Abuse amnesia

“In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. Secrecy and silence are the perpetrator’s first line of defense. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure that no one listens. To this end, he marshals an impressive array of arguments, from the most blatant denial to the most sophisticated and elegant rationalization. After every atrocity one can expect to hear the same predictable apologies: it never happened; the victim lies; the victim exaggerates; the victim brought it upon herself; and in any case it is time to forget the past and move on. The more powerful the perpetrator, the greater is his prerogative to name and define reality, and the more completely his arguments prevail.” 
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

“Some of your childhood traumas may be remembered with incredible clarity, while others are so frightening or incomprehensible that your conscious mind buries the memory in your unconscious.” 
― Renee Fredrickson, Repressed Memories: A Journey to Recovery from Sexual Abuse



After three years of almost total radio silence and inferred antipathy, I am finally - with cautious optimism - back in touch with my sister. I have hope that she and I can rebuild our relationship, in spite of the thousands of miles between us, not to mention the decades of unspoken pain, grief, misunderstanding and anguish that exists festering in our shared histories.

The other day she told me that our mother had recently stayed at her house and demanded to know - in her usual waspish, hectoring manner - what the hell was going on, and why on earth her clearly deranged and bitter daughter (i.e. me) no longer wanted to have anything to do with her. Yes, this is despite the fact I went to great pains to spell out my reasons as clearly and reasonably as I could in my No Contact email of May 2015. Unless you communicate something my mother wants to hear, she simply will not listen. She never has, and she never will.

Like me, my sister hates confrontation, but this time the dear brave soul did manage to state some home truths, although I doubt she was particularly assertive about it. (This is little wonder; I have lost count of the number of times I have tried to get through to my mother about her abhorrent behaviour only to be shouted down or called a liar. She is wilfully, obstinately obstructive to receiving honesty, because it so often conflicts with her own manufactured reality.) I don't know exactly the words she used of course, but my sister told my mother that my refusal to have her in my life any more is "not without foundation": for starters, she made our dad's life hell, and abused both my sister and me.

With wearying predictability, our mother denied everything. She reacted with outrage at the accusation she made our dad's life hell, and as for abusing my sister and me, she apparently said: "I don't remember that".

It is a fairly straightforward diversionary tactic: simply deny all knowledge. I don't remember it, therefore it didn't happen. In other words: your version of events doesn't correspond with mine. (My version of events will NEVER correspond with my mother's, and that is because she is mentally ill and emotionally disabled.)


I have no expectation - precisely none - that my mother will ever say: "Yeah, I was a total shit to your father, every day I undermined and insulted him and I am at least partly responsible for his inexorable descent into the abject misery of alcoholism... and if it wasn't for me, he would probably have lived a longer and much, much happier life." While that is unquestionably true, she will never admit it. It's a shame, because the confession will release her. It will set her free. My mother the soul murderer needs to confess to many hundreds of sins, but not one single solitary confession will be forthcoming. Ever. That refusal to accept culpability, that total abdication of responsibility, is imprisoning her.  It's horrifically sad but she is the only person in the world with the power to unlock that prison.

And apart from admitting, without even a tinge of shame, that she did regularly hit her daughters (bolstered by her usual piss-poor 'justifications': "my mother smacked me when I was naughty... it was just discipline... I was under so much pressure as a single mother", etc, etc), she "plays the innocent" with aplomb whenever she is accused of being an abuser - accused of anything, in fact, other than of being a loving, struggling mother who only ever did her best.  And besides, 'smacking' is completely and objectively different to what my sister and I experienced when on the receiving end of our mother's regular violent rages. She didn't 'smack' us, she beat us. HARD. The beatings were not attempts at discipline, unless 'discipline' means 'terrorising'. So no, I will not tolerate having the physical abuse we suffered dismissed as mere 'smacking'. Clearly if it had been just that, it would not be an issue now, more than 20 years later.

But it is true that both the abuser and the abused may "forget" some or even all of the abuses, or at least downplay or suppress them in their memories.  They do this for different reasons, of course: the abuser 'forgets' (or rather refuses to remember) because otherwise they will be forced to face their own unspeakable grotesqueness, while the victim forgets in order to protect themselves from the true harshness of reality. This amnesia - which can be selective, localised and generalised - relates to dissociation, summarised below, an important topic which I will cover in another blog post.

It is irrelevant whether or not I believe my mother has genuinely "forgotten" what she made her ex-husband and daughters suffer (I don't believe it; not for a second).  Again it would merely be a case of making a distinction between my mother being mentally ill or outright evil. It doesn't matter: she is toxic, and it is of no consequence whether that toxicity is due to mental illness or something even worse.

In any case, I'm not interested in her own 'amnesia', real or faked. She fakes most things, so I have no reason to assume her purported amnesia is anything other than another of her gargantuan lies.

But I want to look at my own 'amnesia', which I do find troubling when I consider the many 'missing jigsaw puzzle pieces' of my past. I KNOW, with crystal-clear certainty, that I was abused by that woman on a daily basis for many, many years. I know that some days were better than others. Some days, even most days,  I could (and did) kid myself that everything was normal, or at least not terrible. That's because, most of the time, the abuse was passive rather than active (i.e. ignoring or neglecting me rather than hitting or insulting me). But the problem I have now is that because I've been trained to doubt my own perceptions and memories through chronic gaslighting, if someone were to actually ask me "What exactly did your mother do that was so bad?", I'd be unable to give a coherent or convincing response. Perhaps a simple and honest response would be to tell that person that she never actually did anything good.

Narcissist parents are very careful about how, where and when they abuse. I am convinced my mother has always been not only fully aware of abusing me, but enjoys doing it, and often actually PLANNED her abuses. And she probably remembers more than I do - because my brain, by necessity, has blocked a lot of my childhood out. That's the nature of childhood trauma. There are dauntingly huge swathes of time during my late childhood and teens that are simply not there, and these missing memories have to be explained, even if I have no intention or desire to retrieve them.

I do have a few precious memories of my childhood from the age of three to eight, and most of them are happy - even idyllic. Because my dad was there. Today is Christmas Day and I remember fondly the Christmases we had as a family of four, before my parents divorced. I can't be sure whether or not it was all just an illusion. I guess it was. Still, I feel lucky that I did at least have that illusion for the formative years of my childhood.


Further reading:

http://outofthefog.website/what-not-to-do-1/2015/12/3/abuse-amnesia

http://flyingmonkeysdenied.com/glossary/abuse-amnesia/ "Pretending not to remember having abused someone like a family member, love interest, or child — knowing full well they abused and are actively lying in order to avoid taking personal responsibility for moral or legal crime while frustrating, insulting, and leading a smear campaign about the character of their accuser, is a typical move for a person who has an extreme personality disorder."

http://flyingmonkeysdenied.com/2016/01/02/what-is-abuse-amnesia/ "According to Out of the Fog, a domestic abuse recovery website, “Abuse Amnesia is a form of cognitive suppression where an abuse victim has trouble remembering episodes where their boundaries have been violated.” 

http://traumadissociation.com/dissociativeamnesia