Codependent guilt

[Depression = 72% of members]

Two years or so ago I wrote about the ways in which my mother made sure to keep me socially isolated. Basically I only had one friend and every single day my mother would scream at me for something or another that was always in some way or another related to M… and often she would yell at me, quite plainly, that it’s either M or her, I couldn’t have both. Later on, when M was out of the picture, everything I did wrong would then get blamed on “the bad influence” of “those barbaric kids” I would sometimes play with whenever I played outside and she usually forbade me from going to anyone’s house.

What I think I failed to mention though was that in any case most kids in most places didn’t like me. Sure, there was M for the first few years, sort of, and there were also some kids in the neighborhood and at school that I sometimes played with, but most of the time most kids didn’t seem to want to be friends with me. My therapist believes that that too is because of my mother, that I’d learned maladaptive ways of thinking and behaving from her and that when I displayed them around other kids, that’s what caused them to dislike me. Personally idk if that’s true or if it wasn’t “just me” (i.e. that I wasn’t just always a weirdo because of genes or whatnot) but anyway, that’s not the point of this post… the point is that it was always just her and me… and for a period of several years (after I’d given up on contact with other human beings) I felt like that was just fine with me… she was all I wanted.

She would depend on me emotionally and I was more than happy to be her knight in shining armor. She’d confide in me all her deepest and most intimate secrets (including sexual ones) and I was more than happy to listen. It made me feel so special to be her one and only and as far as I was concerned she was my one and only too.

She taught me that other human beings were “filth” and I fully agreed (largely because of my own experiences with them) at least when I was ages 9 – 13.

I remember how when I was less than 9 she’d talk to me (while we were in bed together) about how wonderful it would be if she and I could just be on a deserted island together, just the two of us. At the time I hated pretty much all the other people around me so I fully agreed and fantasized too about being alone on a deserted island with her.

Lately I’ve been trying to do some extra work (both by myself and in therapy) on the issue of the covert incest and in what ways it still affects me. One of the main issues, that became apparent, is that there’s a part of me that feels absolutely disgusted with the rest of me... .over the fact that I just went along with her. In my mind she was like a daughter to me but also like a wife… and the latter part leaves me feeling so disgusted with myself.

I read other people’s posts here where they seemed to have always been repulsed by their parent’s attempts to invade their boundaries and in some way or another they always put up a fight… but not me! No way… I was all A-OK with my boundaries being violated… heck, I wasn’t even aware at the time that they existed, much less that they were being violated.

Sure, I did try to put up a little bit of a fight as a kid… when I was 12 and started getting a woman’s body I told my mother at one point that I didn’t want her to see me naked anymore… but then she got angry and started guilt-tripping me and eventually that boundary got dropped and I just went back to letting her see me naked all she wanted… Heck (and this is the really disgusting part), I was happy to let her see me naked at one point. We would joke and tease and flirt (on top of other things) and I was perfectly OK with it because that was just the “special” way she and I “bonded”.

During those years I became just as jealous as she ever was of any male she took interest in and tried to discourage her from having relationships. She was all I wanted, all I could expect to have, and I wanted her to be all mine… and she was quite happy with that. I remember once reading a post someone wrote here about their BPD mother and sister and about how they had “enveloped each other” and I remember thinking “yeah, that sounds like my mother and me alright”. This is why part of me can never stop being angry at myself; not only did I not run away or fight, I actually ended up being drawn to her like a moth to a flame. I wanted to be her protector and hero, like some kind of narcissist, and I wanted to be her sexual play-thing, like some kind of pervert.

[justnothing]

Two years or so ago I wrote about the ways in which my mother made sure to keep me socially isolated. Basically I only had one friend and every single day my mother would scream at me for something or another that was always in some way or another related to M… and often she would yell at me, quite plainly, that it’s either M or her, I couldn’t have both. Later on, when M was out of the picture, everything I did wrong would then get blamed on “the bad influence” of “those barbaric kids” I would sometimes play with whenever I played outside and she usually forbade me from going to anyone’s house.

What I think I failed to mention though was that in any case most kids in most places didn’t like me. Sure, there was M for the first few years, sort of, and there were also some kids in the neighborhood and at school that I sometimes played with, but most of the time most kids didn’t seem to want to be friends with me. My therapist believes that that too is because of my mother, that I’d learned maladaptive ways of thinking and behaving from her and that when I displayed them around other kids, that’s what caused them to dislike me. Personally idk if that’s true or if it wasn’t “just me” (i.e. that I wasn’t just always a weirdo because of genes or whatnot) but anyway, that’s not the point of this post… the point is that it was always just her and me… and for a period of several years (after I’d given up on contact with other human beings) I felt like that was just fine with me… she was all I wanted.

She would depend on me emotionally and I was more than happy to be her knight in shining armor. She’d confide in me all her deepest and most intimate secrets (including sexual ones) and I was more than happy to listen. It made me feel so special to be her one and only and as far as I was concerned she was my one and only too.

She taught me that other human beings were “filth” and I fully agreed (largely because of my own experiences with them) at least when I was ages 9 – 13.

I remember how when I was less than 9 she’d talk to me (while we were in bed together) about how wonderful it would be if she and I could just be on a deserted island together, just the two of us. At the time I hated pretty much all the other people around me so I fully agreed and fantasized too about being alone on a deserted island with her.

Lately I’ve been trying to do some extra work (both by myself and in therapy) on the issue of the covert incest and in what ways it still affects me. One of the main issues, that became apparent, is that there’s a part of me that feels absolutely disgusted with the rest of me... .over the fact that I just went along with her. In my mind she was like a daughter to me but also like a wife… and the latter part leaves me feeling so disgusted with myself.

I read other people’s posts here where they seemed to have always been repulsed by their parent’s attempts to invade their boundaries and in some way or another they always put up a fight… but not me! No way… I was all A-OK with my boundaries being violated… heck, I wasn’t even aware at the time that they existed, much less that they were being violated.

Sure, I did try to put up a little bit of a fight as a kid… when I was 12 and started getting a woman’s body I told my mother at one point that I didn’t want her to see me naked anymore… but then she got angry and started guilt-tripping me and eventually that boundary got dropped and I just went back to letting her see me naked all she wanted… Heck (and this is the really disgusting part), I was happy to let her see me naked at one point. We would joke and tease and flirt (on top of other things) and I was perfectly OK with it because that was just the “special” way she and I “bonded”.

During those years I became just as jealous as she ever was of any male she took interest in and tried to discourage her from having relationships. She was all I wanted, all I could expect to have, and I wanted her to be all mine… and she was quite happy with that. I remember once reading a post someone wrote here about their BPD mother and sister and about how they had “enveloped each other” and I remember thinking “yeah, that sounds like my mother and me alright”. This is why part of me can never stop being angry at myself; not only did I not run away or fight, I actually ended up being drawn to her like a moth to a flame. I wanted to be her protector and hero, like some kind of narcissist, and I wanted to be her sexual play-thing, like some kind of pervert.

[PleaseValidate]

Hi Just, i am so sorry for what your mom did to you. I hope you can recognize that she groomed you via manipulating language, isolation, projection, exploiting your preteen sexual hormones, etc. She basically pulled you by your arm into the place in your mind she wanted/needed you to be and have the feelings you did. I know this will not make you feel all better but I want you to know that it was NOT your fault!  I see your reactions and desires as being quite natural and logical given the circumstances.

Sometimes when I'm feeling guilty and/or angry at my childhood self (and i stress *childhood* self because you are thankfully no longer that same boy who is being abused) it helps me to email evaluate the situation in the third person. Knowing what you do as an adult about healthy mother - son relationships, if this little boy came to you to talk, what would you have to say to him? How would you judge him? Would he deserve your love and hugs? Would you try to help him? What would you say or do? 

If this was a father-daughter interaction, would you be as hard on the daughter for reacting the same as the son?  Are you feeling like you were supposed to be strong because you were "the man?"

Sorry for my potentially overwhelming questions but I hope you can see my point. You were (and still are via memories) made a victim of codependency through no fault of your own.

[PleaseValidate]

Hi Just, i am so sorry for what your mom did to you. I hope you can recognize that she groomed you via manipulating language, isolation, projection, exploiting your preteen sexual hormones, etc. She basically pulled you by your arm into the place in your mind she wanted/needed you to be and have the feelings you did. I know this will not make you feel all better but I want you to know that it was NOT your fault!  I see your reactions and desires as being quite natural and logical given the circumstances.

Sometimes when I'm feeling guilty and/or angry at my childhood self (and i stress *childhood* self because you are thankfully no longer that same girl who is being abused) it helps me to email evaluate the situation in the third person. Knowing what you do as an adult about healthy mother - daughter relationships, if this little girl came to you to talk, what would you have to say to him? How would you judge her? Would she deserve your love and hugs? Would you try to help her? What would you say or do?  If this was a father-daughter interaction, would you be as hard on the girl for reacting the same way?

Sorry for my potentially overwhelming questions but I hope you can see my point. You were (and still are via memories) made a victim of codependency through no fault of your own.




**edited from mobile device due to my wrong pronoun usage. PV

[justnothing]

Thank you very much for your reply PleaseValidate, it actually did make me feel a lot better. On a conscious level I’m aware that it wasn’t really my fault… it’s just that bringing it from the conscious level to the subconscious/emotion level is easier said than done…

About what I would say or do with a child in similar circumstances… it so happens that shortly after writing this post, I got into a conversation with another woman who had gone through some form of sexual abuse (she didn’t go into details and I didn’t ask any) and was having very similar issues when it came to shame and guilt over what happened to her and her own body and sexuality nowadays and somehow when talking to her I knew what to say in order to validate and comfort her (not to mention a lot of websites on hand from all the research I’ve been doing lately). Like you say… it’s not the same thing when talking to somebody else about it… however talking to her about it was in a way helpful for me too.

Incidentally I probably should have made it clearer but I’m female  and straight for the most part, as far as I can tell (**edit** I’d written this bit before I read your edit btw  but don’t worry about it either way)… and yet, like you say, somehow I was always “the man” of the house despite that. Well, actually, it depends… if at any given point it was convenient for my mother that I be the man and her knight in shining armor – that was what I had to be… if she was in the mood for me to be her little baby girl – I was that too… when she wanted me to be a female sex-symbol I was that too… when she wanted me to be a mother to her I was that too… I had to be many different things and (come to think about it) I was somehow always pretty good at playing whichever role she wanted me to play. The only role I really didn’t like was of the big-bad-male-abuser… sometimes when she was angry she’d say things like “first I was abused by my father, then by my ex husband, then by your father and now by you!” and this was even when I hadn’t said or done anything particularly “abusive” (not that I didn’t sometimes do some pretty bad stuff around my late teens-early 20’s mind you… but these kinds of accusations started when I was pretty, pretty young and often over nonsense). When I was a little girl she would often try to encourage me to be aggressive and one time she even tried to make me hit her but I couldn’t do it. Sometimes, starting in elementary school, I’d get into physical fights with other kids, mostly boys, and when I came home and told her about it she’d be like “good for you!” and I knew she’d say that…

Basically… I think my mother always kind of just wanted me to be her victim, her hero AND her persecutor and kind of did everything she could to groom me into all the roles she wanted… somehow that never seemed quite as clear as it does right now as I write these lines  o_O

Oh and btw, your questions were by no means overwhelming and I appreciate them and I do see your point… it’s just not easy seeing myself as a victim for several reasons… one is because I don’t want to be one (that means being helpless and I don’t wanna think of myself that way ), another is that I don’t like putting blame on her (crazy/stupid, I know) and another… is that I suppose I never really thought of myself as a child, even as a child, because of all those times I was supposed to be the big, strong responsible adult (um… on top of having to be small, cute, weak and totally dependent on her… er… but those two were never supposed to clash ya see… and I tried my best not to let them…(messed up, I know... )).

[PleaseValidate]

I like how you put that about needing to be so many different people to your mom while still staying you. It kinda makes me think of elementary school and how we would write the different "roles"we play in the world (eg,  student, neighbor, athlete, etc.) I would love to see all of our pie charts for the roles us BPD raised kids have played to their BPD parents!   

Mine is the forever victim so i understand being put in the "bullying role" when she needed conflict. I'm glad you did not hit your BPDmo when she egged you on. When i was about 6 or 7, mine kept taunting me to spit in her face. Kept taunting. Kept taunting. I was so confused whether she REALLY wanted me to or not. I don't think I was at the age where I understood sarcasm and abstract thoughts. So i did it; I spit in her face! It landed on her cheek and she got up screaming "I can't believe you just spit in my face!" Probably needless to say she came back and smacked me across the face. Good times. 

I'm still not the best at always understand sarcasm.  I think its partly because after all i saw growing up, now almost any wacky thing seems possible. If someone told me she heard on the news that aliens were landing tomorrow,  I'd probably just answer flatly "what time?" Incidentally, my BPDMO always found ways to make me feel "not normal" for my lack of affect.

[PleaseValidate]

PS- You are a survivor not a victim!  And you may feel like you are blaming her when you think of what she did. But what you really need to blame (if anything) is the DISEASE of BPD. I know its hard to keep this in perspective sometimes, especially if they deny having the disease (as my *officially diagnosed* BPDmo does.)

The disease is not an excuse for bad behavior,  but I find it comforting that it is at least gives the reason for it.

[justnothing]

Um… I’m sorry it took me this long to reply. I just wasn’t sure what to say for some reason. All I can say is that I’m sorry your mother used to treat you that way. It wasn’t your fault that she sounded sincere that she wanted you to spit in her face… maybe in a way she was and really just wanted a reason to slap you (so that she could get back in her mind at whatever imaginary aggressor, or whatnot).

Anyway, thanks again for your reply and everything you said and I hope you have a great day.