Some people become more like their aggressors and oppressors. We call this identification with the oppressor. It is easy to view oppressors and attackers as stronger and possessing more power than we, their victims.
Abused children are the victims of their parents’ anger and aggression.
And yet we do not have to remain so. Reaching adulthood allows the freedom to seek help and change.
Change means not simply wanting to or saying I will be different from my parent(s,) but going down a different path during our growth into adulthood, one that ultimately leads us to relating to ourselves, the world and those in our care in ways vastly different from our abusive parents.
We must come to see the world differently, shift the angle from which we approach life and those we encounter, journey along a new perspective that allows us to ultimately see our parent(s) as the weak and terrified individuals they truly are.
In this way we, who were once victims become the victor.
My mother never truly apologized for her abusive behavior towards me during my childhood. The closest she came was asking, in one of our conversations during the months when she was dying of gall bladder cancer, “Do you think I’ll make it into Heaven?”
That she, a self-identified and staunch Christian, would ask this question of me, her daughter, whom she had criticized for not taking a more active role in church affairs, stunned and struck me with awe.
To this day, I mull the question still trying to understand the ulterior motive within her words.
As a priest once advised, “This was her most effective attempt at seeking forgiveness for an act of which your mother was most ashamed.”
My mother was in pain, great and terrible pain. She held an ache that my response to her question, “Of course you will,” could and I fear, did not assuage.
Did my mother love me?
I would have like to ask her that question, the answer of which I still seek today. And yet an even greater one is, “How could you treat someone as you did me, someone you say to love?”
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