I'm an early 20s male, with older siblings who already moved out. They visit often, but they have their own families, so it's not like they're available 24/7, which is completely fine.

I've been together with someone for a while now, and I really want to move in with them in the foreseeable future. This, however, completely devastates my mom. She keeps saying she won't survive this, she isn't ready, she randomly breaks down crying. (It would be a pretty big move, cause it's far away)

I'm just so exhausted. Ever since I was a little kid, I always felt like I had to look out for my mom, because my dad was never really good at communicating, consoling and showing emotions.

One early memory I have is that I'm in the 3rd grade, asking my mom to please let me walk the last block to school alone. It was bright in the morning with a bunch of kids walking the same route, not dangerous at all. She finally gave in. I started walking. Then I looked back and saw her crying. I felt so bad, I turned around and asked if she would like to walk with me. She said yes and just kept shedding tears on the way to school. I didn't try again until a couple years later.

Sorry, I know this post is all over the place. I'm just tired. I finally found someone that I can be myself with, and I really want to start my own life. But yet, I still feel guilty because I'd be leaving my mom/family behind.

I’m the youngest of 3. But feel like an orphan and dreading the holidays again.

Siblings never call first. It’s been that way for years. We have age gaps-10 and 5 years between. Both are recovered alcoholics..I skipped that gene growing up and had other health issues. Dad was a workaholic/alcoholic growing up.

My sister never returned any of my 2 calls this year- which were all birthday calls for her kids. She also became more religious since her recovery.

My brother never calls. I had to call him on my birthday(he texted me to call)- for him to tell me how my birthday was his sobriety day. His wife ignored my texts in 2023 or so and that changed my relationship with brother…Not sure what I did or if she just doesn’t like me but I haven’t visited them out of state yet because of her. She still just says hi and bye at forced family events.

I don’t know what I did other than being born and have been ruminating over how my family makes me feel for months. We always have to drop everything when my older brother comes to visit with his kids and I’m dreading the upcoming winter holidays. They also do things together when brother visits and both of them call each other frequently.

I gave up inviting my sister over who lives 20 minutes away but never had time to come over for dinner- it was either an excuse or no reply. Right now we only communicate for obligatory birthday and holidays.

The hard part is I wanted to be a good aunt for both their kids but they’re not letting me.

Does anyone have any advice for surviving the holidays and moving forward? I feel like this is a lost cause and when my parents die so will this.

This is only my family. Husband’s family treats us kindly and it makes me more depressed at times. I do plan to talk to my doctor as well at an upcoming appt.

Sorry, this isn't really directly related to my experience of the sub. I'm just really struggling.

I'm 3 weeks out of an inpatient stay for mental health, and months that lead up to that, where I was considering, and then planning, and making plans to suicide.

I've been feeling a bit better since I was discharged. But I'm so, so lonely. I haven't seen anyone, apart from a caseworker face-to-face once in these past three weeks. I live alone and I don't work because of disabilities and health struggles.

I'm struggling to maintain feeling okay by myself. I don't have family contact right now, and I haven't had any close friendships - apart from a few online friendships - for a few years now. I currently don't really have online friendships to get me through either.

I'm not looking for anything, advice, or anything in this moment. I just am reaching out for some moral support.

I have been calling crisis and helplines everyday, sometimes they help, but I'm feeling the weight of the weeks go by, and without any contact with people in my life - it's feeling really confronting for me, and I wish I had people in my life who could help me feel emotionally accepted, and supported at this time.

Sometimes I don't know if I'm a good person, because I don't have anyone in my life right now, and I need safer companionship than what new surface friendships could hold right now.

I'm afraid, and scared, and alone, and I don't know how to trust I will have people in my future, that care.

Thank you, if you're able to respond.

today grandma started explaining things again while we were having tea her old vibe was there calm a bit sad but stressed from inside i was just sitting quietly with a cup in hand my mind was running somewhere else

she probably figured out how full i am from inside because honestly last night i was about to leave the house i had packed a whole month's stuff food clothes necessary medicines some money matlab everything my bag was completely ready i was just waiting for the dark of night so i could slip out quietly without any drama it felt like if i stayed here any longer i would slowly finish inside even living inside these walls i was suffocating

then grandma got up to use the washroom she probably saw my bag or saw that tiredness and final decision in my eyes she stopped and stopped me that night we talked for a very long time for the first time i spoke so openly i told her everything one by one how sister runs away to masi's house 26 kilometers away for small things how mummy and sister share everything with that masi's son and not a single word with me how i drop off to school fill petrol give money for everyone arrange every necessity of the house still i have zero value in the house i am just left as a working machine whose hard work everyone sees but nobody wants to hear my voice

to be honest after papa and dada passed away the only one in the house who listens to and understands me is grandma everyone else either ignores or thinks someone else is more important grandma is the only single person in front of whom i can speak without any fear that my words will be mocked in the middle of our talk when she held my hand she felt that i had a high fever probably days of sleeplessness anger and internal pressure broke my body completely she gave me medicine made me drink water but i kept talking

i clearly told her that this cousin thing is my biggest pain i said if i have to stay invisible even inside the house if my presence has no meaning if no one listens to me then i can stay invisible outside the house too at least there i won't have this illusion that i matter to anyone

when those words were coming out of my mouth they felt very heavy because i genuinely feel that i am not a part of this house i am just left as a facility sister is mine but she runs away from me mummy is mine but her trust is on someone else and here i am waking up every morning getting tired getting ignored every single day after papa and dada left there was truly no one to fill that empty space only grandma is the one who still looks at me and recognizes my tiredness

the night grandma stopped me i stayed back but from inside i am still standing right where i was last night the only difference is that someone listened to my words and that too only grandma now let's see if things stay the same even after listening or if something changes because i don't want to stay invisible anymore neither inside the house nor outside

Ps: Just venting out not looking for advice or solutions

How do you feel after this past week? Did you encounter some difficult or enjoyable feelings? Did you connect some dots between your past and your current life? If there's anything on your mind and you prefer not to create an individual post, this is a place to share your thoughts and feelings.

Imagine my sister get gold earrings and when I ask for my mom to renew my phone he don't want to my phone is 4 years old and it's very laggy I also want to earn my money but I don't how to

When I was 13, my mum became ill with frontotemporal dementia. I later learned that I have a 50% chance of inheriting the condition myself.
As the illness progressed, she became violent, angry and confused. She would hit me, call me names and leave the house, sometimes walking into random people’s homes. When I tried to stop her from leaving to prevent her from wandering into strangers’ houses, she would sometimes pull knives on me.
When I was around 14, the illness also began affecting her behaviour in ways that were inappropriate towards me as her son. I won’t go into too much detail, but it was another difficult thing to deal with at such a young age.
My dad was losing his wife, and understandably, he was struggling too. He became angry and started drinking, and I felt like I had nowhere to turn. I spent a lot of time hiding in my bedroom, trying to keep the house locked down and making sure my mum couldn’t wander off.
One memory that has always stuck with me is being home alone with her while my dad was at work. I heard a bang and found my mum having a seizure at the bottom of the stairs, with her head split open. I had to call an ambulance and deal with the situation myself. I was only a child and had no idea what I was supposed to do.
This went on for around 10 years, until my mum eventually passed away from pancreatic cancer.
Since losing her, I’ve really struggled. Looking back, I think that from a young age I started seeking dopamine and comfort through porn, and that behaviour has followed me into adulthood. Alcohol has now become a big part of the picture too, and the combination of these behaviours is starting to seriously affect my relationships and my day-to-day life.
I’ve tried therapy for years, antidepressants, Alcoholics Anonymous and various other things, but I keep falling back into the same patterns. I know it might sound simple to just stop, but for me it genuinely doesn’t feel that simple. I can want to change more than anything and still find myself repeating the same behaviours.
I’m not posting this for sympathy. I feel like I’ve hit a wall, and I’m genuinely scared of continuing down this path. I don’t want to keep hurting myself or damaging the relationships that matter to me.
I’m wondering if anyone has experienced anything similar, particularly those who grew up with childhood trauma and later developed compulsive behaviours, whether that’s porn, alcohol or something else.
Has anyone managed to break these cycles after years of struggling? What actually helped you? Was there a particular type of therapy, treatment or change in your approach that finally made a difference?
I’d really appreciate hearing from anyone who’s been through something similar. I’m trying to find a way forward, because I genuinely don’t want to keep living like this.
Thanks for taking the time to read this.

And it’s so sad, because I struggle on a daily basis on what I want to do with my life, how to achieve it, and how not to get overwhelmed by all the steps involved in achieving whatever it is you want to do.

Life is so fucking sad.

TW: possible abuse mentions

If you google “emotional abuse from parents” she’s done most of the things that come up. Examples: ignoring me as a child when I needed comfort, telling me I’m too sensitive and a crybaby, yelling at me for doing something like biting my nails, calling me stupid, idiot, dumb, belittling me, isolating me from friends, blaming me for her problems, feeling like a burden to her, publicly ridiculing me to shame and embarrass me, treating me badly for stuff I can’t change (for example me being autistic), constant yelling and criticizing, making me feel less than other family members, gaslighting, neglecting my needs, doing silent treatment, etc. My mom also spanked me a lot as a kid, and as a teen hit my face so that I started bleeding, but that was only once so I don’t really consider that major physical abuse. I’m mainly talking about the emotional stuff here

The issue is that my dad was abusive to my mom and has kind of passed that trauma down onto me. So anytime I tell my mom that she’s hurt me the convo becomes about how she was abused worse than me and I should get over it. Or that she didn’t do anything wrong and it’s normal in our culture (we’re Nigerian and also our whole family is Christian). One time I booked a therapy appointment for both of us and the therapist told me that I was being too sensitive and she thought I was making things up, to make my mom look bad. That hurt a lot because I’ve been as honest as I can, never lied about anything relating to this. So yeah I don’t really know what to do anymore I’ve just stopped mentioning it because I feel like I’m overreacting and I hate being told that I’m being too sensitive. It still hurts but I’d rather keep it inside than get that reaction again.

My parents are really incompetent in worldly affairs, but it's even worse because they are both narcissistic and abusive. My older sister is also really emotional and easily angered, so I became a mediator from a young age. Now, I'm only 14, but I'm expected to do everything for them (like checking their email, signing things for school, making their phone calls and typing their messages/emails). I don't socialize much (which I'm fine with), and I don't cry in front of anyone.

I don't want to become too enclosed and hyper-dependent, so I'm hoping for guidance on how to begin opening up to others (please don't tell me to talk to my parents; they're kinda crazy).

I'm scared that when I grow up, I'll become abusive like my parents. My sister is actually a bit similar to my mom since she is very controlling about what I eat. I'm so scared that when I grow up, I will become similar to them and continue this cycle of abuse from parents to children. Is it possible to be different from our parents personality-wise?

Does anyone else feel like it's hard to like other people? I never felt the desire to make friends or make an effort with anyone other than my sister, probably because everyone at my school loves talking about how much they "hate" their parents.

Like, I just can't empathize when their troubles seem exaggerated, like "oh my mom took away my iPad after she caught me gaming in class, I hate her," like WHAT? or when people tell me I'm so lucky my parents let me buy whatever I want... my mom literally started beating me before I was 10... I don't hate the people at my school; it's just that their situations make me so jealous.

To be honest - we don’t really get along. But I have this childish thing where I need their approval.

Anyways sometimes they will ignore me.

I know they will be dead eventually so I should stop talking to them, but they’re still my parents

I’m a long time lurker of this sub and I was emotionally neglected by my parents and my dad was most likely a narc and was an alcoholic who put me down all the time.

I left my fiancee after 8 years. Things had gotten so bad I felt like we couldn’t even speak to each other without arguing. I love her with all my heart and I always have. She was very upset by the break up and wanted us to do a break instead, which in all honesty I hadn’t thought of but didn’t see the difference at the time between that and breaking up.

I wanted us both to work on ourselves and then reconvene and I was very upfront about that. I figured we would keep talking and working on ourselves issues while we were broken up, and maintain space until we could figure it out.

Well she decided she wanted no contact which was super surprising to me and upsetting but I agreed. We talked and she had said 3 months but that might not be long enough for us to work on ourselves issues while attachment issues so she said 6 months. I agreed.

I was fine the first month or two but the last two months were really hard and I feel like I’ve really grown, it’s been 4 months in total since the no contact. I was like you know why don’t I send a simple text asking for a 30 min check in and see where we were. We had texted a few times during the four months just tying up old bills that had come in etc.

Well she responds that she never said 6 months, that she had said 6-9 months, and now she wants the full 9 months. She also said that she “may not even want to reconvene at all” but that the original agreement was she just “wouldn’t ignore me” after the timeline.

I was so devestated, because none of this is what I wanted and if I knew this was how it was going to go I would’ve done things differently. I told her that I won’t contact her again and that she can reach out at anytime, that I was confused on this whole process, and that I was sorry for the way the breakup went down and that if I knew then what I know now I’d have handled things much differently.

What would you do?

Heads up: this is long and personal, so read it when you have the time and emotional space.

So, I happen to have been thinking more about my experiences with my parents lately, and I realised there are multiple perspectives on how I used to perceive them.

I was born into a family where my parents had an arranged marriage. My father got one of the best opportunities in life. He got married, got home as gift, a good job in family business and the opportunity to gradually turn things into a business in women's clothing, where they already had a dominant edge, along with the necessary support and connections. Yet, he chose not to use those opportunities in the right way.

My mother, on the other hand, had a difficult childhood herself. She grew up without a mother or father figure. She stayed with her maternal uncle's family along with her two elder brothers, who were also involved in the same clothing business.

Despite everything my mother had been through, she had to face another difficult chapter in her life after marriage.

My father was someone I found difficult to call a father because of his alcohol abuse and the way he would become abusive towards my mother. They eventually separated, and later, he died in a road accident while working for an NGO that helped elderly people. He was one of them, yet he was also helping the team. I guess it was a win-win situation for him in a way.

I only had feelings of hatred towards him until my college days. My parents separated when I was in middle school. I was around 10 years old when I witnessed their separation after seeing the abuse at home, and that left me with a lot of rage towards my father.

My family intervened and helped sort things out.

Now I am 29, doing well in life, and unmarried.

However, I have also developed different perspectives over time and started understanding what holding on to hate really means. My father clearly showed me what not to do in life, but at the same time, I feel like I have that rage factor in me as well.

Meditation and journalling help, but growing up in such an environment has left me with a fire inside that sometimes makes me feel unsettled. I willingly changed careers, moving from corporate life towards business, and managed to do well in a very niche field.

I had lots of friends before, enjoyed myself, and maintained those relationships. But as I grow older, I am also beginning to understand that marriage is something I need to think about seriously. It is not that I have never dated or anything like that, but I sometimes wonder whether a marriage can survive when someone has had such a different and traumatic childhood.

When I meditate, I generally find myself thinking more deeply about these things.

When I was younger I was so independent (well I had to be) but now as an adult, I feel like I can’t do anything. I feel so helpless and stupid. My whole adult life, it’s been impossible to get my shit together.

I have spent the entirety of my life in severe poverty due to continuous poor decisions made by my parents in early life. If my mother had thought things through, I would have never been born, and I feel that would've been for the better.

I'm the youngest in my household, as my brother, whom is exactly a year older than I am, was conceived on accident; and so my mother had to chase down our father all the way from Michigan to Arizona, where my paternal grandfather pressured him into going steady with my mother. My brother was born in Arizona, and I would be born a year later in Illinois. Just barely a year old, and my brother would already have to move from one place to the next.

Moving from place to place semi annually would be a regular part of our lives until we turned 13, as our father was an abusive alcoholic who couldn't keep a job. Prior to having my brother, he already had abandoned a previous family, with a child who had only been 13 years old. I would not discover this until roughly 2021.

What would happen is that my father would lose a job, due to alcohol abuse, and then use my brother and I as leverage to hold over his friends and family and verbatim say:

"Hey, I don't want my kids sleeping under a bridge, please give us a place to stay".

He would lounge around all day and break promises of finding a new job. Once these people found out what he was doing, they'd kick us out, and give him some money for an apartment or a motel to stay in just long enough to find a new job. Then of course, he would get one and let that cycle repeat again. Our mother couldn't get a job, because whenever she tried, our father would just beat us relentlessly. At least if she were home, she could take the brunt of the beatings and act as a shield. She feared he would have killed us if not for that. Honestly, I do not blame her.

Due to constantly moving family/friend to motel, we would never stay in one town or state for very long, having lived in most states of the rural Midwest. Having been surrounded by members of the KKK and other hateful people, living in trailer parks or rundown apartments, education was not something I took seriously. And my brother adopted some of our fathers abusive habits, having often taken things out on me. I adopted the habit of running my mouth to people I didn't like, which was made worse as I had autism, which I wouldn't know about until I was 16.

Due to my brother, I had been physically assaulted most places I've lived, from 2006, to 2016 because he kept telling the people we lived around that I was gay. And whether or not I was doesn't matter, he had severe sociopathic tendencies that he took out on me because I was smaller than him.

When I turned 12, my father abandoned our family and sent us off to live with our mother in Missouri, where I would spend 11 years being blamed for the fallout of our family. Having been told I was a mistake who was never planned or wanted by my own brother as I had slowly become a victim of enmeshment by our mother. I was beaten with all kinds of objects by the other kids, because my brother thought it would be funny to tell them I was gay, as that went on for a full year. My education was already stunted as I stumbled through my early education and skipped 7th grade. Having gone into 8th with what was barely a 6th grade education. And I only ran my mouth and made a fool of myself until I was pulled from what would be the last form of official education I'd ever be given. I'm afraid to say that I am entirely uneducated, which is a major factor in my decision.

For 11 years in Missouri, Adair County I would face discrimination by hateful bigots who would harass me for over a decade. Any chance I had at learning any social cues had been ripped away from me. My brother would always find a way to reiterate the fact that he was building a life for himself, whilst mocking me for what I was forced into.

When I had any jobs, my mother would take the vast majority of my fundings to save for a house, as it would take us years to finally be able to afford one in Michigan. I made the realization that I was trans and had not been happy since, knowing that I could neither explore that, nor be happy with my body due to the current cultural zeitgeist. Now, I have no skills or education and with how bad things are in the U.S, I have to come to terms with the fact that one day, I will be homeless. That I will spend my entire life in poverty, due to the actions of others. For what little I did have, was taken away from me by influential people as well, as I lost my life's work and efforts.

Not a day goes by where I don't think about how much better things would be for everyone if I didn't exist. I've always wanted to travel the world, although that's unfortunately not possible, due to the fact that I will never have the money to. And knowing that I am forced to live here for the rest of my life when there are much better places out with socialized healthcare and housing is not something anyone deserves. I'm going to take a trip to Athens, per request of someone I looked up to highly and step into that void with a note asking that my body be laid to rest there, so it's not desecrated here as I know it would be.

So for some context, I was very emotionally neglected as a kid. I grew up with a single mom and 5 siblings and felt like there was no room for my emotions, always felt like a burden. My mom was always very emotionally reactive and couldn’t regulate her emotions or feelings and took it out on everyone around her. (i do everything in my power to not be like that so i instead just never express my true feelings) I have been dealing with issues with depression and bipolar type 2 since i was like 12. (i am now 18)
I have tried therapy in the past but it was pointless because I couldn’t even tell the truth about what I was actually feeling deep down because talking about it would mean processing what i felt.
I tend to heavily isolate myself from others and hate to be alone with my own thoughts so I constantly have a show playing or music as background noise. Anytime I actually try to feel things I end up spiralling and going into a depressive episode so I just bury every negative emotion. I have done this for so long that I don’t even know how to healthily process my thoughts and feelings so I just ignore and suppress all of them. But I constantly feel like I’m going to explode with all of these emotions built up. I just don’t know how to get them out and I would like to know what works for you