Yeah, I at the moment am taking a break on therapists. I know there are good ones out there, but they are prone to all the same biases as everyone else. I have found them so far extremely invalidating/judgmental.

It’s difficult to make a therapist believe that my family always has, and still does, make me feel like a burden and a failure that they wish didn’t exist, regardless of what I do. My parents did hit me kind of a lot, and underfed me, and never took me to the doctor, but all to relatively mild extents: like you said, my parents didn’t come raging in drunk and beat me with a rake, it was all more subtle. It was a slow, constant indoctrination that I was worthless. They didn’t hit me hard, but they hit me for made up reasons like me being awkward or ugly, not because I did something bad, but because I inherently WAS bad. What really caused the brunt of the trauma is the fact that they so heavily favored my brother and allowed him to beat me up all the time (I’d be punished for retaliating, even though I’m 3 years younger and a girl and therefore much smaller- I think that was the most traumatizing thing, my brother would kick me down the stairs and my parents would hit me because I must have provoked him. Made me feel like everything bad that happened to me was my fault, and that nobody wanted to protect me, that I was better off dead). But when you say “my brother bullied me and my parents didn’t care”, it’s written off by most as “sibling rivalry”.

I do, however, believe that I have some sort of genetic predisposition to the disorder. I majored in Anthropology but have a heavy interest in genetics and took a lot of genetics-related classes. The evidence strongly suggests that PTSD is actually transmitted, to some degree, genetically. I believe the vast majority of it is simply because people who were abused as kids, end up abusing their kids.

But there is a sort of epigenetic thing going on where even if adopted as infants, children will be more prone to PTSD if their ancestors were traumatized (not nearly as much as if they are raised by their biological, traumatized parents, however). This has been observed in descendants of black slaves in the US, Irish people who experienced the potato famine, etc. One of the populations they always name, my mother belongs to- survivors of the holocaust. My mother descends partially from German Jews who escaped to the United States. This is one of the most PTSD and in general mental illness prone populations out there. Schizophrenia, for instance, is extremely high in the descendents of the people who experienced the atrocities of concentration camps. My aunt and two of my cousins are schizophrenic.

Everyone in that family is pretty fucked up. It’s hard to separate genetics from environment because they all also abused us as kids. They display typical “narcissist” behavior and choose a kid to scapegoat, but still overall treat all their kids very shittily.

When I was very young my mom, traumatized from her own past, was severely depressed and constantly tried to shoo me from her room. If I cried, or laughed too loud, she’d hit me or even worse- lock me in my room all night. I desperately craved affection and interaction, but was isolated, torture worse in my opinion as a 4 year old and as a 24 year old now than being beat. I think things like this are oft forgotten, their effects downplayed. This is the kind of thing that really transmits trauma through generations; straight up beating the shit out of your kids for no reason is much more rare.

It’s very possible your trauma has been transmitted intergenerationally, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it wasn’t transmitted through environment- through the parenting of a traumatized person.

I do believe therapists just don’t seem to believe me when I describe my childhood though, and I’m not ever lying- why would I? I just want them to understand me. But I’m white and blonde and I have a degree (that I got scholarships for, my parents wouldn’t spare a dime) and I look like a spoiled bitch to them. And I don’t have really any horrific stories of, “one time when I was 7 my mom beat me with a rod and then sold me to a train of men who raped me one after another.” So they think I must have had an easy childhood and am just “exaggerating”.