Emotional abuse is strange. So is bullying. And as my doctor has recently helped clarify for me: bullying by crazy people is different than bullying by bullies who are more cognizant of what they are doing.
Sometimes, when people are mentally ill, they think they are interacting normally with others. They surround themselves with all sorts of machinations and constructs that reinforce the notions, "I'm normal. I'm just having a normal conversation here." I thought I was interacting normally with my wife in the worst of the worst months before diagnosis. I was so ill at that point and she was at her wits end. I now see how downright crazy I was.
I grew up in a household where one parent had undiagnosed mental illness (likely severe cPTSD resulting from extremely severe childhood abuse and possibly some degree of DID). She emotionally abused both me and my sister. Her standard mode of conversation is a form of emotional bullying.
As my doc helped point out just recently, when you stand up to "normal" bullies and defend yourself, they often move on to another more compliant target. But when you confront a crazy bully, they often get much worse and immediately because you are challenging all those machinations and constructs. In my case, any attempt to establish what I instinctively understood to be healthy boundaries as a child and teen resulted in my mother committing acts of gross self harm, all the way up to a suicide attempt at the crescendo of our little pas de deux.
This creates an entrapping double bind, a prison without bars. Many abusers will do this via some means or another, you know, coerce via force or emotional abuse full compliance out of their victims. Sometimes abusers prey upon the remaining shreds of human decency in their victims, such as your mother's desire NOT to see harm come to other people, especially family. Of course she'd beg you not to reveal what happened. There may have also been reality based fears of repercussions.
Early in my recovery process my doc clarified that when we human beings are pushed to the limit and forced to make really lousy choices, especially a series of really lousy choices, where nobody really wins and where you are forced to chose between the lesser of two or more nasty evils, PTSD is often the result. We do the best we can with the options available at the time. These questions you have sound pretty normal to me. They echo some of the questions that haunt me in my more contemplative nightmares and teeter on the existential.
Lastly, regarding your question of "who's brainwashing who" -- like your situation, mine had two parents. Took me some time to realize the deep well of anger I have for my father. Not once did I ever see him do anything to stop my mother, to encourage her to get help. Instead, he went on as if our family was normal. He went out of his way to convince me of that on several occasions in fact. He even threatened to hospitalize me as a child and a young teen on several occasions when I did what anyone in my situation would have done: stood up for myself.
And that was the brainwashing I went through: stand up for myself and protect any sort of healthy boundaries and pick your punishment: get hospitalized or drive your mother to suicide.
Oddly though, through all those years, only once did anyone ever land a punch on me. And for years, that fact contributed to my own machination that I had not suffered any abuse and that any compliants I had was just me being a whiney brat upset about being told to eat all my green vegetables and go to bed at bedtime. Somehow, I'd blacked out all the really nasty stuff.
Anyways, yeah, what you are saying about being confused and dead inside sounds familiar. This crap is exhausting. And though some folks who haven't been through it might not get it: emotional abuse takes its toll and can really screw a person up.
Stay strong, Sigh. Keep seeking health and peace.
~ Blues
