petridish
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What is your sexual orientation: Straight
Posts: 19
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« on: November 09, 2013, 07:29:59 PM » |
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I'm in a rough situation right now (and have been for some years) with my parents. I'm the adult daughter of a mother with behaviors that match decently with BPD and a father with some OCD/OCPD tendencies.
I've suspected since I was about twelve that there was something external going on in my mother's relationship with me. We'd fight a lot and I had trouble predicting her moods towards me. There wasn't really anything physical towards me, much more verbal lashing out. Granted, I was not a shirking flower as a child and thought it was my duty to advocate for both my younger siblings and the family. But we'd get in fights where she'd get colder and colder towards me as I sobbed more and more and begged her to just hug me. My father would intervene with both of us -- he's really great at both listening and mediating and very fair -- and while I don't know what he told her in private (I do know that he thought she should be more consistent in her treatment of us, rather than making and breaking promises/punishments), in private he would let me know that she DID love me, she was doing her best, she had some social deficits (his explanations made sense to me but weren't standard). Eventually, things were not as volatile and I thought perhaps I'd been a particularly ornery teen until my youngest sibling hit the teen years while I was still living at home. I saw the same fights playing out between them and realized more clearly how inappropriate her behaviors were for a parent.
While I have considered that she might have BPD, I've also read about bipolar, ADHD, autism, and NPD. The behaviors that have been hardest for me and my siblings through our lives have been: her inconsistency/unpredictability, her lashing out unexpectedly, her inability to take ownership for doing something hurtful, and her lack of empathy for us. Splitting, as I've read about here, sounds very familiar. I have thought since I was a kid that her relationship with me was especially fraught because she lost her mother relatively young and before they had a chance to resolve their contentious relationship. As her only daughter, and having been given a caretaking role by both parents, I sometimes wonder if she unconsciously expects me to solve that.
Counseling has not been of much use. I started seeing a counselor when I was in college, hoping to break the pattern (i.e. not use my potential future daughter to resolve my issues with my mother), but most counselors have had overly simple solutions (go no contact or let her fail). We also saw one counselor together, which was such an unmitigated failure that after years of counseling, I am now very hesitant to try again. That particular counselor was also my individual counselor for over a year and during that time, I kept letting her know I felt like things were getting worse; she told me it would eventually get better. I feel that, in retrospect, she encouraged "fleas" in me and repeatedly tried to paint some of my early childhood experiences as "abandonment" (I had some deaths in the extended family, but I never felt abandoned because I knew that it wasn't a choice for the people and that I was really loved by them). At any rate, through counseling, my relationship with my mother has significantly deteriorated. Her individual counseling has not worked well (she knew FAR too much about her first counselor's personal life and started refusing to be open with her second counselor because of his health issues and "not wanting to burden him" at least judged by the metrics of improved relationships with others.
In the past few years, my father has been losing his short term memory. This wasn't unexpected to me or my siblings (both our parents are older and we saw some of the same things happen with some of his siblings) but apparently blind-sided my mother. She has become even harder for me to deal with because she feels betrayed by my care-taking of my father. If he needs to sign something and I am able to get him to (often an hours-long emotionally draining event for me), she is angry at me because she thinks he should have signed for her. For the first few years, she would say to his face extremely insulting, belittling, and hurtful things that seemed to me and others to serve no purpose other than to antagonize him. Because he has lost some of his self-control/patience along with his memory, and his anxiety in some settings has greatly increased, and because as far as I know she hadn't turned this kind of vitriol on him before, he responded with anger/frustration, ordering her out of the house or blocking her from leaving (this is unclear, as she called once saying this and I ran there only to find she was refusing to leave through door that he wasn't blocking).
In the last few years, I ended up the primary full-time caretaker for my father, upwards of 70 hours a week. My mother, in her denial and sense of being wronged, saw this not as me taking care of a senile parent, but as me betraying her to side with my father. I eventually spent through my savings doing this, but to her I was lazy, entitled, a burden on the family, crazy, sick, etc. I couldn't eliminate contact with her, however, as she was sometimes living with my father (she wouldn't let me know ahead of time), but sometimes not, sometimes feeding him, but sometimes not. In fact, in this time, she found an apartment just a block from mine, which she has at times banned me from visiting.
I have tried SO hard to be respectful of how this situation is hard for her and how difficult it must be to be blindsided by it (my parents' marriage has been one of two idealistic individuals in denial about major parts of life) but she has needed support from me while also denying that a) I was in a difficult situation as well, b) I had less choice in the overall situation (i.e. born into it rather than marriage of equals), and c) I might still love my father and feel some loyalty to him. I have tried to meet her needs (partly so that there would be less chaos for me). I have done both what she has explicitly requested and what seems like it would help her. It has become clear to me (as it probably should have been much much earlier) that how she reacts towards me is at best tangentially about ME. At this point, I feel like she sees me as a whole mess of people she needs or is angry at. I honestly think that she cares about me, but I am not just me. I am her parents, who have abandoned her while she is hurting (my siblings and I noticed that she became significantly less grounded and more volatile after her father died in our late teen years); I am my father, who has both abandoned her and picked her children over her (this is NOT his view; he is explicit that he loves us, but we're his grown kids who should be off doing our own things and he wants to be hanging out with and taking care of his wife); I am her daughter, denying her a relationship of deep friendship/loyalty that she didn't work to build but has always assumed would happen; I am her, and whatever ways she feels she is insufficient or unloved.
I should add that I'm not perfect by any means. Over the course of our counseling together, I became much more emotionally entangled in my mother's lashing out and unable to let it roll off me as I used to given a little time. She's also able to really deeply wound when lashing out. I would get pulled in, swearing at her as she told me she never wanted to talk to me again, taking things much more personally. I began to feel abandoned and rejected and ashamed when she'd lash out at me, rather than just frustrated at her unpredictable behavior and saddened to think she might mean what she said. I started to see her "extra" lashing out at me, compared to siblings, as just more pain, rather than somehow preventing her from hurting them instead. I feel that in some ways we've regressed to our relationship when I was a teenager, but without being under the same roof to remind her she loves me, without my father to mediate, with less responsibility being taken by her, and with less patience for really inappropriate hurtful behavior from me.
I don't know how to get to a better point with her, though now that other siblings are around, I am in a situation where I could feasibly cut off contact with her (she's currently not talking to me). I'm not sure what boundaries I could set with her that would be helpful. She has told me she doesn't want to hear about my father or related topics, but when I bring up other topics, she wants to talk about my father (not in productive ways). If I bring up my father, she is hurt and doesn't want to hear from me. If I don't, she feels I am doing things behind her back. If I talk about my life, she says "I've already heard THAT before" or start offering (generic/trite) advice almost before I say anything. The thing is, though, that about 1/3 of the time (over a long time period), she's a loving, empathetic, listening mother and I know she's trying. You know, just enough to keep one hopeful and coming back and trying to explain things.
Any insights? My hope for bpdfamily is basically to have a place where I can feel comfortable talking, without feeling like I am betraying my mother or ashamed for still wanting a good relationship with her.
(And so sorry for the length of this!)
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