Leslie

I hear your frustration, your anger and your grief. And it’s all out there — written, and no doubt, 15 minutes after you read your words it’s not your sister telling you that you are selfish or your mother blaming you for her issues — but it is your own mind questioning if any of them were right.

The hardest thing about living with someone that was mentally ill is that became my normal. The hardest thing later on about learning normal was to let all of my ideas of what that normal was — go. And when you live in constant turmoil, expectations are all you have as your control. The anger is fear… and the fear can be resolved within Rozanne. My mother will forever be exactly who she was — living or dead, it was her mental illness, not mine. No matter the blame, no matter the chaos — all is stilled by putting one foot in front of the other and continuing on in peace… in stolid determination.

Thank you for your sharing.

The HARDEST thing for me is to have shared the same space, mentally and emotionally, with my mother, and to not be able to explain to others why I feel disturbed by that experience. As a child, my mum was frequently in a rage, and would mainly speak in a tone of blame or demand. She was unable to express kindness in her voice to me, or show any emotional warmth. It effected my family a lot, but throughout it, we didn’t find a way of overcoming her fundamental rule, that love should not survive in our house. Because of how she treats others, I feel it is not safe or acceptable to show love in our house. Thankfully I no longer live with her, and that is NATURALLY resulting in healing for me as I can begin to feel normal about myself in relation to the world of people, instead of living with criticism and being stared at constantly. My mother’s eyes were very penetrating and since my teens especially I have felt like my body consisted of thin air, or that people could see all of my thoughts and feelings and I have no where to run or hide from others minds. I can’t explain any of these thoughts or feelings to anyone. I don’t even know what it is myself. All I knew at the time was that I felt out of control of my own mind around my mum, as if I wasn’t a “real” person. Her staring at me led to me feeling there was something wrong with me and that I wasn’t a person like everyone else. She seemed to be communicating this to me through her eyes. That is how it felt anyway.

When I was at home, she would “move me” constantly, so I could not sit still for a moment comfortably without her expressing the need for me to do something. I would be knocked out of myself when she called my name, although I was not sure why this was. I lost control of leaving my body. I would do it automatically when she said my name or looked at me.

I am now an adult and suffer from not believing that I am a person.

If I could have chosen the course my life took, I wish that I was taken from my mother as a child so i would not have had to try to relate to a psychotic person during my growing years, blamed for her every mood, stared at constantly, and used by my family as the person having “something intrinsically wrong” with them.

Throughout my life, i have had to hide my feelings and emotions from my mum in case they were used to prove I was a bad or useless person. I had the courage to tell my this year some truths and also demand to not be psychologically used in the family as a “bad person” when in fact, I had suffered from being abused by her, including being denied food (as a punishment) and love as a child.

During one of these phone calls, she said that I was “born defective”, whatever that means. And the last time I spoke to her, she said that she was not Schizophrenic, but “manic depressive”, which is odd considering that she is on medication for psychosis, and has had numerous psychotic breakdowns before and after I was born. She has doesn’t experience emotions in the same ways as others, but has been “flat” for many years probably due to medication.

I also found the lack of emotion hard to explain in its effect on my soul. The truth was, there was no one to explain it too. The illness, whatever it was, was the status quo. If anything or anyone was “wrong”….it was ME. My mother was unable to take criticism, unable to be responsive to anothers emotions or life-story, and totally neglected to tell me about my father….it was as if I didn’t have a dad. My mum just didn’t have any concept of what it was to be family.

At the age of 9 she told me I was disturbed, as if I was an adult, responsible for every trait of personality. She didn’t mother me, but speak to me like an adult.

At the age of 12 onwards, she expressed her desire for me to leave home. I never understood why my mum didn’t like me, God knows I tried to please her. Then again, I also hated her and lived in fear of her. It felt as though I was thinking about her and what her moods were all the time, or just generally feeling disturbed by her behavior - sitting in a chair all day smoking.

Living with a mentally ill parent is (potentially) hell, make no mistake. And throw away remarks by people who DO NOT know what it is like piss me off.

There is no way of describing what it is like to be terrorised by your mother’s emotional, mental and physical violence, and then blamed somehow for it, by everyone around you as if it were “your fault” or you are intrinsically “faulty”.

Of course I am not “normal” now. But it pisses me off that everytime I meet my older sister, she says I have a character trait. That I have no humour, or take life too seriously etc. Apparently, feeling bad about having a mentally ill parent, according to her view means I am a VERY SELFISH PERSON.

The repercussions of having a mentally ill person, or narcissistic person at the head of the family is far fetching, effecting all the children and their relationships with each other and sometimes, the wider social community.

It is hard for me to forgive the people who allowed my mother - suffering from psychotic anxiety - to continue to raise me. My mother was emotionally unresponsive to my being sexually abused. It never occured to her that she may have had responsibility as a parent to guard me from sexual abuse. She was just “there”, watching me growing passively, perhaps standing in my way now and again, to critise me or hide food from me behind her chair - something she joked about with my younger sister.

Rod