Hugs Wendy. Good to see you. I understand what you mean. My dad is an alcoholic, so he kind of has a "reason" for his behavior, however shoddy. But my mom. Like ten kinds of dysfunction going on, and I didn't really start to understand what was wrong with her until I was in my mid twenties. She smoked pot, but that was actually a relief when she spent most of her time hiding in her room getting stoned. Because the alternative was torrents of verbal and emotional abuse, irrational behavior, bizarre accusations.
When I was a teenager she punished me for "trying to plant thoughts in her head." She thought she was psychic and could read minds.
When I was about 25 she ripped the phone line out of the side of the house because she thought Al Qaida was spying on her. I was away at military training, making my usual Sunday phone call, only to get a message that the phone had been disconnected. My brother told me the story after he went out and bought himself a cell phone on payday.
A whole lot of stuff fell into place. Paranoid schizophrenia. She still hasn't technically been diagnosed, but that's what I'm **% sure it is.
I still spent a lot of years being raised by someone whose entire perception of reality is warped beyond recognition. Having a label for it is helping he to heal now, but I understand what it's like for a parent to just be abusive with no real, tangible reasoning behind it (I know that doesn't make it better, but at least you know WHY- they were drunk, whatever). It sure did a number on me, left me feeling like I somehow deserved constant "punishment", because there must be something horribly wrong with ME to make her say and do all that stuff.