Introvert Born or Made? #4

Part Four

Maternal Strictures

Is introversion simply a habit self-preservation?

Having quiet, out of the spotlight children seemed a rule for social acceptability for my mother. She didn’t want to be judged for any youthful indiscretions my brother or I might commit. Indiscretions like having an opinion that might contradict and embarrass her, or having friends she didn’t approve of because of what their parents believed or did, or rumors she’d heard.

Mom made up for dad’s lack of extroversion with a kind of social butterfly energy, mostly centered around their church, where everyone — she assumed — believed the way she did about most things. Ravenous for acceptance and approval, she endeared herself to other women who needed a listener for their woes.

This hunger for acceptance ruled everything for her, tempered by her notions of everyday dresses versus slacks as “proper” attire for ferrying her children to school, little white gloves with dressier outfits and hats for church, to a beaver jacket or mink stole that she thought proved she fit in with the social in-crowd.

Weekly appointments at the salon kept her dark brown hair fashionably coiffed and sprayed stiff enough to last a week. I can only remember a few times seeing her wash her own hair and using curlers. Her high cheek bones, small mouth, and slightly Asian looking dark eyes caused some to wonder about her heritage, and she always showed a kind of amused pride when we encountered Native Americans.  

“They recognize me as one of their own,” she would say, referring to her mother’s half Cherokee lineage, then proceeded to talk like a colonizer about how the church civilized the Indian children in special schools — an experience she probably never personally had and knew no actual facts about. (It’s possible the orphanage she and her siblings were sent to when her mother died was run by a church in a similar manner of dehumanizing Native children, beating the Native out of them, and abusing them into obeying white authority without question.)

From my perspective she seemed to easily make friends among those with the same need to feel saved from the challenges of life in an upwardly mobile, multicultural community. But she made it apparent that for her anyone who didn’t exhibit the same needs and beliefs would be harshly judged, and often made the target of her holier than all y’all attitude.  

I’ve often thought that this way of being for her was a response to untreated trauma in her own childhood.

Rarely would she be rude to someone in their presence, but her face had an unmistakable disapproval setting — a kind of pouting frown, a smelling something unpleasant nose, accusatorily narrowed eyes, and judgmentally arched eyebrows. Think of actresses Sada Thompson in the show Family (if you’re of my generation) or Kelly Bishop as Emily in Gilmore Girls.

With no self-awareness, nor willingness to engage in self-examination — because doing so would require facing the fact that she was objectively wrong about a lot of things — she acted oblivious to the impactful harm her judgmentalism had on others, including me. Several early school friends of mine who had occasion to interact with her, or overhear their parents talk about her, have told me how she was laughed at behind her back for her inability to “read the room” before launching into incessant, and in their view, unwelcomed or off-putting proselytizing.

I don’t know if she was ever aware of this, but I suspect on some subconscious level she was, for that being laughed at thing became a manipulation she flung at me.

I remember being embarrassed by her intolerance and what felt to me, even at a young age, like an almost panicked need for everyone to live and believe like she did so she could feel safe.  I felt sorry for her, and that was the kindest emotion I could ever feel regarding my adoptive mother.

Mom backed up the don’t attract attention warning in my teens by ridiculing how I looked. It was the Twiggy years of the 1960s when the ideal shape was to be an unhealthy stick thin.

People laugh at you for what you weigh, she’d scold.

At 16, I was an adult 130 pounds instead of her preferred little girlish 105.

Hypocrite, I thought, for she herself was on the chubby side. I later learned the psychological word for this is projection — accusing others of what you dislike or fear about yourself.

Criticism like this isn’t motivating. It’s ridiculing. It’s shaming — a form of emotional child abuse. But that notion wasn’t yet widely discussed in women’s magazines in the 50s and 60s, her main source of advice on child rearing.

So I never realized I was abused. I just thought I had overly strict parents. Only once had she whipped her handbag across my face while driving me to high school. I’d said something she didn’t like. No clue now what that was. She never apologized. After all, it was my fault for “being mouthy.”

I knew better than to try arguing her out of her perception. When I said things she didn’t like, my point of view would invariably be weaponized against me, used to criticize and shame me more. Easy to connect that dot to being reluctant to share anything about myself with most people.

Not too many kids asked about the red mark the purse left on my cheek as I walked head down to my locker five minutes later. No teacher seemed to notice, and I was grateful for the wall of invisibility I must have built around myself.

My pain mattered to no one. And for survival’s sake, I strove to not let it matter to me, either.

The result was that I became hyper-observant, and pretty closed to a lot of outward display of emotion, happy or sad or fearful. Her litany of judgmentalism that I interpreted as me being somehow irreparably flawed was just something to endure until I could escape.

I dreamed of running away, planned where to go (Estes Park), how to survive (waitressing), but instinctively knew I’d be punished severely if they found me, and I knew they would. She had often threatened to send me to reform school for “stealing” snacks from behind the cans of green beans and jars of tomato sauce at the back of the pantry in my own house. I got the message that I didn’t really belong there, wasn’t really an equal member of a family, and I could just imagine she’d do worse for embarrassing her by being a runaway.

Of course, I didn’t know at the time that admission to a reform school required a court adjudication of some kind of demonstrably juvenile delinquent behavior. Contradicting your parents or taking sweets from their hiding place without permission weren’t legitimately criminal offenses. Nonetheless, the threats succeeded in adding to my unspoken animosity towards her.

Today that constant stinging criticism in addition to getting hit with a belt at her direction would be considered emotional and physical abuse. But in the 50s and 60s I didn’t know I was experiencing life-altering trauma. I had no broken bones. Neither the spankings nor the assault with the purse left any scars. Not outward ones anyway.

Incessant shaming and threats or acts of unjustified punishment leave a trail of trauma in the psyche. And it colors everything in a person’s life, starting with learning not to reveal much to friends and strangers alike.  It’s a soul-crushing dynamic that further inhibits ability to trust in relationships, and feel safe in asking for help.

For me, that kind of surreptitious trauma built determination to be so self-sufficient no one could break me down in public or private. For decades I kept those hurts all inside.  

Was emotional abuse a contributing factor to me being an introvert? Perhaps, if that is defined as anticipating silent judgment and public criticism when around a lot of people at once, or fearing I’d be exposed as not good enough.

Was it a trigger for a life-long struggle with social anxiety? No doubt.

But in my teens and early 20s I had yet to learn how the traumas of her own childhood became an untreated mental illness. In brief, her mother died when she was seven. With her twin sisters and baby brother, she was put in an orphanage. The sisters were adopted without her. When her brother was adopted by a different couple, she was taken by that family until he was settled, only to be returned alone to the orphanage.

Abandoned once again.

In retrospect, working backwards from her behavior and attitudes, we have reason to believe she was sexually abused in the institution. She was finally rescued from the orphanage by a kindly couple. But two years later her foster father died from heart failure while she, aged 11 or 12, was at his bedside.

During the Great Depression, she was raised by a single mother. The anguish of multiple abandonments and separation griefs was never treated. This damage done to her got internalized and became the dynamics of emotional abuse, lack of empathy, and projection that created the perpetual rupture in our mother / daughter relationship.  

Damaged parents, even without meaning to, are likely to instill in their children some remnants of personality and social challenges. Children have two choices — to conform to what their parents model, or to rebel. Rebellion can provide some personal satisfaction or sense of empowerment, but doesn’t necessarily repair the inherited damage. Nor does rebellion magically instill social skills.

Installment #5 The Rebel Introvert uncovers how retreating into introversion may have been my way of thwarting the expectation to show up in my mother’s world in the ways she demanded.

---

© 2025 Deah Curry PhD. All Rights Reserved.