Bruce

BDW's recovery from Parental Abuse
2023-02-03 19:22:30 (UTC)

I never had a Mom

I am not a medical doctor, psychologist or a therapist, but I have been in therapy to deal with the effects of being raised in an environment with abusive parents. My mother has all the signs of two serious mental disorders, Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). I just need to reflect on these and elucidate the behaviors I observed or directly experienced, with her struggle with this disorder.

Reference: https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/borderline-personality-disorder

1. Efforts to avoid real or perceived abandonment, such as plunging headfirst into relationships—or ending them just as quickly. - I have observed this over my lifetime with my mother. Her father was abusive to her all of her life and was probably a Narcissist. My mother sought his love, attention and acceptance, until the day he died. She thirsted for her "Daddy" to care about her. She had two marriages, both filled with fighting and abuses of different sorts. The first was to my biological father and I only remember seeing and hearing the fights. Her second and longest marriage, was to my stepfather. He is an alcoholic, with NPD tendencies. When drunk, he is a violent drunk; physically, verbally and emotionally. My mother has always been afraid of losing his love, to the point of blaming me and accusing me as a child, of "threatening to destroy our lives".

One particular event is as fresh in my mind, as if it happened yesterday. He had been drinking whisky and they got into a fight, which went from screaming to physical violence. They ended up in the front yard, with him sitting on top of her, beating her with a large wrench. As a young teenager, I intervened to protect my mother. He was taken to jail, she was taken to the hospital. This happened in the late 1970's, when a spouse could choose to press charges or not, before the modern laws about domestic violence were implemented. She was brought back to the house several hours later, after being checked out in the emergency room. Immediately upon coming home, she started screaming at me, told me that what I had done was going to "get us tossed out of the house" and that I was a selfish, ungrateful brat for turning on him. The man who was beating her with a wrench, punching her in the face and body, the man I tried to protect her from, was now the victim – fourteen year old me, was now the villain of the story.

2. A pattern of intense and unstable relationships with family, friends, and loved ones. – This is very obvious to me. I have seen this all her life with her siblings, parents, friends, husbands and children, to include me. I can only really speak knowledgeably about our relationship. She has told me that she loves me; she had also told me that she hates me and wished I was never born. Her relationship with me would never just be “normal” or “mellow”, it was always intense – very smothering in terms of trying to show love, or burning with a white hot anger and hate.

3. A distorted and unstable self-image or sense of self. – Obviously, I cannot be privy to her internal dialogue or mental states. However after being in her presence and seeing her behaviors over nearly six decade, I can make some valid assumptions. She is very drive to “prove herself”, she poured years of energy into getting a PhD, at the real expense of not being involved in the lives of her family, including grandchildren. It seems to me that she has to become something, to be recognized and cannot just accept who she is.

4. Impulsive and often dangerous behaviors, such as spending sprees, unsafe sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, and binge eating. – Yes, she exhibits these behaviors and always has. She is now in her late seventies, with an obesity issue and diabetes. As far back as I can remember, she binge eats chips/dips, sweets and consumes soft drinks, like a fish consumes water. She decided to stop taking her diabetic medications, stop managing her food/drink intake and monitoring her blood sugar – because “it was just too troublesome”. This has now contributed to increasing debility and led directly to physical injuries that will further disable her.

5. Self-harming behavior, such as cutting. Recurring thoughts of suicidal behaviors or threats. – I have not witnessed self-harming behaviors, but she has made threats of suicide over the years. There are three times in my teenage years when she threatened to commit suicide, in the presence of me or my siblings.

6. Intense and highly variable moods, with episodes lasting from a few hours to a few days. – Yes, this has been a common behavior with my mother. I have witnessed her going between wildly divergent moods in a single day. She could be relatively happy, to raging mad, to sadly depressed in a matter of a few hours.

7. Chronic feelings of emptiness. – I cannot answer this.

8. Inappropriate, intense anger or problems controlling anger. – Yes, I can absolutely attest to this, as I have often been the target of it, from a very young age. I believe that my mother enjoys conflict, I think she feels, at least subconsciously, that anger and conflict is the default means of getting or receiving attention. It was the only way she got attention from her own father.

9. Feelings of dissociation, such as feeling cut off from oneself, observing oneself from outside one’s body, or feelings of unreality. – I cannot answer this.

Do I hate my own mother? The answer is no. I hate how she has treated me and others. I recognize that she is a broken, mentally ill person and is herself the victim of abuse, starting in her childhood and even to the present time in her marriage to my stepfather. She is also a victimizer and exhibits abusive and pathological behaviors. I also recognize that I too am broken in ways, primarily from her choices to enable, look the other way or join in the abuse, when I was a child. Unlike her, I recognized this early and sought therapy. Unlike her, I do not enjoy conflict and will no longer be enmeshed in it.

I saw childhood friends who are close to their parents, saw the normal interactions between their families when I was growing up. I see how my wife and her parents and siblings are close and loving. I see how my wife, children and I are close. I realize that abuse is a cycle, which reinforces the behaviors. I would love to have a normal mother/son relationship with my mother. Unfortunately, that has never existed and will never exist. My mother’s pathologies and co-morbidities are too deeply entrenched at this point in her life. The mother I wanted and dreamed of…..is just that - a dream not based in reality. I can no longer attempt to pretend it is possible to have a loving, normal or stable mother. I have to accept reality and focus on what I can do, not what I cannot.




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