The Perfect Family

This month it will be more than a year that my nightmares started and that I started therapy. Many things changed during this year. And everything changed to the better. After a year of self-parenting I got rid of many unhealthy thoughts, behaviours and reactions. I can now see how my childhood belief-system works, how present it was during the last 25 years of my life and how it stopped me from being happy. There are days that I'm still struggeling with it, when I feel worthless and think that I'm doing everything wrong and everything is my fault. But now that I know these feelings are wrong I fight against them and they get less frequent. Not weaker unfortunately but less frequent.

Years ago I didn't think that anyone would like to be around me, having me as a friend let alone loving me. I remember being surprised whenever someone listened to what I was saying. Once I couldn't help asking a friend of mine:'You actually listened to what I was saying?'. Of course I got a weird look from him telling me that that was a question he never heard before. I was honestly surprised that somebody actually listened when I was saying something. I was so used to be ignored or not heared. In my family you didn't get heared - not that I tried that often - if you didn't scream because that was/is how my parents and my sister communicate with each other.

Questions were ignored or answered in a way that whatever it was you were asking it turned into something they could scream at you for. Sometimes I remember my mother behaving like a normal person, trustworthy and kind. But only for a few minutes or seconds until me or my sister thought we could open up to her and tell her something, anything that happened during the day. I remember her switching immediately back to that hostile 'I know you did something wrong and I will find out'-person freaking out about what was just said. Again trying to turn it into something she could use against you. And even if you could prove that she was wrong and obviously lying, she denied that she was lying until you got tired and gave up. She just couldn't admit anything. The day I asked her if she didn't see what she and my father were doing to me, she told me that they didn't do anything wrong. It was the day I tried or better said I half-heartedly tried to commit suicide for the last time, it was on my 15th birthday (or 16th I just can't remember on which one it was). Half-heartedly because later I understood that I actually just wanted to hurt myself and it turned into self-harm.

My whole family is like this. Another huge issue for them is their public image. We lived in a small town one of those where everybody knows the other at least by their last name. My parents and my grandparents lived in that town for a long time. I can proudly say that I think I could walk around town for hours without anybody recognizing me. I was only known as the daughter, granddaughter, or more frequently the sister of. My parents changed into normal people, laughing, making jokes, having conversations in a decent volume whenever they went outside. This image of the 'perfect' or 'normal functioning' family was sacred to them. Whatever happened outside in public was discussed later. Behaviour my parents laughed at in public was punished at home. In later years they even started bragging about how well we behaved in public when we were younger. ??

I never played along with that and I remember how much I hated it when my parents played this outside role because I knew how they really were. I never believed a laugh or a smile, because I never saw them do that at home. I got annoyed by my fathers laugh and my mothers smile. I don't actually recall my mother ever laughing. That is probably why she didn't like it when we were laughing, telling us something bad will happen and one of us will end up crying anyway.

My grandparents did the same. My grandfather was the worst. I could call him 'the guarder of the family secrets'. There are many many sercets in my family, things nobody talks about. Things that are not appropriate to talk about. One of the things that shocked me that I didn't know was when I found out that my grandmother was in Auschwitz. Something I consider to be a part of history that should never be neglected or forgotten. I was told that she was a refugee during this time and that refugees were also put into the concentration camps. So I started wondering where she actually came from. And I still have no idea.

I don't know if my parents still live in their denial about everything since I have no contact to them but there is no way I will.