Dear Helcat:

“I don’t believe it’s based in guilt for me… Perhaps guilt isn’t the right word. That would imply that I was at fault, when I wasn’t” – of course you were not guilty of (not responsible for) your mother’s abuse of you, it’s that you incorrectly believed that you were guilty and as a result, you felt guilty.

I don’t think that it ever happens that a child who is abused by a parent (and is not protected and rescued by another parent/ adult in the home) does not feel guilty: a child instinctively takes responsibility for the parent’s abuse, a responsibility that does not belong with the child at all.

“I felt overly responsible” – interesting that you used the adjective overly responsible for your mother abuse, as if some responsibility was valid. In reality, you were not responsible at all.

“Perhaps shame is more accurate?” – both are unfortunately accurate, and they go together: the abused child naturally and instinctively feels guilty (believing that you have done wrong and are therefore responsible for the abuse) and ashamed (believing that you are wrong, inherently a bad girl, and therefore, you called for/ deserve the abuse).

“My mother told me that after myself and my brother were born, she magically became a terrible person. She claimed to have been perfectly fine before” – your incorrect belief in your own guilt did not need the additional glue that she threw at it by this false claim.

I imagine that she hated the chores involved in caring for babies and young children, changing diapers etc., so she blamed her babies.

“Her temper could be triggered by the smallest thing, so at night I would analyse the day and try and figure out what I could do better to avoid it” – there is a natural, instinctive reasoning behind the child taking responsibility for abuse: if as a child, you believed correctly that the responsibility for the abuse was indeed all your mother’s, then you would have been aware that you were in great danger and that you were powerless about it.

When you believed that you were responsible for the abuse, you were still aware that you were in danger, but that it was not as great of a danger because you were not powerless about it, there was something you could do to make the abuse stop. The feeling of having some power over abuse makes the situation feels less dangerous.

And so, at night, as a child, you were in the habit of analysing the day and figuring out how to… not cause her to abuse you the following day. But of course, there was nothing that you could have done, like you said: “there was nothing I could do to prevent the abuse. If different children were born to her, they would have been abused too. It wasn’t my fault“.

“When I relax before going to sleep… when my muscles relax (the physical pain) can be overwhelming and there is little to distract me. Worries are easier to think about than allowing myself to be immersed in the experience of physical pain” – I assume that you saw medical doctors in regard to this chronic, fluctuation pain (?)

* I am not a professional, but maybe (?)… the cause for this pain is peripheral neuropathy, “which refers to the many conditions that involve damage to the peripheral nervous system, the vast communication network that sends signals between the central nervous system (the brain and spinal cord) and all other parts of the body… symptoms improve on their own and may not require advanced care. Unlike nerve cells in the central nervous system, peripheral nerve cells continue to grow throughout life” (ninds. nih. gov/ peripheral neuropathy fact sheet).

anita