Reply to How do some people luck out with great adult kids and others have kids who abandon them

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[quote=Anonymous]A big part of this is that people who aren’t familiar with mental illness tend to think that crazy people are a consistent amount of crazy in all contexts.  They are not.  Many people who struggle with mental illness are able to function really well in surface contexts.  My mom was always one of the more popular people in her church/workplace/neighborhood.  She is friendly and helpful to strangers.

As a mom she was controlling and emotionally abusive.  I love her and still visit regularly but I also feel that I have paid my dues in a lot of ways.  I don’t feel a deep need to support her emotionally as an adult because my entire childhood was about her emotions.  She has anxiety and depression that she “managed” by talking out her feelings with me, her daughter.  My earliest memories (age 2-3) are of sitting on the couch patting her shoulder while she cried.  I am done.  To her friends, I often seem cold and distant.

Likewise my dad is really fun and jovial with strangers and casual acquaintances.  But as a father he would fly into a rage at the drop of a hat and was a figure of fear.  He had depression, which often shows up as anger for men.  He would hold in all his anger and resentment from every other part of his life and then expel it behind closed doors.  We were hit, yelled at and punished because that was more comfortable for him than admitting he needed lots and lots of therapy.  His sisters don’t understand why we are such ungrateful children.[/quote]

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