absolutely true. until i was diagnosed with severe complex PTSD my treatment really went nowhere...just bandaid therapy. then when i discovered MSbP on 60 minutes or some similar program, i knew that it was applicable to me...then things really improved. before then, it had taken me many years just to realize sadism was involved in my parents' motives... i kept feeling that the bad incidents with both my parents were different than what other kids experienced
, when their parents were angry, in a rage or being temporarily cruel due to anger....

i dont know what happened to the rest of my last post!
so to continue... when other kids' parents were angry, in a rage, or being temporarily cruel due to anger, it involved loss of control unless they were acting out of belief, (such as to beat the devil out of a child to save the soul). but when they were sadistic, my mother and father were totally in control, more controlled almost than usual . cool, contemptuous, hateful, without any care about how terrible the consequences of their words/actions might be to me....even it seemed willing me to die. over the years it kept nagging at me that it seemed like those times were all about making me writhe in pain and anguish, emotionally or physically. my mother would smirk and sneer with contempt. that was the objective. also, it was never about some bad behavior on my part, usually it was hard to see any cause. it sometimes was subtle and "accidental".("i didnt mean to give you the wrong medicine to put in your eye") or it was more blatant, actually hypnotically me ordering me to die. when i told therapists about some such incident, i was told such things as "every parent gets angry, even enraged, and says or does things they might regret" or "you are projecting your own murderous rage onto them and imagining they actually want to harm you" but my parents never seemed to regret anything they did to hurt me. my mother claimed she never knew what i was talking about when i said she was hurting me with cruel manipulative words...she even said, "i would never say those things to my worst enemy susan, least of all to you! my worst problem has been that i dont know what's reality. there was never validation, no witnesses...then in the last few years, my partner witnessed some of the dr hyde side of my mother ....and again my life changed. finally validation of my perceptions! then at the end of my mothers life, she told me more about her hideously tormented childhood than i ever heard before. told me of her rage and hate. her mother hated her from birth. father too. tried to kill her as an infant. interestingly, she was cared for only when she was ill.
i do believe she was being truthful...i concluded in the last 15 years that she had DID (a multiple).

Sks--I was finally able to log back on here! I had wanted to respond to something you wrote about a month ago and could not sign in for some reason! What you wrote here resonated with me a lot. I am just about to get dinner on the table, so afterwards I am going to write more, but I wanted to just tell you that your perceptions are accurate. I will validate them. I had pretty much the sane exact perceptions of my own mother. You are right that this is the most painful part--what I have been told is "what you are saying your mother did is too crazy to be believed". I believe that this is part of the gaslighting. They know on some level that their msbp abuse, does sound, in fact, too crazy to be believed. This is part and parcel why they choose to do it. What could give a person more power than to "own" another person's perceptions? The therapist who said you are projecting your hatred, etc is an idiot. My mother said something similar to me "You just think I did that stuff (sadistic physical injuries) on purpose because you hate me so much." I want to say more a little later. Please dont doubt your perceptions.

Hi again, sorry I got pulled away.
One of the things that torments me most is the "why" of it all. "Why" did my mother do this? And why did my father ultimately just go into denial about the whole thing?
I have wondered too if my mother had DID, if it was an alternate personality doing the terrible things. I am interested in your view of that with your own Mom.
Ultimately, I didn't conclude my Mom had a multiple, but she is an extremely sick individual.
What I feel my mother thinks about TRUTH is not what I think about truth. To me, the truth is something that cannot changed or be messed with. To my mother, truth is malleable, I truly feel she was raised to believe that the truth is fluid and that if Mommy says the truth is such and such, then that becomes the truth. If you fight against this, someone altering the truth (into a lie), especially Mommy, you're a bad person.
I also know that my mother did not know what love was or is. She perceived her babies in an extremely immature and self-focused way, so that when the baby began to crawl and was able to separate (crawl away) from Mommy, this was a betrayal to her, this meant baby did not love her. I absolutely believe that the reason my mother shut my fingers in a door and refused to open it, finally did, and then laughed and said "that's no big deal you just need a bandaid" (when even my father told me I could have lost my fingers) was because I was going to be entering school in a few months (I was almost 5 yrs. old) and she insanely thought that if I was not able to write, perhaps school could be postponed while my injury healed or maybe in her sick mind she thought I would not go to school. But the horrible thing also is that I do feel that there is sadism involved with munchers especially those who actively injure or sicken. So, I guess the best way I understand it is it is a "perfect storm" of sorts where the muncher has borderline personality disorder (they want to punish the child for having independance and this is because they have totally messed object relations) and I also believe they have sadistic urges that they don't seem to have a problem acting on.
I do believe my mother was the victim of MSBP behavior from her mother although she seems to be in complete denial about this. However, I have heard stories from her own mother that she (my grandmother) "accidentally" killed my mother's pet bird by sitting on it while cleaning and that when my own mother was sick with tonsillitis as a child her mother "accidentally" gave her ipecac syrup buying it from the town store thinking it was medicine (I know my grandmother and I don't believe for a second she really thought ipecac syrup was medicine) causing my mother to vomit nonstop on top of being sick with tonsillitis. However, my mother does not recognize this as abusive--she claims to truly believe this was an accident. My grandmother is also a pain pill addict who makes up countless ailments to get her pill supply even now in her late 80's and I am talking outrageous disorders like claiming to have shingles inside her eardrum!!! That's how skilled she is at lying.
Unfortunately, none of this makes me feel better, that is, understanding the reasons don't make me feel better, because it still doesn't make sense to me. I can't even imagine doing anything to hurt my son even though I was victimized by being intentionally hurt. So, even knowing my Mom was abused doesn't explain it well enough.
I think if I believed she had an alternate personality that would make me feel a little better. My father is still in complete denial. The holidays this year were really rough. She is still on a crusade to convince my sisters that I am mentally ill (the crazy one). Also, she told both myself and my father 2 different bizarre stories the week of Christmas (huge mistake going over there for Christmas!) about a baby that "almost froze". The first story she told me that she knows someone who picked up her grandbaby to watch her for the day and noticed the baby was red all over and had hypothermia and that she had to rub the baby all day, so that the baby would survive. She said that the baby must have "kicked off it's covers in the night" and that the house had no heat and so was below freezing. I said "did the grandmother take the baby to the hospital since she had hypothermia?" My mother said "No, she just rubbed it all day and cried." THEN I overheard her telling my father "I know this lady who brought her baby into her backyard and it almost froze. The baby was 4 or 5 months old. The lady has something like Parkinson's now." My father just grunted, and said nothing. I actually confronted him about this and he DENIED EVER HEARING HER tell him that story about the baby that almost froze !!! Anyway, that story was completely insane! My father's brother has recently been diagnosed with a disease that is "something like Parkinson's" (this is actually real) and my mother's own mother has recently been diagnosed with some kind of dementia (she is almost 90). When I was a child she also told us a story about a baby placed into a backyard that froze and said she heard it on the news and was crying hysterically. It makes me wonder where this story comes from!!! I told my father she needs mental help but he just denied ever hearing her say it!!!
Anyway, I totally understand your confusion and pain. Our mothers were abused in some way, and, in fact, I am sure it was as you put it "hideously" abused. Something is very sick inside them where they have confused the truth with something that cannot be relied upon, that can change and that has no stability. Their abuse involves making their victims lose their own faith in truth as something to be relied upon. Maybe it is too painful for them to admit just how screwed up they are and if they turn everyone around them into people who can't believe anything is really true or not true or real or not real then they will never have to face their own instability?
I hope someday I can find peace with everything, but it hasn't happened yet. It is just way to hurtful and the denial of everyone around me makes it hard. I just wanted to reach out to you and let you know I believe you and don't ever let anyone, whether they are a therapist or anyone, make you doubt your perceptions. God gave us our perceptions for a reason and we should trust our own instincts. Plus, some therapists, I feel, become therapists for the power they can wield, but that is a whole different topic. I hope we will both find peace in the New Year.

layla785...i deeply appreciate your effort to connect, validate and share your own experiences with me. my mother was undoubtedly borderline among other things. her inability to handle abandonment, rejection or even being two separate people, resulted in a deep and hidden rage that she admitted to only at the end of her life. she often said she felt she would be wiped out, obliterated by the other person and rejecting or tormenting the other would save her. that her life depended on it. but there was the hidden rage motive too. she had to see herself as a self sacrificing, selfless spring of unwavering love for me and me as the rejecting, uncaring other. i believe it is that terribly damaged object relations, and in her case the "object" (her mother) hated her, wanted to destroy her, have her lobotomized and institutionalized. my mother split, saw things as black or white, people were good or evil....she had to see herself as good at all costs. i still am full of doubts. i thought today, maybe i just have a chemical imbalance and have come up with all this as an explanation for why i am so depressed and tormented....then i thought, "but remember how you gave up the will to live after the second to last surgery at 7 1/2 yrs old?? drs said i wasnt healing and had no wish to live anymore. why would a young child be in such shape?.

layla785...i deeply appreciate your effort to connect, validate and share your own experiences with me. my mother was undoubtedly borderline among other things. her inability to handle abandonment, rejection or even being two separate people, resulted in a deep and hidden rage that she admitted to me only at the end of her life. she often shared with me her inner torment of feeling she would be wiped out, obliterated, emotionally killed off, by the other person and rejecting or tormenting the other would save her. she felt her life depended on it. but there was the hidden rage motive too. she had to see herself as a self sacrificing, a selfless spring of unwavering love for me ....and me as the rejecting, uncaring "other". i believe it is that terribly damaged object relations, and in her case the "object" (her mother) hated her, literally wanted to destroy her, have her lobotomized and institutionalized. my mother split, saw things as black or white, people were good or evil. intimates or sinister betrayers...she had to see herself as good at all costs. i still am full of doubts. i thought today, maybe i just have a severe chemical imbalance and have come up with all this munch stuff as an explanation for why i am so depressed and tormented....then i thought, "but remember how i gave up the will to live after the second to last surgery at 7 1/2 yrs old?? drs said i wasnt healing and had no wish to live anymore. why would a young child be in such shape?

Sks, What you wrote resonates so much with me. The mother who wants to destroy but at the same time needs to be seen as the one who is such a selfless giver and they are the ones being rejected out of cruelty (which is extremely ironic since they are the ones handing out cruelty in huge doses and they get rejected because of their abhorrent behavior!)

You wrote: "i still am full of doubts. i thought today, maybe i just have a severe chemical imbalance and have come up with all this munch stuff as an explanation for why i am so depressed and tormented....then i thought, "but remember how i gave up the will to live after the second to last surgery at 7 1/2 yrs old?? drs said i wasnt healing and had no wish to live anymore. why would a young child be in such shape?"

I understand. MSBP turns reality on it's head more than anything I've ever encountered. It makes you question what is real/not real--after all, the most powerful and important thing of all--mother's love--was not real. Talk about someone trying to build a house and having the foundation ripped out from under it! This is what it felt like for me trying to be/become a person and it sounds like, for you too this is how it felt.
Plus, the family members whose actions and words show their outright denial of what happened. I have gone no contact with my mother and father (there is no other way to survive mentally) but one of the last things my father said to me was "You just love to recreate reality!" (?!) because I state the truth! As kids or even as adults if we let this kind of thinking get inside our head (and it is so hard not to!!) it is mind-twisting!
Plus, the things I have been able to read on the internet really do not seem to illuminate how sinister MSBP is and says little to nothing about the psychological effects on the victims. Although yesterday I finally found a book called "Practical Aspects of Munchausen by Proxy" by Artingstall and a big chunk of it was available to read online and for the first time I thought, OK this writer gets it. This writer gets just how sick MSBP behavior is and for the first time I myself felt, wow I am not crazy to feel like I was living with an extremely sinister mother from whom I needed to mentally disassociate from in order to survive. I think I am going to order the book. I would recommend it from what I read. It's so hard, not being able to freely talk about this MSBP which had such a huge impact on our lives with other people (at least I feel I can't) but reading the book might be affirming to how we perceived the MSBP behavior and how it effected us. I think it is because when a young child realizes or simply knows intuitively that mother's love is not real this places everything else we feel is "real" into doubt. You seem like such a kind and strong person, this is something to take solace in that something inside your being was not harmed by them, they could not take it away or destroy it. I hope the New Year is bringing you only good, Layla