I was sexually abused as a 15 year old boy by my mother. I am starting to work though this with my therapist. It is hard to deal with at this time. I have mixed feeling about my mother, I have been told by I have to love my mother yet, with what she did to me how can I love her.

admorris -

welcome. so good that you are ready to post. keep at it. it really helps.

incest is a whole additional can of worms on top of abuse. it make stuff so difficult. glad that you are working with a therapist.

i don't have an answer for you to your question. but i want you to know you are not alone. for me it was a step-father who did most of the abuse - but mom was complicit. i too have very mixed feelings toward her.

keep working, and best wishes for lots of healing this year!
Lee

Lee,

Thanks for the support. It is good to know I am not alone. I wish I could say that my mother was the only one but there were others. It is something I will have to work one this year.

I have been having to figure out if I have any blame. I have periods of guilt dealing with the abuse.

though i don't know the whole story - my bet is that NO - you were not to blame. she was the adult - and a parent at that - and responsible to keep you safe. you were a kid - legally a child - and not expected to be the one setting the tone for the relationship. 15-year-olds may be physically "mature" but are definitely NOT emotionally or mentally mature. even if you think you could have stopped it, the power balance was not on your side. authority figures weild much more power than kids.

IT WAS NOT YOUR FAULT!
Lee

You are not to blame. And (in my opinion), you don't have to love her. Love and forgiveness are gifts, and we sometimes happier and healthier if we decide to give those gifts -- but since they are gifts, no one can force us to give them.

I too was abused by my Mother and it went on from early infancy into my late teens even early tweenties. I blocked everything out as she died twenty years ago, but as with so many here it all came flooding back. Two odd years later the flashbacks are not so bad and the constant video in my head is a lot less thank God, but I feel only now over two years in am I finally really accepting what was done to me and how it has conciously and sub conciously blighted my life and especially my relationships with others.

Blame and guilt are such heavy crosses to carry and the one thing we and especially I is to remember we were not to blame. My familly blamed me, others blame you but it's their need of denial that causes it.

Im finally at the accepting point finally, now comes the coming to terms with it and trying to deal with the disociative alters i created to protect me in those vulnerable years. They have become so ingrained into me that they react on a hair trigger and before i know where i am Mr protect at all cost has destroyed another good relationship because of a percieved danger of getting hurt.

We are in a mess, but knowledge is power and finally accepting disociative me might just give me a chance to help fix me before its too late.

Had enough of lonely. xxx

Love doesn't mean you should not be angry, and it doesn't mean having a relationship. Anger is protective and lets you know that you've been wronged. It's your body feeling the truth of what's going on, that someone is hurting you. That was the situation, so you should be angry. It wasn't some misunderstanding. If you try not to be angry, it will just go underground and poison you.

I love my abusive mother in the sense that I wish her well rather than wanting revenge, in the sense that I hope she gets help, stops the coverup, and comes to repent of the terrible things that she has done, so that she can be a better person and maybe one day find peace. I forgive her in the sense that I don't want terrible things to happen to her as punishment or revenge. I do not forgive her with any sense that what she did was in any way acceptable or anything other than monstrous. Jesus says "Love your enemies"; I love her, but also consider an enemy. I consider her a persecutor and someone who hates me and whom I should avoid.

In terms of my natural instincts, I loathe her. Her voice makes my skin crawl. I fear her and my adrenaline comes up just at the thought of her. I am very angry at her, and especially at the way in which she would blame and shame me throughout my childhood for problems that I had which she had to know were caused by the abuse.

Hope that's in someway helpful. To have your own mother be one of your worst enemies is a great, great hardship and sadness. Go easy on yourself.

All the best,

Ninja_Turtle

I do not have conscious memories of abuse by my mom, but I know from my reaction to her and certain things that it took place. It is very difficult to deal with and has caused me to choose certain kinds of women over the course of my life, including my exwife, who with her friends drugged/abused/sexually assaulted me over a period of about 10 years. This kind of abuse is of the most destructive kind, not just because it is incest, but because it goes against so many of society's rules about how things are, what happens, what we will accept. I confronted ma and she told me to shut up. The power/level of denial it takes for the abuser to function is contagious to a child that looks to them for leadership and care. That learned denial to the point of total insanity and my inability to trust/picking terrible women have literally destroyed me combined with the psychological symptoms from years of physical/emotional abuse as a child and ASA. I have no means to cope with this, it's killing me.

Oh yeah, I don't have to love anyone, and certainly not ma. Just because they're your family doesn't mean that they are capable of love or deserve it for that matter. Dealing with those people is very dangerous for me, they know how to push buttons and I can get easily distracted, emotionally derailed, manipulated, etc. Getting away from my family was best thing I ever did.