On being Adult Survivors of Emotional Child Abuse

Can I hear from everyone who grow up in a traumatic childhood / abusive environment?

I think i am not alone in this situation. I'd love to connect with all of you and ask some questions that i have been battling alone. It is lonely and painful experience being abused when we were young, when we were very weak and fragile.

here are my questions -

2- As an abused child, what do you do when you grow up? Did you deserted your parents, cutting-off all the ties or do you forgave them?

I think most abused child have a fear of becoming a parent one day - they (including me) are afraid that deep down they will continue the vicious cycle. I think somehow our fear are valid - here are a study i've found that prove it

“In a survey of such studies, Joan Kaufman and Edward Zigler, psychologists at Yale, concluded that 30 percent is the best estimate of the rate at which abuse of one generation is repeated in the next. ” (New York Times article, “Sad Legacy of Abuse: The Search for Remedies“)

anyone else nervous about the thought of being a parent?

3-If you married - is your spouse proven to be abuser & worse than your own family, or do you find someone sane & much nicer as your spouse (Some blogger on the internet wrote that they ends up with abuser, the cycle never ends and it makes me terrified on the thought of what sort of people i would end up with)

4- Do you have problem bonding with people, because of your traumatic childhood ( i found that i do have this problem, but i dont know if i could pinpoint it exactly to my abusive background or was it just my personality - i couldnt tell)

5- lastly, if you are married & have children - what have you done to break the vicious abusive cycle from being transferred to the next generations?

6- How do you heal your inner invisible scars?

7- What is something that would trigger your memories from traumatic childhood? Even when I live my everyday life there would be something/some object that reminds me to hurtful memories, and tears would just comes out like that. the pain that comes out of flash associated with you seeing some object that your abuser had used - anyone else felt that? i felt the memories haunted me to no end.

Hope to hear from everyone soon.

Hi hikariblue, I'm sorry you've been through something bad. There seems to be very few people in this forum :/

I don't think I have the answer to all of your questions because some of them are difficult to answer and I don't really know.

1) I do talk to my parents, but did confront them as soon as I realized the extent to which I had been abused (as a child you tend to think you're the one to blame!). I'm very close to my BPD parent even if it's the person that's harmed me the most in direct ways (my NPD parent was mainly neglectful rather than directly abusive but his neglect was abusive as well). I do believe that my BPD parent is sorry about their actions even if they probably can't completely grasp the extent to which I was harmed.

2-3: I did end up with 2 abusive partners, the latter of which I had children with. But that's because I wasn't aware of how my history was affecting my choices of the people I was dating. I think if you as a young person are aware of this you will probably not end up with someone abusive. Talk to your therapist or psychiatrist about it if you think someone you're dating might have abusive tendencies. They will help you disengage.

4- I do have trouble bonding with people, trusting them and feeling accepted. I do think it's because of the abuse. It's important to talk to a mental health professional that can help with this issues.

5- Probably the more helpful thing I did toward my children was to extract myself and them from the abusive relationship as my partner was already showing sign of wanting to dole out abuse to the children as well. I also try to limit what my BPD parent can say to the children.

6- I don't know the answer, sadly :/

7- I lost all my belongings from my childhood (long story) so that's extremely sad but I guess also prevents me from being triggered by objects. I seldom cry (I tend to have somatic complaints) but I do find that sometimes the silliest trigger will make me cry uncontrollably, say a sad song. I really hate that b/c it makes me look crazy :/

hikariblue wrote:

here are my questions -

2- As an abused child, what do you do when you grow up? Did you deserted your parents,... or forgave them?


30 percent is the best estimate of the rate at which abuse of one generation is repeated in the next. ” (New York Times article, “Sad Legacy of Abuse: The Search for Remedies“)



3-If you married - is your spouse proven to be abuser

4- Do you have problem bonding with people, because of your traumatic childhood

5- lastly, if you are married & have children -

6- How do you heal your inner invisible scars?

7- What is something that would trigger your memories from traumatic childhood?

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2/It was my mother, I see her twice a year but never alone. I simply do not care about her. I cannot imagine forgiving myself to heal my inner child as much as I can imagine sitting in a circle with other survivors and singing Kum-bi- yah ... it may work for some but not me. probably because for last 25 years I have been continually rehashing what happened to make sense of myself.

I see that stat nut not sure I would believe it. They put a group of pedophiles in prison on a lie detector test. 70% claimed they were molested ... only 29% came up on the test.

They often lie about abuse to explain themselves while others have a distorted view of the world.(ie: if you don't believe everything they do is perfect and say is true then you are mercilessly cruelly attacking them

3/ Sometimes but at other times we bond with other victims even if we are totally unaware that they were.

4/ Bonding yep, but develop close friendships with a few people, very close.

5/ Married and spanked my oldest son once (very mild ) he cried (in shock) and I wondered then how anyone could ever do that to a child. It was a real shock to me. I believe though picked up gene
damage from me (I think both of them did) but that is very controversial and is only in really extreme physical abuse cases.

6/ Healing comes by understanding. Now all I care about is dealing with hyper vigilance and hyper arousal.

7/ Every time I hear of some child being murdered by their mother or step father, but I deal with it much better now.

My advice is read, be aware of signs of child abuse PTSD (ask if you need a link) and be kind to yourself.