Is it possible that he has PTSD? When triggered, I did not melt down. Instead I was cruel to those around me, but, I could see why somebody would melt down.
I am nearing the end of my Cognitive Processing Therapy and learning the ways of rewriting my script using positive accomplishments to overcome my social deficits that I can remember. With that, I am learning an inner peace (or is it the THC gummy that I ate?)
G'day again, Gerald! Bwahaha, THC gummies.
I've wondered, but then I have complex PTSD and don't want to project it onto others... it's possible. I mean, acts of violence, chronic meanness, feeling unsafe as a child for prolonged periods - he totally HATED school, for that and other reasons. All of it, start to end. Whereas with me, it was just middle school - in my primary school and senior high school I felt generally very safe and happy and it was a wonderful contrast to home life!
He says he had a happy family life but his father actually is a bully, who he's banned from our house because of his poor behaviour towards me and his lack of respect for our boundaries. He's the kind of bully who looks like a harmless jolly Santa most of the time but when he bullies, he's quite mean, manipulative and sometimes he throws things at you and yells. The mother enables the father and teaches everyone to walk on eggshells around him so as not to provoke him. She even tried to get me to do that, in my own home, and that was not OK. As he won't admit he's done something out of line and apologise for doing something offensive etc, we couldn't talk this through or sort it out, so after a few unpleasant visits and incidents my husband told him not to come back. He will, however, go visit his parents in their own space.
I can't personally imagine that this produces a happy childhood, to grow up with someone like this. My husband just learnt to avoid him as a kid, but that's not the same as having a father you can relate to etc. I personally wouldn't have felt safe with him, but with his mother on her own, it's fine unless the father is around as well and she's enabling him and trying to hush everyone etc. The father was often working remote and not home the whole week, so that might have been OK then.
You'd have to ask him, but when I do, he mostly says, "I don't remember." The level of detail I remember from my own childhood is huge and sometimes I am amazed at the kinds of things he can't answer about his childhood, like if his parents hugged each other.
)
