depression and chronic anxiety

great that you're still talking, Lisa. Was the physical abuse you suffered at the hands of your father delivered to you as a punishment, or to force you to change your behaviour? because if it was, then that makes it corporal punishment. The difficulty I have with women derives from their total support for the men who beat me and also of course, my mother and female teachers also beat me, whilst a very few years after I left school in 1966, women worldwide were stridently demanding equality and special treatment although women have never acknowledged that men were vulnerable and subject to the same emotional damage as women. Women have tended to blame me for not moving on from my abuse. I do of course understand how that is for you when your main abuser was your father, the most significant male person developmentally in conditioning your relationships with other males for the rest of your life. Understanding our shared equality of abuse doesn't necessarily make it any easier for us to relate to the opposite gender, though, does it?

I never had the opportunity to have my father removed by the police since everything he did to me was fully supported by the law. My definition of corporal punishment is, therefore, any hitting allowed by law. In your case, would it be true to say that you consciously chose to remain with your family, abusive as it was because that still seemed preferable to being put in a children's' hostel? Did you have love from other family members? I did not and so I might have prefered a children's' hostel except that in South Africa in the 1950s and 1960s they were notorious beaters and abusers of children.

Hi again Jack..

Sorry for the delayed reply, my mood has been low the last few days.. So i have not been online very much.

The abuse that i recieved was percieved by me as punishment but i wasnt always clear why i was being punished. My father had a quick temper and it might be that my sisters and i were playing quietly and he would still find a reason to be intimidating and abusive toward one of us and 'punish us' for something. He got irritated by me especially im still not sure why. Toward age 10/11 I learned not to show a reaction, not cry so he would try his best to bring me to tears, by singling me out, not letting my mum make me dinner, call me names or inflicting pain all in the the name of making me cry.

I was too scared to speak to anyone about it or report it as i was scared and intimidated by my dad and did not want to be seperated from my siblings.

I will never get closure or a reason why i was treated this way as he died suddenly several years ago.

I have mixed feelings about him now as deep down i know he was troubled and i knew he was a victim of childhood abuse/corporal punishment also though he nevwr spoke about it. So i feel sorry for him but i also greive a childhood that was filled with pain, fear and saddness..

There is so much more to it abd so much happened but i could write all day and still not get it all down..

L x

I'm so sorry to learn of this terrible suffering that was inflicted on you when you were a sweet helpless little girl. It makes me feel very sad also. I'm glad you figured out the link to your dad's behavior of his own abuse as a victim of childbeating adults when he was a little boy. I think it likely that he was acting out on you some of what had been done to him. I don't think, from what you say, that what he was doing to you was punishment for some real or imagined offence you had committed. It was physical abuse, though. And it's ruined your life

What I have learned is that painful incidents from the past still live on inside me because I never had the chance to express my pain and suffering at the time. These feelings have been bottled up inside me and they continue to drive my behaviour, making me angry with people, or unutterably sad and depressed in ways that don't seem to relate to whats going on in my present. In the past, I attempted to deny what happened to me and the results were that my anger was out of control, and got me into trouble, including with the police. Eventually I realized that unconscious fury from the past was controlling my behaviour in the present - in other words, I had an angry little boy inside me.  Once I got that, I stopped acting out so much, but I had to spend most of my time responding consciously to feelings arising in me that originated 60 years ago. Women tend to act in, like cut themselves, bang their heads on the wall etc, but the principle remains the same. You talk about feeling low and I can so get that. But I've been doing this work and talking about corporal punishment for 30 years, now, so I am much more leathery skinned and things have shifted quite a lot for me, luckily. But like you, I have huge chunks of stuff missing that I need to live, like a social life, for example. I wonder if you have that, finding not only that you can't get on with men, but that you simply don't socialize - like you've been desocialized?

Yes, unfortunatly what happened to me still affects me very much to this day.

I live with chronic depression & they say that i have post traumatic stress disorder and borderline personality disorder.

I find it hugely difficult to make friends or even just be in a social situation without feeling anxious.

It has lead to me attempting suicide... As recent as last summer.

I am now a parent also and i struggle with putting bounderies and dicipline into my own childs life as i never want her to feel like i did. Unfortunetely, lack of routine and dicipline has brought its own issues.

I have struggled with relationships and dont feel like i have ever wanted to love someone in that way, strange as that sounds. I just dont know how. Any relationship i have ever had has has not lasted longer than a couple of months.

I have had lots of councelling, seen psychologists and psychiatrists but i have also been told by professionals etc, to not dwell on the past, and thst i cant change it. However i dont know how to do this seeing as alot of my current thinking and behaviour is a result of my past.

How do you find socialising, etc

I have found psychiatrists to be particularly the most willfully ignorant filth. Telling you not to dwell on the past demonstrates perfectly their utter contempt for human emotion, They are filth, keep away from them. Counsellors are just as ignorant but they have less power. I don't know what your monetary circumstances are, but probably not good. If you had the money you could try primal therapy. I've never had the money to try it, but I think just reading about it has helped me enormously, particularly in re-connecting my feelings. I wonder if you have heard of The Primal Scream by Dr. Arthur Janov. Presumably, you can still read books and get information? It's very simply written. You can get it from Amazon at a very affordable price. I first read it when I was 20 and it has had a big impact on the way I understand people and how I relate to them. Of course, you were never loved and like me, you don't know how to love even if you wanted to. That's not good for your children I guess, but I can well understand there is bugger all you can do about it, you just have to go with what you ain't got. 

 Me, I don't socialize. My son comes once a week and we play guitar and fantasize about going to a studio and getting recorded - it costs £50 an hour and we reckon 1 song will take 4 hours. I have no contact with my daughter, she hates me. My younger son by a different mother also hates me because he is an extreme Progressive Socialist and has far left extremist views - like he wants to stay in the EU and he thinks free speech should be banned. I'm not kidding, he really does. Because I disagree with him he never calls me anymore. I do not speak to my neighbors, I really despise them for their stupidity and narrowness. They watch TV all the time and they believe the lies the politicians tell them. They are like a rabid mob and as emotionally disconnected as a mob of serial killers.But even if they were not, I am still unable to relate to them, I cannot go to the pub and make small talk, like you I become nervous. I never made friends as a child, I was always alone and now I have come to loathe socializing - its something I just do not get.