Abusing behaviour makes children cold-blooded for parents

Ellie Muir, The Independent

As a child, Alexandra Walker endured years of what she describes as emotional abuse by her father. By the time she reached her thirties, her father’s worsening alcohol dependency only put further strain on their already fractured relationship. Alexandra decided to cut ties with him during the Easter period in 2022. Just over a year later, Alexandra received a call from her father’s neighbour informing her that he had not been seen for several weeks; his lawn was overgrown and his post was piling up. He was then found in his home, having been dead for about a month.

From this point, Alexandra experienced every emotion imaginable. There was guilt. Shame. Sadness. “I had always been nervous about my father’s death because he had cut ties with almost everyone in his life,” Alexandra tells me. “It was shocking to deal with the reality of the fact that he died alone. I had a mixture of anger about the whole thing. And disbelief, and shock. And if I’m being really honest, there was also a sense of relief, because I couldn’t see any good end to his situation. I just knew that it was only going to get worse because he had isolated himself.”

Addressing the loss of a family member with whom you had a complex relationship is never easy, nor straightforward. This is something that Mariah Carey is likely grappling with this week, after she announced that her mother, Patricia, and her estranged sister, Alison, died on the same day. The causes of their deaths remain unknown.

In her 2020 memoir, The Meaning of Mariah Carey, the singer-songwriter described her relationship with her mother as one characterised by “betrayal and beauty”, “love and abandonment”, and filled with a combination of “pride, pain, shame, gratitude, jealousy, admiration and disappointment”. She continued: “Like many aspects of my life, my journey with my mother has been full of contradictions and competing realities. It’s never been only black-and-white — it’s been a whole rainbow of emotions.”

She also wrote that her therapist encouraged her to “rename and reframe” her family and her relationships with them. “My mother became Pat to me, Morgan my ex-brother and Alison my ex-sister,” she wrote. “I had to stop expecting them to one day miraculously become the mommy, big brother and big sister I fantasised about.”

Carey also wrote of her strained relationship with Alison, writing that her sister was “brilliant and broken” and had experienced things that had “damaged and derailed her girlhood”. She alleged that her sister “drugged me with Valium, offered me a pinky nail full of durg, inflicted me with third-degree burns, and tried to sell me out”. She later came to accept that it was “emotionally and physically safer” to withdraw contact from her sister instead of continuing a relationship.

Carey’s complicated state of grief was also articulated by former child star Jennette McCurdy in her own memoir, 2022’s bestselling I’m Glad My Mom Died. It recounts her relationship with her mother, Debra, who McCurdy says was abusive and invasively controlled every aspect of her life, from her friendships down to her body hair. McCurdy was relieved when her mother died and the abuse finally ended, but that also didn’t mean that she didn’t miss her, or grieve for her. “I used to really have a complicated relationship with missing her; I’d miss her, then I’d feel angry and that she doesn’t deserve for me to miss her,” McCurdy told The Guardian when promoting her book. “(My mother) abused me, how do I still have love for this person? It was a deeply confused form of grief.”

Grief has many layers. But with the added context of a fractured — or abusive — relationship, the experience is sometimes much more distressing than losing someone you were on good terms with. Sarah Lee, a UKCP psychotherapist who works with childhood trauma survivors in Manchester, tells me that the experience of losing a family member who harmed you can be isolating. Society tends to instruct us that there’s only one way to speak about the deceased — that we have to be respectful, solemn and sad. Shades of grey aren’t enormously encouraged.

During our conversation, Lee describes a hypothetical scenario in which an adult attends the funeral of their abusive parent, and watches their life being celebrated in a wholly positive light. “Maybe that person is really sad at the funeral because everyone’s talking about how great their parent was,” she says. “They go home and they start thinking, well, hang on a minute. ‘What about all the times they left me at home on my own to go out drinking? Or they told me that they hated me? Or that my life was completely pointless?’ And then they get angry.” Lee tells me that this is one example of the emotional “jumping around” that comes with this type of grieving process.

Lee says that self-blame and self-loathing might accompany these emotions. While there is no one way to grieve, beliefs like “Don’t speak ill of the dead” are often widely adhered to — and veering away from the norm might raise some eyebrows. “There’s a potential to feel triggered by the fact that you’re not doing ‘grief properly’ or feeling judged by other people,” says Lee.