Reply to Is there a "good way" to be a vessel for your family members' anxieties?

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[quote=Anonymous]My mom has had a lot of trauma, and she uses me as her dumping ground for all of the angry, sad, anxious, bitter feelings she holds inside.  She says if it wasnt for me, she probably wouldnt want to go on living, and that she always feels lighter after dumping all her feelings onto me.  And she tells me she has no one else in the world who listens to her without judgment - not her sisters, not her friends, not my brother.

It honestly took me a lot of hours of therapy to get to this point, because before I just couldn't handle it.  Her over the top anxiety would bleed onto me, and it would send me into a tailspin of anger and resentment and just avoiding her calls. But now I am at the point when I can, for the most part, be a vessel and witness to all her negative feelings, her safe place, so that she can feel better after.

I do this for my kids too.  And sometimes, it is a lot to handle.  At one point, I had a friend who I also did this for, and a MIL, and at the time, I didn't know how to handle it.  They all expected me to be their sounding board, to pick up at the first ring, to be the empathetic ear, the "one who understood".  I eventually drew boundaries with my friend and MIL, and we now have much healthier relationships with much firmer boundaries.

I'm consciously deciding that I will do this though, for my mom, and my kids, because I really feel like they need it from me.

If you know anxiety, you know that there is a lot of just dumping of irrational thoughts, blaming, anger, and delusions.  It's always been challenging for me to refrain from correcting the delusions, which ends up making them feel completely invalidated.  But it's also their reality that they are experiencing.  There are days when I have much more capacity to do this.  And there are days when I'm just spent and don't have enough gas to tolerate it.

My question is whether I need to be still be drawing boundaries to protect myself.  I don't want to get myself to a point where I break and end up screaming at them or something.  At the same time, I want to give them the safe space to honestly express what they are feeling so that they can experience the release of the pressure valve that they very obviously need. [/quote]

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