Dear NB:

I am sorry that you are suffering and hope you feel better soon.

Do I understand correctly: your mother emotionally and physically abused you but it is you who are feeling “profound guilt” for.. ?

I ask, but I too was abused by my mother and yet I felt terribly guilty. I believed that I caused her to get upset and abuse me.

If you  would like to, please tell me more about the ways she abused you, and about your guilt and about your anger. If you do, I will read and reply further.

anita

Dear NB:

You are welcome.

“As a child, I never knew what upset my mother, what triggered her to dislike me”- you didn’t do anything that upset your mother and cause her to dislike you. I  know this because a child desperately needs her mother’s approval and love, so if there was something that you did to cause her to dislike you, you would have stopped doing it very quickly.

You know how people around you like or dislike other people that they don’t even know, just by the way they look, or by their voice? I imagine that’s why she didn’t like you, something you couldn’t change, being a female is one of the things she didn’t like and which you couldn’t change.

“I cannot remember times that I did not upset my mother and the consequent silent treatment or hitting”- the cause was not you upsetting her, the cause of her upset was her own thoughts.

“As I grew up, I feel like I upset her intentionally with words to get attention”- I don’t think so. A child never intends to incur her parents’ anger. What happens is that the child/ teenager gets angry at the parent (the natural result of being abused by the parent), and then feeling like a bad daughter for feeling that anger.

* Did your mother accuse you of trying to hurt her intentionally with words?

“I always just felt I was never good enough.. and that pushed me to always try and excel at school”- if you were motivated to “upset her intentionally” you would not have excelled in school. You worked hard at school so to make her feel good, to make her love you.

“I feel guilty because now I am left with never having been a good daughter”- you were not a bad daughter; she was a bad mother.

“I feel guilty because I didn’t know any better to break this cycle of abuse”- she was the adult, you were the child; she was the perpetrator, you were her victim. Your relationship with her was never between two equals, even when you became an adult. So that “cycle of abuse” was hers alone, you had no part in it.

*** Your anger at her did not equal you abusing her, it was a natural consequence of her abusing you.

“I feel guilty that I was not empathetic enough towards her to see what was prompting her behavior”- children are always most empathetic to their mothers. Mothers are too often not empathetic toward their children. If your mother was empathetic to you, she would have noticed how miserable you were as a child, and she would have changed her behavior (no more silent treatments and no more hitting to start with), so to make you feel better!

“.. to see what was prompting her behavior”- you saw what was prompting her behavior, you wrote it yourself: “I don’t think my mother ever liked me”. Children see/ perceive accurately, and hitting and silent treatments by themselves are clear indications of not liking a person.

“I also feel guilty that I have anger towards her for destroying my childhood”- people get angry at others on the road for inconsiderate driving, for a moment in time. It is quite understandable to feel anger for having a childhood destroyed!

“that also adds to my guilt.. as if I am too  privileged to feel so strongly about something that is in the past and cannot technically hurt me anymore”- well, you were not privileged enough to have a mother who loved you- oh what a privilege that would have been!

And technically it still hurts because technically your brain is the same brain you had as a child (as you know, we shed our skin not our brain), and the hurt is still there, re-activated from time to time.

“How does your mother’s behavior towards you make you feel guilty?”- made me feel guilty, not anymore. The behaviors that made me feel guilty: expressing her misery in dramatic ways, telling me I made her miserable, that other mothers had good daughter and how unlucky she was for having .. me, telling me that I intentionally said things to hurt her, that I wanted to hurt her.

Post again anytime, NB.

anita

• This reply was modified 4 years ago by .

Dear NB:

We have a similar experience. I struggled for years with love for her and anger and guilt and that intense distress often in her presence and shame and cringing at her touch…it was a nightmare, really, for me. And all along I was focused on her, feeling empathy for her and none for me, feeling and believing I was worthless and undeserving. My mother is still alive but I ended all contact with her seven years ago.

This is the biggest piece of clarity that made it possible for me to exit that nightmare (a nightmare that wasn’t over when I ended contact with her): I finally understood that I loved her from the beginning and all along, but she didn’t love me back.

Those “glimpses of maternal love” on the part of my mother were moment of genuine affection, but in many abusive situations, within families, in prisons, in past concentration camps, people who were terribly cruel to other people, were also, from time to time, affectionate with those same other people.

When I thoroughly understood that I did love her intensely all along (no matter how angry I was at her for so long), and that she didn’t love me back not because I wasn’t lovable, (or because I didn’t love her), I was finally able to exit that decades long nightmare.

anita

• This reply was modified 4 years ago by .

Dear NB:

“my mind telling me that I probably wasn’t up to her standards”-

– it wasn’t about standards, as in you not being smart enough, or a good student, etc. I think that she was angry at her adult family members: adults in her original family and in her husband’s family (“she was fighting her battles being married to a far more conservative family than her”). She held a lot of that anger inside her. She felt that she couldn’t express her anger and frustration at them for fear of some sort of retaliation, so she did what many abusive mothers do: express and inflict her anger and misery (“expressing her misery in dramatic ways”) at her child. A child does not retaliate and adults witnessing such abuse don’t interfere (They feel that a mother owns her children to do with what she pleases, and they may feel relieved that .. they are not the recipients of her anger).

“I used to hate making her angry”- it felt to you like you were making her angry, but it wasn’t true: she picked on something you said or did, or something you didn’t say, or didn’t do as an excuse to express and inflict her anger and frustration at you, and in so  doing to relieve herself of her distress and feel better as a result.

What came first, what came second: First she was angry and frustrated at other people; Second she chose you to use you as a recipient of her anger and frustration, to punish you so to relieve herself from her distress and feel better for it.

“After a big fight, when we used to go into our respective rooms, I used to come back and knock on her door to see if there was any chance of a reconciliation before we slept.. I cannot remember even once when she responded positively.. sometimes, not even opening the door”-

– I imagine that after each one of you went to your respective rooms, she never knocked on your door to see if there was any chance of reconciliation.

What came first and what came second:  First she picked on you so to express and inflict her anger on you. Second, you felt angry for being picked on unfairly, wanting to protect yourself from false accusations, arguing back. When an innocent person gets victimized, the victim automatically feels anger. Even though you were confused, thinking that you caused her anger, part of you knew very well that her anger at you was unfair, that you were indeed victimized, so automatically, you felt angry back at her.

In your original post you wrote: “we didn’t get a chance to reconcile and I am now left with profound guilt as well feelings of anger that she just left without making things right with me”-

– at 56, the time of her death, she had behind her 2 or 3 decades of getting angry at you so to relieve herself from anger and frustration- she used you (aka abused you) for that purpose, and she did that repeatedly, year after year. After fights, when you knocked on her door “to see if there was any chance of a reconciliation“, she wasn’t interested because she was still angry and she wanted you punished, she wanted you to suffer.

It is difficult to think of one’s own mother wanting her child to suffer, but this is what my mother wanted for me every time she was angry at me, and that’s what your mother wanted for you, every time she was angry at you. And she didn’t bother, at the end of her life, to tell you that this is what she did. It was easier for her to not bother.

In summary: you served a purpose in your mother’s life: you provided her with emotional relief repeatedly. You didn’t volunteer to do that, she helped herself to you in this regard. She fed you, clothed you.. and used you. You owed her nothing and you owe her nothing: she already took from you all that she chose to take, which was her way to feel better again and again, and yet again.

anita

• This reply was modified 4 years ago by .