TW: Domestic violence, Mother From Abused to Abuser.

Hi @Sugarshack , I have sent you an email. Can you please have a look at it?

Hi @Sugarshack

I have only just read your troubling account, and since it was written a month ago, I am guessing it is unlikely that you'll read my response.

But if you get a chance, let me say how sorry I am that you and your sibling suffered so much. It sounds like a horrific ordeal and a stolen childhood. I don't know what to say that is comparable to my feeling of hurt listening to your account.

It is interesting thinking about the question of why your mother was privately so physically violent and abusive, whilst publicly projecting the opposite persona of a victim (my apologies if I have misread your analysis).

I was wondering if there is any agreement with the suggestion that children are seen as something other than people that deserve love and protection when they are being raised by abusive parents? Otherwise, how would it be possible? How would one account for that cognitive dissociation?

I have met women that are ostracised by their children but they didn't say that they were abusive parents in the extreme way that your mother behaved to you and your brother. But I think there maybe a hint to your question in their story. In summary, she was raised by a strict catholic Polish mother and father. The father sounded like he hid in the shed away from her mother, and smoked himself to an early grave. The mother was definitely the head of the family, and was hyper critical to her two daughters. Although this woman would visit and shop with her mother once a week without fail, she would relay the events to me over the three months I knew her and complain how critical she was with every choice she made. When I met the mother, she seemed like a regular old woman conservatively dressed but without horns, forked tongue or scales.

From what I could gather, the woman only felt validated once the boys in her school reached puberty and flocked around this tall athletic young woman. That was the start of her dating, and she was popular. Her self esteem was positive for the first time. However, she didn't enjoy sex until she was in her late 40s.

Cut ten years later, she leaves one marriage very early, meets another man and has three children. From the children and man's perspective, I think that they were all surprised and condemning of her when she decided to leave this man. However, two of the three children stay with her whilst she struggled to fight this man in court. From her account, he was relentless in his attempt to legally battle her in violent retribution.

Somehow the two children leave her and she is suffers from this betrayal. She is on a social group organised through an internet application, and she is happy living the rest of her life trying to catch up with what she thinks she has missed in her life. She is disappointed in the time that she wasted until she reached her 60s.

From what I gathered of this story that may have some relevance to your initial question as to how is it possible for a mother to mistreat their children, I think the process that she went through raising her children was as tragic as it was 'organic'. I think that she believed and was most likely a vast improvement on her mother's hypercritical parenting. However, since the children do not have this experience, what they saw was just their mother's behaviour to them. She would have been much more positive when she was calm and happy, but when they misbehaved, her behaviour would be strict and more like her own mother. And since they were not initiated in the constant hypercriticism, the three children just saw the swing in their mother's behaviour from their perspective, not in reference from their mother's perspective. If they did, of course, it would be a criticism of "6 out of 10" rather than the "10 out of 10" that a Polish catholic mother would constantly do. In other words, the children had no resilience to criticism, but the mother saw through the lens of what her mother was like, and so the two generations operated in different systems, like the metric system to the imperial one.

I haven't mentioned the additional forces that you mentioned in your own case, and I think that they have definite merit too. In other words, had the mother dealt with the trauma of her own upbringing before becoming a mother herself, she would have probably responded to her children's misbehaviour with a sense of balance and consistency that the children would possibly not seen as unfair and within good measure.

Anyhow, I would love your take on this account and I do wonder if this thought contain some explanation of abuse that is passed down each generation.

Kind regards

J.

Good morning @J_1nOz thankyou for your detailed reply.

I think you are right on the money in your response. From what I summarise in the two circumstances are:

a) The Mother has not had good examples in her own parents.

b) She rebels against them, yet becomes them via becoming a parent herself.

c) The Mother has a 'half view' of life, they have experienced the negative but have no true positive as a reference. For example a battery with two terminals, each terminal has to be connected for the battery to function. Yet if there is only one connection applied, the battery/human experience will be 'polarised' from dysfunctional conception.

d) The Mother then finds herself unable to sustain an adult relationship with a partner. It is her unresolved childhood experience, "the lens of her own parents" governing her behaviour, values etc from the subconscious.

e) The mother is further compromised by way of available social/parenting skills, she has very little reference to draw from when the tables need to be turned for her own authority/guidance/nurturing over the next generation of children.

f) Due to limitations in her skills and experience, use of criticism etc she creates and re-creates a SOUR and unpleasant experience with her own children, she has no positive leadership or faiths to draw from, for example "this behaviour is normal because my kid is 10 years old and trying to get friends"...she thinks "this behaviour is abhorrent and my kid is being naughty".

g) she has unwittingly recreated the familiar because her fundamental values have barely evolved outside of the parents impression.

h) In a freudian/lacanian predictable outcome, she becomes the object of desire, she connects with her psychic parents by way of becoming them against the 'outsider'.

i) From here the process of birth and maturity has completed from the mother's perspective.

j) But once more the actual children, the future front of evolution are devoid of parenting skills while they are firmly under the thumb of the mother's culture, hard to explain but they are as immature as her having been denied and also rejected the process of full maturity.

k) Part of that denial and rejection of maturity is failing to integrate friendships, adult relationships, fundamental change, the psychic separation between parent and child, the terrifying responsibility of mortality, will to survive etc.

What you say PERFECTLY describes what I see as the 'chain of dysfunction' in that within dysfunctional families there's also a hidden layer of incestuous behaviour and mindset because within full development of indepdence, as in the animal kingdom theres a point where the offspring can do everything for themselves and they wander off to form their own tribe/herd/existence and breed the next generation without doing taboo acts which diminish the strength of the species.

But in human dysfunction, I have noted in all my friends and fellows of dysfunction there is a breach between generations where the grandparents, parents, the history and past of the family dictates and dominates the forward culture. This is VERY prevalent in Catholic families yet their fundamental structure prevents inbreeding, I note from the outside that religious application of human affairs very much has predictable roles and channels of being such as Chess, each piece has a limited part which makes up the entire game.

Then in Liberal lifestyle, it is much less organised and formalised yet there is still the invisible rules of the human psyche as to contentment, fulfillment, self actualisation etc which make up the new era of lifestyle.

In note of the above two references, I do chuckle to myself as I note that each generation of Liberal being has a radical rebellion aspect to it - the hippies were rebelling against short back and sides, the stockbrokers of 1980s and 90s were rebelling against conservatism and tradition - in the internet age, individuals are rebelling against humanity itself with the creation of 'new' forms of displaying identity and tribe, for example ideological groups united by access to internet and divided by physical proximity....every generation has a rebellion against religion and conservatism yet its the conservative religious mindset that keeps creating children, marriages, predominant cultures etc whereas every time the individualistic approach fails to produce children and dies out within a generation or two.

* I write this from the perspective of someone involved quite heavily in alternative and fringe groups over my lifetime, in maturity I see it coming in young people and I think of the Marlon Brando line..."What are you rebelling against?" "Whaddya Got?" as the monkey thrashes against the bars of its self perceived cage, and I see my own journey of thrashing against the cage until I realised it's bars were in my own mind, and limitations of experience and resources 🙂