The "Beating"

    I never really got to "do much" as a teenager. My mom used to pride herself in being nothing like those horrible parents who controlled their children with authoritarian rules and punishments, she said they "made their own children lie to them". Instead, "you should always be your child's friend". Other children grow up hearing "if you do x, the punishment is y". I grew up hearing "you know, I think that only stupid people do x, and besides, you don't really want to do x", and then if I did x, I was punished via adult tantrum, suicide threats, screaming, and so on. She was partly right - parents who give their children structure and discipline in the form of healthy, straightforward rules and punishments generally do it for the child's long-term benefit. She couldn't care less about something like that.

    It's no wonder that the meltdowns increased exponentially any time there was a new friend or boyfriend involved. No one was ever good enough, she could immediately find a dozen things wrong with people she's never even met, and most importantly, everyone was "trying to take me away from her and brainwash me against her". I wish I was exaggerating. She practically begged me to be careful in picking a partner, so I didn't end up with "someone who tried to destroy what we have". I was so used to the "jealous girlfriend" version of parenting that I didn't really question it, although I did always feel uncomfortable with it.

    Once when I was 17 years old, she disapproved of someone I associated with so much that she cornered me and screamed at me. This was actually unlike her - things almost never got that bad. The accusations were all over the place, I was being a tough guy, a show-off, rebellious, whatever. She was in my face and I was panicking. I remember feeling legitimately terrified of her - fight or flight kicked in, I pushed her out of my way just enough to run to my room and hide, and I thought that was the end of that.

    The next morning, I realized she wasn't speaking to me. The silent treatment was common in our household and it could be over any stupid thing, really. It never worked too well on me, because even before I realized that my family is dysfunctional, usually the silent treatment just meant that people who made me feel bad would leave me alone for a bit. Usually, they'd get angry with me for not giving in, and they'd start speaking to me again after a couple of hours. Although, after this went on for a couple of days, it started to get weird... usually, it didn't last this long. She'd even turn her face away from me when I entered the room or tried to speak to her.

    Days later, I found out through relatives that I "need to apologize for doing something so cruel and evil to my loving mother". WTAF? Eventually, even my dad confronted me about "the brutal beating" and how "she's bruised up, you made her face bleed, how could you!", demanding that I apologize. I remember being totally confused. This did not happen. I've never been in a physical fight in my life. I wouldn't know where to start. At this point in my life, I was an out-of-shape overweight nerd, and she was a manual laborer with the shoulders of a football player. My dad literally lived with us and saw her every day since the supposed "beating" - there were no bruises, there was no blood, there was no "black and blue".

    I can't even describe what I was feeling, it was somewhere between dread, confusion, heartbreak, and terror. I almost understood the fact that people who didn't live with us believed it, although they still should have questioned it... but my dad? It's legitimately terrifying when you realize that your own parents, the people who are supposed to nurture and protect you, are capable of teaming up to create such insane works of fiction about you, seemingly just to hurt you.

    Despite the fact that I knew that they were lying, I was so desperate for things to go back to normal that I apologized. I tried to sort of confront my mom about the lies, but she just doubled down. "You beat me. There were bruises. You made me bleed. End of story", she was literally hissing at me and I could tell there wasn't any space for me to defend myself.

    For years, I questioned why this happened, even after I figured out that everyone in my family is deeply sick in the head. Surely, there were better ways to get an apology. She didn't have to drag multiple people into it. Of course I'd remember if I did something that evil - which I'd never do, I've never done, and I'm not even capable of doing. There'd be physical evidence of it, which there wasn't.

    After years of going in and out of the FOG (although this incident occurred years before I learned about these things), being convinced for months at a time that my family are terribly mentally unwell and unsafe for me to be around, and then being roped back into thinking that I must be the sole bad guy among all of these wonderful, hard-working people, I finally ended up moving out. I think that was when everything finally unraveled for me, because I was finally in a safe enough environment that questioning things and feeling negatively about them was no longer dangerous.

    My mom didn't like that I was going against her by associating with a person she didn't like. Many will think she was trying to keep me safe from a bad person, but no, she was trying to keep me under her control because she knew that this person knew a lot of nasty details about our family life. And like all people with personality disorders, she really likes attention and drama. She knew I depended on her and my dad for all of my material needs. What she did actually made a ton of sense, since it combined all of her favorite pastimes with her need to control me and put me in my place. She wasn't saying "you beat me", she was saying "never forget that I'm in charge of everything, from how others see you to how you speak to me". And due to the fact that personality disorders usually pop up in multiple places in a dysfunctional family system, lots of people were happy to play along, even though they knew better.

    I now know that there are terms for everything that happened. Silent treatment, triangulation, gaslighting, enmeshment, FOG... the discomfort I felt wasn't indicative of there being something wrong with me, the family drama queen who always takes everything too seriously and can never just get over anything. Their behavior was indicative of their own mental problems, which are actually diagnosable and widely studied. I felt discomfort because I was being abused in objectively verifiable ways that are recognized by psychologists worldwide. I wasn't just being sensitive or making up stories. It was real.

    I remember telling my husband about this story, shortly after we met. He doesn't come from a particularly healthy family either, so he's familiar with how disordered and manipulative people work. As soon as I mentioned that my mom once made up a story about how I beat her up, he just laughed. He didn't need any more context to believe me. Apparently, to anyone outside of my family, it's obvious what actually happened. I was always scared that the narrative that I'm a troublesome person who is always up to no good would follow me around for the rest of my life, but so far, it hasn't. And my parents go on creating bizarre coping mechanisms and excuses for why I've distanced myself, as if I'd ever willingly go back to living in that narrative.

Introduction

    The word "unpleasant" was used to manipulate me for as long as I can remember. When I was little, I thought it really meant what it sounded like - that I was being unpleasant, although I didn't understand how or why. My mom would say it so often that I thought I must really just be a terrible person to be around. It didn't really occur to me until I was an adult that it really means "you're doing something that I don't like right now, knock it off".

    "You're being unpleasant" had a lot of implications. Namely, that my job was to be "pleasant" all of the time. To my mom, "pleasant" was: entertaining, agreeable, funny, and most importantly, not daring to have age-appropriate needs, not questioning anything that was going on around me. I was especially "unpleasant" if I was stressed about real problems in my life, or if I pointed out that something in our family was dysfunctional or wrong. For a long time, I was trained like a dog. "Unpleasant" was meant to make me drop what I was doing and immediately grovel for forgiveness and approval.

    She frequently remembered back to tougher periods of my life, where my behavior was erratic and unpredictable due to C-PTSD and depression. "You were so crazy back then! I miss it!". As a wife, mother, and someone who is finally in a relatively good place mentally, I'm almost perpetually stuck as "unpleasant" - because I'm boring and predictable now. I think it speaks volumes of how emotionally stunted she is that she thinks a person should be all over the place and unstable ("so crazy"), even once they're married and have children. I'm no longer the "fun best friend", who I never wanted to be in the first place, I'm practically of no use to her.

    "Tough girl" is a rough translation of one of my mom's favorite phrases to use against me. Imagine something like "macho", they way it's used in the United States as a derogatory term for someone who is being a try-hard, a rebel, a show-off, except it's not specific to men. One of the things I wasn't allowed to point out about my family was the total lack of sexual boundaries, and the fact that it's not normal or appropriate for my dad to corner me and fondle my butt. I remember feeling total panic and dread every time this happened. Eventually, I realized that those feelings weren't a defect in myself, and I started speaking up. My dad would immediately get angry, and my mom would roll her eyes accuse me of "playing tough" or "being a show-off" because I didn't just let it happen. Sometimes, it was implied that I should apologize to him for being this way.

    A couple of years ago, I was expected to drive my mom and dad somewhere, and my dad would not stop yelling in the backseat. I repeatedly asked him to quiet down. I could hardly focus on driving. I hit a curb. This triggered an unhinged torrent of verbal abuse and threats towards me, and then he decided to yell at me that he's "going to walk home". I told him to go right ahead and do that, because I wasn't comfortable with him in my car anymore. My mom demanded that I follow him as he walks down the street, beg him to get back in the car, and apologize. I was being "unpleasant", a "tough girl, a "show-off", because I didn't want to let someone whose disrespectful behavior caused a minor car accident back into my car, especially after they were making threats towards me. She cried and accused me of being a terrible person the entire drive back... radio silence in regards to his violence and threats, of course.

    Any semblance of boundaries, a backbone, or self-respect was met with accusations of being some sort of rebellious brat who just had to go against the grain. "Tough girl" was probably the most common way to degrade me after I dared to insist that I'm actually a human being with rights. I'm still not sure to what degree she was doing this on purpose. There seemed to be an attitude that it's a woman's job, specifically mine, to put up with grotesque violations of personal space and bodily autonomy... otherwise, you were being difficult. When I was much younger, I was convinced that she was just as much of a victim as I was, and I'd vent to her after my dad did these things... today, I know that she was as complicit as he was in a purely evil family system.

    I'm not very good at making creative pen names or usernames. Usually, the ones I choose are just silly. I wanted this blog to be serious, so I couldn't make it some sort of bizarre inside joke or reference to something that makes me laugh. That's how I came up with "unpleasant tough girl". It's not really all that "deep", but it's something I've been called my entire life, and only recently started to question. What did it actually mean, and why was it made out to be so bad?