Dear Nar:

I will attend to two topics in this post, first topic:  excusing parental abuse because of earlier times, lack of education and not having known any better, second topic: the adult’s retroactive efforts to understand by intellectually integrating what a person heard and read during later life (many years after early childhood)-  into that early life experience.

First topic: “These were 90s in the post-Soviet country. People didn’t even know that things like mental wellbeing exists.. nobody thought they were abusing or damaging these kids emotionally or mentally.. my mother was just a product of her environment. And she didn’t know any better… I genuinely think she thought criticising, withdrawing or being strict is a good way to bring up a kid”.

The problems with this argument are: (1) these are the 2020s, and your mother has been exposed for quite some time to the issue of mental well-being: you educated her about it, and yet, “she never said sorry neither to me nor my sister”.

(2) There is plenty of child abuse happening nowadays in the U.S., were the issue of mental well-being is very much a popular topic in the front of public attention. This means that lack of education and exposure to the topic of mental well-being is far from being the most significant factor in child mistreatment and abuse.

(3) Regarding all the adults/ parents who abused children in the Soviet Union in the 90s, adults who were not educated on child abuse: these adults/ parents were once children who experienced the same abuse they inflicted on others later on They remember how it felt, having had a first-person experience of child abuse, which is much more powerful than reading about it in a book or hearing about it on a TV show. These adults/ parents chose to pass on the abuse to children not  because they didn’t know how it felt to be abused, but because they were angry. Anger, not lack of education, is what motivates abuse. Look at nature, anger precedes aggression.

Regarding the second item: you wrote, “I read somewhere strict parenting can lead to developing obsessive thinking patterns. I know I am hurt, but I don’t know why fully. I think it’s more complicated and multi-facet than just my mother’s strictness or silent treatment”-

– when you were a young child, you were very different from who you are now. Your experience consisted mostly of raw emotions, not of elaborate thinking. As a child, in your first decade of life or so, you didn’t know words and terms like “strict parenting”, “developing”, “obsessive thinking patterns”, complicated”, “multi facet” or “silent treatment”. These words and terms came later on, after what’s behind those words and terms affected you and became a part of you.

What’s behind those words and terms were raw emotions- the way a younger child experiences life. Raw emotions without elaborate thinking. Here is a problem as you now, as an adult, try to understand the why (“I don’t know why fully”)- because as a child you did not experience elaborate thinking and you therefore didn’t record your thoughts and feelings at the time in a journal, you now do not remember how you felt then.

The raw, intense emotions of the young child that you were are lost to you now, not having been cemented in elaborate thinking and recorded for future understanding.

But there is a way to retrieve those emotions- I have and it’s been a result of an intentional and long healing process.

Back to you, notice this: “there is genuinely no deep resentment or hate in me towards my mother. And this is only because I really know she didn’t know any better”- as a younger child, when you were hurt by your mother, when you were scared of her, you did not think: “she didn’t know any better”. She-didn’t-know-any-better is a later life thinking.

At the time you were a younger child, you fully experienced raw fear, raw anger- unmitigated/ unadjusted by later life thinking.

anita