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Originally Posted by RedEagle
Doesn't sound particularly abusive to me. A lot of parents hit their kids. I got hit, so did my sisters. Did she say mean things a couple of times and that's it? Maybe she was just a mean old woman, some people can be like that.
Abusers do very specific things in how they treat you. An abuser's goal is to systematically break you down, weaken you, make you more dependent on them and turn you into a more pliable victim because they are attempting to gain something from you that they lack within themselves. It's a very complex, effective and insidious process.
A normal, healthy parent would behave in a way that assisted your maturation and development. An abusive parent, who isn't really a parent at all, would do the opposite. An abusive parent encourages over-dependence and intentionally stifles maturation because they are only interested in exploiting you for their own selfish purposes. The more mature and strong you become the harder it is to easily victimize you. Once you are broken and depleted, when you're at your most vulnerable state, then you will be discarded and all of the blame will go along with you. It's the same concept as wringing out a rag and then throwing it in the garbage. This type of situation is not simply "a part of life". It's an abhorrent tragedy which befalls many innocent children who probably end up very bewildered about the whole thing. It's not as if once the process is over someone shows up to finally tell you what's been happening. You may find out just by happenstance one day many years later like I did long after it's too late to do anything about it.
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I feel that hitting a child is abusive from my experience with my grandmother. My dad? Yes, you can say he was abusive or not, as he hit me but he never did it in anger, or with whatever he had in his hands like a switch or a shoe and never caring where he hit, but more to keep consistency. He did it in a controlled manner, to make me feel hurt with my feelings, but not to leave bruises or just do it nilly-willy in any part of my body. I had two methods of corporeal punishment, and I don't believe that my grandmother was right in hitting us the way she did in retrospective and in the way she treated us.
No, she never just said things like that a couple of times and that was that. It was constant. In the 7 years I spent with her those are the phrases I remember most out of all she ever said to me and my siblings. I don't think a child who has a well adjusted or healthy parent remembers the negatives about their experience with them. I remember far more loving memories of my father even though he was strict and was present one or two months of the year during those years at home than I do of my grandmother.
Yes, a normal healthy parent will assist you in your development, I understand that from whatever little studies I have done and speaking with other parents. However, abuse doesn't just manifest itself into dependency. I learned through revisiting those years that it can also manifest itself into neglect or even rejection of a child. Like I said, looking back at it I realized nothing of what I had experienced back then was right because that's not what love is, that's not how you demonstrate to someone you love them. It sounds to me like signs of abuse or abusive behavior from my grandmother. Even if she didn't try to break me down systematically she engaged, for reasons I cannot yet understand, in abusive behaviors which ended up hurting me and my siblings. The fact she was a mean old woman doesn't mean that gives her any justification -- let alone rights -- to have told children that their mother was worthless in front of them who just got abandoned by their mother or any of the other things she said. To me, that's abusive, now that I look back at it. Regardless of whether she was a mean old woman or not.
Being a victim of abuse, I've learned, doesn't just involve they making you dependent upon them. It can take many forms, and many parents who abuse their children mean no harm in their actions. Yet they are abusive. The fact that they are not trying to make you dependent upon them and feel the abusive behaviors are done in your own self-interest doesn't precisely mean they are not abusive.
I just feel that way because I grew up being put into my head that I was privileged I even had a family and that my grandmother was just not right in her head and that I should forgive her and that life is life. However, I don't think that somehow that sounds right; and honestly is something I've been trying to change my perspective about to begin to understand what went wrong.
The fact is that abuse is not something we can point out and say "well
THIS isn't abuse and
THIS, this right here, is abusive behavior" as it can take many shapes and forms. Mine perhaps just took a more ambiguous shape than the norm.
I also don't feel I became particularly strong from the experience. If anything I feel I became more detached and more self-absorbed to prevent getting hurt from her words. I keep people at arm's length to not get hurt. That's not "healthy" development when you feel so insecure about others it cripples how open you can be to them or how much you can trust them. Being mature and strong implies to me different things than keeping people at arms' length and feel like you can't trust anyone, which is the behavior I most often take with new individuals and I more often than not test them to see if they won't hurt me.