Mati

[Mati]

WARNING EXPLICIT MOLESTATION DESCRIPTIONS


I cannot remember most of my childhood. Or most of my life for that matter. There is no continuous script or memory of emotions apart form anger. It is only in the last 3 years that things are becoming clearer, but at the same time, the confusion is intense. It is in cycles, the extreme confusion when memories come back, then periods of clarity when I feel hopeful and energised.

Some of the problem I think,  is due to mercury poisoning, while I was a baby due to teething powders. I was in hospital for 6 weeks very ill and remember an out of body experience due I think to the distress of being abandoned by my mother and just left to cry in a cot besides an open window in December (mercury poisoning causes hot red extremities) . Those days, mothers did not stay in hospital with their children. And then she had to make a long journey to see me and i don't know how often she came. I was left with a damaged immune system, cognitive difficulties, frequent infections and chronic fatigue.

The rejection from my mother was early. This first child of hers was a major problem, crying so much and not thriving, which did not make her look a good mother and she was very interested in appearances and the attention from others. There is no memory of affection or touching, just coldness and criticism. Photos show me to be a sad lonely looking waif.

From six or so, an uncle took advantage of the situation to indulge in his  paedophilic predilections. He would get me to lie down with him when it was time for my grand-mothers afternoon nap and put his hands in my knickers. I still cannot remember much about this. I do remember one day sitting on his lap and feeling his penis touching my leg covered by my dress and concealed from the rest of the family present. If i stood up he would be found out but I thought that the family would split up, and it would be my fault, and my only real connection was with this grand-mother who gave me a little attention.  He was the only one to give me physical contact and I felt protective towards him. I never got to confront him. A marriage guidance counsellor told me not to report him as it would break up his marriage. I regret that now. He should have paid for what he did.

I was a child who had special needs due to the effect of the poisoning, but instead i received rejection and emotional abandonment and became the scapegoat for the family who found reasons to explain my depression and what i now know as autistic symptoms. Some doctors think that autism is caused through the mercury in childhood vacinations. I was unable to express myself or defend myself. They said that i was jealous of my sister, who had my fathers affection (my brother had my mothers). They said that I was a hypochondriac. To this day, they still explain me by these things. My mother has been hostile towards me for all of my life and could barely conceal the disdain in her voice. She is dead now, a year ago. I have not missed her at all. The extent of the abuse form her has made itself increasingly clear since her death.

My father? Uninvolved and working most of the time. When he was at home, my parents did not speak to each other, splitting when I was 17. He slapped me nearly unconscious once for coming in late and would pin me down and tickle my feet because I found it unbearable. That's about it.

I grew up feeling ugly but noticed at 13 looking in a mirror one day that i was not and then came the male interest which really traumatised me. I felt ugly and hated my body but at the same time knew that men found me attractive and hated that. What a conflict. I wished that i was dumb. It seemed that it was when I spoke that my mother become hostile so I must have reasoned that I would be loved if I could not speak, and maybe not get chased with the kitchen knife until i locked myself in the bathroom dreading her breaking the door down.

Due to this mess in my head, I married two men who had severe personality problems and addictions, the first with gambling and the second it was alcohol, debt, sex and later drugs. They were both so alike looking back, charming and feckless. It was their need of me that decided on the marriages.

There were four children, two to each men, but I have been unable to protect them and get them away from their fathers though I left the first one early his family took over the children and damaged them. I just did not see the abuse. It was just so normal. I struggled to manage with little money, chronic fatigue and total brain fog and confusion.

The second husband I now know to be either a psychopath or NPD  and he has sabotaged the relationship between myself and his two children. They are all drug addicts now.   

It seems that all of my life has been one trauma after another. Now, I have broken contact with my FOO and am trying to heal. totally alone and yet needing to be in some supportive community. Whenever I open up though I seem to experience more rejection. I go to a church but I only get rejection there. A brief hello is about it.

I had a counsellor for a while as part of her training experience but my experience with her has just reinforced all of the old issues as she has abandoned me when her own mother died and her own issues surfaced showing that she was not healed enough herself to be counselling someone with so much trauma.  She should have  referred me on to someone else I see that now.

This period has been a nightmare (literally, many nightmares) as i try to make sense of my life. I want to heal and have made a lot of progress. It has been hard to see all of the abuse and relive it. It feels like it will never end. And i need to have help but cannot find any and now don't feel like  I canl trust anyone again. If I was not a Christian the experience with the counsellor would have caused me to give up entirely. I am fighting that desire to give up all of the time and it gets worse.

I have however, gained a strong sense of who I am and what i need and where not to look for help. I have been helped a great deal by the integrity and compassion that  have found on this board. I need your help and hope that i can give something back in return.

This is just a brief introduction of my story and I will add more, but thanks for this chance to tell it.

[Mati]

I think that I should explain the out of body experience in the hospital when I was a baby poisoned with mercury. I have an image imprinted in my mind of me as a small child, standing in a hospital cot dressed in a thin cotton nightdress. I told my mother about this, and described the room, and she said yes it was as I pictured. She said nothing about me having an out of body experience, and nothing when I told her a few years ago that my uncle had molested me. It was like she did not really believe anything that I said. It was all met with a slight sneer and cold hard look. When I found out about the mercury and the teething powders a few years ago, also, she was angry with me for 'blaming her' as she interpreted my telling her.

I am pleased that she is dead. I know, that is a dreadful thing to say but I have not been released until then. She was better towards my sister, but she developed paranoid schizophrenia when she was 15. My mother just used me as a sounding board after that, complaining about my sisters behaviour. I tried many times to explain that contradicting her over her hallucinations was not helping. When my sister told me outragious things I just said something like 'oh?' and start to talk about something that was happening in the present time and this seemed to get her back into reality a bit. My mother would just tell her to stop being stupid. She really had no idea. I think that she did have some sort of mental illness herself. In fact my father told me she had once. But he did nothing to protect his children. The way she would chase me with a knife showed some serious disturbance I think.

After age 13, I was left to babysit my sister and brother (aged 7) every other evening as my mother had taken an evening job to get out of the way I suppose, and my father went ballroom dancing three times a week. I was told that I had to be a good example to my siblings as I was the eldest. These were very scary long evenings as the house we were in was, I felt haunted so I was sitting at the bottom of the stairs when my mother would return home in the evening.

I see now that I spent a great deal of energy trying to change her. She had a terrible diet and health problems so i would try to persuade her to improve on her eating habits and take supplements so that she would stop complaining about them to me, for one reason, and I did care about her. We had constant arguments. She disagreed with everything I said and was totally beyond reason in everything she thought. She was highly critical of everything I did regarding my children. There was never once, in all of my life, when she ever said I had done something right or well done, or anything at all to validate and support me. It was just hostility that she could not conceal. Her foot would start tapping as soon as I sat down in her house.

Why I kept going back I do not know. She caused me severe distress at times over the response when I told her anything like when I said i was pregnant. I had severe post-natal depression after the birth of my 3rd child, and my mother told the family that I was just looking for atttention  because I was jealous of my sisters mental illness. I got no support or understanding from any of them and just withdrew. They left me to it. I am a hypochondriac after all.

I did try once to tell her about the ways she had harmed me but she became very angry and would not listen.

Before she died she had her grand-daughter coming to help her (I was living away from her house). The niece became very hostile towards me and it was not until I sorted out my mothers' estate that i found out why - she had been helping herself to the majority of my mothers money, and it was quite a sum unbeknown to me.

My mother was having a birthday and the niece arranged for the family to go to a restaurant to celebrate. I did not hear about it till afterwards. I was not invited. My niece said that she thought that i would be too ill to go. It was an excuse as I had gone to see my mother a week before her birthday taking a big bunch of flowers. I told my mother afterwards but she was not interested nor did she seem to notice the way my niece was ignoring me and speaking rudely to me. She chose to ignore any mistreatment of me.

The whole family have personality problems as well as mental illness I think. I was the outsider and the scapegoat and nobody was ever on my side. I grew up feeling that I had no right to exist and that any hostility towards me was normal and I just accepted it without question.

My sister died tragically 22 years ago. It could have been suicide or murder the verdict was open. My mother really put on a big show about her suffering over this and everyone ran around her. My eldest son commited suicide 6 years  (he was schizophrenic too) and my mother hardly said anything to me about it nor the rest of the family. I had to grieve alone. I wanted to have the small wake after-wards in her house as I live away from the home town, but she said no. Secretly I think that she held me responsible for his death.

I do not now have much anger left over my mother. I feel sorry for her. She was very sick. I don't feel trauma recounting these experiences and I thank God for healing me in this area though i still have the effects left on me.. I still remember things and realise that they were abusive. But this sort of abuse is not the worst kind imo. It was just straightforward hatred. The worst abuse I think is where the person pretends to be your friend and is not. The betrayal here is extremely damaging.

My second husband abused me in this way. Another story.

[Mati]

MY MOTHER

I did come to terms with my issues with her a few years before she died, and I am very pleased that I did so. I am sure that it has helped me to deal with her death.

As a Christian, I knew that I had to forgive her. Christian forgiveness is misunderstood. The forgiveness that the Bible talks about is way beyond human ability because it means to actually wish good and DO GOOD to the one who is forgiven. Forgiveness occurs like the layers of an onion and this level is very deep and impossible for man to get to.

God loves us and does not expect us to do something that is harmful and something that we find impossible. His way is for us to see that we cannot do and to come to Him and ask Him to do it.

There is a time for anger and a time for forgiveness and we cannot move on until we are ready. And we cannot move to divine forgiveness until we have reached that place of handing over our own protection to God, in fact it is not a safe place to be in, for we need protection from the evil in the world. To trust God alone for our protection, is the ultimate place to be, and the place where we will be whole for this is how He made us, to be absolutely dependent on Him but with the co-operation of our wills, not as slavish obedience. And first we need to feel His love for us and learn to trust Him.

I did not want to forgive my mother, so I asked God to make me willing to want to forgive her. It took time, time where He showed me my own soul and how I had abused Him and neglected and abandoned Him, my maker. It was hard but He let me see myself as I really was. And then He let me know that He still loved me apart from my dirtiness and badness, but because He loved me He wanted me to be whole and complete, so some work had to be done to get rid of my bad attitudes and the anger and pain of existence which is in facing that empty hole inside that no-one but Him can fill.

Eventually I forgave her, and began to pray for good for her and take her flowers and tell her I loved her. I got little or no response to this but God had taken me to a place where I just accepted her as she was, and knew that I would never receive any love or acceptance from her. The love and acceptance I had form God was more than enough though. We will never receive enough from our fellow creatures, there will always come a day when they will let us down, or we will escape from reality to avoid facing this fact. Reality however is where mental health is and peace and joy live.

I am dealing with a few things that came to light after her death, and really seeing clearer just how badly she abused me. Before I was able to forgive with only a partial knowledge of it, and now, the full horror of it is there for me to face. I did not see how little she thought of me until now and it is hard to come to terms with, but I know that healing is taking place and with this new insight I will be able to get back to the level of forgiveness that I was in previously. I know this not because I trust myself or think that i am able but because my long relationship with Jesus Christ has taught me that I can indeed trust in Him.

Current opinions of some who are not believers is that forgiveness is even harmful and the therapies are all about protecting ourselves and abandoning abusive relationships and rejecting contact with those who are abusers. This is indeed love to ourselves, but the Bible says that we are to love others as ourselves and it does not give a clause for abusers to be exempt. In order to do this however, we must be in that state of trusting God entirely for protection. And those who are doing this will testify that He does indeed protect and no harm comes to us that is not 'worked to the good of those who are in Christ Jesus'.

I was treat with great cruelty during my life, and am going through a crisis at present and need the help of others, but I have been in a place of safety and healing that is way beyond comprehension where I knew only peace and joy resting in the arms of my Beloved.  Buddhism calls this Nirvana. It is not just for the ones who can devote a whole life (or many lives) to seek this, but is there for each of us when we give ourselves entirely to Christ.