Dear Javier,

thanks for sharing some more about your childhood. So the first five years of your life you spent growing up with a father who was violent and a bully, who used to severely punish you and your siblings for even the slightest transgression. You were so afraid of him that you would wet yourself anticipating his beating. In addition, he was beating your mother too and was threatening to kill her (She was the victim of physical and mental abuse by my “father”, harassed, endured death threats, and then was left alone as my father left her for his mistress.)

During that time, your mother tried to protect you, but she was weaker and would got beaten up too, I guess. She, you and your siblings were victims of domestic violence. Did your mother ever asked for help from social services? It appears she was enduring your father’s abuse, and might have endured his abuse even further, had he not left for another woman.

So when you say:

She always put her kids first. My mother never neglected us, we took her for granted and did her wrong.

it’s not completely true, because she didn’t leave your father. She allowed the severe abuse to last for 5 years. Perhaps she had no other choice, nowhere to go (her parents had deceased by that time), your father was maybe threatening to kill her if she turned to anyone for help…

But the fact is that you as a little child were exposed to domestic violence, in which both you and your mother and your siblings were victims. The difference being that you couldn’t do anything about it, but your mother could have, at least in theory, since she was the adult. You felt completely helpless and terrified because there was no one to protect you.

Your mother allowed severe punishments, or she couldn’t prevent them from happening, and the result is that you have severe trauma starting from very early in life. Apart from fearing for your life, you feared probably even more for your mother’s life, because your survival depended on her. She didn’t ensure you the conditions for healthy growth, but allowed (due to her own difficult background and personal weaknesses I don’t want to speculate about) that you and your siblings grow up in an abusive home.

Children from such homes often grow up to be drug addicts and act out in various ways. You were no exception. But it wasn’t your fault – it was the consequence of being raised in an abusive, violent home, suffering and witnessing abuse on a daily basis, and fearing for your own life as well as the life of your mother.

The first 5 years of your life determined your later trajectory. Everything that happened later is a consequence of those 5 years.

One year after your father left, your mother found a man who loved her enough not to beat her, but not enough to marry her. She settled for a relationship of being a mistress, because she probably didn’t think she deserved better? You say your mother was happy. Well, she might have been happy in the beginning, when this man was promising her to leave his wife. But as the time passed by, I don’t think your mother was truly happy. She was probably hoping he’d leave his wife and children, but he never did it. Maybe he was giving her false hopes and you saw him through,  you saw he was lying and manipulating her (I realized he will never leave his wife and kids).

You wanted to protect your mother from pain and disappointment, you told her to leave him but she wouldn’t, so you stopped speaking to her. Perhaps you were influenced by other people telling bad things about her – that she was a homewrecker? Maybe you felt embarrassed because your peers were saying these things? If so – if you wanted to protect yourself from embarrassment – that’s completely understandable, because in our teens we’re very susceptible to what our peers think about us. If your mother was a source of embarrassment for you, it’s no wonder you “rebelled” against her.

You say that your mother broke off the relationship because of you, and that it broke her “into thousand pieces”. That it killed her and you never saw her happy again.

Well, although you may not see it, Javier, your mother hasn’t treated you well, neither did she treat herself well. She first got involved with a bully, your father, who was abusing her and the kids for full 5 years, and it stopped only because he decided to leave for his mistress. Then, she got involved with a married man. She didn’t think how that would affect that man’s marriage and his children. Her need for a relationship and to feel loved by a man was more important to her than the well-being of those children. She put herself first, rather than those children.

In her marriage with your father, she didn’t leave, she didn’t make the abuse stop. She didn’t put you, her children, first. She put the relationship first, although it was a horrible one.

It seems to me that your mother, due to her own weaknesses and perhaps a difficult background and the conditions in which she grew up – had a need for a relationship, for man’s presence, even if that relationship was abusive or unsatisfactory. In her marriage she was physically and mentally abused, in her relationship with the married man she was probably emotionally manipulated, lied to, promised things that would never happen etc. She never had the courage to break it off, although she certainly wasn’t happy in that relationship either. But she didn’t know better, perhaps felt she didn’t deserve better.

What I am trying to say is that your mother in fact put herself first before her children. She didn’t see clearly how her marriage was affecting you, and later, how her illegitimate relationship was affecting her lover’s children. This doesn’t make her a villain, but she’s no saint either. She had personal weaknesses and deficiencies and didn’t know better.

How does this what I’ve just said affect you?

Dear Javier,

While reading your post, I got the “sense” of relief and your reasoning enlightened me. But, seconds later, the negative thoughts and guilt and all the self-hate came back again.

I understand your reaction – even if we understand something rationally and it sounds true to us, and we accept it as true, it still doesn’t mean we can suddenly stop our negative thoughts and feelings. That’s because those thoughts and feelings stem from an earlier phase, when we were little children, sometimes even before we could talk. The inner child in us is hurt but it also blames himself for causing pain to his parents.

The first thing you could do is to start having compassion for the little boy that you were many years ago, who endured all that abuse. Start having compassion for yourself as a helpless, innocent child. It was absolutely not your fault that your father was a bully and was terrorizing your mother, and that he later brutally punished you for the slightest mistake. Try to have compassion for that little boy who just wanted to be loved but couldn’t, because he was living in such terror. His mother wanted to love him but she couldn’t protect him from his abusive father. She wasn’t able to protect him. Try to have compassion for that boy who had to endure beating and terror for full 5 years. Do you think you can do it?

 I just want to see her happy, and like everybody else, she deserves to be happy.

Everybody deserves to be happy, but we cannot make our parents happy if their unhappiness is caused by their own wounds. I could never make my mother happy, no matter what I’ve tried and how perfect of a child I was. Your mother’s unhappiness isn’t caused by you – it is primarily caused by her. She endured an abusive marriage and probably would have endured it further, had your father not left. She endured a relationship in which she was a mistress for 10 years, in which she certainly wasn’t happy but it was still better for her than to be alone.

She might be blaming you for depriving her of her happiness, but is her, with her own weaknesses and childhood wounds – who deprived herself of true happiness and settled for breadcrumbs. She accepted and tolerated men who didn’t really love her or respect her. It has nothing to do with you. It was she who was creating her own unhappiness.

That’s why you can only work on your side of the relationship with your mother, but you cannot make her happy. You can have compassion for her, understand her, help her, however you cannot heal her wounds. Your task is to heal your own wounds, and be able to relate to her from that healthy place, from which you can offer more both to yourself and to her.