abuse?

I've spent a large part of tonight reading Harriet Jacob's blog, parts of which deal with her abusive ex-husband and father. While her writing makes it easy to empathise with her, I wasn't expecting to recognise any of my own experience. Then I read this:

“When he told you he used to insult you just to make you feel like shit and shut your mouth, all you could feel was relieved,” he said. “You didn’t feel angry. You just felt relieved. That’s not normal. That’s fucked up, that somebody tells you they’ve been intentionally hurting you, and you’re just happy they finally admitted it.”

My brother recently apologised for intentionally making my life miserable when we were kids and I felt relieved. In principle, I know I should feel angry, but I can't deal with that. It is some comfort to know that I wasn't imagining the maliciousness I experienced and to stop having to feel guilty for provoking him or reacting in the wrong way. If he chose to act the way he did, then it wasn't my fault. Except I still feel guilty for thinking about blaming him because there are always extenuating circumstances... Plus, I shouldn't even be comparing my experiences with actual abuse. Didn't everyone's older brother beat them up and belittle them?

But then there's also this:

I don’t know how many people can understand this — I know Badger does, we talked about it — but god I am so jealous of people who can break down. I once had a boss who told me about going on a vacation, and calling home from a pay phone in a diner only to have his father tell him his brother had unexpectedly died. He described going into this blind rage, where he punched the pay phone until it came out of the wall, and cried for hours, unable to stand up. I know he was telling me all this in a vulnerable way, talking about something horrible that had happened to him, but I kept thinking how awesome it was. I wanted to ask him, what were you thinking when you punched the phone? Did you know that wasn’t an okay thing to do but did it anyway? Did you not care? Did you not even think about that? Oh, man, how did you not think about that? What does that feel like? I could never do that. I could never will myself to become that unconscious of everything around me that I could even raise my voice.

Especially the last sentence. I can't even write a facebook status because I'm too conscious of every possible interpretation. I act (and think) like I've been abused, even if I feel like using the term is cheapening the experiences of those who've really been abused. Maybe I'm just defective enough to be broken by normal sibling behaviour.

Reading those segments felt like when I picked up a library book called Emotional Incest purely out of morbid curiousity and was horrified to find that the blurb sounded exactly like my experience with my mother. She recently asked me to tell her what it was like growing up with my brother making my life miserable, but I didn't want to hurt her, or more selfishly, deal with her self-flagellation over letting it happen.

Maybe I am angry. I've self-censored that out while writing this. Still, it's hard to let myself be angry at damaged people for their responses to that damage, especially when one of them was just a child himself.