For those of you who didn't having controlling parents, you might want to skip this post (unless you are just really interested…). For those of you who did, please, read on.

I wrote this blog post in 2011 on a different blog. I'm transferring it here to add to my list of topics under the Holistic Healing for PTSD tab. I might move a few other posts from that blog as well.

I can honestly say that now my family's life is not at all this intense around here. Time and experience and focusing on my own healing has improved things, even though both my husband and I had to hit our own bottoms before things have turned around for our family.

I have talked quite a bit on this blog about my insecurities and anxieties about my own capacity as a mother. Midway through my 40th year now, I spent about a year and a half examining the factors that have created my anxieties and feelings of inadequacy in mothering. I'm not sure how much it has helped. Sometimes I fall into the same patterns of behaving. But I keep searching for solutions.

I, like I suspect many people who use search terms "gaslighting", "mean mothers", "attachment disorders and anxiety" and find my blog, have had a traumatic childhood with a very controlling family dynamic.

For my part, I simply rebelled. Nobody valued my input and they sought to squelch my expressions. In response, I simply got louder and angrier than anyone else. My family attempted to control every aspect of who I was, from my bookish nature, to my lack of style in my clothes and hair, to the choices of boyfriends and the choice of universities I wanted to attend. And since nothing I did was good enough, I really didn't try that hard to conform. Yet, when someone in my family was hurting, I came to their rescue, and tried to validate their feelings and sort out their messes they created, even long after I left home.

I've been trying to sort out my past for only one reason. It affects my current relationships with my daughters and my husband (and, well, with friends sometimes). I know…it sounds so stupid, but I really don't know what healthy relating during conflict and healthy parenting looks like in action. I've been trying to find out for the past 9 years or so. When you don't know what healthy parenting looks like because it wasn't modeled for you, and you see the crappy job OTHER parents are doing around you, how on earth do you know what it looks like? Seems like no one I know has this thing down.

I see a lot of parents who appear very controlling around here. Some of them know they have tendencies toward being controlling. They laugh and crack jokes about how they are OCD and need everything in it's place, or too anxious/high-strung, or too perfectionist, and it trickles down to their children and they seem to acknowledge it isn't healthy, but they don't know what to do about it. Some of them even go so far as to quip how they are setting up funds for not for college, but therapy sessions for their kids when they are older. The more frightening ones are the ones who don't think twice about their controlling behaviors and then lament why their kids don't listen to them anymore.

For me, I tend to be way more laid back than my contemporaries…but I have my own control issues too that comes up in ways pertaining to my daughters' sensitivities that trigger my own.

I spent a lot of time and money on books trying to figure out how to be a better parent than my own were to me and my siblings. I have a small library of my own in my quest to be a good, healthy person and parent. I thought I had a lot of understanding of the problems…yet I still lack some tools. Heck…you should see how many times I screw up.

I'm still anxious, still more reactionary when under stress than I'd like to be. I have come to realize, I'm trying to control the uncontrollable nature of children and child-rearing, particularly MY children, who are anxious, independent thinkers (yes, already), and probably as stubborn as I am. It seems to me that some kids, particularly the sensitive, observant ones, seem to instinctively know their parents weaknesses and go right for them. Or so it feels. I know it's just coincidental. Kids just do what they do, and we react based on long ago scripts embedded into us from our own childhood.

As a sensitive person who came out of an abusive, controlling family, I have a hyperawareness…a hypervigilant nature…and a tendency towards a perfectionist nature – but not in outward trappings (like clothing, appearance, or my home), but in getting this parenting thing 'right'. And the more I want