Parental verbal abuse

I was just wondering if anyone else has suffered verbal abuse from his/her parents as a child (or even now) and how you go about 1) coping with it and 2) learning to accept your parents as human beings despite all the hurt they may have caused you in the past.

Hello,
I am Lady D, and I am just now in therapy learning to deal with the verbal abuse that I received from my stepmother, my ex-husband and others I have encountered in my life.

I was brought up believing the core values I learned as a child was who I was. According to my mother I was stupid, fat, did not work up to my ability and everything that went wrong was my fault.

I spent a lot of my life trying to please others and trying to change the awful person I must be.

Please seek therapy to help you not get to my age and finally have a major melt down from trying to be who others labeled you.

I used to fight with my mother all the time. My house was very verbally and emotionally abusive. I learned with my siblings to fight back. To use the low and dirty tactics my mother and step father used.

I would use the most erroneous things against my mother as she would to me. She would blame me for how I was as "bad" as my father. She would give me a gift, only to use it against me later. I became distrustful of her, and resorted to the same things she did. I lived in seething hatred in that house.

But I knew I didn't want to be like her, so I looked up to my brother, who's a great role model. But still she managed to make him out to be something bad to look up to. I recognized that all as negative and un-healty behavior.

Now I pick my battles, I still get a sick kind of satisfaction from conflict, but I manage it in regards to the situation, and not the person. I love to argue, but there's a difference between attacking a person's point of view and attacking their character.

But one must also know how to resolve the conflict. Refraining from putting any blame on them. A mistake I often see people use when trying to apologize is "I'm really sorry, BUT if YOU didn't-" See? That statement is still very accusatory and backhanded. There's a lot in how one should go about this kind of thing, but a little research might teach many a lot of what they may not know.

I don't know how to help you deal with it, but as for seeing them as humans.. well where do you think they learnt it? Almost certainly from their parents. And where did their parents learn it?
To desire to inflict pain and suffering isn't a natural or healthy behavior, its something you learn. And they can't defeat the person doing it , they start to think its normal, so they look for someone else to do it.....
It makes me very sad

I don't know how to characterize mine, It wasn't all that bad. I mean my father would either call me fat or a retard. I could never go to them for support on anything, let alone my feelings.

I just looked for the good in him i guess, I mean no matter what he's done, all the times i've been kicked out, all the hateful things he has said to me... I can't seem to hate him.

My Dad and brother verbally abused me when I was a kid. I now have chronic low self esteem.

I'm sorry for the abuse you all have been through. We have low self esteem becouse of the abuse, but we are not responsible for what our families did, and it can get better. And we can't help how we feel about our abusers, wether we love them or hate them. We can accept our feelings and try to heal.

I was verbally and emotionally abused by both my parents. I am SLOWLY learning to distinguish what I am and what I believe from what I have been told or taught. It's a slow process, but a good therapist is helping to speed it up. It takes a lot of introspection and uncomfortable feelings. At this time, I will not speak to my mother at all and rarely speak to my father, and even then only about superficial things.

Yep and I still do get it. Mainly from my dad, he has a way of saying things without actually saying them, by the comments he makes.

The way I cope is that I don't talk to him unless he talks to me and when he does talk to me I will talk back in the same attitude he is using on me.

I got it a lot more when I was younger and it affected me more then as well, over the years because of it all I grew a very hard heart towards my dad so most things he says are taken with a grain of salt.

I have accepted my dad is a human by looking at how he was brought uo and then realising he was just bringing me up the same way, realising this is the only way he knew. He is human because he doesnt know another way and I can't blame him for that.