Dear Bee:

“They mistreated my sister and I and we mistreated them in response. I spoke in anger to them” – you are confusing things: they (your parents, your aunt) were the adult entrusted with taking care of the children (your sister and you). When they mistreated you and your sister, they betrayed their responsibilities as parents/ adult caretakers.

When you spoke in anger to them, you did not mistreat them: you voiced your valid and justified anger at their betrayal of you and your sister.

Think of this, a mountain lion (predator) roars loudly as it jumps on a deer (prey), the deer kicks the mountain lion hard with its legs… this does not make the deer a predator (the deer’s aim is not to eat the mountain lion), it makes him an animal trying to survive a predator.

The adults who abuse children are human predators, the children are human prey. When children fight back, in one way or another, they do not switch into predators, they are just trying to survive.

“They disagreed and took strong offense to me even suggesting I have a voice in the household” – in the world of predators, prey have no voice.

“I thought things might get better for everyone there if I weren’t around anymore… I decided to leave…  with the belief that they’d be better off without me around” – while living at home, before you left, you thought that things will be better without you because you believed that you were the villain and that everything was your fault (“I feel like a villain and as though everything was my fault”, April 7).

Abused children naturally believe, falsely, that they are the villains (not the victims) because such false belief makes children feel a bit powerful, as in, if I stop being the villain, there will be no more abuse. If abused children believed the truth, which is that they are nothing but victims, then it would mean that there is nothing they can do to stop the abuse.

Bee, I think that you need psychotherapy to understand this, and to stop this false belief from taking over the rest of your life.

anita