The ultimate emotional blackmail *definite triggers*

[phearial]

One of the most difficult aspects of my recovery has been mapping out the ways I was abused by my BP-mothers emotional blackmail and the subsequent damage on my own being. Both the subtle and explicit.

Susan Forward's book was a great read and she describes the worst form of emotional abuse and blackmail being the threat of suicide. I realized that she said that within the context of her examples; All of which were adults in relationship with other adults. Which means there is a worse form of it and I experienced it.

I was a child when my mother threatened suicide as a means of coercion. Her numerous episodes, abuses, suicide attempts, and hospitalizations all served to galvanize her threats as genuine to me as a child and young adult. Threatening suicide to emotionally blackmail is worse for a child, since it also means real, not just perceived abandonment. The child simply has no defense against it; I had no defense against it. The child simply cannot be safe or loved while forced to carry the death of his mother on his shoulders. Her life was not his birthright. His life was his birthright.

Given her instability and extreme violence during fights with my father or she beat me, I had to believe that she was capable of killing more than just herself. She routinely broke things, slamming doors, cupboards, stomped about, yelling and screaming; sometimes at herself in the mirror. After she first incested me, she threatened in a low and venomous tone "If you tell your father, I will take him away from you!" Why would I ever believe she would stop with just herself?

That ends the grizzly portrait of the seriously ill stranger who was supposed to be my mother. This was the entrapment I suffered daily. The obligation to keep her alive, the fear that she would succeed in suicide, and the guilt that I wouldn't be present to stop it because I was living my own life. Of course, she never killed herself and I still deal with the consequences of my sacrifices and her abuses. I have been no contact with her for 10 years and glad of it.

She still lives and she is a stranger to me now. I realized recently upon reflection that my mother died of suicide long ago, just not all at once.