NERVOUS BREAKDOWN?

As a teenager, I didn’t know how to explain my mom’s “transformation” after the move, even to myself, so I called it a “nervous breakdown.” But that sounds like something you recover from, doesn’t it? My mother was never again the person she’d seemed to me to be when I was a child. Her resentments, it became apparent, were bitter, long–standing, and entrenched.

More than once I suggested that we should get family counseling, but she insisted we didn’t have the money. The more formidable obstacle, I suspect, was her unwillingness to ever put herself in the position of being vulnerable, even for the sake of Doug and me. Being a therapist provided her with a sense of authority, even of superiority, because in this role she was the one with the power—it was one of the reasons she’d chosen this career in the first place. She was never going to agree to reverse roles because the last thing she wanted to know was that she wasn’t the mature, evolved woman she’d always believed herself to be. And the last thing she wanted to do was to delve into the dark places in her psyche, like her guilt over my brother’s burn.

My brother, who doesn’t know psychological terminology, thinks of our mom as having a “split personality.” (Now the term used is “multiple personality,” but that wasn’t the case with my mom.) Still, I suppose, it’s as good a description of her as any—because she had split off all her unwanted feelings. She’d felt loved by both her grandmothers and her aunts and uncles and imagined herself to be the person she was with them. What she refused to address was the fact that she’d also been a child who felt unloved and exploited by her own parents; in fact, I suspect she had such overwhelmingly painful feelings about this that she relegated them to a dark corner of her mind—and rather than allow herself to ever feel them, she took them to her grave.

The French philosopher Simone Weil said, “A hurtful act is a transference to others of the degradation we bear in ourselves.”

I would add: What we don’t allow ourselves to feel we will cause others to feel in our stead—because the defenses we use to ward off what is painful actually engender pain in others.

Unfortunately for Doug and me, my mother’s abuse was and would remain completely hidden. To my relatives, I would learn late in life, my mother used to brag about us as though “the sun rose and set on us,” and since they were of a generation that believed a child should never talk back to a parent, they saw Doug and me as spoiled and disrespectful—kids who made our mother’s life difficult.