Why won't my mum stop talking about herself? It's ruining our relationship

[scaffoldingyawn]

She lives abroad, comes to visit. Should be nice but her inability to talk of nothing else but herself is so draining it makes me feel ill.

My dad is similar.

Is it a generational thing?

So exhausting.

My gran does this. I think people who do this have stunted development that has given them narcissistic tendencies. You can’t change it. They don’t care.

is it nerves?
filling the silence?

Ive come across many like this i use to hate it now i love it.
Why because the less they know about me the better.
I learn so much about people just because they love ther own voice.

My older dsis is like this.
The morning that DH died..I rang her to tell her.
She just said "Ah bless him ". And then ranted on about her various ailments..stool samples etc.
I was so upset...I thought .here I am telling you that the love of my life had died... and all you can talk about is your fucking ailments..

I relate to all of these posts because my dm is exactly the same

Its absolutely not generational. I have several friends & former colleagues who their age & older (late 70s / 80) who are v connecte & interested in life & the world

I think it's personality type & v limited lives..I've never been close to my parents i find them incredibly hard work & draining

My mother dominates all conversation with her monologue which is pretty much always about herself or anecdotes about her childhood told in a weird sad depressed tone of voice which is hard to describe

Even at christmas when dc were excited about their toys she'd start with 'when I was little i only got a doll...& on & on about her poor parents, God be good to them...etc etc. really depressing conversation topics especially with other guests. She talks about her childhood all the time but barely remembers mine which I find weirdly upsetting.

As she wound down to the end of a long monologue about her own childhood one Christmas, she went on at length about the one toy she got etc, dh grabbed then reins & asked her what my favourite Christmas toy was when I was small & she was confounded...it really stopped her in her tracks & she had a bit of a think but was saying stuff like oh I don't know ! Then she named 1 thing that I got, a bike, that i hated & never wanted & presumably it was bought for me as a sensible option instead of the toy I really wanted
I was changing schools & the new one was further away so it was decided the bike would be used for that. To my eyes as a child it was not a present it was akin to a bus pass.
She accused me of not being grateful for it that Christmas (i wasn't) so it stung that she plucked it out of her memory as my favourite present ever

She doesn't have dementia she's always been incredibly self focused

I operate a VERY strict news management system about my life as she'll indiscriminately share all info to anyone who'll listen as 'conversation '

I'd love to have a different type of mother. I've always wished that secretly

I maintain a cordial relationship & don't challenge any of it as I don't think they can change & what's the point. But I also limit my exposure. It's sad.

@NewShoesForSpringI wondered then if you were my sister! Yes my Mum is also a total mood hoover. At Christmas when everyone is excited having fun she will also go on about her own Christmas’ followed by the fact there will be children who won’t have any presents and there are still starving children in Africa. Whilst all that is true it’s like she’s determined to bring the mood down. And yes I know exactly the tone you mean, all very ‘woe is me and whiny’.

Blimey. Thats awful. I wonder if people like this might be autistic or something? I know not everyone with autism would be like this. But looking back at my mum I suspect she probably was. Maybe they just haven’t learnt the art of conversation?

I’ve a relative like this. She’s completely uninterested in you or anything you’ve got to say to the point that, in the rare event she asks a question, will cut you off two words into the answer and resume talking about herself. She also repeats the same stories over and over, even in the same conversation.

It’s dull and exhausting, and at times
downright bloody rude, but she’s not actually a bad person. I just have to limit one on one time with her or I find myself utterly drained.

My dad does this. Always has. I say something and he talks about his experience of whatever it is. I hated it because it felt like he didn't care about me.

I realised much later that he thought that was how conversations worked and that was his contribution. He's definitely undiagnosed ASD.

I'm diagnosed and it didn't occur to me that I often did the same thing. It went over my head completely. I am now much more conscious of it and try my best to not do it/limit it. The problem is, sometimes I now focus too much on the other person, consciously making an effort to ask questions and not talking too much about myself, that I can come across as overbearing.

@Tiddlywinkly i used to be the exact same. I thought it was a way of showing interest/empathy. I’m much better now but I have to concentrate/work at it. I only improved because I read something that said you shouldn’t do this. I strongly suspect I’m undiagnosed ASD. Dd is ASD and like I said earlier I think my mum probably was.

That’s awful
sending you hugs xx

Brutally, no I know I won't feel that. Maybe your relatoonship is/was better than others on here?

I sympathise. My sister, who is 10 years older than me, had a rather dramatic divorce 30 years ago. Since then, regardless of the subject of our conversation she somehow finds a way to twist it into retelling a selection of long, tedious anecdotes from her divorce.

I don’t even think these conversation twisters realise they are doing it. Or if they do they don’t even care. It’s just like they want to talk and nobody’s going to stop me launch into conversation I want to have about stuff nobody wants to hear… again.

When my relative was terminally ill we wanted to hear stories from the past. Relative was happy to oblige. We spent lovely times listening to how things used to be and great granddad did this and that, those shops weren’t there it was houses, etc etc etc Interesting. And the last time we’d get the chance to hear it sadly.

And we spent half of it twisting the convo back to this after a non-family member kept twisting to her past “oh we had a Woolworths in our high street too” “our cinema was like that as well”
We aren’t interested in your past today pal, this is about his. I just kept saying “that’s nice, so back to xyz” (that the terminally ill relative was saying).

I’ll never forget that. This non relative person had form for twisting back to herself, but when someone’s dying and people are clustered round to hear, gonna shut up.

This situation with my mother & father has got me so so down that I have gone very low contact now.
I see them around once every 6 months for around 30 minutes. Instigated by me, not them.

I feel utterly utterly rejected, unimportant and like they just don’t give a flying fuck about me or my kids.

Neither has even noticed, not a phone call or text from either, confirming the above.

It got to the point where I just stopped talking, didn’t speak when I was with either of them.
They just talk at me, about themselves and people I don’t know, if I tried to say something, they either spoke over me, brought it immediately back to themselves OR even worse, did not listen or even hear what I had said.
No hearing issues, just did not listen or hear a single thing I said.
Never noticed I was silent for a whole hour either..

My mum is nearly 80 and she's been doing this for years. Going into enormous detail about the lives of people I don't know, and frankly sometimes she barely knows them either. She has no life of her own so she piggy backs onto everyone else's business and back story and talks about them as if they are people close to her. Often they are nothing more than acquaintances, or the relatives of acquaintances.

Recently she went to the funeral of a neighbour and she was telling me how there was someone playing bagpipes at his funeral. I made the mistake of saying 'Oh, was he Scottish then? I didn't know that.' And she started her reply with:

Well, his father was a soldier, man and boy. He moved to India with the army so Bernard was born in India, then they went to South Africa and Bernard was sent to boarding school, then he joined the army....'

I was like 'Muuuum!!!! Stop! I don't care about the life history and CV of Bernard's father. I just asked if he was Scottish.'

And she looked all hurt and sulky and said 'well yes, I was just getting to that.'

My gran is the same. Identical to this. She has no life and honestly never fucking has. It’s utterly dull. She seems happy enough about it all but it’s really fucking weird. She’s also the type who says she is very easy going and “just has a laugh with everything” when she very much fucking isn’t like that at all.