To think my mum was a bit shite?

[MollySummers]

When I was younger my mum was a bit odd let's say. She was always angry and hated being with us. She used to ignore us. However a few things stick out. She was so angry once she smashed a glass bottle and fainted and was bleeding everywhere, she threw all our toys out once and one time woke me up at 1am screaming about the state of the house and demand we tidy it

Your mum sounds mentally ill. I'm sorry you had to experience that.

Do you still have a relationship with her?

I'm not keen on her but yes we do have a relationship

Was anyone else's mum the same ? It's only in the last few years I've thought about it.

She sounds mentally unwell rather than just “shite.” Where was your dad?

Yes my mum was similar but maybe a bit worse. Not only was she always angry and didn't want to know, she was very physically aggressive and loved making us cry.

She also used to do strange things for fun. One time there was a milk carton full of lumpy gone off milk and she tried to get us to drink it. Another time my sister was whining in the bath and my mum pushed her head under the water, she had to be dragged away.

Do you think she was abusive? That sounds awful. I'm sorry.

Woah 😥

Sounds quite unsettling for a child.

Parents were more ignorant when it came to the psychology of how their behaviour and parenting style impacted their kids though. I do think parenting (barring abuse) from times gone by should be treated with a bit of slack cut.

Depends how she is now really, and whether your relationship is good. If it is, I don't think it's ever helpful to over-ponder on the past. It's a foreign land and things were done differently there.

Your examples sound like she was "stressed". If they're isolated, it's forgivable.

We live in a very Americanised culture of counselling and reflecting obsessively, but I don't always think it helps relationships.

Just curious, do you have any children ?

So my mum put a pillow over our face as we lay on a bed - in absolute rage. Rammed a bar of soap in my mouth for repeating a rather innocuous swear word age 5. Seriously battered my sibling alongside our dad for stealing age 9.

She came from a large working class family where the women were like this. All prone to drink but also the life and soul of the party! Messed up.

I totally forgave it all as I understand that it was a bit more ' normal ' to be somewhat abusive back in my day. I also realised how much anger parenting can trigger sometimes. ( I did not do anything like this).

The problem is here and now - today. No accountability,no responsibility, no genuine apology and alot of counselling helped me realise my family are full blown sociopathic. You can't really work with that.

I think there are situations wherein behaviour has been appalling and abusive but there can be forgiveness and restoration. Accountability and genuine sorrow for your experience - no matter what the cause of their behaviour is what helps repair this.

I'm sorry you experienced this. I can totally relate, my mum was very similar. She'd shove my head in the dirty washing basket, there's a certain mouldy smell that bring back that memory. Things being smashed, ranting and raving all the time and foul language directed at me and siblings and yes being dragged out of bed at silly o'clock because the house was a mess.

Sorry to hear of your experiences, I think many people would have had similar.

I do wonder though, with counselling, was labelling them as sociopaths helpful to you ? I wonder if you were more at peace forgiving them for their utter ignorance? (Forgiveness usually for the benefit of the one doing the forgiving for inner peace not the one being forgiven )

I'm just pondering really, but I do sometimes wonder if counselling helps or hinders people...

@Halloumiheaven that's a really good question! Part of me wants to go back to living in ignorance, like most people do. But the visceral pain I have felt at knowing something is terribly wrong with my family dynamic but not understanding it,has always been there. It's very true that the body feels it and processes it, even if the mind does not. I have a multitide of very significant Autoimmune Conditions as an adult. I don't believe that's a coincidence.

Knowing the truth has helped me protect myself alot more as I'm older but more important understand what I have to keep an eye on in myself as a parent. It also helped me to put a bit of distance between my own child and family members. Before I would have believed as I'd been trained to believe it,that everything was all my fault and I deserved and still deserve highly abusive treatment at the hands of family. My child would therefore also have continue to watch this unfold.

I believe you can lose your shit,even do things that are abusive and still have a good heart ay the end of the day. I don't believe at all that every parent doing bad things is a sociopath either. My family are very very messed up. This word is not used lightly.

In my experience, counselling/psychotherapy has been essential to processing the trauma I experienced as a child from bad parenting and emotional abuse. So much stuff that happened just felt "normal" and I had no understanding of how it was abusive and how it had actually affected me. I just knew as an adult that I felt dreadful all the time, that awful feelings that something incredibly bad was going to happen, a sense of doom. I also suffered really badly with anxiety and depression in general which I now think we're just my unprocessed childhood feelings showing themselves and bubbling to the surface.

Therapy has meant, for me, a really slow but definite change. I still feel some difficult feelings but I have a much clearer idea of where they originate and this helps tremendously. I do sometimes still get anxious but nowhere near as often and hardly ever as obsessively as I used to!

@EducatingArti I agree with all that.

I feel strongly that people who embark upon counselling who stick with it and uncover the truth of their abusive past and also confront the dark elements of their own nature are incredibly brave. It is not an easy path, it is incredibly painful to face reality - which is why so few people do.

My sibling went for about 3 sessions, the reality of the situation was too much and they completely unravelled, lost the plot and then carried on being abusive and living in ignorance whilst taking no accountability for their own behaviour.

Oh hun, I’m so sorry, I’m truly am. Sounds like an extremely volatile environment to grow up in when you’re small.

I remember waking up some nights and she’d be over me crying, I was only about 5/6, I was frozen and scared, she just used to ask “do you love me?”. She also used to give me the silent treatment from as young as I can remember - this is still triggering for me now, I’d rather be shouted at. She ignored me as much as she could and I can never remember being cuddled or looked at really, I pretty much only remember the back of her head growing up. She had such a passive connection with me and she was extremely self centred.

She was quite traumatised as a child and never considered getting any real help. I grew up with a very emotionally immature family too and so I had to swallow the belief that I was the issue - it would have been to scary to face those around me were the problem.

Even now my Mum will not acknowledge the impact our relationship had on me. It’s such a massive relational wound isn’t it?! I hope you’re okay. I’ve had years of therapy too and done a lot of healing. A good therapist can offer good enough conditions to know what connection really feels like and mourn the connections we didn’t have as little ones x

Yes. I'm 99% sure my mum is autistic and 99% sure she was going through perimenopause.

I do have a child yes. My dad was around but passive and used to placate her alot. She still swings between being nice and an absolute knobhead

What the OP describes is abusive behaviour. That doesn’t mean some people of the day may have thought it was acceptable including her Mum or that her Mum wasn’t doing the best she could do.

She sounds like she was bi polar or something @MollySummers

Sorry you had to go through that. My mum had her flaws but nothing as extreme as that. Must be hard to process as an adult with a child of your own.

Yes your mum was a bit shite. Also known as abusive.

Now you're grown up, you're seeing it for what it was.

If this was something happening right now I'd be thinking that the other parent or other family members should be insisting that she goes to the GP and gets help for her mental health. She sounded stressed and mentally unwell which does affect how well you can cope as a parent. Obviously this might not be possible if it's a lone parent family with no relatives nearby.

I don't know how old you are OP and I know that people weren't always so aware of mental illness or talking about it. It sounds like a scary situation for a child to be in. I think it's not unusual for parents to have times where they don't parent as well as they should for these reasons but not so bad as that.

I think my father was the same. He’d do the “cruel parenting” to appease her, I’m sure.
Huge efforts made to look normal and ‘naice’ to the outside world though. Awful thing is my parents were also approved as foster parents back in the 50s. I often wonder what happened to the poor child who stayed with us for about 3 years, was going to be adopted then got put back into care, aged 6. We kids were told nothing, he just disappeared and a few months later I remember being told if I didn’t like living with them they could do the same with me.
Didn’t let them near my kids, they met them about half a dozen times.

when my sister was whinging one day my Mum took her new bike and bashed it repeatedly on the wall, breaking it. She once tipped the contents of my bag (when I was a teenager) and drove over them in the car.
I didn't have sex until I was nearly 20 and Mum said she hoped I got Aids.
Strangely, we're still talking. Low contact and I moved 500 miles away.

Sadly some mothers are abusive. I was assaulted (actually battered) by mine when she found the contraceptive pill among my toiletries when we were on holiday together once and she called me a slut. I was 28......