Emotionally Immature

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. Yesterday I listened to the most recent episode of the I Have ADHD podcast. It was on parenting and specifically on how to raise an emotionally mature child.

The concept of emotional immaturity as the problem behind many challenges parents and their adult children face, was first populated by Lindsay C. Gibson. She was a guest on the podcast episode too. However, emotional development as its own thing isn’t just her idea. As regular readers of my blog know, I occasionally write about how it relates to challenging behavior as seen in individuals with intellectual or developmental disabilities. The person behind this theory also focused heavily on coregulation (though I’m not sure he used this word yet) as a means of allowing individuals with disabilities to grow emotionally. So does Gibson.

In her latest book, which is geared towards parents, Gibson has a chapter on things not to do when raising a child. I haven’t read the book, but in the podcast she mentioned hitting as an example. Oh my, did it hit home (no pun intended)! Gibson explains how tempting it can be to spank your young child, but goes on to say that if you set this precedent, what will you do when the kid is fourteen or sixteen? What will they do, I wonder. My mother used as an excuse for smacking me in the head and worse that I was fifteen, not three. I’m pretty sure she did spank me when I was three too as that’s what parents did back in my day. That’s not an excuse though.

Another example Gibson gives is never to invalidate your child’s feelings. This is an extremely hard one, honestly. I mean, on a daily basis when I express my insecurity, I hear my staff respond with things along the lines of “There’s nothing to be scared of”. Well, so you think, but you’re not in my head and my body.

It’s unfortunately worse with my parents. Last Sunday, I had a lengthy text conversation with my mother, because she demanded to know why I don’t feel safe meeting my parents without my best friend. I didn’t give her the explanation she wanted, because I know that’d lead to further invalidation. Rather, I set a boundary that I won’t be meeting her and my father without my best friend present, period. Let’s just say that, after a lot more harsh words towards me and my best friend, I decided to cut off contact.

I did take away from the podcast episode that I’m myself also very emotionally immature. Not that I didn’t know this already, as I’ve explained multiple times when discussing emotional development before. However, a positive takeaway was the fact that self-reflection can help us grow emotionally if we’re genuinely curious about ourselves and others. With my parents, this ship has sailed. I’m also childfree, so no need to worry about continuing the cycle with my own kids, but I do believe that curiosity and self-reflection help any relationship.

Missing Mommy #SoCS

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. Today’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is “miss”. I immediately thought of the fact that I miss my mother. No, scratch that: I miss Mommy. I miss a mother I honestly never had.

When I was little, my mother did try to stand up for me to my father, who’d been adamant that if I didn’t meet his expectations for me, I wasn’t worth raising. Not even worthy of life. As regular readers of my blog know, my father asked the doctor when I was an infant in the NICU whether I should still be treated aggressively given my possible future quality of life. The doctor was adamant that they were keeping me alive no matter what.

As I get older, accept more care and show more and more that I’m unable (and unwilling!) to conform to my parents’ rigid ideas of a person with a life worth living, I find that my mother is the one most vocal about the fact that she’d rather die than than live like this. And by she, she means me.

Nonetheless, I can’t keep from texting my mother. I honestly wish I could full on go no contact, but that’d be extremely hard if not impossible. I’m working on making sure that at least she will never be appointed to be my medical power of attorney. I am thinking hard about the difficult choices should I actually deteriorate to the point of no longer being able to make my own decisions. The first step, after all, is making those wishes clear.

However, all this doesn’t keep me from missing Mommy. That is, missing a mother who unconditionally loves me whether I’m disabled, queer, neither or as in my case both.

Not Dead Yet

Posted on by Astrid

“Not dead yet.” That phrase has been on my mind almost constantly for the past few days. It’s the name and/or slogan for a disability rights organization most specifically focused on campaigning against the “death with dignity” lobby.

Though I am 100% in support of every individual’s right to die when and how they want, the key here is “individual”. This means no-one should be pressured into dying either by family members or relatives, doctors or the government. This is why the phrase resonates with me.

My best friend and I are now almost officially divorced. I say “almost” because we’ll still separately have to talk to a lawyer via a video call next week. I however already updated my Facebook status and told my parents. This may’ve been a mistake less than two weeks before my birthday, but I can’t undo it now.

My parents are saying they’re worried I’ll end up lonely in the institution. No amount of me telling them nothing’s changed about the relationship with my best friend, convinces them otherwise. They’ve actually invited me (and explicitly just me, without my best friend) for dinner at a local-to-me restaurant on my birthday. Too bad I’ll already be meeting my best friend.

That’s not the worst though. The worst are all the comments my mother made on the phone about how she’d rather die than live like this, how hard it is for her to see relatives in care facilities, how I’ve only deteriorated over the past 20 years, etc. She herself claims she’s already made plans of ending her life in the event my father passes before her. I respect that choice, because like I said I’m all for the right to die. But it has to be a right. The way my mother spoke, it made me feel pressured to end my own life.

As poor as my quality of life is at times, I’d still like to be the one making the decision whether it’s so unbearable without a prospect of improvement that I’d rather be dead. I don’t need my parents’ opinion on that. And at this point, I’m choosing to stay alive whether my parents like it or not.

Family Dynamics: Roles in Dysfunctional Families #AtoZChallenge

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. I’m once again incredibly late writing my contribution for the #AtoZChallenge today. Today’s letter is F and what better word to choose than “family”? After all, with most people who experience complex PTSD as a result of childhood trauma, the trauma originated in the family. This, obviously, does not have to be a birth family, unless you’re talking about the experiences of a traumatic start in life. The traumatic experiences I’m going to talk about here, can affect children brought into the family at any time during childhood.

Often, there are particular dynamics in families in which at least one of the parents is abusive, addicted or otherwise dysfunctional. This is a reason siblings in dysfunctional families often have very different perspectives on their upbringing. In my own case, my sister retreated to her room whenever my parents and I had an argument. As a result, she didn’t see the way my parents reacted and she did hear my screaming. She also resents me for having gotten more attention than she got, even though most of this attention especially when we got older, was negative.

Children and parents/caregivers in dysfunctional families can have many different roles. Some of them, I’ll discuss in more detail later in the challenge. They include:


  • Golden Child: the child who “can’t do wrong”. They are often the family “favorite”, often experiencing being spoiled or having few limits placed on them.

  • Hero: the child who “proves” that there’s nothing wrong with the family. This ties in with the “lost child” role that my sister had: the invisible one.

  • Identified patient / problem child: the child/person being identified as the source of the family’s dysfunction or the reason the family enters therapy. This role shows that, even in families in which one person is clearly the one being obviously abusive, the actual problem is the dynamics within the family.

  • Scapegoat/black sheep: the opposite of the “hero”, the scapegoat is the child blamed for everything going wrong in the family. Usually they get the harshest abuse.

  • Enabler: this is the person, either the not-so-obviously abusive parent or an older child, who maintains the family’s outward appearance and tries to take care of the family at least to an extent.

For clarity’s sake, none of these roles are “good”, in that they all show that a family is dysfunctional. I mean, I was often raised as a mixture between the golden child and identified patient. I regularly tried to deny my golden child attributes, because too often the golden child turns out to become abusive towards their own partner and eventually children. Then again, being the golden child is not that child’s fault. Continuing the cycle once they’re an adult, however, is.

Emotional Abuse and Neglect: What If You Were Never Hit? #AtoZChallenge

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. It’s nearly 10PM as I type my letter E post in the #AtoZChallenge. Today, I want to explore emotional abuse and neglect. After all, many people who survived trauma, wonder whether their experience of complex PTSD “counts” if they were never physically or sexually abused. Unfortunately, many clinicians fail to validate the fact that, yes, emotional abuse and neglect count. I can relate to this myself: I tried countless times to get support for my symptoms of complex PTSD due to childhood emotional neglect and abuse (as well as abuse within the care system) only to be told I was being negative, had probably brought it onto myself, etc. However, when I first shared about the physical abuse I endured as a child, my support staff were pretty quickly alarmed.

Guess what? Even though I was hit many times, it isn’t that which made the most significant impact on my experience of C-PTSD. The worst was the emotional abuse, which came in some quite insidious forms. I mean, losing your temper once and yelling at a child (or someone else dependent on you, like a client in a care setting) isn’t okay, but it doesn’t usually cause lasting effects. What does commonly cause C-PTSD is a longstanding pattern of disregard for the child’s needs. And like I said, this comes in sometimes quite insidious forms.

An example is the fact that, when I learned of the things a child needs growing up, “realistic limits” didn’t ring a bell with me. The reason it didn’t ring a bell to me, was the fact that I was repeatedly told I was being selfish. I also didn’t realize at the time that, if I didn’t get realistic limits set on me (and spoiler: I didn’t!), it wasn’t something I had done to elicit my parents spoiling me. I till this day struggle with this idea, because well doesn’t the fact that I was allowed to set my own bedtime from age nine on, never had limits on screen time, wasn’t made to do chores, etc., mean I’m one giant brat of a person? I can see why my sister, who did get some limits set on her, is sometimes jealous of me.

What else do children need from their parents? Like I’ve shared, they need to have their autonomy encouraged. This may contradict the idea of limits, but really, it’s a matter of balance.

None of the things a child needs from their parents are black-or-white when it comes to emotional neglect and abuse. I mean, obviously a parent should never lay a hand on their child and one incident of physical or sexual abuse can cause significant trauma. With emotional neglect, it’s a matter of “good enough”. What I mean is, a parent doesn’t need to be attuned to their child’s emotional needs all the time (no-one can realistically meet such a standard!). However, when a parent isn’t in tune with their child’s needs most of the time, chances are the child will develop complex PTSD.

Codependent (Fawn-Based) Trauma Responses #AtoZChallenge

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone and welcome to my letter C post in the #AtoZChallenge. Last year during this challenge, I discussed codependency for my letter C post. Today, I want to talk about the same topic, but specifically as it relates to people who experienced complex trauma.

You are probably familiar with the fight or flight response when it comes to fear. However, there are several other ways people can respond to perceived threats. One of them is fawning. This has always been a confusing term for me, particularly because I’m a non-native speaker of English and there is no proper translation of this word in Dutch as far as I’m aware.

Fawning, if I’m correct, in the context of trauma means being overly compliant with the wishes of other people and being unable to protest. It’s similar to people-pleasing, for which I haven’t found a proper Dutch translation either by the way.

Pete Walker, the author through whom I know of the fawn-based trauma response, has an entire chapter on this topic in his book on complex PTSD. I just opened the book to the chapter on fawning and oh my did it hit hard! Walker starts out by explaining how he learned that he himself gravitates towards a fawn response when he apologized to a chair for bumping into it. I have done that too.

However, it’s harder for me when I find myself apologizing to people, because too often my apology gets seen as being insincere when I truly have a reason to apologize. That makes sense, especially because I can also show a fight-based response when triggered.

The thing for me is that I overadapt until I can no longer take it anymore and then I have an aggressive meltdown. This sometimes makes me doubt I actually fawn at all. It doesn’t help that my parents from a young age on ingrained the thought that I am selfish into my psyche. I can indeed be self-centered, but that’s not the same.

I am still unsure whether I am a primarily fawning trauma survivor rather than a fight type. However, reading Walker’s chapter makes me realize I’m probably closer to the fawn end of the fight-fawn continuum than many people, including myself, believe. I, after all, experience a deep-seated lack of understanding and even deeper lack of appreciation of myself. Walker calls this self-abandonment and self-abnegation. I wonder whether, because my most outwardly noticeable reaction when triggered is fight, I have been conditioned to see myself as primarily a fight-based type.

Birth: The Effects of a Complicated Start in Life #AtoZChallenge

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone and welcome to my letter B post in the #AtoZChallenge. I’m doing this challenge on healing past hurts. Today, I want to go far into my past: I want to talk about the effects of a complicated birth.

As regular readers know, I was born prematurely and spent the first three months of my life in hospital. Of course, I have no conscious memories of this time, but that doesn’t mean my complicated start in life didn’t have an impact. There is evidence that many people who were born prematurely or otherwise had a difficult start to life, experience attachment problems into adulthood. Now of course I didn’t have the most positive childhood either and there is no way of knowing whether I would still have attachment issues had my parents been well-attuned to me. Of course, this is also a difficult question, since my parents experienced their own trauma having me prematurely.

The thing remains though, a child who was born prematurely, spends time in a clinical setting that they should’ve spent literally inside their mother’s body. There are attempts to lessen the burden this has on children (and parents). For example, kangarooing, in which a baby experiences skin-to-skin contact with their parents, is encouraged as soon as it is possible. However, for preemies and other NICU graduates who are now adults, this may not have been the case. Many older NICU graduates hardly saw or heard their parents for the first few weeks to months of their life. My parents, thankfully, lived in the same city I was in the neonatal unit in, so they were able to visit often.

One thing that haunts me though, and I’ve mentioned this several times, is the effect my being medically complex from birth on left on my parents’ attachment to me. Like I said, whether I would’ve experienced attachment issues had my parents not mistreated me as a child, is a difficult question because one of the reasons they treated me so poorly is their difficulty coping with my being disabled. My father quite literally asked the doctor whether it’d make sense to keep me alive after I’d had a brain bleed a few weeks after birth.

It’s telling, in my opinion, that when you look up “birth trauma” online, what comes up most frequently is not the effects a child’s own start in life could’ve had on them, but the effects of complicated childbirth on parents. And like I said, one goes hand-in-hand with the other.

Autonomy: Learning That I Can Do Things and That My Opinions Matter #AtoZChallenge

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. Today is April 1 so this means the #AtoZChallenge is starting. I haven’t prepared any posts in advance, but since I am going to write on healing past hurts, the concept of autonomy spoke to me for my letter A post. Autonomy is the ability to be self-reliant and independent, both physically and emotionally. It starts to develop in toddlerhood.

As I learned about emotional development as it relates to developmental disability (I discussed this in 2023), I realized in many ways I’m not there yet. I struggle with even basic decisions like what clothes I want to wear.

When I was 30, I was told I have dependent personality disorder. This disorder is characterized by passivity and the inability to make decisions independently, as well as a pervasive need to be taken care of. It is often related to lack of encouragement of autonomy in childhood.

I don’t have many memories of my early childhood, but I do know I wasn’t given a lot of autonomy when I was older. It’s not that my parents didn’t try, but as soon as I got frustrated, they gave up. They genuinely believed they were giving me autonomy and that I was just too stubborn to want to be independent. For this reason, they claimed and to this day still claim it’s my choice to be in the care system.

My psychologist back in 2016, the one who diagnosed me with dependent personality disorder, sided with them. She said I did have the assertiveness to stand up for myself, but wasn’t doing things I was (thought to be) capable of. That’s not what dependent personality disorder is though: lack of confidence in one’s own physical capabilities is but one criterion out of eight. And please note: it’s specified that the reason someone isn’t doing something, is in fact lack of confidence, not lack of skill or motivation. In other words, unwillingness to do things independently that you can do, is not dependent personality disorder, but care misuse.

And for clarity’s sake: I am not and never was misusing care. However, that’s exactly what my psychologist thought I was and according to which presumption she treated me by kicking me out of the mental hospital with virtually no support. She once again didn’t encourage me to develop autonomy. Refusing to help someone who clearly asks for help, contrary to the current idea in mental health services, may be politically useful, but it is not autonomy-supportive.

I am only now, now that I’m nearly forty, learning that I in fact was conditioned by both my parents and the psychiatric hospital to disregard my own opinions. Yes, being able to do things independently, is one aspect of autonomy, but so is the ability to make your own choices. One can hardly exist without the other.

March 2026 In Review

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. It’s the last day of the month and that means I’m joining Natalie for her monthly wrap-up. March was a tough month. As I say this, I hear a little voice in my head saying I’ll never be happy anyway as I’m so negative. One of my staff on Sunday said I have nothing to complain about because I get regular support workers and my day schedule is followed. I still wonder how much of my dissatisfaction is indeed due to circumstances that can be changed, such as my day schedule, how much is due to the inherent nature of my being multiply-disabled and living in long-term care and how much is my attitude.

In any case, early in the month I heard that my activity-based day schedule would be taking effect on April 1. That’s tomorrow. Unfortunately, on the same day, the staff’s hours are going to change and this, even though the literal hours they are in the home won’t be cut, means my support will be cut a little. We’ll see how that goes.

I tried to adapt to the new support hours already and this was incredibly hard. I also tried to myself follow a schedule with more meaningful activities. This was partly successful, especially with staff who are already able to help me get more meaningful activities done. For example, last week, one of the staff helped me create a unicorn-themed card for a former fellow resident from the intensive support home, who had her birthday that day.

Thankfully, one staff, with whom until then I’d only been doing dice games and going for walks, herself took the initiative to ask a colleague to orient her to the polymer clay activity.

I have been cooking and baking more than I used to. For example, I baked so-called “healthy” brownies that I fully intended on handing out at the monthly local brain injury meet-up. They weren’t all that good though.

Later, I found out I had a Trojan on my computer that came with the recipe manager app I used to download random recipes off Facebook into, including this “healthy” brownie recipe.

Before I found out I had malware on my computer, I had been obsessing over the idea of cooking vegetarian curries. Most of the recipes, I got off English-language food websites like BBC Good Food, so I’m not sure I’ll be able to use them. After all, though my English is quite good, my staff’s might not be.

Last Saturday, I cooked a delicious cauliflower, tomato and chickpea curry. This recipe was in Dutch, by the way.

Now that I look over this post, I wonder what made the month so tough, given that I once again did more meaningful activities than I used to. I do believe part of the problem is the fact that I’m still not adequately supported when I’m struggling. I mean, highs and lows are to be expected even when you’re having the proverbial time of your life. When people expect me to have a positive outlook because “I have nothing to complain about”, that is horribly invalidating. Life in the care system isn’t great and it isn’t meant to be. I don’t expect to ever rate my days higher than a seven out of ten, but when staff do have this expectation of me, it’s incredibly frustrating. I’m hoping something can be done about this.

Of course, this was also the month I finally realized I’ll never have an okay relationship with my parents. It’s tough realizing I never experienced a proper bond with my parents and even tougher to know that no-one can replace it. However, I do think I’m more capable than I used to believe. I’m not sure how I feel about that.

Chosen Family #WotW

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. Today, I’m joining in with Anne’s Word of the Week linky, as well as Natalie’s #WeekendCoffeeShare. My word of the week (or rather, phrase, as it usually is), is “chosen family”.

First, as I usually do when writing my weekend coffee shares, I’d like to write about the weather. Over the weekend, it was good: relatively warm and somewhat sunny too. I even sat in the sun for a bit on Sunday. However, most of this week brought cooler temperatures and rain. Today, the daytime high was 9°C. That’s considered normal for this time of year, which I honestly believe is crazy but oh well.

Now here’s why my phrase of the week is “chosen family”: several things this week made me realize my wife is more like family than my birth family. Yes, even now that we’re officially in the divorce process.

You see, we had our first meeting with the divorce mediator and financial advisor on Tuesday. I won’t go into detail as to what we’ve been discussing, but it looks like we’re both going to be okay and we’ll find a way together to make this work. We’ll have our next meeting on April 14.

On Saturday, I was at our house too. I got strange queries in Chrome so had run a full virus scan two weeks ago and it’d found a threat. I initially brushed it off, but finally told my best friend/wife. She was a bit stressed, because I had not paid attention to the full implications of this and for example changed my passwords. I didn’t know what the malware might’ve done, so went to our house on Saturday so that she could check it over. It looks like no actual damage was done, thankfully. In case I’ve mentioned the name of the recipe manager I used though (I’m pretty sure I touted it as the perfect app) and anyone’s installed it too: that was the source of the malware. No more Chrome extensions for me.

Today, my mother texted me to check on me. I, stupidly enough, called her. We’ve been in very limited contact for years now due to her attitudes towards my childhood trauma. After I got more of the same shit, among which comments insinuating that I should move closer to my family because my friendship with my best friend may not be forever, I had had enough. I don’t know yet what will happen in the long run, but for now I’m genuinely done with my family of origin. My best friend feels more like family than my parents do and yes, I’m aware that our friendship might dissolve over time. Then again, no relationship is forever.