Fear of my mother’s behavior in everyone around me

[justnothing]

For example… fear that anything I say or reveal about myself to others will be used against me somehow…

This might sound a little bit… ridiculous… but I have just recently made the “bold” decision to try to force myself to make more posts on Facebook.

Yes, I know that might sound weird and stupid because why is making posts on Facebook at all important?

The thing is… I created my FB page a couple of years ago for the sole reason of having an alternative way of staying in contact and getting in contact with a certain group of people. I never had any intention of using it the way people usually use it by making posts about my life or sharing links or whatnot. And indeed, in the past two years I only ever made a tiny handful of posts and shared like 2-3 links. Most of what I do there is just PM people on my friends list or read about what they had to post.

Now, this is, of course, perfectly legitimate, right? Everybody has the right to do with their FB pages whatever the heck they want… and if they are extreme introverts, like myself, not posting on FB and even not having a FB page at all for that matter, is perfectly legit. But the thing is… sometimes I’ll read something on my newsfeed that somebody posted… and I DO want to leave a comment… but can’t bring myself to… and for the past two years I’ve been asking myself why… and I just hadn’t been able to figure it out.

So today I decided to *force* myself to make a couple of posts, stating my opinion on a couple of issues… and it finally struck me… - I’m afraid that people will see what I have to say… and that in some way or another it’ll eventually come back to haunt me!

I’m afraid that somehow, somewhere, someway somebody is going to read *something* I wrote about myself or an opinion I have… and later on use it against me. They will either get deeply offended or angered and start attacking me right away… or alternately they’ll not say anything but remember what I wrote and later on it’ll be something that they’ll use against me in some way or another! And now that I realize this… I realize that the irrational thing I’m afraid of is that “everybody out there is like my mother”. And the thing is… I am absolutely paralyzed by that fear. It has had a profound effect on my life, not just on FB but with people I know in real life and… in just about everything.

There have been so many times in which I wanted to share my opinion about something… blogs I’ve badly wanted to write… forums I wanted to post on… and, for that matter, thoughts I’ve wanted to share with individual people that I know personally… but I ended up freezing up and keeping it all to myself… and not understanding what was blocking me.

But now I finally get it… with my mother… ANYTHING I revealed about myself, at any point in time, could be used as ammo against me at any later point in time! Her ability to take personal information you gave about yourself, no matter how innocent, and somehow use it as a weapon against you, sometimes literally YEARS after finding that information out, was simply remarkable.

It was in my late teens that I started coming to terms with the need to hide things from her, even though I really, really didn’t want to at the time because it felt like I was betraying her. And the irony is that she really didn’t understand why I started keeping secrets from her. She would say “come on, you can tell me, I won’t tell anyone!” and what I so badly wanted to say was “but YOU are the one whom I can’t trust with this information!”.

It started with me realizing that I couldn’t tell her anything about any of my friends, boyfriends or acquaintances because any information she got about any of them would eventually be used as a means of breaking my relationship with them apart. And it continued with me realizing that I couldn’t let her know just about anything else about my life or myself because somehow or another… just about anything could be later on used as “proof” of how awful I was, how incompetent I was, how naive I was, how I “didn’t really love her”, how I had “underlying resentment towards her” and it didn’t matter how unrelated the initial piece of information was to either of the above… somehow she managed to make it fit. So…. I ended up just telling her less and less and less…

Nowadays, I realize that I still do the same thing with people. I’ll have an opinion about something and be afraid of posting it on FB because my friends will be able to see it and become aware of a certain aspect of my personality and one of them might take offense at that and either stop being my friend or otherwise use that information against me somehow… Other than that, I keep many, many things hidden from all the different people in my life… not dirty secrets… just mundane things. As much as I can avoid it, I won’t talk to any of my friends about any of my other friends, for fear of them getting jealous and each wanting to break up my relationship with the other friend!

I have a website that I own and run and for years I never breathed a word about it to my uncle or my brother or anybody else in my life who “doesn’t need to know about it” not because it’s a shifty site or not because I’m ashamed of it but just out of fear that if they know they’ll somehow… become invasive… and try to mess it up…

Also, I realized very recently that I’m afraid of accomplishing anything in life because an accomplishment on my part will mean people will start to have expectations from me and the very second I do anything that’s remotely “not good enough” it will cause me to be berated by everyone profusely for not having lived up to that initial expectation…

Basically I see my mother everywhere and in everyone… and I’m terrified of them behaving the way she did if they know more about me. I hide away from people as much as I can… for no reason what so ever… but I’m too terrified to stop because of this underlying fear that people will behave the way she did.

Sorry for gushing so much but today was the first time I’ve realized all this and it’s frankly quite a shock… I’m wondering now how to overcome this fear and this crazy underlying idea of everybody being like my mother.

Has anybody else here had this kind of experience of being afraid people would use their personal information against them the way your BPD parent did? Or… for that matter… of just expecting everyone to behave the way they did? If so, how were you able to overcome that fear?

[Rapt Reader]

Gee, justnothing, I'm really sorry for all the trauma you are going through--and have gone through--with your Mom 

It sucks when you have to deal with the ingrained fear of castigation, ridicule or crazy revenge, from not only your Mom, but others (even when that may be irrational). Have you had the chance to read our Article: Emotional Blackmail: fear, Obligation and Guilt (FOG)) yet? Here's an excerpt:

There are are a number of styles of controlling behavior.  Each type of controller operates with a different vocabulary, and each gives a different spin to the demands, pressure, threats and negative judgments that they use.

Punishers - Eat the food I cooked for you or I'll hurt you.  Punishers are the most explicit.  They let us know exactly what they want and the consequences we’ll face if we don’t give it to them. They may express themselves aggressively or they may smolder in silence.  In escalated situations, the threatened consequences of not acceding to a controller can be significant: abandonment, emotional cutoff, the withholding of money or other resources. The most terrifying extreme is explosive anger and/or threats of physical harm.

Self-punishers - Eat the food I cooked for you or I'll hurt myself.  Self-punishers turn the threats inward, threatening what they will do to themselves if they don’t get their way. High drama and an air of crisis, often blamed on the controlled, surround self-punishers who are often excessively needy and dependent. They often enmesh themselves with those around them and struggle with taking responsibility with their own lives. The ultimate threat self-punishers can make is that they will kill themselves.

Sufferers - Eat the food I cooked for you. I needed it for myself. I wonder what will happen now.  Sufferers are blamers and guilters who expect us to figure out what they want and ensure that they get it. Sufferers take the position that if they feel miserable, sick, unhappy, or are just plain unlucky, we are expected to help them – even if they haven’t told us how. They let us know, in no uncertain terms, that if we don’t help, they will suffer, and it will be our fault. Sufferers are pre-occupied with how awful they feel, and often they interpret our inability to read their minds as proof that we don’t care enough about them.

Tantalizers - Eat the food I cooked for you and you just may get a really great dessert.  Tantalizers put us through a series of tests and hold out a promise of something wonderful if we’ll just give them their way. They are the subtlest controllers. They encourage us and promise love or money or career advancement, and then make it clear that unless we behave as they want us to, we won’t get the prize. Many tantalizers promise emotional payoffs full of love, acceptance, family closeness and healed wounds. Admission to this nirvana requires one thing: giving in to what the tantalizer wants.

This, of course, is just a start to understanding the dynamics that are entangling you, justnothing, but I would encourage you to read the whole thing, and the other Feature Articles that we have on this Board (here: When a sibling or parent has Borderline Personality Disorder), and also found at the links under the 4 photos at the top of this Board's listing page). Have you checked out the links to the right-hand side of this page? And if you haven't yet read this Article, I suggest it very highly: Article 8: How a Mother with Borderline Personality Disorder Affects Her Children

I mention all of these links to you because once you get a good handle on how your Mom's mind works, and just why her words and behaviors affect you and your emotions and reactions (to her and everyone else) so much, it really can help you move on and figure out how to make things better in your life. I encourage you to read all you can, and then bring your questions to us... .We really want to help, justnothing 

[Lily77]

Hi Justnothing,

Your post really resonated with me! Even though I was nodding along to everything you said, I almost nearly didn't post at first because my knee-jerk reaction is to try to hide and not reveal any true feelings or opinions because it makes me feel too vulnerable. I have the hardest time saying my opinions and preferences, and I avoid posting on Facebook like the plague because I feel like I'm exposing myself to criticism. Like you, I know this is linked to my mother--I was always afraid of disagreeing with her or making a mistake because of the way she raged and put me down. As a result, I'm secretive too, even about silly things. I wish I had an answer on how to heal this, but I just wanted to say thanks for posting, because it made some lightbulbs go off for me.

[justnothing]

Thank you both very much for your responses and so, so, so, so sorry for only replying now (what was supposed to have been just a medical consultation this past Tuesday ended up in an unexpected week in the hospital instead…).

To Rept Reader, thank you for the articles and references. I haven’t had a chance to go over them until now but just on the surface they look pretty good. And Lily, it’s totally OK if you don’t have any “answers”, it’s good just to hear that I’m not alone and I’m glad if what I wrote helped resonate with you too in any way. And yeah, like you say, it could very well boil down to fear of criticism and being vulnerable and the fear of making any kind of “mistake” because somehow making a mistake was always just the end of the world… Sometimes I wonder if this isn’t a bit like what people with AvPD experience… except that AvPD seems to be more complex somehow.