My parents are somewhere on the autistic spectrum and simply didn't have shame or guilt in their parental toolkit. Anger, oh hell yes, my mom can go berserker on anyone, and my dad has his moments too, but I can't remember a single time they ever tried to shame me or make me feel guilty or small. Formal punishment was rare too and only seemed to happen when my parents were trying to appear normal to the outside world. In our familiar world the anger itself was the punishment and evaporated quickly.
The rules in our family were pretty simple. Don't make mom, or dad, or God angry. If you lie, steal, cheat, or hurt innocent creatures (including the human sort) there will be trouble. If you punch a hole in the wall, you have to fix it. But whatever trouble you were in there's always a place for you at the dinner table.
I used to get in trouble at school quite a bit. The school was always reluctant to call my mom because she'd often storm in ferociously angry at me, or worse and much more embarrassing, ferociously angry at the school. Eventually schools would stop calling my parents unless I was bleeding too badly for the school nurse to patch up and send me back out into the jungle. One time they had to call my mom because I had a broken bone, another time a concussion. If I wasn't getting beat up I was being a klutz.
Academically, my mob of siblings and I did all right. All of us were reading when we started school because that's what people did in our house. My parents started reading to me when I was a baby, and I read to my younger siblings. Art and science were important in our house -- it soaked into us by osmosis.
My most serious mental health issue is depression. I cannot function without meds. Without meds my world becomes a very dark place. But rather than a "self hatred/destructive drive" I have a paranoia/OCD/psychosis/anger drive, what I call my "feral human" state. The paranoia is the worst part because it prevents me from seeking or accepting help.
If I'm angry and I hurt myself (which I've done more times than I care to think about) it's not because I'm angry at myself or want to punish myself, it's because I was angry and irrational and did something stupid. God knows I've hurt other people in that state and it's my duty to repair those relationships, if possible, and when I can't repair the damage I'll feel a tremendous sense of loss and sadness but I don't think I was ever trained to translate those feelings into self-loathing or self-destruction. Or maybe that's one of the reasons I got the Asperger diagnosis; maybe I'm missing some bit of mental hardware most other people have.
If what I wrote here isn't helpful in some way, please disregard it. I'm also not sure if it's an appropriate reply to this thread. If it's not, I'll delete it.
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