Skip to main content

Our society ignores abusive mothers

Quite a long time ago I lived in a particular rental apartment with my parents for a little while (I think it was for less than a year or so). I remember vividly one particular thing about that place, and it was a particular neighbor, which I think was directly upstairs from us, which could be heard quite well.

I never saw who that neighbor was, I only ever heard her screaming. From the content and tone of what she screamed, it appeared to be a mother who, for whatever psychological reason, seemed to be on an everyday quest to destroy her child's (I got a strong impression of the child being her preteen son) self-worth and self-esteem, and to make his life as miserable as possible. Almost every day, all throughout the day, she would scream at her son, berating him in a really angry tone of voice, oftentimes even a rather condescending tone of voice. Of course I could not see the actual situation, but it seemed to me that she would yell at him for the most minor of things, and perhaps even for nothing at all. But it was not only her scolding her son for doing something wrong. It was more than that. It was a constant attack on him as a person, with insults and denigration.

It was pure psychological abuse and torture of a child.

While this kind of psychological abuse by mothers is not extraordinarily common, it's not a one-in-a-billion situation either. It's somewhat common, and most people know of, have witnessed or heard of, or even personally experienced this, to one degree or another.

The nature and severity of the psychological abuse can vary quite a lot from case to case, but even the most severe of cases, where it seems like a mother is on a mission to destroy her child psychologically, are not extraordinarily uncommon.

This kind of psychological torture can also happen in other forms (often in addition to the abuse done in private). Such as, for example, constantly humiliating the child in front of guests or other people, such as extended family members, neighbors or family friends. This humiliation can come in the form of, for example, telling these people about how the child (allegedly) misbehaves and what he has done, or what embarrassing things he has done, and telling them deliberately and expressly when the child in question is present and hearing it, and telling it maliciously rather than light-heartedly (even if the parent might outwardly keep a tone that pretends it to be light-hearted.) The parent might also complain to these outsiders, again deliberately when the child in question is present so he can clearly hear it, how hard it is to raise this particular child and what problems she as a parent is experiencing because of it (putting the blame for her problems on her child, either hinting at it, or outright blatantly directly saying it.)

Humiliating a child in this manner in front of outsiders takes the psychological torture to a whole new level.

When our society and culture thinks of abusive parents, the most common mental picture is that of an abusive father, usually an alcoholic, and usually violent or, at the very least, very angry and loud.

However, society seldom wants to think of and acknowledge the existence of abusive mothers. We just don't want to think that women, especially mothers, can be like this. Society wants to think of mothers as perfect angelic beings who have nothing but unending love for their children, who love nothing else more then their children and would do anything to protect them and raise them with love, kindness and compassion.

Many, perhaps even most, mothers are like that. Some are not. And that group is not microscopically small. We, as a society at large, however, don't want to think about them, and for the most part we just uncomfortably ignore them, perhaps at most paying lip service to the problem, but that's it.

Comments

  1. The fact that this has no fucking comments tells a lot.
    This plight falls on deaf ears.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment