She is the source of most of my emotional pain and problems I have in life. She is a disgusting piece of work. When I was very young she tried to kill me many times and later just used verbal and emotional abuse. She had to settle for destroying my life. Now I find myself always in situations I cannot cope with cause I never developed the skill as a child. I can trace almost all my problems right back to her. Negative thoughts, negative feelings, no self esteem, self doubt. When I was young I begged my father to send me to military school to get away from her but he would not.
It is hard to believe if you have not experienced it. She used to hit me in the face to make me stop crying. I listened to that Dr, Phil show the other day and they talked of holding little children under water until they stopped emotional outbursts. I know I get anxiety attacks around water and thought perhaps my mother did it to me and this may be why. To stop me from crying as a baby.
My mother is the source of most of the negative emotions in my life now. This is why I bring it up. I try to understand her and do a little but not enough.
1. she relies on denial as a defense against any criticism at all of her behavior and so never changes at all.
2. she is controlling in the extreme and decides what will be done and tries to enforce it on everyone around her and will cling to it for weeks or months. up to killing herself to make others do what she wants. Or the children. ( I am sorry for my father now). That is exact!
3. she wants no boundaries between her and the people in her family. She insists on knowing everything we do , who we meet, what was said, and what we think. She listens to phone conversations, opens mail, and listens at the door. Any attempt at privacy or to exclude her is met with fierce resistance.
4. she constantly tries to anger men in her family. She will even wake me up at night to say something smart. Meals are usually an opportunity for her to get back at or make me angry. And she is very good at it. She tries to isolate the men from the rest of the family.
5. She lies a lot and it is in service of the above goals.
She doesn't seem to have a life of her own and tries to suck the life out of those around her.
She actually works at trying to get me to feel negative emotions. Not just a little but real hard and like I said she is good at it. She will say and do just about anything to make me angry, guilty, ashamed, fearful, depressed, and stressed. I doubt anyone quite gets it. It is not a conflict between us or some unsatisfied desire that results in this behavior. This is what she does all the time. It is how she lives. My sisters just hang up the phone on her when they don't want the trouble.
I am developing hypertension now as a result of her behavior.
When I was growing up she always had something bad to say to me. She kept a mental list of what she found out and later tried to put me down. I must have heard the message what are you doing, followed by ,you are going to fail 5000 times, when I was growing up. It is really impossible for me to forgive her or resolve my issues with her. She denies everything and attacks when she feels threatened. She treats my progress in recovery like a threat to her. People joke sometimes about this but if she thinks I am happy she will work hard to ruin it. When she senses hurt, change, stress, or vulnerability she attacks.
What all this did was to waste my opportunities to develop as a child. And thus as an adult too.
Okay she doesn't do this all the time but 5 or 6 sessions a day does me in.
She is a disease, not a person.
Thats my mom.
Connie
