Don’t Be Tempted to Make Excuses For Your Abusers
Other people’s trauma shouldn’t become yours
“You know, your mother’s childhood was pretty awful,” said a relative who would know.
It’s a comment I’ve heard more than once, and I usually interpret it as a defense of my mother from someone who has seen a side of her that I never got to know.
Just how awful was it? I wonder. My mother seldom talks about her childhood and my grandmother, who lived until I was 31, never did either. It’s hard to even imagine my mom before she met my dad at age 19, and I tended not to try when I was younger.
Considering our history, I’ve never been inclined to be too charitable toward my mother. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been stubbornly opposed to acknowledging anything that would give me even the slightest twinge of empathy toward her.
I preferred to be angry about all the ways my mother had failed me. Knowing anything outside that story would make it harder for me to summon up that anger, which I could need at any time to defend myself from attack.
Lately, though, I’ve softened. I’ve come to acknowledge that my mother, like anyone else, is multifaceted. Living away from home and seeing my parents very infrequently makes conflict less likely, and so when we do spend time together it’s easier for me to let down my walls and see those softer facets I resisted seeing in my younger years.
Knowing someone’s story can facilitate understanding
There are plenty of people who don’t know the woman I characterize in my writing. In fact, I’m probably the only one who does.
Mostly people see an irreverent hippie, unafraid to speak her mind, who sends cards for birthdays and a plant when your father dies and whose idea of the perfect gift is a pair of concert tickets. My friends from school days see the woman who took them in when they fought with their own parents, the one who would share a beer with them and buy weed from them and invite them over for a cookout.
None of these people, though, know who she was before any of us knew her. They don’t know her parents were unkind and impatient with her. They don’t know she became pregnant and had an abortion as a teen. They don’t know she was altogether feeble and sickly child and got very little attention and affection. They don’t know she was raised by a mother who suffered from untreated clinical depression for decades.
I have an incomplete picture of what my mother went through as a kid, but from what I do know, it doesn’t sound like she had it that great. Now that I’m removed enough from my childhood to process these aspects of her life, these experiences which may have influenced her behavior, I actually appreciate knowing these details and am curious to know more.
I don’t have to imagine what it must be like to have a parent with mental health issues, or to look to men for affection I’m not getting at home. In these details I find a certain level of kinship with my mother, an understanding I never would have achieved as an angsty kid, resentful of all I went through.
In fact, it makes complete sense that she parented me the way she did, if her early life was as difficult as I’ve come to believe it was. It’s also no surprise that I developed many of the same complexes and issues she’s dealt with over the years.
Reasons can turn into excuses
Knowing more about how her parents dealt with her, I understand better why my mother did what she did as a parent. I understand why she grew to become anxious and narcissistic. I get why she self-medicated and I can even kind of understand the circumstances that led her to be verbally abusive.
But, while I will allow those details in, I need to be careful.
Knowing she was, at the very least, emotionally neglected, makes me feel bad for her. Thinking about what it must have felt like to grow up in my grandparents’ house makes me feel guilty for judging her behavior later on. Of course she turned out the way she did. Can you blame her?
Was what I went through even that bad in comparison?
When I think about the affection I so longed for, and the verbal abuse, and how her drinking affected me, I think — well, of course. She didn’t have a model of loving, enriching parents. Of course when she became a mother she didn’t naturally think about how to be, well, maternal.
What right do I have, then, to feel any kind of way at all about my upbringing? It wasn’t really her fault, after all.
As you can see, the slope is slippery, and it can become far too easy to translate acceptance and understanding for my mother into minimization of what I went through.
But what’s true is that, because of what I went through, I went on to develop a host of issues that I wouldn’t have developed if I’d had a parent who was well-adjusted and knew how to deal with her own problems.
That she wasn’t, and that she didn’t, doesn’t make the hurt and the loneliness go away. It doesn’t change the anxiety, the attention seeking, the low self-worth and the eating disorder. It doesn’t fix all the unstable and abusive relationships.
It doesn’t change that I grew up to be a broken adult.
Excusing the inexcusable behavior of others makes it easier for you to excuse your own
I’m nothing like my mother.
That’s what I always used to tell myself.
Apparently, though, we do share some commonalities. We grew up, it seems, with similar unmet needs. As we got older, some very similar issues manifested for us.
So I understand her.
But I don’t excuse her behavior.
If I excuse the way I was treated, just because of the way she grew up, it would be easy for me to adopt the same behaviors when relating to my own daughters. I could be cold toward my children, putting my needs over theirs and discouraging them from showing any emotions I didn’t want to deal with.
If I compare my situation to hers and minimize my own trauma, it would be easy for me to raise kids who turn out just like both of us. I could turn a blind eye to the trauma and the troubles they face, because that’s what was done with me. Then, I could blame them if (when) they end up a wreck, or pretend everything’s always been fine when (if) they eventually find their way.
If I let what I know about my mother become an excuse for her behavior, it would be easy to excuse my own and raise young women exactly like me.
And that’s not an option.
Instead, I work incredibly hard not to fall in line, parenting my children the way I was parented, and the way they were parented before me. I treat my children with empathy, validate their emotions, and possibly overcorrect by making sure their needs (and many of their wants) are met.
Have empathy, but make no excuses
Abusive people often have traumatic pasts. It’s okay to acknowledge that. Build an understanding of the person that includes their softer, more vulnerable parts and not just the abrasive ones, if you so desire.
But never let that empathy come between you and your own experiences and feelings. Never use your abuser’s history to minimize yours, and never let someone else’s bad behavior excuse your own.
Just because that person hasn’t processed their traumatic past and learned to work past it, is no excuse for you not to do so.
Your responsibility, as mine, is to give the world more than what you got. It’s to break the cycle of generational damage so our children don’t have to go through what we did.
You have to deal with your own trauma and take ownership for repairing your broken parts, so the cycle can end with you.
Invisible illnesses are so difficult to manage, in part because it’s hard for others to understand what they can’t see. It can be even more difficult to understand the debilitating effects of trauma on the developing brain, because “trauma” is not a diagnosis. Yet it still manifests itself for a lifetime, a double-invisible influence, informing the beliefs we hold about ourselves and the world and guiding our behavior, especially in times of struggle. For, me everything started with childhood trauma.
Join me here every second and fourth Monday, where I explore the invisible influence of past trauma on current beliefs and behavior. Find all my past columns and subscribe for updates here.