This is really chilling, I think

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Namechanged for this, as potentially too identifiable to FOO stalkers.

I am NC with FOO, for a variety of reasons, none of which I particularly want to rehash here. Occasionally I lurk on a FB forum for parents of estranged adult children, because I find it morbidly fascinating and actually quite validating to observe just HOW bonkers the mindset is.

Today I found this post on there, which sent shivers down my back because it is SO similar to the kind of thing my NMother has sent to me:

The last time I wrote my daughter...a few years ago, I stated the following: "When a person is charged with a crime, the accused is presented with a list of grievances. As your mother, I feel I am entitled to no less a list of grievances in support of your claims of hatred towards me." I've never received a reply, because she has none. We as parents shouldn't accept responsibility for our adult children's short-sightedness and bad behavior.

As ever, it's much easier to see the crazy when it's not your own personal situation being hashed out, but OMG at the demand that the adult child justifies her emotions with a bullet-pointed list of grievances before there can be any question of her being permitted to feel her own feelings. And these people wonder why they are estranged. You'd think round about the time you wrote about your entitlement to a list of grievances to support your child's claims of hatred towards you, you might get a glimmer of realisation about why your adult dc didn't want to be around you. But apparently not.

Actually, I feel a bit sick. It's like some macabre story. She's a really smart woman with a lot of problems. She was a dear dear friend, but I absolutely support the dd's decision to go nc. I feel so sorry for them both.

And the worst of it is, I'm pretty sure that the only reason she agreed for the dd to stay with me was that she believed I would persuade the dd to go home as soon as possible. It does feel a little like a betrayal.
Urgh. Anyway, sorry. Didn't mean to monopolise the discussion. Just glad to have found a place to offload a bit where some of the issues are recognized.

I'm really late to the party here but regarding going NC without giving a full account of why you're doing it: here is an example of how it was dealing with my mother. Once she came to visit us and we went to a cafe with 3 yo DD and she started eating the thing I had just bought for DDs lunch. I asked her to leave it for DD and offered to go and get her one of her own but she refused and for the next three days until she went home she only spoke to us when it was unavoidable. Does anyone think I could have a useful discussion about my childhood emotional abuse with a woman who so easily takes offence that you need to let her steal your 3yo daughter's lunch to keep her happy?

Does anyone think I could have a useful discussion about my childhood emotional abuse with a woman who so easily takes offence that you need to let her steal your 3yo daughter's lunch to keep her happy?

totally understand. If you don't tip toe around totally unreasonable behaviour there's a MASSIVE blow up.

You have to plan around it more than you have to plan around going somewhere with a toddler.

Also, any change in plans is a huge huge issue, even if you weren't aware of the plans or they weren't fixed. E.g. if you say "shall we go for a walk? we could maybe head up to the woods or go down to the stream?…. then if you don't go to the woods AND THE STREAM because you found a nice spot somehwere else, or because the kids got cold or tired or whatever… it's a massive problem for days, big huffs! "hmph well I thought the point of going was that we were taking the children to the stream"… and the joy is sucked out of every little thing because you can never be in any way spontanious or change plans.

People have told me i am beimg ridiculous, i should just suck it up, i should be the first to reconcile, "but she's your mother", " you only get one mother", etc

People think you are walking away from what they identify from their own experiences of a mother-daughter relationship. I NEVER had that, I don't have the option of having that in my life, in fact I have the opposite. I can't "go back" to having a typical moher-daughter relationship because it's not and was never there for me. I have loving relaionships with other people.

Interestingly, several of the people who have quite firmly taken that stance with me, are actually themselves no or low contact with their own fathers. But think mothers are golden. Why can't people like that take gender out of the equation and see that it's the same thing?

toomuch, fuck yes, a million times. It's to do with boundaries. It's not your food, it's their food. My DM used to take stuff off my plate all the time and even now I have to restrain myself from stabbing people in the hand with my fork if anyone dares go near my plate.

screenshotting, do you find that they only do this with your plans, but that it's totally okay for them to cancel/change their own plans at last minute?

screenshotting, do you find that they only do this with your plans, but that it's totally okay for them to cancel/change their own plans at last minute?

Oh yes! "I'm passing by later today and I want to take DD(1) out to buy her a summer dress"
She would then refuse to give even a ROUGH time when they'ld be back, or if I said she needed to be back by X time for a party or because it's a school night, they'ld be 2 hours late and then if I mentioned this being a problem I was in the wrong and it would be a huge row

However if I planned something, I should have let her know earler .. even if I give a weeks notice or if it's CLEARLY a spontanious thing like "it's a lovely day, I'm going to take the girls to the lido would you like to join us?"
Then I'm wrong for not telling her earlier as if I planned it weeks ago but deliberately kept it a secret from her just to mess up her plans (even if she doesn't have any, and even if she did, it was an invitation not a summons)

and then she'ld come along, but act all hassled and rushed all day because she wasn't given enough notice to get used to the idea so she can't/won't enjoy it

dogdrifts Well done, you, for what you are doing for your DD's friend. My feeling is that there will come a point in all this where you have to choose between them, sad though it is. Yes, they both have needs, it's not a competition. But, as you observe, and I think everyone here has experience of this, abusive parents can be exceptionally plausible to outside eyes. If I could have one wish for my past it would be that someone had seen, properly seen, what was going on in our family and had properly advocated to get us the support and intervention we so desperately needed. You are in a highly unusual situation in that you know both mother and daughter independently. So often, a child's version of events is debunked by the abusive parent, and the parent's version swallowed whole by any adults who would otherwise be in a position to intervene. There is no power to intervene or advocate at the disposal of the child because anyone inclined to believe them is powerless too, i.e. a sibling or other child. I think if the shit hits the fan, you really have to protect the daughter from the mother, even though the mother, your friend originally, will probably never forgive you. The poor daughter, it sounds as though she has never truly had anyone on her side, and is very vulnerable, however well she seems to be toughing it out. That's my opinion anyway, though I accept it's easy to pontificate over the internet.

I also wonder if you would feel better and less stressed yourself if you make a decision as to where your priorities lie, instead of feeling you must be supportive to all parties, however mtutally exclusive their needs. This is not really a situation that is amenable to happy resolution for all, which is neither your fault nor your responsibility.

It does sound like the mother in dog drifts case is pretty good at lining up her own support system, so perhaps she doesn't need dogdrift as much as the DD purely from that reason.. she probably has dozens of "dogdrifts" around her!

I once supported a similar friend with similar sounding MH problems.. she implied that I was her support system and she could tell me things she couldn't tell other people… down the line I found out she was saying the same thing to everyone around her but as we all thought we were being told these things in confidence we never realised.

The DD doesn't have quite the same army of supporters around her.. so just from that point of view: logistical fairness, I would focus my support on the DD because dog drift, as you have yourself noticed in the past, it'll damage YOU to be pulled in both directions as a support system for both sides

That doesn't mean you have to "turn against" the mother.. just take your foot off the pedal a bit

Anyone near a Card Factory? They're doing a nice little line in greeting cards for the narc grandparent at the mo

e.g.:

front
from the proud Grandparents
on the birth of
^our grandchild

inside
This is such a happy time for us

The parents don't feature it's ALL about the GPs!

At first I tried to rationalise it like: okay, maybe its an announcement card that new GPs send to friends of theirs…..
… but it's not! because it's not sold with the packs of cards, it's a large individual card to be sent to the parents of a new baby to let them know that the GPs are marking their GC territory from birth!

Dogdrifts not surprised at your reply, tends to be one extreme or the other. Being a child of an alcoholic myself I've gone through quite long phases (years) of not drinking at all, even though I've never had a problem with any substance. I've never even tried smoking or drugs I fear being too much like him. But that behaviour can be an odd response too (I've discussed this in my own counselling) being addicted to not becoming addicted if that makes sense?

To he posters re if I suggest x y z plan and don't do it there's ructions, but if they plan but don't stick to boundaries I just have to suck it up, these are no win scenarios. You may be interested to glance over

www.ericberne.com/games-people-play/

The greeting card any new parents who receive it, go NC immediately! Geez!

Baconyum that's a very interesting link! A friend of mine with a toxic mother talks about "I small the whiff of a burning martyr", so true. Mil is very much like this, no responsibility is ever taken... I have to believe Dp's family enjoy all the drama, or they would behave differently.

It's a fascinating book. I had to read it as part of my first uni course, it was a revelation. That and I'm OK you're OK but this is a heavier time.

Argh heavier TOME!

screenshotting yes yes to the inability to go with changing plans. As with everything else it got worse when my kids were born as before that we were so used to it we would just plan to do EXACTLY what we said, avoiding any of the many and varied social situations that might trigger her paranoia, and I got used to thinking of it as a sort of foible, just an odd thing, like if someone had Asperrs or OCD and needed things to be a certain way... but once the kids were born it wasn't possible anymore for us to anticipate every difficult situation an stick 100% to previously-made plans. And the response we got from my mother surprised even me. Its years since I'd seen her at her worst and the venom and rage was shocking. When I look back now though I suspect that a lot of the time we thought we were managing her anxiety we were just winding her up because she was looking for a fight and not getting one.

That thing of not giving them notice of something. Absolutely yes!! I can remember the first time I started seeing my mum for what she was. My MIL had been taken very ill overnight and it was touch and go. H was at the hospital with her and I needed to be with him for support but couldn't take the children. So for the first time ever I phoned my mum asking her to please look after them for a few hours. Her response "well of course I can't at this short notice, why on earth didn't you ask me a few days ago?". Hmmm because she wasn't ill then? I had this feeling of realisation that the only reason we had got along over the years was because I never asked for anything and managed her behaviour that way.

It's almost like she's on the autistic spectrum BUT JUST WITH ME!!! - she'll smile sweetly and go with the flow with other people, although with other people she just LIES to them all the time if things don't go her way, rediculous elaborate lies.

She's never up front, she doesn't say no to other people (because she has to keep up her "street angel" image, so instead she ties herself up in knots of lies.

One time she told someone she couldn't do something she didn't want to do because "I'm on the night shift". She doesn't work in a field where anyone would need to do night shifts, the person she was speaking to knows what her job is. She also had a PERFECTLY VALID reason for not wanting to do this thing she was invited to.. but she's so used to lying being her default that even when she has a good excuse she'll make a rediculous one up anyway.

Like really simple things that don't need to turn into a web of lies:

• would you like to come in for a cup of coffee screen's mum?
• eh, no, no I can't this time, I'ld love to but I'm cat sitting this weekend and they're dropping the cat over in a minute so I have to get home.

instead of "oh, thank you, would love to another time but I've got quite a lot on today"… and now she has to keep up the cat sitting story for the rest of the weekend LOL

It would be funny, but it's not when she lies so much that I think she belives her own lies, particularly when she re-writes history

And as a child I was expected to part-take in her lies and she got annoyed if I didn't.

I would be quickly briefed in what to say and not say on our way to visit anyone. Stupid things like "I told them our car isn't working so don't say we drove here"

It was fucked up!

And when I refused to get my kids to keep up a crazy silly lie (over something so small it didn't need even a white lie in the first place) to a family friend, she went absolutely nuts at me! About how she is always honest with children and tried to invert the whole thing!

Screen - I had a boyfriend, luckily only for a few months, who was a pathological liar, gaslighter, abusive etc. He ALWAYS used to lie about the stupidest things, even when he must have known I knew the truth! It was like an absolute compulsion to lie, bloody weird.

Thanks all for responding. Sorry to ask a question and vanish but my DD had an accident at school necessitating hospital trip and subsequent sick person (she's fine, but has torn ligaments in her arm). I'm glad that I'm sort of doing the right thing for her. It's very hard to watch.

There's another whole psychodrama going on in the last couple of pages of the GN 'Cut out of loved ones lives' thread - again, the same theme that people who say anything that isn't unquestioning agreement with the emotional state of a few posters gets attacked and dismissed.

The same dynamic is also neatly dissected in a new Issendai post, deconstructing exactly how the mother talks about not knowing the reasons for the estrangement, then shows she does know the reasons, but dismisses them one by one. The script is so similar I'd swear that she was talking about a GN thread, though the detail given shows that it's obviously an American board.

All of it (including this thread) is depressing, but also very validating for those of us who have reluctantly come to the conclusion that NC is the only viable alternative to being permanently stuck in a really destructive relationship.