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Gorb [they/them] @hexbear.net

Anyone here who's parents denied them doors? Looking for doorless brethren to share lamentations with

I wasn't allowed a door and the landing light had to be on all night so i didn't get darkness either. Also wasn't allowed to close the bathroom door. Or really any door ever.

Oh yeah and my bed time was set at 7pm and when i turned 18 was pushed to 8.30pm with lots of negotiation waow

46 comments

  • I was definitely threatened with it, and I think it might have been for a bit? I don't remember why exactly, depression has effected my memory a lot. It's possible it was for masturbating but it might have just been for something else. I'd actually forgotten about it.

    Privacy and alone time has always been really important to me, probably partially because I'm autistic (not that it's not for NTs).

    The other big traumatic thing I remember is my dad threatening to take away/destroy my comfort item/stim, I'd cry and cry when he'd do that. I still have and use it.

  • My dad insisted for a stint that I keep my door open for air flow. He was stubborn on it when I was a teen. Literally all I wanted was to lay in my bed reading for hours in silence. But like, I still had a door.

  • I had doors as a kid but I was not allowed to have a lock on my bedroom door. My sister also got her door removed form the frame of her room as a punishment for a couple of years

  • Fortunately mine didn't go that far but they did make it implicitly clear they didn't respect my privacy by barging in whenever they wanted without knocking, and by explicitly viewing a closed door as suspicious. This was a Christian "don't masturbate" house fyi.

    • Not even a christian household but same issue with suspicion. Closed door means I'm doing something bad or have something to hide. I couldn't even walk downstairs for water as a kid parents would scream of they heard me going down because clearly I must be doing something evil. Constantly treated like a criminal

  • For a few years I lived in a "room" that was a sort of entrance/porch that we used a curtain to block off. It was because we didn't have enough rooms in the house. Not as punishment or a form of control.

    I had a friend who's 4 bedroom house had 13 children in it. His parents were Italian Catholics. So I don't think anyone had their own room. He slept on a sofa for years and had almost no property but his clothes and guitar and emancipated himself legally at the age of 16. He's a chef in Hawaii now.

  • I didn't get to have a door because my bedroom was actually a walk-in closet/storage room. I don't think it was that I wasn't allowed to have a door so much as that my dad (who installed the kitchen and all the cabinetry in the small house) didn't feel like taking off the molding around the doorway to put a door on it. I was always told it wasn't possible for some reason.

    But when I was 13 we were able to move to a new place where I actually had a real bedroom with a door. I remember feeling like I had "arrived" and finally knew what it was like for the normal/rich kids (who were the same thing in my mind back then). That was a good age to finally get some privacy, for obvious reasons, but before that I didn't really mind not having a door, I had a lot of anxiety problems even as a really young kid and would often just go sleep on the floor next to my parents bed. Any desire for privacy was nothing compared to the fear of being alone and disconnected, and I thought a door would have made that worse.

  • Only ever as a threat because I was acting up, but actually doing it is abuse imo. Sorry you had to go through that.

  • I grew up in a place where my room just didn't have walls, or a door. Just a staircase going up to my "room", and a wooden rail into the rest of the building. Had three other walls at least. My moms befroom also didn't have walls though. Was just the curcumstances of the physical space we were living in. Not parental cruelty.

    We also have the fun, classic part of winter, where only two rooms(kitchen, Living room) are heated(with an early 20th century wooden stove) and we are all sitting on top of each other for months. Though we children slept with our parents in a bed till we were 10 anyway. So, like, a private bed was already a luxury, in context.

    • That sounds a lot like my situation. Little firewood-burning stove was the only heat for the whole (albeit little) house, but the kitchen and living room were the same room anyway, just that the floor where the kitchen was was linoleum while the "living room" was where there was carpet. There were no stairs, but my doorless walk-in-closet bedroom was just an offshoot next to the single bathroom, both of which could be seen into from the living room/kitchen (though the bathroom did at least have a door lol). But it wasn't a big deal because it was just how things were. I only had one sibling who was a lot older and often not around, but yeah for me, I was still sleeping in my parents room quite a bit even into early double-digit years old.

  • This was a thing my parents always threatened my siblings & I with if we slammed our doors when they told us to go to our rooms and they did take my brother & I's bedroom door away for slamming it one time, but we were not really old enough to value privacy at that point (I was 9 iirc but may have been a year or two younger) and because we shared the room it was collective punishment (to my brother's detriment because iirc it was me who slammed the door and caused my dad to take it off the hinges) so it was put back on like two days later and it was never done again.

    We moved when I was in middle school and I got a bedroom all to myself with a door that actually locked, which I naively thought would keep my parents out until the first time they stuck a toothpick through the pinhole on the other side and pushed the lock out of place. Funnily enough though the way my closet was positioned near the bedroom door, if you opened the closet door all the way it would prevent the bedroom door from opening more than an inch or two - which I discovered after the first time my parents barged in on me sitting naked at my desk at like 3am circa 2008 looking at porn. By the time I was in high school I'd pretty much forgone locking my door or buying myself a minute or two by blocking it with the closet door because I knew my parents would wind up barging in whenever they wanted and instead started making them regret doing so with shit like "hi mom thanks for bursting in without knocking, why do I need to put on underwear and a shirt I'm just sitting here playing the PS3??"

    Was actually a big reason why I was so desperate to get out of the house as soon as I turned 18!

    • Yeah actually I did get a door taken off its hinges when I was like 6 for slamming it too much, pretty reasonable thing for parents to do at that age, doors are expensive and I was being a little shit. Privacy during my teen years was generally respected except when my parents found the nudie mags (I didn't have my own computer).

    • The lack of privacy thing was actually the minor issue for me. The desire to sleep in darkness or.. well sleep properly for the first time in my life was a big factor. The other part being when i got a job at 18 I'd come home late cos the commute was long and my bed time was still set at.... 8.30pm so i basically had no life at all. I would have committed a home shooting if I lived in America i swear

46 comments