Hi. While replying to a previous thread, I thought I’d start this topic. My parents had a one-act play (I like to call it) – their staged performance for us kids, and others, too (hey, it’s more fun when there’s an audience, right?). Mom would pick-pick-pick-pick at Dad. Dad would get mad. Mom would cry and go to her room (this was usually around mealtimes, so she would often stop eating / refuse to eat – it’s more dramatic that way, you see). Mom portrayed herself as the victim. Dad was the perpetrator. I actually fell for this bit for a long time. Sometime during my adulthood, I started to see that there was no true “victim” or “perp.” They did it to each other. He’d ignore her and not come home, visiting friends, or one of his string of girlfriends, she’d nag and gripe and belittle him, he’d get pissed and snap back, she’d run off and cry. I now see things in a whole new light. I don’t see their marriage of 40+ years so much as a “successful marriage” (yikes!) as I do an uncanny ability of both of them to tolerate abuse. As a child, I clung to my dad, who basically tolerated me, as long as I kept quiet and stayed out of the way. He wasn’t particularly loving to me, but he was a picnic compared to the emotional and psychological mind-game playing, crazy-making mother. Therein lied my loyalty to him. It wasn’t for what he DID do, but rather for what he DIDN’T. Fast forward to my teen / adulthood…there was always something to be impressed with about someone, because of what they didn’t do…didn’t do drugs, didn’t hit me, etc. Mother, I have only recently figured out, treated me in a way to ‘resolve’ her issues with her younger sister. She was the elder of two sisters, and felt that the younger was treated much better than she was. Truth be told, I will have nothing to do with that aunt – she can be found on several pages of an Abnormal Psychology textbook. That notwithstanding, my mother, I don’t believe, has ever resolved her issues with her own family.But what it took me so long to realize, is that she didn’t hate ME, per se. She hated the “younger sister” persona that I represented. She treated me the way she would have (immaturely) liked to have seen her own younger sister treated. She purposely caused conflict between my own elder sister and myself, the same way that she had cried about for years, that her own mother had done to she and her sister. Once I finally figured this out (“My God, it WASN’T ME!! It wasn’t because I was flawed, or sick, or evil, or a little s—. It was her. It had NOTHING TO DO WITH ME”). What she did over the years was create a child with very low self-worth. This caused me, I believe, to attract people into my life who valued me very little. I was attracted to them too, because I was subconsciously attracting my ‘mother’ in an attempt to finally prove to ‘her’ that I was valuable. This is a classic case of a set-up for abuse. You don’t value yourself; you find people who don’t value you; this reinforces the belief that you really aren’t worth much; you can’t ‘prove’ your worth to them, because guess what? THEY too, are looking at you through the same diseased filter as your toxic parent(s) did. When I realized though (gosh, just a few months back), that “it was HER; it wasn’t me, it never was me”…holy buckets! That made a huge difference and I feel like I have recovered quite a bit. Guess I’ve said enough on this topic for now…my main point, I’m trying to make is that if we “grewed up screwed up” as I call it, those are the issues we need to first resolve before we can begin attracting people into our lives who actually value us, and can see the beauty we all have within. That is key, I think in many cases as to why people look at us, especially if we’ve had a string of ‘bad’ relationships, and wonder, “Does she LIKE being abused or what?!?” No; it’s just that sometimes, you don’t know any different.