Posted by Tamar on May 24, 2006, at 19:00:57
In reply to My mother - Trigger maybe, posted by Dinah on May 24, 2006, at 15:38:42
Wow, it sounds as if you had a very useful conversation with your mother. I’m glad that was possible for you!I don’t know about your particular situation, but I have been amazed at the stuff people are able to forget. I talked to my brother last week about all the violence in our late teens, and he didn’t remember any of it. He didn’t remember my father coming home from work and punching us; he didn’t remember dragging me out of my bed and punching me repeatedly in the face the night before one of my exams, and he didn’t remember breaking down my bedroom door.
I don’t know why some people remember and other people forget. But I’m certain that for the people who remember, the incidents were especially traumatic.
It’s also possible that people interpret the same event in very different ways. I read a journal article not long ago about the possibility that kids might interpret spanking as sexual abuse. The parent doesn’t necessarily intend it as sexual abuse, but the kid might interpret it that way because of the way butts are sexualised in society and because of the feelings involved. It’s an interesting idea and one that should probably be explored further. And it fits in with another idea I read about many years ago about various kinds of monkeys that present their buttocks to the more powerful monkey as a sign of submission (at which point if the buttock-presenting monkey is female, the male powerful monkey will often have sex with her). Admittedly, I’m not exactly providing references here… Anyway, it’s just an example of how people can interpret events in astonishingly different ways.
And yes, if she was out of control it’s probably even more likely that she’d forget. People often don’t like to remember how bad their behaviour has been. I went to a talk about domestic violence a while ago, and one of the speakers said the men who hit their wives are almost never able to describe exactly what they’ve done. They’ll say they slapped her around a bit when in fact they’ve put her in hospital. So it’s very common for people to minimise their own violence, apparently.
Just my two cents.
Tamar
poster:Tamar
thread:647919
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20060517/msgs/648022.html