Dear Shipp:

Thank you for sharing such personal details. I am glad you did. I did have to take a break while reading, not easy. But I am back.

Regarding the change in your mother’s personality following her stroke. It seems to be quite common for an aggressive person to lose all of one’s aggression following a stroke, a brain tumor, an injury to the brain.

Regarding your love for your mother: a child loves her mother no matter who the mother is. Actually, the more cruel and aggressive the mother is, the stronger the attachment of the child to the mother. Not because the child is attracted to pain, but because the more in-pain the child, the more the child needs comfort.

So there is the mother, the source of pain, but also, at times, the source of comfort. I live in a wooded area and often see deer. When a fawn follows her mother into the woods, she follows because she is motivated by the emotion of Attachment (what we call love). Now imagine this scenario (that does not happen in nature)- the mother deer turns around and bites the fawn, the fawn bleeding. Does the fawn, having been beaten, bleeding, does she turn away from the mother, stop following her? no, the fawn is MORE in need of her mother now, that she is injured, more in need for protection and being fed, having been compromised by the injury. So the fawn keeps following, the mother turns around once in a while and bites the fawn. The fawn grows up to adult size, but so injured, it keeps following the mother.

When you feel that attachment, that love for your mother, it is that same attachment in nature, passed on to us through millions of years of evolution. We follow, and when injured we follow more intensely and way into adulthood.

Till your next post, take care of yourself.

anita

Dear Shipp:

I was up last night, thinking about the horrible abuse you went through, which you described in your post yesterday, and decided, last night, to write you more. What you described is dreadful and I feel so very sorry for the child that you were and for that child that is still you. The fear, the shock, the misery you felt must have been extreme.

My mother too, in her violent rages against me, went from suicidal (a whole lot of the time) to homicidal. And of course, she always blamed me. According to her, she was simply reacting to my badness, the way… any good mother would react to a bad, ungrateful, evil-intentioned, defected, inferior, etc., … daughter. According to her, I was the one hurting her. I can share more, and just did, but I want my post to be more about you.

In a previous post on this thread, you wrote: “When I chose my career, I chose the legal field because I have a hypersensitive sense of justice and what is fair…”

We often do try to make our childhood abuse just and fair. To realize that it wasn’t fair or just, that we were truly helpless, needy, loving, lovable trusting victims of the person we loved so desperately- this realization is … hard to take in, to endure.

You wrote in yesterday’s post: “I never understood why my existence made her life so unbearable” I believe that an abusive parent is abusive because she/ he was abused and so they carry a rage within that they need to express and get a relief, so they express it. Only the relief is temporary. Why did she choose you and not your sister? Could be anything; maybe something in your face resembled her abuser and triggered her. Nothing more. Your sister, I suppose, was her proof that indeed you were the cause.

If a stranger appeared at your door and did what your mother did, the gun, the violence, after the stranger left, you would have no problem calling the police, wouldn’t you? See to it that he or she goes to jail? It is obviously unjust and unfair. If a stranger did what your mother did to a child, it would be maybe a bit more cruel, wouldn’t it? When it is one’s mother doing this to her own child, it is even more cruel because the child trusts and loves the mother.

Back to the need for life to be fair and just. We make believe certain things to… twist reality to a fair-and-just version. Examples of such versions: the abuser will be punished in hell, there will be justice THEN. Or, I will go to heaven; there will be justice THEN. Or: the abuser was giving me the abuse I deserved for what my soul’s former body did to the abuser’s soul’s former body, and therefore my abuse WAS fair after all.

Reality is, the innocence, the trust and the love of a child was brutally violated. It wasn’t fair and it wasn’t just. The abuser was most likely abused when she was a child. And she reacted to her abuse of the past. But here is a key point: in between the rages of the abuser, how is it that the abuser didn’t, in a calm moment, regret the abuse and does something to protect the child from herself? As the abuser sees the damage she inflicted, in a calm moment, why did she not say out loud: “I did wrong to you! It is not your fault! I must stop!?

anita

Dear Shipp:

I feel closeness with you for the reasons you indicated in your first paragraph above.

You wrote: “Later in life, Were you able to get answers as to why, what caused her to be that way, etc?” I tried to understand decades ago, and I still do. Only yesterday (!) did I get a better understanding than ever before. I understand better by paying attention to (being mindful of) how my brain works.

This is what I learned yesterday: it is a compulsion. I am compelled myself to abuse myself- see, my mother has a mental representative in my brain that continues her work. That part is compelled to harass me throughout the day, to scare me, to blame me, to pronounce me Wrong any chance it gets.

That part of me … really wants to do that. So I figured, she really wanted to do what she did: she was DRIVEN to do it, compelled. It is possible not to give in to that compulsion, to that drive, but it is uncomfortable. It simply feels better to give in to it.

My mother told me once and only once: “You think I don’t know that what I am doing is wrong? I know. But what are you going to do? You can’t have another mother. You have no choice!” She also told me at another time: “You think I am stupid? You think you can get me in trouble? I am careful, I know not to leave a mark or break bones. I am not stupid!”

She didn’t perceive a bad consequence for her, so she operated in much the same way people will break the laws if there is no one enforcing them.

Till your next post, take care:

anita

Dear Shipp (Post # 1, want to keep issues separate):

Very interesting for me, to read your possible explanation as to why your mother picked you and not your sister, as her main rage-target. My mother was 20 when she had me (her main rage-target) and 26 when she had my sister. Giving birth to me was traumatic to her because during her pregnancy with me she was underweight and I was a bridge baby and the doctors cut her parts to get me out unharmed. She told the story many times, how a group of doctors gathered to observe the unusual birth, how ashamed she was to be observed, how painful it was.

She was of normal weight when pregnant with my sister and the birth was normal.

And another similarity: as a baby I was repeatedly sick and spent a few months in an isolation ward in a hospital following dysentery. Not the case with my sister.

anita

Dear Shipp (post # 3):

My mother made that comment only once, about being wrong, and there was no apology in it. It was her thinking out loud. Every other time, according to her, it was my fault.

After all these years, I figure my mother had a combination of personality disorders. My mother though was not born with a mental defect rendering her a future abusive mother. She was abused herself, terribly. She carried with her rage and a compulsion to express her rage, to have- this time- power over me, to be the powerful one, an obviously intoxicating experience, lasting only a short time and so needed to be repeated.

anita