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alee_grrlSo this article on parents estranged from their adult children came across my Facebook dash today. I found it a bit triggery and upsetting and I wanted to discuss that reaction somewhere. I didn't want to comment on the post, because they have it set up so that comments must be done through Facebook. There are some discussions I do not want to get into on Facebook. So I thought I would post my reaction here so I could work through it somewhere I felt was safer.
First off the article was written for parents, not the adult children, and I can understand and appreciate that to a point. What really upset me was that the article mentions that the parents need to "recognize what caused the rupture" but doesn't actually discuss the parent acknowledging their own potential mental illness or problems. It glosses over the fact that the parent may have crossed the line behavior wise and focuses instead on the child's potential misunderstanding of the problem. While the article doesn't say "your child misunderstood what happened" it implies it heavily, and then follows up with the parent potentially needing to acknowledge that their child "isn't quite right."
This is what upset me and pissed me off beyond measure. Because this is exactly the sort of gaslighting my mother used to pull all the time. It was never, ever, her fault. Whatever had managed to upset me was always my fault. I misunderstood. I was too sensitive. I had problems. According to her, I was the crazy one. And I believed her, because she was my mother. She was the adult. She had to be right, didn't she?
It took me a long time to understand that she was gaslighting me. The term gaslighting, a great phrase that I only recently learned, comes from a 1938 play and its 1940s film adaptions. In the play the husband plots to convince his wife and others that she is insane, so that he can have her committed and gain access to her wealth. He manipulates their environment in a way that makes her distrust her own perceptions of reality, particularly focusing on the gaslights (he makes them dim and flicker and then tells her that she is imagining things when she mentions it). This is what my mother excelled at, whether she intentionally did it or not.
I did not imagine her throwing things at me, or stating that I was the worst, most ungrateful daughter and that she wished she had never given birth to me. I did not imagine her saying numerous times that she brought me into the world and could take me out of it. I did not imagine her telling me that I was the most useless being and would never amount to anything. These are my milder memories. By the time I was five I was certain that I was broken because if my own mother could not love me, so something must be terribly wrong with me. By the time I was eleven I was certain I was a monster. By the time I was sixteen I was absolutely positively certain that I was absolutely useless as a human being, despite being a nearly straight "A" student, never getting into trouble, and being completely sober (a pretty remarkable thing for our family). She had me completely convinced that I could do nothing right. For example, I would do the dishes, following the last set of directions that I had received from her, and promptly be yelled at for doing them wrong.
It took me half a continent worth of distance, years of therapy, and a whole lot of support from dear friends to understand that what she had done was abuse, that I had not imagined it, and that I wasn't making it up for attention (rather hard to rely on that theory when you aren't talking to anyone about it and did your best to be unnoticed). That the mental problems I had were directly correlated to the trauma I dealt with growing up. One of the hardest decisions I ever made was to stop talking to my mom and to block her access to my life and to me. But you know what, I am happy with the person I have grown into to, and happy with the life that I have built and I could not have achieved the amount of healing I have if I still allowed her to cut me down and gaslight me at every opportunity. She refuses to acknowledge that she has any problems, that she needs help. In her reality she was a great mother and I am the ungrateful daughter who is far too sensitive and not quite right in the head. This is after all the same woman who told people that she put me through college (I had a full scholarship for tuition and took out student loans to cover living expenses and books), and that she paid off my medical bills from college (they went to collections, along with the credit card debt that she told me she had paid, all of them were bills she refused to let me see despite the fact that they were in my name). Our realities are completely incompatible. According to the last email that got through the blockade I put up, our final fight was just a misunderstanding. It had nothing to do with the fact that she was asking me to commit fraud (long story), and when I refused she blew up and started on a rant that began with her favorite phrase (ungrateful daughter), and that this all happened the day after my cousin's (whom I had been fairly close to at one point) funeral. Yep misunderstanding.
Sometimes children do not talk to their parents for a very good reason. Sometimes we need to protect our own sanity and health. Sometimes "I'm sorry" is never going to be enough, especially when there is little evidence that they have changed. Sometimes reconciliation just isn't going to happen. And you know what, sometimes it isn't the child who is the problem. I'm sure that there are cases where things go in the other direction, and I feel for parents who have to deal with that. But don't paint all relationships with the same brush. I'll do my best not to do the same. Meanwhile I'm going to go try to distract the brain demons from pouncing on the "see you're the one with the problem" and "you are an awful ungrateful daughter who should be taking care of her mom." Although writing this post did help distract the brain demons quite a bit, which is precisely why I wrote it.
First off the article was written for parents, not the adult children, and I can understand and appreciate that to a point. What really upset me was that the article mentions that the parents need to "recognize what caused the rupture" but doesn't actually discuss the parent acknowledging their own potential mental illness or problems. It glosses over the fact that the parent may have crossed the line behavior wise and focuses instead on the child's potential misunderstanding of the problem. While the article doesn't say "your child misunderstood what happened" it implies it heavily, and then follows up with the parent potentially needing to acknowledge that their child "isn't quite right."
This is what upset me and pissed me off beyond measure. Because this is exactly the sort of gaslighting my mother used to pull all the time. It was never, ever, her fault. Whatever had managed to upset me was always my fault. I misunderstood. I was too sensitive. I had problems. According to her, I was the crazy one. And I believed her, because she was my mother. She was the adult. She had to be right, didn't she?
It took me a long time to understand that she was gaslighting me. The term gaslighting, a great phrase that I only recently learned, comes from a 1938 play and its 1940s film adaptions. In the play the husband plots to convince his wife and others that she is insane, so that he can have her committed and gain access to her wealth. He manipulates their environment in a way that makes her distrust her own perceptions of reality, particularly focusing on the gaslights (he makes them dim and flicker and then tells her that she is imagining things when she mentions it). This is what my mother excelled at, whether she intentionally did it or not.
I did not imagine her throwing things at me, or stating that I was the worst, most ungrateful daughter and that she wished she had never given birth to me. I did not imagine her saying numerous times that she brought me into the world and could take me out of it. I did not imagine her telling me that I was the most useless being and would never amount to anything. These are my milder memories. By the time I was five I was certain that I was broken because if my own mother could not love me, so something must be terribly wrong with me. By the time I was eleven I was certain I was a monster. By the time I was sixteen I was absolutely positively certain that I was absolutely useless as a human being, despite being a nearly straight "A" student, never getting into trouble, and being completely sober (a pretty remarkable thing for our family). She had me completely convinced that I could do nothing right. For example, I would do the dishes, following the last set of directions that I had received from her, and promptly be yelled at for doing them wrong.
It took me half a continent worth of distance, years of therapy, and a whole lot of support from dear friends to understand that what she had done was abuse, that I had not imagined it, and that I wasn't making it up for attention (rather hard to rely on that theory when you aren't talking to anyone about it and did your best to be unnoticed). That the mental problems I had were directly correlated to the trauma I dealt with growing up. One of the hardest decisions I ever made was to stop talking to my mom and to block her access to my life and to me. But you know what, I am happy with the person I have grown into to, and happy with the life that I have built and I could not have achieved the amount of healing I have if I still allowed her to cut me down and gaslight me at every opportunity. She refuses to acknowledge that she has any problems, that she needs help. In her reality she was a great mother and I am the ungrateful daughter who is far too sensitive and not quite right in the head. This is after all the same woman who told people that she put me through college (I had a full scholarship for tuition and took out student loans to cover living expenses and books), and that she paid off my medical bills from college (they went to collections, along with the credit card debt that she told me she had paid, all of them were bills she refused to let me see despite the fact that they were in my name). Our realities are completely incompatible. According to the last email that got through the blockade I put up, our final fight was just a misunderstanding. It had nothing to do with the fact that she was asking me to commit fraud (long story), and when I refused she blew up and started on a rant that began with her favorite phrase (ungrateful daughter), and that this all happened the day after my cousin's (whom I had been fairly close to at one point) funeral. Yep misunderstanding.
Sometimes children do not talk to their parents for a very good reason. Sometimes we need to protect our own sanity and health. Sometimes "I'm sorry" is never going to be enough, especially when there is little evidence that they have changed. Sometimes reconciliation just isn't going to happen. And you know what, sometimes it isn't the child who is the problem. I'm sure that there are cases where things go in the other direction, and I feel for parents who have to deal with that. But don't paint all relationships with the same brush. I'll do my best not to do the same. Meanwhile I'm going to go try to distract the brain demons from pouncing on the "see you're the one with the problem" and "you are an awful ungrateful daughter who should be taking care of her mom." Although writing this post did help distract the brain demons quite a bit, which is precisely why I wrote it.
