When your parent or grandparent tries to indoctrinate you as a child

[Unbroken1]

Not sure why I am posting this. Maybe I'm looking for confirmation that the following kinds of behavior are not normal. For a long time I thought I was special and different for having experienced these things and would actually tell friends, laughing about how outrageous it was but probably unconsciously looking for someone to tell me how effed up it was. I have been thinking about this for a very long time, and never had a chance to verbalize what I experienced to anyone I can recall (TW: suicide, animal abuse, N rage, mental illness).

I was an only child of an uBPD mother and covert emotionally frozen uNPD father, so it makes sense that mom's parents had issues as well. One big family secret was that my maternal grandmother was for a time an out of control alcoholic who occasionally would be found passed out drunk on the floor. When she became unmanageable, grandad would pack her off to a nursing home for a couple of months. This would repeat occasionally when he deemed it necessary.

Enter generational trauma: the pattern showed up again as my mother would be committed to months-long treatments in local mental hospitals where she would receive electoshock therapy and prescriptions for heavy doses of antipsychotic meds and tranquilizers like Chloral Hydrate, Haldol, Trazodone, Halcion, Lithium and Valium, which I used to steal, along with grandmother's Quaaludes. Due to the insanity, I was just beginning my own path of numbing out with weed, meth, psychedelics and pretty much anything I could experiment with (except for Heroin, the anti-drug propaganda films we were shown in school scared me too much to try the needle). I even stole one of mom's Premarin pills but it really didn't do anything. I guess that shows how desperate? I was to zone out.

My maternal grandfather, I now realize, had definite sociopathic tendencies and I now believe he was a malignant covert narcissist as well. When I was about 12 he had a lot of influence over me since my mother had been diagnosed with clinical depression and attempted suicide at least twice from what I've been told by surviving older family members. For a couple of summers from 1969-70, when I was about 12, I was shuttled off to live with my paternal grandmother in West Texas, or cousins in the Pacific Northwest. Another time, said grandfather took me on a trip to Kansas to meet the farming branch of our family.

I guess granddad must have figured that my dad just wasn't bringing it as far as teaching me how to be a man, so he decided to start telling me things like all the racist names for people of color he liked. Or how you just don't let a woman cut you off on the highway, so you follow her to her destination and then give her a good tongue lashing when she gets out of her car (I was there). And then when a man in a highway restroom spies on you through a glory hole in the restroom stall, you don't provide any response insofar as protecting your grandson when he reports it to you.  Or, sharing the pint of whiskey with you from the gas station owner in the cab of his pickup while a tire is changed. Or how much fun it is to torture farm chickens since they're bound for the dinner table anyway. Or pointing out how the big patch of paper covering the porch of the house at that highway inspection was hiding the gore from a recent horrific car crash at that spot. Or how my great uncle pointed out the place in the alley where he had to throw up from the chemo he was taking.

I learned a lot on that trip! I also learned how to bale hay with mom's (much older than me) cousin who let me drive a tractor, ride a parent-forbidden mini bike and gave me my first beer ("don't tell your mom, OK?"). I felt kind of grown up, and treated differently by mom and dad. I got to go fishing in a lazy creek for catfish and got my first driving lesson on the farm, so it wasn't all bad. I had my first cheeseburger and drank coffee for the first time. I got to escape the craziness at home, so believe it or not this trip is not one that I have a lot of shame over, like I have with many other childhood memories. The experience was the antithesis of what my parents were like: uptight, controlling, anxious and fearful.

But I have completely reframed this memory now. Thinking about it brings a little EF - when asked by my great uncle, I opted to go to Six Flags instead of a pro baseball game, which meant riding the rides alone while a sullen, petulant grandfather had to look after me. I think now that he was definitely trying to indoctrinate me... to be what, I don't know, for that brief period. Maybe he saw my parents raising me as a softie and thought I needed hardening. I think I understood this on some level at the time.

[bloomie]

Unbroken1 - what a lot to try and make some kind of sense of as a growing child. It is normal to try and take all of the puzzle pieces we are given by our elders along with our youthful observations, and make some kind of foundation or understandable whole out of them, in my own experience.

With the kind of very grave addictions and mental health issues you were witnessing unfolding in the people around you, not to mention being left alone for long periods with a grandfather who was unfit to even treat a chicken with human kindness, you are left with very little that makes any sense in all of it. And those around us normalize it. And we learn to try and do that too. 

The behaviors of your grandfather may very well have been an indoctrination. It is not normal, love, mentoring, even generational and cultural differences to expose you to the kinds of circumstances, bigotry, alcohol, risk, misogyny, and so much more that your grandfather exposed you to.

This from the article linked above laying out what normalizing looks like:

The process of normalizing (usually a sustained effort over time)  may touch off deep inner conflict in the person who is the target of normalizing efforts.   The reason for this ambivalence is that normalizing requires a person to adjust their personal standards, and accept, participate, or collaborate in bad behavior in order to receive a payoff or reward.

What seems perfectly understandable and normal to me is that you would have deep inner conflict around these experiences and the atmosphere they create around you. It has to have been hard to share and relive some of this with us. I hope bringing your grandfather's behaviors into the light can help you heal and process it.