Hey all,
I'm having a tough time today, dealing with some trauma feedback as a result of an altercation with my housemate. I don't think I overreacted or handled the situation wrongly, but I'm having trouble dealing with the guilt associated with hearing my mother's voice in me. I'm becoming aware that I let myself get pushed around because when I stand up for myself (even in situations where I should do so) I perceive echoes of her steel spine in me, and it's scary. That spine is associated with abuse episodes in my memory . . . but trying to repress or reject it is how I end up accepting abuse from others.
Long story short(er), we have a terrible roommate. He was recommended to us by friends who had never lived with him, and he comes across as an affable enough guy, but he feels entitled to have everybody clean up after him. Even little things like throwing out the packaging from his meals or doing the dishes, he just ignores and seems not to understand that when that packaging disappears, it's because somebody else has thrown it away. A few examples of things I've let slide so as not to make waves, even though I was upset:
- His cat often throws up on the carpet - sometimes from hairballs, sometimes just eating too fast. The other three of us have, until recently, just cleaned up its messes.
- He doesn't vacuum, even though his cat is longhaired and requires cleaning up after much more frequently. Even when his cat basically changed the colour of my living room chair with its fur, he waited around until someone else vacuumed it.
- There is only one member of the household who has never emptied the dishwasher after it's been run. Guess who?
- In the winter, he pleaded out of shovelling the driveway, saying that snow gives him migraines. Fine. But now that it's summer, he's not taking on even a tiny share of basic lawn care.
- He wastes electricity by leaving lights on all night - not little night-lights, but big four- or five-bulb fixtures. He has a full-time job with benefits and can afford to do that, but the rest of us are in school or working part-time minimum-wage and we really can't.
- I get that everybody is guilty of leaving dirty dishes in the sink once in a while, but one time I was emptying them and was heartbroken to find that a set of beautiful painted bamboo chopsticks my brother gave me as a gift had been left to rot in the damp beneath all the other dishes. (I put my good chopsticks in storage after that, but I can't un-wreck that one set.)
- Our other housemate was taking care of his cat for a while, since he was living in a place that wouldn't allow the cat. Now, even though they're living in the same place, he leaves all the cat's care to her. She's planning to move back in with her parents to save money, and he recently tried to guilt her into taking the cat there with her after she explained to him that her parents would not permit a pet in the house.
. . . and so forth. The most recent problem centers around the fact that Housemate is neglectful about cleaning his cat's litter box. As a result, Cat has been taking advantage of other locations to do his business, including my cat's box (so I've been cleaning up after his cat for quite a while), hidden corners of the basement, and - so we discovered yesterday, to our deep chagrin - the front hall closet.
A significant part of this discovery was the discovery of my only pair of winter boots, completely soaked with cat urine. I bought those boots on clearance just a few months ago, and they're completely ruined. Plus, because they are my only winter boots, I will now need to buy new boots at the start of the season, when they're all very expensive, instead of getting them cheap at the end of season like I had originally done. I'm absolutely livid. Those boots were beautiful.
Today I confronted him as he was on his way out the door - perhaps not perfect tactically, but the only way I could talk to him about it since he hardly ever leaves his room. When I explained that the cat box needed cleaning, he tried to brush me off - "going to an appointment, can't do it now" - to which I responded that if he couldn't have done it BEFORE the cat started using the closet as litter, he needed to do it right now so the cat wouldn't KEEP relieving itself in inappropriate places. As he grumblingly went to clean the cat box, he asked, ":)'you want to come help?" and acted offended when I said (somewhat incredulously) I most certainly did not. He then blamed the rest of the household for not telling him that the box was overly full, and griped that he can't possibly pay attention to his cat's box when he works six days a week. Like it's someone else's job to take care of his damn cat! The whole time, he was eye-rolling and puffing and acting like I was being perfectly unreasonable - obviously an effort to activate my guilt buttons, but knowing it's that makes it no easier on me.
I then told him my expectations - that I wanted the money to buy new boots, and that I wanted him to leave by August 1st. (We had already given him 60 days notice at the start of June but said he could stick around until the end of August if he needed the time to find a place, so I was basically rescinding the extra 30 days we had felt comfortable permitting when his presence was an irritation but not a source of property damage.)
To the first point, he said "Not gonna happen", which left me pretty dumbfounded - on what earthly grounds do you refuse to pay somebody back for an item that you (or your animal) ruined? After I freaked out at him a little bit, he amended that to say he would look the boots up online and order a new pair in the identical style, but I'm not really happy with that. I'm not very comfortable ordering garments online and would rather just have the money for a new pair. He also said he'd only pay me back to $100, though suede boots are often worth more than that. But I'd frankly feel more comfortable taking just $100 than having him order me a pair online, because I'd rather be able to budget but try on before buying.
To the second item, he basically said, "Nuh-uh, you gave me til the end of August and that's how long I get". For a bunch of complicated legal reasons, we're probably stuck with that and not willing to fight it - basically it boils down to the fact that it's a sublet and I'd rather not anger/stress our landlord. But I hate living with this guy and I'm livid that he's going to pull that on us.
But for me, the big problem was that this whole exchange was delivered in a quasi-shouted, very heated argument where he spent a great deal of time looking at me like I was a psychopath and/or talking to me like he thought I was nuts for being angry that his cat was messing everywhere and ruining our possessions. His tone and language was patronizing and frankly insulting. The sense of being gaslighted made me all the more furious. My BPDmom used gaslighting a lot when I was young, and my abusive (possibly narcissist?) husband followed the same pattern, so it really upsets me.
But - sigh! - it also works. As soon as he left for his appointment, I ran upstairs in tears, hating myself, wanting to self-harm, because there was so much of my mother in that exchange. I hated the few seconds when I seemed a little bit out of control or emotional in the discussion . . . but even though I thought my overall approach had been pretty calm and in-control, and probably appropriate in that sense, I hated that worse. Because
that's exactly what Mommie Dearest would have done to us. Right down to asking my dad for support. (I asked my SO to back me up when Housemate said repaying me for my boots was "not gonna happen".) I feel terribly conflicted. This guy totally deserved for me to chew him out royally. He's been acting like an entitled jerk for months and we've been letting him slide, and now something that belonged to me had to be tossed in the garbage, and God only knows if we'll be able to get the cat-piss smell out. But at the same time, I also feel like my mother and that fills me with shame and self-hatred because she was my abuser.
So what do you do with that? How do you deal with a situation where somebody deserves/needs you to tear him a new one, where you've tried your usual nice-person approach and it just gets ignored or walked all over? I always try to be really nice to people and I let them get away with more than I ought because it feels safer to be used or taken advantage of than to be angry and demanding the way my mother was. But then, when it just goes too far and I actually stand up for myself, I feel like the world's biggest bhit and I believe his "you're such a psycho" gaslighting. Because I grew up in a place where crazy was normal: if I really were being psycho, how would I know?
I can tell myself all I like in my head about how much Housemate deserved this, go over all his misbehaviour like a litany in my head, listen to my friends'/SO's feedback, and fail to come up with any other way it could've played out, but none of that changes how I feel. Nobody else has been there and heard the way she is when she's angry, then compared it to the way I was today. I can see the parallels, and I have this really deep, visceral shame over them. How do you move past that?
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Yikes, that was long. Thanks for reading, if you did, but just in case, here's the . . .
TL:)R version: What do you do if you know you were in the right getting mad at somebody who was taking advantage of you, but your past trauma leaves you feeling ashamed and self-hating because you associate anger with a pwBPD who hurt you? How do you help feel comfortable with yourself and viscerally aware of the differences between yourself and your BPD-having abuser (especially one who is a parent)?
