Can no longer tolerate my mother

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Op Here. Thanks for the replies.. I guess my real question is am I a terrible person if I just cut her out of my life completely? I don't see the value our minimal relationship brings at this point and causes me stress and anxiety in my own life that I don't need.

I think it would be cruel to cut her out. Be cool. It distant. The cruelest thing to do to someone is to ostracize. Karma will not be kind.

[Anonymous]

Your mother is going to think that you are being cruel. That is not the case.

You didn't cause your mother to be this way, you can't cure it, and you can't control it. Continuing to have contact with your mom won't make her any happier. It will drag you down and sacrifice your wellbeing. So, faced with a choice over whether to make your mother temporarily feel better (remember you can't permanently fix anything for her) and permanently addressing your own needs, which makes the most sense?

As for the above commenter's reference to karma, here's something else to think on. Even Buddhist scholars would not require you to stay in contact with your mother. Enabling a abusive person to continue to behaving in the same way is not a kindness to her or yourself. Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche called this type of enabling "idiot compassion." I'm not a religious person, but I find that relgious texts can be useful philosophical tools when making tough decisions. There has been some wisdom through the ages, after all. Well, not even the Bible requires that you support someone like your mother: https://www.openbible.info/topics/enabling.

[Anonymous]

How will she be with little kids though? Some parents who are like this can be good with the little ones, so then the kid gets to have some kind of bond with GP while the kid is too young to recognize GP's issues.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:How will she be with little kids though? Some parents who are like this can be good with the little ones, so then the kid gets to have some kind of bond with GP while the kid is too young to recognize GP's issues.

I grew up with a toxic grandmother. I wish I hadn’t. She never directed her bile at me, but I did see her fight with, bully, and manipulate her children all the time. She also complained constantly. It normalized the behavior for me as a kid and made it much more likely for me to accept high drama situations as an adult that I should not have tolerated. For what “love” she was able to show, the negatives far outweighed the positives. Plenty of kids grow up without grandparents or with family friends who support the parents like extended family.

[Anonymous]

This book really helped me see how damaging my parents were, and how to move forward.

https://www.amazon.com/Toxic-Parents-Overcoming-Hurtful-Reclaiming/dp/0553381407

[Anonymous]

Seriously feels like half of DCUM is estranged from their moms for the last 18 months or 2 years or so. I wonder what is going on. These post have really been pervasive. I am also estranged from my mom for the same reasons as OP--it started when the kids were around 2. But I didn't break it off completely until 2 years ago--now they are 16 and 19. It NEVER got any better with her. It accelerated after the election, too (or maybe I just couldn't take ut anymore).

[Anonymous]

OP, I had a really challenging relationship with my mom. She was incredibly strong, incredibly smart, and had at least some narcissistic and/or borderline personality disorder characteristics. She also, I think, really wanted children, and I think she wanted us to be happy, at least as subsets of her self -- not as people in our own right.

But that sort of inkling of how it could be, and her drilling it into us from childhood that only she loved us, that we could not trust other people, that she knew best? That made it really hard to develop a sense of self and a map of the world that was realistic and accurate.

I had a lot of the ambivalence that I read in your story. It helped me to remember that when we love someone, we take pleasure in their happiness and feel pain when they are sad. Those times when she vindictively took pleasure that something didn't work out (even if she wouldn't admit it, the satisfaction was clear) or when she was jealous of and minimized my success? That wasn't love. That was pathology.

It was a pathology woven into her self-identity. She wouldn't go to counseling (I bet you can list the reasons with me!), and she could not seem to bring herself to change. And she rewrote history -- she couldn't acknowledge some of the things she had done, so they never happened.

When I was older and on my own, I had to make the choice to be more distant. I didn't contact her for a few months after I left home, but we did work back into a relationship together. I think you *have* to be realistic about what will happen from contact. Can you talk every weekend, say, and come away from it feeling at least neutral? Or will you end up feeling worse? Doesn't matter what she intends -- if the latter, it's not doing either of you any good.

You might need to go "no contact." You might find a balance at some other point. Either way, know that taking care of ourselves and maintaining healthy boundaries is a gift we give every single person in our lives. Nobody can do that but you, and without it, it all falls apart eventually.

Be good to yourself. Give yourself time to think about it, and make the choices that make sense to you, with or without input from others. You will know what you need. Then pay attention to what happens, and adjust your course. Sometimes it's a moving target.

The other thing that helped me was the Desiderata: http://mwkworks.com/desiderata.html

Find what helps you, and good luck!