...99% kidding!

Parental cut downs hurt, and they are not how we should parent our own children.

To help you through this, you have to realize - really see it - that this is not something you did to yourself.

You can go to a therapist but I always bullshitted my way through therapy, pretty pointless. When you're trained to tell people what you think they want to hear, psychiatry is crap!

The thing that helped was reading Alice Miller's book Drama of the Gifted Child, which basically explains why your parents were such flaming assholes - it was done to them, and on and on through the authoritarian centuries.

Once I realized what was wrong with my parents, I was able to understand them and eventually forgive them.

It is an immense relief, please seek this book.

The 1% of not kidding is that it is actually, I think, good to have a facade of control and well being. Faking it until you make it is not the worst advice I ever got. True control is a matter of practice, not hoping that you will never again feel anger, helplessness, frustration and unfairness, because the world drips that shit on us from an endless tap!

A quick search of "men's health group vancouver" pulled up these two sites:

http://menshealthresearch.ubc.ca/dudes-club/

http://www.westcoastmen.org/programs/mens-circles

Surely these groups have resources to help men through the kind of PTSD you describe.

Wow, you absolutely nailed this. The 'taken to a psychiatrist for not behaving' is basically the force/violation part of it. (Speaking from the reveiving end of experience over 1.4 decades)

Sadly once the boy is too deep into the psych part of that intrusive system and has a 'history', extricating them becomes increasingly difficult.

Counselling isn't about figuring who to blame for our neuroses- it's about figuring out how to move forward. Say what you will about biopsychology but it's better than all that Freudian garbage that WAS about blaming parents.

There are few resources for men, and have less identity over the last generations. I agree. My dream (as a woman who aspire for equality across the board), see this as society's quiet issue. I am not undermining women's abuse issues, but both sexes deserve support. I hope you find yours. Keep trying and believe in yourself as a person.

So why is your post so laden with thinly-veiled sexism? Do you assume that women who were similarly abused have some kind of special place to go where they get free therapy from warm and fuzzy specialists? Guess what? We don't have any more resources for that type of thing than guys do. Don't confuse the very few resources available for women who've been sexually assaulted or abused, or who're fleeing from domestic violence, with the type of mainstream therapy you seem to assume is abundant for us. Also, to somehow blame feminism for abusive mothers is just ludicrous! Bad parents have been around for as long as humans have, and feminism has nothing to do with it. So, if you feel you need therapy then look like you're going to have to get in line like everyone else or pay for it like anyone else. Including women!

This is the Elephant in the room and what this is creating is not sugar and spice and all things nice, though we are supposed to pretend everything female is sweet, nurturing and nice while rampant abuse is shoved under the rug as there is pretense that women don't abuse. It is appalling how many boys in the nineties were put on ritalin because mom was incompetent.

I've been there, man. My mom apologized to me for some really nasty things she said a couple weeks ago. I'm 26 and this is the first time she's said sorry to me for anything, period.

Maybe this will help: to start healing, I needed to forgive my mom, and find a way to be self-sufficiently proud of my choices and where I am in life. Also, in order to give myself the space to do that, I needed to become totally economically independent of my parents.

Good luck!

I am sorry you were hurt. Hurt by the person who was supposed to protect you. It is not helping you to broadcast this here. If indeed you are as you say, a survivor of abuse, then your experiences have biased your perspectives. You can get the help you want, and from the sounds of it you probably should avoid women as they are a trigger for you.

Have few, if any, avenues for talking about their traumas, so you are not alone in that. But I think what you point to, that "it seems that as long as a woman can "put on a good face," she is socially entitled to abuse her children as much as she wants at home," is not so gendered as you paint it to be. Abusive fathers do this as well. Abusive PEOPLE do this - they put on a good face to the public all while gas-lighting and neglecting you. So I fear you are in danger of seeing your mother as "all women," and all women like your mother, and this is a faulty mentality to assume if you are to enact any real and lasting healing. Anyone with trauma that has sought help finds hypocrisy in the system, and, for some, in the course of action the therapist wishes to take. It is not fair, but your healing and your life is bigger than the counseling system. There is no grand conspiracy against you - healing is within your grasp.

To help yourself, and it IS up to you to do this, you have to stop seeing all people, and in your case, all women, as equivalent to your mother and her abuse. Separate the two, and you may get perspective and regain control over what must feel like a daunting situation.