Ran across this today: “The parent hits the child, then asks, ‘Why do you make me do this to you?’
( My ‘mother’ threw me out of the house at age 14) before delivering the next blow. Then they say, ‘This hurts me more than you,’ before continuing the beating. (you are an awful person, I’ve lost my welfare income because of your leaving) . Here both the agency (you make me do this) and the cruelty (hurts me more) are pinned on the child.” - Mitch Y. Artman
This resolved for me my guilt and shame for being thrown out of the house at age 14. I know I don’t have secret mind powers to make parents or anyone, choose abusive behaviour towards me.
They choose that because they have some illness, plain and simple.
So I left, a self-helping behaviour. But programmed to believe it’s all my fault.
To have stayed would have been self-defeating behaviour.
Albert Ellis talks about this, but this is the first time I have applied it to others' actions towards me, ”You don’t get upset because bad things happen; you get upset because you believe they shouldn’t happen, and it’s awful when they happen.”
I always saw myself as ‘the bad thing’, I was programmed to do so. By a narcissistic parent and siblings. I was/am the scapegoat in their eyes.
Eventually, I got married to a narcissist named Carol Graham; it was love bombing, then abuse, which again was all my fault.
Cocaine ensued after the separation. Eventually, she got a law degree and divorced me. More being thrown out of the house. Edi, after ten years, blamed me for making her life miserable by being assertive. I was responsible for her support system leaving she said. So, more being thrown out of the house, more being blamed for my beatings financially and emotionally. ‘You made me do this.’
