Who Am I, Anyway???

    I have really been struggling with depression lately.  There are a lot of factors playing into it and I know this is just part of the process.  Lately I have just felt so despondent and like things are never going to get better.

    I am still working through spiritual abuse issues, and expect that this will be an ongoing process.  As I mentioned in this post a little bit back, I am working through a book called The Subtle Power of Spiritual Abuse. I have to take it in chunks because so much resonates with me; I can't plow through it.  I will probably go back and read it a second time after I am done with it, keeping a notebook with me to write down thoughts as they occur to me as I'm reading.  I'm amazed at how the authors nail on the head so many of the feelings and internal struggles I have had all of my life, including conflicting feelings about God and feeling so much guilt over having those feelings that I have felt paralyzed and that I needed to up my outer performance in order to be in good graces with Him.

    As different things have come to my mind regarding my parents' treatment of me, I've realized how often my dad really was very unkind to me.  Some of the things he would say to me were really mean and things that I don't believe any father should ever say to a daughter.  For a long time I've seen my dad as the "Good Parent" because my mother is the one I had to deal with most of the time.  My dad had a fun sense of humor and I think he meant well in a lot of ways, but the more I learn about abusive family systems it is so plain to me that he was a classic enabler as far as my mom was concerned.  I turned to him so many times in tears, wanting him to help me and protect me, and he usually just backed her up and I would get a lecture on what I had done to deserve the treatment I got (based on what she would tell him).  There were so many times that he made me responsible, through both reactions and things he would say to me, for his and my mothers' emotional well-being; like if they were unhappy it was my fault.  I guess I really had some nerve deciding to be born (maybe they should have used birth control awhile longer before deciding to become parents if having that responsibility was going to make them so miserable).  I wasn't celebrated; I was tolerated.

    I've been watching parts of the Winter Olympics, and love watching the figure skating.  I think it must be such an amazing feeling to have parents who are so supportive of your dreams and desires, and who encourage and believe in you.  One of the skaters I watched from Thursday, from Italy, is a former Olympic contender who almost didn't come back after some devastating losses from previous Games.  She decided to come back one last time at the urging of her mother, who told her to just skate for the joy of skating.  I didn't see the short programs but her long program was beautiful and an absolute triumph.  They showed her mother hugging her afterward saying, "Do you see?  Do you believe now?"  What an amazing feeling that must be!

    Something I am feeling so keenly is grief over what might have been.  How different could my life have been if I was adored and encouraged, instead of torn down and humiliated on a regular basis? What if I had been born to parents who weren't so injured themselves that they would have nurtured my self esteem instead of screaming at me that they couldn't understand why my self-esteem was so low?  What if my feelings had been validated and I would have been listened to when I was hurting?  What if I hadn't had to fight to make every single opportunity for myself that I got? What if I had felt God as a loving, empowering force to joyfully embrace instead of this supreme, angry being to be feared any time I made a mistake?  What if I could have been free to just discover myself without all of the constraints and fears that were drilled into me, and could have been allowed to be the joyful little being that I naturally was instead of being seen as someone who needed to be broken?  What if I hadn't dealt with so much trauma that I wasn't constantly walking around in a daydreamy haze and could have actually comprehended the things going on around me and interacted in a normal way with my peers? At my age (I am 47), I am feeling like all the pieces that are coming together are too little, too late.

    In a lot of ways, I feel very lost.  I don't really know who I am. I'm realizing with more and more clarity that almost everything that I involved myself in, including talents/abilities I cultivated, I did in an effort to be accepted and to fit in somewhere.  I'm not sure I even really know what my true nature is because I had to use adaptive behaviors to survive by the time I was three years old.  I had to gauge situations for volatility and then chose behaviors that would serve my well-being in the best way, and many times what I chose was extreme opposites:  either super-perform for oohs and ahs and applause, or to try and be invisible.  The way I latched on to religion was a way to be a "good girl" and not get into trouble, and since there were nice teachers there who liked me for being well-behaved in class and knowing all the answers, that was somewhere that I sought approval from.  Now that the scales are falling from my eyes and I'm looking at things as they really are and how they have truly fit into my life, I feel a kind of nothingness.  I don't know what defines me. The way I am chaffing at the bit as far as church goes is getting me increased isolation as well, because this is not desirable behavior in a church member.  If I were to freely speak my mind to other church members whom I have considered to be my friends, they wouldn't want anything to do with me because I would be considered to be falling into forbidden paths that lead to "apostacy," and therefore a bad influence. So really, if I were being outwardly truthful about how I am feeling, I would probably lose most of the friendships I have.

Intuition/Feelings of Warning vs. Plain Old Worry

    One of the things that has been baffling for me to distinguish has been identifying whether I'm getting true intuition/guidance from higher power or just being a paranoid worrywart when I get a feeling of warning about something.  Usually my gut feelings are pretty much right on, but I have had a few times where I've absolutely been wrong (at least from anything I've been able to determine from what is visible).

    In my last post I referred to an incident of "mom-worry."  This happened several weeks ago.  I wasn't sure what to make of it afterward.  I had a hard time trusting my initial feelings of unease for a long time and would second-guess those feelings, which I know now put my children in harm's way (like letting my mom have access to them because of wanting to give her a chance to be a grandmother to them and have her be a significant part of their lives) more than once.  My counselor explained to me that your body is designed to let you know when there is danger, but when you are abused you learn to not trust that and it gets screwed up.  I can totally see where it first got messed up because of my mom's games and cruelty; it was further damaged by various kinds of abuse from other people, as well, when I was young.  For most of my life I heard, "You're so suspicious/paranoid/over-reactive," so as an adult when I've had those feelings my first inclination, if not impulsively freaking out unnecessarily, I've second-guessed by telling myself I'm just being a worry-wart.

    With the incident that happened several weeks ago, I turned out to be wrong.  The conclusions I drew were really scary and when I acted on the push I felt to go and check on the person I couldn't find them and it made things worse for me internally.  I had the biggest adrenaline surge and truly thought there was an assault going on; even after eating I felt like my blood sugar was low.  I had not had this drastic of a response in a really long time; after the fact it reminded me of another time just before my daughter's 3rd grade year when I thought I was prompted about something where I think it turned out that I was wrong.  I have felt completely lost on how to distinguish when that is going on versus when action is called for.

    I asked for suggestions on this and got a lot of good responses. Collectively it was generally agreed that it's better to act on those feelings when they come than to ignore them; better safe than sorry.  Most of the time there is probably a reason you are feeling that way, and better to not beat yourself up for the times when you are wrong.  One of the members said that when she has total peace about something then she knows it is her true intuition, the whisper from her Higher Power whom she chooses to call God, that is working in and through her.  When she has anxiety, doubt, fear, feeling of unrest then she knows it's her PTSD.  A lot of the other posters agreed with her.  I remember the first time many years ago when I started to realize that maybe I was having far more fear responses than "promptings" that something was wrong or not to do something when I was sitting in church one day and during one of the lessons they said that fear is never of the Spirit.

    Still working through this, and it will probably take me quite awhile to get it right.  It's hard to wrap my head around how getting a prompting regarding someone being in danger, etc. wouldn't involve a feeling of fear or similar negative feeling, because in those instances something is wrong.  I can't see how that would involve a feeling of peace.  Added to the mix for me is the fact that I really never felt a sense of everything being okay as I was growing up because there was so much emotional upheaval on an ongoing basis.  I was always stepping on eggshells; if I didn't tread carefully I was in for it.  So it is really hard to not view the world around me with anxiety, some amount of fear and distrust, etc.

    If you feel so inclined, I would love comments about this (and any other post).  I think this is an area of common difficulty among those of us who deal with PTSD, and it would be great to have additional thoughts and insights so that we can all learn from each other.  So if you feel so inclined, feel free to chime in on comments (this is always welcome on any post, so long as comments are respectful).

Helpful Remedy For the "After" of a Panic Attack

    I meant to post this some time ago.  I asked for help with managing adrenal letdown several weeks ago after an incident of mom-worry that ended up not being what I thought it was, but the conclusions I was drawing in my head were so frightening that I had a LOT of adrenaline pumping.  The adrenaline letdown I had after that was a doozy.  Even several hours later, after eating, resting, drinking water, etc. I was so lightheaded and had the hardest time focusing on anything.  The altered focus, etc. was still evident a few days later, and I was so fatigued.  This is one of the things that led to me going back on medication, which I talked about in this post.

    Any way, the suggestion given to me was to take an epsom salt bath  with 4-6 cups salts (I misread and have used 2 cups salts and this has been beneficial) in the hottest water you can stand.  Soak for at least 30 minutes.  This is a proven way to increase cellular magnesium as well as sulfate--both of which neutralize and then detoxify the adrenaline.  Take a glass of water in there with you and be sure to hydrate.  She recommended soaking for 45 minutes before bed, which helps you to sleep well despite the earlier stress response.

    I haven't done it with the larger amount of salts, but I find that I am taking epsom salts baths at least 3 times per week lately.  It's become almost an auto-pilot response to feeling anxiety lately LOL. I also add about 5 drops of essential oil into the bath; I love rose oil an have also used lavender, lemon and sweet marjoram (separately).  It's amazing how much better I feel just being in the water, apart from adding anything else to it. I've noticed this whenever I get into a swimming pool--I feel my whole body relax. Don't know if that's because I'm a scorpio or what, but I'm totally a water baby.

Onions, Juggling Balls and Exposed Wires

    I was just glancing at the subtitle under the name of my blog here, where it says, "Working Each Day Toward Wholeness."  It seems a little ironic for how crappy I'm feeling today, but I'm also reminded of a time in my life several years ago that was very dark, and how I realized that progress can look very different from day to day, and that applies to what our best is, as well.  My best effort on one day may look outwardly like I have a lot on the ball because of getting many "checklist tasks" done, finishing projects, having a full work schedule, etc. but yet another day my great accomplishment is that I'm vertical and moving.

    It's great to understand that and I'm glad I came to that realization that long ago, but the lack of consistency really frustrates me.  I am the kind of person who likes to be busy and out there, but I swear that most of my adulthood has been such a struggle that way.  When I was younger, especially during my college years, I was busy ALL THE TIME, often overextending myself and keeping too many balls in the air--and in a lot of ways I was great at it.  Now it feels like all my balls fell to the ground and occasionally I find one and am able to to toss it up and catch it for a bit before becoming so exhausted that I don't even have the energy to remember where I let it land when I'm done with it.

    Today my nerves are shot.  I haven't gotten a full night's sleep in about a week; I'm often getting to bed too late (even for me) and then only sleeping for about 6 hours.  When night comes I feel a compulsion to stay up, even if I am tired, and my anxiety level is pretty high.  During times like this I become fearful of driving, worry more about my family members' safety when they are out and about, etc.  This past month the anxiety has been worse than it has been in years, and when it rears up this way I feel immobilized.

    Honestly, in some ways it feels like I have regressed by 5 or 6 years.  I have to keep reminding myself that I am in a healing process and that it goes in layers, like peeling an onion (Shrek would agree with me).  You peel back one layer and work through the stuff you find underneath it, and then after a period of time it's pretty cleaned up and you feel better.  Then the next layer starts cracking with the stuff underneath it that needs to come out and you have to deal with that.  Fortunately, my experience has been that although it DOES NOT FEEL LIKE IT SOMETIMES, that next layer doesn't start cracking until your system knows you are strong enough to handle it.

    This spiritual abuse layer I'm working on is brutal and is really doing a number on me.  I was given the recommendation to read the book The Subtle Power of Spiritual Abuse by David Johnson and Jeff Van Vonderen and started it this past week.  It is excellent and I felt a lot of comfort when I started reading it, just in the introductory pages.  As I'm going through it, though, so much is resonating with me and a lot of stuff is coming up.  This is scary territory for me, given how intertwined in my upbringing religious tenets were.  I'm very much going against the grain by looking at this squarely and actually stating my feelings, so on some levels it feels like rebellion (which in and of itself is not allowable if you want to be a faithful person and be in favor with God).  Scary stuff. In some ways I feel like I don't even know who I really am and it's very disconcerting in a lot of ways.

    I was in the car driving home a little bit ago and reflected that I feel like the end of a set of coated wires where all the wires are exposed.  I feel like all my nerve endings are exposed and raw.  It's icky.  But I'm determined to see this process through, rather than go back into denial, stuff my feelings with food or start getting busy to distract myself.

An Explanation of Dissociation

    I just did a response on another site to a person who had questions about what dissociation is.  I'm pretty well versed in this, as I dissociated a LOT as a child (interpreted by adults as daydreaming at the time) and learning about this was important to my recovery efforts several years ago.  Since I put quite a bit of time into giving the information I thought I would reprint my response, along with some additions, here; I'm sure that I would have done a post on this at some point, anyway.

    Dissociation is a very common response when someone goes through trauma.  You almost always find this phenomenon in someone who goes through sexual abuse, but the abuse doesn't have to fall into that category to cause dissociation.  A person who dissociates originally does it while the trauma is happening because otherwise it is too painful and/or frightening, horrific, etc. to stay present in the moment.  It's a survival mechanism that enables the person to go on.  One reason it enables the person to go on is that it allows them to "forget" what happened.  Another word for this is compartmentalizing, and there are varying degrees of severity. Everyone dissociates to a degree--anyone who has missed an exit on the freeway, for example, because of their mind being somewhere else has dissociated and this is why they miss the exit. Another example is getting lost in a good movie.  These things would be on the bottom end of the spectrum.  On the most extreme end you have multiple personality disorder, where the person actually assigns identities to different functions and/or emotions, and these become sort of their own entities within the person because of the way the brain wired itself to do that.  In order to access the different functions they have to switch.

    Somewhere in the middle is probably where a lot of abuse survivors fit.  If you have repressed memories that are difficult to access, you probably dissociated and that is why you can't remember or only remember fragments.  I fit into this category. When I first realized that I dissociated I was so mad.  I told my therapist at the time, "I can't believe I did that; I am so stupid!" Because I could see where it played into my being so spacey growing up and it causing me other problems.  I was like, "I am an idiot for doing that."  My therapist said, "You are NOT stupid.  It takes an extremely intelligent and creative person to think of doing that.  The ones that don't dissociate from these experiences are the ones that end up insane or in prison.  It is a great tool for survival, but not so much for blossoming."  His point was that I did it because it was needed, and now we could work on retrieving and healing so that I could blossom more as a person.  It does stunt your development to an extent.

    The cool thing is that if you did dissociate, you can utilize some really cool tools in recovery that you can be really good at BECAUSE you have the ability to dissociate!

    When dissociation has happened to cope with abuse, it will also happen during recovery as your subconscious brings things up and your conscious mind tries to process and access.  Reminders of the time can trigger a dissociative  response, as well--the taste of something that you were eating or liked as a treat at the time, fragrances that were in the air, a person who resembles the abuser or coming into contact with the abuser him/herself, a photograph, etc.  It can feel very surreal.  There are things you can do to ground yourself--some examples are deep breathing, keeping a polished stone in your pocket that you can rub when you  feel yourself drifting and you need to stay present, etc. are examples of things you can do.  For more ideas, consult your therapist since s/he will be familiar with you and your situation and can help you determine techniques that are best suited to you.

    There are a few books I can recommend if you are new to this information and want to understand it better.  Healing the Child Within and Memory and Abuse--both by Charles Whitfield--and Homecoming by John Bradshaw.  I personally think everyone on the planet should read Healing the Child Within because EVERYONE has an inner child that is wounded in some way, and often grownups function from that wounded child mindset, even if they aren't consciously aware of it.  Think of how many parents are raising extremely entitled children these days because they are filling voids that they felt as children and giving them everything they want, for example.  When I first did Inner Child work I became a little alarmed when I realized I had more than one.  I was afraid that it meant I had multiple personalities, but that is not the case.  What I was seeing in my mind was myself at different ages when certain key things happened and I tucked them away.  I can honestly say that Inner Child work has been the most beautiful part of my healing process.  It can actually be a lot of fun as you find ways to nurture your Inner Child, giving yourself the love, acceptance and enjoyment that you needed when you were that young.

I do think that it is a good idea to utilize the support of a good therapist if you deal with dissociation, especially if you aren't aware of doing it or are having trouble managing it.  During periods of time where repressed memories are surfacing, it is so helpful to have that extra support and guidance.

When Mothers are Jealous of Their Daughters

    I was perusing Dr. Karyl McBride's blog (she is the author of the book "Will I Ever Be Good Enough" about daughters of narcissistic mothers) today and ran across this article.  This is an issue that has colored an awful lot of my relationship with my mother.  It was really baffling having this dynamic as I was growing up and I had the sense a lot of times that she was jealous of me, but then I would think, "Who do you think you are?  You think you are THAT great?!!" because it just didn't make sense.  Now on hindsight and understanding the narcissistic angle, it makes sense.  It's still strange to me and so, so sad.  It hurts a LOT during your grownup years to have a mother that on one hand put an incredible amount of pressure on to be a performer and make a good impression, yet have that same mother tear you down when you do have successes. There are a lot of things that I can bring up in regards to this, but I mostly wanted to share the link for others to have access to here.

    I will say this:  I've come to understand over the past year that my mother was jealous of me, even as a tiny little girl.  She wanted to be everything to my dad and when I was born and she saw how much he adored me, she was jealous.  To her, I was taking something away that was hers.  I think it is very possible that she felt pressure from my dad to get pregnant when she did, and I don't think she was emotionally ready (maybe she never would have been truly ready, I don't know).  As I've mentioned before, I am the first child.  I was born a little over a year after they were married. I've heard the story many times that my dad would come home from work to find her playing with her dolls and he said, "You need a baby."  I don't think he meant it in a mean way; he probably thought it was cute and that a baby would fulfill whatever need was associated with her playing with dolls.  I have had a really strong sense, more than once, that when I was born she saw me as competition for his affections.  I think this affected not only the way she treated me, but how my dad responded to me.  He probably felt like he needed to reign in how much affection he showed if she lashed out at him. I also have a memory of her smothering me with a pillow when I was very small.  I don't know what induced the rage, but I have had the sense that when she snapped out of it and came to a realization of what she was doing she realized that if my dad knew he wouldn't want anything to do with her.  So I believe that other than jealousy, there was also this thing where every time she looked at me she saw her guilt.  She used to say weird things to me as I was growing up, like babies have no memory; you can do anything to them and it just hurts for a minute and then they forget.  I can't help but wonder if that was a kind of reinforcement for me to not remember the incident.

    There are quite a few things in this vein that will probably come out in future posts, so I won't ramble on and make a list of jealousies here.  Here is the link to Dr. McBride's article:

Mothers Who are Jealous of Their Daughters

Refreshing Change

    Tonight my husband went to the airport and picked up our niece and nephew, from his side of the family, who are visiting from out of state.  We always love it when his sister's family comes to visit.  It's always fun spending time with them, with none of the drama and backbiting that goes on with my side of the family.

    This is how awesome they are.  I am tired and didn't have the energy to run around getting the house in perfect order.  I used to stress about that any time we were going to have company because I would get so worried about making that "good impression."  I guess all the stuff we have been dealing with over the past several years has just worn me out. LOL  My attitude now is basically, "You can take me as I am or not, I really don't care."  And you know what?  They totally don't care.  I made a nice dinner, homemade soup and spinach/strawberry salad, and they were so appreciative, asking if there was anything they could help with.  I apologized for the mess around the house and didn't need to.  It feels awesome.

    It's nice having family that we actually enjoy spending time with. The only part of my side of the family that I have that with right now is one of my brothers, primarily my sister in law.  At Thanksgiving we had that brother and his family over for dessert and games, and we had a blast.  I remember looking around and noting that everyone was genuinely having a good time--every person in the room had a genuine smile on their face and I remember thinking, "THIS is what it's supposed to be like."  It's always like this with my husband's sister's family, too.

    Nice to have a little breather. :)  Now I'm off to play Killer Bunnies and have some apple crisp with ice cream!

Spiritual Abuse and Making a Good Impression

    Since today is Sunday and once again I did not go to church, I decided to address some more aspects to the spiritual abuse I experienced in my home growing up.  Maybe if I get it out in writing it will be one less thing swimming around in my head.

    As I mentioned in my previous post here, I grew up in a community that was almost exclusively the religion I was brought up in.  Because of this, everything revolved around the structure the church provided in regards to church on Sunday, activities during the week, etc.  As I've looked back on that experience I've been so struck by the fact that the most important thing to both of my parents truly was how their children made them look.  I was told on numerous occasions that how I acted would make an impression to everyone I came in contact with as to what kind of parents they were.  I was expected to act, look and perform a certain way. I frequently heard remarks like, "What do people at church think of us now?" and it was usually over really petty, stupid things.  This was such a pervasive thing that I really didn't act like a normal kid. I became a very compliant, good little girl who could never do enough to please and who was extremely hungry for adult approval. So little positive reinforcement was given to me at home that when a compliment was given to me by a teacher or any adult, for that matter, it meant so much to me that getting compliments became the basis of my self-esteem.  If I didn't get compliments I felt terrible about myself.

    My parents were both raised in poverty and they both experienced abuse in their homes.  My father was raised in the religion I was brought up in.  My mother was raised in a small mining community that was more diverse and although her dad was a member of this church, he was not a practicing member and my maternal grandmother belonged to a different denomination.  She and the kids were baptized into the church when my mom was ten.   In listening to my mother over the years, it is very apparent to me that as she looked around her, coming from poor financial circumstance, she wanted the kind of lifestyle that she saw in others around her.  For whatever reason, the members of this church were more affluent and had nice things.  They functioned better as families.  I really feel that my mom's decision to be an active church member was because she wanted to LOOK LIKE those people.

    An experience that illustrates the need they had for trying to impress other people to the extent that they did happened the day after I was baptized.  I was baptized at the age of eight on Saturday and was confirmed a member the next day at church.  The confirmation is done in the form of hands placed on the person's head and a blessing being given.  We had Sunday School before the general congregational service, and after I picked up my younger brothers, ages 5 and 3 1/2, from their classes, we went to the chapel to sit with our parents.  Our parents weren't there.  As we stood waiting and looking for them, our ecclesiastical leader noticed that we were feeling worried, came over to us and told us we could come up and sit by him on the stand and watch for them.  Right before the service started my parents showed up at the door.  My brothers and I were so relieved that we excitedly jumped out of the seats we were in and ran off the stand and up the aisle to them.  My parents were furious because we ran through the chapel in front of everyone and embarrassed them.  They found seats for the service and during the service I was confirmed as planned. When we got home my parents yelled at us about the fact that we ran in the chapel and what must everyone think of them for their children to be so irreverent.  Not one acknowledgment of the fact that we were SCARED that our parents weren't there and church was getting ready to start, or that we were relieved and happy to see them. They could have seen it as humorous, or allowed themselves to feel very loved as they saw their children racing over to them.  They lost sight of the fact that this was supposed to be a special day for me.  I should have been hearing, "We're so proud of you.  This is such a special day for you.  We're thankful for the kind of girl you are," but instead I was shamed and belittled and by the time the night was over I was convinced that every other person we went to church with had been completely horrified by my terrible behavior. During episodes like this, the only solace I had was to go to my room where it was quiet and hug one of my dolls.

    This experience did so much damage to my perception of how others saw me.  I am sure that there were amused smiles as people saw these three cute little kids rushing to greet their parents and that that's all it was. I seriously doubt that anyone was scandalized and I don't think people saw me as a stain on the family name, but I thought that was the case.  This also affected my spontaneity and fueled my need to second-guess my actions all the time.  I was so self-conscious after this episode; I hadn't realized I was doing anything wrong (which I wasn't) and so it really made me feel like I must naturally be a bad person to have not thought through the fact that running in the chapel was irreverent; I knew this but I was so scared that my parents weren't there that my relief at seeing them made my feet fly. I was one of two or three children being confirmed that day, and when it was my turn to go up to the stand I felt that everyone looking at me was thinking how embarrassing my conduct had been as the meeting was starting.

    As an adult, one of the ways this comes back to haunt me is when I see children on these occasions being treated with love and tenderness, and see the approval and pride on their parents' faces. Which is how it is supposed to be; I'm not resentful of the child being treated that way.  Sometimes these things trigger back the bad memory and I feel that humiliation and rejection all over again.

Malice vs. Ignorance; Hard to Tell With a Narc

    Yesterday I took part in a discussion that ensued from the following quote: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." (I personally prefer the word ignorance over stupidity.) The person opening the discussion asked if we could think of situations with our narcissistic parents where this may have applied to more than the narcissism itself and I found the discussion very thought-provoking.  It was pointed out that often people act out, ignorant to the way their actions are affecting other people.  Also that early in parenthood, mistakes are made in ignorance because the person thinks that that is just the way things are done because that's the way their parents did it.  An example that was used was the overuse of spanking and how for a lot of people that was just the go-to response when a child misbehaved.

    When narcissism is part of the mix, you do experience many instances of things being done maliciously and so it's easy to lump all the bad experiences into the same category of "malicious."  As I thought about this it brought to mind a few bizarre experiences I had with my mother that didn't make sense to me at the time, and I've been reminded of the phenomenon of the narcissistic wound, well explained at this link:

 Narcissistic Injury

    With someone like my mother, any perceived threat elicits a rage response.  It doesn't matter whether that perceived threat is real or not and it can come from something that has absolutely nothing to do with them.  My mother is like a wounded animal who has so much personal unresolved pain but if you try and get too close to her, she'll strike out at you over what she PERCEIVES to be an attack.  Sometimes she is malicious but I think a lot of her acting out is rooted in always being on alert for attack.

    Looking at the overuse of spanking as an example--in my mom's case, she took personal offense to my husband and I choosing other methods first when discipline was called for with our children.  I never said, "You were a bad mom for spanking me," but she took it as a personal attack that I was choosing to simply do something differently than how she did it.  The same thing applied when I chose to nurse when I had my first baby.  She had no desire to nurse, and often made derogatory remarks about women who did when I was growing up.  Nursing is something I wanted to experience, and so that is the choice I made and she had the same internal response to that as the one I described about her having at us attempting to discipline our children differently.  When my husband called her to tell her the baby was here, one of the first things she asked was if I was nursing.  He replied that I was and she asked how it was going, with this tone that made it really obvious that it was a given that it was a horrible experience.  He said, "It's going really well and she absolutely loves it!"  She said nothing.  It seemed to bother her that not only was I trying it but that it was going well.  When we came to visit (we lived out of state) she treated me like I was dirty for nursing my baby.

    I had a really bizarre experience when we first moved back here to where I grew up and lived with her while we got settled (biggest mistake ever).  One day my daughter, who had just turned four, was acting up. I looked at my mom and said something along the lines of, "I promise we don't encourage this."  I addressed the issue with my daughter by telling her she needed to stop (we had chosen as parents to do that first as kind of a warning, and then if the behavior persisted we would do a timeout or whatever).  I had to go downstairs for something, I think I was making the beds, and all of a sudden my mom was down there in my face, very angry.  She had a lot of malice in her voice when she said, "With that situation upstairs were you insinuating that I was a terrible mother because I spanked you?" and proceeded to scream at me for about 10 minutes.  When I tried to clarify and defend myself she just got angrier.  I was completely bewildered at how she came up with that because I wasn't insinuating anything personal to her.

    Here is another example:  My daughter, now a young adult, suffers from severe multiple food allergies and it wasn't discovered that this is what was causing her some serious, pervasive health problems until she was about 18, with the worst allergy not being completely understood or identified until she was 19.  Almost two years ago I went to lunch with my mom, and as we were eating I was telling her about what we were finding out.  I was really distressed because the extent of what was wrong was so overwhelming.  I had to relearn how to cook and was on a really steep learning curve for identifying safe food sources because of all the hidden sources one of the allergies presents.  My daughter was dangerously sick and I needed someone to talk to.  You are supposed to be able to turn to your mother during times of distress for support and comfort.  Instead she monopolized the conversation and started rambling about other people she knew who had had to have carpets, etc. removed from their home and I could hardly get a word in edgewise.  A little later in the conversation I mentioned that as I had studied and learned about her allergies I had started to make connections between some physical symptoms I had had for years that didn't make sense and possible undetected food allergies in myself.  I had testing done and I was correct. As I was sharing this with my mother, all of a sudden there was this cold silence and she stopped talking.  I was pretty bewildered.  She was cold for the rest of the time, including in the car as I drove to take her back home. Then it occurred to me that she was taking me sharing what I had figured out about myself as a personal assault on her parenting.  I was labeled a "picky eater" and was forced to eat food that I found repulsive, to the point that I sat at the table for hours sometimes trying to make myself eat the food on my plate.  I was then told I was a bad girl because I was being stubborn and was whipped and had things taken away from me.  As I made the connection on my food sensitivities and had my own testing done, I realized that I was intuitively turning away from food that hurt me.  This was an amazing discovery to me.  In sharing this with her I didn't accuse her of being a bad parent and I didn't get into all the whipping, etc. but I did mention that I felt that I was instinctively not wanting to eat food that hurt me.  From all of that, instead of having an "aha" moment herself (which could be beneficial to her because based on what I've experienced I think it is very possible she has food allergies herself) she became defensive and enraged that I would dare blame my problems on her.  This was the beginning of what has become a horrible two years of coldness and unkindness during a time when our daughter, as well as my husband and I, were in need of kindness, love and support.  I will write about this in more detail in a future post.

    My mother used to tell me all the time as I was growing up that someday when I was a mother myself, I would understand how hard it was and I would be just like her.  Well, I'm not.  And I guess it has bothered her that her prophecy didn't come true.