After some thoughts about it, I think it’s along the lines of the woman who raised us, regardless of how bad or good, is someone I don’t really know anymore, I get kind of a lost feeling. I wish they’d tell parents ‘If you raise your kid a certain way, they will undoubtebly inheiret qualities you might not necessarily want them to have’ That shit should be government ordained.
Spoken like a true non-parent. You’re an adult, dude. It’s not about her any more; it’s about you now. You’ve gotten some excellent advice here. So what steps have you taken to address your situation?
I apologise for my lack of offspring in regards to having an objective view on how I feel. Other than that, I have re assessed how I view parents in general, I’m just gonna take a break from her, become more self sufficient emotionally.
I don’t think it’s hate, like one of the posters said, just a more tiring of her bullshit, and I got angry. It’s gonna take more than a few posts on a message board to get round this, but I’ll get there, I have never really talked about this to anyone, and I only got round to thinking about this a few months back.
Hit the nail on the head.
Good Luck and give it some time. If you don’t tolerate her antics then she may come around. She may learn that if she is going to be in your life she needs to act appropriately.
When I was 5 years old, my father was a fire-and-brimstone Lutheran Minister - and I didn’t know if my Mom’s name was whore, bitch, slut, fat cow, dumb farm girl, or just plain stupid. I hated my dad for a long time.
When I was in my early 20’s, during a conversation with my landlord, I realized the incredible number of times my Dad had tried to walk away from an argument and my Mom had not let him - egging and digging at him until he lost his temper because she wanted to be ‘the good parent’. I hated my Mom for a long time after that.
Then one day I realized that hating my parents had no effect on them whatsoever, but took an incredible ammount of energy out of me. So I forgave them. (I didn’t forget what they did, I just didn’t give it my emotional energy anymore. They were human like me afterall - and did what they could with what they had.)
I made peace with my Dad before he died. I love my Mom too. It helps that she lives a state away. She is in her 80’s. I call her from time to time…
Ryan, believe me, you are not wallowing. It is good that you are finally talking about this.
Those of us who read may tend to project our own experiences onto your situation. I’m no different. Take whatever fits:
I was decades older than you before I realized just how angry I actually was at my mother. Until then I had taken my anger out of everyone else. I was a very hostile person. Even hostile toward myself.
But when in therapy I could finally confront the reality of the cruelty of my mother, I could finally begin direct my anger in the right direction. I thought about all of the ways that she still established emotional ties to me and I mentally removed them and established my independence from her. I had cut the wires with which she manipulated me and, indirectly, my emotions.
I didn’t blow up at her or tell her even what was going on in my mind. I just told her that I wouldn’t be talking to her as often as I had been. (I had always been the one to call.) And I told her that if she wanted to talk, she could call me.
There were times when she once again tried to verbally manipulate me and hurt me, and I would tell her that I wouldn’t talk to her when she was saying such things and that I would call her back some day when she was pleasant to talk with – or she could call me when she calmed down.
I limited my visits to her to once a year. That was a big change.
It took about five years before I realized that you can hate and love someone at the same time and both emotions are real.
But you are wrong about one thing that is very important, Ryan. You are the anchor in your life now. Pay attention to what is good for you. Don’t let anyone run over you by such things as sending someone to live with you! That is your space! Protect it!
Don’t make a decision about when you will let her back into your life. But please, please, do let it be someday and let her know that someday you will be together again but just not in the same way.
I remember you from my earliest days at Straight Dope. There is very little that I remember about that time period.
Peace be with you.
I had the Mom from hell, and there was a point I had to cut it off with her (and other family members). We ended up not speaking for a year. The thing that helped me in making this choice was that I accepted I wasn’t being forced to make a choice ‘‘once, and for all time.’’ There’s nothing wrong with giving yourself some distance from people who hurt you, Ryan. Just because you’re not going to talk to your mother now doesn’t mean you can’t talk to her later, once you’ve grown into your own and learned to accept that no amount of hatred toward your parents will ever cover your loss or help you heal. It doesn’t mean you have to do anything other than what’s best for you right now in this moment.
My Mom and I have a good relationship now, because I grew up, became an adult, and set boundaries which she agreed to honor in exchange for my company. People, my therapists included, fail to understand why I am not consumed by rage and hatred toward my mother for everything she did to me. I can’t really explain it, other than I understand where she’s coming from and what she was going through when she abused me. What matters to me now is that she cannot abuse me again because I have the power to make sure it never happens. She was never a bad person, just sick.
I didn’t speak to my biological father for 10 years (from the time I was 12 to 22), and now we talk on the phone fairly regularly and I visit whenever I’m in town. He was a neglectful alcoholic which by all other standards makes him the best parent I’ve ever had. I love him a lot, but I’ve accepted that I’m never going to feel like he is my ‘‘Daddy’’ the way he so desperately wants. He wants to undo the failures of his past, and he can’t. But that doesn’t mean I can’t share the present with him.
My adopted father on the other hand is out of my life completely and totally. While at the time I couldn’t handle making a ‘‘once and for all’’ decision to cut him out of my life, that was eight years ago, and I now see that there is no way in hell we could salvage a relationship, because the person I loved as a child never existed in the first place. I am MUCH better off without him in my life.
My point is, you don’t know how it’s going to shake out, or how your growth as a person is going to change your perspective toward these people who raised you. You don’t have to know in order to make the decision about what’s best* right now.*
Hey Ryan I have a little trick you might want to try. It’s not difficult and it really worked for me.
The need to love our parents/ caregivers runs really deep in human beings. Society conspires to make us feel we should ‘honour our parents’, ‘blood is thicker than water’, etc, etc. Adult children who remove themselves from the influence of toxic parents, even though they are righteous in their actions, struggle with it. Christmas and Thanksgiving come every year, people, when they ask about your plans, want to hear you’ll be in the warm embrace of your family.
So what’s a person to do? Lots of love and honour inside and no one to confer it on, only toxic persons that is it better to be away from.
Find a photo of your Mom, (and, your Dad too, for that matter). It needs to be a photo from before you came along. They need to be happy, young and smiling. Crop, enlarge, convert to black and white, mat and frame. Now, hang them on your wall some place where you’ll see them every single day. I put mine up side by side, like the ancestor worshiping Chinese do, don’t worry they’ll fit right into any decor - just old family photos.
Now, acknowledge you can love people from afar. If you were at university, in England, or had a job, in Japan, you’d still be able to have love in your heart for your friends or girl back home. Tell yourself you will be content to love these people from afar, from now on.
As you look at the photos, over time, it will sink in that you can love these people in the old pictures. Look at them, they are young and happy and brimming with potential. Life has yet to shape them into the creatures you find toxic. No matter what they’ve done to you, how they’ve wronged you, you will have a place for the love you once, and still, have for them. This opens the door for your loving nature to rise above their actions, you no longer have to deny or withhold love. A very positive step, believe me.
Also slowly over time, you will come to recognize that you are just like those photos, young, happy, brimming with potential, really, just raw material. This will happen without effort, don’t sweat it. In recognizing that they were once, just as you are, you will begin, slowly to be able to forgive them for who they became. Your love for them will become disconnected from their actions, who they are today, and, instead attach to all the potential they once represented.
Once you disconnect from their actions being able to hurt you, you have reached unconditional love, a very powerful and healthier place to be. The need to connect loving them with condoning their behaviour will disappear. All this will happen just with the passage of time. Those photos will do the magic, just as long as you see them every day.
Bonus - once you’ve truly forgiven them, for who they have become, you’ll find it’s easier to forgive yourself for not being able to be in relationship with them.
Do this and you will find yourself in a loving place, without judgment, and somehow insulated, by openhearted lovingkindness, from the hurtful effects of any future actions of theirs. Again, it will just happen, all by itself. You’ll just find yourself in a better, more positive, place and realize their toxicity has diminished because you’ve healed yourself.
I encourage you to try this, no therapists bills, no conflict, no difficult conversations. And, as I say, it will all just kind of happen, over time, somewhat organically. Besides it’s easy, you’ve nothing to lose.