My story began long before I was born, from what I now understand of my family history. I’ve long been aware that my parents had met in a rather unusual way; my mother met my father’s parents before she ever met him. I’ve had very early memories, to as far back as to when I was just two years old during the mid-1970’s, of my mother having been a much different person at that time than she has been for most of my life. I am now aware that my mother was holding a secret that she has only since revealed to me after my father passed away in early 2017. And that additional piece of information that I had never been fully aware of while my father was alive, has allowed me to make sense of all the experiences I’ve had through the years.

I experienced typical childhood development in virtually every respect, except one. I could learn at a rate that was far advanced for my chronological age. By the time I began school when I was five years old, I had already been reading for some time, could easily count to one hundred and solve simple math problems, and possessed the curiosity to learn more that was both rivaled and limited only by my imagination. But my development was being stunted by my parents, and rather than being encouraged to learn, at home I had already been discouraged from doing so. Unfortunately, no one at my school was aware of what was happening to me, at home. The result was disastrous for me, but I never lost hope, despite what seemed to me to be limitless efforts by my parents to undermine my well-being.

It was only after reaching adulthood and moving out of their home that I fully realized the extent of what they had done. That was partly due to my having lived in fear for so long with them, and partly because I had no other frame of reference to compare my experiences to. I maintained contact with my mother even after I moved out of her home (just prior to my 25th birthday) and a few years later she let me borrow the family photographs as by that point I hoped to scan them. As I looked through the years of photographic prints that had been made, including several of me that I had never seen before, I realized that my parents had, in some cases, documented what they had been inflicting upon me. I still had no firm clues though, as to why it all happened.

And, I never had a name to put to my experiences with my family. All that would come later. For lack of a better description, my parents were rather unusual, to the point of exhibiting rather odd characteristics. I had often been ‘punished’ as a young boy, for doing things that are a part of the typical, early development of most children. Specifically, exhibiting curiosity about the world around me, was something viewed by my parents as being a punishable offense. Unfortunately for me, while I understood what was happening to me, as a child I had very few opportunities to try to convey it to anyone outside the family. And, even when an opportunity to do so occasionally presented itself, as a child it was nearly impossible to convey what was happening in my home to anyone outside my family, with my parents present, and against their adamant denials of what I knew to be real events. What I didn’t realize through the years was that they truly believed, apparently, that I was the source of and the reason, for their own issues and struggles. That is one of many consequences that victims of gaslighting abuse might face.

Since my father passed away, my mother provided me with what could be called a ‘missing link’ that now not only accounts for all the experiences I’ve had with my family through the years, but also why it all happened. And, that has led me to the term from psychology -gaslighting - that I am now aware of and that precisely describes the patterns of experiences I had with my parents, beginning during my early childhood, more than forty years ago. The ‘missing link’ for me, was my mother’s acknowledgment to me, about nine months after my father passed away, that she had experienced something similar to what I had with my parents, but from my paternal grandmother during the 1960’s, before I was born.

Combining that additional piece of information with my own memories of events I experienced many decades ago, along with documentation in the form of some old elementary school records that I had obtained in the early 1990’s, the family photographs, and the interactions I had with both my parents through the years, has allowed me to finally understand why this all occurred. Sadly though, I am now aware that my family was doomed to fail, even before I was born. Both my parents, unbeknownst to me until now, had the same types of experiences with my paternal grandmother, as I’ve had with my parents. The gaslighting abuse that I have experienced for many decades, and that is still ongoing, had repeated itself from one generation to the next, and it was apparently unavoidable, for me.

I never lost hope though, that someday, I would overcome it all, because I was determined to hold on to reality …