Childhood Neglect: how do we heal?
How do we heal from emotional instability, alcoholism, and abandonment?
I was raised by two emotionally immature, alcoholic parents. I was an accident. My mother drank while she was pregnant. She was always in denial of her alcoholism until two years ago when she got in a physical altercation with a neighbour out and broke her wrist and could have been arrested.
My father still drinks.
They split up when I was seven years old, and immediately introduced me to the man my mother was having an affair with . Brian. I lived mostly with my mother in a basement apartment. That’s where I would sleepwalk and pee in the closets, my nightmares repeated and no one helped me.
My father was living alone and depressed and emotionally absent. When he got a new partner, I had to mould to their family. He did that twice. I was seen and not heard.
My mother moved me across the country when I was 17. I left all of my childhood friends behind, which was bittersweet since many of them were my bullies. His now ex, Bev, convinced him not to pay child support. My mother would yell and scream and cry and grieve to me. She tried to kill herself twice. I found her in the bath tub, having downed a 40L of gin. She has always loved me, but being a mother was hard for her.
My father is now with a very controlling spouse and they fight a lot. They moved away from the city and I don’t drive, so I can’t see them. They make plans with her sisters and exclude me.
I have a high stress job. But it’s all I have so I stay. Addicted to stress.
My marriage ended about 8 years ago when I cheated on my husband with another emotionally unavailable man. My ex husband was a drinker, a partier, and was cheating on me from day one. I would come home from work and find him passed out, having pissed himself, in the middle of the kitchen floor. I was unsafe with him. I left. Then my other relationship ended because he didn’t love me. He was using me for sex. After that, I got cervical cancer. I got cervical cancer because my ex slept with a woman with it. I stayed with him for years after he had to confess it to me.
I am 45 years old now, and it’s hard to believe I will ever have peace and grow up.