@
yvan6615 Hmm. I, and most of the many people I have known, would regard a lot of that as sheer cruelty. The idea of a 13yo boy still being bathed by his mother, being beaten even in late teens by either parent and allowed no social life even with good people, raises very serious questions about their motives.
Did they even love you, or secretly regard you as a liability whose arrival in the world had cramped their lives socially and financially while loading them with a heavy responsibility? I have a horrible feeling that this lies behind so many accounts of horrific childhoods in the days when "family planning" was far more difficult than it is now.
Yet our lacking the more extreme parental behaviour you describe has not stopped any of us turning into decent people who respect others and respect ourselves.
I think what your parents thought of as "respect" was not true respect, which should be mutual, but fear. If mine had behaved like yours I would have been only too glad to get out and abandon them to their self-inflicted misery.
That once you were an adult, starting with your university course, you still liked to wear shorts, is another matter, and entirely by your choice. You did not have to wear them. I like shorts too, but this is a recent development, I think in my fifties. I also like consensual corporal punishment games, but only as games between consenting adults, not in any sort of reality.
