I have post viral cognitive impairment and use AI to structure my written communication. I’m about to start proceedings for a legal claim. Can someone suggest an app I can use where my verbal diarrhoea can’t be subpoenaed or used against me - if that’s even possible? 🙏
TW: child abuse, domestic violence, addiction, family dysfunction
I’m 36F. I’ve recently cut off most of my family of origin, and I’m trying to understand what happens when you only recognise the system after you’ve already spent a lifetime inside it.
I was the academically gifted child. Dux award. Top percentile. The only one in my family with that kind of academic trajectory.
My father was highly intelligent, autodidactic, sharp, capable. But also profoundly violent and abusive. He used to hold knives to my throat as a child and tell me he wanted to “slice my jugular and watch me bleed out with every pulse like a sheep”. He called me a “parasite, no good for nothing cunt” daily and told me that I would amount to nothing. The abuse was extreme and ongoing, and the wider family knew. Noone intervened.
Over time, I became the designated “problem” in the family structure.
When I achieved academically, the response was often silence rather than acknowledgment.
Earlier in childhood, my dad’s sister (who’s 3yrs older than me) had taken one of my academic awards down from my grandparents’ hallway and replaced it with her own primary school merit awards. My achievements were often minimised, redirected, or quietly erased.
There is significant intergenerational dysfunction, including addiction (gambling, alcoholism, prescription and illegal drug use), incest and paedophelia, domestic violence, and enabling. The focus was always on appearances, respectability, and judging others, while internal dysfunction was severe and unspoken.
Growing up, I often felt like the “Matilda” in the family. Things never made logical sense to me. The level of money and energy that went into drug habits, chaos, and dysfunction always felt internally inconsistent with the image the family presented. I never understood the logic of it, and I still don’t. I have never abused substances myself, but I self regulated by binge eating and disassociating into a fantasy world instead.
I am the only person in my family who has consistently engaged in therapy. I do this because I have a deep fear of being a bad person and I am very solutions focused. I want to understand patterns and change them rather than repeat them.
I suspect there is a lot of undiagnosed neurodivergence across the family system. When I received my own AuDHD diagnosis at 32 and tried to bring it into conversation, it was largely dismissed.
Over time, I came to understand I was likely the scapegoat. The one who noticed patterns, spoke about them, and disrupted the image being maintained.
Outside of the family, I’ve often experienced a very different response to me than the one I grew up with. People have frequently been surprised by how I see myself versus how I am perceived externally, particularly in relation to appearance and capability. Within my family, however, the messaging was consistently critical and undermining from a young age.
I also need to note context about my own trajectory. Meek, sensitive, high performing teacher’s pet before I dropped out of school at 15. Pregnant at 16. DV relationship 15-18 followed by a lot of encounters with exploitative dark triad personalities throughout my life. I was later diagnosed AuDHD at 32. I had to consciously learn social functioning and interpersonal dynamics through studying psychology and behaviour. Despite this, I built a career into the top 5 percent of income earners in my country through sustained effort over many years. I formally mentored women in business, formally mentored at risk youth, and volunteered for my local emergency service.
From the outside, that looks like success. From the inside, I can see how much of it was driven by a need for recognition that was never present in my family system.
I’m now no longer able to work due to chronic illness and have just completed disability paperwork with my doctor. That has forced a different kind of reflection on the cost of how I’ve lived.
What I’m struggling with now is not the past, but the continuation of the same pattern through my children.
My daughter experiences my boundaries as controlling. I offer structure and stability: work or study, responsibility in the home, and the opportunity to live rent-free while saving for independence. Those expectations are not mirrored in other parts of her environment, including her father and extended family, where there are fewer consequences and more tolerance of poor decision-making.
When she was 15, she stole my car and used my financial details for online purchases while I was out of town for work. I asked for accountability and an apology. That did not occur, and the response from others in the system was to minimise or absorb the behaviour rather than address it.
As a result, I find myself positioned as the problem in the dynamic, despite being the one maintaining boundaries and consequences.
I also suspect there may be neurodivergent factors involved (possibly PDA profile traits), which may further
complicate how boundaries are experienced.
What I am trying to understand is this:
- How do you maintain a parenting stance based on accountability and long-term stability when the wider system frames those same behaviours as harmful, and frames lack of boundaries as care?
- And how do you stay psychologically grounded when your children are being influenced to interpret you through a narrative that does not match your intent or behaviour?