Anonymous wrote:Okay, the answer to your subject line is that you have chosen to be polite and thus are allowing your mother to direct the narrative. Your mother has crafted a narrative wherein she was reasonable and you have cut her off as an ungrateful child who doesn't like how your mother parented you.
If you don't want the family members to attack you and you don't want to allow your mother to craft the narrative, you have to be much more open and blunt about why you cut your mother off.
They’ll start by asking benign questions to reel me in, and then explain to me how much I’m hurting my mother, how it’s time I talk to her again. When I explain that I just can’t, the mood changes completely and I’m attacked! From three different people I’ve been told that I have “never deserved anything good”, that I’m “disappointing and cold hearted”, and one person told me that my side of the story doesn’t matter and that they “will ALWAYS take your mother’s side”. All of these arrived within the last three days.
When they get to the point of explaining to you how much you're hurting your mother, you can't be polite. You are just saying that you can't reopen yourself to your mother to be polite. You need to say that your mother subjected you to years of emotional abuse and manipulation and that despite your trying to protect yourself, she continued to hurt you and that you were forced to cut her off to avoid her causing your more emotional harm than she already has. If you need, you can say that you've had to go to therapy for what she's done to you and that your therapist agrees that continuing the relationship with your mother is harmful unless your mother changes her behavior and that your mother has made no attempt to change the behavior that has put you in therapy. Even if this isn't true, you need to put things in terms so clear that the family members will not blame you for the disruption of relations between you and your mother. For the person that says that your side of the story doesn't matter and that they will ALWAYS take your mother's side, then you can just say that you're sorry that this relative does not care about you at all and that the expectation that you will reopen relationships with your abuser just because she believes your mother is sad and hurtful on her part.
You can continue to be polite and then you will have to put up with the extended family believing your mother's side of the story. Or you can fight back and establish your own story about being the abuse victim and protecting yourself. That should stop the aggressive gaslighting from your mother and the family that she has convinced. They may still choose to take her side and deny that your mother was abusive, but they should stop trying to convince you to reopen relations with your mother.
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