At several points in the series, Helena exhibits a clear and horrified awareness about what the abuse she has suffered throughout her life has done to her. Not the least of which is when she turns on Tomas in the first season, telling him, 'You made me this way,' before trying to thumb his eyeballs in. As such, the most evident product of her history is the damage to her self-concept. She is a broken person who has done horrible things, largely unlikeable and (for most of the timeline) entirely unloved.
Perhaps the worst part of what the Proletheans did to her, though, is to so badly and completely corrupt her recognition of that abuse. Interestingly-- and impressively, she is able to readily identify the maltreatment committed by the nuns she was raised by as heinous and horrible and undeserved; she even refers to having blinded one sister who had sewn her mouth shut in her childhood as punishment for impertinence. The worst part about the Proletheans, for her, is that she was tricked by them into believing they were better and right. While what the nuns had done was horrible and deeply affected her perspective on people and children, at least she had recognized that for the evil it was and sided against the nuns.
In contrast, Tomas and Maggie turned her against herself. As Cosima pointed out, being special, being the original, was a temporary delusion that nonetheless justified all the horror she had gone through. These beliefs lit her life and gave it meaning that she clung to with perverse tenacity for years, despite that it cost Helena nearly as gravely as it did those she killed. Perhaps the most clear evidence of that was the self-injury they taught her to engage in: it was no accident that she took the knife to herself, instead of flogging or other punishment by their own hands. In this sense, she cannot fully externalize the blame for her brokenness; she bought into it so fully that going back, undoing what was done, seems like an impossibility. And it may well be. Worse, though, the Proletheans left her with a vague but disquieting suspicion that she must be inferior or awful by nature, to somehow have deserved what was done to her. In other words, what classical psychological wounds her experience with the nuns didn't manage to inflict, the new church did.
Notably, the brainwashing and related abuse affected other areas besides her attitudes toward physical aggression and punishment. As a consequence of these teachings, she takes a haphazardly puritanical and moralistic attitude on many subjects. She frowns upon artificially-created life for reasons unrelated to the ethical considerations of the subjects' freedoms and right to life, slut-shames like an asshole kind of, approves of girls who are sweet, thinks monogamy is good and right, and so on. Similarly, she appears to have little interest in money, material comforts, and other experiences traditionally associated with 'pleasures of the flesh,' with the exception of food (and even then) (that restaurant wasn't that nice my goodness).
However, these attitudes do not have much in the way of organization or consistency, especially since her delusions broke. She thinks good girls are the ones who obey their parents, per her encounter with Gracie in season 2. Helena also adapts surprisingly well to being abducted and having her own eggs stolen for fertilization. However, she does eventually come to manifest a very (violently) staunch stance on women's rights to control their own bodies as a principle, and even encourages Gracie to have an abortion if she wants. Later in the series, she will grumble and snit at Rachel doing another woman's fella with a sniper rifle pointed at the woman's head, but has absolutely no problem with her favorite fellow clone having a baby out of wedlock. Her own sexuality will prove under-developed, and her way with romance is hilariously forward-- but chaste. In general, she likes notions of purity, innocence, virtue, dichotomous good and evil, but she falls short of perfect in the majority of the commandments. In other words, Helena can appear kinda judgey in a messed up psuedo-Christian way, but it's frighteningly hit-or-miss how much she actually cares about a given ideal or principle.
Like many abuse victims, she has to cope with the anguish and suffering somehow. While violence and retribution are clearly one aspect of that 'coping,' that is, doing injury to those who initially did her harm, she also has a tendency toward regression. When one does separate that from violence and retribution, in fact, her regression is nearly textbook per psychodynamic theorists and conventional understandings of the term. In the latter, more superficial sense of the term, she is funnily childlike in her conduct. Flouting social norms might take any number of forms, and this is hers. She'll sing along to radio, wail when she cries, eat with her hands, say absurdities, walk in the unsteady, hunched totter of a retiring child, make many various mannerisms and requests that are eerily reminiscent of a much younger girl.
As to the other form of regression, a psychoanalyst would observe, correctly, that Helena has actually gotten trapped into habits she developed as a child and never quite grew out of. Sarah Manning asks her, Didn't they feed you where you come from? and indeed, part of her voracity and messy pleasure with food is the punitive, near-neglectful frugality with which she was raised at the nunnery. When she is looking at photographs of Kira alone at the Prolethean base, she rocks herself and stares obsessively and mumbles, which was the only kind of soothing that was available in her childhood. The mouth-sewing nuns didn't do television, long walks, or cuddles. Under greater stress, this becomes even more exaggerated: she gets very upset with Tomas when he locks her in a cage, and she starts to whine incoherently and grasp his face very gently.
As a consequence both of Helena's regressive tendency and her firsthand observation of the vicious, exploitive behavior of adults, she tends to feel much closer to, and sympathetic toward children than she does those her age or older. The Proletheans did leave her with a disquieting suspicion that there must have been something wrong with herself. However, this only serves as a contrast and context for her belief in the purity, innocence, and potential of those who are still young. This falls partly in the domain of her Christian upbringing-- the idea that kids are born free of sin and so forth. However, she is all the more protective of children because of her own abuse history. She basically hates that shit. She will totally lose her temper and brutally murder some abusive grown-ups [probably in front of those children] [k rational this is not].
For now, Helena is portrayed as fairly reasonable about her definition of abuse. She probably won't flip out over a rebuke, but when she sees an adult lay hands on a small child, especially for a disproportionately mild offense, this leads to death threats in season 2.
All the gory stuff aside, the child-like manner discussed earlier really helps with getting on with children, generally! They tend to think she's hilarious or at least real straight-talking. If I've said this before I apologize for redundancy.
She likes teenagers and pre-teens okay too, there just aren't many on Orphan Black. In general, she gets on with the smaller and less worldly ones better.
Self-harm
As previously mentioned, Helena's self-harm operated much like the mortification of the flesh pervasive in several world religions. While the Proletheans weren't exactly conventional in their take on Christianity, the scarification they taught Helena to engage in appeared to follow the principles of Roman Catholicism. She was shown that choosing pain over comfort proved and purified the "light" she was told was within her, elevating her further in her status as a chosen warrior, bringing her closer to God.
Notably, Tomas used the seductive appeal of this holiness to refocus her when he felt she was getting off-track, specifically when he handed her a razor just as she was beginning to describe doubts about killing Sarah. (Which was barbaric.) This tactic didn't turn out to be effective in the end, but it did highlight Helena's desperation to be special and chosen. Many of her injuries did not appear to be healed as seen earlier in the episodes, suggesting that persevering through the pain of contact with clothing and physical activities was also part the process.
However, there were also aspects to her scarification that were not necessarily related to weird religion, more reminiscent of the pathology and emotional problems more commonly seen in self-injury. When she cuts herself in season 1, Helena's confusion dissolves into an expression of bliss. This is unmistakable connection to the function of self-injury for many cutters: the physical sensations, colors, and acts, both express internal suffering and also relieve the paradoxical numbness that comes from anguish that a person cannot otherwise articulate or divert. At the height of her delusion, Helena had a lot of internal suffering, internal conflict, and weird dislocated parts of herself that she couldn't otherwise deal with.
Now things are different. She's quit cutting largely because the first component-- the mortification of the flesh-- isn't much of a part of her inner-life anymore. She recognizes the Prolethean nonsense was really nonsense. As to the other component, the problems with emotional experience and expression, it was fortunately the lesser of the two. We didn't see her respond to most stressors with cutting for emotional reasons, and there was an awful lot of stress. Further, her lifestyle and attitudes also took a shift that pushed her to self-explore, express herself in other ways, and find less opportunity to self-injure.
Sarah and Kira are a big part of that, actually! Sarah has this go-getter, direct, no-babying, face-the-problem attitude that pretty straightforwardly shoved Helena's face in the fact that she isn't the super-special original, and that this is survivable anyway. Kira showed her a very profound, intimate connection that cut through all the confusion in a moment of startling clarity. After that, her increasing social contact throughout the second season and busy-bee with the weird strategems basically precludes sitting, dwelling, and chopping herself up.
In consequence, cutting is very unlikely aboard the Tranquility. Likely triggers will be: reminders/seeming evidence that God is aboard and needs connecting with, and extremes of isolation, unhappiness, and idleness in combination.
The gd church
Helena hates the Prolethean church and wants nothing to do with them.
Her confrontation with Kira in the alleyway raised the question in her, about how she became to be this way-- the realization that there is something wrong, that she'd gone horribly astray. Sarah's super blunt tack toward secular reeducation pretty much forcibly expunged any possibility that the whole 'you're special cuz God reasons and therefore get a free pass on murdering regular people who've never done shit to you' was true. By 'super blunt,' I am of course referring to that funny time Sarah drove to a secret bunker owned by murderous zealots, freed Helena, narrowly escaped death by psychotic priest, then stuffed Helena into the trunk of her car, frogmarched her into a townhouse, and tied her up in the basement, all of this in order to introduce Helena to their birth mother. "I don't want to be your sister, meathead. Look, I just want you to know you're not the original. Got it? You were born of science, not of some immaculate womb, or whatever bullshit Tomas fed you."
Suffice to say, there were no arguments forthcoming.
At this point in canon, Helena has not only abandoned her belief in the Prolethean interpretation of the Bible. She is also very angry with the church. Were Tomas or any others to turn up on the ship, she would not have compunctions about sinkholing some eyeballs, setting fires, and the lot of it. Exceptions could be made if there were some tactical reason to bide her time, or members who would insist they do not condone the torment she was put through (I.e., the New Order, seen later in season 2).
This is not to say that she didn't once love Tomas very well and trust Maggie with her life-- all these are also true, and their betrayal and callous use of her was worse for it. She blames them for exactly what they were responsible for. It was a lot.
Revised (CW: Self-harm and trauma in extensive discussion.)
At several points in the series, Helena exhibits a clear and horrified awareness about what the abuse she has suffered throughout her life has done to her. Not the least of which is when she turns on Tomas in the first season, telling him, 'You made me this way,' before trying to thumb his eyeballs in. As such, the most evident product of her history is the damage to her self-concept. She is a broken person who has done horrible things, largely unlikeable and (for most of the timeline) entirely unloved.
Perhaps the worst part of what the Proletheans did to her, though, is to so badly and completely corrupt her recognition of that abuse. Interestingly-- and impressively, she is able to readily identify the maltreatment committed by the nuns she was raised by as heinous and horrible and undeserved; she even refers to having blinded one sister who had sewn her mouth shut in her childhood as punishment for impertinence. The worst part about the Proletheans, for her, is that she was tricked by them into believing they were better and right. While what the nuns had done was horrible and deeply affected her perspective on people and children, at least she had recognized that for the evil it was and sided against the nuns.
In contrast, Tomas and Maggie turned her against herself. As Cosima pointed out, being special, being the original, was a temporary delusion that nonetheless justified all the horror she had gone through. These beliefs lit her life and gave it meaning that she clung to with perverse tenacity for years, despite that it cost Helena nearly as gravely as it did those she killed. Perhaps the most clear evidence of that was the self-injury they taught her to engage in: it was no accident that she took the knife to herself, instead of flogging or other punishment by their own hands. In this sense, she cannot fully externalize the blame for her brokenness; she bought into it so fully that going back, undoing what was done, seems like an impossibility. And it may well be. Worse, though, the Proletheans left her with a vague but disquieting suspicion that she must be inferior or awful by nature, to somehow have deserved what was done to her. In other words, what classical psychological wounds her experience with the nuns didn't manage to inflict, the new church did.
Notably, the brainwashing and related abuse affected other areas besides her attitudes toward physical aggression and punishment. As a consequence of these teachings, she takes a haphazardly puritanical and moralistic attitude on many subjects. She frowns upon artificially-created life for reasons unrelated to the ethical considerations of the subjects' freedoms and right to life, slut-shames like an asshole kind of, approves of girls who are sweet, thinks monogamy is good and right, and so on. Similarly, she appears to have little interest in money, material comforts, and other experiences traditionally associated with 'pleasures of the flesh,' with the exception of food (and even then) (that restaurant wasn't that nice my goodness).
However, these attitudes do not have much in the way of organization or consistency, especially since her delusions broke. She thinks good girls are the ones who obey their parents, per her encounter with Gracie in season 2. Helena also adapts surprisingly well to being abducted and having her own eggs stolen for fertilization. However, she does eventually come to manifest a very (violently) staunch stance on women's rights to control their own bodies as a principle, and even encourages Gracie to have an abortion if she wants. Later in the series, she will grumble and snit at Rachel doing another woman's fella with a sniper rifle pointed at the woman's head, but has absolutely no problem with her favorite fellow clone having a baby out of wedlock. Her own sexuality will prove under-developed, and her way with romance is hilariously forward-- but chaste. In general, she likes notions of purity, innocence, virtue, dichotomous good and evil, but she falls short of perfect in the majority of the commandments. In other words, Helena can appear kinda judgey in a messed up psuedo-Christian way, but it's frighteningly hit-or-miss how much she actually cares about a given ideal or principle.
Like many abuse victims, she has to cope with the anguish and suffering somehow. While violence and retribution are clearly one aspect of that 'coping,' that is, doing injury to those who initially did her harm, she also has a tendency toward regression. When one does separate that from violence and retribution, in fact, her regression is nearly textbook per psychodynamic theorists and conventional understandings of the term. In the latter, more superficial sense of the term, she is funnily childlike in her conduct. Flouting social norms might take any number of forms, and this is hers. She'll sing along to radio, wail when she cries, eat with her hands, say absurdities, walk in the unsteady, hunched totter of a retiring child, make many various mannerisms and requests that are eerily reminiscent of a much younger girl.
As to the other form of regression, a psychoanalyst would observe, correctly, that Helena has actually gotten trapped into habits she developed as a child and never quite grew out of. Sarah Manning asks her, Didn't they feed you where you come from? and indeed, part of her voracity and messy pleasure with food is the punitive, near-neglectful frugality with which she was raised at the nunnery. When she is looking at photographs of Kira alone at the Prolethean base, she rocks herself and stares obsessively and mumbles, which was the only kind of soothing that was available in her childhood. The mouth-sewing nuns didn't do television, long walks, or cuddles. Under greater stress, this becomes even more exaggerated: she gets very upset with Tomas when he locks her in a cage, and she starts to whine incoherently and grasp his face very gently.
As a consequence both of Helena's regressive tendency and her firsthand observation of the vicious, exploitive behavior of adults, she tends to feel much closer to, and sympathetic toward children than she does those her age or older. The Proletheans did leave her with a disquieting suspicion that there must have been something wrong with herself. However, this only serves as a contrast and context for her belief in the purity, innocence, and potential of those who are still young. This falls partly in the domain of her Christian upbringing-- the idea that kids are born free of sin and so forth. However, she is all the more protective of children because of her own abuse history. She basically hates that shit. She will totally lose her temper and brutally murder some abusive grown-ups [probably in front of those children] [k rational this is not].
For now, Helena is portrayed as fairly reasonable about her definition of abuse. She probably won't flip out over a rebuke, but when she sees an adult lay hands on a small child, especially for a disproportionately mild offense, this leads to death threats in season 2.
All the gory stuff aside, the child-like manner discussed earlier really helps with getting on with children, generally! They tend to think she's hilarious or at least real straight-talking. If I've said this before I apologize for redundancy.
She likes teenagers and pre-teens okay too, there just aren't many on Orphan Black. In general, she gets on with the smaller and less worldly ones better.
As previously mentioned, Helena's self-harm operated much like the mortification of the flesh pervasive in several world religions. While the Proletheans weren't exactly conventional in their take on Christianity, the scarification they taught Helena to engage in appeared to follow the principles of Roman Catholicism. She was shown that choosing pain over comfort proved and purified the "light" she was told was within her, elevating her further in her status as a chosen warrior, bringing her closer to God.
Notably, Tomas used the seductive appeal of this holiness to refocus her when he felt she was getting off-track, specifically when he handed her a razor just as she was beginning to describe doubts about killing Sarah. (Which was barbaric.) This tactic didn't turn out to be effective in the end, but it did highlight Helena's desperation to be special and chosen. Many of her injuries did not appear to be healed as seen earlier in the episodes, suggesting that persevering through the pain of contact with clothing and physical activities was also part the process.
However, there were also aspects to her scarification that were not necessarily related to weird religion, more reminiscent of the pathology and emotional problems more commonly seen in self-injury. When she cuts herself in season 1, Helena's confusion dissolves into an expression of bliss. This is unmistakable connection to the function of self-injury for many cutters: the physical sensations, colors, and acts, both express internal suffering and also relieve the paradoxical numbness that comes from anguish that a person cannot otherwise articulate or divert. At the height of her delusion, Helena had a lot of internal suffering, internal conflict, and weird dislocated parts of herself that she couldn't otherwise deal with.
Now things are different. She's quit cutting largely because the first component-- the mortification of the flesh-- isn't much of a part of her inner-life anymore. She recognizes the Prolethean nonsense was really nonsense. As to the other component, the problems with emotional experience and expression, it was fortunately the lesser of the two. We didn't see her respond to most stressors with cutting for emotional reasons, and there was an awful lot of stress. Further, her lifestyle and attitudes also took a shift that pushed her to self-explore, express herself in other ways, and find less opportunity to self-injure.
Sarah and Kira are a big part of that, actually! Sarah has this go-getter, direct, no-babying, face-the-problem attitude that pretty straightforwardly shoved Helena's face in the fact that she isn't the super-special original, and that this is survivable anyway. Kira showed her a very profound, intimate connection that cut through all the confusion in a moment of startling clarity. After that, her increasing social contact throughout the second season and busy-bee with the weird strategems basically precludes sitting, dwelling, and chopping herself up.
In consequence, cutting is very unlikely aboard the Tranquility. Likely triggers will be: reminders/seeming evidence that God is aboard and needs connecting with, and extremes of isolation, unhappiness, and idleness in combination.
Helena hates the Prolethean church and wants nothing to do with them.
Her confrontation with Kira in the alleyway raised the question in her, about how she became to be this way-- the realization that there is something wrong, that she'd gone horribly astray. Sarah's super blunt tack toward secular reeducation pretty much forcibly expunged any possibility that the whole 'you're special cuz God reasons and therefore get a free pass on murdering regular people who've never done shit to you' was true. By 'super blunt,' I am of course referring to that funny time Sarah drove to a secret bunker owned by murderous zealots, freed Helena, narrowly escaped death by psychotic priest, then stuffed Helena into the trunk of her car, frogmarched her into a townhouse, and tied her up in the basement, all of this in order to introduce Helena to their birth mother. "I don't want to be your sister, meathead. Look, I just want you to know you're not the original. Got it? You were born of science, not of some immaculate womb, or whatever bullshit Tomas fed you."
Suffice to say, there were no arguments forthcoming.
At this point in canon, Helena has not only abandoned her belief in the Prolethean interpretation of the Bible. She is also very angry with the church. Were Tomas or any others to turn up on the ship, she would not have compunctions about sinkholing some eyeballs, setting fires, and the lot of it. Exceptions could be made if there were some tactical reason to bide her time, or members who would insist they do not condone the torment she was put through (I.e., the New Order, seen later in season 2).
This is not to say that she didn't once love Tomas very well and trust Maggie with her life-- all these are also true, and their betrayal and callous use of her was worse for it. She blames them for exactly what they were responsible for. It was a lot.