Dear Helcat:

“Many of us who haven’t been taught how to protect ourselves by our families are naïve and still learning about the world and how to interact with the people in it” – my mother did not teach me how to protect myself from her. It would have been against her self-interest to teach me to stand up to her, how to stop her from saying whatever she felt like saying to me; from doing whatever she felt like doing.

I remember little but I remember this one scene: she was hitting me, with her hand across my face on and on, and she said to me, she praised me, saying the only thing I like about you is how you look down at the floor when I hit you. You don’t talk back to me, like other people’s children do.

Of course, I wanted to be a good girl, I wanted her to think of me as a good girl, I wanted to please her while at the same time I couldn’t help the anger that made my face and inside my head feel such heat, wanting so badly to hit her back, it was instinctive.

“My family taught me to accept abuse without protest. This normalised a lot of abusive behaviours, to the point where I had difficulty identifying poor behaviour as well as protecting myself from it” – I could have written these two sentences!.

“As you know, abuse victims have a tendency to gravitate towards people that perpetuate their cycle of abuse” – we gravitate toward people that remind us of our abusive parent, hoping by proxy to change the abusive parent into a loving parent, is my experience.

“We can only hope to learn and grow as a result of our experiences‘ – well said. Thank you, Helcat, if it helps you and I to share more about our experiences of abuse and the consequences of it, if it does, let’s share and grow a bit further here, together.

anita