Dear Choccoffeewine:

The best line, for me, in your latest post is: “this cycle stops with me. I’m NOT passing it onto my children.”
I like that very much, oh how better the world will be if it was so for many other parents.

Your mother, like any other mother, was once a child and as a child she was deeply hurt. This is what I learned from my experience with my abusive mother: it is harmful for my mental health to continue to feel empathy for her. She deserves empathy, only not my empathy. She deserves, if she looks for it, for someone to help her understand what motivates her and how to go about her life in healthy ways- only I am the wrong person to attempt to be that for her.

And she deserves to be loved, only not by me.

The reason is that she hurt me and she did so personally, in person: it was a personal affair between her and me. When she attacked the little girl that I was, loving her unconditionally, needing her desperately, when she attacked that little girl again and again, that was personal.

This is why it can’t be me to love her, to try to understand her, to try to help her.

Our mothers, they are not just people for us. When we were children, they were part of us, automatically. There was no separate identity.

To heal from the mother’s abuse, a daughter has to leave that identity, that one unit of identity. To empathize, to try to love an abusive mother is to stay in that unit.

anita