It’s strange the things that can put your own life into stark relief, and suddenly make you look back on the decades with a level of insight and clarity that you hadn’t necessarily even realised was missing. Such a thing happened to me recently, watching a documentary on television that echoed much of my time on this Earth. It sent me spiralling for several weeks as I realised just how abnormal, difficult and unacceptable my childhood and early adult life had been.

The programme was called My Wife, My Abuser and contains graphic video evidence of a man, Richard Spencer, being beaten and verbally ridiculed by his wife, Sheree. Spencer suffered this abuse for 20 years – and it often happened as their two young daughters looked on. Seasoned police officers involved in the case described how they’d cried as they dealt with it. Some said it was one of the worst crimes they’d investigated.

Yet when I watched that programme – it was released on Netflix late last year but originally made by Channel 5 – my first response was to think: ‘Gosh, she isn’t that bad: she’s not a patch on my mother. And she isn’t even touching the children.’. You see, I grew up in a household where my mother was physically violent, emotionally and verbally abusive, and horribly controlling. My mother meted this behaviour out to her husband – my father – and also to her children, from when we were toddlers onwards, sons and daughters alike.

I grew up in a household where my mother was physically violent, emotionally and verbally abusive, and horribly controlling. None of her violence was fuelled by alcohol. She did not hold down a job outside the home. We were a nice, middle-class family – intelligent, well-educated and well-spoken. It’s so important to acknowledge that violence really does happen behind well-to-do doors. I’m not here to diminish anyone else’s experience of domestic violence, and I know (at least according to instances that are reported) that women are at far greater risk of it than men.

But that was not my experience, and it’s an uncomfortable truth to acknowledge that sometimes women are violent, too. Not all mothers are nurturing and wonderful and the conversation around abuse needs to be broader, so everyone feels able to come forward and talk about it without shame. I’m writing this piece to do just that. For as I kept watching that film about female violence in the home, more pennies began to drop, and I realised just how far outside the norm my initial reaction to it was.

Yes, of course, what I was watching was bad. It was criminal and terrifying. And so, too, was what had happened in our house. You’d never have guessed it, though. It was a big house set in a large garden, in a good area of a large town. And yet my mother’s temper was both quick and fierce, and good hidings, as they were known, could come at any time. She called us and our father horrible names – names this paper would not want to print – and she’d turn violent at a moment’s notice. Perhaps one of us wasn’t word perfect with our homework, or we hadn’t reacted to something the way she wanted. Or it could be that you were the punch bag for something totally unrelated to you that had annoyed her.

She hit with her hands and fists, or grabbed kitchen utensils, including knives, to hit us with. Sometimes, in the midst of a verbal hiding, she’d send you off to collect her preferred instrument of punishment and make you carry it back for her to use on you. She shoved us against walls, pushed us into corners where it was easier to deliver physical blows and harder for us to escape: all you could do was to cower like a traumatised dog.

I’m sometimes amazed that none of us ever went to hospital. Sometimes, I’m even amazed that none of us died. There was no timetable to her lashing out. You could go for a week when all seemed fine, or have several consecutive days where, no matter how hard you tried, everything you did was wrong (in her eyes) and would set her off. I remember one severe beating in the hall one morning before I left for school. I was probably 13 or 14. My mother had kicked off – I don’t recall why – and she picked up a chunky walking stick and started walloping me with it over and over again.

I crawled to the foot of the stairs, curled up as best I could, and let the whacks rain down. Resistance was not only futile, it would likely make things worse. But it was so painful and so relentless, I remember thinking that this time she might actually kill me. Yet still I did nothing. She was so out of control on that occasion that the bruising couldn’t be hidden. Friends saw it at school and I told my best friend what had happened. She wanted to call social services and I had to beg her not to: I was too terrified of what my mother would do if she found out. And so the cycle of silence continued.