I have always been pretty stoic about the things that happened to me in my childhood. I guess I figured that other people had it worse so I had no right to complain. Problem is, these feelings keep creeping up on me and can sometimes cause issues with my current relationships. I guess for now I want to just admit to some of the things that bother me and ask for advice on exercises to help me process my emotions and move on. This will be a long post so I appreciate anyone who has the patience to read all the way through. Unfortunately, we do not really have money right now for me to seek professional therapy, I am not even sure this warrants the trip.
Below is kind of a quick list of things that bother me still, I have a hard time talking about this stuff even with my wife. I have mentioned it, but never in detail, she isn’t my therapist and I don’t want to unload on her.
My parents went through a bad divorce when I was 5, my mom got into drugs and wasnt willing to quit. My dad worked construction and would sometimes be away at a job site for long periods of time. When we were at my mom’s house her new boyfriends and her brothers would come over and they were very mean. I watched one of them rape my mom while drunk, another one had all of us kids at gunpoint and had a standoff with the cops over it. They were almost all violent alcoholics.
My mother died when I was 6, my aunt and her were addicted to meth and when fighting one night my aunt hit her in the head with a space heater. She waited until she sobered up the next morning to call 911 and by then it was too late. My mom laid in the hospital brain-dead for two weeks before they pulled the plug.
After that my dad became an alcoholic. I think he struggled to process losing the love of his life and becoming a single dad of 3 kids. He became very physically abusive and distant to the point where I don’t feel that I truly had a parent after the age of 7. I got up alone, made myself breakfast, got myself to school (bus or walked), got myself home cooked dinner, etc. It was like I didn’t exist. For example, when I was in 3rd grade I went to a week-long summer camp with my school and when it was over nobody came to pick me up. One of the camp counselors drove me back to the school and went to call my dad, I just left and walked home with my bags. When I finally made it home my family turned to see who was walking in the house, then just ignored me. Nobody said a word to me, nobody asked how camp was, apologized for leaving me, nothing. I went upstairs, unpacked my bags, and cried until I fell asleep.
My father went through 5 wives over the course of my childhood and each one was worst than the last, they brought nothing but problems and fighting into the house (which just served to make my dad angrier and more violent). When he had a relationship he would completely forget about us kids, such as leaving for a gambling weekend without saying a word to us and not come back for 2 - 5 days sometimes. I didn’t put it together then but he must have had a gambling addiction because there was many times when we didnt have basic things in our house such as heat, water, or food. He had money to go away for the weekend but us kids had to disconnect the dryer vent and throw a blanket over us to warm up and pick peaches off a tree in the yard to eat.
He divorced his last wife when I was 12 and we moved to a different state. Everything was actually kind of nice for about a year. He got back together with his high school sweetheart and we celebrated my birthday for the first time in my life (her influence, I am guessing). Unfortunately, their relationship didnt work out and he started dating again. By the time I was 14 he had completely moved out of “his” house and in with his new girlfriend a couple towns away. He would stop by every few weeks to grab something of his or say hi but never stayed longer than a few hours. I started mowing yards and working on a family friend’s ranch for some extra cash and would use that to buy groceries and myself stuff for school (he atleast kept paying the bills for the house). He would often come by and “borrow” money from me though, so I never had money to go out and do anything. Until I was almost 17 I lived almost completely alone using my own money to get by and did nothing outside of work and school. This was extremely isolating. I never got to go do anything with my friends or have a social life. I had to quit playing sports because I couldnt afford to buy myself new gear and needed that time to work. I spent a majority of my teen years alone. An unfortunate side effect of being a teenager bored and alone in your house with nobody to watch me, is that I got to do whatever I wanted on the internet. So I started watching porn and masturbating ALOT. That was almost all I would do. I developed an addiction and now I struggle to go even a full day without watching porn and masturbating, there are many days that I will do this multiple times a day and sometimes it can cause issues with my wife and our sex life.
I graduated high school early and convinced my dad to sign me into the military at 17 so that I could escape. Up until this point, I have always kind of brushed off the things that happened to me but I now have three kids of my own (2, 5 and 7) and could not imagine them going through what I went through. So I am finally seeing (with a bit of help from my wife) that maybe all the things that happened to me were not normal. Some of the ways I have caught this affecting my adult life:
- Anger problems, though I have gotten quite a bit better as I have gotten older.
- Porn addiction, talked about this above.
- Unrealistic expectations for my kids. I find myself incredibly disappointed with how soft and irresponsible they are. I don’t think this feeling is unique to me, I think many dads feel this way about their kids but I seem to take it a bit far and my wife has to remind me quite often that what I did as a child is not a good example of what normal small children should do.
- Intense lonliness, I havent had a I consider a real friend since my sophmore year of high school.
- Low self-esteem, I find myself quite often wondering why my wife is with me why people at work like me. I am waiting for them to lose interest at any time and leave me. I am for some reason extremely hard on myself and when I fail to meet my own expectations it can really rattle me. For example, I got an 85% on an assignment in one of the classes for my master’s degree and I was incredibly angry and fixated on it for days afterwards. I have a 96% overall, but that 85% just burns me.
- Jealousy of my wife’s life. Her relationship with her family, her social life in high school/college, her chance to date around and just generally have fun. (I joined the military and kind of took myself out of the pool for awhile, my fault, I know).
I have heard that it can be good to keep a journal of how these emotions can play out, meditate, exercise, etc. I am curious if anyone has any other good tools or exercises to help me process and get over this stuff. I can already say finally being honest about what happened and venting on this post has already been kind of therapeutic 
