I am glad. It made me stronger and more resilient. There is little I fear in the coming struggle. I was born for this shit.
On the positive side I dedicated my earliest years of activism helping guide what was an actually good charter/continuation school that is now the nature academy which my little brother got to attend.
I was in one of those zero tolerance places. A kid broke my finger, but I didn’t fight back (weird notions about pacifism and I really am not a good fighter anyway) and nothing happened, but I was acutely aware if I had fought back I would’ve gotten in trouble. The principal was ready to point out that it was essentially my fault because I was bigger than him and he hurt me, though, so that’s fun.
The entire set of Western values.
Where I grew up, all of society was divided into hostile, irreconcilable classes. One owned the means of production and through that ownership captured all of the value produced. The other class worked at productive labor, but had to sell their labor power to the owning class in order to do so. This caused all kinds of other problems for many years.
In hindsight, its fall was inevitable.
Loud noises in another room
Being stessed about new clothes.
Being alert when I hear a door handle.
Loud pops that sound like gunshots.
Scared of cities for a bit there.
Not being able to relax when someone else is doing a chore. Not being able to relax during the day period even if I’m having a flair up.
Fear if I accidentally break something or let something go bad.
Fear about talking about my needs IRL. Fear of going to the doctor too much and it driving my loved ones away.
Unable to fit in to society and not knowing how to play with children after a long young life in complete isolation.
Probably more.
There’s a term for some of these: ‘hyper awareness’. Where you’re essentially tought to walk on tiptoes (figuratively) around someone to minimise conflict. But it looks like more than that.
Hope you’re doing well today.Aw thank you!
Yeah that tracks.
Thankfully I’m doing a lot better now a days. The relaxing thing is still a pain, but it has a little bit more of untangling that needs done cause of other elements as well.
I resonate with some of these
Someone seeing my post and not upbearing it
Tell me whom
I learned it was not normal to fear the sound of a car door slamming (since it meant my parents were coming home) and it is certainly not normal for a child to think that they are some horrible person who has been reincarnated and this life is their punishment for the last one, or for a child to think that maybe this is just what hell is like and part of being in hell is not knowing that you’re in hell and your existence is punishment.
and it is certainly not normal for a child to think that they are some horrible person who has been reincarnated and this life is their punishment for the last one, or for a child to think that maybe this is just what hell is like and part of being in hell is not knowing that you’re in hell and your existence is punishment.
Oh
do you have to do anything about that?
Also thought the 2nd and 3rd thing as a child , just thought about that for the first time in a while when I was trauma dumping to my gf last night so youre not alone in that
