Taking Your Crisis, and Making it Worse and Making it All About Themselves

[Invisiblewoman]

I want to add trigger warnings for mentions of physical abuse.

When I was a young teen I had an abuse experience with a classmate that put me in an emotionally vulnerable state.

My relationship with my UNPD mom was already strained and she put me in a situation that made me homeless. She used my homelessness as a "woe is me my daughter ran away" tale when she actually told me she just didn't want me at home.

After the experience I had called her in tears. She said I was a bad daughter and she was going to put me in foster care.

I went to a teacher and debated on going to a hospital or going home. I had self harmed, and I hadn't before and I felt at risk for suicide. The teacher called my mom and my mom screamed at the teacher that everything was my fault.

I decided to go home thinking I would work things out which was my first painful lesson in dealing with a PD person; thinking something is wrong is a personal attack even if it has nothing to do with them.

I was physically assaulted when I got home.  She let my older brother (age 18) beat me in front of her. I was told I was crazy and that I was going to be locked up.

I escaped the house and tried to report them. The police labeled me a runaway/an attention seeker and sent me home.

My mother tried to commit me to a youth facility (I found the forms after accidentally knocking over her purse). This "help" never came to fruition. Any other counselling revolved around my mother labeling me as the problem, while she maintained a dangerous dynamic between my brother and myself in secret.

In one meeting with a social worker I was not allowed to even talk. I tried to speak up and was immediately shut down and was told it was all my fault.

My mother played victim to the hilt. To this day I am still blamed and if I hint at the history my family tries to control and isolate me it seems.

I can remember, after a year of living in a battlefield at home, being told I was bad that I harmed my mother by running away. My mother had me kicked out again because I went to a friend's house (I was told I was bad and needed to be kept at home until I was 18, and was not allowed friends). My mom knew exactly what group home I lived at and every week I called her, asking to come home, she told me I didn't deserve to come home.

There is a lot more to this story and I have been thinking a lot about why I feel deliberately isolated, and how much I have been smeared.

Anyone ever experience a PD person becoming physically abusive in response to your own struggles, and reacting as if your emotional reaction is a personal attack?

[bloomie]

Invisiblewoman - I'm sorry this has sat for a bit without a response.

What you describe happening to you is terrible. My heart aches just thinking of you, a vulnerable child experiencing abuse from a classmate and then accusations, rejection and further abuse when you turned to your mother for help.

I can only imagine that maybe, like my own mother, your mother experienced anything that demanded anything of her as an inconvenience and there had to be someone at fault. And possibly, was thrown into a rage when her terrible, neglectful parenting was exposed or potentially exposed.

Everyday, predictable needs on my part - supplies for school, a cavity that had been neglected far too long needing to be filled, clean socks to wear to school, someone bullying me at school... were a personal attack and affront to my mother who frequently declared she never wanted to be a mother. Ummm...yes, Captain Obvious we know!!! 

In my own case, these types of everyday things were an opportunity to rage, give me the silent treatment, or huge dramatic displays of histrionics while she declared her self sacrifice screaming about my selfishness and always wanting or needing something.

So, I understand to some degree the abject wasteland home can be for a young person trying to cope with very difficult things outside of the home and, as you so well said, a "battlefield" within the home with secrets, alliances, my mother's additions, volatility, and disordered abuse reigned.

I wonder if you, like me, learned how to be self sufficient very early? I wonder if you, like I do, still have difficulty taking good care of yourself in some ways? Trusting yourself and your own perceptions?

There are two really great advocates for those of us who are survivors of childhood trauma that I continue to learn from and find very helpful that I wanted to share in case you haven't heard of them:

The work of Patrick Teahan has validated and illuminated some of the things I have needed to work through from my own childhood trauma: https://www.youtube.com/@patrickteahanofficial

And Ingrid Clayton is another voice that has been a great resource for me. She adds humor at times and both she and Patrick Teahan are direct and do not mince words: https://www.youtube.com/@IngridClaytonPhD

Thank you for sharing a tiny snap shot of just how hard and dark your mother's behaviors (and brother's!!) have been and seem to continue being for you.

[Invisiblewoman]

Thank you for your response.

I do struggle with self care at times and tend to sometimes pick jobs that aren't a good fit.

I struggle to trust my instincts and so tend to neglect my inner self in relationships, thinking I need to fix the relationship when my partner isn't being fair, and is being selfish with me.

I have chosen to be single until I maybe I meet someone in a healthy way.

[Call Me Cordelia]

That sounds beyond awful and a lot to work through years afterwards, but I'm glad for you that you are now. So many in your life who should have been on your side and protected you failed to do so.

The title of your post resonated very much with me. Yes. I too was not allowed struggles and suffering unless it could be turned towards my parents' advantage as a source of supply. In my case and then my younger sibling's it became factious disorder by proxy. So much drama and attention to be had by playing the poor parents who were bankrupting themselves and suffering so much by watching their children suffer from unknown dramatic illnesss.

As a teenager this sibling also experimented with self-harming. She was not gotten any help whatsoever, like with the constant bringing her to specialists for her vague and wildly exaggerated physical symptoms. No. She got blame, shame, physical abuse, and never speak of this ever again. No way to play mother of the year with that one.

[Poison Ivy]

I had a severe eating disorder when I was a teenager. At one point, my family and I had a few sessions of family therapy, and in one of the sessions, my mom said something about her theory that I had gotten sick to make her and the rest of the family look bad. My mom has struggled with various types of mental illnesses throughout her life (which I don't blame her for), but I'm certain that these illnesses affected her parenting, especially of me, and that I inherited some genes for brain disorders. Her statement in that family therapy session about me choosing my illness and using it to hurt the rest of the family killed any possibility that I would want to or attempt to have a closer relationship with her. I'm in my 60s now, she's 95, I help with her care, but I've never forgiven her for that statement.