Suffocating Mothers, Absent Fathers

naps wrote:

Logonaut wrote:I do. My mother wasn't exactly smothering, maybe controlling is a better word. She was extremely authoritarian. Any perceived resistance or lie on my part was perceived as a direct slight, and, I assume, a blow to her ego. She was obsessed with maintaining fake fronts.

My father was alcoholic, distant, always hidden away in the basement drinking and reading.

Huh, weird. My parents are very similar to yours. The difference might be that they were both unpredictably, explosively angry. My dad would drag me around by my hair when he was in a mood, but my mother was way worse. I loved my father but not my mother. He was much nicer.

slimsally wrote:Huh, weird. My parents are very similar to yours. The difference might be that they were both unpredictably, explosively angry. My dad would drag me around by my hair when he was in a mood, but my mother was way worse. I loved my father but not my mother. He was much nicer.

My mother was perpetually angry. She walked around with a pissed off expression 24 hours a day. The thing was that she was deviously clever about punishment. I would get punished for something I did weeks before, and at the absolutely most frustrating moment. If I was banned from using the car all weekend, I wouldn't find out until I had made plans and had the keys in my hands. It would make me incredibly angry but I dared not show it. Anger was synonymous with lying, which was the worst possible thing I could do.
My father was mellower than yours. I honestly don't remember him punishing me much, if at all. I remember him hitting me in the face on two occasions when I was little. I wonder why now. Maybe he had stopped drinking for some reason.
Otherwise, he's kind of a vague memory. I'm sure my mother owned him.
By the time I was nine or ten, I don't think I loved either of them anymore.

naps wrote:My mother was perpetually angry. She walked around with a pissed off expression 24 hours a day. The thing was that she was deviously clever about punishment. I would get punished for something I did weeks before, and at the absolutely most frustrating moment. If I was banned from using the car all weekend, I wouldn't find out until I had made plans and had the keys in my hands. It would make me incredibly angry but I dared not show it. Anger was synonymous with lying, which was the worst possible thing I could do.
My father was mellower than yours. I honestly don't remember him punishing me much, if at all. I remember him hitting me in the face on two occasions when I was little. I wonder why now. Maybe he had stopped drinking for some reason.
Otherwise, he's kind of a vague memory. I'm sure my mother owned him.
By the time I was nine or ten, I don't think I loved either of them anymore.

Ugh...I can relate to the punishments your mother placed on you. So frustrating. I feel that psychological abuse is worse than physical abuse (depending on the severity, of course.)

Did your mother punish anger? I imagine you must have let it out in other ways. I did.

slimsally wrote:Did your mother punish anger? I imagine you must have let it out in other ways. I did.

I learned as a little kid not to act out of anger in front of her. I couldn't even do it in the privacy of my own room. Once I was grumbling about her and she literally burst through the door and gave me the "you got a problem with me?" speech.
I hung around with bad kids, I did all kinds of drugs, I got in trouble. But this was probably due to other factors as well.
Truth is, I think I'm still letting that anger out.

This doesn't so much have to do with the abuse part of it itself, but I was reading the Wikipedia article on boredom the other day, and this sentence really rang true to me:

"Some philosophies of parenting propose that if children are raised in an environment devoid of stimuli, and are not allowed or encouraged to interact with their environment, they will fail to develop the mental capacities to do so."

I think SPD is a subset of that, complicated by other "nature" and "[lack of] nurture" kinds of factors.

Logonaut wrote:I saw somewhere that the combination of suffocating mothers and distant fathers is posited as a reason, if not the reason, for someone to have turned out schizoid. It so happens that the same situation has been blamed for some, if not all, homosexuality.

Well... Speaking as a homosexual by orientation & a schizoid personality-wise, I have to ask: how many of you fall into this category? One is, you might say, especially primed to accept the explanations above! so the prevalence or not of this dynamic intrigues me.

I do. Mother worked, was raised by an emotionally and otherwise unavailable, but extremely strict and weirdly self-centered grandmother, no father, had contact with grandfather who was shift-worker and home rather rarely, and eventho he had anger problems my childhood consisted to a huge degree of waiting for someone to play with me etc.
As to the cause of homosexuality - I am gay btw - this is mroe complicated. There seems to be a pretty intriguing book with an unnormal title, something like "psychopathogenesis, polymorphism and something homosexualities something", which seems to go into detail as to the manifodl different scenarios of how this condition develops. But the original idea was that hmosexuality results out of an identification with the same sex parent - whiel according to Bowlby f.e. identification with an absent parent is the to-go way of a child who has unavailable parents to deal with that. So I think theres truth to it, eventho it might be reductionistic.

Btw sorry if I'm hard to understand, had cocktails yesterday. Nuclear warhead cocktails, still ###$ up.

I think my mother killed my sexual drift.

My parents were unremarkable, my upbringing was secure - my brother is a stable, hardworking, family man.
I am SPD. (Or more accurately, I think I'm SPD therefore I am SPD.)
I cannot be certain of course, but it seems to me likely that I'm SPD because of some innate reason, and so more biological than environmental.
I am not gay, but if I were it wouldn't be a result of my upbringing - that seems to me a very old-fashioned view (over-mother your boy and you'll ruin him - similar to letting your daughter wear trousers will make her lesbian).
Asking people on a forum such as this will probably be self-selecting and so hardly a statistically valid exercise. But interesting responses nonetheless.

PerplexedMan wrote:Growing up, my mother was very volatile and in some ways abusive. My father was always distant or as you say it, absent. I feel that this definitely contributed to who I am today.

Me too.

slimsally wrote:

naps wrote:

Logonaut wrote:I do. My mother wasn't exactly smothering, maybe controlling is a better word. She was extremely authoritarian. Any perceived resistance or lie on my part was perceived as a direct slight, and, I assume, a blow to her ego. She was obsessed with maintaining fake fronts.

My father was alcoholic, distant, always hidden away in the basement drinking and reading.

Huh, weird. My parents are very similar to yours. The difference might be that they were both unpredictably, explosively angry. My dad would drag me around by my hair when he was in a mood, but my mother was way worse. I loved my father but not my mother. He was much nicer.

My parents were like that too. My mother wasn't extremely authoritarian, but she was controlling, manipulative, smothering... you name it. Depending how obedient you were, she either fully approved of you or rejected you emotionally. Both of them were very moody, but I can't say that physical abuse was particularly bad in our family. Emotional abuse was a lot worse.