A sighting of the Child Who Left for No Good Reason
The centerpiece of the estranged parents’ movement is the Child Who Left for No Good Reason. Most of their own stories, and almost all of their stories of other people’s suffering, feature this mysterious, shadowy creature–a figure who, Bigfoot-like, is often spoken of and occasionally seen when someone is alone and cameraless, but almost never caught on film. Asking members of estranged parents’ forums to point to living, breathing specimens is a lost cause. The members call the entire Millennial generation narcissistic and addicted to social media, but they never seem to know the blog address or Facebook page of an actual Child Who Left for No Good Reason.
So it’s exciting when a parent has a sighting in the wild, and brings back a URL where the beast can be found.
Today’s sighting of a Child Who Left for No Good Reason is described thus:
So, she rants on about how there really wasn’t anything she could truly put a finger on; she just felt more LIBERATED and FULFILLED (or some such bs) without her MOTHER… That until she cut her out of her life, she wasn’t realizing her full potential; that since she had, her career (blogging, really???) had flourished, she had “travelled the World” and taken courses. I guess having a mom is prohibitive to all of these things…
The main poster didn’t remember the URL, but another member found this article, and the main poster affirmed that it was correct: I Ghosted My Own Mother, a blog post by Elisabeth Lighty on ScaryMommy. Go read it–it’s short.
So, she rants on about how there really wasn’t anything she could truly put a finger on;
What Lighty actually says is,
As a little girl, I felt anxious and confused most of the time. I didn’t understand that the way I felt wasn’t normal, and I figured it was my fault.
Years later, after lots of therapy and expanded self-awareness, I connected these feelings to my relationship with my mother. Thus began my attempt to negotiate what had always been a relationship fraught with tension and unease, a relationship I thought was supposed to be easy.
[….]I realized that I was emotionally exhausted. My guard was always up, and even though things seemed “better” from the outside, I was once again trapped in a constant state of hypervigilance, the one I knew so well from childhood.
First, no ranting. Second, Lighty clearly knows what the problem is, but she’s decided not to make it the focus of the article. You can argue that she should say more to justify herself, and I think the article would be stronger if she had said more; but she also describes the anxiety, the confusion, and the hypervigilance that being around her mother inspired in her. Whatever was going on, it was bad.
she just felt more LIBERATED and FULFILLED (or some such bs) without her MOTHER… That until she cut her out of her life, she wasn’t realizing her full potential; that since she had, her career (blogging, really???) had flourished, she had “travelled the World” and taken courses.
Up until the last two paragraphs, Lighty says barely a word about feeling better. She talks about how hard it was, how she wrestled with guilt and grief, how she felt that something was wrong with her and worked hard to reach a place where she could reconcile with her mother, how she had to lie to herself to maintain the reconciliation. Then, at the very end:
In the last year, my self-esteem has skyrocketed. I went into business with my best friend. I’m writing again. Without my mother in my life, I feel lighter and free to be who I really am. I feel like there is enough room in the world for all that I bring to it—big emotions, fierce loyalty, deep empathy, strong business sense and even some sparks of creativity.
Since ghosting my mother, I’m free to truly be me.
The disconnect between the estranged parent’s characterization and the words of the blog post are so extreme that I have a hard time believing it’s the right post. No traveling the world, no taking courses. None of the spacy, psychobabble mindset implied by “LIBERATED and FULFILLED” and “realizing her full potential.”
By the way, her flourishing career? Not blogging. She runs a doula agency. It’s in the “About the Writer” box at the bottom of the article.
I guess having a mom is prohibitive to all of these things…
Yes, that’s exactly what she was complaining about. Having a mother.
This is tangential to the estranged parent’s interpretation of the article, but critics are in fine form in the comment section. One weighs in with a string of cliches straight out of every estranged parents’ forum:
What goes around comes around . Never forget karma. You ghosting your mother is teaching your kids to do the same thing to you. Kids need grandparents and you are teaching them by your own example how to estrange from you one day. When that day comes; and trust me it will, you will have yourself to blame. Love, care, forgiveness, and compassion are the hallmarks of a mature person. Have you ever thought of dual counseling with you and your mom? You need it.
Another shows grace, tact, and a remarkable ability to maintain her composure while spinning a logical argument that empathizes with both mother and child:
Wow – you self-righteous bitch… just who PAID for that English degree, and the home over your pointed head while you were getting it??? Put the gas in your car and fed you??? you and those like you are a REAL piece of work; go on, travel the world, whatever, and when you are in your 60s, I hope to fuck YOUR kids find some innocuous thing wrong with YOU (too fat, gone too often, work too much, out of $) and dump you like the garbage you are. it WILL happen. Let the world take a spin. I am SO SURE your so-called “friends” will be the first in line to donate a kidney, spoon feed you if you were quadriplegic, or stop a speeding bullet for YOU, you ungrateful bitch. Just wait… Your generation is SO fucking spineless and self-absorbed, you will NEVER see it coming. Parents make mistakes – EVERYONE does; kind human beings accept one another and love them anyway. Unless your mom beat you senseless daily, lit your goddamn hair on fire and fed you garbage scraps, you were not “ABUSED”; perhaps DISCIPLINED, which is different (and not allowed today). Anyway – Karma be knockin’ at your door soon enuf – and when you DO need her, I hope your mom spits in your fucking smug face. Oh – have a narcissistic day!
Charming.
The member who found this specimen of the Child Who Left for No Good Reason goes through some stunning contortions on her way from Lighty’s essay to her own post about the essay. She neatly erases everything Lighty said about the problems she had with her mother, and substitutes a fantasy that Lighty couldn’t put her finger on the issues. She skips Lighty’s descriptions of how she suffered when she was in contact with her mother, and–strangely, for a member of a forum where members speculate about whether their children feel guilt or loss during estrangement–ignores everything Lighty says about how she suffered during her first estrangement.
(Or maybe it’s not so strange.)
In place of the lightness and freedom Lighty felt, the member reads self-indulgent psychobabble. And in place of Lighty’s conclusion that the world has opened up to her now that she’s free of her mother’s toxicity, the member reads that Lighty thought having a mother at all was holding her back.
Along with these minimizations is a pattern of mistakes that can only be called poor reading comprehension. The member misremembers Lighty as traveling the world and taking courses. She assumes that because Lighty’s article is on a blog, she’s a professional blogger, and misses the section where it’s established that Lighty runs a doula agency. She also misses the clues within the text–Lighty says she started a business, and in a separate sentence says she started writing again, so the member conflates the two. Another conflation: Lighty says, “my self-esteem has skyrocketed. I went into business with my best friend.” The member associates “skyrocketed” with “went into business,” and writes, “her career […] had flourished”.
To quote from Bob Altemeyer’s study on authoritarian personalities:
They could not remember some pieces of evidence, they invented evidence that did not exist, and they steadily made erroneous inferences from the material that everyone could agree on.
The reading comprehension doesn’t stop with the original member. Another forum member says, “Here is what this person said in another article,” then quotes an article by a writer named Jen Kim. A third member says, “I checked out scary mommy’s blog. What a self-absorbed ass. Her parenting skills are asinine and she seems to spend more time worrying about her body then her relationships.” Even when articles are laid out in standard newspaper style, with the author’s name at the top, the members don’t notice that Elisabeth Lightly isn’t Jen Kim, or that ScaryMommy is a community with hundreds of authors. This isn’t a minor slipup–“Oh ho ho, those elders and their silly ideas about the Internet!” It’s part of a pattern of jumping to conclusions based on the slightest data, and an incuriosity so deep that it doesn’t occur to the members that they might need to look farther.
I continue to hold out hope that a Child Who Left for No Good Reason will be found.
I also hold out hope of a Nessie sighting.
If I find either, I’ll let you know.
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This stuff about authoritarians’ dodgy relationship to the truth is exactly what I needed to hear, to keep me from trying to talk sense into them over and over again. >_> It’s so difficult for me to comprehend their mindset, but I know that it has to be different or they wouldn’t cause nearly as much trouble for everyone as they do.
I really love this site. It’s so exhausting to be a child of people like this and see these things and think, “but… but… but… that’s all so wrong!” like we’ve done so many times throughout our lives, to no avail. It is so empowering to see you lay it all out. On willful ignorance of the online world — I know that someone tried to explain reddit to them at one point because they are convinced that it is a site for estranged children, and they threw him out on his ear. None of them are technologically inept, but once they’ve identified someone as the enemy, they only see what they want to. I had a pretty good laugh over the scary mommy thing though. My own mother acts like a doddering oldster on the internet too, whenever it’s in her best interests to do so, but she spends whole days online so it’s clear she’s only clueless by design.
What about an estranged child who feels their mom is too intense set some healthy boundaries and practice basic human manners and politeness while maintaining those boundaries?
A mom is a mom and you can cut her to the core with shunning. Just manners 101 people. There is no justification for cruelty.
Jane,
I think you are confusing ‘no-contact’ with shunning, but they are two very different things. ‘No-contact’ is an act of self-preservation, and the person cutting off contact is doing it to protect themselves from emotional, psychological or physical harm. They are certainly not doing it to intentionally hurt someone else. Shunning or giving someone the ‘silent treatment’ is done to intentionally hurt and punish someone, control or manipulate them, or force them to ‘fall back in line’ and do as they’re told.
I come from an abusive family background and walked away from my entire past. It was my mother that mainly abused me, but by the time I cut off all contact, I was also concerned that my father might shoot me. Or at the very least, turn up at my home with a loaded shotgun, with the intention of forcing me to return to my parents home, where they felt that I belonged and had no right to leave. Do you think I am shunning my family simply because I have chosen to protect myself from abuse? And guess what? My family will never admit to what they’ve done and pretend to be clueless to the reasons as to why I walked away, i.e. they don’t know what they’ve done and I LEFT FOR NO GOOD REASON.
Also, what do you mean by ‘Their mom is too intense?’ Terms such as ‘intense’ are sometimes used to minimize the abusive behaviour of a parent. Can you give some specific examples of what you view as ‘intense’? In my situation, my family refused to acknowledge that my mother was abusive, and sometimes of the opinion that her behaviour was simply ‘intense’. They would often say, ‘I know that she can be a bit much sometimes, but she cares about you really. She just goes about things the wrong way’.
In regards to boundaries, putting boundaries in place only work when you’re dealing with a non-abusive parent – at least in the longer term. Where abusive parents are concerned (and as already mentioned, some of these abusive parents might be described as ‘intense’), they don’t tend to work. On the one hand, as a victim of abuse you have to put boundaries in place in order to protect yourself, but on the other hand, the abusive parent has no respect for you or your boundaries. The aim of the abusive parent is often to gain complete control of their child/adult child, so once you put boundaries in place, the abuse tends to get worse as the abusive parent tries to regain the control and power that they have lost.
Jane, you may be of the opinion that all or most adult children who cut off contact with their parents are cruel, but I can assure you that they are not. If you look at some of the research into estrangement – not anecdotal evidence or posts on internet forums – one of the commonest reasons (but not the only reason) is abuse. And in the way that there is no ‘justication for cruelty’ to a parent, there is absolutely no justification for a parent cruelly treating or abusing their child/adult child.
“A mom is a mom and you can cut her to the core with shunning. Just manners 101 people. There is no justification for cruelty.”
Disengaging from a relationship that you find to be damaging to yourself is not cruelty. If we were talking about a friend or romantic partner then you wouldn’t be talking about leaving as cruelty: parental relationships are no more obligatory or mandatory than those.
Besides which, “mom is upset,” is not an argument against the estrangement being a good choice for the estranged child. This has been addressed elsewhere on this site, but we aren’t responsible for the feelings of other people, and the emotional responses our actions engender do not undercut the legitimacy of those actions.
Polite boundaries do not work with my mother. She believes that she has an absolute right to do or say anything she pleases when it comes to me and my family, and she has said as much. Boundaries only work when the parent acknowledges their obligation to comply with them, and the right of the child to set them. My mother views boundaries as an attempt “to control her.” Again, she has said as much.
My mother’s behavior is destructive to me and my family. We have no contact for our protection because she chooses not to control that behavior or comply with any boundaries.
FWIW, I no longer believe my mother has genuine feelings of affection toward me or my family. She is hurt about as much as a toddler hurts when their favorite toy is taken from them.
Quite a number of the parents on estranged parents’ forums dealt with “intense” parents, and many of them found it necessary to cut them off. Perhaps you should discuss with them their experiences with setting boundaries with their parents.
Now that some time has passed, I’ll point out that when a parent is too intense, she’s come to rely on her children as an outlet for her feelings. She’s not going to react well to having that outlet taken away. It feels to her like her children don’t care about her, that they want to muzzle or censor her, that they don’t want to know about the reality of her life. She feels that they’re abandoning her with her problems. She feels that her children took and took from her, and now that it’s their turn to give, they’re too selfish to be bothered. She’s not going to be open to change, because it feels to her like being open to rejection and control. While she stays in contact with her children, she’s going to push and push to return to status quo, the only arrangement that doesn’t feel like a knife in the chest.
How do I know this? Because it plays out over and over on estranged parents’ forums.
A few parents eventually do change… after they’ve been left without an alternative for a few years. They still feel bitter and rejected, they mourn the status quo, and they don’t reconsider what the relationship must have been like to their children. That “closeness” and “openness” still means family to them. Even after they’ve changed, they’re still not able to have healthy relationships with their children because they’re still looking for ways to get the old relationship back. Contact with their children reopens their wounds and makes them regress.
Does this sound like a situation that can be managed with boundaries and manners?
This thread just popped up about estranged parents who estranged their own parents. They had “real” reasons for doing it, as opposed to their children who just made up reasons. The lack of empathy/self-reflection in some of the posters is astounding.
(I removed the link because I prefer not to point readers directly to the forums. It makes it too easy for assholes to go a-trolling.)
Ugh, yes. And the loudest of them all is as borderline as they come. I believe her stories of mistreatment by her family, but when she says her children are estranged because of parental alienation, I roll my eyes.
It does break my heart that some of them regret not cutting off their parents. On the old boards, one woman said, “If I’d estranged them, maybe I wouldn’t be the worthless person I am today.” She wasn’t worthless. But after a lifetime of enduring her parents in the name of family, she believed it. It’s awful that someone would be reduced to that state. And after reading abut the effects of depression on parenting skills, I wonder if not only she, ut her children, would have been better off if she’d broken away from her parents.
That one reminds me of my mother. The way she uses hyperbolic examples to minimize her behavior is very similar. The primary difference is that I think dementia is starting to get ahold of my mother and she’s not nearly as well-spoken as she used to be. She’s become sort of… vapid, I guess. My mother was estranged on and off from her parents too but ultimately ended up attending to their needs for errands, etc. in the end. Both were abusive alcoholics. I think that went a long way toward “breaking” her, but she doesn’t acknowledge it. There’s another poster that I feel really bad for. I think she’s on the right track but the other posters are dragging her the wrong way and deepening the estrangement through their influence.
Which one? I’d be interested in your insights into the board dynamics. It’s been a while since I was a regular reader.
About parents who were on the right track, not along ago I came across this comment on Facebook:
She came so close to reconciling, then her sister destroyed it.
I read that board & one other pretty much daily. I am trying so hard to wrap my head around why my own mother behaves the way she does, and how I might reach her to discuss a way out of our estrangement. I guess I feel like there’s a possibility to find the answer from the people on these boards.
But the actual effect has been to convince me that our approaches to parent/child relationships are so fundamentally different that there is no hope of a real reconciliation where we all kiss & make up & go marching into the sunset together. Probably the best we can all hope for is to tolerate each other’s presence a few times per year.
I agree – there’s one poster (actually the OP of the thread I referenced) who is relentlessly examining herself & trying to find the reason for her children’s estrangement. The others keep assuring her that she had nothing to do with it – the EC’s just estrange “because they can.”
I see who you and Magpie mean now. She’s been like that from the start–admit fault, get bullied back into child-blaming optimism, coast for a while, admit fault, get bullied back into blaming her kids… I don’t remember her story and the forum it’s on is gone, but her admission that she’s co-dependent with her schizophrenic, alcoholic daughter could stand on its own as a reason for the estrangement. Lots of people back away when their parents pour all their energy into a sibling who’s a hot mess.
Yes, that would be the one.
There are a number of threads where she has explored some of the possibilities. She’s trying and she’s looking for support in that, and she wound up in the wrong place for it. I find myself really hoping that things work out for her. Her pain and willingness to work on things seem so genuine.
My first comment (above) was in reference to Magpie’s comment. I cross-posted with you, Issendai. But wow, that poor woman in your comment was on the right track & her sister gave her precisely the wrong advice. How many of us have longed to hear an acknowledgment that we went through hell with our parents’ nutty behavior?
Ayup. It doesn’t matter that the parent wasn’t in her right mind. We KNOW. We want to hear that our parent is sorry for the things she did, because even if she wasn’t completely in control of herself, she still did them. And she did them when we were dependent and defenseless against her.
Recovery from chronic depression, bipolar, etc. should involve a 12-step group. Too many people think recovering from the medical event wipes the slate clean, but the reality is that they’ve done damage. And the disease doesn’t take the blame for all of it, because unlike someone who’s out of their mind with, say, insulin shock, depressed and bipolar people filter the symptoms through their personalities. A lot of the things they do are because it’s easier for them, or it’s the first impulse that comes to mind and they’re too self-centered to think again. When the crises let up and their minds clear a little, they deflect and deny to avoid doing anything to prevent another crisis from happening. Speaking as someone who was seriously depressed for a while, some of the damage to other people is because you have brain weevils, and some is because you have a shitty way of coping with brain weevils.
On top of that, anyone who’s gotten away with bad behavior for a long time has normalized it. It’s especially bad when the mental illness hit so young that they didn’t have a chance to acquire adult coping skills. That doesn’t go away by itself.
I don’t even necessarily need or expect my mother to accept responsibility for what happened. Just admit that it happened and accept that I will take precautions to keep her from doing it in the future. She kept showing up uninvited while I was out, so she never gets a key to my house.
By the same token, estranging children should apologise to their parents for hurting them by estranging. They may not have meant to hurt their parents, but they still did.
Today they’re pushing back against a member who told one of them to get over her anger at her mother and learn to love her mother for what she did right. The answers are civil, reasoned, and exactly what you read on any “estranged child” forum.
I wish there were a way to make them see that there’s no difference between them and the people on abuse survivor forums. But that would mean identifying with the people they tag as like-my-kids, and that would result in seeing themselves as abusive, which absolutely, positively cannot happen.
But I’m gonna yoink some of their quotes for my page on why estranged children REALLY estrange.
(Sorry I’m not keeping up with replies. It’s crunch week at work.)
It’s interesting that some of the ones with children that aren’t estranged report that those kids say things like, “sometimes you made mistakes,” or “sometimes you were too hard on us,” and they take those statements to mean, “but you got most things right so you were a good parent.” There’s no exploration of or responsibility for that conduct, and no acknowledgment that this may be the same conduct that led to the estrangement of the other child(ren) (but the estranged child was unable or unwilling to tolerate those things because the balance was not really that they were good parents, just that the non-estranged child is more tolerant of it for some reason). For the ones that report that their parents were abusive but that they still had contact because of some familial obligation, there’s no acknowledgment that the non-estranged children may still be in contact out of that same sense of familial obligation, not because the poster is a decent parent.
A point that I think they miss is that many of could forgive the things that happened to us as children, IF THOSE SAME THINGS WEREN’T STILL HAPPENING. It’s the abuse of today that pushes us away. (Hey I made a rhyme!)
YES THIS. By trying to protect ourselves from present and future abuse, we’re accused of overvaluing the past. “BUT YOU’RE TOO SENSITIVE!”
Which is funny because my mother’s favorite example of why I’m a terrible person is something I did when I was about six years old (40+ years ago).
Oh my god, my mum does the same thing! Anything I might say can be discounted because it happened so long ago, and besides, I’m so very untrustworthy because I told lies when I was seven.
Issendai – this is something I have really wrestled with during the process of going Low/No Contact with my mother, who has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, but I believe meets the criteria for borderline personality disorder as well.
On the Out of the Fog forum, we (adult children of BPDs) spend a lot of time discussing intent and awareness.
As in, are our parents aware that their behavior is hurtful?
If they are aware, do they just not care?
If they do recognize it and do care, is it just the desperation to quell their own anxiety that leads them to behave this way?
Can they control the behavior?
If they can’t control it, why do they not at least acknowledge it afterwards and apologize?
And finally, does any of this even matter? The behavior is traumatic and hurtful, no matter what is causing it. I would LOVE to hear more of your thoughts on this area.
Oh man, that’s a tough one. It gets tougher when BPD is in the mix, because the disorder causes distorted perceptions that make outright psychotic actions seem justified. It varies from action to action, too. Most abusers don’t have just one justification for their abuse.
*scratches head*
There are actions that people think are normal and acceptable, even though they hurt people. A non-disordered example would be the reasoning estranged adult children use for cutting off their parents.
There are actions that people think are wrong, but justified. For example, you know it’s wrong and illegal to resolve conflicts with violence, but if someone grabs your boob at a party, you might punch them anyway. Any time a parent protests, “I didn’t know what else to do!”, they’re using this logic.
There’s a lot of overlap between these two reasons, with people switching between them as doubts arise or go away. People who operate according to these reasons are less likely to lie, because they think they’re fundamentally right. Oh, they may be lying to themselves, and they may lie to the law if it comes to that, but at the root they’re generally more honest than people who act for other reasons.
An example of disordered people who use these reasons: Amy and Sammy of Amy’s Baking Company. Their perception of threat is so distorted that they sincerely believe they’re justified in all the awful things they do. A lot of weird logic goes into it–witness Sammy’s claim that he doesn’t take the servers’ tips as he takes their tips, because as far as he’s concerned the servers know they don’t get tips, so the tips aren’t theirs, and he deserves the money because he works so much harder than they do.
There are actions that people think are necessary for the greater good–agh, work calls, I must break off. But this is the point where abusers start covering up for acts that they know are abusive. Extra complication: Abusers can be excellent at convincing you that they fall into the first two categories, when they’re fully aware and they do what they do because they can get away with it. Witness the chilling stories of how wife-batterers talk when they let down their hair in group therapy sessions.
Thanks Issendai – definitely more food for thought! I had not heard of Amy & Sammy – I had to look it up – but, wow, how did I miss such a story?
I’ll have to think this over in regards to my mom. My first impression is that she would put herself in the second category – she knew it was wrong, but her life was so hard & unfair that she deserved to erupt & the rest of us should not only understand this, but feel sorry for her as well for all she was going through.
After her Big Bad Rages, she would slink around looking guilty and ashamed of herself, so I think that speaks to awareness. But I think we enabled many of her “lesser” behaviors (sulking, passive-aggressive comments, etc), since it was easier on us to just let it go, and perhaps gave her the impression that these were OK and didn’t bother us.
By the way, I recently brought up the “eruptions” to her as one of the reasons I can’t see her right now, and she claims not to know what I’m talking about (head smack).
I believe my mother has BPD and I have confronted her on this issue. I have outright told her in the moment that she is hurting me so she was aware of it. However, she claimed that her hurt was greater than mine, past and present. On present issues she just pushed her own viewpoint on how it was worse for her, and with past events she would counter with other unrelated events to claim that I had hurt her more. In any case, she was unable to see anything from my point of view, could not show empathy and claimed that she was hurt more. These were events that did not even concern her, such as me getting married – me getting married to someone she disapproved of hurt her more than her insulting, being unsupportive and refusing to attend my wedding.
Hope this sheds some light as to their reasoning.
I know you’ll probably never read this, considering how much time had passed, but I would like to provide some insight as someone with BPD.
For background, I did around a decade of therapy. I left my DBT program after I no longer met diagnostic criteria for several months, and I’ve been stable and healthy in the years since then.
I think different people with BPD have different levels of awareness. I can only speak for myself, but I can speculate on what it’s like for people with less awareness based on my own experiences.
For me, if I had an episode and did something hurtful, I was always vaguely aware that I was being nasty. What didn’t register to me in the moment was *how* hurtful I was being and how disproportionate it was. That kind of realization would only come a few hours after the episode had passed and I had calmed down. What would follow would be horror, followed by very intense shame & guilt. The only thing I can really think to compare it to for a non-disordered person would be like waking up after a crazy party and realizing you completely fucked up someone else’s house while drunk.
How people respond to that shame depends on the person. I would take responsibility every time, and wanting to do better by other people was my biggest motivator to get help. I can also see how, for someone who’s in a more fragile state than I was, that admitting responsibility could be too painful. If something is too overwhelming, too painful to deal with, then everyone has the built-in ability to repress it – out of sight, out of mind. For most people, that level of overload is relegated to traumatic events, but someone with BPD responds to everyday stimuli like it’s traumatic. All of their normal defense mechanisms are overloaded; the only option left is to deny it happened at all. Good for them, but bad for everyone else.
Can the behavior be controlled? Yes, the same way anyone’s behavior can be controlled, but someone with BPD isn’t often able to see that. In my case, I felt completely overwhelmed and out of control literally all the time. Life was something that happened to me, and there was nothing I could do. Looking back, I think I can connect that feeling of helplessness to my own childhood abuse – the idea that there are greater, more powerful forces that will do whatever they want to you, and there was no action you could take to change that outcome. But that’s a matter of internal perception, not a reflection of reality, is it?
A lot of the DBT process was focused on helping me understand that, even though I felt like I was out of control, there was still an internal logic to my actions that I wasn’t aware of. Because even if *I* feel like I’m not in control of my actions, they’re still actions that I’m taking, right? Being able to understand why I was acting that way is the first step to fully taking accountability and preventing it from happening again.
I think the most important question here is: Does it matter? In my opinion, both as someone with BPD and someone who was abused… not really. Because it still happened, and you’re still hurt, and no amount of explaining can ever justify that. I think there’s very often a drive to understand what happened, as if there’s just one missing piece of information that will un-traumatize you. Like if you just understand enough why this happened, then maybe it will all make sense, and that will allow you to move on. Unfortunately, the nature of abuse will never really make sense. There’s never a logical reason for someone to abuse someone else.
I hope this can provide some level of insight to someone.
“Lobster Thermidor a Crevette with a mornay sauce served in a Provencale manner with shallots and aubergines garnished with truffle pate, brandy and with a fried egg on top and spam.”
“They are certainly not doing it to intentionally hurt someone else.”
As Issendai points out of estranged parents, they justify their behaviour by saying they do not intend to hurt. Issendai’s position is that if you hurt someone, you hurt them. Well, that applies to adult children too.
WHS, you genuinely seem to be missing the most important point: estrangement is an act of protection, whether for the self or for one’s child. It is also an act of utter, exhausted desperation.
Consider this: when one adult refuses to stop insulting another, refuses to stop insulting the younger adult’s spouse and home, insults their very young children to those children’s faces, screams at and threatens an adult for wanting to choose their own food, and refuses to behave in a civilized manner despite the calmest, most rational persuasion or tearful, heartfelt pleading… what can you do?
What should you do if this aggressive, hostile, unsocialized adult has been doing this to you since you were a toddler yourself, wholly dependent on them for your very life? Scream back in response to every sentence? That’s nothing you want your own toddler to watch, and even without minor children in the picture, spending that much time screaming would be utterly exhausting. Hit them until they stop? That’s illegal, and for good reason.
And that’s just assuming purely verbal abuse. What if you grew up with a parent who hit you for not picking up a toy the very instant the first command was out of their mouth? To expose a child to someone who treats children that way is a horrifying violation of the responsibility and protection that an adult, any adult, owes to a child. An adult who hits and screams at children for the most minor disobedience is actively harmful to children and should not be given access to them.
Also: actions have consequences. This is a core function of society. Many ways of mistreating people, many of which have been turned on adult children by the parents they estranged, are in fact illegal, just rarely prosecuted.
To compare an action-response scenario from another part of society: showering a person with obscenity and insults every hour on Twitter is a cruel act; the target ignoring every tweet is *not* a cruel act, and neither is blocking the harasser without a word. By blocking, the target has simply refused to interact with a person who is mistreating them. Do you truly believe the target should apologize for hurting the feelings of the harasser?