Dear Helcat:

“I’m sorry to hear that your mother was so abusive and unreasonable. You didn’t deserve to be treat like that. You deserved to be treat with love and care“- thank you. Seems like I lived a whole life believing that I deserved the treatment I got because she said so, wouldn’t call it abusive but.. fair treatment considering the wrongness of the child.

Now I say it was abusive, and at one point on, after reading about abuse, I suspected it was abuse, but I wasn’t sure. A big part of me still thought, believed that, as she said, she was the abused (by me, by others), and I was her abuser (one of her abusers, and a major abuser).

There was this incident I remember: she was hitting me with her hand, hitting my face, and after a while of hitting me on the right side of the face, then on the left, then right again, and again, she stopped hitting, looked at her hands and said: “Look what you did to me, my hands are hurting!”

Everything was my fault, and she.. only reacted to this faulty thing in front of her, a faulty thing that was hurting her.

“I feel like my mother was more direct with her concerns. But she kind of used them as excuses… There were a lot of rules that she had for us. We were not even allowed to eat without her permission. We were not allowed to use the TV without permission. With all of these rules it was easy for her to find an infraction and make up a ‘reason’ to beat us“- Excuses-to-beat. Just now as I quoted you right here, in this paragraph, and decided to not quote all (using “…”), a concern appeared to me (brace yourself, it’s crazy): what if Helcat gets angry at me because in the first paragraph of my reply, I quoted all that Helcat wrote about my experience, and here, in this paragraph, I shortchanged her and quoted only part of what she wrote about herself..?

I feared this because that’s what my mother did: anything, everything was ground for accusations. In the case right here, the accusation would’ve been: anita, you only care about yourself, or, you tried to hurt my feelings by not quoting all that I said.

Accusations came from everywhere, could come from anywhere and as you can see, I still hear her (projected into others) accusing me and I get anxious.

“I responded to this with perfectionism. Growing up I would review the mistakes made each day and try to get everything right the next day. I had magical thinking because I was a child. I hoped that if I got everything right, she wouldn’t beat us“- I used to say every now and again: From now on, I will be perfect. From now on, I will make no mistakes, and I was optimistic following those declarations, but of course, I failed every time. The next accusation was just around the corner.

“I feel like you experienced, my husband’s family didn’t make sense with their complaints. He would do things that weren’t wrong and be beaten for them… My husband’s home country is very dangerous. They wanted to toughen him up and protect him and had a level of control over him. He grew up being told that everyone will try to hurt him and he cannot trust anyone“- this is what my mother told me too, that everyone will or did try to hurt me and I can’t trust anyone. She didn’t include herself in the message.  She too punished me for things that weren’t wrong (things equivalent to not quoting all that you said, right above). But she didn’t try to toughen me up and protect me. She tried to.. protect herself from me. She kept presenting me as a wrong or evil-doer who was hurting her.

I am sorry for all the abused children in our world, past and present, including you and your husband. I wish healing for all. Love and best wishes for you, your son, your husband and your dog.

anita