Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:Therapy.
It's normal to have a phase in your 20s when you get some distance from your parents and realize the mistakes they made, and how them impacted you. Every parent makes mistakes. Everyone has things about their childhood that weren't best for them. And I think the process of figuring this out can shape you as a person, help you understand who you are, help you see your childhood with some distance and understanding, and help you understand your parents as real, whole people, rather than just Parents. And then your relationship moves to a more mature stage where you interact more as equals.
It sounds like one of two things are happening with you, and it's impossible to tell from your short description which it is:
1) You're somehow stuck in the "fixating on what they did wrong" phase and can't seem to move out of it.
2) Your mother was outside the realm of just regular parenting mistakes and missteps, and was actually a bad parent, and you're starting to understand that but need help processing and moving forward. The results here can be anything from "report to the authorities" to "cut mom out" to "strong boundaries" depending on what happened.
Statistically, it's more likely to be #1. But either way - a therapist can help you work through this and move forward, whatever that looks like. There's a reason "tell me about your childhood" is such a cliche therapy question.
I’m not the OP, but sometimes there’s a third option. My mother is neither 1 or 2. She was mainly a good parent, if a overbearing. And I’m not fixated on the past anyways The challenge now is that my mother would never agree to treat me as an equal, not even close. She openly tells me that in her eyes I’m still that same 6 year old in the photo on her wall, she’s my mother, and I need to listen to her. She even tells me she raised me wrong because I don’t just obey. I’m a married, stable 40 year old with two kids.
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