Disordered monkeys

[Couscous]

I came across this clip about a mother spider monkey who lost her own mother at an early age and as a result is now struggling with motherhood and separation anxiety. It’s interesting to see how her behavior is not unlike BPD mother behavior.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gvIGNnv73bg

[Riv3rW0lf]

This made me sad.

I am surprised that the other mother Chrissie is not trying to teach her how to be a mother. In the body keeps the score, they showed that for anxious mothers, the presence of sane mothers within the group really helped appease and correct poor behaviors. But it seems like maybe not for spider monkeys ...

Broke my heart.

I don't feel like this was the case between my mother and I... I feel like if anything, she rejected and neglected me much more than she tried to keep me for herself.

But then, she accused me of breaking everything she tried to give me...so maybe she did try but I just kept fighting her until she had to "let me go", hence her current resentment toward me.

[Couscous]

Yeah, I also felt very sad watching it…

BPD mothers suffer from extreme maternal separation anxiety and I think that a BPD mother typically rejects her child after her attempts at keeping the child close have failed. I have observed how smothering and overprotective my mother became with my nephew when she babysat him a lot as a baby. She loves babies, so I assume she was this way with me too when I was a baby, although she actually rejected my second son at the age of 3 months because when she held him for the first time he cried and didn’t want her to hold him. I guess that in her mind he was rejecting her so it was only ‘natural’ that she would retaliate by rejecting him in kind, and now she seems to have completely forgotten that I have a second child… In my case my mother talks about how I broke her heart when I pulled away from her at age 5, and I assume that’s when her resentment toward me kicked in.

All that to say RW, your mother likely loved you until you triggered her separation anxiety.

But I think it may have been a blessing in disguise that our mothers rejected us otherwise we would have ended up in an covertly incestuous relationship with BOTH of our parents which would have been even more damaging for us, and probably we wouldn’t have ever been able to set boundaries with them.

[Riv3rW0lf]

Yeah, you are likely right, this is also something I've considered, but I keep oscillating between feeling like I was loved VS feeling like I was rejected by her. Mainly I was scared of her.

I've also observed her becoming completely crazy about my daughter and son. And I was the mean one she needed to protect them from. Once, I will always remember because of the face she made, my son was crying and I came to take him in my arms and she almost threw him at me... I immediately sensed she hated that he was pushing her away to get toward me. To her, this was unacceptable, so like you said, she had to reject him.

Which is also why I don't feel like my mother treated me like this monkey? In the sense where, because I liked my father very much, everytime I went toward him, she would reject me and scream at me in turn... So it wasn't an overly maternal protection and enmeshment but more of an oscillating pattern between a cold, scared love and a rage, terrible rejection.

In the end, I just ended up being completely afraid of her. still am !

I think what helped me most was not her rejection though. I was talking with my cousin and I came to the conclusion that the abuse from my father and the abuse from my mother likely complemented themselves in a way that I was able to develop somewhat properly, with no real enmeshment with either of them, as I kept rejecting them on and off, trying to feel closer to the other one. Also, the surrogate spouse in me was somehow mature enough to parent the scared child. That's because I didn't chose any of them completely, always oscillated between being close to my father, then my mother... I never settled like my brother did. He simply chose our mother.