Creating Space, Compassionate Witness to My Childhood Story

[Our abuse recovery guide]

I want to hold space on this site for myself, first as a child of a borderline mother. I probably can explore other groups at some point because I may qualify, but I start here because I seek to become a compassionate witness to my childhood, which after many years of hard, careful work I am proud to be at a place to begin to offer myself, including the decision to find this community. So I want to talk about mom here, in a way that honors her as I have always taken exquisite pains to do, but most importantly now, I seek to honor the child that I was and to seek to meet some of my adult needs amongst and with other adults who have struggled through some of these hard experiences too.

I do want to mention a disclaimer here: there are many layers that do not so neatly all fit. While to my horror I have noticed that I do have some charactersitics of BPD despite trying so carefully to learn to avoid my mother's mistakes, and I also have been going through a seperation and divorce for the past several years, the pain as I feel it and experience it has most consistently been know to me as a mother wound and a challenge in leaving mom to grow up, even so many years after mom has passed. Other groups and belongings have eased the pain and offered me opportunities and options in my lifetime quest to grow into myself, but as I come to the end of the chapter of some of those groups, I find acceptance of a need for a new place of belonging. Yet, because I intend to share deep emotions such as grief, anger, and pain, and some of these just as present in me now as when I was a child, I have to add that this is not my only source of support or strength, and I need to make that known so that I can with time share deeply without worrying about overburdening others.

However, I am looking forward to being able to write some of my story here because I think people who have experienced a parent with characteristics of BPD might find help and healing too. This gives me confidence in exercising voice as the setting and space here has mostly already been created. This is a great gift and help to myself in the work of speaking on my reality that has often been hard to find space for in a way that benefits all involved. Thank you, and thank you.

And now for a bit of raw emotion, which now that I hope I have shows you that I am both careful and self aware in how I speak, that I on some deep level as yet to be healed, very much needing to speak: I am tired but I am also finally angry and indignant and disgusted that I am compelled to speak because I have often been alone in this lifelong longing to know what happened to me. Where my mother seem to charge through life with both guns blazing yet rarely seeming emotionally reflective, and where I feel as though my brothers and father dutifully marched on through and past, rarely looking back, as an empath and witness from childhood to all this, I am deeply affected and I have an emotional landscape and wreckage laying around me and in me, a constant call on my own. This empathetic, feeling, clinging heart o a sensitive, receptive, responsive six year old who I was when I became aware that I was thinking about all these things.I think my solitude as a child, and in school, and yet my longing to have friends, who noticed things, is still very much with me more than thirty years later. As much as I have longingly attempted to persuade other family members to understand me to join me in my quest, to take interest, to take remembrance, it is at last dawning on me that they are not able. They try, they listen politely, they corroborate one thing or another, but there was no me, with me, while I saw what I saw and heard what I heard. There was no other adult bearing witness to my pain of an empath, deeply feeling, and a gifted child, perceiving, wondering, curious, putting two and two together, turning the problems over and over with the confidence. So, because I accept this about myself, and the pain and worry about protecting family members privacy and experimenting in finding in life the appropriate place and space to share these things, I do now want to write these things down.

I am tired of holding secrets for my family. I am tired of holding the burden what I have seen and felt inside. I needed a good bit of help for it then and I do now as well. Its sad that this silence has weighed on me so much, and has not helped or changed many of the realities, so I think I wish to break out of this pattern and have had enough help and support to this point to be able to do it. I think I deserved to be heard when I was that child, but did not seek out and was not given that space, and I deserve to hold space for myself now. Stories fade swiftly, and the opportunity to hold someone’s ear for these rich family traditions can seem impossible to imagine. I think the best I can say is, all these years of trepidaciously studying, of privately and scientifically corroborating evidence, of interviewing family members as though I myself were a counselor or a parent rather than a wounded adult them self in need of one, and to giving the benefit of doubt, all these years have added greatly to my understanding of what was happening and to my own experiences and my own questions of how to speak on these things one day and how to find strength to believe myself. Life circumstances and changes have added a pain and pressure and urgency to this lifetime goal, letting me know that I'm almost ready and that its almost time.

A little note or promise to myself and to members of bpdfamily.com on what I hope to right and what I'm looking forward to. So I am very much hoping to write story chapters here for your, and my own, healing. I am an authority only on my own experience, and my own ability to speak and write, persuade and propose. I am responsible to find a space and voice to do this for myself, and will give it a try if my writing continues to seem to me to be a benefit to myself and others here.  I now am seeking to be as loyal to myself as I am now learning with practice to do, coming a long way from a child who was loyal to my mother, who overwhelmed me with her own a sense of purpose and belonging. I learned to serve her, to stay with her, and to stop being myself, to trade the real me in for a silent, detached, way of showing up in life, that I think writing will be a good exercise here in a different approach.

[Penelope M]

I want to hold space on this site for myself, first as a child of a borderline mother. I probably can explore other groups at some point because I may qualify, but I start here because I seek to become a compassionate witness to my childhood, which after many years of hard, careful work I am proud to be at a place to begin to offer myself, including the decision to find this community. So I want to talk about mom here, in a way that honors her as I have always taken exquisite pains to do, but most importantly now, I seek to honor the child that I was and to seek to meet some of my adult needs amongst and with other adults who have struggled through some of these hard experiences too.

I do want to mention a disclaimer here: there are many layers that do not so neatly all fit. While to my horror I have noticed that I do have some charactersitics of BPD despite trying so carefully to learn to avoid my mother's mistakes, and I also have been going through a seperation and divorce for the past several years, the pain as I feel it and experience it has most consistently been know to me as a mother wound and a challenge in leaving mom to grow up, even so many years after mom has passed. Other groups and belongings have eased the pain and offered me opportunities and options in my lifetime quest to grow into myself, but as I come to the end of the chapter of some of those groups, I find acceptance of a need for a new place of belonging. Yet, because I intend to share deep emotions such as grief, anger, and pain, and some of these just as present in me now as when I was a child, I have to add that this is not my only source of support or strength, and I need to make that known so that I can with time share deeply without worrying about overburdening others.

However, I am looking forward to being able to write some of my story here because I think people who have experienced a parent with characteristics of BPD might find help and healing too. This gives me confidence in exercising voice as the setting and space here has mostly already been created. This is a great gift and help to myself in the work of speaking on my reality that has often been hard to find space for in a way that benefits all involved. Thank you, and thank you.

And now for a bit of raw emotion, which now that I hope I have shows you that I am both careful and self aware in how I speak, that I on some deep level as yet to be healed, very much needing to speak: I am tired but I am also finally angry and indignant and disgusted that I am compelled to speak because I have often been alone in this lifelong longing to know what happened to me. Where my mother seem to charge through life with both guns blazing yet rarely seeming emotionally reflective, and where I feel as though my brothers and father dutifully marched on through and past, rarely looking back, as an empath and witness from childhood to all this, I am deeply affected and I have an emotional landscape and wreckage laying around me and in me, a constant call on my own. This empathetic, feeling, clinging heart o a sensitive, receptive, responsive six year old who I was when I became aware that I was thinking about all these things.I think my solitude as a child, and in school, and yet my longing to have friends, who noticed things, is still very much with me more than thirty years later. As much as I have longingly attempted to persuade other family members to understand me to join me in my quest, to take interest, to take remembrance, it is at last dawning on me that they are not able. They try, they listen politely, they corroborate one thing or another, but there was no me, with me, while I saw what I saw and heard what I heard. There was no other adult bearing witness to my pain of an empath, deeply feeling, and a gifted child, perceiving, wondering, curious, putting two and two together, turning the problems over and over with the confidence. So, because I accept this about myself, and the pain and worry about protecting family members privacy and experimenting in finding in life the appropriate place and space to share these things, I do now want to write these things down.

I am tired of holding secrets for my family. I am tired of holding the burden what I have seen and felt inside. I needed a good bit of help for it then and I do now as well. Its sad that this silence has weighed on me so much, and has not helped or changed many of the realities, so I think I wish to break out of this pattern and have had enough help and support to this point to be able to do it. I think I deserved to be heard when I was that child, but did not seek out and was not given that space, and I deserve to hold space for myself now. Stories fade swiftly, and the opportunity to hold someone’s ear for these rich family traditions can seem impossible to imagine. I think the best I can say is, all these years of trepidaciously studying, of privately and scientifically corroborating evidence, of interviewing family members as though I myself were a counselor or a parent rather than a wounded adult them self in need of one, and to giving the benefit of doubt, all these years have added greatly to my understanding of what was happening and to my own experiences and my own questions of how to speak on these things one day and how to find strength to believe myself. Life circumstances and changes have added a pain and pressure and urgency to this lifetime goal, letting me know that I'm almost ready and that its almost time.

A little note or promise to myself and to members of bpdfamily.com on what I hope to right and what I'm looking forward to. So I am very much hoping to write story chapters here for your, and my own, healing. I am an authority only on my own experience, and my own ability to speak and write, persuade and propose. I am responsible to find a space and voice to do this for myself, and will give it a try if my writing continues to seem to me to be a benefit to myself and others here.  I now am seeking to be as loyal to myself as I am now learning with practice to do, coming a long way from a child who was loyal to my mother, who overwhelmed me with her own a sense of purpose and belonging. I learned to serve her, to stay with her, and to stop being myself, to trade the real me in for a silent, detached, way of showing up in life, that I think writing will be a good exercise here in a different approach.

[Penelope M]

Post #2, My Six Years Old Magical Memory of Childhood with Mom in a Beautiful House with Family and a Neighborhood with Friends is probably my favorite memory. It is also a real memory, and a true one - the joy of innocence and connectedness and comfort that I feel when I think of it was as real as the hot South Carolina sun, as real as the sandy backyard and as real as me and my brothers playing together and exploring the backyard while my parents worked gardening and caring for it. It was a time when who I was, and what I needed, seemed to match where I was and what my parents wanted from me, what the world wanted from me, as special time that seems pure and holy oasis of childhood happiness that I return to drink from often, in my daydreams then and now.

I could be a child and I could meet others expectations, I felt, and the world had many interesting things to explore, to learn about. This was a delicate, precious experience of what I remember as family comfort, just before mom reached a tipping point and my life would be flooded with grief, concern, and watchfulness, where my childhood transformed from curious and unafraid exploration to cautious tip-toe tightrope diplomacy and impossible conflicts of interest where there was no hope, no resolution in sight for me getting my emotional needs met. If that does not sound too depressing, I do feel defeated as I read it even now, and those are the impossible terms of life that I accepted.

This makes me question if it is even wise for me to try to write about this, if in some way I am carrying on my mothers unintentional emotional abuse of me through the imbalance of her own unexamined and unsupported social supports, by subjecting myself to experience this over and over again. I do not think so, I suffer daily, and though the traumatic memories may be built into my bodily reactions, writing a story is comforting and hopeful to me. It reminds me of reading the stories that comforted me in childhood, that seemed to connect with my feelings in a way others around me could not and that I needed. So now, I am writing this to both take care of and comfort my emotional empathic childhood self in a way I could not then, and take care of my adults self in a way that I can now. But, the danger is always there that I will get more depressed by taking up old obsessions and problems that have no solutions. I am a vulnerable human being even as a larger and more experienced adult than I was as a tiny, small and obedient child. But I often feel now the same way I think that I remember feeling as a child, and some educators suggest this is a nonverbal body memory of a trauma and I am aware as I feel things to take care and be careful. I learn to respect my wounded empathically attuned adult self, and care for the characteristics of BPD and of PTSD that I now face such as aching feelings of abandonment at times that come up in normal interactions, or a numbness and overstimulation of emotion when I get too close to a painful experience. Its a different kind of struggle that I face now as an adult, now that I have learned to attune to my own needs as best I can.

But in my childhood, I became obsessed shortly after this ideal moment at six years old, with helping mommy, and her problems, verbal outbursts, and discussion of her adult needs and the recruitment of me and my brothers to meet those needs, and the alienation from my father as she increasingly scapegoated and villainized him in verbal ventilation of pain and anger and her assessment of the world, and what was wrong with it, and the conclusion that my job as a child was to identify with her, to take her side against my father and against men in the world at large, and provide validation and support for her. This is where things become particularly shameful and delicate for me. As a child my challenge was to believe mom, be obedient to her and loyal, and to join her, to subscribe to her educational content that she wanted to teach on, and to never question her. So I took up the impossible task, brave little boy that I was, of listening to mom pour out her pain, maybe in the way I wanted and needed an empathetic and caring adult witness to do for me. I despaired of having any feelings and communications of my own at home - there was no space for it, mom occupied and dominated that emotional, psychological, and social landscape. That was quickly a very different picture than that moment of happiness those years in that two story house in the sandy South Carolina backyard, when mom and dad worked together and had friends, and where I had not yet been recruited against my father and into mom's campaign. This was a happy, magical place, a turning point, where I can feel even today some of the joys of being a child, where I think that I had not yet stepped into a weighty emotional role of supporting my mom that hurt me and though it served some purpose for her, probably fed her illness and not what she really needed.

That is the shameful and confusing part. I only wanted to help her and I got support for helping her, but I did not know the help I needed myself the way that I do now as an adult looking back. That is why when I am writing this, I am keeping myself and my own wellness central in a way that I was not able to as a child or even in the pain I felt in my teens and twenties with trying to hold onto a relationship with myself and mom at the same time.

I also to this very day feel ashamed for not being able to take better emotional care of mom as her illness progressed, and I feel horrified that I have not taken better emotional care of myself, or the effects on my mind and body of my lifetime predisposition of feeling capable to care for others while neglecting myself. But as a child I just knew that I was concerned for mommy. But there was a year or two in that same house, that I experienced the wonder and joy of childhood, nature, family unity, community belonging of my parents and myself, and a marvel at the world that was unfolding before me. Then, tragedy struck.

The tragedy of mental illness, of emotional abuse, and of child parentification came as a shock and a concern that drew me closer to mom for comfort, and comfort would come with the ebbs and flows of the disease, in a rhythm and cycle that had a logic all of its own, of about two hours of pained, angry raging by mom, after which she would find some comfort and calmness, and cheery skies seemed to return, like clouds parting after the rain. These spells were severe, upsetting and unpredictable, but I would try to study what she said to see if I could solve the problem that daddy could not, and it seemed that mommy held the answer to, and offered me a clear belonging on her team that she was creating. Mom sounded an alarm that would not stop for the rest of her life, that something was wrong, not in her heart or emotions, but in the world, out there somewhere, or in our home, with my father, or elsewhere, and she gave clear orders to us as children what we were to do about it. We were to stand by her, to support her, and she began to lecture urgently about things she felt were wrong in the world, conspiracies of politics and power that I could not see, but looked for, and wondered about, and wanted to believe so that I could be good and one of the few people in the world who do what is right and listen to her.

I know now these were adult things that were organized around and disrupted by a tragic illness that was causing me great pain because it was preventing my mommy from being able to care for my emotional needs, and though it was flattering to think mommy needed me to listen to her, and it was interesting to try to learn from her about this interesting world. I truly think that mom did not mean to emotionally abuse me, or ever think for an instant that her unawareness had that effect on me, but that is what was happening to me and my delicate empathy. I did not have in her a compassionate witness to myself and my own inner experience that I was becoming aware of.

It pains me today to admit what she would not, that she had an emotional imbalance and illness and no other adult in the world who could help her see it. I am proud as a child of trying to help with a problem that was very serious. I am really sorry how much it hurt me, and how little ability I really had to help, and how I was badly damaged myself in what I innocently believed was helping. I could not bear to leave my mother even today, years after she has passed on, I still cling to her in my heart, am concerned for her in my emotions, and struggle to allow myself to be angry at the harm that her disease caused me, struggle to see my emotional needs as present and important now as they were as a child. That is probably the fawning response of a scared child who must depend on powerful adults, and in my case mom, with noble intentions, unintentionally passed on a practice of verbal and emotional abuse of me, and dominated me. Yet, in many ways mom was my hero, I thought of her as brave, and strong, the way she wanted to see herself and needed to see herself, for she too was a survivor of parental emotional abuse. As a child I understood these things about her, and did not realize my own needs were being pushed aside so that I could hold a space for her. She did need somebody to support her, and though it may have been hard if not impossible to find at the time, I know as an adult who has had to try, that she needed to try and she had decided not to. Mom was a fighter, and an artist, and I admire those qualities about her, and think her brave for it, so she became my hero and source of validation because I could not have one in myself. I could not be proud of myself, I was ashamed from the emotional abuse and felt responsible for it and did not think of it as abuse at all, but my responsibility to care emotionally for mom in response to the pain of not being seen by her or cared about, but used as a vessel for her instead. 

As long as mom continued to sound the alarm that something was wrong in the world, and offer solutions through raging, crying and recruiting me and my brothers as her confidentes to side against my father and the world. There was an attachment and emotional problem somewhere behind these discussions of adult realities of the world and it was causing me great pain, and I truly believed listening to mom would help make the world right and maybe even help me. At the age of six, as the wonders of childhood innocence and coming to the age of awareness and industry bloomed like the goldenrod with mountains of pollen sweeping along the sidewalks in the hot South Carolina sun, I accepted a deep wound full of shame, overbearing in guilt, was that mom did not need help from other adults, she only needed her children, and she was able to be our hero and our savior.

To this day I am greatly conflicted and torn about my membership in her party. It seemed to me then and now that I had no other option, and yet I feel as though I made a willing choice to particpate, and had an intention and desire to do what was asked, and a fire of love and compassion in my heart to do what was right. That I was an abused child seems so sad to me, and so opposite of what either my mother or my father or me or the world intended, but with decades of my own careful and conflicted and loyal study of her needs and my needs, that mom suffered from a painful illness absolutely rings true despite her protests. I settle on this charactersitic, as well as several of Narcisistic Personality Disorder, with the defensiveness as though I were a lawyer working on her behalf, and at the same time, the shame, embarassment, and denial of a child wanting to believe the best in his parents while caught in the middle of divorce, my mother's disease, and my own unmet needs. This brings me great pain today because after this lifetime of study of her, I have identified borderline characteristics that today effect my emotions badly, to my horror, while in the midst of the pain of my own seperation and divorce. I feel badly ashamed to share that bit of information, and guilty for the pain I fear it is causing my own children who are about the age now that I was then. But my hope is that by writing this story, I will find for myself some of the freedom and liberation from this disease that I could not find as a child and that a lifetime of concern and pain for my mother did not have the power to change. I hope in holding space for myself now as a grieving adult empath who himself suffers from feelings of abandonment, that I am making choices that are absorbing and redirectiong some of the tragic suffering caused to me by how this mental illness interrupted the capacity of my mother to percieve my needs, to connect with me, and to guide me in my emotional and social development in this challenging world. So I return to that house, and my six years old, to the joys and pains of life and holding space for remembering tragedy in a way that is respecful of myself, my mom, and I hope, others who have this disease as well as family members and survivors.

But most of all I have learned through a lifetime of recovery to find a way that is honoring of myself, and I have not felt that I could honor myself until I first considered all the needs of others. That is really sad because I had no intention of becoming a martyr or caretaker emotionally, but that is the conflict I always felt with my emotions, a hyperawareness of how my actions could affect others, even though I don't hold others to those same standards that I hold myself. I just want to find space for having my own voice and have had to wait and study a long time until I feel it is safe to do it. This is the lingering effects of the emotional abuse, the burden of having to become a perfect non-entity, in order to accomodate this damned illness that hurt my mother and by extension hurt me badly, caused her to not be emotionally attuned for me in ways I deeply needed somebody to be. So here, in this space, I am accomplishing my life task of both finding out how to help my mother who deeply struggled with this disease in her own way that caused her to lash out at people, places and things in a way I was determined to one day understand but always knew that I had not yet figured it out but that there was a logic and and answer out there somewhere and that one day I would find it. It is so sad that I am just now, by learning to attend to my own pain and what may be my own mental illnesses such as codependency, depression and feelings of abandonment, healing to the point of being able to learn the skills to do this.

I can distantly see a hint that in some way I have been deeply hurt in ways that could have been better prevented, and have some sadness for myself. But I cannot see this very well. I can better see spaces and moments of joy that stand out to me, like those happy years in the two story house, that are full of color and life and are vivid and rich sources of connection for me. I use those rich moments as touchpoints and though I can trace outward from there to a point, I must often return to memories and moments such as these because they give me strength in the present.

[khibomsis]

  Penelope, and welcome to the family! We are sorry for what brings you here but happy you found us.
I just wanted to say that I am reading and following your posts. Sending you some empathy! I think the emotional work that you are doing is healing. With time the bitter memories will fade and the good ones will remain. And in healing yourself you are able to give your children a deeper love.
 

[Penelope M]

Post #3

In my first post I set my goal of beginning the challenge within this supportive space to tell my story here of growing up with mom. My second post showed a glimpse of a happy and ideal childhood in that white two story house with the sandy backyard in South Carolina. In this my third post, I want to write about how upsetting it was when paranoid features of mom's undiagnosed borderline disorder interrupted my childhood.

Mom was being hi-tech harassed, she said, piquing the curiosity of my brothers and me and my father. She seemed irritated, angry, and on edge, defensive, and forceful about this. Dad thought she needed counseling and seemed unconvinced. My brothers and I drew close, listening as concerned early grade school boys to what mom said was happening. Men, mom said, were jealous of her female genius and had gotten together to spy on her to make her uncomfortable and intimidated. It was very uncomfortable to hear mom talk like this. The happy childhood I longed for at home, where I hoped to play with other kids, see my parents interacting together and with other adults, and being involved as a family in community like we were years earlier was quickly drawing to a close, where mom threw a birthday party and let me invite all my kindergarden class, or dad brought us to cub scouts and even was a den leader. Soon mom and dad would not even interact with each other, would not entertain guests, and my childish concern would be increasingly taken up on listening to mom as she explained to me dangers in the world out there somewhere that she was bravely defending herself and her family against. It was upsetting, but it was also a problem that I thought I could help her solve. Mom felt unsupported as her aunts and uncles drew back, fearing that she was turning crazy, and their suggestions that she get help and counseling just made her more angry. Dad drew quiet and withdrawn as his assessment was rejected by her. Mom grew louder in protest as the months and years went on, beginning and education campaign. Many of the things she was saying about feminism, organizations, and gender relations intrigued me and seemed sound, it would be years before I would be able to understand the emotional imbalance beneath them, in the workings of a disease and disorder that is based on attachments, percieved rejections, and that had its own logic that was different from the verbalized content. The language of feared abandonment and percieved rejection was seen in mom's high sensitivity. But mom was so smart and argumentative that nobody could convince her otherwise. But my task as a child became increasingly, to comfort her with something that she said no other adult seemed to be doing for her: that is, supporting her, listening to her, and heeding her wisdom. It is a sad reality of social rejection of people who are mentally ill that this is so, but it was also a tragic consequence of mom's choice not to get help for herself, while at the same time it was very apparent to me that she needed my help of empathy, which was powerless to heal the disease, but I am sure was of some comfort to her. It is only now, over 30 years later, after decades of devotion to mom, and defensiveness for her, and eventually despairing of my own ability to help her as I grew into an adulthood where I could feel how painfullly unprepared I was to even helping myself, that I had to leave mom in order to grow for myself. It felt horrible, I felt the shame of having become a betrayer of her to whom I had sworn my allegience since I was six years old. I see now that the good intentions of a child were powerless against this disease that I myself have come to carry certain characteristics of: feelings of abandonment, and overwhelming shame for becoming a self and exercising the rights of a self. But I go back to that day when I was six, when mom, who perhaps always had bpd, expressed those paranoid features when under extreme distriss from a legitimate problem that she was experiencing while finishing her college degree. I would spend the next few decades studying her story instead of being a child. I would spend the next few years learning from her all the things she had noticed about the world, so hesitant to believe that someone so smart and talented and creative could be mentally ill. I spent the next few decades living in a strange closeness to seeking to understand mom, while not having anyone who was seeking to understand me. It is scary living with someone who has a mental illness and who is seeking to heal themselves. Mom wanted to get well but wanted to get this healing for herself, and she did not want treatment from doctors or therapy with counselors or support from groups of adults. Sadly, because she did need what one hopes could be found amongst other adults, it was extracted from the community of children she formed around her, and as an empath I really needed a lot of extra support during those times. It was really sad caring about mom and thinking that other adults didn't support her, which I know now was probably a deep childhood wound she was expressing. It is sad that what she needed fell on me as a child to carry the bottom line of to try to think of a way to help a person who narcissistically didn't think anything could possibly be wrong - it had to be the rest of the world that was wrong. I was willing to entertain this benefit of the doubt as a child and I am glad I did because it is absolutely true. But it would have been better for her to know that she needed help, and to have been able to arrange for herself another adult or group of adults. There was none. Just me, my brothers, and my withdrawn father, and mom who exuded her childhood pain, and me, an empath child without an attuned parent or counselor to help me process how unfair this was. But life is not fair. Life happens, consequences fell, and living bodies and being and souls reacted. I grew where I could. It hurt a lot. I lost a lot of the little kid who I was in the process. I wonder what my little child self felt and needed and wanted during those times. But that just wasn't an option. I am an adult child of a mother with BPD and NPD. Its a lonely, stifling and suffocating trauma of wanting to run away from somethings scary that wasn't directly hurting me, but not being able to find the help I need for all the feelings I was having, and then sitting and listening and listening and listening to someone who felt they were being hurt but other adults in a world that I had not control, presence, power or membership in. I was a child with a mother who could not see how her being sick was hurting me. I know she loved me but I did not know that borderline disorder could not be solved by a curious, empathetic, concerned and courageous child who believed in his mother and who had to give up a lot of his needs to be heard, to a disease that cannot hear anything except what it needs to be soothed. So, by soothing mom, I could eventually if I were patient, find my own peace, in waiting out the roller coasters of her anger until the path cleared, being careful to do nothing that might make the natural course that she needed take any longer than it needed to. I soothed mom, and myself, by listening quietly to her while she talked, cried and taught about whatever was bothering her, whatever she was angry about in the world, and whatever wounds pained her that I seemed to be able to feel. I got through the ups and downs of mom's illness by learning how not to take up any space, by being seen and not heard, by being a quiet, supportive witness to mom's pain which was real and needed and deserved, as a human being, not to go through it alone. Sadly this taught me an awful lesson that I was worth nothing, that it was my job in life to dissapear and placate the powerful, and to be prone to the flattery of people who find me to be special because of this vulnerability. I find it hard today to think of this as emotional abuse, to think of mom as an adult who was responsible for ignoring my emotional needs which she did not have the gift of empathy to see. I do not think I was mom's caretaker, because she took care of herself. But I gave over so much of my heart to her because I hoped perhaps one day to be worthy of being cared about by her. I know she cared for me. Children are brave partly because they do not realize how big of the problem they are in. These were adult problems of a very isolated woman who I defended then with all my heart, who I belived in with all my heart, and who wanted me to be on her side. Its really, really sad. Well into adulthood I still felt very defensive of her when relatives implied she was crazy, and this made me feel even more alone, because I did not have the luxury they did to be able to choose to accept her or not. This was my mom, and I would stand by her while a disease took its course and mom could not see it, where other adults resented her and thought she was crazy, but she was my only hope for getting my emotional needs met. I had to be a good boy by standing by someone who was rejected by other adults, and who themselve rejected other adults. Mom could usually not get along with others. So, better to get along with her children who had no power to question her. This is a really sad and solutionless existence, when you feel like your mom is your only link to feeling okay with yourself, and you feel like you are your mom's only link to support and help. So there we were, all stuck together during childhood. There were many good times in spite of this, and many normal childhood experiences too, but to find them I often times had to leave my brothers behind, who had become withdrawn and isolated, to go out and find friends to play with and something active to get into to deal with my pain and my growing social needs. But I often felt guilty leaving my brothers behind to do this, they were not motivated in the same way I was and did not deal with the pain in the same ways. As an adult I would feel awful for trying clumsily to set boundaries with mom, to diplomatically navigate coparenting with her and my dad, and to try my hand at following all that mom had taught me about life as it gradually dawned on me that I would need to leave one day, not just for college, but also for good. I was afraid to let mom try to live her life on her own as best she could, and terrified of the guilt of leaving her, and yet feeling that adulthood attempts to be around her increasingly left me feeling exasperated, overwhelmed, and feeling such high concern for her and for myself that I finally knew I would need to move away to a big city and build with very shaky legs upon the foundation that she was able to offer me. I'm thankul for all mom taught me, and for my own courage to know when I needed to go. There is tremendous survivor's guilt in that, as I was not yet in my own therapy and though I knew I needed help, I hadn't yet figured out exactly how and where to get it. It would be a decade and a half past then till know, six years after mom passed, that I am just starting to understand something of my own pain of what may be my own symptoms of borderline disorder, thereby helping me experientially to understand some of moms. But mom had additionally a narcissistic disorder which narrowed her empathy into a tiny pinhole - she had very little capacity or space to understand others emotions, but a very large need to have her own attending to, and expressed, artistically or otherwise. I am an empath, and I feel others emotions strongly, and as a child I needed an adult with competent, attuned skills at reading my feelings and helping me sort them out. I would get that decades later as an adult, leaving a good many innocent childhood years emotinoally neglected. Now today, the love and care and concern I still have for mom, I am starting to have for myself too. I will never get a turn at being loved by her the way I wanted her to love me and the way I tried to show her I loved her, by listening, and empathizing, and holding space for her. But I am now trying to do this for myself by writing this here and growing to be a strong, competent and empathetic witness for myself and the child that I was. This is a great joy and lifetime victory of mine: in this compassionate space, and informed by adult to adult therapy and support groups, at last I get what my heart desired and needed then and now: that both mom and me get to be understood. Its a little piece of hard-won heaven present though we do not always understand the timing of these things, we have these desires in our heart for a reason, at least the reason could be these are my personal values of listening to others and wanting to be listened to, and learning to take up space at last where I can be sure that I will respect myself and it will be a beneit to myself and others.

[khibomsis]

 

[Penelope M]

Post #4: I Abandon My Role of Silence That Did Not Win the Love and Protection of My Being Though I  Had a Parent With a Mental Illness and Emotionaly Abuse Tendencies and Both My Parents Had Survived Alcholic households. I Deserved Then and Now and Speak Up Today at Age 40 For The Child I was Who Deserved To Be Heard But was Convinced Not To Believe What He Saw, Felt and Experienced.

 I have decided just this week to leave my six year old collusion with my beloved yet emotionally abusive actions of my mother and to some extent my father,  and I have returned in imagination to my pre-conscious infanthood where I still felt it was okay instinctually to fight to get my needs heard. Most of my life I remember childhood at kindergarten, where I learned to be good and obey and to pretend to not know what I know. But today, in my adulthood almost forty year old heart while I was at work, on purpose I pretended to take off and put my six year old oath of silence in a box in the warehouse where I work, disposing of it in the proper way when discovering with horror, surprise and fierce compassion. I want to speak and I now have enough people that love me and see my pain and confident to feel able to do it so I am writing here.

There is a deep wrong that has been thought of as good, that has been treated with affection, which is my decision as a child to never betray one parent to another, and to become a good tough little soldier, a good little boy, by thinking my being quiet was going to protecting the fragile brittle, clamouring insatiable disease of my mother and father. It was a family system that I did not create, that I was not responsible for, and that was the structure that guided me and functioned for some purpose. It moved, it worked, it had its own agenda and its own logic and its own managers and processes. I still deeply love my parents and can hardly bring myself to say this. But I now know that as a tiny child I misheard the cry for my mother for a protector, supporter, and restitution. I maybe came to be persuaded that I really did not, or had better not have, needs of my own, but that the family silence and study and monologue had better be enough for me. So I think I entered a long period of numb servitude in close relationships, even my own head and heart were swollen, painful places to try to come out of denial. It has not been safe until I am now almost forty to give up on that vow of the conscious child that a tragic family adult disease is worthy of more honor, protection, reverence, secrecy, denial, and care, than a growing child’s uneasiness with living in and around an untreated mental illness and who even had a mental illness growing inside himself.

There is an added layer of religion that I had not been able to understand until now. Honoring my mother and father is also what would please God. As an adult this seems perfectly ridiculous, but I am speaking as an adult who believes that as a child he had to become quiet, hidden, and keep his feelings to himself. There is the awful pain I feel still that other sincere adult peers might respond to this with some offers of reassurance. Maybe it has not been truly that bad, or perhaps you as a child had been mistaken. However, as an adult witness to my own childhood pain and at last grasping how serious I it was and its effects in me today, I cannot any longer comfort myself with well meaning people who did not grow up with a parent with a mood disorder, or an alcoholism, or some other mental or physical abuse present in the home. Unless your family system was badly disrupted you might have no reason to think twice about it. I never hoped to spend my life wondering where this terrible mental and emotional pain keeps coming from and at almost 40 I do not like still having to come back again and again to it while the rest of the world seems to have comfortably moved on from their childhoods. But that is not my reality, and overlooking my reality is something I have done for years and years. Its what I was taught, and I have had very little help in learning how to face this alone.  I feel now that in the past I would have liked it, hoped in in and thanked them for it, but now that i must protect myself from smiling people who want to sell me their own ideal remembrance of  family experience that they think I might have had. With great pain I own my own experience, and after decades of hoping it were otherwise, I finally accept and take my own sid, and I protect what I went through as my own witness. Though its lonely and has taken me years to come out of silence, I do so now because I have reconciled with abandonment. I accept the neglect that I so feared, has already happened to me, and I have lived through it and now will tell the story as I experienced it, and as I have studied that it happens to people like me. After decades of agreeable hoping that I was remembering wrongly, my past is still with me, and I finally see the abused child that I think I was and I think that I will not be dissuaded any longer from how I remembered and lived my life. I spend my whole life seeking to be reassured by close family members for some way through this problem of pain, and I also have meditated daily well into adulthood perhaps because of my own mental illness now, on what was for me a lonely, painful childhood. I experienced family as a problem that needed to be solved before I had any hope of getting my needs met. This is a horrible forecast for what to expect from ones intimate relationships. Therefore, now that I have left the vow of silence of the emotionally abused child in a box somewhere at work where it belongs, I enter my life free from that impossible task of meditating on  my parents problems before I can be allowed to get any attention on my own. I have at last got therapy for child abuse. I was as a child an emotional being, I saw things and heard things that I have given decades for the adults and fellow survivors opportunity to discuss with me, to get help on, and to validate and affirm. Though I am proud of how I treated others throughout my life, I have a growing horror that I had never realized over how I was treated, and how I treated myself, and the low value and esteem I had for my own emotional suffering, and my own unique way I understood and experienced what was happening in my family.

 Standing in my way is what now seems to be a problematic and sensational rendition of the ten commandments which promise me that I will be rewarded for appeasing my powerful parents and abandoning and ignoring the needs of my weak, sensitive, suffering witness to my life. I voiced my problem to god the other day on the ride home. Did you collude with my abusers? I heard no answer but think I felt in that space a self-compassion for emotional wounds so deep that they cannot be effectively healed without the presence of trained professionals in personal therapy, and a cloud of witnesses of writers in the field. I felt affirmation. Yes, wounds this bad can be confronted gradually over a lifetime, and this is my reality. That is a change in my relationship with God and what I think God wants from people. I am thankful Alice Miller had the courage to write about this in some of her books for adult children because it has helped me care for myself more.

I am abused by a mother who was herself abused, I am ill in some ways and my mother was also ill in others that affected me greatly. I grew up with a mother crying out against her abusers who I could not see try as I might, and I could not understand, study as I might. Now to my horror, here I am crying out quietly as I type against my own abusers, and they are ones I do know, but never wanted to believe that they hurt me, as well as ones that I do not know, of the sufferings  of abandonment and loneliness in the privacy of my own mind that people who struggle with mental health conditions know all to well. I am a survivor and witness to my own family’s untreated mental health disruptions playing out in my own family of origin. But today I have also become, with the help and healing from caring and brave advocates against child abuse, a witness of my own pain.

I have witnessed and studied both the harms done to my mother from her words to me from childhood and her relentless explanations to me about the way the world is, and the harms done by my mother, and this she never acknowledged, but I felt it as pain in my mind and in my heart, and in my sorrow that those who lived with an ill yet domineering parent might know the complications of that. I have some knowledge of my parents experiences as children, and the harms of alcoholism and verbal and emotional abuse that were present in thier homes. I like to think that many of the things they struggled against were broken of their power, and that they left for me an experience protected from what horrified them as children. However, I saw what I saw and I will not be quiet any longer. I am now not only a survivor of emotional abuse, but I have my own mental health concerns to attend to. This is very sad for someone who tried to spend their life worrying about a parent’s mental health, to find themselves afflicted with symptoms too.Its probably easy to hear someone say, but its horrifying to know that you are becoming like your abuser if only in illness. Maybe that is an aftereffect of the emotional trauma related to someone you feared, whose illness was frightening in ways they did not see, whose behavior upsetting at times.

 I had hoped to avoid mistakes (which were actually deep, inflexible behavior patterns that would not change much with time though I changed and grew)  my mother had made and instead I must come to grips with what may be my own borderline disorder or trauma caused by poor attachment from a caregiver, herself unable to attune to what I as a dependent being needed. I don’t know about this explanation but its possible, I’m curious about it. Strangely, I see my mother with great compassion, and most of my hopes at finding compassion for myself and the child who I was are dim, distant, and have no color or texture to them. I grew up turning my attention of compassion to my mother, and that Is what she trained me to do, and felt entitled to, and that is what helped me feel like a good boy, like i belonged, and like I had some worth and value. The glow of validation I experienced from having these thoughts and feelings sheds inverse light on the emptiness both I and my mother held for my own emotional experiences towards myself.

As I looke at my relationships, there were some good ones and some painful ones, but since that was how me and mom related in a way that functioned to leave me feeling unseen yet protect me from her unpredictable irritation, I think maybe I might have learned a habit or think I deserved to pair myself, and continue to be sought out by, people who included addicted or avoidant or tunnel-visioned self-focused people who instinctively wanted to own me as their selfless codependent helper who did not take up too much space or inconvenience them by asserting any equality, who did not ask questions or make any needs known. I had learned, in this not taking up any space, to find satisfaction in people vicariously sometimes. But I want to step back from these rationales, explanations, scripts, and theories whose content carried me into codependency in the first place by talking me out of my right to feel, to see what I see, to seek comfort, to ask for help for troubling things, and to have my feelings heard.

To this day I have glowing admiration and love for my parents, I can feel the childish awe at them, for how beautiful, strong, and safe I often felt around them. I feel ashamed to have experience my childhood so differently from how they experienced my childhood. I feel horrified to have problems of mental health and suffering that could have been treated, noticed, helped and cared for during childhood. I feel sometimes as though I have failed my parents, even now, failed to become a healthy, happy child even at age 40, or successful adult that they wanted. And as I share this story, I notice I  feel disgusted with the weaknesses that have sapped energy away from my life, and I feel longing for a happy childhood, myself now almost forty. I feel that these feelings are offenses and embarassments to my parents who did not experience those times in the same way. While I was once a tiny being that made them proud by my existence, my emotional life did not make them proud then or now, and as an adult struggling with my illnesses and troubled memories at times, my restless searching for comfort is today and embarrassment to them and me. Perhaps that is my own disease and disorder at this point, and its so sad that I keep returning to my parents and memories of my parents when even after all these years they could not give me what I needed to be well and right.

This may be a sad reality of living with a mental illness, and parents may need special supports in dealing with their childrens needs. But that is why I feel a strong need to go back to the story of what I lived and experienced, to fight through the horrors that I feel about it even today. I have realized that I was then sadly, and now am still my only witness to my life then. I accept it and have wished it wasn’t so. I have taken great pains over the past three decateds to find literature, help and corroborating material that could give me some reassurance that somewher out in the world somebody else has experienced the conflicting feelings that I do about wanting to protect and care for a mentally ill parent who was also frightening and upsetting. The fact that I wanted to do that for my mother may have been an awful symptom of my own need to feel protected and cared for while mom was busy screaming and crying at the men in this world who conspired against her. I was greatly concerned that mom had been abused as a child, but I could hardly imagine that beneath the plentiful content, theories, rationalizations, and doctrines that she intelligently and convincinginly lectured often on while she was raging and to which I subjected myself to with concern and obligation and penitence, that what I was experiencing her mood disruptions by an untreated narcissistic and borderline disorder as an abuse and neglect and trauma. I truly think that it is easy for a reader to hear and believe somebody claim abuse, hear them say the word. I don’t think anyone can imagine without me telling them, how much horror I feel in saying the word. I heard my mother use this word for decades and I listened with the love and concern of a child well into my adult years. While she claimed to be being abused, she could not see how her moods were hurting me, and her disease took up so much space that I had needed instead. I was abused by someone who complained about being abused, and that I believed, but who could never help me see that I was worth protecting too. By claiming abuse myself now, I fear that I have become like my mother, embattled, irritated, unseeing.

[Penelope M]

Post #5  Space I Found In An Addiction To Mom As I Experienced Her As My Higher Power Was That I Could Stay in Codependent Adulthood and Try to Understand And Fix Mom's Disease That She Did Not Want Help With or I Could Run Away And Try To Become An Adult And Get Well and Get Help On My Own. I Chose To Grow Alone, She Died And I Faced My Own Pain Like Never Before And With Time I Have Found Compassionate Witnesses To Help Me Accept What Happened to Me and To Her

I don’t think I have the narcissistic disorder that kept mom from seeing my emotions. I do think I may have the borderline disorder that, deeply hidden, brought out feelings of abandnment that drove much of her actions. I vowed in my life that i would never become blaming, hostile and selfishly ignorant of others feelings like my mother, so for me to claim that I was abused as a child sounds so much like her that it scares me. She was the dominating center of attention that she was in our household,It is as though in order for me to deserve be heard or concerned about myself, I would have to identify with and occupy a dominating space and I knew I could never do that, so in the meantime I could also never be heard unless maybe I could help her one day, and that never happened. I would have to make a bid for the absolute power over the content and airspace of voice and sound in my family system, I would have to wrest the seat of psychological control where she held the bottom line, I would have to badger and convince and litigate everyone else in the  family to secure their attention, affection, and submission. The king of the castle gets to have oher people care about how they feel, the weaker dependents must worship her. It doest not matter that I knew mom was sick, and that she could not and would not see it. What matters is that powerful, forceful, overbearing, articulate, passionate fighters like mom were worthy of my love and attention. That sounds like I was dominated and forced into subservience. I was caretaking from a place of scarcity. I was walking on eggshells and if I could walk carefully enough, I might find some space where I could be alone.

 This was the hellish course of the disease that reduced my mom, it would become more and more apparent as I grew into high school and college years, that  to only being able to socializea with her children. Her intelligence and craftsmanship did not matter - she was badly impaired interpesonally in anything that required relationships, from being abile to socialize with other adults, much how bullies are not liked by other children when they are unaware of how their actions are affecting others. My mother was not aware, did not notice and did not care. Its hard for me to temper this observation with knowing that I took up the opposite dysfunction of codependent overfunctioning, seeking to care for other people without taking care of myself, and seeking to be liked by others so that I could feel some sense of love. So I often wanted to help mom be conscientious in the way that I had learned to walk around others, whereas she walked through them.

Both tendencies we held I think now are satires of responsible adulthood, but in the poverty of what I knew then despite all my efforts at getting well and getting out, I often liked to think of myself as knowing something that mom didn’t. I did. I knew my own fearful maladaption that she did not. It was sad to gradually sense that even throughout college the end of my own imagined ability to help or care for mom, and a growing unease at my inability to care for even myself despite the promise of education. I would have to go somewhere else to find the support and safety and space that I needed hope for.

It was with great pain and emptiness in my heart that I moved away from mom and my brothers and tried to learn how to make it in this world, clinging to some friends I had made, a religion I had found, and the hope of leaving country life for a big city’s divirsities and opportunity. I feel conflict, horror and confusion at mom’s inability to cheerled me during these self-concious and nerve-wracking exercises in having a self. That I would look longingly to the one who had so badly damaged, despite her intentions, my own ability to have a self, for encouragement and celebration at milestones of my own recovery from her and my own becoming who I am, is tragic. I was angry that I had to leave mom. I deserved to be celebrated, sent off, and respected for how far I had come in trying to learn how to have healthy relationships. Watching mom meander, crash, and feel her way through life from a distance was heartwrenching for a codependent like me, and when she died of cancer years later  I could not be there with her though I had managed to preserve some relationship of phone calls over time with her, and sending her flowers for mother’s day. When mom died I was in the throes of my own failing marriage and my own difficulty asserting and caring for myself with basics of housing and work. In psychology terms I think my wife had become my replacement unfeeling authority figure, who promised love and acceptance that never came, who mirrored mom’s lack of interest in my emotions and who I would fixate on in hopes of finding some stable attachment figure.

A note on death making things worse. Far from being free of mom in death, there arose a horror and abandonment that I have never experienced before. I had failed to heal her and thus obtain my own right to be comforted. All hopes of having a mother who would love me the way I needed to be loved were ripped aside by death to reveal my very badly damaged ability to survive as a self. My addiction to mom’s brought upon withdrawal symptoms when she died that I am still experiencing today. It is not the peace and acceptance that one may find in a grieving process. It is rather an extremely even more painfull sounding of the alarm that the house of cards that I had build my childhood on was on fire, that the elephant in the room that I had build my life learning how to walk around was now no longer there to be walked around, leaving nothing but my own emptiness and pain that I had not yet experienced and processed. The people and places and things in my life that I had used to compensate for childhood wounds were all taken away from me at once. When mom was there I was always worried about her, and that covered over the pain that I was feeling. When she died, the pain I had not allowed myself to feel rushed in and overwhelmed me with fear, dread, and abandonment that was probably from when I was a child. It was a time of horrific exposure, trauma and ripping open of wounds I thought had been mostly healed because my focus had become on mom’s illness and never on my own pain alone. I thought I had been in pain before but it was pain about my relationship with mom. Now I was in pain about me and this was a new pain that I had been feeling but somehow not fully exposed to.

If you are not the child of a parent with a borderline or narcissistic disorder, and even if you are, and are not yourself an empath personality like me, or if your abuse did not happen in quite the same way as my brothers experienced it very differently than me because they are different people, I have concluded over many decades that one who is not me can’t understand what any of this means. That is why I am writing this, because I am convinced, by having empathetic witnesses lately who are knowledgeable of my abuse and who have been able to walk with me thorugh my memories in therapy, that I am able to face the depths of aloneness at last without the frantic clawing for someone to validate me. It is the great irony that I have at last gotten the help for myself that I woud have needed then, that I can finally put my covenant of secrecy aside. I know now how alone I was as a child and even now as an adult I feel its reverberations strongly, and I bear witness to that isolation and solitude now as i write this.

I also know now that I am a self, and that I have the job of accepting my experience as I experienced it after a lifetime of being talked ouf of my realities. I also know that this becoming a person has an economic and political and social location that I always hoped to avoid by becoming a non person. I have the responsibility to have an address, to own my own reality, and to have done the work in making sure that I am being responsible to myself and others. The amound of self help, religious and psycholigcal books I have read and practiced would make it seem that I should be very confident in what I feel. That is not the case with the problem of low self esteem. Yes I feel some validation and affirmation from the community of book, artists, authors and writers online on the subject. That gives me some confidence and gilding light and some courage that my experience fits somewhere in this world. But it does not make me as though I had never been hurt, and it does not make me as though I were a person who is not struggling now with his own illness. I am an ill person who has experienced child abuse using a gift that he has, and that is the gift of writing, but I have not been able to write though I have tried many times because I was not healed enough to know how hurt I was.

 As I discovered growing up with my mother who was a writer, visual artist, and poet, the use of words absolutely does not mean that your existence is not full of suffering, disorder, and lack of awareness about other areas of life. That was the great mystery to me growing up - how could my talented mother be ill? The two absolutely can and did coexist, but one was used to cover up the other. I read with codependent despair of the lack of awareness of her own narcisssitic or borderline disorder, and this has been especailly painful reality of growing up with mom and having to leave her to crash through life with her own disease while I struggled to extricate myself from my own woes. We codependents often think mistakenly that others’ cant take care of themselves, and though there were tragic realities for my mom, made more tragic by her talent and ability with words and pictures, one has to realize that yes we have a manifestation of a nuanced and spectrum of disease, and yes we are also people who have as different personalities as night and day, and I am using and borrowing the humanizing and intricate Johns Hopkins University model here to describe what may be my or my mom’s borderline disorder, and my mother, but we are also humans with patterns of behaviors that may or may not include addictions, habits of abuse or neglect, and in addition to this, each person has their own unique life story from the frame of which provides a very different perspective from how they will experience the disease. Borderline disorder is passed on geneticlly but also behaviorally through insecure attachment and attunement in mother caring for her baby. I am grateful that I did not inherit mom’s narcissistic tunnel vision, but I am sad that I got codependency instead. And its horrifying to me to know that I share some diseas characteristics with the woman who frightened me so much as a child and who was the source of both larger than life admiration and unintentional emotional abuse through lack of awareness or ability to see how her actions, words and behavionrs were impacting me despite her intentions. My own diseases and depdendencies are sadly badly intertwined with hers, even after all these years of my trying to get free, my heart is still attached, I still fawn at the thought of mom with the reverence and awe that one would a princess, a superstar, or head management of the company. Yet the hope I have is that as I come out of denial about the abuse I expeirence, I will gain strenght to accept what happened to me, and the sanity of mind of at last becoming, like Pinocchio hoped, a real boy. I have always I think been real, but I want to feel and experience that as a lived reality. So with the help of a lifetime of trying very hard to get well, I will make what progress I can in getting these secrets out into the open. Its part of the work of getting well that I have before me, and is only possible to do at this point because  I have been getting so much of the help that i need for myself. So I celebrate the strange and very messy lifetime work of getting well that us child abuse victims have to do, not because they wished for the difficulties, but because they have made up their mind that they will do everything they can to get well.

[madeline7]

My parents always said I had to respect them because they were my parents, but then they would go on to say respect was a one way street. I knew as a kid that that was wrong, and as a teen I tried my best to insist that respect was a two way street. I think my Dad was so stuck in his enabling role that he just said whatever my Mom needed to keep the peace...between them. Now he is gone and she is old and frail but still stuck in her dysregulation and manipulation. Setting boundaries has gotten easier, but still way too much effort is needed to be in her world.

[khibomsis]

Penelope, this is so deep. I cried as well as I was able when I read it. From one child who was forced to deny what she knew to another, it gets better. Keep on bearing witness to your inner child. He deserves it. 

[Penelope M]

Creating Space, Compassionate Witness to My Childhood Story
Post #6: Mom's Gifts and the Family Disease

My mom had a disease of intense relationships that often alarmed my sensitive mind. That is one reason that I do not think I inherited mom's disease even though now I share some characteristics of it such as feeling abandoned often. I am looking at this with my therapist and think it has more to do with childhood trauma. I often reflect on the gifts my mom shared with me, taught me, and left me with. There is a  book by Mondimore, MD and Kelly, Md called Borderline Personality Disorder: New Reasons for Hope from Johns Hopkins University 2011. I really like the model they use: the look at the disease and what the disease is, but then they look at the personality of that particular person, then their unique life experience story, and also their behaviors. That way you can appreciate that person as a human being but also see areas where their life and yours was disrupted. I really like it because it has always been important for me to have compassion for mom as I struggled with my lived reality. But now as an adult I found out that another of grandpa's children has borderline disorder as well, though she was raised by a different mother than my mom was. That is a whole mystery to look at of how its both inherited and created through the infant attachment. I have to look at this as I figure out as an adult what kinds of supports I think I need. I like to explore thoroughly all possibilities, even when it gets very close to home. So even though I am a survivor of childhood emotional abuse and the horror of being aware of something being wrong with mom, I also feel a strong need to defend her as well as the family name. Each of my brothers and my father are in various places about this that are different than the place I am at. That strikes a very raw, sensitive nerve for me because so much of growing up was filled with not having other people around who could solve what was for me an unsolveable problem. I think its normal to be angry at parents and siblings, and now at 39 years old I finally feel safe enough and distant enough from the situation to feel some anger towards them. I can finally feel upset that the little child who I was did not have somebody around who could let him know both that what he was seeing was valid. I think this is because of different ways of being traumatized. The way my body and mind responded was by running, trying to be successful at problem solving, and my brothers more so zoned out but their pain was no less important. My father was kind of zoned out too and tended to downplay things, and even today I think he feels embarassed at my suggestion that his beautiful talented wife also may have had a bpd, and also that he left me and my brothers in the care of someone who had this and that it lead to some emotional hurt. So much of my journey has been spent wondering about who was responsible for this. My mom did not ask to be sick and she did not think she was avoiding any reality, but her interpersonal interactions were touched by pain. I sometimes think she had trauma too. But much harder to see is my own trauma, I have spent a lot of my life giving mom the benefit of doubt. The work I have now is to find a foundation of acceptance and learn to give myself the benefit of doubt. Family members who are not on the same journey as I am on remind me a little bit of how hard it was growing up and seeing things my own way, experiencing hurts my own way. I loved mom too, she was my teacher and its a hard thing to admit that she may have been sick. But because I am learning to love myself, I do admit it, and I am glad for the comfort I find on my journey. Mom had lots of wonderful things about her, and so did I. Here is to all who are working on the brave journey of looking and looking again at what their life was like.

[Penelope M]

Post #7:  I call this post "My Tragic Emotional Toil Today to Identify with Myself as Alienated Child Instead of Taking The Side Of My Mother Who Unknowingly Emotionally Abused Me"

Good morning. It has been a few months since posting. Progress is foggy and partial at times, but I have a little ray of light that opens up a little more space in the work I am doing of reclaiming my childhood from a mother who I loved and feared so dearly that I gave it away to. I still love and fear her with all my heart, but I return as an adult with words and memories to take back for myself the gift that was never hers to take, but the diseases' tragedy. Mom, while a creative and intellectual teacher, artist and outdoorsperson, had a tragic disease that strained and exasperated relationships. I delighted in her yet was overpowered by her desire to hold onto me against my will to grow as a human child. With her death seven years ago and my own seperation from my wife who I was probably trying to resolve these mother issues with despite my best intentions not to, all the progress I thought I made seemed to cave in and the pain of abandonment became an overpowering daily agony. It has become necessary to return to face my pains with the help of trusted able therapists who specialize in helping clients with coming to acceptance and recovery from traumas of their own child abuse.

At 39 years old, I still am horrified to even call my childhood emotionally abusive, because I put so much work as a child into being pleasing, comforting my mom, and listening to her claims of emotional abuse at the time. My life has centered around listening to my mother's complaints of being abused by men, so it is horrifying to me to realize that I was abused by someone I was trying to help, someone I cared about deeply, someone who I could not believe had diseases of narcissism and borderline that might be fed by her emotionally coercing me, someone who despite being a beautiful human being with breathtaking and admirable abilities and gifts, someone who enriched my world greatly, was also a great source of pain to me and to family members on both sides of the family.

Since the lightning of high conflict relationships transformed the mother who comforted and enjoyed me into a prophet warning against conspiracies and sexist oppression everywhere, I spent my life sacrificing my childhood desires to be comforted, supported, and centered, in order to comfort and convince her that I was not a bad boy like those other sexist men, that unlike the rest of the world and my father and her relatives I and my brothers was on her side, to comfort her, and to know that I was doing the right thing. Now I must continue the hardest work of my life and stand up for the little child I was, and bear witness to everything I saw, felt and heard.

I remember my childhood obsession with mother's pain which had become my own all so clearly as though it were yesterday, and have hoped one day to be well enough and understand myself and her and the world enough to be able to solve the problem of what happened to her first, which was always my foremost concern, and only after that, would there be space to wonder what happened to me. My therapist finds this tragic, but for me I have never been allowed to put myself first. Mom always had to come first. Now that there has been no mom for 7 years, just the shambles and illnesses of my own life and failed relationships, which remind me chillingly of observing hers through adolescence and this fills me with horror that adults who have been abused as children know too well, the fear of becoming the one who they swore they would never be like. 

The abandonment horror that I struggle against daily seems evidence to me that I have much work to do in reconciling with my own soul and learning to attune to myself with the help of attachment specialists. But on my worst days I feel so identified with my mother still, that I obsess about her pain and almost cannot see that it is me today feeling pain for myself. I do care deeply about the things in this world that hurt her, the sexisms and verbal abuses and the inequalities in this world, but I add to these tragedies now something that I have only just become strong enough to accept. My healing from childhood emotional abuse requires me to prioritize the human needs of the child who I was over and against other things she thought and taught as important at the time. She did not have to overpower my human needs to develop with her adult needs and understandings. I should not have been brainwashed away from identifying with myself, with me, with my father, with other family members. As a child I should not have been sought out as a political recruit or formed into a family social justice and religious cult. The tragedy is that my childhood needs did not have to be alienated. Its possible to care for a child withouth cutting them off from other caregivers and indoctrinating them with one's own ideology. I want to care about myself as a child one day enough to say it was wrong without reservation. Today I do not care about myself as a child enough. Perversely I still like the nobleness of sacrifice of myself for good cause and the warmth of acceptance, closeness and integrity that those choices, if we could even call them free decisions, brought me as a child, as though I were not manipulated into them. But warmth, closeness and support, did I really even deserve them, if the were not automatically and freely given? Deep down I felt impossibly responsible for my maleness that created a world of pain for my mother, and I promised never to question the illnesses and narcissisms, paranoias, fears of abandonment, and deep personalization that allowed my mother to feel so entitled of me, my brothers, and my father. To make matters worse, all of them experienced mom differently and I feel somewhat alone in my lifelong quest to understand her and myself as well as my family. So I begin to overcome the emotional parental alienation from them and from the rest of the world as an adult looking at his failures in other parts of life.

With respect and reverence for the child I was who still lives in me and who I am better able to take care of now than ever before, I share this beam of light that cuts through some of the fogginess and raininess of peering back into a textured childhood that contains enough emotional abuse to give me pain today that motivates me to keep searching for peace and for giving myself a voice that I never was allowed to have. I am proud of how far I have come and am grateful for this private, safe space with other survivors and caring family members of loved ones with bpd.

[Penelope M]

Post # 8: Aretha Franklin Songs that Comforted Me as A Child From the Frightening Observations About the World Expressed to Me by My Mother Who Was An Artist, Activist and Who Had Borderline and Narcissistic Tendencies and My Father Who Was Largely At Work.

Last night I watched the new Aretha Franklin movie starring Jennifer Hudson and I cried often throughout because the songs brought me right back to that home and that childhood as well as my own joys, my love for my mom, aspirations and depths of pain that only the voice of this singer could make me feel understood. She could make you care and cry for the whole world, for those you loved, and even care and cry about and believe in yourself, even me as a little boy who cared deeply about things and did not know what to do about them. The humiliation and responsibility to keep mom on the happier side of her disease with little regard for how this was affecting me emotionally and socially carries some more enjoyable times of listening to Aretha Franklin records, especially "Best of Aretha Franklin" (1985) and "Through the Storm" (1989).worse that mom studied the world with a giftedness and creative rebellion of a painter, feminist activist, and had the bravery expressed through a high-conflict personality disorder. But she still had her own person, characteristcs, and history that made her who she was apart from the illness, yet the pain she caused in interpersonal relationships has for me always been present in her. If mom was not aware of it, if I could not be compassionate to myself, these songs were there, the songs cared, and made me feel that someone strong cared and understood about mom and about me.

Mom loved music, to sing, and of course I peered over her shoulder to find what I could from the list of approved resources she allowed at home. There was no TV allowed, so it was either records, books, or music tapes from the library.

Marlo Thomas and Friends also had a collaboration record album with lots of authors, entertainers, and composers that really spoke to my desire to belong somewhere not just at home and in family but also in the larger world. It was called "Free to Be A Family", a project of the Ms. Foundation for Women and Children. The songs cannot be found on any major streaming or media networds other than if an original copy of the album can be obtained by cassette, cd or record. On this album, Kermit the Frog, Superman, Whoopie Goldberg, Robin Williams, the Fat Boys, and Shel Silverstein and many others sang and acted and talked about families and the problem of belonging in a way that made me feel really good and hopeful about the world. Mom loved Ms. Magazine which was a source of feminist thinkers and resources for writing for her.

The movie was centered a struggle for Aretha Franklin to develop her own voice while struggling with complicated relationships with her own father and her first husband at different times, both who had abusive tendancies as well as were major sources of creative financial and political support for her at different times in her early career.

So I mention both of these records here as comforts that my mom provided for me and herself approved of, and that made me happy even today to listen to them because they resonate with ideals that I believe in about belonging, freedom feminism and social justice.  Finding spaces of love and belonging is a major theme in my life and I am happy to have found these spaces in these records as a child. Yes I wish that I could have found it more in myself and in my parents or my brothers, but instead it was here that hope and comfort and happiness invited me to keep growing beyond my family and keep searching for belonging. Well here I am years later coming back to myself to find it, and here are these songs still beckoning me there just as they did as a child. Its wonderful how some things stand the test of time so beautifully and reminds me of ways God loves me and looks out for me. These were gifts given to a child that remain precious to me today.