u/pswelcometomylife

Trigger Warning: Sexual assault. Not done to me, but to my mother.

Also, this is really long.

She's been dead for 9 years now so I'm not sure if it counts, but she passed when I was 17 so I've still spent a majority of my life under her roof. I'm asking if this is usually what happens when a parent is bipolar. I was also diagnosed as autistic as a little girl so maybe that might give some context for why I did certain things that I'm going to say I did. My mom was also like 40 to 50-ish when I knew her, if that helps.

The most notable part of living with her was from about 12 to 17 where her screaming at me was at its worst. She had gotten off her medication when I was about to start high school to work a taxi cab again, because taking it put her at risk of falling asleep at any time, even in her car on the road. She said she "did it for me" and so she could "pay off the house" so I'd have it as an adult (I live with another family now and I haven't gone to that house in years).

I was expected to clean while she was gone, but when I did I'd get yelled at for "rearranging shit" and when I tried to ask her where things went when she was home, she'd act pissed off that I was bothering her. I remember once I said "I don't know what trash is!" because sometimes there'd be these random thingamabobs I'd never seen her use and she literally called up all her friends to make fun of me saying "I dOn'T kNoW wHaT tRaSh Is!" But if I did so much as put random crap in a plastic grocery bag because I didn't know where they went that she later found, she'd still yell at me for "throwing shit away." Sometimes she'd accuse me of trashing stuff when I didn't even remember cleaning that day. It made me feel like maybe I had been so bad up to that point that I didn't deserve the benefit of the doubt anymore.

Even when she was right there to tell me what to do, I'd usually do it wrong somehow. Like I remember a few times my mom told me to text a bunch of stuff for her all at once using her phone, then she'd get angry that I "shortened" it when trying to read it back to her because I couldn't remember everything she told me to write. Or at least once she'd tell me to do a bunch of things all at once, then add more while I'm the middle of the first batch, then complain and ask why I hadn't already done anything from the second batch, and I remember once saying I hadn't even gotten done yet, she laughed and was like "I'm sowwy!" and called me her little "gopher" while I cried. She ended up doing the same thing again at some point later, though, getting just as mad, as if it never happened or it never mattered.

Sometimes it felt impossible to do what she wanted correctly. Like one time she wanted to get me a "red dress" that was hanging, and then I did and she just huffed and got up and got a visibly less red dress on it, and when I pointed this out she said "Well, it has red on it, so it's a red dress!" If I tried to ask for clarification on a task she just gave me, she'd get mad, like the time she asked for a "red bag" and we had a recyclable grocery bag, and a red flexible material lunchbox, so I asked which and she yelled "THE RED BAG!!!" and it was apparently wrong because she threw it at me. Two different times she wanted me to get her up for work, and one time despite her groggy protests I did and she got up yelling "You think I can work forever!" and the other time I listened to her protests, and let her sleep, and she woke up yelling "You want me to sleep my life away so you can play on your [devices]!" It made me think if I didn't know what she was talking about, then I was stupid or careless for not paying enough attention to what she "really" meant.

Sometimes I wonder if I really was causing problems on purpose like I was accused of. She once told me directly "You LIKE it" and another time telling me I had a fetish for women crying, but then did this weird turnaround of "It's okay/understandable for you to find crying sexy." She'd do these weird turnarounds a lot, like suddenly switching to calmly while smiling telling me that I need to put more effort into cleaning because it's really important, or the time I said I thought I was depressed and she screamed at me because I didn't know what real depression was and then suddenly doing a 180 to show concern when I was crying. Or the time I was in the car crying and she said they were crocodile tears, then I tried stifling them and then she suddenly acted like it was serious because "If you're trying to hide it, then it must be real." She always said I was pulling "poor pitiful me shit" whenever I cried, which was every day, and would often like to tell a story about how an annoying toddler relative was crying, and me mom told me to cry to prove to that child crying is easy, to make the case that I'm good at faking tears therefor my current tears are stupid.

When she wasn't screaming at me when I was home, she was usually on her phone talking super loudly, typically about whatever dramas she got into recently. She was constantly having interpersonal conflicts with other people, that I ended up hearing about all the time due to simple proximity. I don't think I ever heard her express remorse or regret for anything she did to other people - the closest I saw her get to that is when she'd start crying when it turned out her friends died. It seemed like if a friend didn't die, they'd either fade into obscurity in her life or she'd have a fallout with them. One time she had a crush on a store owner, and she eventually had a hissy fit in his store so big he told her to never come back, and she'd get these weird unknown calls and answer them and taunt whoever was on the other end because she thought this guy was "stalking" her via this way. I also remember being in the car with her when she couldn't find one guy she never interacted with before, and after the ordeal she made comment to me how she thought this guy was in cahoots with a completely different person she had currently beefing with for weeks. I wasn't in the drama, though, so I don't know.

She often didn't seem to understand why anything she did was bad, and would even get angry if called out on it. One time she told me directly and to several friends on the phone that she sent a picture of herself in lingerie to a coworker and his partner got mad, and she didn't understand why the woman was making a fuss because "It's just a picture." Another time we somehow got into a conversations where she smiled and said "Men can't be raped!" I even tried pushing back against this but she just said if I kept it up she was going to "beat my ass." Even though she also liked to tell a story of how she hit me once as a toddler and I got angry about it so she "never hit me again" like she was prideful of it, but would also often say she would "beat my ass" if I did or didn't do something up into my teenage years, even though she never did it, but I didn't want to test her by trying too hard to resist.

This is a good time to bring up how once my mom cried to me about how she was molested by her own father as a child, and was raped as a young adult, and after crawling home after the latter incident, her own mother told her "If you insist you were raped, I won't love you anymore." As a preteen my mother for a period of time for some reason had me visit my grandmother, this same woman who told her that, every month, until one day she got into an argument with my uncle and her mother where he called my mom a cunt and we never went back.

Going back to the sexual stuff, my mother was extremely promiscuous before and after my father passed. Since being a teenager, I remember her sometimes telling me stories of her sexual experiences, and said stuff like if I ever wanted to know anything to just ask her, and if I needed to release my "urges" that she'd buy toys for me. But I never really asked her to tell me those stories. She'd even put stuff like that on me, too. I remember being as young as about 12? 14? and I just danced in the living room and she smiled and laughed as she told me "If you dance like that in front of a man, you're going to get raped! :D" and I froze up but she just kept her smile on. She even told me wanted to be a cam girl and had me sit at our computer and read out all the options for each question and click everything for her, and getting angry at me several times when trying to take a picture of her ID was too fuzzy. She also said something when I apparently jiggled my chest around, about how she could have me wear a mask and shake my chest for money, but I genuinely don't know if this was supposed to be a joke, since we never pursued it, but I don't know if this is because I never said yes.

But there'd be times where she'd make me do something anyway. When we did do things together, I hated it because I didn't like being around her, and I often felt forced to. When she was still on good terms with the store owner guy, she basically pressured me to go in there and give some sort of "original" "cute" message when I didn't want to, and tried to be like "Hi! My mom [said this] and by the way I was forced to say that! :)" because I didn't want to do it at all. She also had this tree she decorated on public property between these two other places, and was in legal battles with them over whether it's their tree or if she could touch it. She made me go over there to clean trash around it. One time she painted a wooden cross white, and put Christmas lights on it, and forced me to walk with it up and down a sidewalk alone at night a few feet near the tree for some reason. I tried putting the cross away from the road so maybe it wouldn't get seen, and she didn't seem to notice.

She'd never try to make anything more comfortable for me or do anything I wanted or thought we should do. I remember her putting the music up super loud in her taxi when I was in it with her sometimes, overwhelming me, and I'd dread the sound of loud music coming up to our trailer because then there was a risk of her being upset the moment she busted through the door. I remember I was just trying to make conversation once, and talked about something a lunch table mate said at my high school, and she just laughed and said "She must be the daughter of [one of the people who own a property by the tree I mentioned!]" I don't even remember what the girl said. I also remember I couldn't speak for myself. I remember being put on the phone to talk to someone and told what to say to them (I don't even remember what I was made to say) and I complained about not being allowed to just say what I wanted. She just accused me of having a crush on the guy on the phone. I don't even remember who it was on the phone. I also couldn't do anything more efficiently. Like one time my mom wanted me to be the one typing and clicking on everything on Google to find an online complaint form for a fast food place, and I was so tired of going nowhere that I just decided to type and click stuff on my own out of frustration, and the second the form we were looking for pops up on the screen, she literally goes "AAAAAAAA! AAA! AAA! AAAAAAAA! I DON'T EVEN WANT TO DO IT ANYMORE BECAUSE YOU DID WHAT YOU WANTED TO DO!!!'

I remember I spent my days when I was home alone online, but I never actually talked to people because stranger danger was ingrained in my head. I never snuck out, and I'm genuinely not sure if it's because I was scared of it, or because it never occurred to me because I took this state of life as a given. I knew of what other kids were probably doing with risky behavior, and a part of me wanted to believe I was morally superior to them, but at the same time I wondered if it would be better to do the kind of risky crap they did, and if I'd be happier.

I even wished she would die or something, which I guess worked. She did say in her last months of life she thought she was dying, and said she "couldn't" go to the hospital because I "wouldn't clean" and because social services would take me since the house was falling apart. We were living part time in a hotel on weekends because of this and the hotel also got dirty and while I spent the weeks at home, she got angry at me for not cleaning the hotel room properly, too. She had arthritis which is why she said I had to clean everything, which she medicated with BCs and marijuana.

Sometimes I feel like I must have been as horrendous as she made me out to be due to some horrible adult decisions I made, and also the way I feel about everything, including the world in general. Or if I still deserve to be called out as horrendous even if my past caused me to be that way, because I'm the only one left who can still be punished. There's a lot more that happened before her death but I think you probably get the idea.

Do you suspect that coming to the conclusion "you are bad" is just a way to avoid telling yourself "this is what you did wrong and this is why" because in reality you're thinking at least if you are bad then you don't have to actually take responsibility for doing anything wrong? Even if you won't admit it?

Like, I literally had my birth mother hear me say "I'm worthless" as a teenager and she mimicked me saying it and said I sounded pathetic. So I ended up using the second-person "You" in a notebook to verbally eviscerated myself. Instead of just putting effort into doing anything correctly, probably because it would psychically offend me or something.

Like, maybe when I wouldn't clean despite getting yelled at for it, it was because I just didn't want to take responsibility for when I'd do it wrong because it would hurt my ego. Just like how I ended up blaming my peers for not liking me when there was nothing about me to like because I was annoying, petty, immature, and vindictive.

I genuinely wonder if it's a good idea to even be posting here because a person with an actually traumatic childhood, and someone who did the wrong things over and over on purpose since childhood to roleplay victim hood due to their own ego issues, and/or because of the thrill of the pain, are indistinguishable. How do you know you didn't want to be hurt?

Before anything even happens, I worry about how I will react to getting criticized angrily for doing something wrong, but a lot of the time I wonder if I am in reality planning it.

I have the compulsion to think of scenarios with mostly my mother and me doing something to upset her, and how if I didn't have anything else I would think of her as this lonely, pathetic person that I should be allowed to disrespect and should have crimes committed against her, her family members, and how not even her own family would miss her after she dies. Basically dehumanizing her. I do not doubt that this could lead into physical territory if left completely unchecked and not avoided by being very careful.

She's mostly fine, very amicable and friendly, as long as I manage to never initiate any venture or weird habit outside the ordinary, never inconveniencing anyone by asking them for anything, never complaining or even asking clarification about anything (so as to not look like I'm challenging authority unnecessarily), and always jump to do things she requests of me promptly and accurately.

The only alternative I've used to avoid the issue of anger is displacing the anger onto others, like friends, or random people online, and in the past in sketchbooks, but obviously the interpersonal ones are not a viable long-term solution.

If I didn't do this, I assume I would just absorb the shock of the anger completely and take it at face value, thus resulting in me internalizing what was said and what I felt was implied about my worth, and just decide to never step out of anything. Not even in my head - I would see myself drilling myself on how to be obedient and not a lazy waste of life if I accepted it head-on until I completely mentally collapse and kill myself from denying myself even in private.

Otherwise my life is completely fine as long as I don't experience any persistent active stressors. Which I currently don't - it's all kinetic energy.

But since I want more out of life and think it's inevitable I may face pushback, then how am I supposed to deal with this?

Growing up, nearly every time I've tried to do something that I initiated that wasn't someone's instruction, it has more often than not been wrong, even if it was minor. Even when expected to follow explicit instructions, I'd get things wrong, often accused of it being on purpose to piss people off. When I was just expected to do things on my own time, I often used to pick being "lazy" over "doing things wrong" because I'd be wrong every time somehow, and asking for help would make it worse, because at least then I could recuperate and know what would eventually happen instead of dreading how I actively messed up before my work was actually checked. Nowadays I try more when people aren't looking but I still get "paranoid" that whatever I just did set a ticking time bomb in my current house.

But I can't tell if the times I feel some sort of "excitement" or "panic" is me actually dreading what would happen, or me hoping that it's going to. So many people made me feel like I was smart and special growing up even though simultaneously being made to feel worthless "confused" me. If I was so smart and talented, then how could I possibly accidentally get simple things wrong? I couldn't have. It feels like maybe the only reason I don't actively do something like that anymore is just because technically they weren't any repercussions except screaming, but now that I live with a new mother and family since age 17, I "couldn't get away with it anymore" and had to be scared of "actual consequences" so it's more self-preservation than growing a moral compass.

I want to do more than just be in my room online all day, only going out when offered, but it feels like if I ever tried to be actively chasing after something, I'd put myself in a state of energy where even if I'm excited about something that's supposed to be innocent like art, I'd stop paying attention to my surroundings and piss my mother off by doing something careless, making me regret what I wanted to do. Or if I did go out, she'd possibly accuse me of neglecting responsibilities in favor of spending too much money, doing something risky while out, or of just not doing a good enough job about communicating when I'd be home or something. And then her anger would make her more sensitive to little things while also putting me on edge and more likely to fail, leading to the possibility of a cycle of me repeatedly messing up that could get so bad our relationship is ruined permanently and every day I have to suffer, because once again like my OLD mother, she eventually would get so tired of me that I lose all benefit of the doubt and become the default problem in the house.

I'm not even sure if I were to decide to do stuff even in spite of her getting upset, if it wouldn't just be because I was deliberately trying to make the problem worse out of the same kind of adrenaline junkie or drama-seeking motivation I was accused of having more frequently a long-time ago. I've always wanted to FEEL like my problem is me not being allowed to do more and being a victim of repression, but I also suspect that me "taking steps to fix it" would be engaging in a worse version of behaviors that caused me to live the so-called "victim of repression" lifestyle in the first place. Instead of doing something out of agency for the first time, it could just be doing the thing I've always had the agency to do but in the worst way possible.

How am I supposed to tell the difference? The best answer I can come up with is "be honest with yourself" which by that would mean looking at the past and clear cause and effect, which would seem to imply that I did in fact want to hurt people and need to trust that I've done something wrong when I am criticized instead of victimizing myself like always.

I'm not talking about straight-up abuse. I'm talking about a failure to set them up for success. This is from what I've personally experienced.

Special ed classrooms will have people across the entire spectrum in the same room, but it feels like they all get treated the exact same way, so anyone who has the potential to excel with a little more resources is pushed aside, in favor of helping the child who consistently seems more focused on talking about cartoons and playing around all the time.

When autistic children are mainstreamed after a period of starting school from special ed, they are just put in there. That's it. I know it sounds like a weird "no duh" thing, but think about what social models they have been given up to that point. In elementary school, sped students will typically not be able to form words, if they are even verbal, and typically won't interact with others, only being scolded for independently making noise, not for having conversations. The students will have no form of learning social skills other than their parents and teachers, so at best all they know how to do is follow instructions. This makes it difficult for them to know what they're supposed to do when THEY get the opportunity to initiate social interaction with equals. And assuming they even get their foot in the door and don't get ignored or merely rejected, they will typically be made fun of, often in insidious ways. They may not even realize they are missing out on how deep human relationships can be. Even the examples they have seen in media are just colorful pixels on screens and they don't understand the weight.

When they get put in what the majority of children experience, maybe in later elementary or middle school, they are basically being thrown in the deep end of the pool after spending a long time in a kiddie pool. You might think about how sped kids might get opportunities to learn how to interact with others through stories read or shown to them in school. But that's not how I've seen more highly autistic kids work.

The way they absorb media, is that they get fixated on the surface level aspects about it, like dialogue or certain tropes you might see over and over, as if they like the sound of them more than what they represent. It's like lyrics to a song to them, and often a lot of them may fixate on a specific thing as if it were an earworm. I knew one kid in a sped class who would sometimes say "Jumanji!" but you could never hold a conversation with him about the movie.

In fact, a common way I've seen them interact, is typically to reenact episodes by quoting the dialogue, or play pretend instead of working, even up to 8th grade in middle school. What's noticeably absent from what they do is conversations about real world things, like events going on in the school, their own teachers... they won't even talk about other people (not classmates, not about each other's characteristics, and not celebrities). It's either talking about their narrow set of interests, or to their own teachers, if even that. That's it. They don't actually integrate any of the actual lessons the stories may communicate into their internal model for the actual real world. It seems more like they treat the whole of the real world as if it's a playground and the media and even people in it as toys.

If you already think special ed children can't learn through mainstream channels, why do you seem to act like they can just learn social skills through osmosis? If it isn't that, then adults just don't think that the social part is important, and just care about them getting the mainstream curriculum. Or they think it's solely the child's responsibility to figure out. They don't have to watch the child get older, so to them it's probably not their problem. I remember in middle school there was ample time in our classes where we could have spent at least some of it potentially learning about how human interaction worked in a direct way, but instead our teacher decided to fill that time with having us "write stories" which was basically him saying a situation and each person got one thing they did in the story (which was like "[X] decides to make a sand castle" and "[Y] decides to go swimming" without any actual conflict or lesson happening), and once in a blue moon having us watch movies (which for some reason he didn't bother to screen or research before, so a couple times he had to stop movies like "13 Going On 30" and "Drop Dead Fred" from getting shown too far along).

Adults might literally see or hear signs of an autistic child struggling or desiring to make friends and still do nothing. I was literally checking out books about how to make friends in the library, but I don't think anyone thought to check if I actually had friends. I remember when I was in my first middle school and being bullied, I asked at least one peer and a teacher "how to be popular" and they gave me some sort of platitude about being nice or how it doesn't matter, and that's where the conversation ended. I ended up needing to move to a different school because either I was getting bullied so bad, or I was just being moved because I snapped from it and tried to slap another child.

If an autistic child actually makes another child uncomfortable and it isn't obviously malicious, like trying to awkwardly make them participate in the media reenacting thing, or just them saying random stuff out loud to no one just to say stuff, adults will typically just be like "We do not do [annoying behavior], okay?" but would never give them rundowns on how communication is supposed to work like with discussing hobbies, feelings, etc. They'd only intervene if they were actively doing something wrong.

Anybody subjected to this system who is self-aware enough to know what "less functioning" individuals are doing wrong, but not self-aware enough to understand how to "mask", probably feels deeply isolated, and like they're the only kind of person like them in the world, wearing the skin of a zombie but having the mind of a human (they think). They are probably going to build deep resentment for wanting and feeling capable of more but being given less. Especially since it's these children who might get praised the most for their insights but will have nothing more done for them.

I'm surprised that the stereotypes around more severely autistic people are moreso about them not speaking at all and just drooling around, or being these weird, clean, stoic robots, or being like these completely normal people whose only negative trait is being rude because they're blunt and say things impulsively. Then again, most people don't see autistic children in their natural habitat, and most will never meet one in their regular classes, if even in real life at all.