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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I think you might be more forgiving when you come into your mother’s shoes as a parent with adult children. You may not know exactly why she is emphasizing praise to your brother. Maybe your brother is secretly suffering from depression and needs the extra attention? Maybe she is trying to get him to participate and do more? She probably thinks you are a strong person and don’t need the extra attention that your no so mentally strong brother needs. Your mother is not perfect, and neither are you.[/quote]

Brilliantly put PP. I agree. Most people posting things like that are truly childish and they do not give any slack to their parents and the word narcissistic is heavily overused here. Next time their mother SINS against the sensitivity with some simple aging person's quirks ask yourself .. does she have enough credit for raising  you to let go your little drama?[/quote]

Well my experience has been the opposite. [b]As I became a mother and have grown older, I feel more and more horrified at things my mom did growing u[/b]p.[/quote]

This. So this! My mother would love to normalize, mimimize and justify her disturbed behavior. Now as a parent I realize just how truly deranged she was and how I wasted so many years blaming myself.[/quote]

Yes!! And while I know I am not a perfect mother by any means (maybe not even a great one), I have found it extremely easy not to make the kinds of mistakes that my mother did. [b]She loves to act as if “nobody is perfect” and “everyone makes mistakes”. Those things are true but not all “mistakes” are created equal. [/b]

I’ve got my failings, to be sure. And yet I’ve somehow managed to shield my kids from 100% of the traumas that my mom subjected me to growing up......[/quote]

This![/quote]

NP, and yes!!! It's amazing how common this is. I thought I'd worked through a lot of my issues with my parents before I became a mom (in fact, it was something I knew I had to do in order to become a decent parent, so I postponed starting a family until I was in a good place). I was amazed at how my anger towards my parents surged after becoming a mom, and how I discovered things that I had previously just accepted and became horrified. I had to go back into pretty intensive therapy for a bit because it shocked me how angry I was those first few years, when I realized.

My parents did a pretty good job of brainwashing us into believing that a lot of the alarming things they did to us was because we were uniquely bad children, or because that's just what parents do, or even because that's how to show love. Becoming a mom has really taught me how messed up it all was. They did it because they were immature, short-tempered, with some messed up values and terrible parenting role models in their own childhoods. None of it was because we were terrible (we were typical, and actually often exceedingly well behaved because we were dealing with such emotionally volatile parents) or because it's normal or natural for parents to strike their kids or tell them how awful they are. I can't even fathom treating my kids with the level of disdain that I just internalized as normal parental attitudes as a child. Even writing about it now is bringing it up a bit. But the good news is that it has also made it even easier for me to set boundaries because I often do it now to protect my kids from them (as well as to help me).[/quote]

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