Updated Jul 24, 2019
These are two different questions/issues.
Age 11, when she directly stated that she beat all three of her children “not for discipline”, but rather, because it “made (her) feel better”.
I figured out, after years of violence… “She isn’t beating me because I’m a bad person … But rather, because she is a bad person”.
Years later, when I was twenty, I learned about the massive denial, victim-blaming taboo that is endemic among women.
I naively assumed that, the average adult woman had awareness and understanding of the pervasive reality of maternal child abuse.
It was at that age that I learned that, females who didn’t experience maternal child abuse are all in a state of denial and victim-blaming. Non-survivors live in a fantasy-world. And that was a realisation almost as profound as the realisation of my mother’s abusive nature.
Those people are effectively accomplices to the abuse. And, due to their numbers and pervasiveness, cannot be jettisoned with anything near the ease that the one direct abuser was dismissed from my life when I was eighteen.