Part X of Living and Dying with Abuse
[TW: depression, suidical ideation]
Anger
Conflicting feelings hinder you from doing what you want to do. Rage may be all that you have left, the thing that gives you agency, and so you cling to it, or fail to suppress it — in a weird way it also numbs the pain. On the other hand, it may make you solely focus on your own suffering and less attuned to the pain of the other abused, whereas patience and calm are needed in supporting people in abusive relationships (which may be difficult if there is no outside support, and confusion and division within the abusive environment).
It’s the anger of children who want parents, even abused ones, to live up to the tasks of parenthood and the additional challenges that arise from living with an abuser. A mother, made to bear the stress of abuse in addition to the hard labor of childrearing and domestic labor, and taking a toll on her mental health, may fail to exhibit outstanding parenting that would be needed in the wake of abuse. Failing to recognize mental illnesses in children, an unfortunately still widespread characteristic of many cishet parents, is a source for much frustration in children and can seem double neglectful in an abusive environment. Personal flaws, mistakes, and maladaptive coping can sow further mistrust.
Alternatively, however much a mother does may not be enough to counter the effects of abuse for children, and failure to escape it may be met with much dismay as it falls back on the notion that it is a parent’s job to keep children safe from abuse. Thus, there is anger that your mother, despite all her maturity (the only one, as the entitled manchild lacks it), seems still like this straight teenage girl who believes she has to endure a disrespectful boyfriend who is openly derisive of her; that she wasn’t the one searching for answers, reading books, and naming abuse for what it is herself; that she may have become discouraged, perhaps concluded that being docile and fixing things in the background, out of the abuser’s sight, and taking on his neglected responsibility was easier, as he showed that he wouldn’t butch on his entitlement to have it easier for himself, that the alternative meant more painful abuse like shouting and threats. It’s easier for children, even then, to be angry with the mother for not trying harder and being strong enough to get out herself: “Children of abused women thus feel angry and upset with their mother for standing up to the abuser and for not standing up to him. Their reactions in this regard are entirely understandable, but the mother can find herself in an impossible bind that leads to more distance and tension between her and her children”, on the other hand, I may have been blind to “the many efforts she may have made to keep” us “safe and the many tactics the abuser may have used to interfere with her parenting” (Lundy Bancroft, Why Does He Do That, p. 253).
I felt frustration and resentment because her remaining felt like a choice she made, like complicity or indifference. I was also angry and afraid that, if she didn’t notice my trauma and mental illness as a child, she wouldn’t care enough now. I’ve often found myself overthrown by those feelings. I withdrew from her more for my own painful but less frustrating physical isolation, thinking that was for the best, but in effect, I had abandoned her, I left her with the abuser, and that killed her. She might have felt the anger and thought herself the actual source; children themselves can unwittingly contribute to a mother’s reduced self-worth. The abuser “getting you and the people you care about turned against each other” (Bancroft, p. 67) takes on this more systemic characteristic which, in time, feeds itself and needs little direct input from the abuser. The long duration effects of living with an abuser can create this headspace of “everyone for themselves” and “leave the abused behind to save yourself”. At times, it seemed easier to give up on the abused mother — but that is exactly what the abuser wants.
Communication
The superficiality of my father had trickled down to all of us and all interactions. My fear of him gaining information about me was also present in the conversations with my mother. Besides the trouble communicating emotions, a devastating side-effect of the longevity of abuse and distress was that I refrained from telling my mother of problems. Even when I was confident in her respect of privacy, there was fear of my father getting to know of them eventually and the possibility of him deciding to overrule my mother’s help with his own bad parenting decisions. The possibilities of freely talking with my mother diminished as well: Returning home happened on weekends which was also the time when my father was present, talking in person was a trouble but phone calls felt too impersonal, and texting felt like posing a potential danger as my father convinced my mother first to have her mobile code known and then entirely unlocked.
It can be a muddied line between the exact effect of division sown by the abuser and the other parent’s failure regarding their personal responsibility to foster trust and honesty, coupled with miscommunication or misunderstanding.
Like that one time when I had worked out something that made it a bit more bearable by spending as little time and engaging as little as possible with the abuser. I minimized the occasions of coming home when he was present and kept myself closed off not to invite more interactions (I couldn’t have born anything more anyhow, spending any minute with him was excruciating). The emotional peace came to an end eventually one time, when my mother told me that he said that me ignoring him was hurting him and that he wondered why I looked so gloomy at home. Self-reflection is impossible for an abusive, entitled, narcissistic man, so he put the guilt on me as I threatened his self-image and status by being a detached daughter.
Abusers will see your unhappiness, comment on the display of it but will continue as ever. The acknowledgement of your discontentment or depression is just a statement, not an inquiry, about your appearance, not your being, and it becomes an unspoken assignment to refrain from showing it anymore. Because, as in matters of consent, abusers see discomfort but their own pleasure, comfort, and needs matter more. “[I]t is often a requirement upon oppressed people that we smile and be cheerful. If we comply, we signal our docility and our acquiescence in our situation” (Marilyn Frye, Oppression). I was frustrated that my mother played messenger for him, that she didn’t know of the causes herself. It seemed like compliance, as if there was this abstract, more resilient connection between her and the abuser than between her and myself. At times it just felt like she was in line with him, though she might have just tried to do damage control.
There is potential dismay when a child recognizes the abuse for what it is before the parent does, that one has to go through the pain of telling about the nature of abuse because the other person fails to discover it themselves, and resentment at the idea to tackle the whole matter yourself — it feels like taking on the role your parent should. Much could have been avoided if she had, but on the other hand, also if I had. The condition of having to get away from only one parent and the other being enmeshed and entrapped can just as well be difficult to fathom as having both parents be abusive. Generally, there didn’t seem to be any adults who cared or were competent enough to know what to do in such situations.
Yet the worst of all was the fear of disappointment and rejection. The question was how to engage with my mother’s lack of knowledge and initiative to find it. This could elicit stronger emotions than anything else at times as it was tied directly to the solution or its failure. I was afraid of the unknown difficulty, of ultimate rejection. At times, it was not the existence of abuse that hurt the most but the possibility of being rejected and of everything being played down, the refusal to solve this immense wrong in our lives — and in that pain were the decades of already having had to live with it. For some reason it was just too infuriating that she didn’t take care of the situation herself. The task needed calm and patience which I couldn’t muster, the anger rendered me inactive, I too became more volatile through my trauma responses than I should have been. I wanted her to be Daedalus, but in this the goal of escape and the role of initiator fell to Icarus. In this tale of Icarus there is still failure and demise, it is Daedalus that dies.
My mistake was to keep my thoughts to myself, the opposite hasn’t been much of a habit. You don’t learn to communicate thoughts, opinions, and pain in an abusive environment when you aren’t the abuser, instead it teaches you to suppress your impulse to point out the truth, it builds a barrier inside you that keeps you from articulating it to the outside. I just kept waiting for the moment to initiate the conversation, not realising that time was running out.
I had hoped to have some time to get my shit together, to finally address the matter with a calmer attitude, but I was also shifting into a mood of fatal hopelessness and forgetfulness. On the other hand, it was classic executive dysfunction that I wasn’t doing this relatively easy thing that could have fixed our lives, no matter how hard I tried or how much I told myself to do it, and I didn’t know why. Often we are inadvertently keeping the abuse a secret by keeping our secrets.
Additional Pain
“Countless biographies by women reveal that girl children witnessing a mother’s suffering at the hands of male tyrants — fathers, brothers, and/or husbands — are deeply, traumatically affected. Not only do we want to rescue our mothers but also we want to change our destiny so we will never suffer the way they did or do.” (bell hooks, Communion, p. 20)
A mother’s entrapment, suffering, learned helplessness, and her dealing with abuse is traumatizing in itself, perhaps the most. Witnessing a loved one abused and exploited is often more damaging than being subjected to it oneself: “Children who are exposed to the abuse of their mother have been found to exhibit virtually every symptom that appears in children who are being abused directly” (Bancroft, p. 243).
The mother wound remains, and I shift between grief and irritation. I had felt angry and hysterical every time the unspoken matter of abuse and its consequences and lack of resolve presented itself, when my mother lacked the knowledge and, instead of seeking it, continued with endurance, when her entrapment meant my entrapment. Despite all or any love, there is anger towards older generations of women who couldn’t fend off abusers themselves and have born you into this environment, into living with abusers. A daughter can both connect with a mother for being a source for emotional support and regarding the gendered issues both face, and reject her for ignoring or enforcing them. A mother having had to give up her personhood for motherhood can cause even more hurt in an abusive relationship, which may also unconsciously translate into sabotaging her daughters for her own lost potential. I often found myself thinking more about my mother’s parenting than the abuser’s lack and utter contradiction of it, as she was the constant and he was more like a recurring guest. With the existence of abuse any shortcoming could be double the hurt.
The difficulty (even the sense of impossibility) to address the topic of abuse is connected to the incredible hardship of dissolving generational trauma and your own psyche having tied the trauma of abuse to the abused themselves. A daughter can recognize her own depression in her mother’s, and if she sees the silent unresolved endurance she may see herself mirroring it (she may know and loathe it and do it regardless). Showing or talking about the distress can seem to a child like the most one can do. Modeling the endurance of your mother can be just as likely as modeling the abuser’s behavior. Masking can be difficult for a child to discern, especially if the styles of concealment differ from each other, when one does it with withdrawal and the other with cheerfulness. So much could’ve been hidden behind my mother’s facade. How could she have known what lay behind mine when I never managed to see the full extent of what was hidden to my own eyes (and behind them).
The abuser creates an environment in which negative emotions, especially those deriving from abuse, are to be suppressed and ignored. The mother’s conditioning in this environment gets passed on to the children. One can think that her endurance seems like enabling the abuse, or that she doesn’t see how the abuser’s entitlement and disrespect towards her pains the children and will likely extend to them in time as well. This typical reaction of frustration towards the mother is, indirectly but in effect, part of the division sown through abuse. It is like an extension of turning to your mother for your father’s abusive behavior because he is too scary and indifferent to be held accountable, and your mother remains the only one who can help you. Feeling resentment towards your mother is a promising outlet to one’s rage of helplessness. The question arises whether the wound would be less severe without any abuser present, or whether similar feelings would exist, with different causes, because frustrations within a particular relationship can arise from sources outside it but get muddied within an abusive environment through its element of confusion.
Women are also conditioned to show strength, mostly through repression and endurance, building up tolerance for emotional pain and minimizing one’s own needs:
“While women acknowledged the stigma of depression, they indicated that their resistance to seek help for their depression was influenced by the expectation of women’s self-reliance in the rural setting and the gendered taboo against negative thinking. Ambivalence and stigma led women to try to cope independently, resulting in further isolation.” (Mental Health Treatment Seeking Patterns and Preferences of Appalachian Women with Depression)
My mother once judged one of her sisters to seem unable to live without a man. Both live(d) with an abusive and straining man, and to both the abuse was completely obscure. It seemed more like the classic venting about bad husbands without any serious consideration of leaving them. My mother’s proclamation of being able to live without a man herself makes me wonder whether she regarded plowing through difficulty as a form of independence, or whether she was gaslit to believe this. Many who live with abusers and learned helplessness can pass on and reinforce this conformity and acceptance vertically to the next generation and laterally onto their surroundings. It becomes a habit, a condition, a mystery, and with years perhaps generational trauma which can just as well mean accepting and normalizing abuse and remaining in bad marriages.
The romanticization of resilience is making the pain invisible. Strength is misdirected into silence, while it should be put into working through or past the source of hurt and towards change. Perhaps she was one of the abused women who developed a lack of confidence in being able to live alone. Perhaps she gave up and remained for the sake of her children (believing remaining together for the children and shaming divorces is damaging). The most damning thought is that one has to live with it. Perhaps she thought it a plight she had to tolerate, that only she was being hurt, or that she could simply make it work. Perhaps I did as well, by never talking about it and instead keeping quiet. But your rationalisation to simply endure more or anything that comes your way only serves the abuser:
“Don’t keep telling yourself, “I can handle this, I can handle this.” That message may help you be strong sometimes, but right now it’s not working; in fact, it’s keeping you vulnerable to the abuser. It’s okay to need help. In fact, it’s profoundly human to give and receive assistance.” (Lundy Bancroft, Five Central Concepts in Getting Free From Abuse)
Was she at fault, too? Why is that such an attractive thought? Is it because it unconsciously holds the only parent accountable who showed accountability, in contrast to the abusive one who never does? Because it is tempting to blame women, as it is more acceptable and less frightening, both socially and within the family? Because vulnerable people in general are more approachable? And because it diverts the pain and frustration into a direction that finds its mark, in contrast to the one whose goal is to elude it? But the existence of abusers are only to be blamed on the abusers themselves.
Perhaps I misjudged as well, and didn’t see how damaged it all already was. It’s shocking how entrapment and its extent can evade one’s mind. I underestimated how much more sucked in she must have been than she appeared. Isolated as she was she would’ve lacked immediate and close support. Abused women have been grinded down, their self-esteem so low they think they have to stay, or have become too lethargic to do anything about it. The abusive man keeps his partner through various abuse tactics by his side to extract domestic and emotional labor, personal caretaking, attention, admiration, status from her, and to have for himself more control and less work, things that society tells him are his right within a (heterosexual) partnership. An abusive man can cling to you like pitch or cigarette smoke. I read accounts of women who left after decades, when they were in their 60ies, or only because of interventions. You’re so bound to the abuser and the environment through laws, duties, commitments, children, and time. Or through the process of traumatic bonding:
“One of the great tragedies of all forms of abuse is that the abused person can become emotionally dependent on the perpetrator through a process called traumatic bonding. The assaults that an abuser makes on the woman’s self-opinion, his undermining of her progress in life, the wedges he drives between her and other people, the psychological effects left on her when he turns scary — all can combine to cause her to need him more and more. This is a bitter psychological irony. Child abuse works in the same way; in fact, children can become more strongly attached to abusive parents than to nonabusive ones. (…) The trauma of chronic abuse can also make a woman develop fears of being alone at night, anxiety about her competence to manage her life on her own, and feelings of isolation from other people, especially if the abuser has driven her apart from her friends or family. All of these effects of abuse can make it much more difficult to separate from an abusive partner than from a nonabusive one. The pull to reunify can therefore be great.” (Bancroft, pp. 220–221)
And as an immigrant she might have thought that, to continue living in a country in which her children started to have their own life and commitments, she had to stay with her abusive husband. Abusers strip you of things that make you independent, and when you grow up with one you either won’t receive those tools in the first place or will be manipulated into thinking that you can’t do anything about their presence in your life. Children may end up thinking that perhaps they can gain something out of tolerating an abuser’s presence, financial security or gifts or allowances or taking care of something, comforts within the status-quo that you sometimes receive, tiny peanuts as advantages to ignore the vast detriments. If abusers want to keep themselves in your life, because they receive privileges like caretaking and masculine or heteronormative status symbols (spouse and children), they will do everything in their power to make you remain.
“One of the defining characteristics of abuse is that you can’t easily get away from it. If you could, you would. The entrapment element is always present. Intimate partners are trapped by threats, by isolation, by lack of access to money, by not wanting to get separated from their children, by brainwashing, and by a long list of other factors. (…) Women don’t get stuck in abuse because of masochism. They get stuck because the abuser — along with the society that backs that abuser up — has trapped them in a bunch of different ways, not least of which is the huge trauma he has caused.” (Lundy Bancroft, Five Central Concepts in Getting Free From Abuse)
Often, to know the context we live in is a helping hand: it’s also societal or familial conventions and conformity, the fear of financial instability or of somehow having failed, the idea that staying together is better for children, the sheer lack of knowledge and information about abuse in most people’s lives, no role models or representation, relatives or friends living and accepting the same dynamics, a society that doesn’t care to educate, and in the end, with enough time passed, perhaps even a sense of defeatism or denial. In a way they are a product of their environment, in a way they are complicitous (in the eyes of children). My mother might have done something, she might have not, she might have died regardless. There is no tangible external structure of help to escape abuse, nothing to cling to to pull one out, it’s just jumping from poison into cold water. Your life is just filled with ignorant cishets who don’t know anything about this world and you have to figure out everything yourself. And then, knowing still doesn’t make it easy, you’re still left not knowing how to proceed from there.
Resentment serves another function: The only thing that keeps the pain at bay is holding her accountable to her failure of not having given us a life without an abuser. Without it it’s the unbearable pain of having failed to use time and opportunity yourself, of something not having happened that should and could have, of absolute irreparability which the finality of death elicits.
The Sense of Futility
What happened to that girl that was once so energized and committed to change? Who went straight after learning about the disadvantages of smoking at school to her mother and asked her to stop this occasional habit of hers. What happened now that I didn’t immediately rush to my mother with the newfound knowledge about abuse? The childlike excitement to pass on something important that was learned and the assurance that they will heed it were gone. I realized why I hesitated for so long: It has been a decades-long conditioning, which culminated into tiny moments like this one, of my mother and I sitting together in our shared frustration (before I started to categorize his behavior as abusive) in which I blurted out in a murmur that the abuser is sexist and she agreed, “Yes, he is sexist”. The fact that that was it, that no change followed, that I had to live with the realization that she kept on living with him despite knowing that, that she tolerated to live with that, was enough to somehow lose hope — though, losing hope had been a habit for a while already. If this wasn’t enough then perhaps nothing else would be. It could have been a moment of connection, of aligning our frustrations and realizing together, but it wasn’t, I didn’t push forward. Sadly, it’s not out of the ordinary that abused people cannot significantly help each other or even themselves.
It was the dread that nothing would change regardless. Perhaps the real difficulty was to make someone else care that they do not have to endure abuse.
Hiding in one’s subconscious and depression thoughts, the sense of inevitability or futility is a bigger obstacle than one assumes. It showed itself in many visions of failure. It’s easy to dream of a life without the abuser, and hard to imagine it realized. Many confusing fears and trains of thought occurred that ended in procrastination: If she didn’t start to realize it herself, then where would the starting point be for explaining it to her? Everyone can end up in an abusive environment but what kind of person stays? Perhaps she wanted to stay blind due to what some people regard as preferable: the agony of remaining unaware instead of the agony of knowing. Even wanting to impart knowledge to my mother made me worry whether I would be influencing and manipulating her like another abuser. I also feared that I wouldn’t be of any help, that I wasn’t enough to justify escape or what was needed for it, and that I wouldn’t be what was required after being free of the abuse.
One’s mother appearing content in the abuser’s presence or the lifestyle, or never naming abuse for what it is can be another cause for confusion and mistrust. Though navigating through abuse is a lose/lose-situation in any case, it also impedes your instincts, judgement, and gut feelings that affect other aspects of life, and imposes the urge to be secretive. For inexplicable reasons I was also scared, for myself and for her. I thought the right thing to do was to keep my distance for a while, thinking her acceptance as an unvoiced decision and that I had to endure for her as she may have thought to endure for us — all of which can happen without openness and honesty.
With my own silence and secrecy I was inadvertently contributing. I was effectively of what I accused her to be, I was also complicitous. I couldn’t control my trauma and that kept me from doing the right thing. I deteriorated, and it scared me. At times, it seemed like letting things run their course until one meets an early end was an easier path to freedom than convincing someone to become aware of abuse and escape it. A self-imposed ending through the sense of futility. It feels as if I fashioned this outcome, and all I had to do was do nothing. My death drive had been more in control of my (in)actions than I realized. Yet, I owed my mother an explanation and apology, she didn’t deserve the consequences of my lethargic death-longing. Yet again, I cannot completely fathom my past self, my past traumatized state of mind that has led me to horrible decisions and missed opportunities and to this outcome specifically.
I shouldn’t have looked at the possible negative outcome of talking about the subject as if it were the end, because it wouldn’t have been. I should have pursued it and worked from there. It would have been a step within a process that demands further effort and attention, or at least it would have meant more certainty. Death can make the lack of answers so absolute, confusion and uncertainty can become solidified. Without any effort for change we just remain on our previous paths until they end in a pit and we fall with them. The failure to act feels like any of this has lost meaning and validity. There is a voice inside my head telling me to live and die quietly, to succeed or fail quietly. Perhaps this underlying resentment to writing about all of this is the fear of exposing pain, because an abusive environment requires one to keep it under wraps: expose the pain and you expose the cause, expose abuse, expect more. Within an abusive environment it was vital to have my mother’s trust and support in my understanding of events, especially when it came to dismantling any previously unquestioned conformity at home. It meant you had someone who gave you the benefit of the doubt, a sort of protection against gaslighting, someone whose goal was always to create a safe environment.
I keep asking myself, what did she die with? What were her worries, her sadness and pain, what did she think of them? I don’t know how much she knew, I don’t know all of her experiences and all of the abuse tactics he used. I don’t know how traumatized and love-bombed she herself was. I don’t know how much I played a part in keeping her bound. Many questions remain, and there is no closure. With loss of life there is loss of any opportunity for connection, understanding, development, escape, and recovery. If we die regardless then I shouldn’t have cared about my confused fear and frustration back then. What would have mattered was having been open and honest, better known and more helpful to each other. I’m sorry that she had to live and die with this. Abused people are robbed of their lives even while being alive.
Lundy Bancroft, Why Does He Do That? (2002), Berkley Books
Marilyn Frye, Oppression (2000), http://www.filosoficas.unam.mx/docs/327/files/Marilyn%20Frye,%20Oppression.pdf
bell hooks, Communion (2002), William Morrow
Bethany Webster, Why it’s Crucial for Women to Heal the Mother Wound (2019), https://www.bethanywebster.com/why-its-crucial-for-women-to-heal-the-mother-wound/
Claire Snell-Rood, Emily Hauenstein, Carl Leukefeld, Frances Feltner, Amber Marcum, and Nancy Schoenberg, Mental Health Treatment Seeking Patterns and Preferences of Appalachian Women with Depression (2016), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5173451/
Lundy Bancroft, Five Central Concepts in Getting Free From Abuse (2018), https://lundybancroft.com/five-central-concepts-in-getting-free-from-abuse/
