Panzer-Woman, Panzer-Man

(extra credit to anyone who knows where this entry title came from)

This morning, while reading my beloved Psychology Today, I came across an article on how difficult mothers end up raising children who have to develop sometimes-detrimental manners of coping with having their initial nurturer treat them abrasively.

A long excerpt:
"The difficult mother imposes her dilemma harshly -- with unpredictable and ferocious anger, punitive inflexibility, rigid expectations, and expressions of neediness that take priority over a child's needs. Envy may compound the mix. Sure, many mothers show anger, inflexibility, neediness and elements of envy from time to time. But it's the routine use of such behaviors that distinguishes difficult mothers and sets up a coercive relationship.
A child does not have the option to say to a mother, I don't care whether you think I'm bad, or, I am not frightened by the prospect of your leaving me. A primitive panic at rejection lasts long after the infant's physical helplessness comes to an end.
Children are therefore likely to work hard to adopt special strategies to protect themselves from a mother's rejection. The particular strategies a difficult mother poses on a child are ruled by fear, anxiety, and confusion. And each mother's particular brand of difficult shapes the strategies that a child develops. . .
[These children's] aim in personal interactions is to please and placate, rather than to genuinely engage. They may be primed to respond with compliance to outbursts or even hints of anger in others; they may assume that others are behaving appropriately in expressing anger towards them. In some cases, they may even be attracted to people whose anger is easily aroused -- because they associate that behavior with attachment and authority."

After this paragraph, I stopped reading. My mind started buzzing. I had never before wondered about my mother's role in my abusive relationships. And as I write this now, I think it's incredibly cliched -- yes yes, blame the mother. But is there something here? Is there something to this?

When people find out I've been in not one, but 2.5 abusive relationships (Mark was a nasty person, with severe emotional disorders, but to his credit (?) he said "I never hit you. I wanted to, but I didn't." He was emotionally and verbally abusive, but very proud of himself that he drew the line at physical. So let's call that a half.) people always ask, "Did your dad beat your mom?" No. Never. Actually my parents (now divorced) never fought. And when I told my dad I knew he and my mom were wrong for each other since I was a child, he asked how I knew. "It's not that there was fighting," I answered, "it's that there wasn't even talking." It was a very quiet household, with the kind of peacefulness that is charged with tension. The kind that you are always afraid to set off, so you behave very carefully, treading a delicate line, to maintain the silence, afraid that anything else would be infinitely worse.

And when I first dated H in 2006, the man who started the horrible cycle that I'm just now getting out of, I attributed the abuse to his history -- his father had beaten his mother during H's entire childhood. And what really horrified me about the situation is that H's mother would take his two sisters and go to a hotel room, but would leave H at home with his raging father. H told me about how there was a bathroom in his parents' Victorian home that had a door into the hallway, and a door into the master bedroom, and he would run into it, trying to lock both doors before his father could reach him. He told me of sneaking a phone into there, trying to call the police, but his father unplugged it. 'What kind of mother,' I thought, 'leaves behind one of her children?' Ironically, H's mother questioned my role before I ever did. When H called his mother after 6 months of frequently punching, choking, shoving, burning, and harassing me, his mother (who is still with his father) said only, "Promise not to see her again."

After H, in 2008, I ended up with R (who, as far as I know, has no history of domestic violence in his family). I started wondering what it was about me that made people do this to me -- after all, H had never hit a girlfriend before. R had been controlling and jealous, but I don't think he had ever been abusive to the extent he was with me. What was it about me that brought this out in men? I spoke to a therapist about it, and he said it wasn't that I made men do this to me, it's that after I became accustomed to being treated like this, it's what I expect, so I somehow felt comfortable when later boyfriends treated me this way. I just assumed that this all began with H, that's where I became accustomed to it, that there was no earlier foundation.

But now, looking back, was I wrong? Is my relationship with my mother what set me up for my relationships with H, then R, then Mark?

My mother is. . .somewhere on the Autistic spectrum, and she has severe depression. Or maybe it looks more severe to me because of her Autistic tendencies. Or maybe it's harder to treat because of the Autistic tendencies. What I think about most about my mother is how she complains to me that "when you were a baby, I had to hold you all the time. If I ever put you down, you cried." She doesn't say this in a charming way, like 'Oh I have a baby that loves me and is very connected with me.' She complains about it. She makes it clear to me that I took over her life 24 hours a day, and she resented every minute of it. She still resents it. Once, when I asked her why, if she quit teaching elementary school because she hated children, she then had four of her own, and she said, "I didn't want kids, your father did. And then he got to go to work every day and I got stuck raising you." I have vivid memories of being in my mom's bedroom upstairs, watching her car drive away with my siblings to a holiday party, or some other celebration, leaving me at home because I wasn't behaving. I remember stapling through my finger, and crying about it, and how my mother refused to tend to my finger until the crying stopped (she was this way about broken bones too, and even then we were sent to our room until we stopped crying). I remember coming home on Thanksgiving break from college and admitting to my parents that I had an eating disorder, and after a long conversation full of tears, my mom telling me to go to take a nap and calm down, and when I woke up, my whole family was gone -- had left for Thanksgiving dinner without me. That night my mom told her siblings that I had stayed home because I was sick, and she later told me she was too embarrassed to have them see me. I also remember my mother "spanking" us all the time. One of the most commonly-heard phrases of my youth was, "Come down here so I can spank you!" I remember threatening my mother that if she ever "spanker" my younger (by 6 years) sister, I would hit her. I remember the first time I realized that I was taller and stronger than my mother, and telling her if she dared to hit me again, I would hit her right back.

Thinking about all of this, it seems ridiculous to suggest that it could not have impacted my future relationships. People ask how I didn't see hints of how H was before the abuse started. Well, yes, he did the typical abuser priming -- act perfect until you trust him, too good to be true, and then once he knows you're too far in to leave, he slowly starts shaking your self-confidence, breaking you down little by little until you will take whatever it is he doles out. But maybe there were hints of his aggression, of his authoritative personality. And maybe I strove to pacify him, maybe I have imprinted on myself the need to placate those who are quick to anger after years of attempting to please my mother, to do anything to get her to actually show her love for me. Maybe, as independent as I like to think I am, I don't actually stand on my own at all.