A submission today from TMFR Discord Guru, Doanya.
This MF is always spitting out some insight and recent learning that helps us all. She has a ton of experience in sorting through Trauma effects and shows so much strength in her continual efforts to settle up with family and friends, despite huge differences in personal perspectives and beliefs.
Today, I’m sharing an article and her personal take on it. Here’s Doanya:
This article started off describing living in fear of whatever might set off the rage of her mom and I felt an immediate series of physical sensations in response, my body remembered the hands on my shoulders, the wild unfocused rage on her face as she shook and screamed things I didn’t understand. Later, it was after her husband would begin his gaslight campaign, picking, and nagging and blaming, subtle passive-aggressive, suggestive threats and she took it all out on me.
Over the years, as I’ve peeled away the layers of what happened, what I think happened, what we pretended did and didn’t happen, setting boundaries but not letting go. He’s now dead, I’ve unfriended several of the men whose opinion no longer mattered and now this layer of the cake, or onion…is facing how to navigate the mine field between me and my mother, who barely acknowledges she stayed married to a pedo for all these fucking years but Jesus has wiped clean her memories with his blood magic prayers … and I don’t want to spend Thanksgiving Day *eye spins* with a house full of people who don’t know that they’ve fucking hijacked a bunch of words to keep themselves justified and always right.
Fuck that shit.
The Cinderella Phenomenon: When One Child Is the Target of Abuse by Alice Kenny | Oct 2, 2020 | ACEs, CPTSD Survivor Stories, Guest Contributor | 0 comments
As a child, I lived in dread that something would set my mother off and she’d fly into a violent rage, unleashing a torrent of physical abuse. There never was any reason for the abuse. There didn’t have to be. Something would invariably infuriate my mother.
I don’t know why my mother singled me out—why she only hit me and not my siblings. Research shows there can be a link between parental mental illness and abuse. As noted by the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, “Through reduced caregiving capacities, the co-occurrence of child neglect or abuse, and exposure to other sources of fear and stress, parental mental health conditions have direct consequences for the health and well-being of their children [children of parents with mental illness].” In my case, my mother was mentally ill.
Sometimes, abusive parents are indiscriminate in their violence, but sometimes not. Researchers say it’s not uncommon for an abusive parent to single out one child as the target of physical violence. This has been called: the “Cinderella Phenomenon.” Another term is “target-child selection.”
I never wore glass slippers, but I fit the definition of a Cinderella. In my case, it wasn’t an evil step-mother heaping abuse on me; it was my biological mother. And I wasn’t living in a fairy tale world. No fairy godmother was going to say “bibbidi-bobbidi-boo” and magically transform my life. No prince would whisk me away.
The rage my mother directed at me was inescapably real.
Why would a parent single out one child for abuse? Byron Egeland, an expert in child maltreatment at the Institute of Child Development, University of Minnesota, says, “Reasons for the abuse are highly varied, and there is no consistent pattern across maltreatment cases.”
Accumulated research shows the Cinderella Phenomenon often involves the redirection of anger that an abusive parent feels toward someone else—perhaps an absent spouse or former partner. The targeted child may remind the parent of a trauma he or she experienced, such as rape, or as Egeland noted, their own abuse. “The abuser is likely to have a history of abuse,” he says.
Sometimes, parents target a child for abuse because the child is hyperactive, has a disability, or displays personality traits the parent doesn’t like.
More likely than not, though, Egeland says, there is no logical explanation.
While all siblings in my family were subjected to psychological abuse, I was the only one who suffered physical abuse at the hands of my mother. I’ve often thought that my mother targeted her rage against me because I looked like her. I remember examining a picture of my mother when she was about eight. It was as if I was staring back at myself at the same age. But what disturbed her about the mirror image I will never know.
There have been many studies on the characteristics of abusive parents. Studies show they tend to have: low self-esteem, poor impulse control, low frustration tolerance, inappropriate expression of anger, impaired parenting skills, depression, and other mental health problems, and as mentioned previously, a history of being abused.
In my mother’s case, I could put a checkmark next to virtually all of these descriptors except the history of abuse. I know nothing about her childhood.
((This article is an excerpt from book, Crazy Was All I Ever Knew: The Impact of Maternal Mental Illness on Kids. You can find it on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback versions. You can reach me at www.Alicekenny.com). I have used a pseudonym to protect the privacy of family members.)
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