I’ve emerged again from my pit because I’ve seen a lot of posts talking about Ella’s personality, and how she’s an Alice Mini-Me.
I used to be an Ella.
When I was in my early tweens/teens I went to a private school with a lot of wealthy kids. My father had just discovered alcohol and was rapidly working his way up to 3-4 bottles of wine a night. My mother had become hyper-religious in response to all the abuse. I had no-one at all. Being autistic didn’t help. (I’m not at all implying that Ella is autistic - I’m referring to my situation.)
I lied like mad and said I was rich because I wanted people to like me. I wrote someone a horrible anonymous letter. I even stole something from school. I took pound coins from my father’s coat pockets to buy my mother ;and even him, to get him to like me) presents, to stop her pulling away from me.
I can’t believe that I did such things now, but I’m kind to my younger self and realise why I - she - acted that way.
I wanted my mother to protect me from my father, not in essence leave me. I wanted my narcissist alcoholic father to praise and love me - more than that, I wanted him to recognise I was a valid and valuable person in my own right. I wanted an ally, not a mother who was off completing her interrupted (due to my father) education or a father who was endlessly self-pitying and self-victimising.
I blamed my mother because I felt abandoned. I acted out horribly in front of her because she was safe.
I’m not a carbon copy of my narc father and Ella is not a narc copy of Alice.
I pulled away from them both in the end. I didn’t rekindle a relationship with my mother until I was in my twenties. I can be cordial with/to my father but the damage is done, and it’s ineradicable.
Ella is angry. All she’s done - taking $400, hacking, this latest stunt - is actually because she WANTS her father. She needs him. But she needs to keep her dangerous ‘mother’ sweet because, for now, she’s stuck with her. She feels completely abandoned. IG put on his own oxygen mask first. He came back with a live-in girlfriend. Ella’s been dealing with her mother’s’ self-pity and addictions. She knows she’ll never get real love from Alice. She feels IG no longer loves her and has moved on with BW.
She’s a kid. A kid in horrendous pain. I think that if IG steps away now, she’ll go on to a very dark path. She’ll attack someone who neither knows nor cares about her and face the full force of the law. Her ‘mother’ is enabling and contributing to this behaviour, rather than reinforcing early lessons about moral wrongs.
I turned out just fine. My moral centre is absolute. I break no commandment.
Please can we cut Ella some slack?
