I'm scared of what I feel

[K1313]

My BPDmother has been very depressed in recent months (well, she's always depressed but it's even worse now). She injured her back pretty badly a few weeks ago and her depression and suicidal idealization have grown significantly. One of the medications they have her on can make thoughts of suicide much worse. They put her on antidepressants to counter that and they wanted to keep monitored/institutionalized for about a week while they made sure everything was okay but she declined and went to a friend's house instead (a friend with whom she had fallen out and not spoken with in years until very recently). Normally she would have gone to my enmeshed brother's place but he's out of town for two weeks visiting my other brother.

On the one hand, I have so much sympathy and concern for her but on the other... .I'm so tired of this. All my life it's been about my mother and her emotions and I just don't want to deal with them anymore. I'm feeling horribly guilty because part of me just wishes it was over. I don't want my Mom to die but it will be such a relief when she does. And this makes me feel like the scum of the earth.

I've been talking very openly with my siblings about our mother and our memories of her and even my enmeshed brother is beginning to realize something is very wrong with our mom. I've also been reading over old journal entries going back to when I was about 11 and it's been really difficult to see how much I had blocked out or forgotten about my mom's behavior. My mother provided for us in every material way but emotionally? How could she? I think she's stuck in her own adolescent emotional state from when a lot of her childhood trauma took place. I feel weird saying it was emotional abuse (especially since so many people go through much worse) and because emotional abuse is so much harder to pin down that physical abuse.

I think I wrote about this a few months back... .my mom was coming to visit and staying in a hotel but I didn't want her to come to my house at all because she was so critical and I would get anxiety attacks trying to make my house "ready" for her. Well that time I worked hard not to have her over and now, three months later, she has mentioned her not being invited over at least half a dozen times. She uses her little girl voice that she brings out when she wants something you don't want to give and says things about wanting to come over next time and why didn't I want her there this time etc. But yesterday she took it a step further and, knowing that we've put our house on the market to sell, said to me "Well maybe I'll secretly fly down there and tell a broker that I'm interested in your house and then I'll get to see it anyway."   I didn't even know how to respond, how to explain why that was so inappropriate. Either she had already given thought to how she could get in to my home against my will or she was able to instantly come up with a way to do it... .either one makes me really uncomfortable. While I'm very doubtful that she would go that far, the fact that she would make a comment like that bothers me. My DH was furious and thinks that she would do something like that and wants me to notify the broker that she is not to be granted viewings.

I'm scared of what it says about me that I'm beginning to wish my mother was dead. I hate myself for it. What kind of daughter am I? I'm increasingly struggling with how I can keep this woman in my life.  I'm scared to cut her off lest it push her over the edge or cause her to have a stroke and then I become somehow responsible. She's in such ill health that I keep thinking that if I can just hold out a little longer, it will all be over. But no matter which way I cut it I feel terrible because I feel that her death is the only way I'll ever be free from this.

[Klo]

I went through something very similar with my biological father, and I am now at a point where I no longer will speak to him at all, and am sort of just waiting for him to die. He put my brother and me through all kinds of hell, too.

The thing is that I think there is a difference between wishing malice upon someone, and wishing that you could be free from them - even if it comes with their passing.

I read a lot on "splitting" trying to understand my own coping methods that happened when I was a very little kid, and how I inherited some of my parents' dysfunctions. And basically when we are only toddlers, our emotions are very primitive and straightforward, based on survival.

What happens is that we instinctively understand that we need our caregivers for survival, yet if we have abusive caregivers, then we also understand that we must defeat "i.e. kill off" the threat or escape it (flight response) in order to survive. So these are two very conflicting situations - we need the parent in order to survive, yet we must kill or escape the parent in order to survive.

It seems our mind is most likely to suppress the kill or escape response, in order to help us survive. But this primitive and very natural response can surface in adulthood when our mind is ready. It can boil down to a very raw feeling of "I just want you to go away and leave me alone forever!" as our adult mind civilize the "kill" or "fight" response we would have had a very young child.

So in other words, your feelings are not bad or wrong, they are just your feelings and they do make sense. All that matters are your choices and actions and how you treat people. But your feelings will never be right or wrong. They are just deep, instinctive parts of you.