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Emotionally Abusive Parents, part 2

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I have spent some more time with my friend who I wrote about in the first page on emotionally abusive parents. As I suspected, she denies that they emotionally abused her.

Here are some more things I found out.

When she was 14 her mother slapped her in the face because she was spending time with a boy her mother disapproved of. The mother locked her in the house for a few hours, then for a month or so took her to school and picked her up so she would not have time to see him.

I told her about Carolina whose parents did something similar in Argentina, but to a more extreme degree. My friend denied that it was the same kind of situation.

My friend insists that her parents trust her. She insists that she makes her own decisions. Yet when my friend was here with me she lied to her mother and said she was somewhere else because she was afraid to tell her mother the truth. And hour or so later the mother called her and wanted to know where she was and what was really going on. The mother then said "We will talk about this in person and not over the telephone." The mother is very smart and realizes that she has more psychological power when she is face to face.

Sometimes I have difficulty speaking. People sometimes will try to order me to talk to them or look at them. This is what my friend did to me yesterday when I started feeling the pain of the thought of losing her. She said "Look at me" and tried to turn my head. I wished that she had read my list of things not to do if someone wants me to talk to them, but so far she hasn't. This is one of the items on the list. I feel too opposed to obeying someone who is giving me orders to do what they tell me to do, sometimes even if is in my own best interest, so needless to say I didn't obey her when she said "look at me." The first time I remember someone ordering someone else to look at them was when I was in a school director's office. She was ordering a young girl, probably around 11 to look at her. People like this have learned that they have more psychological power when the person is looking at their face. They know it makes more of an imprint. They can also see the other person's reaction so they feel more in control. They have more chance of knowing if their words are having the desired effect.

If on the other hand a mother is just lecturing her daughter over the telephone the daughter could be watching TV or making faces to her friend to say "my mother is crazy" and laughing. My friend though, doesn't realize what is happening. She gets caught up in the arguments instead of being able to step back and just listen to see how her mother manipulates her. My friend is very sensitive, and very defensive. She argues and fights back. She doesn't walk away like I do. She doesn't write about things later when she has time to reflect and to analyze what happened. And she has never had any education in this kind of thing or in emotional abuse, more specifically. Emotional abuse is not a common topic here in Bulgaria. Nor would it be in South American countries, where I spent four years. It was easy to see the abuse in South America. Here it is covered up a little better. Here it is more emotionally and psychological than physical.

Anyhow, here are some things that emotionally abusive parents do to their children.

Instead of expressing their feelings they make general statements or declarations like:

There is no future in it.
It can't ever work.
You are wasting your time.
Your father will never accept it.
It's not normal.

Emotionally abused people say things like:

I don't want to hurt my mother again.
I don't want to cause problems in the family.
I don't care about my own feelings.
My parents don't control me.
I make my own decisions.

Emotionally abused people learn it is dangerous to tell the truth. So they start to lie to their parents.

Some emotionally abused people find it very hard to apologize. Others are always apologizing. My friend fits into the first category. When she starts to feel bad about something she did she will begin to defend herself. I think I used to be the same way. It was hard for me to feel empathy for someone I was hurting, or had hurt. I was too sensitive and I felt too responsible. I suppose it was also that it was too important for me to think that I was a good person. Or maybe I realized that I really didn't know what to do when someone was in pain, so I just tried to talk them out of it or deny it. Or maybe my self-esteem was too low to handle admitting that I had hurt someone. Maybe I would have felt too bad about myself. Now I feel better about myself and I can forgive myself and understand myself pretty well, or so I like to think at least. Probably in the past if I would have thought that I had done something to hurt someone I cared about or needed I might have felt too unworthy of them. Feeling unworthy and undeserving was a big problem for me. I once told a girl, when I was around 18, to go find someone else because she deserved better than me. I think my friend is in a similar situation. She is starting to feel unworthy of me. Yesterday we talked about this a little. I told her I thought I deserved more than to be kept a secret. She has been deceiving her parents about how much time we spend together and how close we are because she is afraid to tell them the truth. At one point yesterday she said agree and said she didn't deserve me.

I am afraid that she will lose me and I will lose her because she is so afraid of her parents rejection, and she is even afraid to admit she is afraid of it. She keeps denying that she is afraid of them, but it is very obvious. When they are out of town she will stay with me for the night, but when they are in town, she won't. She also told me that if she were still living on her own in another city she would stay overnight with me. So the obvious reason she doesn't want to do it here now that she is living with her parents again is because she is afraid of their disapproval, afraid of their rejection and afraid of the conflicts.

Something else I have noticed is that my friend's parents have tried to make her feel guilty so often that now my friend tries to defend herself against feeling guilty by saying something like "Don't make me feel guilty" as soon as she she is starting to feel bad about something she is doing.

Something else her mother does is to call her "little girl" when she wants to trigger the childhood fears of disapproval. Last night when her mother suspected my friend was with me she called her and said "Where are you?" "Little girl, what is going on?"

Emotionally abused people learn to invalidate others. See the page called "The invalidating university student", which is about this same friend. Yesterday her mother told my friend that it wasn't a good idea for her to keep seeing me. I later said that it would be impossible for me to go visit her mother at the store where she works now and be friendly with her since she had become something like my enemy. Instead of showing understanding my friend quickly said, "She isn't your enemy"

I have noticed several times that talking to my friend is not really like having a conversation. It is me saying something, and then her denying it or getting defensive. Or sometimes she ignores it or interrupts me. She often stops listening and distracts herself with something else. Yesterday when I was feeling discouraged and invalidated she called her mother on the phone. She was smiling about something and it reminded me of other times I was suffering and people around me were laughing. It hurt so much that I got up and walked away. I walked for several blocks. I could feel my heart pounding. Later I tried to explain what had happened and she said "I wasn't laughing."

Once I pointed out to my friend that she was defending herself. She quickly said "I am not defending myself. I am explaining myself." Another time I told her to stop interrupting me and she said "I am not interrupting you, I am explaining myself."

It has been a long time since I cared about someone as much as I care about this person. It has been a long time since someone else has helped me as much, trusted me as much, believed in me as much and cared about me as much. So I feel extremely sad when I think about how she has learned to express and manage her emotions.

To summarize, here are some of her main "tools".

- Invalidating

- Giving orders.

- Making threats

- Defending herself.

- Denial.

- Saying things "aren't fair" and aren't normal. In other words, attacking or judging the other person. She also will say things like "you can't just..."

Her father said "How could you do this to your mother" or her mother said "How could you do this to your father"

Or emotionally abusive parents will say things like "you are going to be the death of your mother".

The problem with denying abuse is something like this...

If you are being abused, yet you don't realize it, and someone says "How could you hurt your abuser like this?", then you might feel guilty. But if you realize that the person is abusing you, then you won't feel as guilty for leaving them or reporting them to the police or to social services or whatever.

Take a case of someone who has robbed you of your freedom. If a stranger locked you up in a room for two days, most people would call that kidnapping. But if your parents do it to you and you don't view it as anything wrong or abnormal, or if you believe you deserved it for disobeying them or whatever, as my friend Carolyn started to believe after she was locked in her house, then you probably will not try to stop your parents from robbing you of your freedom in the future. And you may not feel a sense of injustice when

Threats

Here are things my friend has said to me

You are going to lose me.
Don't do that to me again.
You won't get a second chance. (I won't give you a second chance.) Same as Sofia said.

Giving orders

When she got in the taxi she said "call me."

When she was leaving she said "don't make me feel guilty"

Yesterday I asked her if she had heard the expression "to push someone's buttons". She said yes so I told her that someone had said "Do you know why your parents know how to push your buttons?" The answer is "Because they have installed all the wiring."

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I feel sorry for my friend, really, because she is at such a disadvantage. She doesn't even know what is happening to her. She loves spending time with me and says that she doesn't want me to leave Bulgaria, but I am turning her world upside down with all the new information I am giving her and the new ways of expressing my feelings and talking about her feelings. I suppose I should back off for a while and give her time to catch her breath. I am a little afraid that if I don't keep spending time with her, her mother and father, or friends will pull her back into their "cult" or subculture.

She seems to realize her life was unsatisfying before she met me. She said once that she realized she was studying as away of avoiding her pain. She also distracts herself with chatting, taking pictures, looking at pictures, sending pictures, eating cookies, going to the mall, having a Coke, and talking to her mother on the phone. She has never gone camping. She never took a walk down by the river as we did yesterday. She has been afraid to try new things. She has never left the country. Was afraid to even go out of town with some friends I met here.

When I tell her I am afraid of losing her she will usually say "You won't lose me." or "I won't leave you," but she has walked away from me several times and she has left me emotionally many times. For example, once I was talking to her about something and she turned away and looked at the computer to do some research for one of her university classes. Another time she turned away to keep chatting with an online friend of hers. Yesterday when I was feeling discouraged and talking about giving up, then feeling invalidated after she told me not to worry, she called her mother on the phone and started talking about something else and smiling. It hurt me so much to feel so invisible and unimportant that I just got up and walked away. Now I remember that I used to feel invisible when I was with my mother and she was shopping. I had to just follow her around but when she started talking to someone I am sure if someone would have asked me how I felt, and I had known the words for my feelings, I would have said "unimportant" or "invisible."

My friend has the potential to be emotionally nurturing, or emotionally abusive.

My friend also said yesterday that she can't believe she is special to me. She said she is not pretty, not smart, just average etc. I suppose she has never felt special to anyone, so she can't believe it is possible. She doesn't value herself enough for the right reasons so she can't see why I would value her. I don't value her for her physical beauty or for her grades or the fact she got accepted into the English "Philology" department at this small minded university. I value her because she cares about me, she understands me, she believes in me, she helps me, she loves children and animals, she is spontaneous, she is open, she is fun to be around, she is good hugger, she values me.

S. Hein
Feb 9, 2008
Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria