Society’s protection of parents damages children.
If the commonly held belief is “honor thy mother and father”, if you don’t, there must be something wrong with you right?
And PS: ever wonder why there are no commandments that you must enjoy the taste of chocolate? Or that you must think Brad Pitt is a babe? (sorry, I don’t know who the hot celebrities are these days)
If people need to be commanded to feel a certain way, there is a reason why. A bad reason.
Growing up (and even now, in the comments section of my videos), people were quick to anxiously remind me that my mother loved me.
This of course, following a video where I explicitly stated how abusive and cruel she was to me as a child.
Complete strangers.
People who had no idea what was going on inside the home where I lived with her, people who would not believe what she said to my ten year old self, after surgery in the hospital after the nurses left the room (“You’re faking”), people who had no idea that she would get us excited that “one of” our dads was coming to visit, insinuate that we would finally have a father for a few hours (YAY!! YAY! CLEAN UP! YAY!), and take off to her bedroom while we worked, only to come down in lingerie with no pants on when the doorbell rang.
This actually happened.
She also once decided to tell us that when we were kids, she wanted to drown us and kill herself.
Love? Really!
These people were DESPERATE that I know that my mother loved me. Teaching a child that that was love is how these cycles perpetuate.
My mother tolerated me. Sometimes. Felt obligated towards me and guilty about me. She had concern over my immediate corporeal safety…sometimes. She sometimes was proud of me when she felt it publicly reflected well on her parenting skills (right).
But no, my mother did not love me.
Or appreciate me. Express interest in my inner world or in developing a personal relationship with me. She didn’t see me as a unique and worthy individual independent of her selfish desires and wishes. She didn’t see me as a new human being who had to learn how to be a woman and person from the one who brought me here.
Her eyes never lit up when I entered the room. She was never happy to see me.
In fact, she regularly neglected, ignored or emotionally and physically abused me because of her own issues and because she never sought treatment for her mental and emotional illnesses.
My mother did not love me.
If that makes you uncomfortable, you might want to ask yourself why.
Another thing people are quick to tell me is to forgive, forgive, forgive. The best therapy I have had, that is helping connect me to my real self, the self that got erased by the indignity of my childhood, has encouraged me to finally be me. To respect my emotions, my feelings, my truths. For once.
If I had met therapists who shut that down by cowardly encouraging me to “forgive”, I would not be where I am today.
Do I think you should wallow in anger and grief and think about how much you hate your parents every day instead?
Yes. If it’s part of your healing process.
You will know when it’s time to let go. And being pressured to “forgive” by people who would rather not have to deal with witnessing your pain or considering what your revelations might mean about their life, is not helpful at all. In fact, it’s quite cruel.
Daniel Mackler explains:
“When therapists are quick to forgive parents their errors, and are quick to preach forgiveness, I am quick to say that I don’t trust them and I don’t want to refer clients to them.
To me, forgiving parents is not part of the healing process, no matter what the Dalai Lama or Eckhart Tolle or Mother Teresa might have said. Yet so many therapists preach forgiveness. Why? Because they haven’t done much to heal their traumas and instead took on the mindset of their traumatizers.
Those who preach forgiving parents are really just preaching dissociation. No one who has really gone into the depths of his or her childhood despair and rejection — that ubiquitous childhood experience — would expect or encourage forgiveness.
Instead they would respect the anger and sorrow and even rage that comes with breaking dissociation, moving through depression, and following the trail of grief.
Often it entails breaking, and breaking deeply, from those who set up or even directly caused the trauma.
To touch upon an earlier subject, this is another reason why I tend to mistrust therapists who have children of their own. So often when people have a child they are quick to realize how imperfect they themselves are as parents, and in so doing are quick to forgive the imperfections of their own parents. This might sound healthy on the surface, but I have observed that it’s a lot easier for parents to forgive those who traumatized them than to look at the ways they are culpable of replicating those traumas on an innocent other whom they created. To me, preaching forgiveness is a sign of a stymied healing process, and why would I want to go to, much less pay, such a person for my own healing?”
excerpt from Is My Therapist Good or Not? by Daniel Mackler
Click here for an infograph on the ABC’s of recovery
Written by a feminist, but still a very good, emotionally raw article: I can’t forgive my mother
Required reading for anyone wanting to get to the bottom of chronic illness, anxiety or depression. Click image for a link to a great preview of this book
Source: http://www.macleans.ca/society/silken-laumanns-shocking-secret/
The Canadian Olympian opens up about her dark childhood: anorexia, cutting and her troubled abusive mother
An Excerpt from Unsinkable by Silken Laumann
One scene from my childhood remains indelibly etched in my mind. I am standing, age six, at the top of the stairs in our house on Narva Court in Mississauga, Ont., carrying a beautiful pale blue dress with a navy sash that cascades to the floor. My dad gave the dress to me for my uncle Rolf’s wedding, and I utterly love it.
My mom looks angry. I feel confused. I’m so excited about this fairy-tale dress, but my mom’s face frightens me. Later, when we’re alone, she slaps me. “You’re always trying to get your dad to spoil you,” she scolds.
I’m ashamed. I know I must have done something wrong, but I don’t know what. I want Mom to know what she’s saying isn’t true, but now doubt has crept in. Maybe I am bad. Maybe I am trying to steal Dad’s attention, like she always says.
I remember another scene, this time on the day of Uncle Rolf’s wedding. My mom poses with one hand on a birdbath and the other on her hip. She is wearing a lovely white, flower-embossed gown with a long, light blue train draped around her. On her blond head she wears a sheer blue veil. Today, not even Uncle Rolf’s bride can escape my mom’s need to be in the spotlight.
My mom smacked me many times while simultaneously pummelling me with her words. Her attacks left me convinced that I was a devious, bad person. Her special weapon was a wooden spoon, but the scariest part of her attacks was their randomness. Since her rules felt arbitrary, she was always catching us off-guard. If I dared say something to her that was unpleasant but true, she would give me a puppy-dog expression of, “I am so hurt.” If I didn’t back down, she would tell me how mean and selfish and ridiculous I was, then taunt me about my hairstyle, or my friends, or my teachers—anything she knew I was sensitive about—until I was in tears. Then she would either become sympathetic or accuse me of being hysterical. I had nowhere to turn to legitimize my feelings, and no one to tell me this wasn’t okay.
When I was 10, [my older sister] Daniele was given permission to ride the city bus to the mall with a friend. Desperately wanting to go with her, I made a huge fuss about how unfair it was to have to stay behind. After shouting at me to smarten up, my mom dragged me inside, then beat me with a boot. I was crying and she was screaming. I don’t remember how badly it hurt, but I do remember the shame I felt about my behaviour, and how afraid I was that my sister was now old enough to leave the house on her own—she was becoming independent and I was left behind. When Daniele was gone, my mom’s focus was on me—and I didn’t want any more of her negative attention.
My [younger] brother, Joerg, was a cute, mischievous kid who could do no wrong in my parents’ eyes—at least when he was little. My mom used to take him in her arms, stroke his hair and call him her little liebchen, but I came to believe his upbringing might have been the most confusing of all, caught as he was between my mom’s mercurial moods and my dad’s great expectations. When Joerg was eight, he started sleeping with a knife under his pillow. He never needed to use it, but it lay close as he slept. Years later, when I asked him why, he said, “I didn’t trust Mom.”
I believe my mom loved us in her own way, but in her darkest hours, she would say things like, “I could kill you and then kill myself.” What seemed to transform her words into a frightening possibility was the fact that a distraught mother in a nearby neighbourhood had shot her kids, then herself. Another mother had gassed her family while they were sleeping. My mom would get worked into a frenzy—screaming and sobbing and throwing dishes. She would howl that she was going to gas us all. Her threat was that she would kill herself and take us with her. She never did anything to show that she’d go through with it, but I slept with my window open.
My mom later insisted her threats hadn’t been serious, yet I felt that we lived in an unsafe house. It’s hard to convey just how volatile the situation felt. I remember one day, when my father was out trimming the hedges. There was a woman suntanning in a bikini in the yard next door, and my mother was consumed by jealousy—she felt my dad was staring. To punish him, she went into the basement and pulled out the plug from his power cord so that my dad would have to head down to the basement and plug it in again. This was repeated a few times before my father raced to catch my mother on her way into the basement and lock her in there. Up to this point, it was almost silly—the plotline for an episode of I Love Lucy—but my mom’s rage bubbled over. She grabbed an axe from the basement and hacked her way out through the door. For me, every day felt like it could take that kind of unpredictably scary turn. Perhaps Daniele and Joerg felt the same way, as we schemed together about an escape, for which we created a kit with bandages and a flashlight. We also saved getaway cash and planned whose doorstep we would land on if we needed to make a run for it.
* * *
I was 16 the first time I cut myself with a razor. It was a Friday night and I wanted to go out on a date. So did my dad. If we both went out, Joerg would be left home alone. My dad, Daniele and I had already been butting heads over my desire for independence. They thought I was being too bold, attending events in Toronto and sometimes coming home on the midnight GO train. Since I was focused on training for the Olympics and excelling at school, I didn’t think I was being irresponsible, but this one night, it came to a head.
Furious that I was insisting on leaving, my dad demanded, “You can’t leave Joerg alone all the time. You’re being selfish.”
I was angry, but my dad’s approval was still desperately important to me, and I crumpled in shame. I did feel the need to take care of Joerg, and I worried that my wanting to leave made me a bad person. Everything was falling apart. My mom [had moved out] and my dad was out of the house a lot. The pressure on me felt unbearable. Shaking with conflicting emotions, I went out into the yard and sat under a tree with a razor blade I’d grabbed from the bathroom. I had been playing with this razor for quite some time; whenever self-doubt broke through my fragile facade of confidence, I’d fantasized about slitting a vein, just to end my anguish and confusion and self-hate. I would put its edge to my wrist, and its sharpness would feel so good that I wanted to go deeper to release the pressure building inside me so hard and fast that I felt I might explode. Now, with anger boiling through me, I was both desperate enough and ready enough. I didn’t want to slash my wrist in order to kill myself, nor did I want to injure myself so badly that I would have to go to a hospital—that part of my mind was still working. Instead, I cut lightly but deliberately and repeatedly to release some of my anguish so I could survive. It felt good to bleed, providing temporary relief. It also terrified me that I could do this to myself, and that someday I might possibly be tempted to go further.
Razors continued to attract me, and I would arrive at this place again a few more times after this episode. I’d toy with the razor, drawing it across my wrist in order to nick the skin. Even the thought of being able to do this served as a safety valve, making the pressure I felt more bearable. It became my secret, my private shame, never to be revealed to anyone.
Excerpt from Unsinkable by Silken Laumann ©2014. Published by HarperCollins Canada. Reprinted with permission
In his latest YouTube video, Russell brand scoffs and giggles over the idea that black Americans’ troubles are stemming from the collapse of their family structure, attributing it instead to “White Privilege”.
I’ve got the video linked below. It contains cuts of debate between Tavis Smiley and Bill O’Reilly.
Tavis Smiley: “What we need is a government that makes it main priority jobs, jobs, jobs…”
I hate to say it but there’s a pretty good chance this man grew up without a father.* Over 73% of African American children do. You can see in his thinking that he is still waiting for a parental figure (the government) to swoop in and save him. My heart breaks for that. But it needs to be called out. And this thinking needs to end.
Some people love to romanticize single motherhood. You know, that “hard working single mother selfless hero” myth? A single mother is basically someone who made the single most important decision in her life a bad one and now an innocent child (or 2, or 4. or 7) will pay the consequence.
When you are a child in a single parent family there is nothing romantic about it.
Having to explain to the teacher every year that you don’t have a father on Father’s day. Addressing the father’s day card to the neighbor because he was the one who taught you how to ride a bike and hearing his wife yell at him about it later. Looking around at the kids who do have fathers and wondering what was so wrong with you. Being so starved for attention that when a man comes over to visit, you and your siblings literally fight to get his attention so badly that he gets exasperated and leaves. Having to ask your mother what ‘bastard’ means… are you getting the picture yet?
Although I have enough respect for her to allot her the responsibility of her choices, I do think that society enabled and contributed to my mother having multiple children with different fathers, none of which stuck around, while on welfare. I remember social workers coming around to the house every time she got pregnant and explaining to her just how much more money she would be receiving.
In the wild, if a rabbit has more babies than it has available resources, they die off. In North America, a hand reaches out of the sky and gives them more resources than they had before the babies were born. Something is very wrong with that and god is it ever unpopular to say so.
Then people like O’Reilly come along and because of the energy behind his words (defensive) and the look on his face (hateful and ignorant), his message which is actually true, gets lost.
We are part of a system that has been using charity to keep people down for way too long. Most people will now attack you for even pointing this out. It’s like the pigs that are happy that the farmer is feeding them more and more food. Don’t you dare be the one to point out that maybe it’s not such a good idea to gobble it up without questioning why!
This extremely popular method of thinking is harming children. It harmed me. So I will keep speaking about it. Popular or not.
* Ah, I was right. God, I wish I could give this guy a hug. It is a pain to the soul to be without a father. But he needs to wake up. Taken from Tavis Smiley’s wikipedia page: “Tavis Smiley was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, the son of Joyce Marie Roberts, a single mother who first became pregnant at age 18”
