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In reply to the discussion: Effects of Bullying Last Into Adulthood, Study Finds [View all]magical thyme
(14,881 posts)In perusing a number of your posts, I saw that you were bullied to the point of having permanent physical damage.
I am so sorry for what you suffered in school, and what you continue to suffer today.
I can relate somewhat. At school, I was ostracized and called names (fairy, queer, ugly, and other things I won't go into here). What my classmates didn't know was that I went home to a family of bullies.
My eldest sister once told me she remember as a toddler being picked up by her hair and bounced off walls. My earliest childhood memory is being smacked hard across the face. It snapped my neck and I could feel myself shrink smaller. I was sit on top of the toilet, watching my mother humming while applying makeup getting ready to go to a party. Then she started screaming and belted me. And then she went back to humming and smearing on her lipstick.
Hitting was pretty routine (she'd cycle into rages twice/week), so only specific abuse remains in my memory. The next one that jumps out was when I was 6 and she beat me until I peed all over myself, and then apologized to our dinner guests (extended family) that my father would be late coming downstairs because "MT is such a baby she peed all over herself and he had to clean up the mess," making me an object of derision and humiliation in front of everybody from aunt and uncle to 4 year old cousin laughing at and mocking me."
She killed our small pets. Once, an easter chick found its way into the washing machine. She laughed at its desperate peeps; the thought of it drowning or scalding to death was amusing and she laughingly repeated the story for years. We were occasionally forced to house our hamsters in the garage, where they were lost to the family cat. And so on.
Between the ages of 8 and 10, my father made repeated, inappropriate incursions into the bathroom when I was either on the toilet or in the bathtub. I was forbidden to lock the door. I have no memory or physical evidence of explicit sexual abuse, but do have a very early memory from when I was 3 or 4, which my mother insisted was "just a dream" when I asked her about it at 5, that suggests he may have molested me.
When I was 14, after both my older sisters were out of the house, I came home from school one Friday afternoon to find I'd been locked out in the street. My parents had gone away for the weekend. They did that to me half a dozen more times. My father got into a habit of leaving a ladder out in the back yard and I would climb in through the bedroom window. The last time was in a winter storm with freezing rain and sleet and I slipped and broke the window. I spent that weekend huddled in fear about how I would be punished for breaking the window.
I suffer constant existential anxiety, isolation, am estranged from my family and have struggled with suicidal thoughts throughout my life.
I think you will find many people on DU who share similar experiences. I think there is a range of bullying and the verbal may seem like nothing compared to physical assault, but it can cause significant long-term damage as well, as can the most insidious, invisible abuse of all -- simple neglect.