Does It Make Us Stronger or Do We Just Break?

hollydolly: I meant to ask you under another heading, have you had your operation yet.? and how are you feeling?
 

There does come a time when even the strongest of us gets tired of endless struggle and becomes fatigued enough to just break rather than suffer through more, and who am I to judge if someone says, "enough"? As we get older maybe breaking becomes more commonplace?
In my own life I've had my share to struggle through and sometimes it has made me stronger, ie - angrier and other times I just get tired and want to escape to a vacation destination. Do you ever feel that way?
 
HermitHogan said:
I suspect there will be an uptick in suicides this year. Some people do break when under a lot of stress.
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My mother committed suicide.. she had , had a horrendous childhood, rejected by her parents as a toddler, raised by evil nuns in an Orphanage... then married my father , a seriously abusive man to his wife and kids, who she hated after the first year she was married to him... he beat her up when she was pregnant with my brother and I.. and we were born 2 months early.. both stillborn, they were able to revive only me... I was just 2 pounds 2 oz

She ended up with 7 pregnancies..lost 3 of them because of beatings .. he would never use birth control and the pill was only in it's infancy when she was having her last child.. she watched while he routinely beat his children up almost daily ...

..... she was bored, lonely never allowed friends outside of the family, and it had to be HIS famiy.. she had 2 spells in hospital after breakdowns, I walked in to find him trying to revive her after she took an overdose..one of my first abiding memores age 3 as I tried to climb in the ambulance with her as they took her away on a stretcher..

Another time I came home from school to find her literaly with her head in the gas oven

She had to be hospitalised after she became anorexic.. ( which wasn't a word back then )... while they tried to get her to eat... all this because she was desperately unhappy..

She left he hunted her down and brought her back.. there was no escaping him... she decided suicide was her only way out at 39 years old... and she managed it that time... I was 18 years old my youngest sibling was 10...
 
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hollydolly said:
Exactly ....

let me give you a small example.. I was telling my husband about a certain sitaution in my family where I was routinely beaten with a belt... and how I had to work before school from age 12 and didn't get paid, because my father was the boss. and he even took my tips from me, I soon learned not complain because that would mean the belt coming out...

..because my husband had a rosy childhood, no smackings, his parents never raised their voices even to their children, the kids were given all they need, best schools.. and so on ( exact opposite to mine ) ..... he didn't understand that.. and countered it with how he felt ''scarred'' because as a child he was expected to put the bins out....

I'm not kidding.. .. this is just a small example of someone an otherwise higly intelligent man ( but with little emotional intelligence) who didn't have a clue what I was talking about.. but he felt traumatised by having to be expected to carry out a chore which he didn't want to do.. and thought he was comparing like for like
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This sounds like my hubs; I often jokingly tell him that he grew up in a "Leave it to Beaver' household, whereas I was the opposite. Often myself and my siblings had to forage for food. He couldn't even imagine going hungry.
 
carouselsilver said:
Yes, mine too. In addition to complex PTSD, I now have essential tremors. Makes life real fun. I am learning ways to work around it but it is damned annoying.
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so have I...BET...benign essential tremors.. For a while I though it might be parkinsons , thank god it wasn't. In the last few years it's all but stopped,,..except if I grip something hard or carry something heavy like a grocery bag.. then it starts again, and doesn't settle for a couple of hours.


I have an irony story which I've told here before.. because of my fathers' violence all my life, I was always a nervous wreck, literally shaking if he was around, and even if he wasn't.. all that pretty much went away when I left the home and married, had no interaction with him at all.. didn't see him for years..

One day I was walking in town and I saw him for the first time in about 5 years.. my legs started to shake uncontrollably. as he walked towards me.. he stood right next to me and my legs wouldn't stop trembling..I was a married woman with a child by then, but I was as terrified of him as always , and my body went into shock..even tho' he wasn't presenting as a threat.. he was acting all bon-homie

I thought by locking my kneecaps it would stop my legs shaking, because the last thing I wanted him to see was me scared of him still...but somehow he saw it.. and he actually taunted me about it...''ha-ha..see you've not got out of that shaking habit ''...and so on...

I walked away from him wishing I could kill the man who killed my mother.. this man who had barely had a days' illness in his life but had caused so much death and illness to others...here he was mocking my terror of him...by bringing attention to my shaking..


()Incidentally my eldest brother to this day has a bad stammer caused by being beaten by him as a toddler... and eventually got MS )...


Then a few years after that I got a message to say the old man was dying.. he's been suffering from parkinson's disease... he wanted me to go to the hospital...I wouldn't go, and didn't... he died alone


In my opinion..Karma caught up with him Big time... here he was dying of strokes brought on by a shaking disease...
 
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hollydolly said:
It never ends even now.. today after my traumatic experience yesterday...some nasty beech on my how was your day thread..suggested that my abdominal surgery was probably for weight loss...how nasty can you be,,,?..

..so even to this day I can't even be ill, be in pain, have surgery cancelled at a momant's notice, without some nasty comment on this forum.. it just beggars belief... it's almost like we survivors are given 3 people's mental strength when we're born to have to keep going on without collapse...
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someone had it removed what a pity......( I wonder who that could have possibly been):unsure:
 
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carouselsilver said:
Parkinson's runs in my family. My neurologist has reassured me that I don't have it, thank God. As a retired Occupational therapist I know what measures to take but I have had to give up some things like crafting for now.
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see it doesn't run in my family he's the only one who ever got it.. so I do think it was retribution for him mocking my shaking.. which was caused by him in the first place...
 
I had an easier upbringing than some of the stories on this thread.
There was at least one ugly episode though......at age five I walked in on her when she was out on a ledge nine stories above the pavement.
She was probably ambivalent about jumping or she'd have done it.
I started crying and she saw me. I'll never forget how she tumbled into the hotel room and not out into the long fall.
She swore me to secrecy and in return she swore that it would never happen again. I kept the secret for sixty years until after she was dead.
But she was bipolar all her life.....four times a year she descended into depression and then gradually emerged, swinglike into an eventual manic phase.

Made me tougher? Could be, maybe. I looked after her when she was in her depressions when everyone else in the family pretended it wasn't happening. I don't miss her now.
 
Repondering said:
I had an easier upbringing than some of the stories on this thread.
There was at least one ugly episode though......at age five I walked in on her when she was out on a ledge nine stories above the pavement.
She was probably ambivalent about jumping or she'd have done it.
I started crying and she saw me. I'll never forget how she tumbled into the hotel room and not out into the long fall.
She swore me to secrecy and in return she swore that it would never happen again. I kept the secret for sixty years until after she was dead.
But she was bipolar all her life.....four times a year she descended into depression and then gradually emerged, swinglike into an eventual manic phase.

Made me tougher? Could be, maybe. I looked after her when she was in her depressions when everyone else in the family pretended it wasn't happening. I don't miss her now.
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are you talking about your mother or a sister ?..
 
Paco Dennis said:
I think that "it" makes you weaker not stronger. Every accident that came close to really hurting me has left scars and tears, and bones that are brittle. At this age I am more fatigued and many parts of my body are failing slowly. All of this is to be expected, not a life where I am trying to live like I am in my twenties. :)
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Yea, I'd have to agree, stuff piles up, but gets harder to get over.
 
hollydolly said:
Of course it makes us weaker.. every attack physically and mentally makes us weaker.. but the question is why does it not ''break'' some of us.. yet break the spirit of others much sooner
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That is going to be different for everyone. Their background, their health, their stability, their relationships, and their constitution. Why do some people "break". That is different also. Suicide sometimes fails and leaves us much worse off. Or we break and hurt someone else. Suffering varies always with intensity, and duration. No one can say why this or that situation caused this or that reaction. Too many other variables to consider to get a perfect answer.
 
hollydolly said:
My mother committed suicide.. she had , had a horrendous childhood, rejected by her parents as a toddler, raised by evil nuns in an Orphanage... then married my father , a seriously abusive man to his wife and kids, who she hated after the first year she was married to him... he beat her up when she was pregnant with my brother and I.. and we were born 2 months early.. both stillborn, they were able to revive only me... I was just 2 pounds 2 oz

She ended up with 7 pregnancies..lost 3 of them because of beatings .. he would never use birth control and the pill was only in it's infancy when she was having her last child.. she watched while he routinely beat his children up almost daily ...

..... she was bored, lonely never allowed friends outside of the family, and it had to be HIS famiy.. she had 2 spells in hospital after breakdowns, I walked in to find him trying to revive her after she took an overdose..one of my first abiding memores age 3 as I tried to climb in the ambulance with her as they took her away on a stretcher..

Another time I came home from school to find her literaly with her head in the gas oven

She had to be hospitalised after she became anorexic.. ( which wasn't a word back then )... while they tried to get her to eat... all this because she was desperately unhappy..

She left he hunted her down and brought her back.. there was no escaping him... she decided suicide was her only way out at 39 years old... and she managed it that time... I was 18 years old my youngest sibling was 10...
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Your childhood was so hard to read holly, seriously :cry: Sending you many hugs 🤗

I'll share few of my big "T" trauma's I've experienced.
When I was 4 my family was in a car accident, me, my sister, mom & dad. The other driver was at fault. My dad seriously injured, sister not so bad, I had a head injury and my mom died. I woke up at the accident scene and saw things a 4 year old shouldn't see. Then 50 yrs later I had a seizure and after getting an MRI they found I had an old brain injury, probably from the accident when I was 4 they said.
When I was 19 yrs old I was planning my wedding. Three days before my wedding I was abducted and was gone for 34 days. Crazy and complicated story I won't get into here.
They say everyone has a story, but I feel like I have a mini-series with all the things I've gone through.
 
My mom kept me in a baby's crib until I was three or four years old. My legs grew through the bars and I used to cry at night and my dad would get up and massage my legs, One day he told my mom. "Buy her a bed!' Mom did that very day and all the trouble stopped pretty much and I became healthy and grew tall but have a slight spine curvature which I don't know if it was from being forced to sleep in a baby crib for so long.

These days she would have been charged with abuse but back then parents got away with stuff. I try not to think of this. She used to keep me in a playpen with bars on it all the time so she would know where I was always but I never felt free. a set of China. She preferred working to raising children and went back to work when I was seven so she could buy a set of China. I became a latchkey kid but preferred this to being trapped.

As I got older I broke away from all this control and have had trouble dealing with feeling caged by life many times, so I can understand why many people break and opt out. I was lucky to have gotten through all this very young.

I became somewhat rebellious later during teenage but forgive myself. I went through some nasty stuff for a few years.
 
hollydolly said:
My mother committed suicide.. she had , had a horrendous childhood, rejected by her parents as a toddler, raised by evil nuns in an Orphanage... then married my father , a seriously abusive man to his wife and kids, who she hated after the first year she was married to him... he beat her up when she was pregnant with my brother and I.. and we were born 2 months early.. both stillborn, they were able to revive only me... I was just 2 pounds 2 oz

She ended up with 7 pregnancies..lost 3 of them because of beatings .. he would never use birth control and the pill was only in it's infancy when she was having her last child.. she watched while he routinely beat his children up almost daily ...

..... she was bored, lonely never allowed friends outside of the family, and it had to be HIS famiy.. she had 2 spells in hospital after breakdowns, I walked in to find him trying to revive her after she took an overdose..one of my first abiding memores age 3 as I tried to climb in the ambulance with her as they took her away on a stretcher..

Another time I came home from school to find her literaly with her head in the gas oven

She had to be hospitalised after she became anorexic.. ( which wasn't a word back then )... while they tried to get her to eat... all this because she was desperately unhappy..

She left he hunted her down and brought her back.. there was no escaping him... she decided suicide was her only way out at 39 years old... and she managed it that time... I was 18 years old my youngest sibling was 10...
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My eyes teared up just reading that, and I have heard your story before. I am so sorry.
 
hollydolly said:
so have I...BET...benign essential tremors.. For a while I though it might be parkinsons , thank god it wasn't. In the last few years it's all but stopped,,..except if I grip something hard or carry something heavy like a grocery bag.. then it starts again, and doesn't settle for a couple of hours.


I have an irony story which 've told here before.. because of my fathers' violence all my life, I was always a nervous wreck, literally shaking if was around, and even if he wasn't.. all that pretty much went away when I left the home and married, had no interation with him at al.. didn't see him for years..

One day I was walking in town and I saw him for the first time in about 5 years.. my legs started to shake uncrontollably. as he walked towards me.. he stood right next to me and my legs wouldn't stop trembling..I was a married woman with a child by then, but I was as terrified of him as always , and my body went into shock..even tho' he wasn't presenting as a threat.. he was acting all bon-homie

I thought by locking my kneecaps it would stop my legs shaking, because the last thing I wanted him to see was me scared of him still...but somehow he saw it.. and he actually taunted me about it...''ha-ha..see you've not got out of that shaking habit ''...and so on...

I walked away from him wishing I could kill the man who killed my mother.. this man who had barely had days' illness in his life but had caused so much death and illness to others...here he was mocking my terror of him...by bringing attention to my shaking..


()Incidentally my eldest brother to this day has a bad stammer caused by being beaten by him as a toddler... and eventually got MS )...


Then a few years after that I got a message to say the old man was dying.. he's been suffering from parkinson's disease... he wanted me to go to the hospital...I wouldn't go, and didn't...


In my opinion..Karma caught up with him Big time... here he was dying of strokes brought on by a shaking disease...
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I didn't go either, when my father was dying.
 
Paco Dennis said:
I think that "it" makes you weaker not stronger. Every accident that came close to really hurting me has left scars and tears, and bones that are brittle. At this age I am more fatigued and many parts of my body are failing slowly. All of this is to be expected, not a life where I am trying to live like I am in my twenties. :)
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I think for a while when you overcome you feel stronger but eventuall it does catch up with you, both physically and mentally. I wish you peace.
 
hollydolly said:
Of course it makes us weaker.. every attack physically and mentally makes us weaker.. but the question is why does it not ''break'' some of us.. yet break the spirit of others much sooner
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I got damned good and mad and fought the "system" that put the sob in power over my mom and family. The anger kept me going. Maybe now it is just that I am tired and I don't want to be angry any more.
 

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