Issues with my mother. What to do? Advice needed please!

[HereInMyHead]

Hello. To cut a long story short i have had some realisations about my mother and how i was parented and it's brought back my depression. Am considering going back on anti depressants. Don't feel like i can talk to her as she'll just make me out to be the bad guy. Anybody had similar experience? What did you do? How did you come to terms with it? Struggling at the moment so any help gratefully recieved. Thank you.

I have had to cut my mother out of my life to a great extent due to how I was parented by her, etc. This is not that hard to do in some ways as she lives quite far away and isnt that interested in me most of the time anyway, even though I've just had my first baby. It is very hard sometimes though as she is old and infirm and I feel bad for her, and she can be extrememly manipulative sometimes which results in me feeling guilty- like you say the bad guy.

All I can say is it took me years to get to the stage where I can just about handle this, and I now regret the time I wasted trying to have more of a relationship with her- for instance all the Christmamses she ruined until I just stopped spending them with her (which was very liberating).

If you cant get through to your mum about this then it really is just a case of looking after yourself and not banging your head against a brick wall trying to get someone to understand you who never will. That is only my experience though. I just realised after 30 odd years that nothing I or anyone else said or did ever made any difference to her behaviour.

I dont know if any of this is at all helpful, but I am here if you want to talk about it All the best x

Hi,

I have a similar situation to lelarose where I had such problems with my mother than I had to cut her out of my life. She is a very manipulative and irrational person, and she would ring me up (sometimes drunk) and accuse me of all sorts of things. I tried for a long time to deal with it and have some kind of relationship with her but it was too hard to cope with. Eventually I ceased contact with her, and she hasn't really tried to contact me since I did this - that was nearly 2 years ago now.

I still find it very difficult to deal with, but I do believe it was the best course of action for me as she was upsetting me almost daily and it was causing me a lot of stress and making me extrememly unhappy.

I personally found talking to her didn't help as she would just make it out to be my fault or make me feel guilty. However, talking it through with other people helped quite a lot.

Perhaps you could try talking to a close friend/partner/sibling about how you are feeling, and talk through what you would say to your mother and how you think it will help you feel better? I say that because so many times I tried to speak to my mother without thinking it through and it just made it worse for me. I eventually realised nothing I say or do would change anything.

I really understand how you are feeling, I have been there! x

Thanks everyone. It's hard for me to write much as i'm on a phone... I think it's good advice to talk it through with friends. I'm also having counselling, which brought all this up to begin with! She's not a bad person, just emotionally unaware and she can also say some hurtful things. She also suffered from depression, and still does so do feel like i should cut her some slack...

We live in different cities , so it's easy to get some space-although i do panic that she's going to ring me and i'm going to blurt it all out!Have also told her i'm not going for christmas, which was a relief.