I just realized what effects the efforts of my mother can have on the emotional development of the child that she has been raising. I saw her interact with a 5 year old child of my cousin. The kid had been crying so loud that we could not continue our conversation anymore. Even though I felt something was off in this interaction, I could not put my finger on it, but now I know exactly what it was. She sat on the floor, directly in front of him, looked in his eyes and said:
"Look how ugly you are. I don't like you when you're crying, you're such an ugly boy when you cry. You're an awful boy, look at you! So disgusting! I won't talk to you until you stop crying."
And next she stood up and started ostentatiously ignoring him. When I tried to point her to the fact that she was only making the boy ashamed and rejected for who he is, she scolded me saying that I don't have children and therefore I have no clue how to raise them and teach them how to behave. She said that she was shaming his behaviour not him, and this is exactly how one should teach the kid discipline. She compared it to training a dog (the boy could hear the whole conversation btw). She seemed to take pride in doing what my cousin had failed to do as a mother in her eyes. Her opinion was that the kid was spoiled.
And again, I have to admit that when I read what I wrote so far, it does not even sound wrong to me. It's this another sign that I've spotted a faulty belief from my past? Dear reader, what about you?
And then I thought a bit more about it. She tried to punish the child for inappropriate behavior. But the behavior was only a manifestation of how the child felt. We didn't even know why he was crying, nobody asked him. Second, the punishment that she used: she was not angry, she was not shouting, she didn't pretend that she would hit him. She calmly sat in front of him, making sure she gets his attention, she waited until they had an emotional connection. And only then she used her weapon:
She rejected him for the way he feels. She sent him a message that feeling inappropriate emotions made him a bad person. A bad person who is not worthy of liking and is going to be completely abandoned now, because of who he is.
Dear reader, the way she made the child feel is the quintessence of how borderline personality disorder feels. I just saw the process of creating a Borderline in real life. Luckily she is not his mother, and she is not interacting with him on a daily basis. But thinking what if that was the case is scary.
I know that there are homes where people shout at each other, don't respect each other, behave impulsively, don't care about the child's needs, or never make any emotional connection with the child. There's a belief that such physical or emotional abuse is the cause of the borderline personality disorder. But what I described here is a whole new level of maliciousness. It's a precisely arranged and fine-tuned performance, constantly targeted at something that in the eyes of the parent is teaching the kid to behave, and what it truly does it emotionally destroys the small person who is only developing. And yes, I believe that my mother's methods were very efficient, there's no doubt about that. She got to the very core of the child and broke it, before it could have any opinion on their own. It's wrongly understood parenting, and sadly, yes, it's driven by love.
PS. I remember my mum saying "Look at you, you cannot be loved". I have been carrying this through all my life, through every relationship and its corresponding breakup. I have been hearing those words in my head while I was cutting myself or getting drunk to death without caring what will happen with my body next. And I can say that now I probably know in which context and for what reason she said those words.