Some heavy stuff that's been on my mind lately and I have to write it some but a don't journal:
About 1,5 weeks ago our mother cat (~5yo) suddenly attacked her son (~3.5yo) in the middle of the night. We woke up at around 3 am to that very loud high pitched cat scream you hear sometimes from the street. We calmed them down and tried to let them close to each other and she attacked again so we've been slowly reintroducing them. I have a pretty solid guess what happened (outside cat at the window causing redirected agression) but we can't be sure.
It is a very distressing thing obviously but didn't explain the amount of anxiety it induced in me. I was so anxious I cound't eat for almost a week and cried on and off during the day. I've had worse but it was pretty bad so I talked to my therapist to move my appointment up.
As silly as it sounds I told her that this incident reminded me a lot to my childhood when my mom was in a bad mood and something set her over to the edge and she'd scream at us. She did that a lot. The worst ones were when she threw stuff as well. She never threw stuff at us but she threw stuff out the door or even swiped down the whole table once breaking some of my things. I was already really skittish when it came to loud noises like dogs barking or sirens so the shouting and stuff hitting the floor scared me a lot. It left me with a lot bigger trauma than I realized at first. We figured that the loud noise and the mother cat's agression probably brought up those traumatic experienes in me. After my mom calmed down I'd tiptoe around the house until I figured I was safe again and it'd happen again and again on a biweekly basis (could've been less frequent but that's how it feels to me looking back).
The problem is that those episodes were never explained to us. I know now that she was very stressed because of her job and she didn't know how to deal with that stress and issues that come up when you have 3 kids other than shouting and thowing stuff because she felt like she'd explode if she didn't do something to let the steam out. And I know that she never learned to cope with her stress productively because of generational trauma. So as a kid I always blamed myself for these episodes and later became very receptive to her triggers and tried to prevent these outbursts. I never got closure. I was never told that the whole thing wasn't my fault and that even though she was mad she still loved us.
So when my mother cat attacked her son seemingly out of the blue and we can't know the reason for sure and the issue is still not resolved it just triggered those childhood anxieties in me. I was resentful of my older cat for the attack even though she was clearly uneasy for a few days as well. The fact that the younger cat (one of the most tame, loving cats I've ever seen) was so fearful reminded me of my younger selfe and that just made me even more resentful.
I'm really hoping that now that I can see why this set me off so much I can focus more on recovering their relationship and also recovering my own relationship with the mother cat because I know she wants things to go back to normal as well. Those seem to be the easier things though. I know that if I want to get past this trauma I'll need to face it and that probably means talking to my mother about it without villainizing her. I'm at a point where I don't know how to help my inner child that's still stuck in those situations but I hope that with time and effort I'll be able to eventually.
