Growing up in a Dysfunctional Home - Experiences

Hello and welcome! This post is the beginning of a three part series going over my personal experience growing up in a dysfunctional home. This post is going to breakdown what my family dynamic is and some of the events that occurred when I lived at home.

I wanted to first break down what my family dynamic was before I dove into some stories concerning my family. I do want to preface, before I start diving into the trauma, that I really do appreciate the stuff my parents do for me, and I do have good memories with my parents, but I also have a lot of bad memories as well. Despite all of the stuff I have been through with my family, I do still love and appreciate them, it’s just a different kind of love considering what I have been through. Growing up with my family was growing up in a household with constant fights and arguments. It gets so bad that I refuse to leave my room when I’m home in fear that being in the same room with my mom will instigate a fight. The problem with that is that a lot of conflicts end up being made between my mom and my sister, conflicts that I usually have to mediate in order to calm everyone down.

I want to breakdown the family dynamic so here’s my family breakdown:

• My mom: My mom is the main conflict in the house. She constantly fights with everyone in the household, and sometimes she even gets physical if the argument is intense. My mom also never thinks that she does any wrong and never apologizes for the stuff that she does.

• My dad: My dad is a judge, and you’d think that that would help when it came to fighting but it doesn’t. My dad never does anything when it comes to fighting, he usually feeds into my moms anger and makes the arguments worse and continue longer than they have to. My dad also doesn’t understand a lot about mental health and is pretty closed off emotionally, so it was hard to discuss anything with him.

• My sister: My sister grew up to be similar to my mom, but with a more intense hatred towards my mom. It feels as if my sister tries to cause my mom to get angry and starts fights. My sister will continue an argument until she gets the final word (which is also how my mom is, so arguments between the two were never ending)

• Me: I won’t lie and say that I’m the perfect person in my family. I do find myself in an argument every now and again. I am more level-headed though, and I find myself taking the role as the mediator in order to get bad arguments to settle down.

Now that you have an idea of what each family member is like and the dynamic of the household, here are a few stories of my experiences growing up in my household. I hope that hearing about these events can give some good insight on what was really like to grow up in this type of environment.

• When I was a lot younger, I remember this one night we were on our way back from a family event. My mom had gotten a little drunk and on the way home my parents were talking about college for some reason. My mom and dad were arguing and my mom said that she wouldn't care if me and my sister didn’t go to college. This made my dad super mad and they started having a full blown fight. When we got home the fight was at its peak and it resulted in my mom hitting my dad. Then she mocked and teased my dad telling him to “hit her back” to which he did. This night was terrifying to me. I was younger so I couldn’t help in any way, and I remember thinking how I knew this wasn’t right and that it was illegal to do what they were doing. I remember thinking how could this happen when you had a judge in the house, surely a judge would only do the right thing, obviously that's not always the case

• My mom is basically like a ticking time bomb when it comes to arguments. In high-school, I remember that once a year there would be a week where my mom would completely explode. It was basically just a week of endless fights about nothing at all. During my junior year of high-school this week ended up being during my finals week. The fighting got so bad that my sister stayed with her friend for the entire week. I had to suffer through the endless fighting while trying to study for my tests. I remember studying for my human anatomy final and having my mom barge into my room screaming about how I don’t do enough for the family and that I’m a horrible child and a huge disappointment. I sat there crying for hours wondering what I did wrong when in reality I had done nothing wrong, my mom was just having an episode, and when she gets mad, her filter goes away.

• The biggest event that happened was Christmas 2019. We were sitting at the dinner table when my sister told my mom that we were going to our friends house this year to make cookies instead of them coming to our house. For some reason this made my mom unbelievably mad, and she exploded on me (just me, not my sister for some reason). At the table my mom called a bitch, a disappointment, a whore, etc. (you name it, she probably said it). Long story-short, that night my mom threw our Christmas tree to the ground, stomped on ornaments we’ve had since we were babies, slapped me so hard my glasses flew off my face, and then booked herself a flight to Hawaii. To top this off, I was the one that had to calm my mom down. The worst part is that my mom, to this day, has yet to apologize for the stuff she did and said. She is actually convinced that it was all my fault.

Here's the only picture I have from the Christmas of 2019 event. At the time this picture was horrible, but now I'm able to look at this and laugh about how crazy this day was.

There are so many more events that occurred, but they all follow a simple pattern: My mom gets mad, things are said, stuff is broken, and I have to pick up the pieces and get everyone to calm down. While it was hard, I’m glad that I really didn’t it affect me that much (at least take the things my mom has said to heart). While it is exhausting being the mediator for every argument that occurs in my house, there are far worse things that could be happening, and for the most part I have a good support system from my friends that allow me to be the positive person that I am.