Hi, everyone -
Happy to have found this community and really hoping that talking with you all will help me find some peace and find my way out of the FOG. I'm really tired of the way my heart pounds whenever I see my mom's name pop up on my phone.
I've been aware of my mom's diagnosis for a long time now, and have been in counseling myself quite a bit over the years. I recently started seeing a wonderful therapist who specializes in C-PTSD and she's helping me with the trauma of being raised by someone with severe BPD. (She also has a lot of related traits - histrionic and narcissistic.)
Since my grandmother's death last year - my mom's mother - my mom has been getting a lot worse, which is something I always feared would happen. My grandmother was my mom's primary abuser, the person whose emotional abuse and abandonment damaged my mom the most. And to make matters more complicated, because my mom was so unstable when I was growing up, her mother basically raised me. My grandmother was abusive to me as well, but living with her was easier than living with my mom. I'm lucky to be sober in AA for 14 years, and the 12-step work has helped me to be able to forgive them both. But this last year of my mom raging and acting out - I don't know, I'm finding it really challenging to have any kind of relationship with her.
For many years, my mom and I had this sort of unspoken agreement - "I make you okay and you make me okay, and we don't ever get angry with each other." The longer I stay sober, the better I get at setting boundaries with her, and she often balks or freaks out at first, but then she settles down and semi-accepts that if she wants me in her life, she's going to have to respect the boundary.
I'm pretty much the only person in the family who still has a relationship with her, and I've always felt like I understood her better than most people do. Not that I condone or make excuses for her behavior - it can be really atrocious. But I guess after years of being more like her parent than her child, I've learned a lot about why she does the things she does in order to get her emotional needs met.
The current situation, in a nutshell, is that my mom has been fixating on my sister and how she parents her children. She's on a mission to "save these kids" from what she sees as dangerous neglect. She's interfering in every way she can, threatening legal action, going behind my sister's back to see the children when they're at school and at their dad's house, humiliating my sister on social media, talking to my sister's friends/acquaintances about her - she's just desperate to control the situation. It's hard because the oldest child is a teenager who is really struggling and needs serious mental health intervention, and my sister does seem to be sticking her head in the sand about it. But my mom has taken it so far to the extreme - she's been demonizing my sister (everyone is either a saint or an evil person in my mom's worldview, there's no gray area). My mom seems to have no memory of the actual neglect my sister and I were subjected to while in her care. She's literally the last person who has any right to criticize someone's parenting.
Anyway, she's been blowing up my phone, trying to get me on her bandwagon to "save" the kids for months now, and when I don't respond to her increasingly agitated texts and calls, she gets enraged. A couple of times she's texted me and my sister for hours with angry, melodramatic messages that are all about how she's a victim and everyone is against her and no one cares about the kids. The first time it happened, it was all I could do not to respond - I wanted to rescue her from her overwhelming emotions like I always did before.
I know that it must be confusing for her, now that I've been seeing this therapist and starting to change the dynamic in order to take care of myself. I wish I could explain myself to her, but I know it wouldn't do any good to talk about her diagnosis, the fact that she needs help, etc. In her mind, she is perceiving reality clearly, and if I suggest that her perception is distorted, she will see it as a personal attack and not an act of love and concern. I feel so stuck, but I'm not willing to engage with her when she's in this state anymore.
I blocked her number and her email address today because I just can't take the heart palpitations and never knowing when she's going to have an episode. Even though it goes against all my programming and my lifelong feeling of being responsible for whether or not she's okay, I need a break from the relentless drama. I don't know how long I'll keep her blocked, but I thought maybe it would help me get some clarity if I spent a few days without the threat of instant terror whenever my phone chimes.
I know I'm not being cold or unkind to her in taking care of myself, and I know it's okay not to explain all this to her right now. I know I don't have to detach perfectly or gracefully. But the FOG is still so intense. I'm worried about her, but also so angry when I think about how indignant she is that I'm not behaving the way she wants me to. For the last few days, she's been really cold and passive-aggressive, refusing to say "I love you" back (even though when I'm "behaving" she loves to talk in this grandiose way about how she has love me since the beginning of time and always will, and that her love for me is the deepest and most wonderful thing she's ever known.) She has sabotaged my relationship with my dad over the last few months, tried to sabotage my relationships with my husband and my aunt, lied to me, the list goes on.
And yet, I love her and want her to be okay. I wish life weren't so hard for her. She's the most unhappy person I know. My heart breaks for my mom. Underneath her pathology is a really beautiful and unique and big-hearted person. If I could have figured out how to save her from her illness, I would have. It's really hard to accept that I can't. I just have to figure out how to love her without abandoning myself (and my husband and daughter) in the process.
Geez, this is really long. I appreciate anyone who actually reads it!
All of this is really scary and complicated and I guess I needed to write it all out. I do feel a little clearer now.
I'm really glad you are all here and I hope and pray that you all have some peace tonight, wherever you are on your journey.
Liz
