The traumatizing criticisms from my alcoholic father when he was drunk I could accept that he would not remember what he said and did. The traumatizing words when he wasn't drunk (which I am sure were far fewer times than I realized back then) he never acted accountable for. In fact my father would deliver such a devastating judgment of me and then seconds later start chatting about the weather or something equally inoccuous as I was still doubled over from the proverbial punch in the gut. It felt like a second blow, in fact.
A therapist once told me he was being deliberately cruel. I defended him saying he didn't seem at all aware of the hurt he was causing me from his affect. Was I just fighting to minimize the cruelty? My mother always defended his cruelty to his kids as his not knowing any better since he had been orphaned at 5.
My uBPD mother's terrorizing behavior toward me came more rarely than my dad's, the overt rage, though there was often a patronizing tone to her, or her favorite pronouncement, "Whatever possessed you?" if I ever strayed from the good girl role she had assigned me and had cultivated tapping into my natural grandiosity to achieve a laudable persona for her respect. it was a pedestal the legs of which became shorter the older I grew. I was what they call a parentified child at times. then again I would be infantilized, too. I guess that depended on my mother's need at a moment in time. Being mothered by me or babying me. Didn't make for a smooth emotional development I am thinking for me.
I often excused my mother's abuse as the obvious result of being so stressed out in an alcoholic marriage. My dad's behavior had her acting not like herself I reasoned. If he would only stop drinking she would not change personalities like he did. She used to beg me to get him to stop drinking. Insisted i was the only one who could. For a long time i assumed my adulthood could begin only when I fixed their marriage by getting him to stop drinking.
Though fewer times she aimed her annihilating anger at me, for something often i had inadvertently done, but I confess i would rather have 1000 insensitive comments from my drunken or sober angry father than one of my mother's condemning pronouncements of me as having fallen from grace and deserving of exorcism at the very least it would seem for betraying her by not being the person she had trusted so. By not reading her mind and knowing "how she would feel." This was a requirement she asserted to me from a very early age.
The other thing with my mother was she never acknowledged even let alone apologized for the tasering things she would say. Never ever. It was like amnesia.
And if I dared broach what happened to that seemingly safer mommy later, suddenly the witch mommy got triggered once again and castigated me again, so I lived in an egg shell walking universe with both her and my father. Being as compliant as possible to avoid being in the line of fire. I could not express the hurt she had caused me. Trying to would trigger more hurting.
When my mother treated me decently I wondered how she really felt about me, which was the real mother. The one who could explode with so much malice or the mother who seemed decent.
If I ever expressed an unhappy feeling about a situation I was in in the family my mother would say shamingly and sarcastically, "Oh, you are soo abused!" as if this was the colossal opposite of my reality and I was so selfish expressing my feelings.
I feel like I am still re-raising my inner child after all these years. And I really have to work at self-comfort and what they call global self-esteem. That is the self esteem that keeps the self-hate at bay when you make a mistake, fail at something, or someone significant gets angry at you. It doesn't come readily. I think my ego often punishes me the way my parents' would.
Decades ago, after being estranged for several years from the family because of my mother, her anger and my terror of her anger, and her making such little effort at conflict resolution, she once I remember wrote me a letter saying she had wracked her brain trying to remember a time she had stressed me unfairly. She had confided something negative about my father after a trip they had taken. My mouth fell open. That was her moment of accountability? That one thing?
She complained to me about my father non-stop. They had rip roaring ugly fights whenever he came home drunk especially on the weekends, and the older I got the more i was pulled into them, trying to deflect the danger from my mother though it was my mother who was poking him, like at a tiger with a stick, and my father was physically threatening but my mother had such a mean tongue and was so cruel and stinging to him.
Anyway, if I complained about my father, which I did because she was always getting me worked up about him, she would tell me I was being disrespectful, since he was good provider and had a tough childhood. This was that Karpman Triangle scenario when the rescuer, persecutor, and victim keep shifting roles.
As I got older and tried to live an independent life I saw that this was impossible since there was often a crisis due to my father's alcoholism that pulled me back into the drama and being available for my mother.
When I moved away briefly and didn't visit my parents often enough according to my mother after college the witch mommy took over the reins for a good long time when i moved back home and it was clear she would never forgive me for that. Looking back I wonder if I was so colossally insensitive as she perceived me. I will never know the exact nature of that reality. I know it was a relief to be away from the chronic tension and explosions between my parents.
I was terrified of my mother. But I didn't easily acknowledge that to myself. If I did I chastised myself for fearing her since she was such a good mother, my fear must be something very sick about me and not based on her behavior, on reality, though once I broke through my denial I could acknowledge how cruel and shaming she had actually often been to me especially when I was having intense and uncontrollable crying jags that were terrifying me in their frequency, it was like gasoline on a fire, her rage at me for crying. They of course exacerbated the crying. A mother who was solicitous of me when I was physically ill was so unbelievably punishing when I was emotionally ill.
Anyway, my dedication to hovering so closely to the orbit of my parents I rationalized that was me as a good daughter who's pity for her parents, especially her mother, kept her own world so small and never seriously launching a truly adult life. It was more about my childlike fear at not providing the unreasonable focus she demanded from me than about my own preferably perceived adult compassion.
Thanks for listening.
Best,
Bethanny
