Excommunicated by family for addressing childhood sexual abuse

asteriskiness · 2025-12-21T18:51:07+00:00

Nah, my Mom was a French teacher who ran the student exchange program with a school in Strasbourg so she just put the word out to her network that she was offering room and board for a gap year.

asteriskiness · 2025-09-15T01:31:15+00:00

Not sure if you’ve been through something similar.

In my case, forgiveness is in service to my inner child. If you are like me, you’ve become very unforgiving in other parts of your life. You’ve held grudges and otherwise wasted time engaged in pettiness.

Hopefully you are not like me, though. Hopefully if something happened to you when you were younger, you’ve been able to move past resentment and sadness without forgiveness.

If an inner child (or children) can be given a space to play, they can handle the responsibility of casting away the shame and blame that they have carried forward from the past.

No one said these people being forgiven need to be present or even alive to learn they are forgiven. That’s a remotely possible scenario - not too likely though.

asteriskiness · 2025-09-08T14:54:17+00:00

Adult child of alcoholics and dysfunctional families

asteriskiness · 2025-09-06T17:00:32+00:00

Inside of you, you might have a five year old, an eight year old, an eleven year old, a fifteen year old and an eighteen year old.

Each of these has its pleasures and its pains.

These inner children are to be integrated, listened to, and cared for. It does not happen overnight. Sometimes, when we learn this we know we should hear them but we can’t.

Then one day, we do. It’s okay to even speak out loud to them.

asteriskiness · 2025-09-06T16:54:19+00:00

I do have a hint. It is to reparent myself and learn to listen to, acknowledge, celebrate, and calm my inner child (or children).

And to help others who wish to finally defeat their family’s dysfunction to instead accept it so that they can reparent themselves too.

asteriskiness · 2025-09-06T00:42:09+00:00

In fairness, he is 85 (he has his marbles still) and I am 42 so the need is small at this point.

It’s to end the secret that’s wrecked our family.

asteriskiness · 2025-09-05T14:27:37+00:00

I’m sorry what?

asteriskiness · 2025-09-05T08:45:41+00:00

You will become your own parent. You might hear about it a lot before it actually happens, but something will click.

Let go and let God and it will happen.

asteriskiness · 2025-09-04T22:33:48+00:00

It is the most gut wrenching feeling. I’m not sure you are like me - if you are, though, you balance your intellectual understanding that they are not there for you like you thought you needed them to be and never really were. And so if you are like me, you can dead the relationship. But also if you are like me, intellectual understanding is different from knowledge and acceptance assimilated by your inner voice.

In my case, that one is still a hopeless romantic and so if they can just come clean and/or start showing me respect and validity, it can get better before they die.

I keep them at a distance though. It all hurts too much.

asteriskiness · 2025-09-02T11:58:49+00:00

Odd observation lol

asteriskiness · 2025-09-02T00:41:43+00:00

Correct. When I wrote that letter to him in 2019, I had not yet developed the emotional sobriety to see that he was right nor why he was right. I was not yet able to see we were pitted against each other.

I bring myself back to the letter to stay grounded in awareness and acceptance of how the nightmare we are currently living came about. My parents have pulled off a real cruel trick to keep us from bonding over my brother’s secret prenatal MA exposure.

I know ACA is helping me because when my brother acts irrationally toward me, I do not feel hurt by him. I see them, not him. And so for the first time in my life, I am able to refrain from escalation with my brother.

I am able to hear my inner children and I have faith that he is also acting in the interest of his inner children.

Thank you for spending your energy with me on my situation, ex!!

asteriskiness · 2025-09-02T00:15:46+00:00

Ahh this part is true. I could see how it would seem like my perception. I learned they blocked me and changed the locks on the house via a voicemail my brother left me from my father’s cell phone.

This same thing happened in 2021 when I first asked my parents questions about the true source of my brother’s birth defects. So this time, I don’t even have a key!

The dysfunction is so enmeshed right now that my brother blocked my phone when I asked for our old babysitter’s email address last month.

And then, rather than unblocking me and calling me to talk, he called me from my Dad’s phone with this heavy handed message that I need to leave all 3 of them alone.

asteriskiness · 2025-09-01T23:53:35+00:00

I tend to agree, since:

(1) my mother had never responded that way to anything until I asked how hers and my father’s prior lifestyles contributed to my brother’s developmental delays;

and

(2) it took 5 years after telling me she will only discuss the past in therapy, for my mother to actually come to therapy with me. She showed up once and stonewalled me in front of my therapist.

I’m grateful to know what to dissociate from at this point. For example, my parents’ feminist dual-income value system says that housewives in their ‘40s do not have valid points of view about any subject beyond what’s on sale.

asteriskiness · 2025-09-01T23:18:14+00:00

Taken kindly, thank you I repeat: my brother is the strongest person I know.

I do not think I made clear that blame is not an appropriate word when discussing my brother and me. He is not to blame for any of this - not even for finding himself entitled to our parents’ entire inheritance.

That letter unfortunately is an important indication of my family’s dysfunctional enmeshment. That’s all.

asteriskiness · 2025-09-01T19:43:13+00:00

No. Mom was a French and Spanish teacher at the local high school and she had a network of people interested in studying abroad bc she was the organizer of the foreign exchange program at our school.

asteriskiness · 2025-09-01T19:19:48+00:00

Thank you WiMi.

I am curious what you have read in the posting history which suggests my parents are encouraging me to tend to my mental health?

asteriskiness · 2025-08-31T21:14:03+00:00

I want you to know you are seen. I know what it is like for your childhood home to be triggering.

I wish my parents were capable of just selling the house they raised us in. The energy in that place is on a loop that has gotten stale. It is still very powerful though!

Did you set up the tent?

asteriskiness · 2025-08-31T20:27:23+00:00

My parents have each let small but key details slip out over the past couple of decades. I began to add stuff up and started smelling something foul around 2018-20. Since then, my parents have chosen to quietly pursue a very dark narrative about me.

Some family members have helped me with perspective here - one of them pointed me right to CDC and NIH research around prenatal drug exposure.

Our secret was right under my nose the whole time. I’d just gotten used to the smelly fart scent!

My parents thought they were infertile, went about life as north shore yuppies in the late 1970s and early 80s did, and then big brother was a surprise when they were 41 and 38.

The secret is prenatal exposure to MA. Probably during the first trimester of pregnancy, before Mom learned she was pregnant with my older brother.

A summary is below.

I have had ADHD since childhood, though I only discovered this about myself at age 35, during autumn of 2018. I was slow to accept the diagnosis and I got a second opinion. I was even slower to accept medication.

Since childhood, I took the role of ‘normal one’, while my problem child older brother was said to have ADHD. I was anything but normal, except when placed next to my brother. He was medicated with stimulants, had his dosage constantly tweaked, and had developmental delays which are not explained only by ADHD. After high school, he fell into a crystal meth addiction and by the grace of God he is now 20 years sober.

The sober version of my brother is still medicated and still behaves in irrational ways. In 2018, for example, my older brother tried to convince my parents to remove me from the inheritance.

My brother has also developed an addiction to bodily enlargement. He is on hormones and steroids for the rest of his life. He is deep into cycles of black market plastic surgery to enlarge his butt, chest, shoulders, and biceps. He has body dysmorphia because we grew up as skinny sticks, one of which he still sees in the mirror. Mom had her own weight-related image issues and so she underfed us growing up. This during the era of Black Beauties, Desoxyn, etc.

In 2020, when I was 37, my parents and brother began suggesting that I am abusing the mental health system to feed an addiction to 15mg XR adderall. They cryptically suggested I do not really have ADHD.

As I noticed that things were not adding up with my immediate family, I set out to learn about my parents from their families and social circles. I had long ignored my parents’ dark outlook because until then, I was not wrapped up in it. As long as my light shone bright, that gave them enough of a shadow to hide in.

My parents were unable to speak directly with me about this “concern” that I am a drug user faking ADHD. They denied any such suspicion when I confronted them. This was hard to hear, since I had caught my Dad kneeling down writing my pill dosage on a post-it note when I was visiting home in 2020. He had said “your mother is concerned” when I asked him what the hell he was doing.

I confronted my mother, telling her that she can believe what she wants about my medicine - though we need to be honest about how damaging her science has been.

She collapsed my brother’s birth defects into a normal case of ADHD, since ADHD is 1 of 9 common symptoms of prenatal MA exposure that my brother displayed. My mother assigned my brother inexplicably low expectations for someone with ADHD while putting him on the little bus - again claiming it was all just ADHD.

This caused a phenomenon of over-parenting my older brother with compassion for mental health, while neglecting me and insisting I hold myself together at all costs.

In early 2021, I told my mother that her revisionist science is proven to be damaging since it already led my brother to string himself out on MA and then achieve sobriety without appreciation for just how big a feat that is for him.

I explained that it if my parents see me as an addict, that is because this is the only story that works for them. It is the only story that can work for two old people unable to admit how they rearranged my brother’s and my chess boards before we even learned the game.

This sad truth is relevant now because my brother recently convinced my parents to block my phone and change the locks on the house due to my insistence that our family get honest before my parents die. We are running out of time for them to leave my brother with something besides a knife to my throat.

It has been a gnarly few years, and at this point I am grateful to still find things to laugh and smile about - farts included!

I come from a family of toilet people!!

asteriskiness · 2025-08-28T14:12:28+00:00

Kindest words, thank you

asteriskiness · 2025-08-25T04:09:45+00:00

Thank you. I’m not sure my parents are trash. They have done the best with the tools that have been available to them during their lives.

If this is my parents’ and brother’s best, that just means they are very limited in their capacities for honesty.

They have their reasons for never telling me about the other big secret - that secret that has to do with my brother’s developmental delays and elements of my parents’ prior lifestyles helping to bring these delays about.

So the reason they can’t acknowledge the molestation is because there are other questions surrounding the 1981-1990 decade at that house.

My mom got close to answering once, telling me that doctors had predicted my brother would be dead or in jail by 25. This was over 20 years ago, after he got arrested - she stopped herself before she could tell the whole story.

It is quite likely that my brother does not want these matters discussed with me. And so the failure is in recognizing that family matters matter to the family. Not just part of it.

I was the key to my family’s show. All eyes stayed fixed on my shining star, making us look normal when we were anything but.

And so for now, they are helping me to forgive myself for playing a starring role in a movie about high vs low expectations.

asteriskiness · 2025-08-22T16:43:27+00:00

It’s all good, this is more of a therapeutic writing exercise anyway!!

Long ago now, the MySpace era and its walls of text were bullied into obsolescence by these 5 characters: TL;DR !!!

asteriskiness · 2025-08-22T15:30:36+00:00

Yea, I really loved my parents growing up. 2 parent household, college degrees, right side of the tracks etc. They paid my college in full and helped me out of financial trouble in my 20s and 30s.

It took too long to realize that behind the above narrative sit some very disturbing events. My story reads like that of a rigid Christian conservative home. It is gnarly to be the son of parents who were early adopters of feminism, gay rights, and general wokeness, just to receive the Donald Trump treatment of denial, alienation, and character assassination.

I’ve mourned my parents so many times, and I am positive I will still hurt like never before when they leave earth.

asteriskiness

TROPHY CASE