How to deal with trauma and abuse, start the healing.

Hi everyone, this is the draft of one of my most recent podcasts which you can listen to by clicking here. I read a story recently online about a Malay woman from Singapore who gave up on her abusive mother and it made me cry - I'm not going to retell the story here and instead, I'm simply going to tell you to go read it yourself. If you're interested, look up the Instagram profile thewokesalaryman and you can see that post from the 15th July. I just wanted to answer a question at the end of that story - allow me to quote the question asked. "I would always wonder - why was she like that? What made her like that? Did she have an undiagnosed medical condition that we didn't know about? I tried to psycho analyse every part of her personality. Explain away all her abuse as due to some childhood trauma or medical issue. The thought of her treating me this way just because was incomprehensible to me." Now for the sake of simplicity and clarity, I am going to call this Malay woman 'Siti' as that's a common name for a Malay woman and refer to her mother as Ibu, which is simply the Malay word for mother. Believe me this will reduce a lot of confusion later. I think it is misleading to go down the medical route to provide some kind of excuse for one's bad behaviour - we have seen this so much in the media recently. In the UK, you might be aware of the case involving the former host of Masterchef Greg Wallace who has since been sacked - he has been accused of everything from exposing himself to juniors members of staff, touching younger female members of staff inappropriately and this goes way beyond inappropriate language at work. If you grope someone without their consent, that's a form of sexual assault and you could go to jail for that. In his defence, he claimed that he had undiagnosed autism and that somehow excuses away all his criminal behaviour. No it doesn't - I'm autistic too, but being autistic does not give you a "get out of jail free" card when you are found guilty these very serious crimes. 

Yet in the case of Siti, the extent of her mother's abuse is criminal - in the West, there would be grounds to send Ibu to jail for a very long time but hey, that's Asia for you and instead, we have the victim trying to make up excuses for the abusers by inventing medical conditions to somehow give them a free pass when it comes to all their worst criminal behaviour. Obviously, this issue touched a raw nerve with me, so instead I'm going to look at the issue from a sociological point of view and explain using sociology why there is something vital missing from our parents' generation and spoiler alert: one of the reasons involves a washing machine. I am going to explain the situation to you using far more logical evidence using human geography and sociology, without giving these abusers any kind of made up imaginary medical conditions to excuse their wrongdoing. Note that this idea of giving Ibu a medical excuse to behave in such an abusive manner didn't come from Ibu, no it came from Siti. I read about this story when I was on holiday in Spain, so I've had plenty of time to process my thoughts and prepare this podcast and I'm hoping it will be enlightening. 

Allow me to explain the three factors that made our parents' upbringing very different from ours - I'm 49 so I'm talking about my parents' childhood which was mostly in the 1940s and of course we all know life was very different back then but we need to analyze the three biggest differences. Firstly, families were much bigger back then, people had a lot more children as that was the norm. Both my parents had 6 siblings, but that meant their parents only had 7 children - it wasn't unusual at all for parents to have up to 8 even 10 children back then! The two main reasons why people had that many children back then was because of very high infant mortality, many children didn't survive into adulthood due to poor health, so parents often had more children to ensure that at least some of them would survive and grow up. My own mother had a sister die from illness when she was about 6. Secondly, back then parents saw children as their own pension plan - children were expected to take care of their elderly parents, so the more children you had, the more children you could rely on. Not all of your children will turn out rich, so having more children was their way to spread the risk to ensure at that least some of your children will turn out financially stable enough to support you when you got old. Of course, people weren't that educated back then, they didn't think it was important to have fewer children so you could focus on them by investing more in their education - attitudes towards education were very different back then as it wasn't considered important at all then. Finally, there was also an issue of birth control - many people didn't little or no understanding of where babies came from and wives felt like they had no choice but to give in to their husbands whenever their husbands demanded sex even if that led to way too many babies. Many of the modern birth control options we use today simply weren't available to people back in that era, hence they just kept having too many babies.

The second factor that defined that generation was far worse working conditions - nowadays we have laws to protect the rights of workers in our modern society and if an employer were to act abusively towards their workers, they would be breaking the law. Back then, people didn't have that luxury at all. Unless you were a very rich business owner, you often have to work long and hard just to put enough food on the table for your family, especially if you had many children! Even in a country like Singapore which famously doesn't have a welfare state, there are still various schemes to help very low income families to ensure that nobody ends up totally destitute - those schemes didn't exist back in the 1940s and people literally starved to death back then! Case in point, that's exactly what happened to my own grandfather (my mother's father). He had 7 children and it was hard to bring up such a big family when he earned so little - it got to the point where if he didn't work for a day or 2, there would be no money for food. So one day he fell ill, he realized he had no choice but to go out to work even if he was feeling very sick, he simply had no choice, they were that poor. A common cold turned into full blown flu, which then turned into pneumonia and when he finally collapsed, they rushed him to the hospital but it was too late to save his life - that's how desperate their economic situation was. He left my grandmother 7 children to bring up as a single mother, as if life wasn't hard enough for her already. My family is perhaps an extreme example of the kind of poverty endured by that generation and even in the cases of families who weren't that poor, they weren't comfortable either - they often had to work very long hours just to make ends meet and support those large families. And as if these conditions were not already extremely hard, I have to highlight a third feature that defined this generation. 

I did my laundry today and all I had to do was fill up the washing machine with the dirty clothes, put in the detergent and turn the machine on; the whole process took about a minute. But what was doing the laundry like for my grandmother back in the day as she didn't have running water, electricity - never mind a washing machine? Firstly, she had to get water from the village well which was a fair hike from the house. She then had to scrub each individual garment by hand in the soapy water until they were clean enough before rinsing them off, often she ran out of water at that point and would have to make a second trip to the well. It was a back breaking hard work, a task that took me one minute to do today would take her one to two hours, leaving her totally exhausted. I have a big fridge in my kitchen so I can easily store food, so I don't have to go grocery shopping everyday. But for my grandmother, she didn't have a fridge back then, so she had to go to the market everyday to buy food to prepare meals for her family and she couldn't afford to take the bus, she had to walk to the nearest market, then carry everything back home. If I felt really lazy, I could even order online and get everything I need delivered so I only have to walk to my front door but for my grandmother, once again, a task that can take me a minute or two today would take her an hour or two back then and leave her exhausted. Pardon me for stating the obvious but without a lot of our modern technology, life was extremely hard back then for my grandparents. Thus I have the time to do the things I enjoy like record this podcast after I have done my laundry and ordered my groceries online, whilst my grandmother would have been left totally exhausted after having done those two tasks in about four hours. Thus for people like her back in those days, they simply had no leisure time whatsoever after having done all of these labour intensive housework tasks. If they had any spare time, they would probably just take a nap as all of these tasks usually left them feeling so physically exhausted. A short afternoon nap was probably the greatest treat they could get in those days before getting on with the next physically exhausting task. Remember, my grandparents were extremely poor, simple housework chores took hours to complete and at that stage, if you considered those factors, the logical conclusion would be avoid having children altogether or to have only one child, but people of that generation did the complete opposite by having ten children and the only explanation I have for this is that people weren't educated at all in those days, hence they didn't know how to make logical decisions and simply defaulted to the social norms. 

So when you combine these three key factors for that generation: having so many children, having to work very long hours to barely make ends meet and the curse of very labour intensive housework chores that had to be done almost everyday, the net result is that they had no free time whatsoever at the end of the day. That meant no hobbies, no time to do fun activities, no time for self improvement and by that same token, no time to get to know your many children. My father used to joke that his own father could never even remember the names of his children under such conditions, so even when someone could come to him with an accusation like, "Poh Ahn broke the window!" The old man would get angry, then look around in that weird mix of confusion and anger, not quite knowing which child to punish as he simply couldn't remember which child was Poh Ahn - under such circumstances, he might even lash out at the wrong child and the innocent child would scream, "no I'm not Poh Ahn, I am Poh Chu, Poh Ahn is hiding in the toilet. He did it, not me." My father found those stories bemusing whilst I am shocked that this was the norm back then, for a parent not to even remember simple details like that when it came to their own children. But that's exactly what happens when you have that many children, you have to work long hours and then come home to do physically exhausting housework chores, something has got to give and that meant parents didn't have time to get to know their children. I'm not talking about little details like knowing what your child's favourite subject was at school or which teacher your son didn't like at school, I'm talking about my confused grandfather looking around the room struggling to identify the right child corresponding with that name he had just been told. So how is that possible, even under those very different social conditions back then? 

It's a simple case of a sensation I call, "I just can't be bothered, I have nothing to gain." Allow me to give you an example of this from my own experience. Some years back, I was working in a company where I had a colleague - let's call her Lucy, not her real name. She was going through a messy divorce and one afternoon, I spotted her on the phone, in the corridor having an emotional conversation and she was clearly crying. It was something about the divorce and I didn't disturb her, but when I saw her later, I had the opportunity to ask her if she was alright and if she wanted to talk about it - I chose not to do  as I did a quick risk-reward evaluation in my head. I wasn't that close to Lucy and a divorce is a messy and deeply personal issue. I risked coming across as a very nosy busybody who was intruding into her personal life in a most unwelcomed manner - would she tell me to mind my own business? Might she accuse me of eavesdropping on a private conversation? After all, she had mentioned nothing about her divorce to me previously, why would she want to talk about it to me now just because we're both in the same office at the same time? She might have been on the phone to a friend she was more comfortable to talk to about this topic hence there was no real need for me to try to talk to her about it. Furthermore, I also thought, I had so much to do that afternoon, do I really have 30 minutes or an hour to set aside to talk to Lucy about her divorce? I thought I had little to gain since we weren't close friends at all, we were just colleagues and I wasn't emotionally invested enough into that relationship to care if she was having a really stressful day because of that divorce. I simply pretended not to have noticed that she had been crying because I couldn't be bothered to intervene, I had nothing to gain by helping. Now I'm sure you'll find my response to that situation with Lucy quite reasonable as you might have found yourself in a similar situation before. Now imagine if a parent treated a child in the same way, say if the parent spotted the child crying and upset, would the parent pretend not to have noticed that on the basis of them being way too busy to find time to get involved or would the parent have the kind of instinct to immediately want to comfort the child? I'm afraid in the case of the older generation, it is always the former and rarely ever the latter because that's just always been the way with Asian parents. There is simply no parental instinct to respond with love or kindness because it is something they didn't grow up with at all and hence they are completely alien to that concept. 

I was 18 years old when one of my childhood friends from gymnastics passed away, she had a rare form of leukemia. One moment she was well and we were chatting, the next moment I found out that she died, just like that. I was inconsolable, I cried and wailed at the injustice of seeing an 18 year old taken by leukemia. My mother saw me crying and she literally ran away so quickly, she hid in the kitchen as if to say, I wasn't there, I didn't see you so I'm not obliged to try to deal with all these emotions even though you're crying so loudly half the country can hear you but I'm gonna ignore you. My mother reacted to me crying over the death of my good friend the same way I reacted to my colleague Lucy crying over her divorce. The only way I can explain it is that nobody ever offered my mother any kind of comfort or love when she encountered pain and grief in the past, so the concept of offering emotional support to another person in these situations is completely alien and foreign to her. I don't want to sound like I am making excuses for my mother, but it reminded me of when I started learning French - of course, my mother doesn't speak any French at all, not a word. So it wasn't like I could run to my mother and asked her for help with my French homework; it was simply a subject that she had absolutely zero knowledge about and I didn't expect her to offer any help in that way, but some encouragement might have been nice and of course, she wasn't capable of that either. Her default response seems to be this "I just can't be bothered, I have nothing to gain by getting involved." It might be heartless to react like that to someone at work going through a hard time, but it was really tough to be at the receiving end of that from my own parents all those years ago. Look, I don't want to feel sorry for myself here and at the same time, I really don't want to make excuses for my parents either, so let me try to explain to you what happened, what went so terribly wrong and how we ended up like that. 

My grandparents had to work long and hard hours, housework chores took hours to complete and thus they had no time to get to know their children in any meaningful way. Our parents however weren't subjected to that kind of hardship, certainly when I was growing up in Singapore in the 1980s, life got a lot easier on all of those fronts. My parents had 3 children instead of 7 or 8, so the financial burden on them to raise a family was lighter. They worked as school teachers and enjoyed much longer holidays than their peers, thanks to the school holidays that meant that they effectively had nearly 12 weeks of paid holidays a year and that was unrivaled in Singapore where most people have no more than 2 or 3 weeks of paid holidays a year. Furthermore, whilst we were poor but we could afford everything from a fridge to a washing machine to vacuum cleaner to a microwave oven, the house had every single labour device you could think of as those became quite affordable on their salaries. The fact is my parents didn't face a lot of the hardships that their parents faced, that meant they had a lot more time on their hands which they could have used to get to know their children better. However, they didn't do that, mostly because they never experienced that kind of relationship with their own parents and so nobody actually gave them the memo that this was what they were supposed to do as parents. What did my parents do with all that free time then? Well, my father mostly liked watching trashy Chinese TV programmes and I recall how he would lose track of what he was watching, zone out and fall asleep on the sofa until one of us went to turn off the TV. I suppose all these programmes were supposed to be light entertainment, they made him forget his problems, they distracted him from the things he had to do at work and most of all, it didn't require any effort from him in order to enjoy the programmes. It was a wasted opportunity, my parents could have spent all that time getting to know their children better, developing a more profound and meaningful relationship with them but instead, they chose to watch TV and thus we repeat the cycle of Asian parents taking very little interest in their children. The conditions have changed a lot from my grandparents' generation to my parents generation, yet somehow, this aspect of not bothering to get to know your own children hasn't changed at all. Now you might find that puzzling but I have a really simple answer to that.

My education was very different from that of my parents' generation, sure I went to school in Singapore but my cultural influences were from far and wide. I did so many things that I took for granted, things that my parents never ever had the chance to do. For example, I watched many television programmes and movies from other countries, I also read books and magazines from other countries. My parents didn't have access to any of that in their childhood - their cultural influences were a lot more local whilst mine were global. It is evident how huge an impact that has had on me when you look at the difference between how I navigate the world and how my parents view the world. I have worked with people from all over world and have thrived in work environments where the main languages spoken were Spanish, French, German, Italian or Russian. Traveling independently doesn't faze me at all, in fact I relish the adventures I've had on my trips to Central & South America and Africa. I speak 7 languages fluently but I can get by in over 30 languages. In sharp contrast, my parents would get nervous when they venture into an unfamiliar part of Singapore and despite the fact that they are much older than me, their education has been so lacking that it hasn't provided them with any useful skills to deal with the modern world at all. Perhaps I am stating the obvious here - my parents were educated in the 1940s and 1950s and education in those days really sucked. The schools were severely underfunded, the teachers were very poorly trained, the class sizes were way too big and so the overall experience for the vast majority of students then was simply terrible - people like my parents learnt absolutely nothing useful at all to prepare them for adulthood. Only a small minority of the very rich in that generation could buy a better quality of education for their children but for ordinary working class people like my parents, education was a total waste of time. If they were at least literate when they left school, it was already considered a huge victory. By that token, they simply didn't have the chance at all to learn about other cultures and they weren't even encouraged to take an interest in other cultures and learn from them. This is why they were oblivious to the outside world, oblivious to different kinds of cultures where parents actually love their children, where parents do take the time and form meaningful relationships with their children. People like my parents are like frogs at the bottom of the well, isolated from the rest of the world, totally uninterested and unaware of the world out there; thus they believe that their experiences and culture (yes even the mistakes and flaws in their culture) are the norm.

My grandparents faced such hardship that they didn't have the time to get to know their children, my parents got distracted by TV and thought that parents having this cold, distant relationship with their children was the norm as that was exactly the kind of relationship they had with their own parents. They never questioned their culture, they never said to themselves, our parents did a terrible job with us because they faced so much hardship but our generation must do better. No, instead their attitude was more like, "well this is just the way things are, this was the way my parents treated me and so this will be the way I shall treat my own children - this is our culture, this is just the way it is and will be, I won't change it." I suppose I've been very lucky to have lived, studied and worked in so many countries all over the world, so I have experienced loads of different cultures from different countries and thus I can compare and contrast everything I have experienced to my own culture that I grew up with. Yet my parents only know their own culture, they never interacted with people from other countries in any kind of meaningful way and have no knowledge of how this issue is handled in different cultures - they have absolutely nothing to compare it with and they only know what their own parents have taught them. But the problem is that what their parents have left them was a very harsh, cruel and unforgiving experience born out of an environment of extreme hardship, that caused their parents to make so many really dumb mistakes along the way, like hideously stupid mistakes like having ten children when you are already so very poor. But instead of questioning the culture they have been given and striving to do a lot better, they default to this attitude of, "this is our culture, this is who we are, this is how things are done in our culture." I find that really sad and regrettable. Our parents didn't just inherit their parents' culture in that sense, no they went one step further - they inherited their parents' dumb mistakes by making those very same mistakes again and punishing the next generation with those mistakes. That is wrong, that is not acceptable and that was why I had to say, I will not partake in this stupidity, this isn't about your culture, this is you being too stupid to question what is right and what is wrong. I will not stand for it, I will not suffer the consequences of your stubbornness and stupidity. I must stand up for myself and do what is right, if you have a problem with that, then too bad. I really don't care. I don't need to apologize for doing what is so obviously the right thing to do. 

So in the case of Siti who questioned if her mother had some kind of undiagnosed psychological disorder or mental illness which led to Ibu's extremely abusive behaviour, I have this to say to you.  No, your mother isn't ill at all. This is our parents replicating, repeating the way they were brought up, so it is clear that my mother received no love at all from her own mother when she was a child, that's why she is incapable of offering me something that she never had and I had learnt about concepts like maternal love from movies, TV shows and books rather than from my personal experience with my own mother. As for the abuse, it is almost certain that your mother has experienced a ton of abuse when she was a child herself. But my point is simple: two wrongs don't make a right. Allow me to use an example to illustrate this point. If you were to look at the patterns of serial killers, they don't just wake up one morning and decide to go on a killing spree. There is usually a long history of physical, sexual and psychological abuse they experienced in their childhood and that creates a lot of resentment, anger and frustration that eventually becomes too much to bear and the only way they can let it out is by taking it out on someone else, often through murder but also through other violent means like rape and arson. I know this is a dark subject but bear with me: you simply can't tell the victims of the serial killer that the killer is himself a victim of abuse and this is just the way the past abuse has manifest itself. This is not how we get justice for victims, by allowing them to commit that same crime to someone else. Those serial killers who go down that road never find peace, each murder they commit will only increases their appetite to commit even more heinous crimes. In criminology, there are profilers who specifically study such violent criminals to try to understand their motivations in order to solve such crimes. If a person has suffered abuse, the right reaction to that very unfortunate situation is to seek help to deal with the trauma and start the healing process, but the wrong reaction is to inflict that same abuse on other person. So why do people choose the latter instead of the former then? Choosing the right option after such a traumatic experience requires one to be sufficiently rational and pragmatic, but not everyone is rational and pragmatic. So let's look at the mindset of victims who find themselves in this situation and explore why they react in a very irrational manner. 

Ibu was probably abused by her own mother, but instead of admitting to herself, "yes I have a terrible, abusive mother, this is a horrific situation and I have to find a way to live with that." That was too much for Ibu to do, she couldn't bring herself to do that. In Asia, there's a very strong emphasis on filial piety but no one ever holds bad parents to account - children are expected to respect and obey their parents no matter how violently and criminally abusive they become. Allow me to be the first to say that this is totally wrong and just because it is somehow a part of our culture doesn't make it any more acceptable or logical. So what victims of abuse do in this situation is normalize the abuse they receive - they look at their friends and see that they are being abused by their parents too, they start to blame themselves for the abuse by convincing themselves that they deserved that punishment because they had been lazy, naughty or disrespectful. Then in turn, when they become parents themselves, they complete the circle by inflicting that very same abuse on their own children because by this point, they had already convinced themselves that this kind of abuse is not only completely normal but necessary and a vital part of our Asian culture. So in the case of Ibu, what is going on in her mind when she abuses Siti, her own daughter? My guess is that Ibu has convinced herself that she is the world's best mother, that she is doing absolutely nothing wrong and that this abuse that she is inflicting on her daughter is a form of discipline which is simply a part of her cultural duties as an Asian, Malay mother. But what is really going on is that in abusing her daughter Siti the same way Ibu was abused by her own mother, there is a toxic mix of Ibu convincing herself that this kind of abuse is totally normal and there's also an element of releasing all that pent up anger, pain and frustration from all that abuse from her childhood. Yes, the ugly truth is that Ibu is both a victim and a culprit at the very same time but she made a hideously stupid decision to follow in the footsteps of her abusive mother instead of trying hard to find a better way as a mother to bring up Siti. I have to point out to Siti that simply condoning that kind of abusive at the hands of an abusive mother like that isn't helping Ibu at all, it is simply convincing Ibu that this kind of abusive behaviour is totally cool and normal. I'm really glad Siti finally walked out on her mother and said enough is enough, but so many Asian children never get to that point and they simply tolerate the abuse whilst waiting for their parents to finally pass away - now that's so wrong on so many levels yet so many Asian children simply don't have the will or desire to do what is right like Siti did. 

Thus in response to Siti, no your mother doesn't have some kind of psychological condition or mental illness that has turned her into a monster - she is simply a case of an abuse victim turning into an abuser and that is only too common in Asian culture. There is an important aspect of our lives that I want to address: it is called free will. We always have a choice - for example, just because I grew up in a very poor, working class family doesn't mean I would become a criminal who steals from the rich just because I had experienced bouts of jealousy and envy when I encountered richer people as a child. No, I knew I had to deal with those feelings in a pragmatic and sensible way. Instead of giving in to the bitter feelings of resentment and injustice, I resolved to build a career that will enable me to become rich one day so as an adult, I wouldn't have to experience poverty and let me jump to the punch line, yes I'm very rich today. We always have a choice how we react to suffering and trauma - some people make the right decision and some people make poor, bad decisions. Ibu made some really awful decisions and we need to hold her account for her actions and bad decisions, just because she had been a victim of abuse in the past doesn't mean that she has the divine right to abuse others today. In fact I can't believe I am having to say this as it should be obvious: nobody at all has the right to abuse others, even if they have suffered horrific trauma in the past. That is simply a red line we do not cross - no ifs, no buts, no excuses, no exceptions and if your Asian culture somehow forces you to ignore that red line, then there's something horrifically messed up with your interpretation of what Asian culture means. Ibu needs to be held to account for her actions, being a victim of abuse doesn't give her the right to abuse Siti - where Siti has also gone wrong in her analysis of this situation is that this is not about Siti, this is not even about Siti's relationship with her mother. Rather it is about how Ibu has chosen to deal with her demons that stem from Ibu's own childhood abuse. It took me a long time to work that out for myself as I had been in Siti's shoes and often wondered what I had done to deserve such abuse at the hands of my own parents. And of course, the answer was obvious: nothing. It had nothing to do with me, it was not something I had done or said. I had done absolutely nothing as a child to deserve that kind of abuse. This was instead all about our parents making some incredibly poor decisions when it came to repeating the very worst mistakes of the previous generation on us. 

Thus we need to hold our parents' generation to account when it comes to their worst mistakes. A lot of people don't quite understand what that means, they might even assume that I want to march up to my parents and start scolding them for their mistakes and demand an apology. No, I don't want to do that - remember what I said earlier about how we will do a risk-reward analysis when it comes to our social interactions? I have nothing to gain by having that kind of argument with my parents as I know my sister has already tried to do something similar like that. My parents simply went into denial, claimed that they don't remember what they had done in the past and started accusing my sister of being a bad daughter whilst refusing to take any responsibility for their wrongdoings of the past. No, my sister gained nothing from that confrontation and so I won't go there. Yet at the same time, I absolutely refuse to give my parents the satisfaction of pretending that I believe they were good parents and that I had a happy childhood - like Siti, I had a miserable childhood because of the abuse I suffered at the hands of my parents. I always shy away from conflict, that is just my nature and I know that confronting my parents about it will achieve nothing. There is no resolution to be had because my parents will accept nothing less than me towing the line and being a filial son, adopting their version of events that they were perfect parents who had done no wrong and I on the other hand, refuse to do that and want to hold them to account for all the horrific abuse I had suffered at their hands. And so we are left with a cold war, I haven't spoken to them in about 2.5 years and if this goes on, it is likely that they will pass away without having ever spoken to me again and I'm okay with that even if some of you may think that this decision makes me a horrific monster. I'd rather be that horrific monster in your eyes than to condone the physical and emotional abuse I had suffered at the hands of my parents because in my eyes, they were horrific monsters too. By that token, horrific parents will bring up a son who turns out to be a horrific monster, that's only natural. You don't expect horrific parents to bring up a child who somehow turns out to be a perfect angel the same way two Chinese parents will never have a baby who will turn out to has blonde hair and blue eyes - no, children take after their parents and whilst I may be a product of my upbringing, I am now exercising my right and free will to choose this path of a cold war to avoid any further conflict with my parents. The fact is I don't have many options and this is the best one available to.me now - unsurprisingly, Siti has also gone down the same path. 

So guys, what do you think about Siti's story and my explanation for why her mother has abused her like that? What would you tell Siti to do if you ever met her? And finally, how can we start the healing process? Many thanks for reading.