In this post, I am going to look at a major trauma that affects children all over the world, the damaging and diverse consequences of which are evident in millions of adults who suffered it themselves as children: neglect. It is the most common and pervasive form of child abuse, and its long-term effects are no less severe than those of physical and sexual abuse.
Prolonged neglect from a primary caregiver leads to the fracturing and eventual dissolution of a child's sense of self-worth and of being acknowledged, accepted, valued, respected and cared for. In short, it is a pernicious and ruinous process of invalidation that, in the most severe cases, can lead to permanent brain atrophy and damage (see images above and below). I looked at emotional abuse in a previous post, and this is always underpinned by neglect. Worldwide, it is estimated that 40 million children under the age of 15 are abused every year - and every single one of those abused children will experience some sort of neglect as an integral part of that abuse. (Source: http://www.internationalcap.org/abuse_statistics.html)
Neglect is a “failure to provide the necessary care, aid or guidance to dependent adults or children by those responsible for their care.” It can be either active (intentional, borne of cruelty or sickness) or passive (due to the ignorance, inattentiveness, drug addiction, limited competence or other unsuitability of the caregiver).
There are many different types of neglect:
1. a failure to provide adequate food, drink, clothing, warmth/shelter, safety, health/medical needs or hygiene
2. ignoring a child (being emotionally absent, dismissive and disinterested)
3. allowing physical or sexual abuse of a child
4. lack of appropriate supervision, i.e. leaving a vulnerable child unattended (although this is a somewhat grey area, depending on age/maturity of the child, the length of time they are left, and the situation/context)
5. exposing a child to danger, unnecessary risk or inappropriate material (e.g. drugs, reckless driving, cigarettes, pornography)
6. withholding of affection and comfort
7. unattentive to a child's education and play/stimulation/learning needs (sensory deprivation)
8. abandonment
9. encouraging criminality
10. a failure to protect a child from witnessing fights, arguments and violence (e.g. marital conflict)
11. showing flagrant preferential treatment to a sibling (or other child)
"...the most seriously damaged children... are not just those who are physically abused or neglected. Rather, they include the children who have been psychologically neglected, the victims of mothers who are emotionally unresponsive to their children's needs. Such mothers tend to ignore their children when the youngsters are uncomfortable, hurt or unhappy and fail to share in the children's pleasures. The children, in turn, quickly learn not to look to their mothers for comfort and support." (New York Times, 20th December 1983)
As I outlined in my post "Insanity: the best possible option", my own mother relinquished all responsibility for her firstborn daughter (my half-sister), for reasons I neither fully know nor understand. I am going to assume that she had good reasons for doing so, and that the decision was emotionally devastating for her. (The issue of how devastating it must have been for her child is also explored in my 'Insanity' post.) My mother was fortunate enough to have good, caring parents who raised her daughter in her absence. But even looking at the situation dispassionately, what she did constituted appalling neglect, or at least dereliction of duty. Out of the list 1-10 above, I'd say as a minimum, she was guilty of 2, 6 and 8.
When it comes to me and my younger sister, I'm more confident in the accusations I can level against my mother. She wasn't entirely neglectful (only the very worst and most sick and disordered parents are): she fed us and clothed us - cheap but nutritious food, and cheap, second-hand clothes, but that was all we could afford. After the divorce, I know for a fact that she did work very hard to keep a roof over our heads.
But there are little things, which individually sound petty but add up to a whole lot of parental negligence. For example: other than attacking my head a few times with a nit-comb when I was a toddler (I got nits several times at playgroup/kindy), she never, ever combed, brushed or styled my hair with the colourful clips, bobbles and ribbons that adorned the heads of my friends. She encouraged me to wear it short (in fact she insisted on it until I was old enough to defy her), but even so, I had lovely golden hair. One of my memories of the mid-1980s, possibly just before or just after the divorce, was when a friend of my mother visited us at our house. She took one look at my unruly, disheveled mane and exclaimed: "Look at your hair! Heavens, does your mother never brush it?" She was joking, of course - what kind of mother never bothers to brush her daughter's hair?! (Answer: mine.) She was one of my mother's many close friends and firmly of the opinion that my mother was a GOOD PERSON and a GOOD MOTHER. So I obediently stayed silent.
She asked me to fetch her a hairbrush, which I did, and she sat me on her lap and devoted the next ten minutes to brushing out every last kink, knot and tangle - of which there were many. It hurt a little, but I kind of enjoyed it. When she had finished, she gave the brush back to me and I just remember staring at my hundreds of discarded hair strands woven through the bristles. Then I went upstairs and looked at myself in the mirror, running my fingers through my hair and feeling amazed at how soft and smooth it looked and felt. I can't remember if my mother witnessed this simple act of kindness between her friend and her daughter, but if she did, it had no effect on her. She didn't want me to 'blossom', she didn't want me to feel good about myself, and she took no interest in helping me look or feel beautiful. Not when I was a child, and certainly not when I was a teenager.
At the age of 12, I was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. Looking at photos of myself from this time (late 1988/early 1989), I cannot believe how ill I looked - almost cadaverous. But it wasn't my mother who suggested I see a doctor after months of looking like this; it was my best friend, who noticed how much water I had been drinking, and how much weight I had lost (not to mention my sickly pallor, and the dark circles under my eyes). Surely my mother noticed all these changes too? If she had done, she said nothing. When I was in hospital trying to learn how to give myself blood glucose tests and inject myself with insulin, I got my first period. I remember excitedly telling my mother about it. Her reaction was lukewarm, but then I suppose I wasn't exactly expecting her to be jubilant. A year or so previously, I had asked her if we could go shopping together as I had convinced myself that I definitely needed a training bra for my tiny budding boobs - and she made my dad go with me. (The poor man! He was mortified, trudging around department stores with his 11-year-old daughter asking the bemused assistants "Where is your lingerie department please? My daughter here needs a bra. Yes. That's right. 30AA.")
Mostly, my mother ignored me, so she is most definitely guilty of number 2. As a human being with emotions and needs, I simply didn't exist to her. I bored and irritated her. Most of the time, I wasn't on her radar at all, and when she did acknowledge me, it was typically with annoyance, hostility or indifference. So even when she didn't make me feel invisible, she made me wish I could disappear. Every now and then, I did receive something that felt like affection - a foot massage, a shoulder rub (she qualified as a massage therapist in the early 1990s), a half-hearted, ambivalent word of praise or encouragement, or sometimes we'd snuggle up (never quite 'cuddling') on the sofa watching television. These little things, precious flashes of familial normalcy which would be completely inconsequential to the daughter of a normal loving mother, kept my hope alive that my mother did love me. Inevitably perhaps, these moments became rarer as I got older, and even the distant memories of those 'warmer' interactions between my mother and me only seem to worsen the pain and confusion.
Would it have been better if my mother was horrible to me ALL THE TIME? I think it might have been, in a way, because at least then there would be no room for doubt. Sometimes, the doubt was the worst part of it all. Because the doubt gave me hope, and having hope about something that is manifestly hopeless is a sure way to mess up your head.
Did she allow me to be physically or sexually assaulted? Strictly speaking, no - she was the only adult who ever beat me (I think my dad might have smacked me once or twice, but nothing outrageously violent, it wasn't in his nature). If someone had interfered with me or sexually assaulted me, I have no doubt she would have been furious. But that fury would not have come from a sense of wanting to protect me and avenge the pervert but from her proprietorial sense of ownership over me. I AM THE ONLY ONE WHO IS ALLOWED TO TREAT THIS CHILD LIKE SHIT, AND I EARNED THAT RIGHT BY GIVING BIRTH TO HER.
Before I was a teenager, my sister and I were always supervised by a 'responsible adult' at home, although I use the word 'responsible' in a fairly loose sense. So as far as I can remember, she is not guilty of number 4. She is not guilty of number 5 either, although she never, ever talked to me about sex and was appalled at the mere thought of me being sexually active - thus she tried, with vainglorious, head-in-the-sand intransigence, to ignore the fact I was turning into a desirous and desirable woman during the first half of the 1990s. Other than calling me a 'slut' a couple of times, she didn't acknowledge my sexuality at all. I stopped confiding in her completely, about anything, after 1995. And that was the year I left home to go to university (she didn't accompany me on my first day; she made it very clear that she was relieved to see the back of me).
She is DEFINITELY guilty of number 6, so much so that even on the rare occasions she has 'hugged' me as an adult, the stiff, perfunctory gesture has sent shudders of horror and revulsion down my spine. How can you accept a hug from someone who beat you up and made your life hell for years and now denies it ever happened? How can you be amenable to any kind of affection, when you know it's just a lie, a front, and that you're simply expected to play along with the pretence?
Number 7 is a tricky one - I do think she was a reasonably good mother while I was very little and most in need of interaction, stimulation and feedback from her, although obviously my memories don't start until around the age of three or four. When I was at primary school, she allowed me to have parties and sleepovers with friends, which I know is an important social privilege denied to many children of narcissistic mothers. I do have a few good memories of this era in fact, although sadly nothing I can specifically remember about my mother... I just know she was there, and that I was often happy and content. Maybe because my dad was also there. That's the thing about childhood memories - they're rarely about specifics. It's usually just a general 'feeling' associated with the nostalgia: happiness, excitement, fear, confusion, guilt, sadness, dread... My later childhood was a mixture of all seven with ever decreasing proportions of the first two as I got older, coupled with ever increasing proportions of the rest.
After the age of 9, she took little to no interest in my education. I passed the entrance exam for grammar school when I was 12, and she seemed quietly pleased, in the tight-lipped, stoical way she had of making sure I would never believe she might actually be proud of me. She never helped me with my homework, but I never presumed to ask her for help. I was fairly bright and I worked hard at school. This diligence and conscientiousness paid off when I got straight-As in my A-levels at 18, which meant I got into a decent university. The decision about which university to choose was another crucial life decision that my mother took absolutely NO interest in (but neither did my dad, to be fair), so I made it entirely on my own, with only a stack of prospectuses and a UK map for guidance. My mother was on holiday when I got my A-level results. She was on holiday when I gave birth to my first child. She went on holiday a lot. Still does, as far as I know. Her leisure and enjoyment has always been tip-top priority - because of course she's earned it after all those arduous, punishing years raising two daughters she didn't even want.
She didn't literally abandon me, like she did my half-sister. However, emotionally, she was perpetually absent - she would have abandoned me, if she thought she could have done so without being judged badly for it. I don't know why she failed to bond with me (I will probably never know for sure), but I went through most of my life assuming that the lack of connection was my fault. I was defective. I was to blame. I was so difficult to love! Except I'm not. I'm as far from being perfect as all ordinary people are, but I am basically quite lovable. It took me the best part of 40 years to realise it, but I have all the good qualities that my mother lacks and expends all her energy faking - I have compassion and insight and emotional intelligence, and I am inherently kind, accepting, empathic and genuine. What my mother actually hated was the lack of all those things within herself, and the constant struggle of having to pretend that she didn't lack them. In effect, she 'stole' all my good qualities and projected (or tried to) all her bad qualities onto me. It wasn't a very fair trade.
It is believed there is a link between parental neglect and criminality in later life (starting with juvenile delinquency and often progressing to serious and violent crimes), but because I lived in fear of my mother exacting her draconian punishments on me for the slightest perceived transgression, I was too terrified to do anything that might risk her wrath - even if I was ever tempted to do something illegal, which I wasn't. (Even so, she raged at me regularly, regardless of my behaviour.) Breaking the law (even the most minor of felonies, such as shoplifting a packet of crisps) was therefore out of the question. I wasn't scared of getting caught by CCTV or the police, I was scared of my mother's explosive reaction. I hankered after her approval. I yearned for it.
It never came.
I did dabble in a little bit of underage drinking, but that's a rite of passage, and it would be a long time before I actually derived any real pleasure from drinking booze and, later on in my mid-twenties, indulging without regret or compunction in a number of other hedonistic pursuits as a form of blissful (yet necessarily short-term) escapism. (Unfortunately, alcohol became a crutch for my sister, who has always had rather too much in common with our dad.)
Number 10: a resounding YES. The insidiously intensifying and often palpable tension between my parents from 1985 onwards was laid bare for my sister and I to witness, horrified, in all its hideous acrimonious glory. From frosty stand-offs, slanging matches and fever pitch arguments to the occasional physical fight (particularly when my older half-sister was staying with us). After my dad moved out, my mother was unable to say a single kind word about him. He was, depending on her mood (which was always a variation of 'very fucking bitter'): hopeless, useless, a liar, a traitor, a crap husband and a crap father; he was sick, alcoholic, suicidal, pathetic, a mess, a mummy's boy, an embarrassment. Meanwhile, we, her daughters, became the biggest regret of her life.
And, finally, number 11: narcissistic mothers divide and conquer. It is one of their most outrageous toxic strategies, and they tend to do this primarily through triangulation, a manipulative means of communication and interaction that involves pitting one (or more) person against another and stoking up unnecessary tension and conflict, while somehow retaining the illusion of being the "peacekeeper". The narcissist is, in fact, a venomous, nefarious spider weaving an intricate web of lies around her flies, some of which she'll retain to groom or ignore, some of which she'll eat. My mother is the reason I am estranged from my sister, who I adore and with whom I once shared a precious bond. I will NEVER fucking forgive her for that.
My mother also took great delight in COMPARING me (invariably unfavourably) to others, usually her friends' children. For example, while I studied hard to achieve a very respectable 2:1 honours degree from a top British university, my mother never wasted an opportunity to remind me that her best friend's eldest daughter, who is the same age as me, has a first class degree from Oxford University, and that she is so preternaturally intelligent she could probably have passed the exams in her sleep. Not ONCE has she told me she is proud of me, and instead prefers to speak in glowing terms about other people's offspring. It has ALWAYS been thus. She has never actually come out and told me directly "You are crap, you are inadequate and I am ashamed of you", but her colossal disappointment in me is heavily signposted in everything she does and everything she says.
The destructive cause and effect of the dynamic between my mother and every significant person she has had in her life is so blindingly obvious I struggle to understand how so few can see it, or why they refuse to see it.
In the course of my research for this blog post, I have read many harrowing accounts of the most vile child neglect and abuse, some so bad that I have had to take a few moments to have an impotent, anguished weep over the intolerable cruelty and injustice of the world. The 'headline' child abuse and neglect cases are probably horribly familiar to you - Jeffrey Baldwin, Baby P, Victoria Climbie, Daniel Pelka - these are just a small selection of the cases that made news in the past 20 years, and only because they ultimately resulted in the death of the child. For every (extreme) case we hear about, there are millions of others that we will never know about. Child abuse in all its forms and severities is going on all over the world, every minute of every hour of every day, and it is a 'silent epidemic' of unimaginable depravity and evil that is poisoning the lifeblood of the human race.
Resources:
https://chronicleofsocialchange.org/los-angeles/child-trauma-as-a-silent-epidemic/16869
http://www.nytimes.com/1983/12/20/science/emotional-deprivation-seen-as-devastating-form-of-child-abuse.html
http://www.internationalcap.org/abuse_statistics.html
What's the difference between these two brains? (The Telegraph, 28th October 2012)
The National Bureau of Economic Research: Does Child Abuse Cause Criminality? http://www.nber.org/digest/jan07/w12171.html
https://relationshipedia.me/2015/05/13/the-4-most-common-narc-sadistic-triangulation-tactics/ Triangulation can be defined as an indirect form of communication where one person (usually the narcissist) acts as a messenger between two other people. Or it can be a direct form of communication where one person attempts to draw in an accomplice to gang up against a third party to further their agenda. In both cases, the messenger (usually the narcissist, but not always) will fabricate or alter a message, usually incorporating a grain of truth, to advance his/her objective.
Recommended reading:
Gerhardt, Sue, Why Love Matters: How Affection Shapes a Baby's Brain
Cori, Jasmin Lee, The Emotionally Absent Mother
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