Comeback: A Mother and Daughter's Journey Through Hell and Back

Caretaking is never about the other person. It's about wanting to feel needed because you're afraid you're not wanted.

It is its own religion, this love. Uncontainable, savage, and without end, it is what I feel for my child.

God doesn't create suffering Claire, we do. We make the world and then we break it.

[Samantha Dunn] wrote that when God wants your attention, first He throws feathers. After that, He starts throwing bricks.

Sometimes, we have to give birth to our children twice....Once your child becomes the "garbage" other parents are afraid of, you never look at any teen, or yourself, the same again. All you see is the child they once were.

My relationship with God has evolved as well. I no longer rail or beg or sass back. I was standing on a bluff over the ocean the other day and suddenly laughed out loud as I realized what an illusion that was, what an impossibility. That would assume a relationship between a “me” and “Other,” a separation. There is no otherness; to be separate from God is to be separate from myself, from life itself. What I’ve been looking for, I’m looking with.

Nor did I grasp the capacity of love's absence to destroy, that my lack of love for myself made my own life unbearable. You take someone whose life experiences have taught them they're worthless, string them out on drugs, and you have one miserable person. How could I have given what I didn't have? It's hard to value another life when you view your own as dispensable, hard to understand how you can have so great an effect on someone else when you don't think you matter.

- Child is abused, perpetrator threatens to hurt mother. Child feels protective of mother. - Struggle to escape perp reinforces feelings of mutual protection. It's Mom and I against the world. - Something necessary at the time later creates "enmeshment." Child doesn't see her actions as separate from mother. Even during normal adolescent individuation. But-- - Normal individuation doesn't happen in abuse survivors. They don't feel normal, so they-- - Act out in unhealthy or self-destructive ways, which creates-- - Fear and pain for mother, which creates-- - Guilt for child who still feels responsible for mother's emotional health. - Child seeks release from the guilt and from not feeling normal, which leads to-- - Escape to the world of other not normal people, where mother can't see her child self-destruct, which leads to-- "The bad news.

Accountability is not about blame, it’s not about being wrong, it is about owning the choices you’ve made, or are making, that create the results you have in your life. And you do create everything in your life.

What was the payoff? It obviously kept me in my cozy zone of being in control, being a good mother, with a good daughter. Most of all, I realize, is that it allowed me to maintain the lie that she was healed, that Nick hadn't permanently damaged her, that I'd truly saved her. Because if I did, if there was no lasting residue of him, it meant that the denial that kept me in the marriage long enough for him to hurt her didn't help create the situation she's in now. The person who I worked hardest to keep safe seems to have been me.