I just didn't want what you wrote to sit out there unacknowledged, as sometimes happens on LJ with serious stuff. It's weird, when I was a teenager I kept trying to get somebody to recognize that Something Was Wrong in my house, and they basically handed back to me what you wrote--you're middle to upper-middle class, your grades are good, what's the problem? My mom-driving-nightmare for some reason also involved a thermos full of scalding water, and the dog wasn't calm, she was running all over the back seat, and managed somehow to spill the thermos. So then I was in trouble for getting my foot scalded. But each individual nightmare just sounds like a bad day; it's when you knit them all together into your whole childhood life that the seriousness becomes apparent--and nobody else really sees the whole relentless, seamless, escape-proof fabric, even though as a kid, I thought they could. Anyway, you know you could go to an Alanon group for Adult Children of Alcoholics and vent now, right? I'm not going any more but I found it tremendously helpful at one stage of dealing with my past. Specifically for coming to terms with the shame that I was making a fuss over a relatively comfortable childhood, and the feeling that having lived through it, I should no longer be freaked out by the threat of anger and verbal abuse. The two big things, though, are that you did escape, and that, as an adult, you are always free to walk away from people who argue and put others down. There's no requirement that you accept such behavior, and you are no longer dependent upon the people who engage in it to get home. Take good care.
Anyway, you know you could go to an Alanon group for Adult Children of Alcoholics and vent now, right? I'm not going any more but I found it tremendously helpful at one stage of dealing with my past. Specifically for coming to terms with the shame that I was making a fuss over a relatively comfortable childhood, and the feeling that having lived through it, I should no longer be freaked out by the threat of anger and verbal abuse.
The two big things, though, are that you did escape, and that, as an adult, you are always free to walk away from people who argue and put others down. There's no requirement that you accept such behavior, and you are no longer dependent upon the people who engage in it to get home.
Take good care.
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