I recently came out of an abusive relationship and have suffered with low self esteem pretty much all my life. I have done a great deal of reading around the subject of abusive relationships and co dependency for example. I do display abusive traits myself and as I said before low self esteem.
It has been very painful to realise that my mother's behaviour is abusive. I'm not talking about physical violence but controlling and emotional abuse.
There are so many contradictory traits in her personality. She can be loving and cold. She can be calm and argumentative etc (you get the picture) I will try and give you some examples of behaviour further down this post. My younger sister doesn't seem to recognise this behaviour as anything but normal. My older brother has been extremely embarassed in front of his partner (now wife) by the slanging matches between my younger sister and mother.
I used to think it was normal for families to carry on this way. I lived away from it for a number of years so I guess I had the benefit of a slightly more outside perspective.
I now try and handle the way I interact with her differently so not giving her an arguement.
DM does try and interfere with a lot of everyday things that are really non issues. For example we had, what started as, a disagreement recently where it turned into a slanging match and then she got in one of her teenage strops and sat in the car sulking whilst me and dd went into the shop. Upon returning to the car we said nothing more about the matter on the 15 minute drive to pick my sister up. As my sister got into the car DM pipes up 'you may be wondering why I'm in a bad mood as me and knowledge have had a row about...' then my sister jumps in a gangs up on me about this silly trivial thing instead of just agreeing to disagree. Then it descended into another full scale shouting match in front of dd who was crying by this point telling us all to shut up!!
All my life whilst dm has been supportive she has highly criticised us all and all four of us suffer with low self esteem.
My DM retires next year and it's only going to get worse as now she's in work 5 days a week.
I am particularly worried about my dd and how not to pass this on to her. I have frequently found myself acting in an unreasonable manner and have to take a step back. Also in the way she observes the behaviour in my dm, sister and me (although I take a back seat now)
I often used to ring up and have one or the other bitching about the other one or they'd be in the middle of a row.
If you've made it this far well done! Where do I go from here?
Do I limit time with DM?
I've come to conclusion she isn't going to change and a confrontation is not on the cards.
It really is so sad as in some respects we are best friends and have such good times. Then there will be a row and in my head my respect for her is being chipped away at.