Neglect stories… I’ve got a few.

From the time I was six or seven she tried to reason with me (with +3-hr scoldings) and get me to change to her christo-Amway of thinking up till I was 16. Than I has a choice: knuckle under or get out. Being 16 and full of great, well thought out plans I left with three garbage bags of winter wear and clothes. Yes, she and him (my father) agreed that the decision to leave was my own to make. At sixteen.

Fast forward to me being 62. She lies dying in a home, and forgives me as her final act of charity. Yeah, ok, so buh-bye.

And him? Dementia. Game. Set. Match.

Treat your children as precious (if temporarily irritating) treasures and remember you only get to throw them away once.

When I was 15 or so I get home from school and get a AIM message from an account I don’t know claiming to be a girl at my school who has a crush on me, but too shy to reveal who she is. Which was weird all by itself because I didn’t use AIM often.

At first I’m delighted, but she quickly becomes sexual. Talking about masturbating to me in very explicit detail. I get freaked out and stop responding. Which prompts an angry phone call from my Dad saying the account is messaging him now and bothering him at work. How she got my account info wss confusing, but i didn’t even know my dad had an account.

So I respond a few more times, and very quickly “she” starts sending me porn, which then turns to sending CSAM saying I need to masturbate to it too. I’m freaking tf out and block the account. Which prompts another angry phone call. I tell my dad I don’t know this person and tell him to just block the account to stop him getting bothered. He calls me a pussy and hangs up.

When he gets home, I tell him that the account was sending me freaky stuff. He stomps over to the computer, opens an terminal and typed a long string of characters that returns our IP address. “If it happens again, do this and we can catch this freak”. He then abruptly closes the window before I can even read what he typed, much less remember it. He slams his bedroom door and that’s the last I see of him for the night.

Took me a long time to fully understand and accept what happened that night, but I never looked at my dad the same again. There were a few more odd situations where he put CSAM in front of me or sent it to my step-dad getting him fired. But he died before I gathered the courage to confront him.

Recognized for being really intelligent.

Rejected my thoughts and opinions about everything because it scares their fundamentalist religious sensabilities.

That cognitive dissonance still fucks with me.

deleted by creator

There isn’t enough time in the day to talk about what my parents did and didn’t do that they should have. The breaking point was when I discovered that my mother was abusing my autistic son in the same manner she had me. It made her happy to make him cry and she was cruel in how she did it. May she rot.

Openly not believing in my academy career, which was a failure for the lack of motivation.

My mom told me that she heard my soon-to-be-wife say some really horrible things about her and my kids behind my back.

Whatever she thought that would accomplish didn’t work, because I had already told my wife to start recording her interactions with my mom. (Clearly not my first rodeo)

Mom wasn’t real happy when I told her I’d listen to the audio.

Used the fact that he named me after himself to commit fraud using my name.

Told my friend that he’s like the son he never had, in front of me.

going into my backpack and stealing my HRT while i was in the shower, and refusing to give it back

For context: I had an uncle who was an alcoholic/addict, with his addiction being the result of immense trauma he suffered as a kid. He was fired from his job in the medical field after writing himself scripts, and made a genuine effort to turn his life around. He went to AA and other therapy, brought his sponsor/buddy to events where there would be alcohol, and generally took it seriously and worked to improve.

A few years later, we got a call in the early morning. He had overdosed and died after an argument with my aunt. It’s unclear whether it was a relapse or if the overdose was intentional, and to be honest it didn’t matter. My aunt was distraught, he was dead, and their kids now had no father. It was a horrific tragedy.

When I got up to ask what the phone call was for, my mother had a huge smile on her face. She thought his addiction was a moral failing that automatically made him a bad person, but she also judged him badly for needing AA and the buddy syatem to stay on track. She told us, with glee in her voice, that he had “finally killed himself”.

It took everything in my power to not lay into her, which I didn’t do only because I knew she would never change her mind. It was just the latest and worst example of her horrid behavior. I never told my aunt, but I did tell other members of my extended family when they asked why I didn’t talk to them anymore.

my dad basically told me how disappointed he was in me when he died.

because i didn’t play high school football.

i was 30.

he was a weird bitter dude, really hung up on sports and a lot of trivial nonsense. only thing he ever seemed to enjoy in life was cruises and gambling.

I’m reading this at the moment. It sounds like you might have active abuse rather than detached neglect (which I believe is also abuse).

This stuff impacts us and those around us in the future. From personal experience it’s well worth talking to a pro about it.

My father was pretty draconic. No time for friends, no time for extra curriculars, no time for homework (he didn’t believe in public education, which caused its own problems), because there was always something to do: my chores, my siblings’ chores, home improvement projects, random “educational” outings that were mostly just me sitting in the car. Not to mention the verbal and physical abuse, leaving me on the side of the road to “scare me straight”, making me live in a tent in the backyard for a while.

I tried to be the bigger person after I moved out and practice hippy-dippy radical forgiveness. Unfortunately, he’s a malignant narcissist and even when he realized he had no leverage anymore and had to behave, he was still a really really bad influence. The more time I spent with him, the more his traits rubbed off on me. I had to cut him off entirely because it became too much.

This one may seem silly compared to the things I’ve read.

My parents gave me a strange eating disorder that it took a while to get over.

Mom refused to accept that there were foods or perhaps ingredients that I was either unwilling or unable to eat. As an example, Onions are horrible and they literally make me sick, whether its whole chunks of onion or powdered onion. But she kept sneaking onion into stuff she made because she just knew I’d like them if I just tried them! It wasn’t a matter of “like” it was the fact that if I ate some I’d end up doing a technicolor yodel over the toilet while she told me I was being dramatic. Sometimes if I was really unlucky I wouldn’t make it to the toilet which would make her even madder. So Id get spanked after puking.

This caused me to be really mistrustful of food that I didn’t prepare myself. I also had problems eating in front of other people, because mom (both parents really) would get upset over how I was eating, and it took me until I was in my 30’s before I was comfortable eating with other people around. Which did wonders for my social life in my 20’s.