Therapist: Do you have any lingering anger with your mother?

@HootyTheNightOwl Omg I'm sorry:/

@Lilymoon Me too, I don't know how to make my peace with it... especially when I can still hear her saying "Social services would take you away from me if they found out that I was doing this".

How do you make your peace with things like that???

@HootyTheNightOwl that's horrible. Don't let her win. Be strong

@HootyTheNightOwl very similar.. she didn’t do it directly but she didn’t stop it in fear of my dad

@MommaBear I was slightly better equipped to handle abuse from my "dad", he was physically abusive and I could dissociate from that from a young age... I know that I was dissociating from the age of 4, but I don't know when it started.

@Lilymoon I'm trying, but it's a recently recovered cluster of memories, so I'm still feeling a bit raw from the recollection. The weird thing is that they changed my name on my birth certificate (my birth was re-registered, that's how I know... it's on my birth certificate)... from what I remember so far, it's possible that this could have been the catalyst for her starting her abuse of me.

The thing is that I don't just have to make my peace with that, but I also have to make my peace with the fact that she wasn't lying when she told me that the name I was always told was mine wasn't the one that my birth was registered with. I was 8 years old when they changed my name on my birth certificate (so they had me use a name that wasn't even my name for the first 8 years of my life... and not one of them corrected "Uncle" when I correctly told him that my name was *real name* they knew that I was right - they all knew that my name was *real name*).

Now, I want to get a copy of my certificate from my birth year and put that wrong right so that I actually get to use the name that I was given at birth... the name that they said wasn't mine.

At the same time, I'm scared because, if they hid my real name from me... what else did they hide???

@HootyTheNightOwl maybe you should just let that go... just try and focus on other things.
I can only imagine the struggles you have to deal with every day.
You're doing really well just keep moving on.
Big hugs 🫂

@Lilymoon I'm angry about it... and, if it turns out that it was just my last name that was changed when they added my "dad" to my birth certificate, I want my original name back.

They should never have hidden it from me in the first place and he wasn't that much of a dad to me anyway... or he wouldn't have hit me half as much as he did. Even though I didn't officially get to use the name, everyone around here knows me by that name and they still ask about me through that name. They don't use the name that I was raised believing was mine or my current name - only my first name.

I think that's what makes it worse for me.

@HootyTheNightOwl be angry and do it! You deserve that closure…

@MommaBear See, you get it. At this point I believe that I know what I'm going to find on my original birth certificate because my mother told me, in a nutshell.

I feel like I need to claim back the part of me that was mine by birthright - and they had no business taking that away from me, not until I was old enough to make an informed decision anyway.

@HootyTheNightOwl best of luck I hope you find it ❤