*Trigger warning: Self-harm, abusive parents, suicide, death, sexual abuse*

I am not really sure if anyone was reading this blog before when I was more active, but if so then it’s been obvious that I haven’t posted in over 6 months.

It’s been really difficult for me to talk about what’s been going on in my life lately, because I have just been trying to stay above the water these last months. My mom who I have talked about here before in detail had gotten pretty sick around March of this year. Even though I hadn’t talked to her in about a year and a half due to the toxic nature of our relationship, I felt like I needed to be there to help take care of her.

Although my time with her was only around a week and a half long, I didn’t know how to process anything that was happening around me. Going from no contact to full on caregiver was a big extreme that I wasn’t ready for. I was still looking to my mom to show me unconditional love and to affirm all the things I was doing in my life, especially since she was so sick. I thought that her poor health might make her reassess her actions and her attacks on me, but I know now that was a pipe dream. It was my idea of the relationship that I craved from her for so long. My time at her place ended in an explosion as usual. My uncle G (her brother) confronted me out of the blue and said that my mom told him that I accused him of sexually abusing me (which I will say again and again, I never said). He stormed out of the house in a rage after I told him that my mom has been making up stories like this and spreading them to everyone in the family who will listen. My heart broke when I looked her in her eyes and she straight faced said to him that I accused him of that. My healing fantasy was broken. I was broken.

During the time at my mom’s house, I was struggling so much with self-harm and would find myself at night in the bathroom punching myself in the face and telling myself that I hated myself. This is something that I have struggled talking about for so long. My default ever since I was a child was to self harm and to blame myself for the chaos going on around me. I used to pull my hair out of my head, cut myself and put salt in my wounds. When I am in this head space, I feel so low that I could sink in to the ground and have it swallow me whole. I tell myself that if only I was better then my mom would love me or understand me. That scared, hurt, and confused child is still inside of me using the only coping mechanisms that she knows that helped her survive so long ago. It has been so difficult to confront this hurt, because it feels so natural. It’s my default when I feel unsafe or uncomfortable to tell myself that I must be a freak, that I must be the problem.

About a month ago my mom passed away at the age of 40 from liver failure due to a combination of cancer treatments and alcoholism. I only talked to her twice since I left her house in March and thankfully I think that I got the closure that I needed. She called me sometime in April and said that her hallucinations had told her that she hurt me recently. *When I was with her she was still fully lucid, but after I left her house her mental health was drastically declining due to the toxins from her liver reaching her brain*. She said that her hallucinations were all family members and that they told her that she hurt me. She also told me that she has a hallucination that I died in child birth and I guess she was wanting to check up on me. I told her that I was healthy and that she did hurt me. She said that she couldn’t remember how she hurt me, but that she was really sorry. She said (for one of the only times in my life) that she was really proud of me and that to this day it makes my eyes well up because it was something I craved my whole life. After this conversation with her she called once again but she was more casual than loving. I didn’t call her again but left my line open to her to call if she wanted to. That was the last time I ever talked to my mom. I didn’t want to ruin the perfection of closure by reaching out again and possibly being rejected or attacked. I was so scared of losing this image of my mom who validated and loved me that I knew that I couldn’t be the one to care for her anymore.

I didn’t feel like I was ready to start therapy until she passed. I needed the closure of knowing that there wouldn’t be anymore convolutions to sway me away from loving myself. I have depended so much on my parents/family to affirm me and to tell me that I am atoned for the negative ways that they see me and now that my mom is gone, I finally feel like I can let that pressure go.

I started therapy again two weeks ago and I am excited to heal in ways that I wasn’t able to before. My default is to be hard on myself so my ‘homework’ is to try and find compassion for myself as much as I can. This has brought up the realization that I am engaging in a lot of negative self-talk. I am also realizing that I am so caught up in my ego and the perception that people hold of me that I am held back by myself. I am just taking life a day at a time and seeing what comes up.

It’s so easy to put things off to the side and to let self-hate bubble up naturally, but I don’t want to live that way anymore. Actually, I just can’t live this way anymore or I will probably hurt myself very bad.

Below I have some resources to better understand some topics covered in this post. I highly recommend taking a look at these to better understand some bi-products that arise from having abusive parents.

“We think the people will change and care about us if we just preserver in doing things we think will get their approval.”

Healing fantasy: https://www.newinsights.ca/children-cope-emotionally-immature-parents/