Parents are the absolute worst bullies. I'm not saying every parent bullies their children, I'm saying the ones who do the bullying is much worse than anything peers can dish out. And it's more persistent and impossible to escape. Then they turn around and act normal in front of other people so the fucked up kid looks like the bad guy to outsiders.

From as far back as I can remember until I left for college my mom berated me day in and day out about how my of a piece of garbage I am, how I ruined her life, how literally everything I did was wrong, and how I'm the reason my dad is an alcoholic. Despite me being a good kid who never got into any trouble.

I was bullied in elementary school, middle school, and summer camp for being a runt (literally off the growth charts) but it didn't actually bother me, I already learned that I was garbage from my mom.

Been through years of therapy... I don't think I'll ever be able to really recover, the best I can do is move forward.

I'm very sorry this happened to you.

So sorry you didn’t have it better. Parents should be the absolute opposite of a bully.

I'm not sharing my experience for sympathy, I'm sharing it to challenge the "parents are basically Jesus" narrative of society. If an adult child doesn't provide care for their parents (or even limits contact with them) then society thinks the child is the asshole. Yet it's been my observation that 9 times out of 10 the asshole is the parents, not the broken and innocent child. We have to navigate both the severe emotional turmoil the parents caused and the (sometimes severe) societal disapproval of distancing ourselves from the toxic relationship.

There are loads of us. And I wonder if our parents even know.

My family recipe, taught to me decades ago? Take normal discipline, punctuate it with crying and guilt of being a single parent, then sparingly frost with golden phrases like "you look just like your fucking old man," and "don't think with your dick like him", and "women who like him are whores...", and "look at how he sits" or "[laughing] look at his writing"...

Stir in some bad grades. Maybe a latent learning disability.

Let simmer alone.

Viola! You get a 12 year old pushed so low that they've spent their free time figuring out how animals are euthanized, how much to use on themselves, plotting ways to get their hands on it...

Try being the anxious daughter to a perfectionistic but insecure mother. You're one of the lucky ones if it has never occurred to you that mothers can be terrible bullies.

My mom was one of four sisters... whose mom was one of three sisters... That's a lot of unbalanced dysfunction to grow up into. I grew up with a dad who tried to get me to well adjusted and a mom who treated me like a broken girl, as opposed to a boy. They both wound up working against each other (not intentionally), and I was close to 40 before I would consider myself at a relatively well adjusted point in my life.