Still lying to yourself?
You're feeling guilty about being mean to your parents by going no contact. Or by limiting contact.
You say to yourself, "But it's my father." Or, "You only get one mother."
You're also telling yourself, "She did her best" "She loves me, but just in her own way," and "She went through a lot." I know you're telling yourself these things because I did.
All children of Cluster B parents lie to themselves constantly. You're lying to yourself that your mother did her best. You're lying to yourself that what your father did was "his best." You're lying to yourself that it's your job as a child to "understand" and "not hold grudges."
You've accepted a perverse turn-around: Your parents put you in the role of adult while they got to be a child. To their own child.
Maybe they mocked you. Maybe they gaslit you into believing that things that happened to you never happened. Maybe dad turned your brother against you and convinced your brother that you are the crazy one.
Maybe mom hit you with a wooden spoon and now jokes about it at Christmas as if it were a colorful family story.
Maybe your mother spent two days in bed “depressed” and not bothering to get you breakfast for school. Maybe she brought strange men home for one-night stands and expected you to sit at the breakfast table with him silently as if nothing out of the ordinary were going on.
Maybe your father has siphoned money off you for years to pay his own bills or dig his way out of stupid business schemes.
Maybe dad molested you. Maybe mom knew, and she helped arrange it.
Here are some new things to tell yourself.
And they are for you to tell yourself. None of these are for you to tell your father or mother because you don’t speak to people who abused you, do you?
Your mother: "I guess you'll never forgive me for my mistakes."
You: "You've never apologized or repented."
Your father: "I did the best I could."
You: "Your best was abuse."
Your mother: “You don’t know how hard it is to be a single mother.”
You: “I know that no matter how hard I have it, I don’t lie to my children or hit them.”
Your mother: "You should be more understanding of what it's like."
You: "You should be so ashamed of yourself that you can't even bring yourself to talk to me."
Your father: “I was so mixed up when I was a new dad, and I was drinking too much.”
You: “You raped me as a child. I wouldn’t invite my adult rapist to Christmas dinner either, would I?”
Your abusive parent: “I may not be perfect but I loved you.”
You: “No, you did not. You have never loved anyone because you are broken and incapable of giving or receiving normal love.”
I know that you do not want to tell yourself any of these things. It isn’t because they’re not true (you know that they are true). It’s because they hurt.
They’re supposed to hurt. For a moment. They should prick you and wound you enough to wake you up so that you finally put a stop to the charade you’re playing in your mind.
Your Cluster B parent doesn’t love you the way a normal parent does. Her best was never good enough, and frequently, it would have gotten her arrested if she pulled her behavior on anyone but her own child.
I know it sucks because I’m you, and you’re me. We, all of us abused children, end up here. Facing a reckoning.
Take the leap. Let it hurt if it has to hurt. There’s a better place on the other side.
I took the leap six years ago and my life has never been saner.
Good luck.
This is excellent, as always. The point about arrest is especially salient. I stumbled across this a few days after I had my magic birthday. Was arguing with my mother, and she ran across the room to hit me across the face. I no longer lived with her, so at first I turned to go. Then I reached for the phone. "Why don't we let the cops settle this one?" She didn't exactly cower and back down, but she tried to talk me out of it. I just wanted to get away and be quiet, so I let her talk me out of it. Later, I realized why -- what had consciously occurred to her but not me. For child abuse, she could explain to the cops that I had gotten out of line and deserved it. (As indeed she had, the handful of times that neighbors called the police when I was a kid.) As an adult? Assault and battery is actually serious--you know, a crime against a person. An actual human. And that human could decide whether or not to press charges.
That revelation changed everything. Thank goodness.
“You don’t speak to someone who abuses you”. This right here. I’m a therapist and the only reason I am sitting on that chair vs the other is because of that simple fact. Sure. Its never mutually exclusive and there’s all the training, etc. None of that would be worth a damn if I hadn’t disowned the clusterfk that I was a part of, involuntarily. Its so powerfully simple. And especially important to remember this time of year. Great post.