[ SECRET POST #2215 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2215 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


There is a moving gif in this post.


01.


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02.
[Rose McGowan]


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03.
[Puella Magi Madoka Magica]


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04.


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05.
[Fringe]


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06.


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07.
[Touhou Project / Axis Powers Hetalia: Romaheta / Kuroshitsuji / Homestuck]


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08.
[Being Human UK]


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09.
[Three Kingdoms 2010]


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10.
[Legend]


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11. http://i.imgur.com/fO4RU.jpg
[linked for kind of porny/suggestive postures of possibly underage character]


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12. http://i.imgur.com/T28p7.jpg
[linked for illustrated porny x 2 (clothed, but that doesnt do much)]


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13.
[Downton Abbey]


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14.
[Xia Junsu/Tarantellera]


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15.


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[ ----- SPOILERY SECRETS AHEAD ----- ]














16. [SPOILERS for Downton Abbey]



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17. [SPOILERS for Homestuck]



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[ ----- TRIGGERY SECRETS AHEAD ----- ]















18. [WARNING for abuse]



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19. [WARNING for abuse]



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20. [WARNING for incest]



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Notes:

Late day at work, sorry.

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 000 secrets from Secret Submission Post #316.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 1 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 1 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ], [ 1 - template ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[fscom]

19. [WARNING for abuse]
http://i.imgur.com/zyai4.jpg

[(Anonymous)]

Google "narcissistic mothers", you'll be surprised and horrified at what you find. I'm so sorry for you.

[(Anonymous)]

WARNING FOR OP, I'm not doubting you, but I do have doubts about others

I'm seeing SO MANY of these secrets and sentiments...I'm really starting to question how many of them are legitimate, and how many of them are teen girls who feel gleeful they might get to play the 'woe is me' card by pretending their mother was abusive, whether or not they have any reason to.

Again, I'm not doubting you here, OP, or even your story.

[(Anonymous)]

Right, because it can't possibly be that toxic parenting is a hell of a lot more common than people think, and people feel safer admitting such things with a degree of anonymity.

Because if they tried to admit it face to face, especially to those who know their parents, they'd be disbelieved and dismissed and told to just suck it up by people like you.

[clodia_risa]

I'm sorry that you had a triggering experience like that, not to mention a childhood with such abuse.

But I'm glad you had a moment it all became clear. It was real. You are allowed to accept it. You are allowed to complain about it and be traumatized and have to recover from it. I hope you're able to find a way through it.

[(Anonymous)]

/hugs (if you want them)

Don't watch the movie. I liked it, but I won't watch it again because her character really hit home with me.

[(Anonymous)]

I've not seen this movie, so I looked up the clip on Youtube, and um. Wow. That is some effed up abusive shit right there that Disney put in a kid's movie.

[chardmonster]

Was your mother also evil due to tragic brunetteism

[(Anonymous)]

Don't watch it... I'm still not sure how to define my relationship with my mother but I was very uncomfortable during the whole movie (it didn't help that one of my friends was saying that the character resembled my mom :/)

[(Anonymous)]

That's what's so insidious about emotional abuse - you never really understand what's being done until after the fact, and it's hard to get help because a lot of people are going to assume you're blowing things out of proportion (like the 2nd comment asshole). I'm glad you realized what happened, but I'm sorry you had such a bad reaction :(

I agree with others - you probably shouldn't see the whole movie, at least not any time soon. It's a lovely movie, but Gothel's behavior is distressing and unnerving, even to somebody who hasn't directly experienced it. On the other hand, they never portray her behavior as excusable or loving, and (without spoiling much,) the story is very rewarding in that aspect. If anything, I'd recommend it for when you can handle the emotions, and watching it at home with a trusted friend.

I hope things are getting better for you, anon <3

[(Anonymous)]

:( *hugs*

I hope you're getting help and I hope that your situations is better too.

[silverau]

I'm sorry OP. :( *hugs*

[kaileighblue]

Did someone complain about it being by Disney, not Pixar yet?

[(Anonymous)]

OP, I had a viciously abusive mother. And I went to see this movie for fun and yeah, this scene pretty much sent me into a tailspin but I was afraid to say anything because all my friends saw this whole movie as nothing but delight and awesome.

It's almost a relief to hear someone else upset by this. Almost.

[(Anonymous)]

The parallels aren't as strong as they could be in my case - Gothel is a very calculating character, and the things she does to intimidate and isolate Rapunzel are very deliberate, where in my mother's case it's more about her emotional volatility, and how once she's pissed off enough she doesn't care who she hurts.

But I'm with you on the late-in-life realization that what's going on is actually abusive, that human beings have a basic right not to be treated this way. (I remember being kind of shocked when I read an article that mentioned threatening suicide is a form of *domestic abuse*. That it's actually a horrible thing to do to another person to win an argument, that I'm not just 'too sensitive' because it makes me feel like I've been kicked in the stomach.)

[(Anonymous)]

Regrettably, there's nothing "less bad" about emotional abuse. I can understand feeling like your friends have it worse, but ... the part of any kind of abuse that stays with you the longest is what it made you feel. In that sense, you're all in the same boat.

It sucks to feel like something a family member put you through was abusive, and you're the last one to know. I think just about everyone who has direct experience with emotional abuse has been there, though. It's not strange that it took a movie, or watching it being done to someone else, to make it click for you.

A final word, OP: emotional abuse is very common. There are a lot of people who will arge hard that "X isn't so bad!" because they've done it, their friends have done it, or they still can't deal with the idea that they were abused too. People like that will try to make their insecurities your problem. But none of those are good reasons to second-guess yourself.

[othellia]

...damn. This is what I miss when I choose to spend my evening putting together an IKEA bed.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm sorry that happened to you, OP.

(Also, not Pixar.)

[ariakas]

Yeah, I used to think this way (that my parents weren't abusive because it wasn't - at least later - physical abuse). They only shouted/ridiculed/mocked/threatened/made their love conditional upon compliance with rigorous standards (e.g., no Bs in school, no crying, no alternative sexualities). My parents literally sat me down to give me the gay talk and it went something like "you'd better not be gay, or you're out of the house".

That was how it always went. "You don't do _____, you're out of the house", "if you disagree with me about _____, you're out of the house". I once slept in past the mandated time for waking up in the morning - it was a weekend, and I had nothing to do that day - and my father literally bashed the door in with a hammer to get me out of bed (I'd locked it, because my parents also liked to randomly check up on me at night, and when you're a teenager you, uh, sometimes need personal time that you'd rather not have you parents walk in on and all that).

So when I was talking to one of my other friends whose father got drunk and hit him a couple of times, yet he was trying to reconcile with him, I saw that as "real" abuse and was like "you're a better man than I - my parents were just assholes and I wouldn't want to go back to them" and he responded incredulously "what the shit I'd take my parents over yours any day, at least he was nice when he wasn't drinking" it finally made me realize that yes, that was abuse.

At least they never broke my shit though, lol. Because I bought everything I owned. My parents made us get jobs at the age of five and up (paper routes, then on to dock labour when we were older) to buy our own toys. I would have reported it to the police, and they knew it. That shit was mine.

[fuchsiascreams]

You're right, OP. Emotional abuse is still abuse. Please don't compare yourself to your friends and say, "But it's not as bad as that, so it can't be abuse". Yes, it can.

I really hope that you can find a way to be safe and happy. :C

[fuchsiascreams]

TW: emotional abuse.

To the anon who was trying to say that smashing a child's belongings are not hurtful or abusive: you are just plain wrong. I didn't read any examples from the people who were trying to explain to you why you were wrong, so here's one, and I'll try to explain it as well as I can so that you understand that breaking a kid's stuff can actually have emotional consequences.

When I was about ten, my mom and I got in a fight. Actually, it was more just her yelling at me, because I was very shy and quiet as a child, and was terrified to argue back because of some previous childhood abuse. She took her arms and swept them across every surface in the room - my shelves, my dressers, my nighttable, my bookshelves. She threw plants against the wall. She smashed glass objects. She ripped books apart. She threw my clothes on the floor. The only thing she didn't throw onto the floor was my fish bowl. The whole time she was doing this, she alternated between breaking my stuff and screaming at me. I was standing against the wall, crying and hyperventilating.

She has since apologized for doing this and I am convinced that she is genuinely sorry, but to this day I have long-standing effects from this, and other similar experiences. When someone yells at me or raises their voice even a little bit, I completely shut down. I literally just can't respond. I can't think. My mind is blank. When I cry, I hyperventilate, especially if I'm crying because someone is yelling at me. I can't NOT have that physical reaction, even if it's just two people yelling at each other in close proximity to me. It even happens when I hear people yelling on TV sometimes. I also have a mild tendency to hoard because I'm afraid of letting things go. My mother has not only inadvertently taught me that's what mine is not mine and can be taken/destroyed by anyone at any time, that there is no such thing as personal belongings or boundaries, and that my feelings are not important, but has also basically conditioned these extremely emotional responses out of me in regard to yelling/breaking things (the hyperventilating). Although some of these problems are not entirely caused by that one incident and occurred over time because of a few different things, it was the culmination of these incidences that led directly to some of my current behaviors.

Anyway, I tried my best to explain. I'm sure that at least one person is going to accuse me of being weak and overly-sensitive, and I'm sure that stalker-y anon is going to come on here and tell me to quit whining and playing the victim card, but I hope that you understand a little bit more now how something like that can affect a child. You write on the slate of who they're going to be as adults. There is no excuse for trashing your kid's entire room because you had a bad day at work and came home to find that the dishwasher hasn't been emptied yet. To this day, it still wakes me up out of a dead sleep in a panic when I hear the sound of my dad's car pulling into the driveway and the garage door opening, because I was so terrified of my mom coming home from work every day. My brother also has the same reaction to that sound.

Edit: Also, I have pets rats. Have you ever had pet rats before? Have you seen what happens when you take/destroy their food or favorite toys? I've had rats in the past that were very submissive towards some of the more dominant ones, who would take their toys from them, steal food right out of their mouths, etc. Their response to it was generally to become depressed and antisocial. I've had rats before that couldn't stand having their things taken so much that I had to house them in a separate cage for the rest of their life because they either became very depressed, or went the opposite way and became extremely aggressive. A lot of these rats also later went on to become self-mutilators (i.e. barbering themselves). I've seen this happen with at least three different ones. My first rat ever, Nerva, was the runt of his litter in the pet store (which is why I chose him). There were about twelve of them in a cage that I wouldn't even have put three in. He was extremely small and the other rats would steal food FROM HIS MOUTH even if the food bowl was full. He responded by becoming extremely antisocial and aggressive towards other rats. We had four boys in one cage, and Nerva in a cage by himself because he just simply did not trust other rats. He got along fine with people and other animals, though.

Semi-relevant story, tl;dr @ self.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeahhh, I'm going to second the other people telling you not to watch it. I actually think this scene was one of the least creepy parts about her character, she's absolutely unapologetically wretched in the other scenes.

*hugs*

[nyxelestia]

Hope you can get out of that situation, OP.

Try not to compare your own situation to your friends'. I know it's tough, but that way lays misery and repression.

I've had over a decade to come to terms with this, but it's still difficult for me to acknowledge that just because my parents didn't mean to hurt me with all the emotional bullshit they piled on me as a child, doesn't actually mean it's "okay". And the reason was simply because I was surrounded by so many more serious cases of abuse and people telling others to get over it. My parents never intended to manipulate me with suicide threats, so clearly it's my fault for misinterpreting their words. Because, y'know, 7-year-olds are supposed to understand the nuances of complicated and abusive adult relationships and tonal arguments in the middle of messy divorce. >.<

Your friends may have situations worse than you, but that doesn't mean you are in a 'good' place simply because it's not as bad as them. Their suffering DOES NOT invalidate yours, and pain is not a zero-sum game.

Seconding the opinion that you should probably avoid this movie for now, as Mother Goethel can be very triggery. If you ever get out of this situation and triggers aren't as much of a problem, well...While Rapunzel's initial reactions once she sees the evil can be empowering, the story - this being Disney - ultimately still hinges on a rescue by a "prince". So I'd be careful of that. But if you think you can handle that, then the ending is quite a happy one and can make you feel better. It's up to you, OP. :)

[(Anonymous)]

I have never read a secret that I was able to relate to as much as this one. I feel the same way. There are so many times where I hear these awful abuse stories and think that my stories are nothing in comparison.

I've only recently cut off contact with my mother, sad to say I'm 28 now and it took me this long, and it's provided me so much clarity. I'm listening to my sisters and brother and their relationship with my mother, and I'm seeing how much she still controls them and manipulates them into doing the things she wants. It's awful and there's nothing I can do about it, because this was me a year ago, ever since I was a child.

It's terrible being stuck like this, and there's really no one you can talk to or explain your situation because we weren't left with visible scars. I can only hope that you keep going, keep moving forward, and maybe one day you can tell your story to someone who understands.

[arcadiaego]

That film made me really uncomfortable in places, because I recognised my own upbringing in it, even though I realised long ago my mother was emotionally abusive. The bit where Rapunzel was alternating between jubilation at being out of the towers and crushing guilt that she was the worst daughter ever made me laugh but I kind of wanted to cry at the same time!