Reply to Vent about my cruel immature mother

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'm sorry you have this in your life.

Why are you still in contact with her?  If she brings nothing positive into your life, cut her  off.[/quote]

This is my question. I don’t understand why you would keep her in your life? Seems like you truly had boundaries then you wouldn’t have stayed on the line after telling her you heard her?[/quote]

My dad is long dead and my only living relative under 60 lives even further away than me. I feel guilt and shame as well as an obligation to maintain a minimum amount of contact because I am stuck with power of attorney and some other legal stuff for my mother. I’ll be the one the social worker calls one day.

I know the drumbeat on this board is in favor of cutting people off completely, but it’s much more difficult in reality than angry blogs and self-help books would suggest. [/quote]

Agree. It's not the solution people make it out to be. I hold my awful mom at arms length but the truth is that if I cut her off completely, I'd still feel a deep sadness and hurt every day of my life. I'd still have every cruel memory living in my head.

I find it easier to maintain contact but strong boundaries, go to therapy, and simply accept that my mother will never be the mother I want or need. Whether I cut her off or not, I will never have a loving, kind mother. This is simply the fact of it. I can't escape that by pretending she doesn't exist.[/quote]

There was nothing "easy" about deciding to go no-contact with my narcissist, alcoholic, emotionally abusive dad. It took a lot of therapy and mourning. I haven't seen him since 1999 and I haven't talked to him since 2001. It's been wonderfully freeing. He never respected boundaries no matter what I tried, and he refused to disengage from the emotional abuse no matter what. I decided he had no right to keep abusing me, and he certainly had no right to have access to my children, so he's never met any of the three of them.

I still sometimes feel sadness and hurt that my dad prioritized his alcoholism and his narcissism over me and my sisters, but cutting him off was the best decision I ever made. It enabled me to get away from the ongoing hurts and reach acceptance of our relationship as something in the past and behind me, not in the present and an ongoing part of my life. If I'd kept him in my life, I would have been complicit in my own abuse. When he dies, I'm sure a lot of it will be stirred up again, but I lost my dad -- or, more accurately, he lost me by his own choices -- a long, long time ago.[/quote]

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