Dear Mrs. Bluth,
I don’t know what is wrong with my life but I am beginning to believe that the problem lies with me. I am about to end my third marriage in the space of fourteen years to an extremely abusive man who is making my life unbearably painful both physically and emotionally. What is it that makes men subjugate their wives in order to feel powerful, important and fulfilled? I am an attractive, intelligent person with an outgoing personality, so why is it that I keep making the same mistake? Why am I attracted to destructive, abusive partners?
My childhood and home life was painful and dysfunctional and I was raised by my mother who was left an agunah after my father just disappeared one day. My eldest sister (there were four of us, all girls) was 11 and I, the youngest, was two and change. My mother did the best she could but she couldn’t deal with the shame and responsibility of raising four children all by herself with hardly any help or understanding from anyone. She subsequently suffered a nervous breakdown from which she never fully recovered and because she was institutionalized most of the time, we went to live with my grandparents. I do have recollections of small periods of time when she would be with us in my grandparents’ home. Those were memories tinged with acid and bile and reflected in every photograph I found of myself as a toddler, youngster and teenager wherein each one I appeared sad and somber, never smiling, with unshed tears hiding just beneath the surface of my dark and brooding eyes.
My grandparents were not prepared to suddenly care for four little girls as they were getting on in years, and we were probably not the easiest children to raise, so we were all quite resentful of each other. My grandparents never cared for my father and cut off all contact with my mother after she married him, so they were virtual strangers to us when we went to live with them in their tiny, cramped apartment on the Lower East Side.
To add to the many conflicts that intensified the hostility between us, they were ultra Orthodox and we kids were raised in a non-traditional environment where my mother had to work on Shabbos so that she could support us. My grandfather saw us as a bunch of heathens, ungrateful and unwanted and my grandmother, a stern, cold and unloving woman forced to take in her granddaughters so that the community could see what a tzadeikes she was, but behind closed doors she beat us, degraded us and never let us forget what a burden we were to her. It is no surprise that we grew up twisted, emotionally stunted and despising everything that had to do with Orthodoxy or religion. We grew up believing that we had been abandoned by both man and G-d.
My eldest sister ran away when she was sixteen and we haven’t heard from her since. My second oldest sister was married off when she was seventeen-and-a-half, to an ultra Orthodox man fourteen years older than herself, sold into a life of servitude and depression. My third sister escaped to Israel and made a career for herself in the army. I, too, married at an early age and thus began a series of mistakes and failed marriages that have followed me to this day. The blessing is that I am childless by choice as I never want to bring a life into this horrible, loveless and lonely existence that I have suffered. But I am still here and I want to change the course of my life for the better. The past, however, refuses to let me be. and that is why I am writing to you. I will be looking for your reply in a forthcoming issue of the paper. Many thanks.
Dear Friend,
Based on your letter, I can certainly understand why the trajectory of your life has taken such a downward spiral. You appear to be an intelligent, articulate and perceptive person who has suffered much, yet you have maintained the will to strive for a better life and this is the starting point of all change.
Your understanding, in your introspection on your childhood, is that love and nurturing were not only absent but was replaced with abusive taunts, belittlements and degradations, and these were given to you on the ‘good days.’ You have been denied the mental, emotional and spiritual sustenance that every child needs in order to grow up safe, loved and secure. There is no way you could recognize these qualities in another if you did not experience them yourself. Instead you sought out the only personality you normalized from your childhood because you normalized them. Your many insecurities come from the fact that you experienced abandonment, first by your father, and then by your mother, due to illness. Your sisters floated out of your life one by one and so you had no stability or permanence in your life to ground you and give you a sense of belonging.
It is important for you to seek the help of a therapist you can trust, and are willing to work with. You have to tie up loose ends, get clarity on why you are not able to free yourself from your destructive past and use the tools and methods that will set you on the road to the life you so desperately want. Also helpful would be for you to read the book “Women Who Love Too Much” by Dr. Robin Norwood, which discusses the phenomenon of women who repeatedly get involved in abusive relationships as a result of abusive childhoods and the road to healing and overcoming that destructive pattern.