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There are abused infants and children whose life is in permanent hell – unless someone from the outside identifies what the dynamics of the parent-child relationship truly are – and permanently separates the parent and child. When the root of the abuse is mental illness, particularly of the ‘splitting-projecting’ severe Borderline, there is NO HOPE for achieving safety for the abused child. REMOVE IT!
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March 4, 1958 Tuesday morning
Dear Mother,
Notes as late and must close.
1. Report cards last Friday. John got all S’s. He is so proud and has been put in advanced reading! Linda [age 6] STILL poor behaved, loud, insolent etc. but good at home! She’s as usual – plays around if not watched closely! Same at home – I speak to her ten times to three to the others [put together] – hope she’ll grow out of it – it’s still her lack of imagination and old silliness I think. She’s not tom boyish though. All S’s in school work too and an excellent reader.
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“The others” in my mother’s mind were all her other children put together. Those other children were so rarely parented by my mother’s ‘bad-evil’ self as to hardly be noticed over the entire 18 year span of their childhood.
Me, on the other hand, belonged to that special group of ONE that ‘deserved’ to be parented by the ‘bad-evil’ mother. Nobody ever noticed that as my mother ‘bad-evilized’ ME that the ‘bad-evil’ was on the other side of a dark looking glass.
How do I know that those two words, ‘put together’ needed to be added into my mother’s tirade against me here? Because I heard that phrase during my entire childhood up until the night when I was 18 and my father told me that he and my mother no longer wanted me under their roof – because I was the cause of all the troubles in my parent’s marriage – and because I had ALWAYS been more trouble than all of the other children (by then there were five of them) put together.
What my mother was doing to me STILL by the time I was six was obliterating my SELF. Some people refer to severe abuse of infant-children as being ‘soul murder’. I disagree. My soul was mine and my mother could NEVER touch it – so she didn’t. She DID, however, have the power to obliterate my growing and developing SELF from the moment I was born.
These ‘ten times’ that my mother refers to in her letter were not ‘ten times’ of gentle, appropriate correction. She responded to her projected evil put into me with her own unrecognized internal evil.
These kind of parent-child interactive combinations are NOT correctable. There is, as I have said so many times before, nothing either the child or the parent can IN REALITY do to make things ‘better’ or ‘safer’ or ‘more appropriate’. The foundation for the abuse I received had NOTHING to do with reason or reality. There was NEVER a REASON for anything my mother ever did to me.
True, I was not able to be a perfect child – nor were my siblings. But the only way I could NOT have had my mother hate me and treat me the way that she did was by my NOT BEING A CHILD in the first place which of course meant that I would have had to CEASE BEING ALIVE.
In these situations any child in my position MUST BE REMOVED from the abusing parent permanently. There is no other option.
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Stop the Storm 
Your mother set up the perfect environment for her perfect husband and children where she could be the perfect mother in the perfect Alaskan mountain free from any outside interference. She successfully convinced your father that his family was bad and banished them completely. (Thus removing you and your siblings from this set of potentially loving grandparents and eliminating a possible source of rescue for yourself.) She distanced herself geographically from her own mother since they were unable to have a good relationship living in close proximity to each other. Once your mother was safely removed from her mother, she was able to create a fantasy relationship where she adored her, missed her and fed her information on her perfect mothering skills. She no longer had to worry about your grandmother interfering with her parenting skills or her over involvement with you. Your mother went to great lengths to be able to live out her dream/fantasy and act out her madness without consequence. Unfortunately, you were the primary outlet for this “acting out”. Your mother alienated everyone from her life. She had no friends and allowed no friends into her inner circle, including her children’s friends. On top of the isolation, your mother was a skillful liar if not delusional. How could anyone know that a child in your family of origin was a victim of severe abuse? Even today, with laws criminalizing child abuse and mandatory reporting laws, a child in an isolated home with a delusional mother as you were, would be nearly impossible to identify. Your mother created the perfect environment for abuse.
Wow! When you put it THAT way…….. 🙂
In the ‘nut shell’!
I think about this a lot right now – and maybe will for the rest of my life:
“How could anyone know that a child in your family of origin was a victim of severe abuse? Even today, with laws criminalizing child abuse and mandatory reporting laws, a child in an isolated home with a delusional mother as you were, would be nearly impossible to identify. Your mother created the perfect environment for abuse.”
Few abusive parents can create the ‘perfect home-life storm’ such as my mother was able to – as you so perfectly describe here. [I had never thought about the removal of my paternal family as also being part of the ‘picture’ – AND then also my mother’s brother’s, his wife in L.A., also.]
But there HAS to be visible, detectable SIGNS to identify and recognize this level of severe child abuse around us today. It does happen! Researchers like to eliminate and control variables when they study something – I guess my case is perhaps so extreme that NO useful conclusions can be drawn from it because of the picture you describe so well here. I am very disappointed if that is the case!
There are children today being raised by mothers such as mine was. Their suffering is nearly beyond most people’s ability to imagine it. These victims cannot possibly appear in public as happy, well adjusted, thriving children.
I believe ‘expert’ researchers could design accurate assessment tools that could be used to learn the truth from these children about the truth about their life. Teachers need to be taught how to recognize these children. (Reactive Attachment Disorder information as it is applied to high-risk adopted children would be the best place to start for identifying these children’s symptoms.)
Once the children are recognized, certainly within school settings some efforts can be made to talk to them. In today’s chaotic schools we might believe these steps are impossible. When we consider the suffering of these children will compound and continue for the duration of the survivor’s entire lifespan, we cannot afford to pretend there is nothing we can do to help these children.