I mentioned that I had found myself a psychologist, one that I hoped would actually be able to help me make some meaningful and permanent improvement in the state of inside my head by using the correct, evidence-based therapy models with me. The thing I am doing is called CPT – cognitive processing therapy. I don’t know all of the details about how it works but part of it does involve “homework” sometimes – writing down thoughts with regards to specific prompts. This is my first such homework task.
Am I worrying that I did it wrong? That’s a trick question, no-one who has ever met me would even bother asking that. I did ask what volume of words was expected, and the answer was basically: whatever you want. In whatever format you want. Can be full prose, dot points, freeform notes, whatever. It might have been better for me to ask if there was a word limit. Oh well.
Short answer: some people are just cruel, selfish assholes that don’t care about others.
Long answer: it’s a whole lot of psycho-social buzzwords and catch phrases, including but not limited to: hurt people hurt people; generational trauma; generational abuse; systemic and internalised misogyny, especially as relates to expected gender roles; systemic and internalised homophobia; perhaps some ableism.
It doesn’t take a genius to see that many of the things she criticised in me were likely things she herself was criticised for. I broke many of the same rules that she did, but often in quite different ways – some of that just because of my personality and some probably because my personality likely includes neurodivergent attributes.
I think if I am going to expand on the list of things in the first paragraph I probably need to explain a little about her and who she was. She was the youngest child, a surprise, born right at the very beginning of the baby boom in 1946. I know she had at least two older sisters, who were already adults when she was born and maybe even already married themselves. It was a significant age gap, and her parents were relatively old when she was born. (By the standards of the time.) From what I understand they were otherwise a fairly traditional family with traditional values. She… was not a traditional little girl. What would have been called a tomboy. I got the impression that some of the interests she had were grudgingly tolerated, like participating in certain sports (women only teams of course) but other things like her complete lack of interest in being properly feminine and delicate and learning appropriate skills to grow up and be a good housewife were more of a sore point.
Obviously she didn’t want to get married because the only acceptable person for her to marry would have been a man. So I think she chose one of the few other options available to young single women and became an office worker, secretary type thing, and made a decent career of it. When she and my mum bought a house near Ballarat and we moved there, a few months after my dad died, she got given a really fancy clock as a leaving gift and I think it was because she worked for the company for like 20+ years or something. I think probably a mostly typical existence for a person that had to hide a large part of themselves from society.
I don’t really know whether she had any significant relationships before my mother. I believe that she was somewhat out, with her family, but it was uneasy and they weren’t really cool with it. So she then met my mum and there was the small complication that this fantastic woman had a child but that was, I guess, tolerable, because the kid lived with her father and only had to be endured at weekends and maybe a bit during school holidays. Then that selfish bastard of a man went and died and the child became a 24/7 problem.
I think this is probably the point when her relationship with my mum should have ended. Not explosively, or antagonistic, or anything like that, but with the honest admission that a child in her life was not what she wanted. Of course, it didn’t. And I kind of get that – I understand how deep both the social conditioning towards motherhood as well as the biological can go, and even if you never expected or wanted to have a child, whatever is left of those probably lets you convince yourself that you can adapt to having one there if it means not losing this amazing new relationship you found.
At first I think it was fine. It took several years for the resentment to build. Ironically, some of what I think are great things about me are things that provoked her to become critical and hateful towards me. My mum has always been a very accepting person, welcoming to differences and intolerant of bigotry or hate. This is something I learned and inherited from her easily. So I adapted very easily to the fact of my mother having a new partner who was a woman and accepted her as part of our life, as another parent even. I don’t think she believed it could be that simple. Perhaps she had never experienced it as such from anyone who wasn’t gay themselves. I don’t know. There were times when it seemed like she was determined to make me admit that I didn’t really accept or like her. I had a diary when I was a child. I only wrote in it occasionally but I did consider it to be private. For me only. I hid it accordingly. Not very well, apparently, because she took it; but she didn’t ever admit to having taken it. Then in one of these sessions where she yelled and ranted and criticised and I cried, she accused me of hating her and having written in my diary that I hated her and hated that she was a woman and that my mum was a lesbian and various other things. I denied that, because I hadn’t written anything like that, because it wasn’t true; and so she challenged me to prove it. Of course, I couldn’t prove it, because I was not in possession of my diary. So my ‘refusal’ or ‘inability’ to prove my innocence beyond pathetically saying “no, I didn’t do it” just proved that I was guilty, by her standards.
So this is the “internalised homophobia” part of it. But some part of her must not have been satisfied in having proved that I really did hate her and everything about her relationship with my mother, probably because it was all based on farce and gaslighting. So the next attempt to catch me out and make me admit that I hated her and all gay people was to tell me that my father had been bisexual. At the time I hadn’t really known whether that was true or not, turns out it is, but that’s neither here nor there. Maybe this was the thing to tip me over the edge into admitting my hatred because being bi is worse than being simply gay or lesbian? (I don’t think that but I am aware that there are apparently a subset of people that do.) Her telling me this did upset me. Not because of the content. I don’t care who either of my parents fuck as long as it’s all consensual, just like any other person. It upset me because for the first time I realised that she believed beforehand that this would be upsetting information to me and said it to me anyway. It was hurt she intentionally chose to inflict on me for her own “gain.” Even though she was wrong about why this upset me, it was still, in her mind, evidence that she was correct.
As for “internalised misogyny?” Well, I wasn’t a typically feminine girly girl either, by 1950s standards. I don’t think I was particularly odd by 1980s standards, but probably leaned towards being less interested in classically girly stuff than average. I read a lot, and I don’t think that is particularly coded for girly or boyish, I think the problem with that is that I preferred to read than to go and interact with other children. I had a variety of toys, dolls and bears as well as lego and slinkies and large wooden dice and playing cards. Now I know the lego was definitely somewhat boy coded (at that time) and therefore “worthy of criticism” for not being a normal little girl, if you have fucked up ideas about what any particular person should or shouldn’t be because you were also not allowed to just be. I am also not at all sporty, I could give or take fishing (I participated because most of my extended family did too, not because I had any particular passion for it myself); so I also failed at failing to be a girl by not really being a tomboy either.
Ableism: well. I don’t know that anyone would have identified it as such at the time and I think it’s really subtle, but certainly I can see that some of what was “wrong” with me is very likely attributable to autistic traits. My preference for my own company over that of other children. Some of what I mentioned as my favourite toys to play with, for example the wooden dice and the playing cards. I played normal solo card games and I built things out of stacked cards but I also arranged and sorted and dealt the cards in lots of various ways based on number and suit. I rolled the dice over and over and took notes about how many of each result I got. Sometimes I would intentionally influence the rolls, putting more or less effort into the throws. I had a travel Yahtzee game which had 5 standard d6 contained within a holder that allowed for each to be either rolled against the palm or fixed in place. I played with the combinations of results you would get on that. I experimented with how much movement against the palm was actually necessary to make the dice move to a degree where the result would be considered sufficiently randomised or not. Even with my lego – when I was not building something, I separated them out into parts organised by shape, size and colour. It bothered me to have them all just loose in the bucket. All of these things that I did which were completely innocuous, not at all harmful to myself or other people, but very much “not normal” by the standards of someone raised in a time when social and intellectual conformity were very important. So, yes, her criticism of those parts of me and those behaviours would I think definitely come under the scope of ableism, but only in retrospect based on knowledge I have gained since. Back then I just thought it was yet another thing wrong with me, because I could obviously see that I was different in many ways to other children, and being different was bad. And that’s why I got “in trouble” for it.
When I mention “generational trauma” what I am getting at is that I have an understanding that most people default to parenting the way they were parented. Even when they never intended to be a parent and denied that they were one. So if the way they were parented included abusive behaviours, they’re more likely to do the same with their children – sometimes not even realising that it is so because of the social and biological instinct to trust in our parents and believe that they are always acting in our best interest. Therefore I’m able to understand based on the knowledge I have of past generations parenting in general and her in particular that the approach she took to pointing out my perceived flaws was quite possibly done with the belief that it was necessary for someone to do that so that I could learn to correct myself and become a proper decent member of the human race. That fact that pointing out all of these “hard truths” to me clearly upset me wasn’t relevant. Someone has to do it and you just have to learn to suck it up and get over it and be normal. Or something.
That’s kind of where all of this becomes a problem for me. I assume that the point of this exercise, answering the question of why this all happened, is to make sure I know that it wasn’t “my fault.” I didn’t do anything to cause it, simply by existing as I naturally do. And I do understand that. I also understand that people are the product of both their experiences and their genes. I am intelligent enough to identify all of these common areas that I know, or can infer, were things that she herself was criticised or derided for and see that that’s why she then did the same to me, even if the way I “broke the rules” wasn’t exactly the same. I know that this is a story that has been repeated thousands, if not millions of times, all over the word, and that’s why it has been termed “generational.” It’s not unique to me.
And yet..
Lots of people who were abused manage to not abuse their own children. Being a victim of abuse does NOT guarantee that you will be a perpetrator of it. And if some people have the ability to not fall into that trap, then theoretically anybody has that ability. When you are doing something, and the person that is the subject of your actions or words is expressing that they are pained, distressed, heartbroken, devastated, crying uncontrollably, sobbing and hiccupping, that kind of intense sadness that leaves you suddenly shuddering and gasping on and off for hours after the actual tears have stopped.. it shouldn’t be a difficult step to realise that you are causing harm and that you should stop because this is not how we should treat other people. People who abuse demonstrate that they know they are hurting their victims, and that they want to hurt them despite knowing that it is wrong when they take steps to ensure that their abuse is not discovered by others. When they do things like restricting the places they hit so that bruises do not show in places not ordinarily covered by clothes, when they tell victims that “this should be our secret only because X wouldn’t understand and would be jealous” or when they tell you things that twist your perception and exploit your innate desire to please your parents by making you believe that they are helping you to hide all of your flaws and inadequacies from your mother because it would just devastate her to realise that you are such a broken, wretched and wrong excuse for a human being; so you somehow believe that their abuse is actually protecting you instead of damaging you.
They know. And they do it anyway.
So then, that just comes back to: some people don’t care enough about other people to make the effort to be better than they have learned to be. They may be the product of a complex web of factors spanning various social, political, familial, generational issues; but very few people have had experiences such that they would develop entirely without empathy. They are choosing to ignore the empathy and the conscience that tells them what they are doing is wrong. Choosing to be cruel and selfish by passing the harm onto someone else instead of figuring out how to excise that from themselves. You might not always be able to be perfect but you can try to be better, and they choose not to. Some people just suck. That’s why.