Toxic Childhood? 4 Exercises to Promote Healing

a post by Peg Streep for Knotted: The Mother-Daughter Relationship blog [via World of Psychology]

I always thought that how I acted was just a function of my personality—that I was born defensive, quick to anger, prickly. I didn’t occur to me until recently that it had to do with my mother’s treatment. Imagine that? A revelation at 39.

I always knew my mother didn’t love me; I was really little when I understood that what she said and did wasn’t loving and that the way she treated my younger brother was really different. She lit up when she saw him, you know? But I also thought that the problem was me. That the ways in which I was different from my brother were bad and that she was probably right not to love me. I mean, why would she? I was 38 when I heard myself actually say that to my husband and the look on his face was like a bright light going off in the darkness. And then he said,’ Wait. You believed she was right not to love you?’ Bells went off in my head.

All children normalize their experiences in their families of origin, believing that what goes on at their house goes on everywhere until they grow up and perhaps begin to see that there are, in truth, meaningful differences. Note the word perhaps in that sentence because, as the opening quotations make clear, this isn’t precisely a foregone conclusion. Even when a daughter recognizes that she’s been wounded by her mother’s treatment, she’s unlikely to see how she’s affected without therapy or a great deal of guided self-reflection.

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