This is the story of the abuse and harrassment that I suffered for around twenty years at the hands of my mother. It is a big deal for me to publish something so personal and make it available to everyone. No matter what your reaction to my story is, I request that if you decide to send me any feedback, that you do so with sensitivity and with respect for my feelings. The fact that I am exposing myself here is not an invitation for more abuse from anyone (January 2005).
For most of my life so far I have colluded with my family and my culture to one degree or another, in concealing the abuse I received in my family of origin for a period of around 20 years.
Like many abuse victims I was condemned to living with the memories and the effects of my abuse while the perpetrator keeps walking free and unaccountable for his or her crimes. My mother was never prosecuted for what she did to me and I was never taken away from her. At the time I grew up the abuse of children went on in silence with little social acknowledgement. Although we have made some progress towards the protection of children, I have no doubt that many suffer in silence for many long years. Many people end up living a life of misery of some type or another. Some of those who do make it, I will probably meet as clients along the way.
I am writing this story primarily for me but it is also a tribute to all the children out there who are condemned to a childhood of torment. This is a tribute to those children who suffer anything from outright abuse and neglect, to a life within emotionally unskilled, blocked or unloving families that discount their feelings and their experiences without realising the amount of damage they do. It is a tribute to children who have to live in families where the protection of secrets or of an ‘image’ is considered more important than their well-being. This is a tribute to children who are used emotionally and physically by parents who believe that their children are their property, and who are sentenced to growing up without ever being seen for who they are and loved simply because they are. This is a tribute to all children who are forced to parent their own parents, and who never receive the kind of guidance, nurturing and support that they need to prepare them for adulthood. This is a tribute to all those whose childhood rendered them ill or disabled in some way, to those whose childhood caused them to attempt suicide and to those who succeeded. In many ways my story is your story.
Since visiting Israel in October last year and seeing my mother, I have had a growing feeling of discomfort. I felt so uncomfortable to the point of experiencing physical symptoms that so far have no clear medical explanation. Since my visit and since hearing from my sister-in-law what my mother said, that she wasn’t a perfect mother but she doesn’t think she was that bad, I think I began to feel a growing sense of anger at the denial of my abuse and harrassment at her hands. This isn’t new but I think I now understand better how helping to protect my mother’s image by not telling this story, had affected my health.
Late at night, going in and out of bouts of rage, I have entertained thoughts of revenge and law suits, demands for compensation and an apology. However, after thinking about it for long enough I realised that what I really need is acknowledgement of the truth. I don’t need acknowledgement by my mother but by me. I need to tell my story and let the world know about what happened to me at her hands. This signifies the end of my willingness to collude with the conspiracy of silence, with the demand to be ‘nice’ and ‘considerate’, let things go and get on with it and protect my mother’s image.
I have told bits of my story to a number of people throughout the last few years, my husband, Ian, my therapists, my supervisor and in my ‘Differentiation of Self’ paper, which was a part of my assessment in my psychotherapy degree. But never before have I been able to completely drop the shackles of the commandment to be nice and considerate and to not tell others what really went on in my family.
With respect to the reader, I have to say that I don’t particularly care what others will think of my story. My suspicion is that like in any case of ‘coming out’ with some kind of truth, some will side with her, some with me and the rest won’t care. For me this is a way of setting the record straight by acknowledging the truth, by naming the victim and the perpetrator openly and their role in my story.
Many people avoid writing autobiographies until key people in their story are dead. My mother is still alive and I want the world to know what she did to me while she is still there. I have lived long enough with the requirement, partly self-imposed, to see her side and understand that she was abused too and had a hard life and so on. But understanding that cannot come at my own expense any longer. I am a classic victim of abuse who existed for so long in an abusive system with another human being that I lost sight of myself, my feelings, my needs and my rights. It was her that taught me to put her, not me first, and to surrender everything I was, to her.
It has taken me at least the last 13 years to claw my way out of the dark hole that this woman put me in. I suspect that I still have many years of personal work to do to recover from the deep trauma that was inflicted on me in my family of origin. I am a much healthier person than I have ever been, but I am committed to making sure that I continue to do my personal work for the rest of my life.
This story is written as if it was a testimony in court, under oath. Everything I am telling is the truth from my perspective. It is how I experienced and saw things. It is what I know that happened to me. I have no need, or reason to lie. It is simply how it was for me.
I think my mother began to beat me up when I was quite young. I don’t know what age exactly but I do have memories of being 2 years old when I already felt frightened of her. I remember being with Rosa, the kind old woman my parents and I shared an apartment with in Tel-Aviv until I was about 4 years old. I think she protected me a lot and I remember how safe I felt with her and how calm I was in her little room. I remember making drawings there and being able to forget myself completely. I remember her sofa, the big wooden radio that fascinated me, the wardrobe that fascinated me no less and her sewing machine by the window. I must have been left in her care occasionally and I remember not looking forward to being with my mother again.
I have memories of both my grandmothers at different times saying, ‘leave her alone’ in Romanian. I never spoke or understood Romanian very well but I understood this well enough. Someone was doing something bad to me and someone else was trying to stop them. I don’t know if my mother listened to them, but in any case my grandmothers weren’t there all the time and I was condemned to spend most of my days under my mother’s control. She had complete domination over me, what I did, what I ate, what I felt or said. I felt like I was living under a magnifying glass. Everything was commented on and I couldn’t breathe without her knowing about it. And she beat me up a lot.
I don’t remember running to my mother for a warm loving hug. I have a strong memory of her hands being hard and cruel. She used mostly her hands to beat me up. From a very young age I was her punching bag. She beat me with cruelty and almost enjoyment and then would just dump me there on my own. Often I wasn’t even allowed to cry after beatings. ‘I’ll give you something to cry about’ was a common phrase, as if being beaten was not a good enough reason to cry.
I remember my mother as a cold and cruel woman. She was emotionally volatile and unpredictable. I never knew what mood she was going to be in next time I saw her. It was safer at school or anywhere away from our apartment. Coming home was always something I tried to put off as much as I could. In our family apartment she ruled completely. She controlled everything. There were good times but they were few and far between. I could never relax into a good day because I knew from experience that something bad would happen to end it. The family was dominated by my mother’s volatile moods. (I am not talking here about my father but he is far from innocent himself. Perhaps one day I will write a separate piece about him.)
Growing up in that family felt frightening and profoundly unsafe. The general atmosphere was violent and tense. When I wasn’t being beaten up or picked on it was my parents endless violent fights that frightened me so much, I didn’t know what to do with myself. On one hand I wanted them to separate and on the other was terrified that they would. I remember that even as a 15 year-old I confided in a school friend that my parents were going to divorce any day now. I was constantly worried about my future. Home did not offer me safety of any kind.
My only way of escaping was through school and through going into a world of my own for a little while. It was almost like dissociation. I had to escape very hard to have some relief from my daily torment. When I was able to read I became a book worm, but many times my mother or my father would yell at me to stop reading because I would spoil my eyes. I read anyway as much as I possibly could.
I had a doll called Bella when I was small. I still remember at the age of 4 or 5 what I used to do to that poor doll. I would beat her up, smashing her against furniture. I still remember clearly the overwhelming rage I felt when I did that. Then suddenly the rage would be replaced with an overwhelming sense of pity for her and shame for what I did, and I would hug her. I know now that I was projecting my own inner world on this doll and I played out my experiences with my mother. My mother didn’t hug me after beating me. I understand now that my reaction to the doll was my sorrow for myself that I was projecting on her. It was the only way that I could feel some kind of sympathy for myself. Most of my life I believed my mother that I was a bad, worthless and damaging person. Her beatings and her emotional and psychological abuse left me believing that I was nothing more than a filthy piece of garbage.
If a psychologist could watch me in those moments with the doll, I have no doubt that they would recognise the clear signs of abuse. But there was no one there to rescue me from my mother. I was entirely under her control and at her disposal. I could not get help even if I wanted to because from about the age of 4 I remember my mother and my father warning me to never talk to anyone about what was going on in our family. If I could even entertain the idea of asking someone for help, this avenue was closed before me. This is another aspect of abusive relationships of all kinds, that the abuser isolates the victim and prevents them from seeking help outside the relationship.
It never crossed my mind that I could go against my mother. I was terrified of what she might do to me if I did tell anyone. I have a memory of someone asking me once, when I was quite small, whether I was being beaten up at home. Perhaps this person saw my bruises or recognised something in my manner or behaviour. I do remember that I minimised it and said ‘only a little bit’, or something to that effect. I remember the feeling of trying to make it seem as if it was not that important. I don’t know who this person was. It might have been a teacher. But I don’t know that anything ever came out of it. As far as I know, no one ever intervened on my behalf in effective or long-term way. I was on my own trapped in an abusive relationship with the woman who was supposed to love me and nurture me.
When she didn’t beat me up my mother yelled and screamed at me, but usually the two went together. From a tiny age she used to yell at me that I was selfish and that I was not treating her well... Frequently after such attacks she would give me the ‘cold shoulder’ for a while. I never knew what was worse, being beaten up and yelled at or having her withdraw from me. When I was younger I used to say that having her withdraw from me was worse than being beaten up. Now I just see this as a part of the abusive web that she trapped me in.
I could never do anything right. For so many years I was so self-conscious and worried so much about what other people thought of me and that was simply because this is the atmosphere in which I was raised. It didn’t take very much to set my mother off. Anything could do it. One time when she criticised me yet again for something I supposedly did wrong, I fought back and listed all these other things that I ‘did right’. Her response was that it didn’t matter how many things I did right because one bad thing cancels it all. It is so obvious to me now how trapped I was.
I will never forget one particular incident when I was maybe 7 or 8, maybe older. My mother instructed me to dust the furniture in the lounge room. I didn’t like dusting but I knew better than to defy her so I did it. The stereo system and all our records were on this wooden piece of furniture that I think my parents had from before I was born and I dusted it together with all the other things I knew I had to dust. After I finished she called me back to the lounge room in that menacing voice that I knew meant trouble, ‘Gali, come here!’ When I came she pounced at me and started to beat me up yelling that I didn’t dust as she told me. She beat me so hard on my face that my lips swelled up and started to bleed. I was in shock. I didn’t know what to feel or think. I felt the usual feeling of humiliation that was so familiar, the terror and the hatred and rage and as often happened during beatings or confrontations with my mother, I had a bit of urine escape in my pants.
I think I was so shocked, I didn’t say anything I just took the barrage of beatings and probably whimpered or cried. When she realised what she did to me, she then smiled and said, ‘Oh, look you have sensual lips’. I am so horrified by this story but it was quite typical of the dynamic between my mother and me. Many times I was accused of things I didn’t do and many times she would have a smirk on her face while abusing me. I don’t think she drew blood very often. She was smart enough to make sure my bruises were well hidden, but this time she went too far and that was the only thing she thought to say to me. Later she called me back and said that she realised that I did dust the thing but that the scratches on it made her think I didn’t. She made me look at it from the correct angle so that I could see how she could make this mistake. This was the closest I came to an apology. By then I was shut down emotionally but I had to get on with my life and get through another day and another week waiting for what seemed like an endless childhood to finish.
For as long as I can remember I went to bed at night crying myself to sleep. I would go to sleep wishing that I died overnight and when I would wake up in the morning I felt irritable and disappointed to find out I was alive. At the same time I always felt like I was just whining and that I didn’t have a right to complain. After all my mother and father’s suffering were greater than mine. I was always told that I had more than they ever had and I had no right to feel sad or complain. I not only suffered, I also felt guilty and ashamed of my suffering.
My mother didn’t just beat me up whenever she needed to vent out some aggression. Like so many abusers she also tried to make me feel sympathy for her. From a fairly young age she let me know how unhappy she was and I was supposed to feel sorry for her. This was very confusing. She was the one who was tormenting me and so I naturally felt anger, hatred and a great deal of fear towards her and yet at the same time I was supposed to feel sorry for her, love her and respect her... This is another typical aspect of a relationship between an abuser and a victim.
When I was 12 she found and read my journal where I described in great detail how much I hated her and how horrible I thought she was. The journal was the only avenue I had for getting things off my chest because there was no one I could talk to. But that too was taken away from me. I was severely punished for this. It was then that I made a conscious decision to pretend and never ever let her know how I really felt about her. It was too dangerous. I continued to keep journals but I remember censoring myself. I never again wrote clearly how I felt about my mother even after I left home. As I learned to hide my real feelings from her, I also learned to hide them from myself. Over the years I began to lose touch with my real experience and became almost dissociated. When I first started therapy I couldn’t remember anything coherent under the age of 12. I could talk about having been beaten up but with no emotion and as if I was talking about someone else. It wasn’t until I saw my first Australian therapist get teary when I told her about the beatings, that I began to feel something again. Still it has been a long journey and I spent many years being false, always hiding my true feelings under the surface, the fears, the insecurity, the crippling self-consciousness, the chronic anxiety and the feelings of self loathing.
Around the same age I also started to feel that my mother didn’t approve of how I looked. I felt like there was always something wrong with my appearance. My mother always served us oversized meals and made chocolate, sweets and pastries available to us. But when I would actually eat them she would tell me that I have to watch my weight. The messages about food were extremely confusing. As I grew older my mother became increasingly critical about my appearance and my weight. I ended up with bulimia I think because I wanted to be thin for her sake. I felt as if she loved me only when I was thin and it didn’t seem to matter to her what it took for me to get there. I wanted her approval and was prepared to do almost anything. During my visit to Romania six years ago, she tried to push on me a pair of control underwear to make me look thinner. She disapproved of my shoes and my handbag and it was after that visit that she stopped sending me boxes of clothes, which she did since I came to Australia in 1991. I assume that she stopped because she realised I wasn’t going to wear them any more and that matters of appearance were no longer so high on my agenda. When I visited Israel last October my mother rang my sister-in-law and asked her how I looked... After all these years, what mattered was how I looked... It is only in the last 7 years that I have been able to stop using make-up and relax a bit about my appearance. My bulimia also stopped around 7 years ago.
My mother once told me, I don’t know how old I was, maybe 11, that when she punished me she sometimes wished I would come to her and ask her to cancel my punishment because she wanted to do it. But she said that I was too proud and always carried my punishment to the term, and never came to beg her to release me from it. She wanted me to beg her. She could never bring herself to give in to her own feelings of pity for me and simply release me herself. I obviously wasn’t an easy victim to pick on.
One of the things that did me a lot of damage and that I also now recognise as a typical part of an abusive system is my mother’s insistence that I second guess her thoughts. She wanted me to somehow know what she wanted or needed without telling me. One example is that she would leave a piece of cloth somewhere in the house and expect me to know from this that she wanted me to do the dusting. When I failed to ‘read the signals’ correctly, I was punished. She behaved this way since I was quite young.
I know that in some ways I fought back. Even as a young child I knew deep down that what she was doing to me was wrong. Throughout my relationship with her I oscillated between compliance and rebellion, doing my best to ‘take care’ of her (which was never good enough of course), please her, make her happy, and rebelling against her and fighting back. When I was more vocal and fought back I was no match for her. She was protected by the classic defence that so many abusers have, their profound sense of victimhood. She was beating me up, tormenting and using me, she was the one with all the power whereas I had none or very little, but she was still the victim somehow, and somehow I was always the one who did something to her... She could always yell louder than me and somehow I could never beat her in an argument. She was always right and she said so openly too. She would go absolutely berserk if I dared to say anything that sounded like a criticism of her. She told me many times that I had no right to criticise her but that she could criticise me as much as she wanted and any time she wanted because she was the mother and I was the daughter. It horrifies me to think what kind of a sick image she must have had in her head about what it meant to be a mother. I wonder if this is partly why I never wanted to become a mother myself.
She must have stopped beating me up in my adolescence somewhere, maybe around the age of 13 or 14. That’s when she also started to work and we started to see less and less of her. Perhaps that’s why the beatings stopped. She was just not around as much any more or maybe she was getting her ‘fix’ somewhere else. While she wasn’t beating me up so much any more, she had a new ‘plan’ for me. The volatile moods, the unpredictability continued, the verbal and psychological abuse continued unchanged but she introduced a new way of using me into our relationship. She decided that because I was now officially a teenager, we were going to become ‘friends’. As always I was supposed to make myself available to her whenever she wanted me. She began to use me increasingly as a hairdresser, as a masseur and the worst of all as a confidant. I was supposed to think of it as fun and was supposed to think of it as the way mothers and daughters who had a good relationship were with each other. Well, it was not fun and the way my mother used me in my adolescence has left deep scars in me, and all but extinguished the last remnants of the spark that I still had inside me as a younger child. I was going downhill rapidly.
My mother had a number of extramarital affairs that I know of. Throughout those affairs she felt it appropriate to share every filthy detail with me. I was supposed to help her hide from my father the love letters she received from at least two of her lovers. I was also supposed to cover up for strange phone calls. She gave me clear instructions about what I was supposed to say or do if the phone rang or if my father asked something. When I was 15 my mother took my brother and me to Romania under the pretence of treating us to a trip overseas. The real reason I understand now, was to use us as a cover up for the affair she was having with a Romanian man 10 years her junior. We stayed with this young fellow’s family. My brother and I shared a bed in one room in their apartment while she was having sex with him in the next room. His entire family knew about this and approved of it. After all he was looking for a way out of a communist country and would do anything to achieve it. Our presence with my mother was probably intended to dispel any suspicions my father might have had about her affair.
My father came to me many times upset and irritated demanding to know what I knew, suspecting that I knew something. Faithful to my mother’s training and actually feeling sympathy for her, I lied for her repeatedly. She tried to make it ‘fun’, or something like that for me. She tried to make me feel important. But all I felt was used and dirty. I also felt very confused in regards to my father. While all this was going on she also confided in me about how awful she felt about my father and how much she suffered with him, what an awful man he was and how her life with him was unbearable. As a result I felt really angry with my father but when I expressed any anger towards him, she would force me to apologise to him and tell me that I should treat him with respect. It is a miracle I didn’t end up with schizophrenia. An environment like this is what we call in therapy ‘crazy making’ and it can drive some people completely insane.
My mother expected me to have sympathy for her suffering but didn’t give a thought to what she was doing to me, how she was using me and how her behaviour was affecting me. She felt completely justified in everything she did because of her own suffering and I suspect that she still feels this way now. This pretend intimacy that I shared with her made me expect her to listen to me too. I wanted to have someone to confide in as well and I desperately needed to have a mother and to feel loved and wanted. Pretty quickly I learned the bitter lesson that when she ‘summoned’ me to one of our ‘talks’ it was really about her. When she finished with me, she was really finished with me. I always took the bait because I needed her, but I was always disappointed. She was never really there for me. Those ‘talks’ were only about her. This lasted for a number of years. During my military service when I was 18-19 and already a mixed up and unhappy young woman, I wanted sometimes to have a mother I could talk to. So often we would make a time to meet after I finished my duties at my base and so often she would cancel at the last minute. At that time I began to feel the profound loneliness that I felt for so long.
I had my first suicide attempt when I was 18 and in a demanding training course in the military. I was depressed and traumatised and was tipped over the edge by the demands and stress of the course. I just couldn’t cope any more. When the army sent me home for a short leave before re-assigning me, my father yelled at me and wanted to hit me and my mother had nothing to say to me at all. I was not offered any sympathy or support and there was no suggestion of any counselling or other forms of practical help. There was nothing. As always, I was alone. The army sent me back into the same environment that caused me to want to kill myself in the first place, and nothing was different.
After my military service, I left home as soon as I could to go to Haifa to live with my boyfriend and study at the Technion. I was too depressed by then to study anything but didn’t yet know it. Although I was physically far away from her, my mother’s hold on me was still as powerful as ever. I remember her coming to visit me in Haifa with one of her lovers. I remember phone calls with her ranting and raving on the phone and then one time threatening to commit suicide. It is no wonder that I couldn’t concentrate on my studies and ended up failing and withdrawing from the course. I felt a great deal of distress and a sense that I couldn’t get away from her but consciously I didn’t really understand what was wrong with me and why I was the way I was. I also desperately needed some adult guidance and love from her but as always there was nothing available. For a while there I was dependent on my parents financially and my mother repeated something she told me when I was younger, that while I was being supported by her financially I was under her control and had no right to think of myself as independent.
My mother used every possible means to keep me under her control for as long as she could, to make sure I was dependent on her and ‘needed’ her. She needed me to be around so that she could use me. I now know that she does this to others too, but at the time I thought that this special treatment was reserved especially for me.
I came back from Haifa for 3 months to live at home but as soon as I could I left again. Things at home felt so awkward and false that it was unbearable. Of course no one talked about it openly. I rented an apartment in Ramat-Gan together with a work colleague and moved in. By that time I was deeply depressed and suicidal again, but of course I didn’t understand what was happening to me or why. It was familiar because I felt it so much of my life but I was so cut-off from myself that I couldn’t make sense of things. All I knew was how to try and survive, drag myself out of bed in the mornings and somehow go to work each day. I did my best to escape my feelings.
A kind older woman at work about my mother’s age with whom I shared an office, saw that I was in trouble and offered to help. She could hear all the times when my mother rang me at work to abuse me for reasons I could not understand and wanted to do something about it. I was afraid but I was also so desperate that I gave her my mother’s number to ring. Her attempt ended up in total disaster with my mother accusing this woman of meddling and abusing her for daring to interfere with her relationship with me. She also screamed at me demanding to know how I dared to expose private ‘family issues’ to a stranger. It was the same thing as in my childhood and I felt very guilty for allowing that woman to intervene. I was not allowed to ask for help. I was supposed to allow my mother to do whatever she wanted with me and keep my mouth shut.
One day when she rang my workplace to abuse me again, I hung up on her and did not speak to her for a long time. My father then started to come to my office demanding that I speak to my mother again because according to him it was me who was causing her to be unhappy. I managed to get rid of him finally, but I was by no means free from the effects of the years of trauma I suffered. I felt terrible about all of this but it was around that time that I started to get some kind of an insight into how much I didn’t matter to both my parents and how I was being used by both of them. It made me feel dirty and depressed and horribly lonely and abandoned.
Not long after, I attempted suicide a second time. My mother knows about this but had never said a word about it to me.
My mother’s behaviour before my wedding to my first husband was bizarre. It was in 1987 and I was almost 23. I now know she was already engaged in a long-term relationship with the man who is now her husband. But she continued to live with my father under false pretences. I don’t know for what reason she did this. When we were small she could justify it by saying that she stayed for our sake, but by that stage I was 23 and my brother was 19. I don’t know why she kept up the pretence. Refusing to collude with it more through instinct than insight, I declared that I would not come out to my wedding ceremony out of their home but would come out of the apartment that I shared with my fiancé.
I went with my fiancé to tell her that and I will never forget the scene she made. She went totally berserk, screamed and carried on, used foul language and accusations against me, and then threatened that she wouldn’t come to the wedding. I had a sudden moment of clarity then, and I saw things in perspective. This was familiar enough. There was nothing new. The only difference was that I was no longer a child. I felt deeply hurt and was shaking all over when I told her to suit herself and walked away. She then yelled at my fiancé, ‘don’t you walk out on me too’ and he just said his place was with his wife. I was always grateful to him for the loyalty he showed me. I also knew that he got some idea of what I had to put up with all my life.
I didn’t see my mother in the weeks or days leading up to the wedding and had no idea whether or not she was going to be there. She did show up to the wedding dressed all in black, and had the audacity to invite her lover who is now her husband, to my wedding. Throughout the evening she behaved as if nothing was wrong and acted as she thought the mother of the bride is supposed to behave. I didn’t like that wedding night at all. There was very little of the real me present. I was desperately pretending to be the happy young bride. But I did feel like the entire evening was hijacked both by my mother and father as well as my fiancé’s parents. I felt extremely lonely.
After that, I played less and less of an important part for my mother with her probably realising that I was not going to be a reliable crutch to lean on any longer or perhaps because she found a substitute. However, because I always craved having a loving mother I spent years chasing after her. What I discovered though, was that unless I was ‘intimate’ with her in the way we were when I was younger, i.e allowing her to use me, I had no hope of having any real relationship with her beyond the superficial. She never showed real interest in my feelings or the circumstances of my life unless they directly affected her in some way. When I came to Australia 13 years ago, she would contact me by phone once a week or so, which was a nice thing to do. But as much as I wanted a mother I didn’t like talking to her. Each time I did, just the simple experience of having basic contact would bring up all these feelings in me that would spin me out of control and make me feel disturbed sometimes for days. By that stage, like many trauma and abuse victims I was so cut-off from myself, that I didn’t understand why I had that reaction...
It took years of psychotherapy to finally put the pieces of myself and my history together, and to see that my reactions and all my symptoms: my chronic anxiety, my fears, my tendency to pretend all the time, my constant worrying, my expectation that things would end up badly, my extremely poor self-esteem, my worries about what others thought of me, my bulimia and body image problems all made complete sense given my background. But despite this I still kept in contact with my mother and to some extent was still in denial of the extent of the damage she did to me. I now know that I left the care of my family with a full blown Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I am lucky to be alive at all and am very fortunate to be doing as well as I am.
I am not surprised that I decided to become a psychotherapist to try and help people recover from and transcend their childhood suffering. I know trauma from both ends. I know what it did to me as a victim and I also know what it made out of my mother. My mother as a victim of her own traumatic past turned into one of the most dangerous perpetrators I have ever encountered. Trauma begets trauma and the only way to stop the cycle is to heal. What I find particularly painful in my mother’s case is that she could see the suffering she caused me and yet it never caused her to stop and think about what she needed to do herself in order to not inflict this on me. Her trauma has made her hard, selfish and unable to feel sufficient empathy towards me in order to change herself.
She hasn’t changed much, as I learned from the experience of the last three years. Around three years ago she did her final act of ‘cold shoulder’ with me. She simply cut me off and I had no idea why. When my birthday came and went and she didn’t respond to a number of faxes I sent her to ask her if she was OK, I wrote her a letter declaring an end to our relationship as it was. I said that I was taking away the special rights that she had in my life. I said that she had been able to get away with what no one else was able to in my life, and that from now on if our relationship was to continue, it would have to based on something different. One of the first things I demanded was honesty and I said how unacceptable it was for me that she just disappeared without doing me the courtesy of telling me why.
A year after she stopped contact with me I learned via my brother that the reason for that was that I had given up my Israeli citizenship. But she never told me. I never received an apology for any of her behaviour at any time in our history. She is, as always, unrepentant and convinced of her own rightness.
On my last birthday, my 40th, a hideously huge, almost grotesque flower arrangement came from her out of the blue. It was so large I couldn’t fit it through the door. It was so symbolic of how much space she takes when she supposedly does something for someone. The only words on the card were ‘Happy special birthday from Ima and Marcel’. My name wasn’t even mentioned.
Needless to say this gesture left me cold. I thought at first of sending the flowers back, only I didn’t know which shop they came from. They were delivered when we were out. Then I decided that I would dismantle it and make it into what I felt was pleasing. I divided some of the flowers between different vases in a way that fitted our space better and that was not offensive. That to me symbolised transforming something that was grotesque and inappropriate to something that I could like and enjoy.
When I went to visit my brother and his family in Israel in October last year, my mother behaved her usual way. She made a number of phone calls to my brother, to his wife and also apparently to an aunt I haven’t seen in many years and with whom I have no relationship, to try and figure out how to see me without me avoiding her. At least I presume this was her intention. No one really knows what she thinks or feels because she never reveals the truth about herself to anyone. When her plans didn’t work because my brother refused to collude with her bizarre behaviour, she simply showed up unannounced and ambushed me. My sister-in-law said my mother had never showed up unannounced like this before. Once again she got her way. She forced me to see her and put me in a position where I was unable to do anything about it. She wanted to see me, so I had to see her.
When to both my sister-in-law and my shock my mother’s head appeared through the door, I began to shake. She asked ‘How are you?’ and I answered ‘Well, thank you’ but did not return the question because I did not want a conversation with her. My inner child was terrified of her. I had to take myself to the toilet, to calm myself down and reaffirm my commitment to stand by myself and not take care of her by pretending to be nice or civilised.
We didn’t talk. I spent her entire visit taking care of my inner child who was terrified, and ignored my mother. She also ignored me. It was when I learned what she said to my sister-in-law the following day, (that maybe she wasn’t the perfect mother but she doesn’t think she was that bad), that really got me angry. It took me until now, about two months after my return, to decide that I wanted to expose the truth and let the world know what she did to me. I am no longer prepared to collude with her or with any social convention that requires me to be ‘nice’ to a perpetrator at the cost of myself and my reality.
My mother was the most dangerous person I have ever encountered in my life and I was her victim.
Afterthought
As I was writing this story I became aware of the connection between my history of abuse and victimhood and the story of the Palestinians and the Israelis. It is no wonder that I can see the suffering of the Palestinians so clearly. I don't know what it is like to have your house demolished, your olive trees uprooted, your family terrorised daily, your front door knocked down in the middle of the night. But I do know from personal experience what it is like to be trapped under the complete control of a perpetrator so powerful and so ruthless, that you end up feeling completely powerless. Whatever you try to do to stop the abuse, you end up in the wrong. The only reason for the abuse is the fact that the perpetrators were themselves abused and are acting out their abuse on the next generation of victims. The fact that the Jews believed that they needed a national home to escape persecution and the Palestinians were in the way is only the pretext for what has been happening since the 19th Century. After all the whole thing could have been handled very differently. What would have happened if the Jews asked the Palestinians for permission to settle in Palestine together with them? My mother is a daughter of holocaust survivors. Her trauma is the same as the trauma of the state of Israel. Both my mother and the state of Israel became perpetrators as a result of their trauma.
I believe that just like my mother, Jewish Israelis will never be happy (even if there were no Palestinians left — God forbid) and that is because they have done nothing to heal their own trauma and are spending their entire life going around in circles and acting it out on others.
An important difference between me and the Palestinians is that I could get away from my mother while they cannot get away from Israel.
My desire to expose the truth about my own history runs in parallel with my desire to help expose the truth about the history of Israel and the Palestinians. Abusers hide the truth not only from others but also from themselves. They do so by telling themselves that they are the real victims. They wholeheartedly believe that because of their suffering they are justified in everything they inflict on their victims. They are often successful in eliciting sympathy from others and it is usually the victim that is left isolated. As a result, perpetrators often succeed in causing their victims to feel confused and to wonder whether their reality is indeed true. As a therapist, a former victim and as a human being I say, no more!
Page content last modified: 10 June 2006
