This must have been incredibly difficult to write. I salute you for your courage. My family, well, I know they mean well, and I do love them, but it's for the sake of my own sanity that I keep contact to a minimum.
And now, for a fun story. (To cheer you up.)
My great-grandmother lived with us for a time. It was her favourite thing to sit right around the corner of the lounge doorway and wait for me to come through. When I did, she would use her crutch to trip me, whacking me right on the shins! No, I am not kidding you. And the story gets better, when I complained to my parents about it, she denied it! 😂
Of course, little me wasn't going to get whacked in the shins and trip over her crutch the whole time, so I developed a new strategy. A running start and a flying leap through the doorway! Great-grandma wasn't too pleased that I had found a way to foil her ambushes and eventually dropped "the game" completely 🤣
I laugh about it now, but this was actually genuinely traumatizing to me as a child.
holy shit that is a whole new level of gaslighting!!! I want to make some seriously inappropriate jokes, cause man that is loaded with them, but yes. Totally. The mentality of essentially abusing you and then denying it is just horrible. A symptom of the generation? Who knows. It's difficult to know what of my own behaviors are healthy responses or trauma triggers. This is why I'm working so hard on my own mental health. I don't want my own children to suffer for my trauma.
Yeah, the fact that my mom didn't believe this was happening, but then again, who would believe a 80+ something old lady is doing something like that to a 7-year-old? I'd like to think she did it out of sheer boredom and to get a good laugh but who really knows? Either way, I find it amusing now even though it really wasn't for me back then. And technically I won so 😝 mwahaha!
As for the jokes, be my guest, I have a very questionable sense of humour 🤣
your questionable sense of humour is precisely why I think we'll be FANTASTIC friends 🤣🤣