Well, I can’t say all of this doesn’t sound more then familiar.
I think what often helps others most is empathy, listening, and sharing a similar story/experience, so I will try to do some of that for you in hopes of helping and also relieving some of my own pent up frustration.
I have a lot of similar goings on in my family history.
My father’s mother is a CLASSIC emotional vampire…everything is always about her, there is never enough attention directed at her, and she has to be the center of attention all of the time, even if that means creating total and absolute CHAOS! She is so selfish, yes, but mainly she is just very immature. Her mother apparently never allowed her to ever complain or have any problems, so it helped to turn her in to a CONSTANT complainer and whiner and drama queen. My grandmother was also an operatic prodigy at the ago of 5 and was training under a full adult work week for most of her childhood…she never had the chance to really develop emotionally in a healthy way.
My father’s father was an emotionally crippled human being…completey incapable of empathy and showing concern or love in any more then an extremely subtle, near-nonexistent way. He and my grandmother were divorced when my dad was about 7, I think. He lived primarily with his mother from then on and it seems as if his relationship with his father really stopped with the divorce. I describe my grandfather as the cold statue.
My mother’s mother is a vampire but in a totally different way. She steals your good feelings about yourself. Very strict and very indoctrinated with order, cleanliness, and dogma leaving her with an ego more self-righteous then any I’ve ever come across. NOTHING is EVER good enough for this woman. She is the God-Queen of guilt and all of it’s offspring.
My mother’s father is the wild card in the bunch, not in that he didn’t leave scars but perhaps in just his nature. He’s a loon howling at the moon, who will be chasing tail until the day he dies. He has started a new family about every ten years, give or take. My grandmother divorced him after discovering he was cheating, when my mother was only 2 years old. He left the family and was never seen again until my mother tracked him down at age 19. That man…he gives and gives till he’s gone. GONE. A hustler to the core…
Why do I know all of this? Because I have been my parent’s emotional support system since before I can remember. There is no doubt that I am a healer by nature, so this didn’t help things, but the above family background didn’t help either. Both of my parents were basically designed to be emotionally needy people. I seem to attract them actually.
People who are open-hearted, kind, excellent listeners, and very empathetic, feeling individuals often do attract such heavily in need souls. It’s like if someone who is forced to carry around 200 pounds of garbage on their back saw someone that was carrying a bright, shiny, clean trash can. Their first thought is to dump…
And my first thought is always to save…accept the garbage so to speak. I am the one that is good at processing it, right? Well, in life I have found that helping others is a gift I excel at all too well. Strangers, mere aquaintences…pretty much everyone I know longer then 2 to 10 minutes will start indulging me with their pain. Their deep pain. And I feel that a part of my multitude of purpose on this planet is to help as much as I can…to elevate those around me…to make things grow.
This impulse, this situation, takes on a whole new meaning when the soul doing the dumping is a parent. Dumping a parent’s garbage requires a much more complicated disposal process…it takes longer and is much more likely to cause potential harm to the “child” on the receiving end. It is immensely draining and damaging, causing confusion and stress in the short term and, depending on the type of garbage, causing any number of deeply rooted issues, including insanity, in the long term. In short, it is a risky business to become a parent’s therapist.
It’s actually more then just risky. It is unfair. It’s backwards. Just…not right.
What do we all want from a “parent.” WE want support. We want unconditional love and safety. We want that ear or shoulder to lean on, when and if necessary. We want strength, yet tenderness. We want empathy and we want to be cared for without force or dominance.
We want the perfect therapist.
So what happens to a child that becomes the therapist for the parent? They not only loose hope of having the ideal parent, they loose the parent completely.
How lonely it feels.
It is a challenge so many of us face because of all of the pain and suffering that still continues and is passed from generation to generation in this world. Emotional vampires are created by their parents before them, and most likely, a situation created the mental and physical states that so damaged and stressed their parents, and so on. The best we can hope for is to stop or alleviate, or better the cycle.
This is the hard part, I think.
How do we remain empathic, loving people, and abandon those we love to writhe in their misery? I have been plagued by this question for far to long.
How do we grow as people, and learn to stand up for ourselves, when doing so means putting up an emotional wall to others who may need loving compassion most…who never got the emotional open-ness they truly needed to become stable, confident adults?
Well, I do know the answer doesn’t involve further creating a generation of emotionally dependent people. And that’s what I do when I listen for too long and care too much and hold too much in and wait too long to pull the plug…I create that very same emotional neediness in myself. I go home and cry to my husband while simultaneously feeling like no one ever listens to me. I hear myself sounding so unsatisfied, so angry, so bitter, so wishing for more. And then I realize that in order to grow, in order to make the world a better place, I must distance myself from being that person and becoming that parental figure. I have to demand justice and stick up for myself, even though it’s the hardest thing for me to do.
No method is perfect when drawing the boundary line, saying “no more!” or denying them the pity party. Whichever you use, eventually they figure out what your main objective is (to break the dependency) and then the varied and wild reactions ensue.
Upon discovering that they might be loosing their source of parental comfort, which they so deeply need and yearn for, most emotionally needy, vampiric parents completely freak out. This means something different for every vampire…they all have different weapons at their disposal. Some will immediately project their faults on to you, calling you selfish and un-appreciative, when nothing could be farther from the truth. Some will say they knew you never cared anyway and that it was a lie all along, hoping to engage your sympathies further. Some will just flat out call you names, stomp their feet and lock themselves in their room, a la a first grader. And then some of the most desperate and twisted of them will try to guillotene you psychologically, using whatever lies or truth they may know against you to create what YOU fear most. A desperate soul is no laughing matter.
I drew the line with both of my parents and got a mixture of some of the above.
My mother told me she was sick of me always having problems with her and creating problems, and literally stormed off to her room and cried the rest of the night refusing to come out. Well, it’s more like she yelled and twisted her face at me, but hey, who remembers the details? The irony is, I am THE keep-her-mouth-shut, non-problem child and rarely express any amount of dissent. Ridiculous. She continues to have similar tantrums whenever I make a point of asserting myself, but they have lessened in intensity and dramatic nature over the past several years. Apparently she is learning, which is amazing. As long as I don’t back down and coddle her when she’s like that, she will learn something.
My father was less overtly dramatic but his brooding nature makes the psychology of his protests even more shocking and hurtful. The first time I ever drew a line he told me ever so spitefully that he was the one who’d been trying to help me and looked at me with ferocious disgust, as if I’d pulled out his heart and betrayed him on the deepest of all levels. He then proceeded to dive into a blatantly self-destructive bout with depression refusing to ever look happy under any circumstances. The second time I asserted myself he asked me if everything between us had all been a lie, and cried. It was like I was telling him I never loved him or something. In reality, he was projecting all of the pain he harbored toward his mother on to me. “How could you have never been there for me mom? How could you have brought me here and left me so desperately alone?”
How did I take all of this? Well at first, I could barely stomach it. They knew me so well, and my natural desire to please and heal, that they used against me what they knew would hurt me the most…their own pain. The insane things they said also left marks. BIG ones. But what they couldn’t touch or scar was the overall feeling of pride in myself that I had afterwards. I stood up for me. I loved me. And this was the most important lesson I needed to learn. It was what my parents truly needed to learn as well…to love themselves. Why not set the example for them, eh? In a way, I was still acting as a guide, by taking the first step into the unknown.
There are, of course, flare ups and challenges that leave me breathless, but a line has been drawn that we all can’t go back from. I have been lucky enough to have parents who are willing to do some self-reflection, so they have attempted to change and accept wrongs. You can’t put a price on that. It’s when parents refuse to accept the wrong that they stay stagnant and repeat the same mistakes. Until they recognize they hurt YOU, there will be no growth and seeing one another may not be the healthiest thing. Distancing yourself is one of the best, and most effective, tools available to communicate strong feelings of anger, and unhappiness with a parent.
In spite of who it may upset to create this distance, including siblings who may not have reached the level of stress and I’ve-had-it-ness that you have, or who may not be strong enough or brave enough yet to appropriately deal with the situation, it can be a necessary step toward healing. We must preserve our own emotional health and care for ourselves. We must not perpetuate the problem of emotional dependency. Think of our children, yes? That is what I am doing now. I am pregnant and this all has become even more relevant.
I recognize all the stress I process in my body daily in order to be there for others that perhaps aren’t very deserving, and it isn’t good for the new life I harbor. Now is the time to take this lesson to a whole new level. With luck, patience and a lot of soul searching, I will continue to find the answers and strength I need to build a loving and healthy environment for my baby.
I wish all other humans out there dealing with similar troubles the best of luck, and I hope that my sharing my story will help somewhat. I feel for your pain, as it is all too familiar to me…
Much Love,
~AV
