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Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty Paperback – May 21, 2019

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A daring and provocative book-length essay on why we both romanticize and vilify mothers A simple argument guides this book: motherhood is the place in our culture where we lodge, or rather bury, the reality of our own conflicts. By making mothers the objects of both licensed idealization and cruelty, we blind ourselves to the world’s iniquities and shut down the portals of the heart. Mothers are the ultimate scapegoat for our personal and political failings, for everything that is wrong with the world, which becomes their task (unrealizable, of course) to repair. Moving commandingly between pop cultural references such as Roald Dahl’s Matilda to insights on motherhood in the ancient world and the contemporary stigmatization of single mothers, Jacqueline Rose delivers a groundbreaking report into something so prevalent we hardly notice. Mothers is an incisive, rousing call to action from one of our most important contemporary thinkers.

• Print length 254 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date May 21, 2019
• Dimensions 5.5 x 0.57 x 8.25 inches
• ISBN-10 0374538476
• ISBN-13 978-0374538477
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Editorial Reviews

"Jacqueline Rose’s Mothers has already joined the canon of nonfiction books I hold most dear. This is in part because of the importance and luminous clarity of Rose’s argument, and in part because of the supremely intelligent and graceful prose in which she delivers it. Her writing here feels somehow both laser-focused in its analyses, and loose, roving, free. Her book distills a lifetime of psychoanalytic, literary, and political engagement into a fierce, generous study of human complexity―one which pushes us to reckon with the urgent question of how we might stop 'tearing mothers and the world to pieces.'" ―Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts "A sort of Rosetta Stone for the moment that examines the particular mix of fascination and dread that mothers engender . . . Rose is a calm and stylish writer whose rangy essays . . . have become indispensable reading during the current reckoning around power and sexuality." ―Parul Sehgal, The New York Times "Rose is, as ever, devastating in her elegance and striking in her ingenuity . . . Running throughout the book is the conviction that, in matters of both self and state, the boundaries between inside and outside are violent and blurred―a riddle for which mothers are the impossible key.” ―Tobi Haslett, Bookforum " Mothers is a passionate polemic . . . Rose's intellectual range is dazzling." ― The Economist "Dismantling the ideal is Jacqueline Rose’s purpose in Mothers . . . Searching always calmly and intelligently for reasons behind extreme feelings, Rose draws on a wide range of literary and philosophical sources." ―Ruth Scurr, The Times Literary Supplement (London) "As a literary scholar and psychoanalytic thinker, Rose has long insisted that we pay close attention to the subterranean fears, fantasies, and narratives that structure our most pressing sociopolitical problems . . . I was grateful to Rose for giving voice to [the] conflicted realities [of motherhood], for inviting her reader to acknowledge them without fear or shame . . . She had positioned herself as a mother to mothers, ready to soothe all of us who felt like we were constantly failing." ―Merve Emre, The Nation "Compelling . . . [Rose] has a dazzling imaginative range and is fluent in many disciplines . . . Rose is one of our most passionate and intuitive delvers, and she has brought back from the molten core of the deep dark places a fine book, another urgent feminist appeal for cultural change, before it is too late." ―Susan McKay, The Irish Times "Wide-ranging and incisive." ―Hannah Beckerman, The Guardian "Nuanced . . . Mothers is giving me another lens through which to think about individual and collective responsibility." Kika Sroka-Miller, The Bookseller "Rose is a fearless and erudite thinker . . . Thoroughly literary and bracing in its intensity, Rose's Mothers cannot be ignored." ― Booklist "[Rose] seeks to understand exactly what is being asked of mothers on a daily basis and to distill those demands into succinct causalities . . . For those readers interested not just in feminist theory, but also gender theory as it relates to parenting, this will be a rewarding reading experience. Clever, insightful essays on motherhood as 'the ultimate scapegoat for our personal and political failings.'" ― Kirkus "Intellectually rigorous . . . Readers of Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts will be drawn to Rose’s rumination." ― Publishers Weekly "Jacqueline Rose’s book tore me apart, reminding me of things I would rather forget . . . Rose [is] one of our very best cultural critics . . . The book excels in brilliant psychoanalytical readings on the ways that the interiority of motherhood is silenced . . . This is a book of pain, joy and brutality, a howl of anger." ―Suzanne Moore, The New Statesman (UK)

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Reprint edition (May 21, 2019)
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Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty - Jacqueline Rose

Mothers :  An Essay on Love and Cruelty  is guided by a simple argument: that motherhood is the place in our culture where we lodge – or rather bury – the reality of our own conflicts, of psychic life, and what it means to be fully human.

Mothers are the ultimate scapegoat for our personal and political failings, for everything that is wrong with the world, which becomes their task (unrealizable, of course) to repair.

To the familiar claim that too much is asked of mothers – a long-standing feminist plaint – Rose adds a further dimension. She questions what we are doing when we ask mothers to carry the burden of everything that is hardest to contemplate about our society and ourselves. By making mothers the objects of licensed cruelty, we blind ourselves to the world’s iniquities and shut down the portals of the heart.

To demonstrate this vicious paradox at work, Rose explores a range of material: investigative writing and policies on motherhood, including newspaper reports, policy documents, and law; drama, novels, poetry, and life stories past and present; social history, psychoanalysis, and feminism. An incisive, rousing call to action,   Mothers   unveils the crucial idea that unless we recognise what role we are asking mothers to perform in the world, and   for   the world, we will continue to tear both the world and mothers to pieces.

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Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty Kindle Edition

From one of the most important contemporary thinkers we have, a compelling, forceful tract about women and motherhood that demands immediate attention. Moving commandingly between pop cultural references such as Roald Dahl's 'Matilda' to observations about motherhood in the ancient world, from and thoughts about the stigmatization of single mothers in the UK, Mothers delivers a groundbreaking report into something so prevalent we hardly notice. A short, provocative work that considers how motherhood the object of intense ambivalence, of idealization and hatred-is the ultimate scapegoat for everything that is wrong with the world.

• Print length 241 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Faber & Faber
• Publication date 17 April 2018
• File size 1729 KB
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"Jacqueline Rose’s Mothers has already joined the canon of nonfiction books I hold most dear. This is in part because of the importance and luminous clarity of Rose’s argument, and in part because of the supremely intelligent and graceful prose in which she delivers it. Her writing here feels somehow both laser-focused in its analyses, and loose, roving, free. Her book distills a lifetime of psychoanalytic, literary, and political engagement into a fierce, generous study of human complexity―one which pushes us to reckon with the urgent question of how we might stop 'tearing mothers and the world to pieces.'" ―Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts "A sort of Rosetta Stone for the moment that examines the particular mix of fascination and dread that mothers engender . . . Rose is a calm and stylish writer whose rangy essays . . . have become indispensable reading during the current reckoning around power and sexuality." ―Parul Sehgal, The New York Times "Rose is, as ever, devastating in her elegance and striking in her ingenuity . . . Running throughout the book is the conviction that, in matters of both self and state, the boundaries between inside and outside are violent and blurred―a riddle for which mothers are the impossible key.” ―Tobi Haslett, Bookforum " Mothers is a passionate polemic . . . Rose's intellectual range is dazzling." ― The Economist "Dismantling the ideal is Jacqueline Rose’s purpose in Mothers . . . Searching always calmly and intelligently for reasons behind extreme feelings, Rose draws on a wide range of literary and philosophical sources." ―Ruth Scurr, The Times Literary Supplement (London) "As a literary scholar and psychoanalytic thinker, Rose has long insisted that we pay close attention to the subterranean fears, fantasies, and narratives that structure our most pressing sociopolitical problems . . . I was grateful to Rose for giving voice to [the] conflicted realities [of motherhood], for inviting her reader to acknowledge them without fear or shame . . . She had positioned herself as a mother to mothers, ready to soothe all of us who felt like we were constantly failing." ―Merve Emre, The Nation "Compelling . . . [Rose] has a dazzling imaginative range and is fluent in many disciplines . . . Rose is one of our most passionate and intuitive delvers, and she has brought back from the molten core of the deep dark places a fine book, another urgent feminist appeal for cultural change, before it is too late." ―Susan McKay, The Irish Times "Wide-ranging and incisive." ―Hannah Beckerman, The Guardian "Nuanced . . . Mothers is giving me another lens through which to think about individual and collective responsibility." Kika Sroka-Miller, The Bookseller "Rose is a fearless and erudite thinker . . . Thoroughly literary and bracing in its intensity, Rose's Mothers cannot be ignored." ― Booklist "[Rose] seeks to understand exactly what is being asked of mothers on a daily basis and to distill those demands into succinct causalities . . . For those readers interested not just in feminist theory, but also gender theory as it relates to parenting, this will be a rewarding reading experience. Clever, insightful essays on motherhood as 'the ultimate scapegoat for our personal and political failings.'" ― Kirkus "Intellectually rigorous . . . Readers of Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts will be drawn to Rose’s rumination." ― Publishers Weekly "Jacqueline Rose’s book tore me apart, reminding me of things I would rather forget . . . Rose [is] one of our very best cultural critics . . . The book excels in brilliant psychoanalytical readings on the ways that the interiority of motherhood is silenced . . . This is a book of pain, joy and brutality, a howl of anger." ―Suzanne Moore, The New Statesman (UK)

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Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty – Book Review

What does the figure of the mother evoke in us? How does an engagement with this figure expose the persistence of colonial logics and global inequalities? Yianna Liatsos reviews Mothers by Jacqueline Rose.

In our current pandemic social imagination the fantasy of the domestic sanctuary and the idyllic family life it contains is steadily unravelling. From the more serious headlines about the rise of domestic abuse, to the comic relief of tiktok videos depicting before-and-after-Covid snapshots of heterosexual cis women working from home while mothering offspring and husbands alike, there is a growing recognition that our current health crisis, like all past crises, has a disproportionately adverse effect on the lives of women. This, at least, is how the story of mothers circulates in the Global North, implying that Covid is an interruption of an otherwise steady reality where women live “normal lives” that are less stressful or desperate. Like many of the texts on motherhood that flooded the market in pre-Covid times, Jacqueline Rose’s book Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty dispels the myth of this normalcy on several levels, by concentrating on the damaging affective load that mothers are made to carry.

“Mother is, in Western discourse” Rose writes on the opening page of her book,

the place in our culture where we lodge, or rather bury, the reality of our own conflicts, of what it means to be fully human. It is the ultimate scapegoat for our own personal and political failings, for everything that is wrong with the world, which it becomes the task—unrealisable, of course—of mothers to repair. (1)

The gist of Rose’s argument is that there are two types of guilt that plague Western motherhood (discourse) and mothering (practice): there is the guilt the mother feels over never managing to uphold the ideal that is projected onto her by an ever-resilient and adaptable patriarchy, with its penchant for standing guard over social norms; and there is the guilt that the mother herself absorbs and embodies when, in spite of her intimate familiarity with a tragic past, she takes on the romance of motherhood, thus “inscribing her denial of history, her own flight from suffering, across the body and mind of her child” (183). For Rose, both types of guilt are associated with cultural norms that result in suffering—the former internalised by the individual mother, the latter transmitted from mother to daughter across family genealogies. The book, which is divided into 3 parts—“Social Punishment,” “Psychic Blindness” and “The Agony and the Ecstasy”— elaborates this insight through different textual and sociohistorical foci. We follow Rose’s readings of Elena Ferrante, Sindiwe Magona, Toni Morrison, Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, Simone De Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf,  William Shakespeare, and Euripides, among others, as well as her reflections on motherhood in Ancient Greece and Rome, in the United States of Black Lives Matter, in the Brexit-pursuing UK, in post-war Naples, in one-child policy China, and in post-apartheid South Africa.

The mix of topics is dazzling and the writing is beautiful, consistent with Rose’s typical lyrical and moving expression. The book’s bookending chapters (“Now” and “Inside Out”), where Rose respectively discusses the plight of refugees in Europe and the transmission of intergenerational trauma in her own family, stand out as the most hard-hitting regarding both the agonies and the stalemates they describe. In the first chapter, Rose addresses how right-wing elements of the British media have piggybacked on news about the refugee crisis and unaccompanied minors in the Calais Jungle, to foster xenophobia by demonising foreign women. A particular favourite scapegoat is the black African woman, who is represented as coming to the UK in pursuit of “health tourism,” giving birth in Britain to take advantage of the NHS and subsequent child allowance scheme. Rose notes how in spite of British charities reporting that hundreds of pregnant foreigners avoid antenatal care at their peril, precisely from fear of being reported to the Home Office, the derogatory stereotypes of illegal foreigners as a scourge on the national economy, culture and welfare have continue unabated. To the Niobes and Virgin Marys of the world, adored suffering mothers whose torment is redemptive precisely because it is seen to be born of misfortune rather than injustice, Rose counterposes these mothers who are depicted in the right-wing media as aggressively and cunningly defying borders and laws alike. Rose describes these subversive motherly figures as embodying the unsettling arrival of the proverbial chickens coming home to roost, an un-homely return for the willfully amnesiac West, whose historical consciousness is as vacant as its museums are full with evidence of the cost at which its riches have been had. Rose’s suggestion that “Motherhood can, and should, be one of the central means through which a historical moment reckons with itself” (17), stands out for me as one of the most compelling observations her book makes, precisely because it reads women’s generative power as a visceral instinct that anarchically exposes persisting global inequalities and unpaid historical debts.

In her concluding chapter, Rose turns to her own domestic archive to go further back in history and describe how traumatic memories have haunted her own family across generations, thus inadvertently echoing Marianne Hirsch’s writings on the affective charge of postmemory.  We read about her maternal grandmother surviving Chelmno extermination camp in the Second World War; her mother denied a medical education by parents who wanted to secure their daughter’s future by marrying her off at a young age to a doctor; her father surviving torture in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp; and Rose herself adopting an abandoned baby girl from China. By drawing affinities between her family’s struggle for survival across generations and the wounds family members inflicted on each other, Rose reveals the nuanced and unsparing understanding that intimacy demands and affords. Rose goes on to give this filial perspective historical capital when, at the end of her final chapter, she discusses Magona’s 1998 novel Mother to Mother —a fictionalized personal account of Evelyn Manquina’s life, the mother of Mongezi Manquina, who was granted Amnesty by the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission for his 1993 murder of white American student Amy Biehl.  Like Rose’s own family history, this fictionalized mother’s story restores her own and her family’s historical dignity, by simultaneously “tracing the inhumanity of the apartheid regime,” while nonetheless insisting on the value and “complexity of her inner mind” (205-6).  Neither the mother nor her son are innocent—the passive victims of institutionalised racism—or guilty—the exemplary neoliberal subjects making free choices for which they need to be held accountable. Here, much like in her first chapter, Rose’s writing turns to mothers’ stories in order to restore a badly needed complexity and open-endedness to clear and conclusive public discourses about “us” and “them.”

The ethical complexity and weight of the first and last chapters is not as easily detectable in the ones in-between, which juxtapose specific authors and contexts in a manner that reduces their singularities to a common theme of suffering. Morrison’s Sethe (in Beloved ) is compared to Euripides’ Medea for committing infanticide (in the “Loving” segment of Part 2); post-natal depression in Plath is discussed in relation to its “pandemic” presence “among the poor blacks” of contemporary South Africa (186); De Beauvoir’s assertions of the alienation a mother experiences “in her body and her social dignity” (132), is conceived as a “path of a new ethics” that “puts us in touch with the stranger” in every form, inspiring protests against cruel immigration and deportation policies (140). It is this rhetorical “us” that troubled me as I read Rose’s book—an “us” that invites the reader to overlook the gnawing awareness of the stark material differences among the mothers referenced in the book, both real and fictional, and to ignore the radical disparity among mothering experiences historically and today. At the end of her book Rose invites mothers to conceive of themselves as a collective with the potential of “bring[ing] the world to an end as we know it” (208).  Rose goes on to assert “I suspect, certainly for mothers, this would be no bad thing” (208).  This concluding call to arms is a welcome corrective to the “neoliberal intensification of mothering” she names and critiques early in her book (17-8).  Nonetheless Rose here appears to overlook the fact that many mothers who have been conquered, displaced, and exiled in modern history, have already experienced their world end to no great advantage. If a collective ethic can emerge from the perspective of these mothers, it may not be one that embodies the radical freedom that Hannah Arendt attributes to the principle of natality, whereby, as Rose herself notes, “every new birth [becomes a] supreme anti-totalitarian moment” (79). Instead, these women, who have found ways to raise their children in the aftermath of systematic destructions of their societies, may show “us” a  way of moving past the facile melancholia we suffer over the crises we have brought onto ourselves—environmental, economic, sociocultural. To paraphrase Rose, these mothers may help us bring the fantasy of freedom as we know it to an end, and with it, the need to scapegoat the Other for exposing our inherent vulnerability and interdependence.

Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty  by Jacqueline Rose was published by Faber and Faber in 2018.

Yianna Liatsos is a Lecturer in English at the University of Limerick, Ireland.  She has published essays on critical theory and post-apartheid literature and her current research is in narrative medicine and identity.

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Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty , by Jacqueline Rose, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2018, 237 pp.

• Book Review
• Published: 18 October 2019
• Volume 79 , pages 640–643, ( 2019 )

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Zickler, E.P. Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty , by Jacqueline Rose, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2018, 237 pp.. Am J Psychoanal 79 , 640–643 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s11231-019-09216-z

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Mothers by Jacqueline Rose review – an indignant defence

Are mothers really held accountable for the world’s ills? Why does our society punish women?

E very human alive knows something about mothers. Everyone’s had one. Mothering is at the root of all our biology, male and female; it’s tangled deep in our psychic development, and all human cultures have been bound to negotiate – with different degrees of awe, anxiety, sentimentality, hostility – forms and languages around its centrality. Jacqueline Rose thinks that contemporary culture in the west has its relationship with motherhood all wrong, with disastrous consequences for mothers and for all of us.

When she quotes from a 2016 campaign in the British rightwing press against non-EU mothers giving birth in NHS hospitals, and describes the NHS demanding money from pregnant asylum seekers, she’s certainly on to something that shames our country, as did the apparent indifference of our government to the plight of unaccompanied minors held in the Calais camps . “Where are the mothers of these children?” Rose asks. A mother’s loss “is so often the hidden face … of these children’s fates” – that’s true and terrible. It shames us too when she gives figures for how many women in the UK lose their jobs every year because of pregnancy, how many pregnant women face unlawful discrimination or adverse experiences, health and safety risks at work. And of course there’s so much more to enumerate, so much stupidity and cruelty and indifference – and mothers are usually mixed up in it because they are mixed up everywhere, in everything. And because, in the west as elsewhere, society tends to be skewed against the needs and rights of women.

Is Rose convincing, though, when she argues that our problem with mothers specifically is a key to all these different wrongs, connecting and even causing them? We punish mothers, she thinks, because the figure of the mother is “held accountable for the ills of the world, the breakdown in the social fabric, the threat to welfare”. And she believes there are reasons for that – psychic reasons, if you like. We are afraid of our own weakness, in our early relation to our mothers: when “rightwing politicians” promote “iron-clad self-sufficiency”, they may actually be repressing “the echo of the baby in the nursery”, and “their own vaguely remembered years of utter dependency”. Also, don’t we all demand the impossible of our mothers, doesn’t our contemporary culture in particular insist on their perfection? We expect them to “repair the world and make it safe”; because the world is incorrigible and our mothers are bound to fail, we are always punishing them for our disappointment.

These suggestions may have some powerful explanatory value, both in personal relationships and in the dynamics of a wider culture. They are familiar enough: ambivalence over motherhood is hugely important and interesting, and it’s been a staple of 20th- and 21st-century narratives from psychoanalysis through literary fiction to soap opera. But does anyone outside the advertising industry still dwell “solely on the virtue of mothers and motherhood”, really? Mothers struggle when they don’t feel “maternal goodness welling up” inside them, not necessarily because they have been conned by false expectations of perfection, but because it really is important to try to be “good” – patient, judicious, affectionate, tolerant – when you’re responsible for a child (fathers too), and because often, being human and flawed and a needy child yourself, you will fail. This inevitability of failure seems to me not so much a crisis in contemporary motherhood as one of those psychic knots at the heart of life. You can’t cut through it, with whatever reforming zeal – though just naming the problem, and imagining it sympathetically, helps us live with it.

In terms of the understanding and support available for struggling mothers in the UK at present, there is surely progress to celebrate alongside the wrongs to deplore. Maternal and infant mortality are low compared with the rest of human history. Women used to worry that pregnancy made them too ugly for their husbands; now they wear stretchy dresses flaunting bumps. Less than 50 years ago there was no maternity leave; until the 1940s women in the civil service had to retire when they married. There’s a pervasive suggestion in this book that our contemporary culture in the west might actually be the most anti-mother yet. Yet how could one begin to quantify this, weigh one culture’s forms of motherhood against another’s?

Rose is no doubt right to take issue with something saccharine and sanitised in many contemporary representations of motherhood, and she wants us to listen more to the dark side, to what mothers “have to say – from deep within their bodies and minds”. But although there’s plenty in this book from the dark side, she doesn’t sample enough of the other stuff. Who exactly is demanding that mothers be “love and goodness incarnate”, “appease the wrongs of human history and the heart”? All of us? The west? Men? Or only “rightwing politicians”? It isn’t clear. How do these demands get expressed? The evidence needs teasing out, deep down inside the detail of our language.

The net of this argument is cast so wide and so loosely, invoking so much: single mothers and slavery and Victorian divorce law, Rachel Cusk and the Mothers of the Disappeared , Medea and Sylvia Plath and matriarchy in pre-colonial Uganda, Klein and Winnicott and Rose’s own story of adopting a baby from China. Sometimes within one paragraph the focus slides from the UK to the US, and then to contemporary western culture in general – when she says “the law needs to be changed” it’s not always clear which law, where. Her story is too totalising, its passion can feel like a free-floating indignation, drawing anything and everything up into its complaint. The sections on Simone de Beauvoir and Elena Ferrante are better because they are more focused – although I began to feel that you could have too much of Ferrante’s feminist-gothic fatalism, with its anguished attachment to the irrational.

There’s a logical difficulty with treating mothers as an oppressed minority: mothers are also punishers. They too may be neoliberals, anti-immigration, hostile to asylum seekers using maternity services in the NHS; Mrs Thatcher was a mother and so for that matter was Frau Goebbels . Mothers are participants in their culture, all mixed up with men, woven with them inextricably into the flawed fabric of our societies, as different from one another and as multifarious as fathers are. Of course it would be unequivocally an excellent thing if here in the UK we became a less patriarchal society, more oriented to the needs of mothers, listening more respectfully to their stories – though Rose doesn’t have much to say about how we might achieve that. But it wouldn’t be an end to all our problems.

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Young girl who died during 2021 San Jose "exorcism" by family members fought for her life, court documents say

By Dave Pehling

Updated on: April 9, 2024 / 9:24 PM PDT / CBS San Francisco

Court documents in the case of three San Jose family members charged in the alleged child-abuse death of a three-year-old girl during a brutal 2021 exorcism ritual at a makeshift church reveal the child fought to escape even as she declared her love for her mother, who was one of her assailants.

The court documents detail the testimony given during the preliminary hearing for defendants Claudia Hernandez, Rene Aaron Hernandez Santos, and Rene Trigueros Hernandez between March 18-25 in Santa Clara County Superior Court.

The defendants are the mother, uncle and grandfather of three-year-old Arely Doe, the young girl who was found dead at the makeshift church housed on private residential property in San Jose on September 24, 2021. 

The documents filed by the Santa Clara County District Attorney's Office noted in the opening summary that the young girl "fought for her life as three trusted adults forcibly grabbed her by her neck, torso, back, and legs." In addition to smothering "her by repeatedly attempting to pry open her mouth to make her vomit" -- which the family members told officers would make the child expel the spirit that possessed her -- her mother, uncle and grandfather repeatedly rendered her unconsciousness with pressure to her neck and torso and "held her with so much force that she had internal bleeding and injuries." 

The DA's office noted that even as "she was fighting for her life" at the hands of her immediate family, "she told her mother, 'I love you.'" 

The documents also provided information from statements that Claudia Hernandez and her brother Rene provided to police. Hernandez told officers that the she believed Arley to be under possession of a demon insider her because she was screaming and crying and "her eyes were different" the night before she and Rene brought the child to the makeshift church where her father was a pastor. They continued to try to hold her still, struggling to grip her around the neck and torso with Hernandez telling officers "Arely would say "I love you" in Spanish" as they tried to hold her.

It was after hours of holding the young girl down and trying to force her to vomit to expel the demon that she eventually succumbed to the injuries she suffered during the attempted "exorcism" early the evening of September 24.

Hernandez told police that night "God made her understand that Arely was not coming back and was gone." A day after the child's death while they were still in custody, Hernandez told her brother that "God...told her that God had taken Arely on Thursday, and it was because of demons" and that he also said "they were not going to be guilty."

The documents also included details from the testimony of Dr. Michelle Jorden, the Chief Medical Examiner-Coroner and Neuropathologist for Santa Clara County. Jorden discussed the autopsy she performed on the child and said "Arely died of asphyxia due to combined mechanical asphyxia and smothering."

The judge in the case was schedule to rule on whether the three defendants would face a trial by jury Tuesday, but according to a report by the San Jose Mercury News , the judge pushed the date of his decision back to May 13 in order to allow all the attorneys involved in the case to submit briefs arguing whether he has seen sufficient evidence to uphold the charges.

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4 Signs of an Emotionally Abusive Relationship — and How to Get Out

Published on 4/11/2024 at 12:33 PM

Editor's Note: There are varying experiences of abuse, and the following information provided by one psychologist pertains to emotional and psychological abuse.

Abusive relationships can look different, but if you clicked on this article, maybe you've asked yourself, "Am I in an emotionally abusive relationship?" For me, there was no question I was being verbally and psychologically abused. I personally went so far as to seek therapy with my ex, hoping for a change. The question was: why did I stay?

Sarah Schewitz, PsyD, a licensed psychologist and the founder of the therapy practice Couples Learn , sheds some light on this issue for me in one eye-opening remark: "The thing I see over and over again from women leaving these types of relationships is their lack of insight about how important it is to do their own healing work. Yes, they were a victim, and yes, their partner was in the wrong for treating them the way that they did. But if they only focus on the victim mentality and pathologizing their partner, they don't look at why they were attracted to this insecure love in the first place. They are then at risk of repeating the same patterns over and over again and feeling even more broken and hopeless than before."

Dr. Schewitz is referencing an idea that many of us resist: we play an active part in our own abuse. In reading this far, you've already shown up for yourself and acknowledged that fact. Now, let's take it one step further. Ahead, you will learn some red flags of emotionally abusive relationships, according to Dr. Schewitz, and figure out how to process the abuse and move on so that you can find the type of love you deserve.

Emotionally Abusive Relationship Definition

Emotional abuse in the context of a romantic relationship can include belittling your partner, name-calling, saying things to manipulate your partner into feeling insecure, calling them crazy, cheating , and/or lying. While all of this treatment sounds destructive (and like the very opposite of love), both parties tend to make excuses, focus on the highs of the relationship, and live in denial, which is how the abuse cycle continues. These actions don't necessarily have to all be present for your relationship to be considered abusive. And, as Dr. Schewitz points out, "abusive behavior is often the result of an inability to regulate one's nervous system, unhealed trauma from the past, and a lack of education about how to maintain a healthy relationship." You can seek professional guidance about a potentially abusive relationship through trauma-informed therapy and couples therapy, so long as both parties are willing to do the work and self-reflect honestly.

Emotionally Abusive Relationship Warning Signs

If any of the following signs resonate with you, you may be in an emotionally abusive relationship.

• Love bombing: This is how an emotionally abusive relationship often starts. It is the attempt to establish a close bond and trust through a promise of commitment and connection. On a scientific level, it floods your body with dopamine, a neurotransmitter that makes you feel good but can actually lead to somewhat of an addiction to your partner.
• Inconsistency: Here, we are looking at the difference between the things someone says and does. Dr. Schewitz points to empty phrases like, "I love you, I would never hurt you," when the person's actions suggest otherwise. They may also promise you something, fail to follow through, and then get defensive, angry, or insinuate that you're crazy when you bring up your concerns. Alternatively, they may shut down and refuse to talk about the issue altogether, thereby invalidating your feelings.
• Belittling: If your partner subtly or blatantly insinuates you are not good enough, smart enough, or pretty enough, they are exerting control. My ex often told people he didn't like to give me compliments because it would give me a big head. Dr. Schewitz explains why this is a common manipulation tactic: "Abusers often tell women they are worthless, unloveable, unattractive, etc. as a way to control them and make them scared that no one else will want them if they leave." He also constantly put down my family and made fun of my dad. I vividly remember him telling me, "Not one person in your family has a smart bone in their body." Looking back, it seems like he was trying to deter me from trusting the people who would have been able to convince me to leave.
• Denial: In this case, you are probably the one in denial. Dr. Schewitz recommends asking yourself the following questions and trying to answer them honestly: Do the feelings in my current relationship remind me of feelings from my past relationships (both with romantic partners and parents)? If so, am I willing to talk to a professional about how my past attachment trauma might be keeping me in an unhealthy dynamic? Am I avoiding telling friends and family about how bad our fights get because I am embarrassed or afraid it will change the way they look at my partner? Am I afraid friends and family will tell me to leave or judge me for staying if they know the truth about our relationship/my partner's behavior? Do my friends and family have concerns about my partner? Have I asked them to share honestly about this? If not, am I afraid of what I might hear? How do I feel around my partner most of the time? Sad, scared, anxious, and angry, or safe and secure?

The Cycle of an Emotionally Abusive Relationship

As mentioned previously, an emotionally abusive relationship often starts with love bombing, then gradually feels less romantic as you begin to feel devalued. You may feel insecure and notice a push-and-pull pattern, where you're searching for the gratification that comes from the smallest nudge of emotional reinforcement from your partner. Even if it doesn't happen often, when it does, Dr. Schewitz points out that it literally gives your brain that hit of dopamine that is connected with addiction. During the moments you are considering leaving, fear may show up to tell you no one else will want you and that it would be easier to continue the life you have already started with this person.

How to Leave an Emotionally Abusive Relationship

When you're finally ready to leave the relationship (for me, it happened when I was made aware of lying and cheating), you should cut all ties as soon as possible. Unfollow and block your ex. Depending on how the breakup went, your abuser may use family members to get in touch with you, so consider blocking their family's phone numbers and accounts on social media as well. As Dr. Schewitz notes, "Engaging with them in any way (including looking at what they are doing on social media) reactivates the trauma bond and makes it harder to heal." Of course, if the possibility of leaving the relationship feels life-threatening or beyond your capability, and/or if physical abuse is involved, you should seek resources at the National Domestic Violence Hotline .

How to Heal From an Emotionally Abusive Relationship

At least in my experience, leaving the relationship was so much easier than healing, as healing must come with the realization that you have inner work to do. It's important to note that being abused is traumatic . Trauma can cause low self-esteem, trouble sleeping, anxiety, difficulties with trust and paranoia, depression, physical health issues (like chronic pain), autoimmune disorders, and more. When you finally feel safe after dealing with stress for so long, your body will need to regulate itself and recover. You may crave lots of sleep and even get sick. During this time, you should treat yourself with love, whether that's through yoga and meditation, eating healthy foods, or setting your phone background to a picture of yourself as a small child as a reminder to be gentle and ignore any self-criticism.

When you are ready, Dr. Schewitz says you should find a trauma-informed therapist (she recommends attachment-focused EMDR ; I benefitted from somatic experiencing therapy ). If you had a challenging upbringing, such as living with an abusive parent or a guardian with mental illness or addiction, your therapeutic work is critical in breaking the pattern of attraction to emotionally unavailable or abusive loved ones. Just because that feels familiar doesn't mean it's what you deserve.

Dr. Schewitz recommends waiting at least six months before you begin dating. "This only distracts you from the feelings you need to process and prevents you from the insights you need to make a change," she says. It is instead most important to devote your feelings and energy toward your personal progress. As Dr. Schewitz puts it: "What matters the most is healing the wounds from your past that set you up to miss the red flags, stay in an abusive relationship, and ultimately put the needs of someone else before yourself."

If you or someone you know is experiencing abuse, you can call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 800-799-7233 to get help.

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3-year-old 'fought for her life' during fatal 'exorcism' involving mom, grandpa: Prosecutors

Prosecutors write in a new court record that 3-year-old arely endured 20 hours of being assaulted before her death, which happened during what they say was an exorcism-like ritual.

The exorcism of a 3-year-old girl in San Jose, California led to charges being filed against her mother, uncle and grandfather, but now recently released court documents are shedding new light on what happened during that deadly night in 2021.

Claudia Hernandez, her brother Rene Aaron Hernandez Santos, and her father Rene Trigueros Hernandez, has been charged with causing great bodily injury to a girl identified as Arely Doe, resulting in her death, according to a 50-page memorandum filed last week by the Santa Clara County District Attorney's Office.

Arely was found dead in a "church" on private property on Sept. 24, 2021, with her mother, uncle and grandfather who are accused of assaulting her for 20 hours, according to the memorandum, which was obtained by CBS News this week. USA TODAY is working to obtain the document.

Arely "fought for her life as three trusted adults forcibly grabbed her by her neck, torso, back, and legs, smothered her by repeatedly attempting to pry open her mouth to make her vomit, and held her with so much force that she had internal bleeding and injuries," prosecutors wrote in the memorandum explain why the three family members should go to trial.

All three have pleaded not guilty, and the county court is in the process of setting a trial date. They are being represented by public defenders. USA TODAY contacted Santa Clara County's public defender's office but did not get an immediate response Wednesday.

Here's what you need to know about the case and whether it's heading to trial.

Arely Doe told mom 'I love you' during abuse, court docs say

Arely "struggled to escape from her abusers," including clamping her mouth to stop the adults who were trying to pry it open, prosecutors said in the memorandum.

As Arely was "fighting for her life," she also told her mother, "I love you," they wrote.

"When pressure was applied to her neck and torso, she was repeatedly rendered unconscious for moments at a time," according to the memorandum. "This ongoing assault resulted in the tragic death of Arely."

How did Claudia Hernandez know her daughter was 'possessed?'

When a San Jose police officer spoke to Claudia Hernandez, she said, "they were praying for Arely," prosecutors wrote. Although Arely had no medical issues, the young girl was "possessed," her mother told the officer, prosecutors said.

The night before the exorcism, Arely was screaming and crying, she told the officer, they said. The mother said she "knew it was not her baby because Arely was always happy," they said in the memorandum.

Hernadez said Arely was saying "no, no, no" in her sleep while moving her arms out, but she still put the girl to bed because the "possession" was "not really bad," according to the memorandum. The next day when the mother came back to Arely's room after grabbing her some milk, she said she saw her daughter "screaming, crying, and stretching her arms out," prosecutors wrote.

When a paramedic asked Hernandez why Arely had blood on her face, the mother said: "Because she was forcibly trying to open Arely’s mouth and Arely was biting down hard in response," prosecutors wrote.

Arely Doe's mom, uncle stuck fingers down her throat, court doc says

On the day of the "exorcism," Claudia Hernandez told Arely's uncle to pray for her daughter, according to the court record. After Arely went to sleep briefly, she woke up and started screaming again, the mother told the officer, the memorandum said.

Claudia Hernandez and Rene Aaron Hernandez-Santos then got a trash bucket and tried opening Arely's mouth to get her to throw up, prosecutors said.

"(Claudia Hernandez) then explained that she has seen movies that show objects can get possessed," the mother told the police officer, according to prosecutors. "She told (Rene Aaron Hernandez-Santos) that they had to remove everything from the room. They moved all the furniture from the room except the bed."

Arely would bite her mother's and uncle's fingers when they again tried to open her mouth and stick their fingers down her throat, prosecutors said. The two ultimately stopped because the girl calmed down, they said in the memorandum.

Arely Doe's mom, uncle and grandfather tried to make her vomit, court docs say

The two then took Arely to their "dad's church" around 7 a.m. that day, and that's when Claudia Hernandez said she noticed red marks on her daughter's face, court records show. They then held Arely up over the trash can and her mother put her hand on the girl's throat to control her head as her daughter was struggling and saying "No," according to prosecutors.

Arely's grandfather, Rene Trigueros Hernandez, arrived at the church around noon, according to the court record. Arely's mom, uncle and grandfather prayed before taking turns grabbing the girl's neck and trying to make her throw up in the trash can, it says.

"Claudia described Arely as being very strong and described Arely’s resistance to their force as her flailing," prosecutors wrote. "Claudia said she was holding around her jaw."

Once Claudia Hernandez saw "blood vessels burst on Arely's face," the three laid the girl down and "then repeated their previous actions to try to make her vomit," they said.

"Claudia grabbed Arely by her torso and Rene (Aaron Hernandez-Santos) grabbed her neck," prosecutors said. "Arely finally vomited in the trashcan."

Arizona exorcism: Boy dies after man attempted to get 'demon' out of him, officials say

'God had taken Arely,' Claudia Hernandez told her brother after the exorcism

Arely was "cold to the touch" around 6 p.m., the court documents say.

"Claudia said she thought maybe she was dead but that she had never seen a dead body," according to the court filings. "They continued to pray. She moved her onto the floor and then kept praying. Claudia called her mom, sister, best friend, husband, and boss before she called 911."

Claudia Hernandez spoke to her crying brother after detectives interviewed the two of them.

"Claudia told Rene Jr. that while she was in the other interview room God came to her and told her that God had taken Arely on Thursday, and it was because of demons," according to the memorandum. "Claudia told Rene Jr. that God gave her the solution, and everything was going to be okay. Claudia also said that God told her they were not going to be guilty."

Claudia Hernandez saw visions of 'men in white,' court docs say

Claudia Hernandez said she did not want to kill her daughter, and that San Jose police detectives would not understand because "they did not believe in God," prosecutors wrote. The mother then said her daughter was "possessed because she was asleep, she continued to twitch and her stare was different," they wrote.

Claudia Hernandez also spoke to her brother about visions of "men in white" and how they and God took Arely from her hands, the filing says. Arely's grandfather told his daughter not to tell the police anything, according to the document.

More: Tennessee grandmother Amy Brasher charged in 3-year-old's death the day after Christmas

Arely Doe's grandfather spoke to San Jose police about what happened in the church

When police asked Rene Trigueros Hernandez, a self-proclaimed "elder of the church," about the term "exorcism," he said: "That was something they did not practice in their religion," prosecutors wrote.

"(Rene Trigueros Hernandez) said an exorcism is when they put holy water and they pass alcohol," according to the memorandum. "He said Arely was possessed and when that occurs they just pray."

Police brought Arely's grandfather a doll so he could show them what they did to her.

"He described grabbing her firmly for an hour and a half while she was either sleeping or making noises and screaming," prosecutors wrote. "Rene Sr. said when the demon comes out people have to vomit it up and the vomit will be green or foamy."

The judge's decision on whether to have a jury trial for the three family members was pushed back to May 13 to allow attorneys to submit briefs arguing whether there was sufficient evidence to uphold charges, the San Jose Mercury News reported.