This might be triggering for some. It triggers ME.

I remember the HATRED I felt from my mother. She used to say she "despised" us when we "whined", and otherwise displayed fear. I really felt that she would like to see us, or at least me, dead. She backed up her words physically, so as to make it seem more likely to me that she would carry out her wishes. And it seemed to me that the rest of the world wanted me dead too. My brothers, living in much of the same environment, had themselves to protect. No one would intervene in any way. No one would speak of what was happening. No one would listen.

When you are a victim, as a child at least, you broadcast to others your victim status. And with the present state of society, and certainly as it was when I was a child, instead of a caring and healing response, a victim stands a good chance of being further victimized. Other people, both children and adults, perceive and fear you as a victim, because it arouses their own fears, and they would rather have you suffer more than that it should happen to them. There seems to be an instinct to avoid and isolate any person seen as damaged or sufficiently "different" than anyone else.

These instincts have their advantages from an evolutionary point of view. They tend to weed out weakness, there being a natural selection of the "strong" so that the surviving population has fewer "defects" than would otherwise be the case. And the process is "automatic" -- requiring no thought to accomplish. "Thinking" in order to meet dangers seems not as clearly a stable process as instinctual reactions. Herds provide safety of a kind, for the herd as a whole if not necessarily for individuals, and that is the function of evolution. In Greek history "thinking" versus "instincts" might be likened to the Athenian versus Spartan approaches to life. And Athens failed. (But so did Sparta.)

Today we have a choice between automatic, self-actualizing methods such as instinctual coping with problems, or trying to understand and heal them. I think maybe the single benefit (?) that "Western" culture has brought to humanity is "science," from the Latin "scientia" -- which means knowledge (according to Wikipedia). Knowing (or trying to know) of things as they are, not as we would wish them to be. Understanding of how things work, so we can more adequately cope with them. Is it better than instinct? It is certainly more scary.

So now I am remembering more the fears, the absolute panic that I had as a child, of feeling that my mother wanted us dead. Like the witch mother of Christine Ann Lawson's book Understanding The Borderline Mother. Although I recognize others of Lawson's mother types in my own mother, the one that stands out the most is the Witch. And of course now I know that the witch is within me too. I try to understand both. But it is very frightening. I wish there were an easier way to heal than this, but maybe lancing the pus reservoir is the only way to go.

How many of you "knew" that you were "despised" by one or more of your parents? How many felt that you were hated? How many received a warm and healing response from others in society? How many receive it now? How much understanding of the processes by which people get damaged, and how to heal as much of the damage as possible, do you find?