My mother (40F) treated me (19F) very poorly as a child. So a little backstory.. My mom had me when she was 21, and left my real father shortly after. When I was 4, things started to get more serious with my stepdad and they bought a house together and we moved in. My childhood wasn’t HORRIBLE but it wasn’t great either. Yes I know my mom was young.. but it doesn’t change the emotional trauma she’s caused me. For the majority of my childhood she was too focused on her relationship with my stepdad and didn’t pay much attention to me. She never spent time with me, always acted annoyed, and even forced me upstairs at a certain time every night so she could watch shows alone with her husband. She was verbally abusive at times, called me annoying and a brat , other names a child should never be called. Same with my stepdad. I also recall one time I went through my mom’s phone (I know how that’s an invasion of privacy lol, I was like 9) and I found messages of them talking horribly about me. I also recall several times where she went off the deep end and screamed at me like a crazy person. Then, when I was 14 and began having mental health issues / fighting with stepdad.. she practically forced me to live with my grandparents and rarely let me come home to see her and my brother because she didn’t know how / didn’t want to get me help. Now I’ll add… the past 4 years she has been trying much harder and has been much more supportive. But the way she treated me as a young child has deeply shaped who I am as a person and caused a lot of insecurities for me. It’s so hard for me to not blame her for my problems when I know for a fact it was her fault. It’s also hard to forgive when I know I would NEVER treat or neglect my future children the way she did to me. I now have so much anger to her which I don’t know how to deal with. To conclude, I love my mom. She’s a great woman, and she has apologized multiple times and expressed that she feels remorse and knows that she messed up a lot. I want to forgive her so bad but no matter how much we talk about it this anger always resurfaces.
TL;DR: My mom neglected & verbally abused me for a large portion of my childhood, and has only began to show change in the last 4 years. How do I forgive her and stop being angry ??
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Similar-ish experience growing up. For a few years after I learned what damage had been done to me from my childhood I held a major grudge against my mom. But after my aunt passed away and I saw how much it tore up my cousin (they had issues too) I decided I wanted to let it all go and have a relationship with her while she’s still here. Once you can let go of who they were and focus on who they are now it gets so much better.
If possible go to a therapist who specializes in this type of childhood trauma and get it all out on the table. A few apologies and being supportive now is not going to erase the years of neglect and putting you down. Children are ‘hard wired’ to love their parents which is why their abuse is so caustic and hard to reconcile. You don’t have to forgive her, that’s completely up to you. Perhaps one day you will but she can’t expect you to forgive her for years of mistreatment. I don’t think I would talk with her about it other than to say that she damaged your profoundly and while you will work to repair yourself so don’t pass on the results to others in your life there is no guarantee you will ever trust her completely. Do work on yourself with the goal of being emotionally stable and to be able to love and nurture others. If your Mother is not in therapy there is no real reason to think she has truly changed. When/if I had children I would not allow her unsupervised access to them.
You don’t have to forgive her, you can be angry and upset at how she abused you. She was an adult back then and didn’t have to abuse you to spend time with her new partner, but she did it anyways. It may have made everything easier for her but that doesn’t mean you deserved to live through that. She can apologize all she wants, by it doesn’t change that t actually happened and traumatized you.
That being said you need to work on you, find a trauma therapist and work on dealing with your past and the emotions that come with it.