How Do I Move on From My Past?

Question by Speranza: How do I move on from my past?
I keep having memories of things that happened to me and I start crying… I am also not doing well at home. I will eat too little or too much bc I am upset all the time and I don’t know how to voice it out. Whenever I have tried to ask advice from authorities, psychiatrists, therapists etc in the past I don’t really feel they cared about my problems that much… cops would say I did not “look abused” etc. I would like your anonymous opinions on how to get over these things, and advice on what attitude I should have for the future. I apologize if this is long but I just wanted to see if I can get any better advice than my therapist asking if I smoked a bunch of herbs in a cupboard.

Both of my parents grew up in a strict church some would consider a cult, and some traditions included having to maintain a certain dress code and valuing women as inferior to men. When the church broke up into smaller groups, my parents for the majority of my life would fight over their differing religions. My mother also had a harsh upbringing in where she was passed from one relative to another. Things went more downhill after their divorce and, along with other stressors at home, I am physically suffering from how emotionally drained I am. I am not eating well and look very tired.. more than usual. I intend to leave home soon, take a break and regain my health.

These are events I’ve been remembering lately:

1. At different times my mom would threaten both my brother and I that she would knock our teeth out, make our mouths bleed. As a little kid my mom would slap me on the mouth repeatedly if I cried. She would do this if I happened to be in the room after her and my dad had an argument, or after telling me many put-downs. I believe she would try to grab my chest if I tried to run from her too, and she would grab my hair. I cut my hair when I grew older so that I would not keep experiencing that.
2. My dad would call me names like satanist, child of satan, heathen, the b word, harlot, when I was younger.
3. There was one point as an older child, around 14 or 15, my dad spanked me and laughed, and another time at 18 where he would not let me leave the house in shorts. He held up a long black skirt of my mom’s and told me to wear that instead, because it was “sexy”. Yet another time he also looked at my chest for a long time, saying I had milk on my shirt.
4. When given a massage, my mother tried to touch me inappropriately when I could barely move from medication. She said that she was trying to massage ‘there’ because I have always gotten irregular periods, and that her cousins would do the same thing to her when she was younger.
5. I started feeling suicidal at a young age (11) because my mother had just gotten a job and had my dad stay at home to take care of me and my brother, and we ended up eating mostly microwavable or easy-prep food. A lot of it was undercooked, but I ate it anyways, and I became very overweight for my age. I was 170. My dad would keep serving my brother and I this food, and would also give us a very high amount of sugary stuff like M&M’s and tell us not to tell my mom. My mother would then ask why I was so fat all of the time and would tell me things like I was stupid. My dad later announced he was going to padlock all of the food in a closet so I would ‘lose weight’.
6. My parents would forget to pick me up during my teen years. I would wait out in the cold, sometimes in the dark, for hours, and depended on incredibly kind people who offered to drive me home. At one point, one of these kind people was a classmate I hadn’t met before, who told me they could not just leave me outside like that, because ‘I was a girl’.
7. My mom’s boyfriend would repetitively call me sexy when he would drive me to my highschool. When friend’s parent confronted my mom about how she should protect me from these sort of things, she brushed it off and said that he was just joking.
8. I have a friend that would drive with me at night to the more rural area of my city so we could look at the stars and the water, talk about our lives, shop, etc, and when she would bring me home, my mother would accuse me of sleeping around.

There are probably more things that keep flashing in my mind, but I will basically lay these out for now.
More events I just remembered —

9. I considered harming myself, in middle school, because my mother threatened to become a prostitute since me and my brother would ask for things like new clothes.
10. My mom tried to lock me in the house after I tried to get help, as her boyfriend tried to bother me in the wee hours of the night. She lied and said she was awake when he tried to approach me around 5 a.m.

Thank you for listening/reading and I would appreciate any advice on how to transition from this into a stable life.

Best answer:

Answer by luv you forever
I’m so sorry you had to go through all that. I know how you feel, my parents used to call me a bitch all the time and put me down. My mom made fun of my weight even though I was never over 120 and I turned anorexic for a while. My dad was an alcoholic too and used to drive off drunk until late at night. When I was 12 I tried to kill myself twice because I felt like nobody loved me and my sister hit me. I’m 18 now and I moved out, I was depressed for a while but I started thinking that it’s not worth letting my emotions get to me anymore than they already have. It’s hard, but try to almost let it go and think to yourself that you deserve better than to be treated like that. It will get better. I promise. If you want to email me and vent, feel free to 🙂 at “[email protected]”

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