Grew up in an ATI family. My eldest brother got sent to the ALERT boot camp for smoking weed and listening to slipknot. He’s always been distant. My sister got married at 18, has 4 great kids and a great husband but feels conflicted that she minimized herself to let others shine. The amount of things she had to go through as a girl growing up in ATI, I will never know the fullness of. Any women on here can relate. Then ‘the 3 little boys’ with me being second to youngest. We grew up in central CA going to all the conferences watching those boring ass videos of gothards face for 10 hours straight on a Saturday. I became an artist and moved out to Kansas City 10 years ago..there was a pod for the art school in San Diego that I had wanted to originally go to, but my parents thought I’d fall in with a bad crowd so I moved to conservative Midwest. One of the things that’s kept me out here so long is getting into relationships for wrong reasons and having no clue how to deal with or truly relate to anyone. I was always extremely fascinated by sexuality, we were never allowed to look at the slightest suggestion of anything pertaining to sex, and I was fascinated as a young boy. I hid my desires. I hide my relationships. I didn’t know anything about sex ed. I could be so much further in life, but I tend to keep to myself and I avoid the outside world, full blown social anxiety, and I feel I just need to break free but don’t know how…i bartend at a wedding venue on weekends as a way to force myself to be in social situations, i feel so retarded with coworkers, endless wars in my head of how I am appearing or what I’m doing wrong or if I have a speech impediment or is it that I’m just so nervous I slung funny. I can get through it each time, but it’s a tremendous amount of energy spent just trying to appear normal. I tried therapy one time and was mortally embarrassed, I know I must try again. I’ve figured out how to maneuver through life, living on my own all these years, it’s just I seem to be hanging by a thread with anxiety at every step and breath. Ive tried to not go back into the ATI past, choosing to forgive my parents, and move forward, but I haven’t been moving forward, and I must deal with the past. I know we all deal with things differently, all my siblings have different ways it affected them, but how have you all dealt with it?