Sometimes I wonder if the whole journey is basically breaking down the denial. A lot of people have been posting about that voice that says "it wasn't really that bad" or "you're making it up" and so on. I know I've struggled with those voices for years, and it's ongoing, although it is a lot better now than it used to be. The way I see it/work with it is that those voices are my internalised parents, because I really think that we carry our parents with us long long after our childhood is over, and even long after severing contact with them. I look at my own parents and the things they did/do and I know they are still in thrall to their own internalised parents, who they have never actually "stood up to" or challenged internally, although of course their parents have been dead for many years.
Smithfield, that story you tell about your mother and the heartbreakingly cold treatment she received from her own mother, is a great example of this - your mother has evidently never challenged her own mother's authority and so passes on the same heartbreaking coldness to you. I think the way it works, in the unconscious, is that they have to keep denying that their parents did anything wrong, because they can't cope with the pain they would feel if they allowed in the truth, so they have to justify their actions - and carrying on the same treatment with their own children is the biggest justification of their parents of all. Our parents never grew up, emotionally. This is certainly what I think of my own parents, anyway - I realise I can't really speak for anyone else.
I asked my mother once, when I was in my 30's and trying to work things out after the first estrangement - what were you like as a child? Because all the things I knew about her were just the same old stories retold in the same words and with the same distance, as if it were someone else she were talking about, every time. So I wanted something fresh to help me understand her, hence the question. And her reply really shocked me as I hadn't yet understood back then just what a hostage she is to her own past and her own internalised parents. She said: "oh, I was pretty obnoxious really - always singing and dancing and trying to get their attention, really annoying basically." And she said it without the slightest hint of compassion for herself, much like your mother's story Smithfield, no hint that in the intervening 60+ years she had even once been able to think, hang on, mabye there's a different angle to this picture. To me, the way she described herself was as an absolutely normal child, an engaging, spirited girl who just wanted to have some fun while the grown ups were doing boring things, just wanted some love. But they obviously made her feel she was obnoxious and annoying, which she then in turn passed on to me - one of her favourite put downs was "stop showing off" - and yet, at the same time I had to go to bloody piano lessons every bloody week and practice every bloody day, and if I played a piece well in front of their friends they were well chuffed. Which shows that logic or reason or fairness doesn't even enter into the way they behaved, it was all about unconcsiously justifying and exonerating their own parents to suppress their own pain at having been neglected/emotionally abused/deprived of the unconditional love they needed.
They're locked into their ways of thinking and it would take a nuclear bomb to blow their lids open. Actually, they've probably got a secret bunker in their unconscious that would protect them even against that.
I think one reason my brother has done so much better than me in life is that my mother didn't project herself onto him the same way she did onto me. I think for some reason I bore the brunt of both my mother's and father's (negative) projections - maybe because they were both youngest children, like I was; I was a girl - ergo my mother; and I look very much like my father - ergo him. Or coming after my sister's death made it more likely, I don't know. Maybe just plain family dynamics - I do believe there are roles in each family that have to be filled, and I got the victim/scapegoat/loser role while my brother got bully/golden boy/ free agent. If there's a bully, there's got to be a victim.
Pinky, I was thinking about that when you said about your mother sending you into situations where she knew you'd get bullied - was it maybe that the family dynamic was set up so that you had to be the victim, so she would unconcsiously send you into the fray like that? I do believe a lot of what my parents did was unconscious - and my goodness, doesn't my mother love to bleat again and again and again "but we never meant to hurt you" - but how can that make it allright? Your mother probably didn't mean to, Pinky, but she still sent you into that hellish situation time and time again; my mother was the same, even when I told her how badly I was being bullied at school and begged her for help, she "turned a blind eye" and just flatly denied there was a problem, thus leaving me to deal with it entirely alone, as I had done for several years already, but now with not even any vague hope of rescue.
AN, I was so shocked when I read about your father being deputy head at the school where your brother was bullied and denying there was a problem there! Is "I didn't mean to hurt you" excuse enough for not having done anything to protect your child from years and years of being thrown to the wolves, emotionally? Oh, and lol at your mother Pinky thinking she's so great with small children - my mother is very similar, wants desperately to think of herself as very warm and loving and caring and maternal, and has managed to con a lot of people around her through her life, eg my father and brother, who are oblivious to how deeply selfish she is at root. And how emotionally totally unavailable.
Smithfield, my mother did hug me - but it was like being hugged by a robot. I think the hugs were to make her feel better, not me. You and Sakura have both talked, I think, of your mothers needing you to be dependent to make them feel better - that is so true with mine also. She needed to keep me small. Mine cooks a lot too, but didn't teach me to cook, or to look after myself in any way really - it was always "oh, it's quicker if I do it myself" (message - you're so stupid you're incapable of doing even the simplest things) alternating with her just yelling at me to do stuff that I really didn't know how to do. Never any admission that by her not teaching me what I needed to know to be able to function, she was not doing her job as a mother properly. No, she just kept on doing things for me and thinking that made her a really terrific, loving mother, and conning everyone else around her too. And competing! Lots of people talking about that recently - oh my goodness, yes, the competition. She hated my intellect - even though I was completely unaware for a long time that I outstripped her in that department, she probably knew a lot earlier and deeply resented me for it. Which was another reason she loved to put me down for being so "incompetent" at the practical things at which she shone.
My God, it just goes on and on, doesn't it. Aware this is a very long rant, it does help enormously to get this stuff out though and I do hope it may be useful to someone else too. Smithfield, I wonder if that fact you can feel empathy/compassion for your mother but not yet for yourself is to do with deserving/undeserving - do you feel somehow that she deserves it and you don't? The same way you feel maybe you don't deserve the space to write about you? I know that this has been a big issue for me anyway, and healing the aspect that feels undeserving is very, very important for me. Anyway, I applaud you for taking the step to write deliberately about you, as that is a strong, clear message to your inner child that you do deserve support and understanding, and I hope it has helped. Sorry if that sounds a bit sententious, it's not meant to be!