Unlovable or Just in A Childhood Lost

unloved?
I have thought to myself in the past, why must I always spurn and reject the love offered to me?
Which is, at once tragic and hopelessly nihilistic.
I took the blame, always, for being unlovable. It couldn’t possibly be anyone else’s fault that I was this way. That I had these feelings. That I was just distinctly annoying or off putting weird or whatever. Now, it is sad. Very sad. It’s sad that I never examined my emotional life for what it was- or accepted it as real. To accept my own experience as real, though, would have been destructive for the people that I relied on.

Last time I spoke to her, my therapist told me the age that she stood up to her mother was 16. I told her that I had just done it, last year. “some people just take more time.” she told me. But… No, I thought. That’s not true. I knew what the outcome would be, as did she, even when we were both 16.
It’s just that the cost for her at 16 was less than the cost for me at 16.
And, even when I told her this- in a sort of round about way- that I knew in my bones if I ever confronted my mother, she would reject me, she would hate me, she would go to the lengths of her being to hurt me. My therapist just said “I love people who are consistent!”
But she did not understand me, and she said so by her response. No, what I meant was that I could not have handled that much hatred, that much rejection, and that much sabotage from my mother when I was only 16. In fact, I have trouble coming to terms with it, now.
“People change,” she assured me. “sometimes it takes a scare, but they do.”
No. I don’t think that they do. Even within my therapist’s story, there was proof of that. She said that her mother would slap her across the face when she said something her mother didn’t like. Then one day when she was 16, my therapist held up her hand to deflect her mother’s slap. And her mother was terrified, and never did it again.
Well. You see, that is not evidence of change. That is evidence in fact of the opposite principle. Her mother only respects physical violence- since she was bigger and stronger, she got her way. Once her daughter became big enough and brave enough to physically stop her, then she stopped. It just proves that the mother had a capacity to refrain from hitting her daughter, but chose not to. Instead the mother chose to inflict violence on her daughter until the daughter defended herself, then acted scared and self pitying- just another form of aggression towards the daughter.
My own mother didn’t change, either. She never will. I knew it when I was 16, when I was 5, and now. I think, perhaps, the main difference between these mothers is their ability to escalate. My therapists mother was not willing to escalate to further violence, so she had to yield to her principle of the stronger violence. My mother, I think, escalates beyond anything that I could ever offer resistance to. Since I refuse violence, she dominates. And if I ever found it within myself to express any dissatisfaction with her, she rains down her retribution. And when I refused to be manipulated, she attacked.