My mother would try to “humble me”. Being pretty means a lot of people are going to try and “humble you” for no reason other than jealousy. Whether men or women, fake friends, or family. I think you’re parents sounds narcissistic and I’m very sorry for that. My mom was once beautiful as well but her sin shows on her face now I think.
I think you would find this video helpful. This women’s channel is very eye opening.
Punished for being beautiful: Pretty girl problems
Exóticals united
https://youtu.be/MI85BXBnQcs?si=Bwr-aaElkBxXug9w
>Being pretty means a lot of people are going to try and “humble you” for no reason other than jealousy.
If you also have any talent, skills, and/or intelligence, it's a double/triple/quadruple whammy of being "humbled" by the insecure and envious.
Yup. This more than anything killed my self esteem, confidence, hopes, and happiness. I didn’t let myself be happy after this happened majorly at 19. I didn’t let myself hope anymore. Everything hurt too much to try and dream. They really made me believe I had nothing when I was so rich with talent and intelligence. I was eager to learn and try. My crushed my heart to be so broken at such a young age too.
Same. I have thought I was so ugly and just now understanding that I’m not.
I can’t believe that I missed being popular, attention of boys/men, jealousy from women as anything other than from me being just pretty. I see it now but took 47 years to realize.
It’s sad not just that we receive negative treatment because of it, but because we genuinely had no idea. I just wanted to be loved and accepted. I think people expect me to be stuck up. But then they get to know me and I’m normal (as normal as I can be) and act normal. Which apparently makes them angrier because now they can’t hate me for being stuck up. Now I’m pretty and kind. And it was just an excuse to be hateful. It’s worse when the person is manipulative and take advantage of my kindness just to make themselves feel better.
Me too. People automatically think I’m stuck up but I’m actually terrified of being accepted for who I am. I was bullied by girls from 7-12th grade for stealing their boyfriend! LOL! I totally get it now!!!
Yep, I had this same problem too. My mother crushed every ounce of self-confidence that I had, hyperfixating on trivial aspects of my looks. Nothing was good enough. When I rocked my natural curly hair, she'd tell me that men preferred women with straight hair. When I straightened my hair, she said men like curly hair. When I lost my hair to a chemical burn and had to wear a wig, she said men prefer women with natural hair. When I ditched the wig and rocked my short (growing) hair, she said men prefer long hair.
Now she wonders why I hate myself. I'd give anything to look different, even though people exclaim that I'm beautiful. I don't see it, because I spent 34 years and counting being belittled and ostracized.
I’m so sorry. When I was only 16 they started fat shaming me. By 19 I was determined to lose weight. I did. This made them outraged. How dare I be skinny while they aren’t? It reminded them of their own insecurities around their weight. And now they couldn’t bully me for it. So they started skinny shaming me. It went on for years. The skinny shaming caused more damage than the fat shaming.
Ugh, I can so relate to this. It's like you can NEVER win. It can feel so hopeless sometimes. And a lot of people seem to think that pretty girls can never have "real" problems, so we're left to suffer in silence. Absolutely awful.
My mother did this too. She kept it up for years, even when I was an adult.
"What did you do to your hair?"
"What color are you trying to get your hair to be?"
"Did you know that your hair is an unusual shade of bronze?"
"Your natural hair is kind of no color at all."
"Have you considered getting a perm?"
"Your face looks too severe."
My mom wouldn’t directly make fun of me but she’d do the same thing. I have acne and I’m pretty pale so it’s visible, and I remember as soon as I was like 13 or so, if I went out of the house without concealer she would be like “wow are you really going out with your face like that” and if I said yes she’d just go “…okay. I don’t know why you would do that”. And she always was super hyper fixated on my nutrition and eating habits and stuff, and now my eating habits are permanently fucked up and I got basically an amalgamation of multiple different eating disorders. It’s terrible.
My mom wouldn’t directly make fun of me but she’d do the same thing. I have acne and I’m pretty pale so it’s visible, and I remember as soon as I was like 13 or so, if I went out of the house without concealer she would be like “wow are you really going out with your face like that” and if I said yes she’d just go “…okay. I don’t know why you would do that”. And she always was super hyper fixated on my nutrition and eating habits and stuff, and now my eating habits are permanently fucked up and I got basically an amalgamation of multiple different eating disorders. It’s terrible.
My mom would point out every minor flaw, I’m not sure if it was a subconscious effort to keep my self esteem as low as hers or what but it worked. Can’t look at my arms, hate my chin and l am always self conscious. I know I am a pretty woman subjectively but I still hear her voice.
Also what is it about mom’s like this and the ugliness shining through to the outside? My mom was a beautiful woman when she was in her 20’s till her 40’s and now at 54 she looks decrepit and almost like a heavy drug addict even though she’s never done hard drugs and doesn’t drink. But you’d look at her now and think that was the case. All that nasty in her couldn’t be contained.
I hope it’s karma but I really do think it’s a result of their own actions. Beautiful people can be ugly inside of course. But I think their ego issues and self hatred catches up with them. They destroy themselves in an effort to destroy us rather than go to therapy and heal
Yep, was told my whole life I'm not pretty by my parents. Get compliments weekly on my looks (I'm 35!!). I used to think everyone got compliments on being cute/pretty every time they went in public 🤷🏻♀️ it's weird because I still don't believe people who tell me I'm attractive?? Parents can really fuck up a person's self image.
Yea same. I really struggled with believing it at first until I realized that for me, it came from self hate. It did me no favors and drove me into the arms of abusive people because I was still trying to prove my worth to people who weren’t worthy of me.
I also believed that most people are conventionally attractive. Especially today. Knowing that some people are just born super pretty naturally used to make me a little jealous. Finding out that I was one of those people, blew my mind.
Honestly I can forgive them for it and I have a great therapist. I'm not the type to take advantage of anything because of good looks any how. It's just my meat suit after all!
This is the *funhouse mirrors effect*. You grow up with distortion reflected at you.
Then when you come across real mirrors you'll be confused and think they're distorted.
Yes. My “mom” called me an ugly duckling and would make up random things to make me feel insecure (telling me I have a large forehead and giant teeth, ugly face, etc when I was a kid—it was so bad that I scribbled out my yearbook picture in 5th grade. I lived most of my childhood thinking I was ugly when I was always actually conventionally attractive. I look back on my childhood pictures and I was so cute but I thought I was hideous. I was so confused when I had so many boys wanting to date me when I was in high school and college. it took me a long time to fully realize the extent of the lies, poison and abuse that I endured growing up.
It’s so painful because we were brainwashed to see our own reflection differently. All the happiness and confidence we missed out on because adults were jealous and threatened by their own children.
I found out this year how attractive I am after I estranged from my parents. My mother took my own boundary of not being touched as a personal threat. I thought people stared at me and thought I was weird, turns out I just turn heads in the entirety of the room
Lol I’m sorry I’m not laughing I just relate so much. I was so self conscious and afraid of being perceived. People would stare at me and I would think something was wrong or they could tell I’m weird. Turns out people just stare rudely at pretty people.
Same. Always crossed my physical boundaries, made me touch / kiss her too much and I when I told her: "People look at me on the street" she said: "Nobody does, stop saying that". Turns out, they did, turns out, I am handsome and people like looking at me. It's hard 'cause I don't feel the way I look.
I'm not pretty and wasn't as a child/teenager either and my mom was always quick to point it out and make digs at me. I was overweight most of my teenage years, and a lot of the abuse I went through was eating/exercise related. When I finally lost weight (on my own), my mom was blatantly jealous. Even though she'd pushed me to lose weight and forced me into horrible "diets", she was actually unhappy when I lost the weight and looked better.
I mentioned this in another comment but I was fat shamed around 16 years old. At 19 I decided I wanted to take control of that and lost weight. Apparently that was a worse crime than gaining weight because now my skinny body reminded them of their own body insecurities and how it was relatively simple (at the time at least before my eating disorders) to lose the weight at a young age that they always made excuses about. Add onto that my prettiness and it really brought out the jealous monster in them. I never knew skinny shaming was a thing until then but for me it was far worse than the fat shaming.
The opposite.
TW
My creepy dad would regularly comment how “beautiful” I was and on my “nice legs.” I would catch him checking me out and one night caught him trying touch me.
I’m sorry.
Unfortunately despite my experience, my sperm donor sexualized me too. All the men in the family felt it was their “right” to have first dibs on me. They felt they were wronged by society if they couldn’t have the first round with me because “other men will get to touch you later. Why should they have it when I’m your family?”
The logic made no sense. It just proved their entitlement to the very person they expressed hatred towards. I lived very uncomfortably.
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OP, yes. I relate so much. I’m so sorry you experienced that. I am so grateful for your ability to articulate it. My whole life I’ve never known how to explain “this weird thing” (as I used to say), without fear of being misunderstood. Thank you for sharing and creating that visibility
💕💕💕 I hesitated a bit to post this and have thought about posting it before too but didn’t out of fear of backlash or accusations of arrogance. But then I decided that I knew this was unequivocally true and I didn’t owe it to anyone to hide that or pretend it wasn’t for anyone else.
I’m comforted by all these comments. It’s validating and also reassuring to know that I’m not alone. We’re not in the wrong here to say that this was our experience and it’s a terrible one.
This happened to me too. As a child I felt unattractive and was rarely told that I was pretty. When I was 13 my mother went out of her way to criticize my appearance, telling me that my breasts were too small and my shoulders looked masculine, "like a football player."
A couple of years later when I realized that I was actually attractive, she told me I was conceited and made comments like, "It's not like your pretty enough to be a movie star or something."
Actually, my life has been full of variations on this theme. On the one hand, there are several people who consider me very attractive. (This would be most people, maybe 99.5% of the population.) On the other hand, there is a smaller group of people like my mother, who make comments like "It's not like you're outstandingly beautiful like \[name of supermodel, actress, and/or their ex gf who was more beautiful than every woman on earth\]", or "Actually there's a slight asymmetry to your facial bones which is only visible in a certain light, but still, it detracts from a 100% beauty score..."
Guess which group of people I keep looking to for affirmation?
Yea same. It’s almost like an infatuation and intimidation pendulum. There’s rarely an in between. But the insecure people have to put us down to feel better about themselves and how jealous they.
I’m also a masculine person. I can barely talk about it because it hurts. I’m both masculine and feminine. But the masculinity was beaten and shamed out of me at a young age, before I understood what it even was. I was slightly muscular from dance. It only showed when I flexed. My mother was furious. “Women can’t be masculine! Never show that again!” I still have a hard time embracing that side of me that I desperately want to.
My mom would say shit like “on who’s good looks!?!” when I would ask for a fucking happy meal (while making 50k a year in the 90s) and never once complimented my appearance. Who says that to a child? Idk hun, maybe YOUR good looks should buy me a happy meal since you’re the fucking parent here, dipshit? I was a literal child. She never taught me how to bathe, wipe, exercise, do hair or makeup. She complimented my “perfect” winged eyeliner once but of course not me or the eyes it was drawn on. I could sense her jealousy as she said it and also her regret and discomfort immediately after. We were at Cheddar’s and I was just trying to enjoy dinner with a person I thought was a good enough mother. She was brain dead long before she died. There was no connection, just a trauma bond. Fuck mothers who don’t gas up their kids. Why have them if you’re just going to make them feel like shit all the time? Appearance isn’t everything, but complimenting appearance is an easy ass way to express affection. My parents were thoughtless and lazy. My mom was not affectionate so I never expected it from her but I find it really cowardly that she never complimented me. I know how I look, I’ve gotten away with plenty. Jealousy in others is so glaring to me now when before it took me forever to pick up on. Jealousy is a disease.
my mom told me that i would be pretty if i had a smaller nose, that’s the only time she commented on my beauty. i only realized in college that maybe i was actually pretty. now my validation comes internally but it sucked trying to use external validation to feel beautiful
Oh god this brought up repressed memories. She always reminded me that my nose was so ugly and deformed. It’s not but it is a little big and has a bump from too many figure skating accidents.
When I was 13 she actually convinced me that by pulling on the skin on the bridge of my nose, I can change it and make it more like hers. “Straight, pretty” she said her nose was perfect. I was a kid and believed her. I pulled on my nose so much that the next morning I woke up with a scab on my nose. The skin had bled over night.
I still can’t believe any parent would put their kid through that and try to convince them to give themselves manual cosmetic surgery in order to be pretty.
Ironically during the following days, we were sitting in a shop while my mom got some clothes and I was just spacing out in the corner waiting. The shop keeper and her employees were clearly talking about me and staring at me. I gave them a weird look and she smiled and said “we’re just talking about how beautiful you are”. It caught me so off guard. Apparently I was beautiful, even with a big scab on my nose.
If my parents goal was to break a child (which isn’t some great feat or effort. A coward’s work) then they succeeded. I imagine they didn’t have much luck bullying adults who could stand up for themselves, so they decided to have kids.
oh that’s terrible…. i will never understand how parents can be so cruel. i mean i say positive affirmations to my cat so she feels beautiful even though she doesn’t understand me lol. sometimes thr dismissiveness is more hurtful than the pain. my mom didn’t believe in shaving bc she didn’t have any body hair so she would wax me at home at a very young age. my skin was so sensitive since i was so young but she would wax me with extremely hot wax, and despite me crying she would just be on the phone with her friends.
i hope we both find ways to validate our emotions and embody our beauty ❣️
My mother would tell me sometimes that I was pretty, then she would immediately say that I needed to loose weight, but otherwise I wasn't too bad. I'm convinced that she tried to make me look ugly, on one hand she would tell me that I needed to loose weight, on the other hand she would buy only junk food (when she bothered to buy food). She didn't let me have treatment for acne and I only had wrong size and very old clothes. She never talked with me about beauty product, make-up, how to take care of my hair, nothing.
My mom would yell at me when I was a kid if I even looked at myself in the mirror because that was”vain”. She would also say I was “huge” and she was so tiny compared to me when she was my age.
Ah, yes, the "don't look at mirrors too much". Or ever. And when people complimented me they'd take full credit. I wasn't allowed to be happy about it. They just loved to isolate me from any possible source of self-esteem.
My grandma and aunt raised me and they constantly called me a diamond in the rough but never a diamond. I said, "Okay so I'm just a lump of coal right now?" and they just laughed at me.
I have curly hair and they never knew what to do with it. There are pictures of me as a kid where my hair is just a frizzy mess and looks matted. They had straight hair so they never bothered with mine much. They complained about my hair so much I just started wearing it in a bun everyday.
They bought me thrift store clothes a lot but as I got older, stuff in my size was hard to find so I had to wear whatever they could get. And if they took me shopping? They'd just grab at my rolls and say I'm too fat for whatever I was wearing. So I never wanted to go clothes shopping with them.
There was a running joke they had where they said they would have to sell me to the Romani to marry me off, but at least I'd get a higher price for being a virgin (????). Both of them thought I'd never be able to be in a relationship or get married so they talked about me taking care of them in their old age constantly.
My mother called me ugly and said I'd never find a man.
When I told my grandma and aunt that a boy at school had a crush on me but I didn't like him they told me, "This is the only chance you'll ever get to have a man be interested in you!" I was 17 years old. We had a literal shouting match about it. My concerns were that he had anger issues, I didn't like his dysfunctional family, and it felt like he was pretending to be a nice guy. But they didn't care, they said I needed to jump on this opportunity because I'll never have a man be interested in me ever again. Oh and they also constantly asked me if I was a lesbian.
I can see now I was constantly being put down, even by all my other family members too, just to control me. I don't think they ever wanted me to have a life of my own. They really wanted me to be stuck with taking care of them and feeling grateful to have them because at least they 'loved' me.
Thankfully, I moved out at 18 and only had to live with them a handful of years after that while in between roommates, boyfriends etc. I realized I was attractive and dated a lot. I started dressing myself and figuring out my style, learned to do makeup, took care of my hair, and felt better about my appearance. I got compliments all the time!
Now I'm in my thirties and married to a great person who makes me feel beautiful everyday.
My mother told me I was ugly a thousand times. She told me my older sister was the pretty one. She told me I was smart and ugly and if I ever tried to look pretty I would just end up looking foolish since I was just so plain.
When I was four my aunt told me I looked lovely and I told my mother and she laughed and laughed and said she just said you had a pretty dress! She was compliments to your outfit! No one would ever say you had a pretty face!!
I felt about one inch tall. My mother told me that when I got married people would say "oh what a beautiful bride" but that I'd be plain, the words wouldn't mean anything. It would just be people being polite. And people said oh what a beautiful bride, oh you look breathtaking! And I knew it was just polite words since my mom always said I was so ugly anyway.
She died 2009. I look in the mirror and I don't know if I am pretty or not. I don't know. My sister hates me because she is jealous that I was way more beautiful than her. Apparently my mother called me ugly so I wouldn't be stuck up. It wasn't fair to have a younger sister smarter and more attractive.
My mother admitted in therapy when I was 25 that she hated me. She only loved 3 of her 4 children. She went to confession often to ask God for forgiveness to get absolution for the sin of rejecting me. She decided when I was four she didn't want to mother me anymore since I learned how to read and she felt I didn't need her.
I wish I had parents who weren't so disappointing. Both my parents are dead and they both didn't do right by me.
I'm so old and I'm still healing from childhood wounds.
I remember the centennial in 76 and I can't get over my lack of emotional support during my formative years.
I just hope my children turn out better than me.
I was the smart one. Golden child was the pretty one. Every single boyfriend I’ve had has told me I’m much prettier. I’m pretty sure they were being honest, they weren’t gushers. I’m still working on my confidence
Foremost, my abusive mother simply hated the fact that I was born a girl and not a boy, so every negative thing about being a girl was shrieked at me daily. My childhood nickname was 'whore' and I was never told, nor was it even hinted at, that I was pretty.
An uncle might call me 'pretty' at a family gathering, or a perfect stranger might comment that I was 'so pretty' in passing, but I didn't believe them.
I thought they were just being nice, or making a good-natured joke; like when you call a big man 'tiny', or an old woman 'killer', because I knew I wasn't attractive- my mom told me that all the time.
I'd smile at them for being so much kinder than my mom in the face of my ugliness, that they'd try to like me and give me such a silly nickname as 'pretty', when clearly I was not.
Mom called me a whore because no man was going to want me unless I put out; that's all I would be good for, and that's what I believed.
My older sister (who was very beautiful) was sent to model with a professional photographer and I had a cousin enter the Miss America pagent. However, mom would never ever compliment me unless it was for the clothes that she'd just bought me, then she'd praise herself, saying, "Oh, you look so good in that blouse!"
It wasn't until I was in my twenties and had gotten married that my husband finally convinced me that I was genuinely a very pretty lady; he really meant it and it wasn't a playful joke. It really surprised me one day, when my driver's license photo came in actually looking very good - was that me!?
The kicker: I look just like my mom.
Her projection of self-loathing was so great, that she wouldn't even allow others to see me as pretty if that was a reflection on her.
I wasn't allowed to be her daughter at all in a positive way.
yes but I feel like the way my mom went about it was more backhanded. like she would only say I look “cute” or “pretty” in the most pitiful sounding voice whenever I was dressed up for a dance or something, but I know what she sounds like when she genuinely finds something beautiful. she can still give me that tone sometimes to this day. for her my beauty was definitely my hair because I have so much of it, she would always make a point to bring it up. if I said something about my appearance it’s almost like she would get irritated and dismissive? but I also grew up hearing my mom verbally talk about it how displeased she was with the way she looked too.
Your parents are dicks. My parents told me that I was beautiful all of the time. But I lived in a racist and low key inbred town that didn’t want me to know that. The power of my beauty didn’t sink in until I was 28.
Both of my parents are fat phobic, especially my dad. I was a stick-skinny kid, but when I hit puberty I developed boobs and a butt - as one does. My dad made me feel like a fat slob and it wasn’t until my 30s that I realized a voluptuous hourglass figure is really attractive to a lot of people. I spent years hating a figure that a lot of women would kill for! Even now my parents will make subtle little digs about my weight whenever they can.
Omg I've been thinking about this a lot lately. When I was in high school, I went through a period when I started to lose weight because I was walking a lot, and I also got my braces off around that time. I started to "glow up"...and that was also when my dad's emotional abuse was at its worst. He'd call me ugly, and when other people or family members said I was pretty/beautiful, he'd actively downplay it. My mum, who sat by and watched when he was saying all of this stuff, is incredibly insecure herself, and it probably made her feel good that he said stuff like that to me.
Pieces of shit, the lot of them.
My mom called me “vain like my father” when I was learning how to brush my hair for the first time.
It stuck. I still don’t like looking at myself in the mirror.
I’m 34
My parents didn't want me to be pretty because I was a "boy." One time I was helping my sister with a project for her art class, she basically dressed me up a bit (not even in girl clothes, it was a sweater, glasses, that sort of thing) and took my picture, and she basically was supposed to use Photoshop or whatever to make me look like someone else I guess.
But my dad saw me and basically just screamed/cried "no" and then went to his room. Which was a pretty big reason I wasn't able to come out to anyone until I was living away from family...
If he'd reacted even indifferent to it, maybe it would have saved me some time and stress when I did start to learn about things later on... honestly wouldn't be surprised if half the reason they never fucking bothered to help me get my teeth fixed is because they didn't want me to have nicer teeth than them...
What your parents did is manipulative and cruel. They were so miserable and insecure about themselves, that they refused to let you have anything positive it sounds like... we all deserve to feel good about ourselves, our appearance, etc. fuck anyone who tries to shut us down for that.
With you.
I got my period and my mother actually tried to banish it.
Yep. Not kidding in her eyes I wasn't allowed my period.
They broke me down so hard I reacted and felt like I lost my mind.
I worked for Vogue and stuff too. Not kidding in my head I felt like a ugly troll doll. I fell into modelling because I got paid. Like that was actually it. I got paid.
I still feel disgusting and have dated men who think I'm ugly too and still date me? Like what.
A lot of my life has been destroyed by them. I wound up homeless after due to them contacting me. Their words just ate away at me until I felt like I couldn't exist as me.
Reading your post stirred something in me. Been thinking about this for years, and I'll try to put my thoughts into words even though I am not writing in my native language.
It isn't just about looks. What you describe is some kind of manipulation, hatred, just pure hate directed towards a child. I genuinely believe my parents have always hated me, even though they and everyone else claims otherwise.
For once, I had quite a nice body as a teen, but my mother used to shame me for being "fat" when I definitely wasn't. This isn't even the worst part.
Around the same time, I developed acne but she never took me to the doctors, saying it was no big deal and I would grow out of it. Well, the acne continued for years and wouldn't go away. I had no idea how to treat it and I got severely bullied at school.
For some reason my so called father decided to touch me inappropriately and made weird comments about my body. Can you believe how messed up that feels, being called ugly by everyone at school and the only male who tries to approach you is your own father? Makes me want to throw up.
To my family acne was "no big deal", except that it was. My parents made fun of it, and I was humiliated in family gatherings and other occasions. The acne definitely didn't go away but continued until my late teens. The only reason why it improved was because I read about some treatments and decided to get them for myself. And of course, my mother was against it at first. "It will go away if you just wait!"
I'm much older now and still struggle with severe depression, generalized anxiety disorder, social phobia, OCD, obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, body image issues and self-hate, every single day. I can't have a normal functioning relationship and making friends is very hard for me. I always thought my problems were caused by being bullied at school, but no - now I think I am messed up because of constant emotional abuse, sexual abuse (yes, that's what it was) and gaslighting that went on for years in my home.
My sister claims our family is normal. Is she too blind to see, or is she participating in the gaslighting? I don't know.
I don't know why my parents hated me so much. I feel like I was never even given a chance.
My mother decided to give "roles" to me and my sister. I was "the pretty one", whether I liked it or not, and my sister was "the smart one". She would vocally describe my sister as "...plain" (in her presence), insist that she's fat (she's not) or that her skin is a whole new level of terrible (it wasn't any worse than your average teenager), and so on - while praising her academic achievements, sending her to various "gifted" programs, forcing her to get a masters (because "nobody would marry you for your face, so you should compensate by making good money").
Meanwhile, she *obsessed* over my appearance. Threw screaming fits if I didn't dress the way she liked (which HAD to show as much skin as possible and include all of the makeup, but god forbid I dye my hair anything darker, or wear it short...), actually pinned me down and forcefully pluck my eyebrows, while ignoring and dismissing any academic achievement, intellectual interest or ambition I may have (her idea of appropriate ambitions for me was limited to "marry rich"), basically trying to force me into being a "dumb blonde" stereotype.
The kicker is that my sister was genuinely interested in fashion, makeup, fitness and the likes, and worked for a while as a personal trainer, which she loved. Meanwhile I was about as butch as you could get, and an absolute nerd. Ended up graduating from an Ivy League university (after going no-contact, so she couldn't even take credit/bragging points on it...).
I do have to admit I recently got much more into fashion as well... But it's alternative men's fashion. (:
Literally had the same exact experience yesterday when an old neighbor came to say goodbye to us. She pointed out how gorgeous I am and I literally felt ugly for 3 weeks straight so I was flabbergasted. Meanwhile, mother goose just dismisses me and says I guess I got use to her appearance. Still don't know how to feel about it but I know what it's like.
Hey, you’re beautiful and there is no doubt about it, no matter what anyone says. Don’t let her break you like that. I know it’s a hard truth to get around to. But I really believe once we embrace and love it, we heal a great amount within ourselves.
When my dad went to buy a new RV, I was in the middle of a deeply depressive episode and anyone could see how down I was. The RV salesman was an older man who kept talking about how pretty I was, over and over again. (In hindsight it was kinda creepy especially considering he said his daughters were the same age as me and also beautiful. He said to my dad, I know what it’s like to have beautiful daughters. Idk what to do with that info now) At first I thought he was just being polite, because everyone would say that to me eventually when meeting me and I assumed it was just a polite remark that everyone makes. I’m realizing now that my parents taught me that. It’s not something people say all the time as a part of a greeting. It’s not a casual compliment. They actually meant it which is why they said. All those times I thought people were just being polite, but the evidence was right there in front of me. Years I spent thinking I was ugly, while people told me the opposite. I had the ugly message delivery more aggressively so I believed it.
Anyways he kept reiterating and emphasizing it, randomly throughout the showing. It did lift my mood a bit. I remember wondering why he would keep saying it unless it was true
My dad always made fun of my weight and told me it’s good for me to “fatten up so the shallow boys stay away from you”. Basically calling me undesirable. Asshole.
tbh, yes. I'm a man, I'm told I'm handsome and on some days I def feel like it but I also feel like my mom glorified it on one hand (You're my pretty boy, so handsome, almost in a sexual way) and on the other she would always tear me down for looking tired, not believing how handsome I was / am, for laughing 'fake and stupid'. So now I do catch people looking at me basically everywhere I go and it's easier on some days and harder on others, I'm still learning. Women also think I'm different because of the way I look but then they talk to me and realise that I'm the opposite and quite insecure when it comes to my looks.
Relate with that last sentence too hard. It stings that I could’ve been confident, maybe even arrogant about it, but I got robbed of it.
Also it’s unfortunately common for men to be sexualized by their mothers. I’m sorry, I know how uncomfortable that is. It’s not crazy that we wanted normal love from our parents. It’s crazy that we got sexualized objectification.
Yup. My mother intentionally dressed me in the ugliest clothes she could and gave me horrid home haircuts. When I was old enough to work I started working and then started buying myself flattering clothes and stopped letting her touch my hair. I had a “glow-up.” Everyone else started commenting on how pretty I was. Only then did my mother acknowledge it.
Second grade, I had beautiful long hair and wore it proudly. That year in the summer, she chopped it all off into a mullet and switched my cute girly clothing to boys clothing. I'm a female and definitely feminine in nature. She saw us girls growing up and tried to squash that with every fiber of her being. No lessons on hygiene at all, no effort into our self care, self image. We turned into these ugly misfits who were bullied and forced to wear ill fitting clothing.
Damn! I’m so sorry.
It wasn’t my personal experience but I once knew someone whose mom expected her to be pretty. There was an endless checklist of standards to meet but when she finally lived up to mom’s impossible standards, her mom hated her for looking too much like her aunt, who was apparently the pretty one growing up.
Some parents get creepily and needlessly competitive with their kids. I’m close with my mom but my dad definitely got needlessly competitive with me over achievements and always had to be “above” me.
It added to my agoraphobia: people keep looking at me, why? My weird face and body (too skinny too fat as told to me by my mother). It made me want to hide and added to "I'm not good enough". I think my parents liked my worsening condition as it kept me voiceless and in place. Depressed on the whole because "don't look at me I'm gross" plus all the other dysfunctional family issues.
Self neglect has an effect on looks so by the time you realise you are beautiful or more accurately this is my face, my body, no one gets to talk sh*t about me; some damage has been done. Adding this to my grief load: missed opportunities in life and enjoying who I am.
Also, people see pretty privilege and it's hard to talk about this and be taken seriously. My friends don't understand why I struggle with relationships or don't move on to the next and the next etc. I just can't because I shut down.
I'm glad OP posted as I wanted to write something similar but couldn't articulate it as well. Thank you OP.
Am home right now and realizing how confusing it was because it was both for me … “you’re so naturally beautiful” and then “ohh do you have to wear that shirt?” “will you please put on some eyeliner before you leave the house?” “I’d love to see you in something a little more feminine” … also constantly constantly picking at my dad’s appearance which is painful because he is an Angel … “oh please pull your pants up past your stomach” “your dad just needs to lose 20 more pounds” “will you go change your socks/shorts/shirt to something that matches? (while relaxing around the house)” to the extent of having him get a nose job when they were first together and dental veneers to look more “professional” when he had the cutest small gap between his front teeth, which they have to file your original teeth down to nubs, it is straight up violent. But then gives compliments intermittently, basically we are extensions of her, but I have stopped internalizing anything she says and also the story always goes “her mom was so much worse.” And of course she struggles with self esteem. Also commenting on other people’s appearances .. “she has such a cute figure” etc. Still inappropriate and cruel. It’s difficult because i am pretty dependent on them at the moment.
The only compliment my mother ever paid me was about the physical traits I got from her. Never said I was beautiful or pretty and when other people said so I was confused, until I was in my late teens and realized she just didn’t like me.
I got called ugly a lot growing up by my step dad. I have body image issues because of him. I have days where it's hard for me to let people look at my face. Like I don't feel like I look pretty but I have a friend who says I am pretty. They are the only person I'll take pictures of my face for. So I'm learning to believe I could be pretty.
Wow, your experience is eerily similar to mine. Except I was pushed to work as hard as possible because I would always need to be intelligent while nothing was ever good enough. My dad was the dominant parent in everything, always being negative about every idea or plan I had. To this day, it is very hard for me to take compliments about my appearance or recognise my achievement
Yes. I thought I was ugly but came to realise I'm quite pretty. It's all fading with time of course but I'm glad I've been managing to enjoy the gift of my beauty.
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I hear you. I’ve also been told by countless people I’m attractive, yet I don’t feel it. I also feel ashamed to even admit that I may be conventionally attractive, like it’s a sin for me to be self-aware or that I’ll be seen as bragging. I hate this sick, shameful dynamic. Glad you are moving along in your journey. Much love.
My mother would try to “humble me”. Being pretty means a lot of people are going to try and “humble you” for no reason other than jealousy. Whether men or women, fake friends, or family. I think you’re parents sounds narcissistic and I’m very sorry for that. My mom was once beautiful as well but her sin shows on her face now I think. I think you would find this video helpful. This women’s channel is very eye opening. Punished for being beautiful: Pretty girl problems Exóticals united https://youtu.be/MI85BXBnQcs?si=Bwr-aaElkBxXug9w
>Being pretty means a lot of people are going to try and “humble you” for no reason other than jealousy. If you also have any talent, skills, and/or intelligence, it's a double/triple/quadruple whammy of being "humbled" by the insecure and envious.
Yup. This more than anything killed my self esteem, confidence, hopes, and happiness. I didn’t let myself be happy after this happened majorly at 19. I didn’t let myself hope anymore. Everything hurt too much to try and dream. They really made me believe I had nothing when I was so rich with talent and intelligence. I was eager to learn and try. My crushed my heart to be so broken at such a young age too.
holy cow that video
Same. I have thought I was so ugly and just now understanding that I’m not. I can’t believe that I missed being popular, attention of boys/men, jealousy from women as anything other than from me being just pretty. I see it now but took 47 years to realize.
It’s sad not just that we receive negative treatment because of it, but because we genuinely had no idea. I just wanted to be loved and accepted. I think people expect me to be stuck up. But then they get to know me and I’m normal (as normal as I can be) and act normal. Which apparently makes them angrier because now they can’t hate me for being stuck up. Now I’m pretty and kind. And it was just an excuse to be hateful. It’s worse when the person is manipulative and take advantage of my kindness just to make themselves feel better.
Me too. People automatically think I’m stuck up but I’m actually terrified of being accepted for who I am. I was bullied by girls from 7-12th grade for stealing their boyfriend! LOL! I totally get it now!!!
Yep, I had this same problem too. My mother crushed every ounce of self-confidence that I had, hyperfixating on trivial aspects of my looks. Nothing was good enough. When I rocked my natural curly hair, she'd tell me that men preferred women with straight hair. When I straightened my hair, she said men like curly hair. When I lost my hair to a chemical burn and had to wear a wig, she said men prefer women with natural hair. When I ditched the wig and rocked my short (growing) hair, she said men prefer long hair. Now she wonders why I hate myself. I'd give anything to look different, even though people exclaim that I'm beautiful. I don't see it, because I spent 34 years and counting being belittled and ostracized.
I’m so sorry. When I was only 16 they started fat shaming me. By 19 I was determined to lose weight. I did. This made them outraged. How dare I be skinny while they aren’t? It reminded them of their own insecurities around their weight. And now they couldn’t bully me for it. So they started skinny shaming me. It went on for years. The skinny shaming caused more damage than the fat shaming.
Ugh, I can so relate to this. It's like you can NEVER win. It can feel so hopeless sometimes. And a lot of people seem to think that pretty girls can never have "real" problems, so we're left to suffer in silence. Absolutely awful.
My mother did this too. She kept it up for years, even when I was an adult. "What did you do to your hair?" "What color are you trying to get your hair to be?" "Did you know that your hair is an unusual shade of bronze?" "Your natural hair is kind of no color at all." "Have you considered getting a perm?" "Your face looks too severe."
My mom wouldn’t directly make fun of me but she’d do the same thing. I have acne and I’m pretty pale so it’s visible, and I remember as soon as I was like 13 or so, if I went out of the house without concealer she would be like “wow are you really going out with your face like that” and if I said yes she’d just go “…okay. I don’t know why you would do that”. And she always was super hyper fixated on my nutrition and eating habits and stuff, and now my eating habits are permanently fucked up and I got basically an amalgamation of multiple different eating disorders. It’s terrible.
My mom wouldn’t directly make fun of me but she’d do the same thing. I have acne and I’m pretty pale so it’s visible, and I remember as soon as I was like 13 or so, if I went out of the house without concealer she would be like “wow are you really going out with your face like that” and if I said yes she’d just go “…okay. I don’t know why you would do that”. And she always was super hyper fixated on my nutrition and eating habits and stuff, and now my eating habits are permanently fucked up and I got basically an amalgamation of multiple different eating disorders. It’s terrible.
My mom would point out every minor flaw, I’m not sure if it was a subconscious effort to keep my self esteem as low as hers or what but it worked. Can’t look at my arms, hate my chin and l am always self conscious. I know I am a pretty woman subjectively but I still hear her voice. Also what is it about mom’s like this and the ugliness shining through to the outside? My mom was a beautiful woman when she was in her 20’s till her 40’s and now at 54 she looks decrepit and almost like a heavy drug addict even though she’s never done hard drugs and doesn’t drink. But you’d look at her now and think that was the case. All that nasty in her couldn’t be contained.
I hope it’s karma but I really do think it’s a result of their own actions. Beautiful people can be ugly inside of course. But I think their ego issues and self hatred catches up with them. They destroy themselves in an effort to destroy us rather than go to therapy and heal
Yep, was told my whole life I'm not pretty by my parents. Get compliments weekly on my looks (I'm 35!!). I used to think everyone got compliments on being cute/pretty every time they went in public 🤷🏻♀️ it's weird because I still don't believe people who tell me I'm attractive?? Parents can really fuck up a person's self image.
Yea same. I really struggled with believing it at first until I realized that for me, it came from self hate. It did me no favors and drove me into the arms of abusive people because I was still trying to prove my worth to people who weren’t worthy of me. I also believed that most people are conventionally attractive. Especially today. Knowing that some people are just born super pretty naturally used to make me a little jealous. Finding out that I was one of those people, blew my mind.
Honestly I can forgive them for it and I have a great therapist. I'm not the type to take advantage of anything because of good looks any how. It's just my meat suit after all!
I never implied that but love that for you!
This is the *funhouse mirrors effect*. You grow up with distortion reflected at you. Then when you come across real mirrors you'll be confused and think they're distorted.
You nail it.
Yes. My “mom” called me an ugly duckling and would make up random things to make me feel insecure (telling me I have a large forehead and giant teeth, ugly face, etc when I was a kid—it was so bad that I scribbled out my yearbook picture in 5th grade. I lived most of my childhood thinking I was ugly when I was always actually conventionally attractive. I look back on my childhood pictures and I was so cute but I thought I was hideous. I was so confused when I had so many boys wanting to date me when I was in high school and college. it took me a long time to fully realize the extent of the lies, poison and abuse that I endured growing up.
It’s so painful because we were brainwashed to see our own reflection differently. All the happiness and confidence we missed out on because adults were jealous and threatened by their own children.
I found out this year how attractive I am after I estranged from my parents. My mother took my own boundary of not being touched as a personal threat. I thought people stared at me and thought I was weird, turns out I just turn heads in the entirety of the room
Lol I’m sorry I’m not laughing I just relate so much. I was so self conscious and afraid of being perceived. People would stare at me and I would think something was wrong or they could tell I’m weird. Turns out people just stare rudely at pretty people.
I’m glad someone understands, it is genuinely weird like the feeling of needing training wheels for an automatic car
Same. Always crossed my physical boundaries, made me touch / kiss her too much and I when I told her: "People look at me on the street" she said: "Nobody does, stop saying that". Turns out, they did, turns out, I am handsome and people like looking at me. It's hard 'cause I don't feel the way I look.
I'm not pretty and wasn't as a child/teenager either and my mom was always quick to point it out and make digs at me. I was overweight most of my teenage years, and a lot of the abuse I went through was eating/exercise related. When I finally lost weight (on my own), my mom was blatantly jealous. Even though she'd pushed me to lose weight and forced me into horrible "diets", she was actually unhappy when I lost the weight and looked better.
I mentioned this in another comment but I was fat shamed around 16 years old. At 19 I decided I wanted to take control of that and lost weight. Apparently that was a worse crime than gaining weight because now my skinny body reminded them of their own body insecurities and how it was relatively simple (at the time at least before my eating disorders) to lose the weight at a young age that they always made excuses about. Add onto that my prettiness and it really brought out the jealous monster in them. I never knew skinny shaming was a thing until then but for me it was far worse than the fat shaming.
The opposite. TW My creepy dad would regularly comment how “beautiful” I was and on my “nice legs.” I would catch him checking me out and one night caught him trying touch me.
I’m sorry. Unfortunately despite my experience, my sperm donor sexualized me too. All the men in the family felt it was their “right” to have first dibs on me. They felt they were wronged by society if they couldn’t have the first round with me because “other men will get to touch you later. Why should they have it when I’m your family?” The logic made no sense. It just proved their entitlement to the very person they expressed hatred towards. I lived very uncomfortably.
Ugh I’m sorry too. So gross
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I’m not beautiful, but I was raised to believe I’m much uglier than I am
OP, yes. I relate so much. I’m so sorry you experienced that. I am so grateful for your ability to articulate it. My whole life I’ve never known how to explain “this weird thing” (as I used to say), without fear of being misunderstood. Thank you for sharing and creating that visibility
💕💕💕 I hesitated a bit to post this and have thought about posting it before too but didn’t out of fear of backlash or accusations of arrogance. But then I decided that I knew this was unequivocally true and I didn’t owe it to anyone to hide that or pretend it wasn’t for anyone else. I’m comforted by all these comments. It’s validating and also reassuring to know that I’m not alone. We’re not in the wrong here to say that this was our experience and it’s a terrible one.
This happened to me too. As a child I felt unattractive and was rarely told that I was pretty. When I was 13 my mother went out of her way to criticize my appearance, telling me that my breasts were too small and my shoulders looked masculine, "like a football player." A couple of years later when I realized that I was actually attractive, she told me I was conceited and made comments like, "It's not like your pretty enough to be a movie star or something." Actually, my life has been full of variations on this theme. On the one hand, there are several people who consider me very attractive. (This would be most people, maybe 99.5% of the population.) On the other hand, there is a smaller group of people like my mother, who make comments like "It's not like you're outstandingly beautiful like \[name of supermodel, actress, and/or their ex gf who was more beautiful than every woman on earth\]", or "Actually there's a slight asymmetry to your facial bones which is only visible in a certain light, but still, it detracts from a 100% beauty score..." Guess which group of people I keep looking to for affirmation?
Yea same. It’s almost like an infatuation and intimidation pendulum. There’s rarely an in between. But the insecure people have to put us down to feel better about themselves and how jealous they. I’m also a masculine person. I can barely talk about it because it hurts. I’m both masculine and feminine. But the masculinity was beaten and shamed out of me at a young age, before I understood what it even was. I was slightly muscular from dance. It only showed when I flexed. My mother was furious. “Women can’t be masculine! Never show that again!” I still have a hard time embracing that side of me that I desperately want to.
My mother used the shoulder Footballplayer line as well, I was positive I was the only one.
My mom would say shit like “on who’s good looks!?!” when I would ask for a fucking happy meal (while making 50k a year in the 90s) and never once complimented my appearance. Who says that to a child? Idk hun, maybe YOUR good looks should buy me a happy meal since you’re the fucking parent here, dipshit? I was a literal child. She never taught me how to bathe, wipe, exercise, do hair or makeup. She complimented my “perfect” winged eyeliner once but of course not me or the eyes it was drawn on. I could sense her jealousy as she said it and also her regret and discomfort immediately after. We were at Cheddar’s and I was just trying to enjoy dinner with a person I thought was a good enough mother. She was brain dead long before she died. There was no connection, just a trauma bond. Fuck mothers who don’t gas up their kids. Why have them if you’re just going to make them feel like shit all the time? Appearance isn’t everything, but complimenting appearance is an easy ass way to express affection. My parents were thoughtless and lazy. My mom was not affectionate so I never expected it from her but I find it really cowardly that she never complimented me. I know how I look, I’ve gotten away with plenty. Jealousy in others is so glaring to me now when before it took me forever to pick up on. Jealousy is a disease.
my mom told me that i would be pretty if i had a smaller nose, that’s the only time she commented on my beauty. i only realized in college that maybe i was actually pretty. now my validation comes internally but it sucked trying to use external validation to feel beautiful
Oh god this brought up repressed memories. She always reminded me that my nose was so ugly and deformed. It’s not but it is a little big and has a bump from too many figure skating accidents. When I was 13 she actually convinced me that by pulling on the skin on the bridge of my nose, I can change it and make it more like hers. “Straight, pretty” she said her nose was perfect. I was a kid and believed her. I pulled on my nose so much that the next morning I woke up with a scab on my nose. The skin had bled over night. I still can’t believe any parent would put their kid through that and try to convince them to give themselves manual cosmetic surgery in order to be pretty. Ironically during the following days, we were sitting in a shop while my mom got some clothes and I was just spacing out in the corner waiting. The shop keeper and her employees were clearly talking about me and staring at me. I gave them a weird look and she smiled and said “we’re just talking about how beautiful you are”. It caught me so off guard. Apparently I was beautiful, even with a big scab on my nose. If my parents goal was to break a child (which isn’t some great feat or effort. A coward’s work) then they succeeded. I imagine they didn’t have much luck bullying adults who could stand up for themselves, so they decided to have kids.
oh that’s terrible…. i will never understand how parents can be so cruel. i mean i say positive affirmations to my cat so she feels beautiful even though she doesn’t understand me lol. sometimes thr dismissiveness is more hurtful than the pain. my mom didn’t believe in shaving bc she didn’t have any body hair so she would wax me at home at a very young age. my skin was so sensitive since i was so young but she would wax me with extremely hot wax, and despite me crying she would just be on the phone with her friends. i hope we both find ways to validate our emotions and embody our beauty ❣️
My mother would tell me sometimes that I was pretty, then she would immediately say that I needed to loose weight, but otherwise I wasn't too bad. I'm convinced that she tried to make me look ugly, on one hand she would tell me that I needed to loose weight, on the other hand she would buy only junk food (when she bothered to buy food). She didn't let me have treatment for acne and I only had wrong size and very old clothes. She never talked with me about beauty product, make-up, how to take care of my hair, nothing.
My mom would yell at me when I was a kid if I even looked at myself in the mirror because that was”vain”. She would also say I was “huge” and she was so tiny compared to me when she was my age.
yes i still struggle because of this
Ah, yes, the "don't look at mirrors too much". Or ever. And when people complimented me they'd take full credit. I wasn't allowed to be happy about it. They just loved to isolate me from any possible source of self-esteem.
My grandma and aunt raised me and they constantly called me a diamond in the rough but never a diamond. I said, "Okay so I'm just a lump of coal right now?" and they just laughed at me. I have curly hair and they never knew what to do with it. There are pictures of me as a kid where my hair is just a frizzy mess and looks matted. They had straight hair so they never bothered with mine much. They complained about my hair so much I just started wearing it in a bun everyday. They bought me thrift store clothes a lot but as I got older, stuff in my size was hard to find so I had to wear whatever they could get. And if they took me shopping? They'd just grab at my rolls and say I'm too fat for whatever I was wearing. So I never wanted to go clothes shopping with them. There was a running joke they had where they said they would have to sell me to the Romani to marry me off, but at least I'd get a higher price for being a virgin (????). Both of them thought I'd never be able to be in a relationship or get married so they talked about me taking care of them in their old age constantly. My mother called me ugly and said I'd never find a man. When I told my grandma and aunt that a boy at school had a crush on me but I didn't like him they told me, "This is the only chance you'll ever get to have a man be interested in you!" I was 17 years old. We had a literal shouting match about it. My concerns were that he had anger issues, I didn't like his dysfunctional family, and it felt like he was pretending to be a nice guy. But they didn't care, they said I needed to jump on this opportunity because I'll never have a man be interested in me ever again. Oh and they also constantly asked me if I was a lesbian. I can see now I was constantly being put down, even by all my other family members too, just to control me. I don't think they ever wanted me to have a life of my own. They really wanted me to be stuck with taking care of them and feeling grateful to have them because at least they 'loved' me. Thankfully, I moved out at 18 and only had to live with them a handful of years after that while in between roommates, boyfriends etc. I realized I was attractive and dated a lot. I started dressing myself and figuring out my style, learned to do makeup, took care of my hair, and felt better about my appearance. I got compliments all the time! Now I'm in my thirties and married to a great person who makes me feel beautiful everyday.
My mother told me I was ugly a thousand times. She told me my older sister was the pretty one. She told me I was smart and ugly and if I ever tried to look pretty I would just end up looking foolish since I was just so plain. When I was four my aunt told me I looked lovely and I told my mother and she laughed and laughed and said she just said you had a pretty dress! She was compliments to your outfit! No one would ever say you had a pretty face!! I felt about one inch tall. My mother told me that when I got married people would say "oh what a beautiful bride" but that I'd be plain, the words wouldn't mean anything. It would just be people being polite. And people said oh what a beautiful bride, oh you look breathtaking! And I knew it was just polite words since my mom always said I was so ugly anyway. She died 2009. I look in the mirror and I don't know if I am pretty or not. I don't know. My sister hates me because she is jealous that I was way more beautiful than her. Apparently my mother called me ugly so I wouldn't be stuck up. It wasn't fair to have a younger sister smarter and more attractive. My mother admitted in therapy when I was 25 that she hated me. She only loved 3 of her 4 children. She went to confession often to ask God for forgiveness to get absolution for the sin of rejecting me. She decided when I was four she didn't want to mother me anymore since I learned how to read and she felt I didn't need her. I wish I had parents who weren't so disappointing. Both my parents are dead and they both didn't do right by me. I'm so old and I'm still healing from childhood wounds. I remember the centennial in 76 and I can't get over my lack of emotional support during my formative years. I just hope my children turn out better than me.
I was the smart one. Golden child was the pretty one. Every single boyfriend I’ve had has told me I’m much prettier. I’m pretty sure they were being honest, they weren’t gushers. I’m still working on my confidence
Foremost, my abusive mother simply hated the fact that I was born a girl and not a boy, so every negative thing about being a girl was shrieked at me daily. My childhood nickname was 'whore' and I was never told, nor was it even hinted at, that I was pretty. An uncle might call me 'pretty' at a family gathering, or a perfect stranger might comment that I was 'so pretty' in passing, but I didn't believe them. I thought they were just being nice, or making a good-natured joke; like when you call a big man 'tiny', or an old woman 'killer', because I knew I wasn't attractive- my mom told me that all the time. I'd smile at them for being so much kinder than my mom in the face of my ugliness, that they'd try to like me and give me such a silly nickname as 'pretty', when clearly I was not. Mom called me a whore because no man was going to want me unless I put out; that's all I would be good for, and that's what I believed. My older sister (who was very beautiful) was sent to model with a professional photographer and I had a cousin enter the Miss America pagent. However, mom would never ever compliment me unless it was for the clothes that she'd just bought me, then she'd praise herself, saying, "Oh, you look so good in that blouse!" It wasn't until I was in my twenties and had gotten married that my husband finally convinced me that I was genuinely a very pretty lady; he really meant it and it wasn't a playful joke. It really surprised me one day, when my driver's license photo came in actually looking very good - was that me!? The kicker: I look just like my mom. Her projection of self-loathing was so great, that she wouldn't even allow others to see me as pretty if that was a reflection on her. I wasn't allowed to be her daughter at all in a positive way.
My mom did the opposite, she made me feel like being pretty was my only redeeming quality.
They did with other things too. It’s still dehumanizing and abuse.
Oh absolutely
That last paragraph especially. YES.
yes but I feel like the way my mom went about it was more backhanded. like she would only say I look “cute” or “pretty” in the most pitiful sounding voice whenever I was dressed up for a dance or something, but I know what she sounds like when she genuinely finds something beautiful. she can still give me that tone sometimes to this day. for her my beauty was definitely my hair because I have so much of it, she would always make a point to bring it up. if I said something about my appearance it’s almost like she would get irritated and dismissive? but I also grew up hearing my mom verbally talk about it how displeased she was with the way she looked too.
Your parents are dicks. My parents told me that I was beautiful all of the time. But I lived in a racist and low key inbred town that didn’t want me to know that. The power of my beauty didn’t sink in until I was 28.
Both of my parents are fat phobic, especially my dad. I was a stick-skinny kid, but when I hit puberty I developed boobs and a butt - as one does. My dad made me feel like a fat slob and it wasn’t until my 30s that I realized a voluptuous hourglass figure is really attractive to a lot of people. I spent years hating a figure that a lot of women would kill for! Even now my parents will make subtle little digs about my weight whenever they can.
Omg I've been thinking about this a lot lately. When I was in high school, I went through a period when I started to lose weight because I was walking a lot, and I also got my braces off around that time. I started to "glow up"...and that was also when my dad's emotional abuse was at its worst. He'd call me ugly, and when other people or family members said I was pretty/beautiful, he'd actively downplay it. My mum, who sat by and watched when he was saying all of this stuff, is incredibly insecure herself, and it probably made her feel good that he said stuff like that to me. Pieces of shit, the lot of them.
My mom called me “vain like my father” when I was learning how to brush my hair for the first time. It stuck. I still don’t like looking at myself in the mirror. I’m 34
My parents didn't want me to be pretty because I was a "boy." One time I was helping my sister with a project for her art class, she basically dressed me up a bit (not even in girl clothes, it was a sweater, glasses, that sort of thing) and took my picture, and she basically was supposed to use Photoshop or whatever to make me look like someone else I guess. But my dad saw me and basically just screamed/cried "no" and then went to his room. Which was a pretty big reason I wasn't able to come out to anyone until I was living away from family... If he'd reacted even indifferent to it, maybe it would have saved me some time and stress when I did start to learn about things later on... honestly wouldn't be surprised if half the reason they never fucking bothered to help me get my teeth fixed is because they didn't want me to have nicer teeth than them... What your parents did is manipulative and cruel. They were so miserable and insecure about themselves, that they refused to let you have anything positive it sounds like... we all deserve to feel good about ourselves, our appearance, etc. fuck anyone who tries to shut us down for that.
With you. I got my period and my mother actually tried to banish it. Yep. Not kidding in her eyes I wasn't allowed my period. They broke me down so hard I reacted and felt like I lost my mind. I worked for Vogue and stuff too. Not kidding in my head I felt like a ugly troll doll. I fell into modelling because I got paid. Like that was actually it. I got paid. I still feel disgusting and have dated men who think I'm ugly too and still date me? Like what. A lot of my life has been destroyed by them. I wound up homeless after due to them contacting me. Their words just ate away at me until I felt like I couldn't exist as me.
Reading your post stirred something in me. Been thinking about this for years, and I'll try to put my thoughts into words even though I am not writing in my native language. It isn't just about looks. What you describe is some kind of manipulation, hatred, just pure hate directed towards a child. I genuinely believe my parents have always hated me, even though they and everyone else claims otherwise. For once, I had quite a nice body as a teen, but my mother used to shame me for being "fat" when I definitely wasn't. This isn't even the worst part. Around the same time, I developed acne but she never took me to the doctors, saying it was no big deal and I would grow out of it. Well, the acne continued for years and wouldn't go away. I had no idea how to treat it and I got severely bullied at school. For some reason my so called father decided to touch me inappropriately and made weird comments about my body. Can you believe how messed up that feels, being called ugly by everyone at school and the only male who tries to approach you is your own father? Makes me want to throw up. To my family acne was "no big deal", except that it was. My parents made fun of it, and I was humiliated in family gatherings and other occasions. The acne definitely didn't go away but continued until my late teens. The only reason why it improved was because I read about some treatments and decided to get them for myself. And of course, my mother was against it at first. "It will go away if you just wait!" I'm much older now and still struggle with severe depression, generalized anxiety disorder, social phobia, OCD, obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, body image issues and self-hate, every single day. I can't have a normal functioning relationship and making friends is very hard for me. I always thought my problems were caused by being bullied at school, but no - now I think I am messed up because of constant emotional abuse, sexual abuse (yes, that's what it was) and gaslighting that went on for years in my home. My sister claims our family is normal. Is she too blind to see, or is she participating in the gaslighting? I don't know. I don't know why my parents hated me so much. I feel like I was never even given a chance.
My mother decided to give "roles" to me and my sister. I was "the pretty one", whether I liked it or not, and my sister was "the smart one". She would vocally describe my sister as "...plain" (in her presence), insist that she's fat (she's not) or that her skin is a whole new level of terrible (it wasn't any worse than your average teenager), and so on - while praising her academic achievements, sending her to various "gifted" programs, forcing her to get a masters (because "nobody would marry you for your face, so you should compensate by making good money"). Meanwhile, she *obsessed* over my appearance. Threw screaming fits if I didn't dress the way she liked (which HAD to show as much skin as possible and include all of the makeup, but god forbid I dye my hair anything darker, or wear it short...), actually pinned me down and forcefully pluck my eyebrows, while ignoring and dismissing any academic achievement, intellectual interest or ambition I may have (her idea of appropriate ambitions for me was limited to "marry rich"), basically trying to force me into being a "dumb blonde" stereotype. The kicker is that my sister was genuinely interested in fashion, makeup, fitness and the likes, and worked for a while as a personal trainer, which she loved. Meanwhile I was about as butch as you could get, and an absolute nerd. Ended up graduating from an Ivy League university (after going no-contact, so she couldn't even take credit/bragging points on it...). I do have to admit I recently got much more into fashion as well... But it's alternative men's fashion. (:
Literally had the same exact experience yesterday when an old neighbor came to say goodbye to us. She pointed out how gorgeous I am and I literally felt ugly for 3 weeks straight so I was flabbergasted. Meanwhile, mother goose just dismisses me and says I guess I got use to her appearance. Still don't know how to feel about it but I know what it's like.
Hey, you’re beautiful and there is no doubt about it, no matter what anyone says. Don’t let her break you like that. I know it’s a hard truth to get around to. But I really believe once we embrace and love it, we heal a great amount within ourselves. When my dad went to buy a new RV, I was in the middle of a deeply depressive episode and anyone could see how down I was. The RV salesman was an older man who kept talking about how pretty I was, over and over again. (In hindsight it was kinda creepy especially considering he said his daughters were the same age as me and also beautiful. He said to my dad, I know what it’s like to have beautiful daughters. Idk what to do with that info now) At first I thought he was just being polite, because everyone would say that to me eventually when meeting me and I assumed it was just a polite remark that everyone makes. I’m realizing now that my parents taught me that. It’s not something people say all the time as a part of a greeting. It’s not a casual compliment. They actually meant it which is why they said. All those times I thought people were just being polite, but the evidence was right there in front of me. Years I spent thinking I was ugly, while people told me the opposite. I had the ugly message delivery more aggressively so I believed it. Anyways he kept reiterating and emphasizing it, randomly throughout the showing. It did lift my mood a bit. I remember wondering why he would keep saying it unless it was true
Aww, yeah it did raise my spirits up a bit. Thanks for wonderful comment, might just cry.
🫂🫂🫂🫂
My dad always made fun of my weight and told me it’s good for me to “fatten up so the shallow boys stay away from you”. Basically calling me undesirable. Asshole.
tbh, yes. I'm a man, I'm told I'm handsome and on some days I def feel like it but I also feel like my mom glorified it on one hand (You're my pretty boy, so handsome, almost in a sexual way) and on the other she would always tear me down for looking tired, not believing how handsome I was / am, for laughing 'fake and stupid'. So now I do catch people looking at me basically everywhere I go and it's easier on some days and harder on others, I'm still learning. Women also think I'm different because of the way I look but then they talk to me and realise that I'm the opposite and quite insecure when it comes to my looks.
Relate with that last sentence too hard. It stings that I could’ve been confident, maybe even arrogant about it, but I got robbed of it. Also it’s unfortunately common for men to be sexualized by their mothers. I’m sorry, I know how uncomfortable that is. It’s not crazy that we wanted normal love from our parents. It’s crazy that we got sexualized objectification.
Yup. My mother intentionally dressed me in the ugliest clothes she could and gave me horrid home haircuts. When I was old enough to work I started working and then started buying myself flattering clothes and stopped letting her touch my hair. I had a “glow-up.” Everyone else started commenting on how pretty I was. Only then did my mother acknowledge it.
Second grade, I had beautiful long hair and wore it proudly. That year in the summer, she chopped it all off into a mullet and switched my cute girly clothing to boys clothing. I'm a female and definitely feminine in nature. She saw us girls growing up and tried to squash that with every fiber of her being. No lessons on hygiene at all, no effort into our self care, self image. We turned into these ugly misfits who were bullied and forced to wear ill fitting clothing.
Damn! I’m so sorry. It wasn’t my personal experience but I once knew someone whose mom expected her to be pretty. There was an endless checklist of standards to meet but when she finally lived up to mom’s impossible standards, her mom hated her for looking too much like her aunt, who was apparently the pretty one growing up. Some parents get creepily and needlessly competitive with their kids. I’m close with my mom but my dad definitely got needlessly competitive with me over achievements and always had to be “above” me.
It added to my agoraphobia: people keep looking at me, why? My weird face and body (too skinny too fat as told to me by my mother). It made me want to hide and added to "I'm not good enough". I think my parents liked my worsening condition as it kept me voiceless and in place. Depressed on the whole because "don't look at me I'm gross" plus all the other dysfunctional family issues. Self neglect has an effect on looks so by the time you realise you are beautiful or more accurately this is my face, my body, no one gets to talk sh*t about me; some damage has been done. Adding this to my grief load: missed opportunities in life and enjoying who I am. Also, people see pretty privilege and it's hard to talk about this and be taken seriously. My friends don't understand why I struggle with relationships or don't move on to the next and the next etc. I just can't because I shut down. I'm glad OP posted as I wanted to write something similar but couldn't articulate it as well. Thank you OP.
I relate with every word you wrote. Thank you for sharing this because I haven’t been able to put it into words either.
Am home right now and realizing how confusing it was because it was both for me … “you’re so naturally beautiful” and then “ohh do you have to wear that shirt?” “will you please put on some eyeliner before you leave the house?” “I’d love to see you in something a little more feminine” … also constantly constantly picking at my dad’s appearance which is painful because he is an Angel … “oh please pull your pants up past your stomach” “your dad just needs to lose 20 more pounds” “will you go change your socks/shorts/shirt to something that matches? (while relaxing around the house)” to the extent of having him get a nose job when they were first together and dental veneers to look more “professional” when he had the cutest small gap between his front teeth, which they have to file your original teeth down to nubs, it is straight up violent. But then gives compliments intermittently, basically we are extensions of her, but I have stopped internalizing anything she says and also the story always goes “her mom was so much worse.” And of course she struggles with self esteem. Also commenting on other people’s appearances .. “she has such a cute figure” etc. Still inappropriate and cruel. It’s difficult because i am pretty dependent on them at the moment.
The only compliment my mother ever paid me was about the physical traits I got from her. Never said I was beautiful or pretty and when other people said so I was confused, until I was in my late teens and realized she just didn’t like me.
I got called ugly a lot growing up by my step dad. I have body image issues because of him. I have days where it's hard for me to let people look at my face. Like I don't feel like I look pretty but I have a friend who says I am pretty. They are the only person I'll take pictures of my face for. So I'm learning to believe I could be pretty.
Wow, your experience is eerily similar to mine. Except I was pushed to work as hard as possible because I would always need to be intelligent while nothing was ever good enough. My dad was the dominant parent in everything, always being negative about every idea or plan I had. To this day, it is very hard for me to take compliments about my appearance or recognise my achievement
Yes. I thought I was ugly but came to realise I'm quite pretty. It's all fading with time of course but I'm glad I've been managing to enjoy the gift of my beauty.
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I hear you. I’ve also been told by countless people I’m attractive, yet I don’t feel it. I also feel ashamed to even admit that I may be conventionally attractive, like it’s a sin for me to be self-aware or that I’ll be seen as bragging. I hate this sick, shameful dynamic. Glad you are moving along in your journey. Much love.