Continued (as always, trigger warning):

There is a combination of intense fear and rage (intense anger) that I am aware of this afternoon, that which I experienced growing up (growing in, really, shrinking in fear, not expanding):

The fear was fear, always fear, this zzzzzzzzzZZZZzzzzzZZZZZZzzz.  And rage, rage at being humiliated, taken over, subdued, going belly up in front of the aggressor. The need to fight back, to have some power in powerlessness, to rise up, to rebel, to take power, to subdue the enemy instead of being subdued by the enemy.

When the enemy is your mother, you don’t have a mother. She is that person over there, taking over.

To be taken over, to be made a Nothing, a Big zero (her words) is ENRAGING!

I stumbled earlier today on some writings about parenting styles and though to myself: abuse is not a parenting style.

Some say you should forgive your parents, forgive your mother. I agree when you happen to have a mother. When you have an enemy, run away or fight. Except that when you are a child, you can’t. You aren’t allowed to. And people say: don’t be angry at her, she is your mother!

Again, I never had a mother.

What I do have is fear and rage inside, rage at all the people who hurt my paranoid and histrionic-personality-disordered “mother”, and rage at her for hurting me so badly, repeatedly, never to correct, never to regret, never to .. never to acknowledge, as if it never happened but only in the deluded mind of a bad, bad girl, bad daughter, bad person.

She hated me for the rage in my eyes as I looked at her, as a teenager. Rage in my eyes was all the evidence I had that I was a person, not a Nothing. Nothing doesn’t rage. A person rages.

To be continued.

anita