Dear Gigi:

Of course her aggressive acts against you, the messages she repeatedly gave you caused your current struggles. How can it not? How can it be that what the most important person to a child tells a child, again and again, not have a great affect?

You wrote in your last post that “for some reason (you) thought of it as normal”- this is because you were born not knowing anything about what a family should be like and how a mother should behave. You were not born with the information of how things should be in a healthy home. So you didn’t have what to compare your experience to.

When your friends complained about similar things, it means that abuse is common.

Parent abuse of children, physical, verbal is very, very common. In that regard it is “normal.”

And the reason millions and millions of people have so many problems, and why the world is in the sad state it is in, is because parental abuse is the norm, not the exception.

But it doesn’t have to be and it is not always the case. And it definitely shouldn’t be that way.

It is tough to absorb this. It took me a long time to understand this. Children, all the way to adult children of old age are most invested in seeing the very best in their parents, minimizing and denying abuse. It takes a lot to gather the courage to see things as they are. Seeing reality the way it is makes healing possible.

anita