“I Didn’t Want to be Born! You Didn’t Want Me to be Born Either!”

I can’t even begin to count how many people have told me that, as children, they were told by their mothers “I wish you’d never been born.” It’s tragic, if not criminal, that a parent should say such a thing to their own child, or should treat them as if they wished the child were dead.

In this clip from “Now, Voyager,” Bette Davis, who plays Charlotte Vale, has just broken off her engagement to a very wealthy widower. It was the right thing to do. Her real self knows this. But as she’s climbing the staircase, her codependent self takes over, and she mercilessly beats herself up for breaking the engagement. “Oh, you fool!” she says to herself. “Now you’ll never have a man of your own, a home of your own, or a child of your own...” She engages in damaging self-talk. Self-talk that’s brought on by her codependent need to be loved because she was never loved by her mother. And she knows that all too well.

To make matters worse, Charlotte goes into her mother’s room and tells her she has broken off the engagement. Her heartless mother immediately reacts with rage, shaming Charlotte for even existing. Charlotte jumps up and screams “I didn’t want to be born! You didn’t want me to be born either! And it’s been a calamity ever since!”

The elephant in the room is finally exposed. The truth is finally spoken. And Charlotte’s mother can’t handle it. She’s so enraged that she has a heart attack (hard to believe she actually has a heart) and she dies on the spot. Then Charlotte, like a good little codependent, blames herself for her mother’s death.

I never really felt loved by my mother. I heard expressions like “I’m ashamed to even call you my son!” But I was never told I shouldn’t have been born. There were times I felt like, or even wished, I hadn’t been born, but the words were never actually said to me.

Telling a child, or somehow making them feel like, they never should have been born is the ultimate form of parental abandonment. The scars from never feeling loved by parents become the wounds that eventually need to be medicated away through addictive behaviors. Anyone who honestly believes and feels like they are unlovable has to learn to cope or die. Coping becomes addictive acting out to medicate away the emotional pain. And sometimes even the coping skills addicts develop lead to death.

This is why Recovery is so important. Through Recovery, we determine our own self worth. We learn to love ourselves in the many ways our parents were incapable of doing. And we do so by allowing ourselves to feel loved by God, or a Higher Power of our own understanding, by making friends with ourselves and learning to love who we are. And we do so by opening up to trusted people who are able to tell us and show us that they truly love us— just the way we are.