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Tuesday, July 23, 2013. I haven’t been in the mood to write lately, but the topic that has appeared lately in comments on different blog posts here has lit my fire. If you are an adult who as a child, and probably on through your adult life until now, been the “scapegoat” hated, despised, scorned and abused child of especially your mother, it is time to WAKE UP and take a clear-eyed look at what is going on both for your abuser and for yourself.
As I have written elsewhere on this blog I had no clue that I had been abused as a child until I was 29 years old. Abused? I doubt there were more than a handful of days in my entire 18 year childhood when I was not horribly abused in word and action by my mother. I spent the entire decade of the 1980s in one kind of treatment after another trying to get a handle on what happened to me and how to heal.
NEVER, not one single TIME in all those thousands of hours of so-called “help” did anyone EVER mention to me that my mother was MENTALLY ILL! I discovered that fact on my own when I accidentally discovered and read the 1998 1st edition (blue cover) of
by Paul Mason MS and Randi Kreger
Not only was my severely abusive mother mentally ill, she suffered from Borderline Personality Disorder with psychosis.
I am recognizing the same patterns in the comments arriving on this blog. These people do not CHOOSE not to know the truth of their life. They do not even CHOOSE to hate us. The abuse of their childhood changed their physiological development and triggered a gene combination that is as yet not understood that altered the development of their nervous system AND THEIR BRAIN.
The way these people are in their life is entirely CORRECT, REAL and RIGHT to them — but they did not CHOOSE to be the way they are and they WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO CHOOSE TO BE DIFFERENTLY THAN THEY ARE.
These abusive parents will ALWAYS abuse us. We are not people separate from them. We are the personification of their own inner demonized hopeless child. We cannot fix them and they cannot fix themselves. In my opinion every BPD parent who torments and tortures one child as being “all bad” suffered at some point in the history of the development of their disease from a psychotic break. The treatment such children receive from this parent all of their lives is psychotic.
Those of us who suffered then, and those adults who are trying to stay in some kind of a relationship with their BPD parent, are never going to establish a “normal, sane, fair, just, reasonable, etc.” connection with these people. NEVER! And to think it is possible NOT TO BE ABUSED by these people is CRAZINESS inside of ourselves.
Ditch them and RUN FOR YOUR LIFE? Is that the only solution?
Bluntly — yes, it is. There IS NO HOPE!! There is ONLY SUFFERING unless those in contact with their abusive BPD (probably psychotic if the abuse was pervasive and severe) parents can deeply understand that they HAVE NO PARENT. Never did. Never will.
We had and have AN ABUSER. That is it. This is NOT going to change no matter how much we try to talk to them reasonably, try to get them to “see reality,” try to get them to experience even the smallest flash of conscience or compassion or regret or guilt or remorse or simple human caring for us.
They are NOT capable of these emotions with anyone and they cannot even begin to fake it with us that they do.
Those of us who did not end up with a personality disorder ourselves most likely have vast amounts of compassion and reasonableness in our inner being. We are good and kind people and we believe – against all odds – that healing and fairness exist in the world – and that if we just try hard enough and love our abuser “good enough” we will win the day.
Not going to happen!
A BPD brain and nervous system does not operate normally and never will. Talk about trying to squeeze blood out of a stone. It is our ignorance if not our downright denial fantasy life that keeps us in a perpetual tug-o-war trying to win a hopeless, painful, abuse-infected war against one of the most severe mental illnesses plaguing the human race.
Smarten UP and take care of yourself. In my opinion if you are going to have such a person in your life IGNORE EVERYTHING THEY SAY AND DO and add no fuel whatsoever to their abusive insane fire!
Can you do that? Hear no evil? See no evil? Don’t ever even try to verbally defend yourself, stand up for yourself, try to communicate how you feel and how you have felt all of your life as the hated tortured child of such a parent?
I could not do this. I disowned Mother long before I had a clue she was mentally ill. I disowned her when I deeply and finally understood that for all the horrible, HORRIBLE things she had done to me not ONE SINGLE TIME did she feel remorse!
I didn’t care at the time how she got to be the way she was. I just knew there was something PERMANENTLY wrong, dangerously wrong and totally abnormal about Mother!
I never regretted my decision and feel no guilt or shame for the fact that she died alone a miserable death as she lived a lonely miserable life. That was not MY fault, nor was it the fault of any of my 5 siblings who ended up having to let her go as did my father. Her disease ruled her life. It was present ALL OF THE TIME in everything she thought, felt and did.
But there comes a time when enough suffering is ENOUGH. If you are currently trying to have anything like a “relationship” with your mentally ill abusive BPD parent – forget it. Not going to happen. The ONLY thing that matters is that YOU TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF.
If having ANYTHING to do with that person is hurting you GET THE HELL OUT OF THE FIRE!
If you need to get a restraining order, get one. Most sick families will fly at you en masse when you stand up for yourself. It takes nearly super-human courage, strength, fortitude and determination to escape – but there are ways to take steps in that direction.
The first step is to deeply comprehend that you are not dealing with a human being in any kind of ordinary way. You are dealing with a person who has been swallowed up whole by a serious, severe, devastating, tragic, comprehensive mental illness that at present has no cure – and except in the rarest of cases – no truly effective treatment. It is VERY RARELY DIAGNOSED or even reported.
While we can learn about some of the dynamics of this disease we will never understand these people because we do not have their kind of nervous system or brain. There is no reasoning with them. There is no talking and understanding in return across the Great Divide. I do not believe it is helpful to engage in the delusions with these people. Theirs is a mad, mad truly insane world and just because they were able to trap us within their psychosis as their all-bad projected self does not mean we have to stay there.
Get out.
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Stop the Storm 
I am in full agreement with the physiological development. I am researching my own genetic illness….Being that my grandmother delivered breach in 1948 more than likely affected my mother’s brain and nervous system development. This makes sense to me since I am her only child with a very rare genetic heart condition. I never understood why she cried one day way back and said…” I hope I didn’t do this to you.” Yet threw me out of the house 2 weeks. post cardiac surgery. I am only 42….yes…get out of the fire. It’s not worth the insanity. I still call and wish her well or send her a text…but that’s because she is still my mother.
Hi Allison – As I approach my 62nd birthday it is finally sinking through to me that when “they” say that stress can be bad for health on many levels that living as a severe abuse survivor has created HUGE multiple layers of stress in my body even if nothing obvious is stressing me on any given day. I mention this because I suspect that a stance such you have taken is lessening the stress costs to your body – never mind to emotions through continued trauma dramas – in significant ways. Thank you for your comment!
Yes. I have only vague memories of abuse. Only now that mother is showing her crazy thinking
Am I realising that she told me my and her history over and over until I believed it happene
as she said. I am now finding out the extent of how her reality had to be the real one and not mine.
To honestly see this can take years and years.
Yes, it takes a long time. If even ONE therapist had known what was going on – and they were the professionals!! – I could have had a clue so much earlier. They did not know what to make of the level of abuse I suffered — but they did not admit this to me directly. I was raised to believe I deserved, no – rather EARNED intentionally – everything Mother “had” to do to me. Oh, so sick.