Child abuse, part 3.3: Voluntary victimhood
Channel: spiritanvil
Date: 29/11/2012

This video's contents are interspersed with brief flashback experiences, as well as a single mention of self-harm, which might be triggering. I have left everything in on the assumption that people who experience similar things in their own recovery process might be better able to empathize with themselves by seeing such things happen in another person.

I loosely address the idea of voluntary victimhood and the character of the "borderline waif" - a person who suffers from borderline personality disorder (BPD) and expresses it as extreme helplessness and frailty, continually asking people to rescue her through various verbal and nonverbal cues, but also voluntarily placing herself in the very situations from which she needs to be rescued. The borderline mother, in particular, may try to control her children via guilt-trips and obligations, pulling them into the dysfunctional family's fold.

The follow-up videos will include more detailed information on different aspects of my mother's attitude, which I believe led up to and cemented her difficult circumstances.