Dear Jenny:

“Mom literally said ‘you’ve not seen what all parents tell to their children still they listen”- she said that  other parents treat their children worse than she treats you, yet those children were more submissive to their parents than you are to her- she wanted complete submission.

I wrote to you earlier that in nature, aggressors attack the small and weak, because the small and weak will not fight  back, and so, the aggressor will not be physically harmed when attacking its victim. Similarly, lots and lots of parents attack their small and weak children (and not the adults in their lives) because the child will not fight back and the parent therefore will not get harmed when attacking her child.

Parents who want their children to be completely submissive, so to make sure that the children will not fight back when attacked,  and therefore- no danger to the parent when attacking the child.

You wrote regarding your fair assertive words to your mother (I detected no rude words on your part): “I could have said them in a lower voice”- the voice naturally and instinctively gets louder when attacked/ when angry as a result of being attacked. You can’t help it, it’s automatic.

You told your mother: “you have all rights to call me out of a fault”- she doesn’t have a right to call you out on a fault shouting and insulting you. Also, parents often call their children out on faults that the parents themselves created. For example, your slouching may have been a natural reaction to your mother repeatedly shouting at you- she created your slouching and then assigned you the responsibility for it, calling you out on it.

Notice: she did not call herself out on shouting at you, she called you out for naturally reacting to the wrong she has done to you (by the way, same here, slouching as a child and being called out on it).

“What was I doing with him! I think I was so swept up in my own dreams/ fairytale and so clouded with self-doubt… I also couldn’t wrap my head around how can a person be so inconsistent with someone he claims to love”- similar to your mother claiming to love you while shouting at you and demanding complete submission and calling you out on faults that she created in you.

When we don’t clearly see the nature of our parents and the nature of our relationships with them, we proceed to not understand relationships with romantic partners either.

“I think I definitely dodged a bullet. There is so much I read Anita about selfish partners, abusive partners which literally fit him to a T”- I agree, he is very selfish, and you definitely dodged a bullet. There is something very wrong with R, a severe deficit in empathy.

anita