When you’re growing up in abusive family, you don’t feel like “oh, I’m being abused, this is wrong.” You don’t even think about that. Instead, you feel guilty all the time. You feel like a horrible person. You feel useless and wrong, like something is fundamentally wrong with you, and you deserve every bit of harm coming your way.
For every time your parents hurt you, you feel it was justified and you deserved and provoked it. You keep feeling horrible and guilty about everything you’ve done to cause it. Even when something extreme happens, you dismiss it with “they didn’t mean that” or “it was just once, in anger, so it doesn’t count.”
You feel like a burden, because you know these people don’t want you in their house, and you don’t feel capable of being independent, and it’s on you that you keep bothering them with your existence, and don’t seem to be capable of getting out of there. You don’t feel like you deserve food, shelter, clothes, or anything. You feel like a burden no matter what you do. You don’t feel welcome anywhere, you don’t feel like you have a home, like there’s a place on this planet where you could be loved and cared for. You doubt yourself so badly, you struggle to see any value in your existence and it becomes hard. You break down and feel weak and lost and like everyone else is leaving you behind. You don’t feel like a part of anything. You feel guilty for existing the way you are.
If you felt this, you’ve been thru abuse. There is no one on this world who is useless, unworthy of love, or deserves to feel so guilty and to be hurt all the time. These ideas didn’t come from you, but from how horribly you were treated. Feeling this way is not normal. You did not deserve to feel this way.
