Dear Janine:

It may be your 18 birthday today, one of these very days you have turned or are just about to turn 18. I have a gift for you. My gift for you, in potential, can save you decades of life with much distress. It is the following: part of you and a whole lots and lots of people want to deny the reality that is painful to see as is. This denial may feel pretty good at times, postpone unwanted pain for a little while, but pain there will be until reality is confronted and injuries healed.

People (and part of you) will tell you, again and again: you, Janine were not abused, not mistreated, no way! Your mother (and father) had the best intentions for you. They did their best. They are only humans. They make mistakes. No one is mistake-free. So forgive them and move on. Be happy! After all, you have lots of reasons to be happy: you are young, you have all the material things you need, you can have any kind of life that you want.

I am taking on correcting these messages for you right now:
1. First about being abused: in my experience, abuse is very common and is not limited to physical abuse, or blood and gore/ starvation abuse. At least half of all children are abused, at the very least. And most of the children abused- through adulthood- don’t fully believe it. But if you check the numbers of how many people are under psychiatric care for anxiety and depression alone, the numbers are staggering. I don’t want you to be in that statistic.
2. If you are coming out of your childhood, now 18, as a mentally healthy individual, feeling love for your mother, no anger (other than temporary and resolved incidents); if you feel safe enough to get out into the world as an adult, then your parents were good enough. Then it would be true to say that they made mistakes. As is true, all people make mistakes. But if you come out of your childhood feeling unloved, scared, “afraid to be me” as your title indicated; troubled, then your parents were not good enough and their “mistakes” with you are expressions and acts of cruelty against you, lack of empathy, seeing you hurt and continuing to hurt you, never trying to change their behavior so to help you. This is cruelty, abuse, not mistakes.
3. Once you are significantly injured in childhood, as you have been, you can’t just move on, not before you heal. There is healing work to be done. I highly recommend you attending psychotherapy with a competent, caring, hard working psychotherapist that will be on your side, take on your self interest (not your parents’). You wrote that your parents are well off, well, they can pay for such therapy for you, but without being involved in it, just you one on one with the therapist.

Here are my evidence that you were abused, all quotes from your original post: “Over my lifetime, I have collected a lot of unconscious anger towards my mother, which has eaten away at me. I do not feel love for my mother and cannot recall ever feeling secure around her…Being around her makes me tense and fearful…I feel no interest in receiving her love or being in any form of relationship with her…Underneath my anger there is a core feeling of emptiness. Trying to interact with her leaves me feeling extremely defensive…instantly I feel attacked by her, and then I go into fight mode. The dynamic gets complicated when my dad enters the picture .. he starts doing all he can to hurt my feelings…So she grabbed both of my arms and started yanking me towards the stairs. And then my dad joined her.”

You asked a question in your original post: “Why would a child reject a source of unconditional love, if it is truly a warm embrace?” My answer is: you didn’t reject a source of unconditional love. You didn’t reject any kind of love. A child does not reject love- it is impossible. A child rejects abuse. You were not loved; you were attacked and that is why you are defensive, why you are ready to fight- you fight an attacker, not a lover.

Please take my post here for you, this whole thread if you want to print it, and take it to a competent therapist and start working on healing from the abuse you suffered as a victim, abuse by both parents.

Please do not accommodate your own denial and the denial others will so generously hand to you. See reality for what it is- through therapy and heal. Post anytime.

Make your birthday special with this resolution, and so Happy Birthday!

anita