Dear NB:

You are welcome.

“As a child, I never knew what upset my mother, what triggered her to dislike me”- you didn’t do anything that upset your mother and cause her to dislike you. I  know this because a child desperately needs her mother’s approval and love, so if there was something that you did to cause her to dislike you, you would have stopped doing it very quickly.

You know how people around you like or dislike other people that they don’t even know, just by the way they look, or by their voice? I imagine that’s why she didn’t like you, something you couldn’t change, being a female is one of the things she didn’t like and which you couldn’t change.

“I cannot remember times that I did not upset my mother and the consequent silent treatment or hitting”- the cause was not you upsetting her, the cause of her upset was her own thoughts.

“As I grew up, I feel like I upset her intentionally with words to get attention”- I don’t think so. A child never intends to incur her parents’ anger. What happens is that the child/ teenager gets angry at the parent (the natural result of being abused by the parent), and then feeling like a bad daughter for feeling that anger.

* Did your mother accuse you of trying to hurt her intentionally with words?

“I always just felt I was never good enough.. and that pushed me to always try and excel at school”- if you were motivated to “upset her intentionally” you would not have excelled in school. You worked hard at school so to make her feel good, to make her love you.

“I feel guilty because now I am left with never having been a good daughter”- you were not a bad daughter; she was a bad mother.

“I feel guilty because I didn’t know any better to break this cycle of abuse”- she was the adult, you were the child; she was the perpetrator, you were her victim. Your relationship with her was never between two equals, even when you became an adult. So that “cycle of abuse” was hers alone, you had no part in it.

*** Your anger at her did not equal you abusing her, it was a natural consequence of her abusing you.

“I feel guilty that I was not empathetic enough towards her to see what was prompting her behavior”- children are always most empathetic to their mothers. Mothers are too often not empathetic toward their children. If your mother was empathetic to you, she would have noticed how miserable you were as a child, and she would have changed her behavior (no more silent treatments and no more hitting to start with), so to make you feel better!

“.. to see what was prompting her behavior”- you saw what was prompting her behavior, you wrote it yourself: “I don’t think my mother ever liked me”. Children see/ perceive accurately, and hitting and silent treatments by themselves are clear indications of not liking a person.

“I also feel guilty that I have anger towards her for destroying my childhood”- people get angry at others on the road for inconsiderate driving, for a moment in time. It is quite understandable to feel anger for having a childhood destroyed!

“that also adds to my guilt.. as if I am too  privileged to feel so strongly about something that is in the past and cannot technically hurt me anymore”- well, you were not privileged enough to have a mother who loved you- oh what a privilege that would have been!

And technically it still hurts because technically your brain is the same brain you had as a child (as you know, we shed our skin not our brain), and the hurt is still there, re-activated from time to time.

“How does your mother’s behavior towards you make you feel guilty?”- made me feel guilty, not anymore. The behaviors that made me feel guilty: expressing her misery in dramatic ways, telling me I made her miserable, that other mothers had good daughter and how unlucky she was for having .. me, telling me that I intentionally said things to hurt her, that I wanted to hurt her.

Post again anytime, NB.

anita

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