Reply to ‘Help’ that is not wanted is not help

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It’s not about helping you, it’s about them- she wants to showcase her cooking, she wants the event to be about her etc. it’s not about helping or making life easier for you. [/quote]

I think this is wrong. At least it is with my mom, who sounds very similar to what OP is dealing with.

My mom really, truly believes she's helping, and being selfless or inconveniencing herself is a key feature of this. I think you see this with a lot of women, who learned that the way to be a good daughter, mother, friend, or spouse, was to martyr yourself of the sake of someone else's comfort. It's probably a dynamic that was very prevalent in their homes growing up, and they were probably told a million times by their parents that it was their job to help others even if was hard or painful or uncomfortable or inconvenient for them. A whole generation of women were raised to be martyrs to other people's comfort. And I think before this generation, people just didn't care that much about women's comfort so the fact that mom or grandma was getting up at 5am to cook a meal for a party they weren't even hosting so that everyone could go to church together was just taken for granted as normal.

But now it's not, and that conflict is hard to reconcile. My mom really does want to just make herself absolutely miserable so that everyone else can be happy. But she doesn't seem to understand that we actually find it unpleasant to see her inconvenienced or having to work hard while others do nothing. Like I'm never going to enjoy an event where my mom is slaving away in the kitchen and everyone else is having a good time! But I also don't want to sacrifice my own happiness to join her, why would it help if we are both martyring ourselves? It doesn't.

But my mom was brainwashed as a child. What are you going to do?[/quote]

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