Struggling with DM - again

[christmaspresentaibu]

I've posted here about my relationship with DM and her behaviour previously. It all blew up around September/October last year and I thought we'd got to a point where DM understood that she couldn't keep putting pressure on me to drive home and see her and DF all the time and texting/calling/messaging constantly - I'm doing a PGCE and live about an hour away from them.

After much crying on the phone and my DF driving up to see me and cry in his car on the first day of my PGCE about how my behaviour (not seeing/talking to them as much as they'd like) was affecting them, I thought I'd finally got through to them that I just don't have the time or the brain capacity to deal with them. Through my PGCE safeguarding training and talking to colleagues, I've come to realise that their behaviour (this year just gone and lots of incidents throughout my childhood) probably constituted emotional abuse. I actually dropped everything one Sunday before Christmas to go to their house and 'have it out' - DM crying on me, asking me to hug her and tell her I loved her, after all which she goes 'I know you hate me.' Just the whole thing was awful.

Despite all this, I went to stay with them for a few days at Christmas and then DP and I drove down to see them again for the evening about three weeks ago.

Since then, I found out that DM and DF have visited the area where I lived but gone home without telling me. I also have to instigate any contact at all now - so it's one extreme to the other. I sent DM a small/token gift I'd thought about and chosen to show her I was thinking of her, but when I messaged her last night to ask whether she liked it, her response was 'it would've been nice to see you last week but never mind' (schools in our area were on half-term but I had PGCE assignments and planning to do, plus wanting to spend time with DP and my friends).

Am I doing something wrong here? I'm trying really hard to weigh all this up in my head (I don't really have anyone to talk to who understands, apart from a colleague at work who has similar parents). Am I being a shit daughter? I'm trying to come to terms with their behaviour and still be kind to them, while at the same time do the best I can in my training, look after my mental health and enjoy my relationship with DP. Nothing I do for them is ever enough.

If anyone can advise me on this (again, sorry), I'd be really grateful.

My mum was jealous of my DP and really snarky about his parents.

DH, I mean.

Aussiebean and golondrina, I'm sorry but not surprised that you've both encountered this too, if that makes sense!

She seems to expect that, despite treating me in the way she has for 25 years and continues to do, I owe her my time and attention, how dare I spend it with somebody else, especially another family.

It's fucking exhausting being her daughter.

She rages and has screamed and cried about me being 'under the thumb' of DP's family (who are generally a normal, lovely family) and then wonders why I don't tell her about my life and want to spend time with her.

I've just twigged that the real reason for her rage will be because I'm no longer under her thumb!

It’s quite a moment when the penny drops. Every penny helps though.

Thanks, Aussiebean. I feel like I'm having a lot of small 'penny drop' moments recently.

It does make me sad that I have to hide lots of my life from my DM because what makes me happy makes her angry. Last year at work, before I started the PGCE, my dad was phoning me up in the mornings to talk about DM and I had to tell my manager what was going on because it was eating into work time. It wasn't anywhere near as bad then as it got in September/October but it was still rubbish. I remember my manager saying, 'but isn't she even slightly pleased for you?', with a newish DP, getting on to the PGCE course, moving house etc. Nope! Not in the slightest, if it doesn't involve her.

Can I ask if you ever struggle with your sense of self? It's something I've been feeling for a while - that I don't have a definite personality. Is that mad? I wonder if it's some sort of deep-rooted thing from being neglected emotionally when I was tiny. I think I tend to fit in with people so that I hopefully don't make a fuss. It's a really weird feeling, not being 100% sure of what you're like - has anybody else felt this?

I wonder if it's some sort of deep-rooted thing from being neglected emotionally when I was tiny

yep

if you've had to constantly put someone else's needs ahead of your own like this, it can happen.

Good news is that the sense of who you are can be discovered, if you have the right cirumstances; not being made into someone else's follower, having supportive friends and DP, space and time to try to things out and discover what -you- like.

Thank you for replying, SeaEagleFeather. I think that sounds like what I've had to do for DM (both my parents, really) my whole life, without realising it at the time.

I do feel like I'm discovering my sense of self a bit more now. I love the volunteering I'm doing at the moment, being outdoors with DP, spending time with our friends.

It's really starting to dawn on me that she isn't normal, even though this thread has been running for months now (huge thank you to everybody who has posted on it with advice, I really appreciate it all). I've known for ages but I'm only now starting to properly appreciate what that means, I think? Although I have no idea how you can treat your children like she treated us - ignoring us, screaming at me, driving away and leaving us, then the things that fall under the 'neglect' category, like not showing us how to wash. None of it is remotely normal parenting. I don't think she understood what she would have to do as a mother - my overriding feeling is that she thought we would just 'happen' with minimal (emotional) input from her? If you sit a child in the bath, they will just know to make themselves clean?

It's all so strange but I do think I am starting to see now what a damaged, insecure person she is, and it's going to help me work out how not to be so insecure if and when I have my own children.

Well I am a great avoider and avoided my mum for years. I didn’t understand what she was or why? All I knew was that she hurt me and wasn’t nice to be around, so did my best not to be around her.

I think that helped me work on my sense of self, what I liked and didn’t. Even though I didn’t have the full information which would have made the process much quicker.

What I did realise was that I would often have no emotions. My husband would feel something (sad, angry, upset etc ) and I would feel nothing. I knew I should feel something, but nothing. Not always of course. But enough for me to realise that it wasn’t right.

I was reading a board on here, separate to the stately homes thread, but similar subject , and the topic moved to exactly that. That we struggle with feeling emotions because our entire life, we have been told what to feel and if we felt differently to our mums, we were wrong. So it was safer to wait to be told what to feel.

That was amazing. I still have trouble expressing my emotions but getting better and better. Plus I have a husband who accepts that these are my emotions and that is ok.

Wish I could remember the name of that thread

I can relate to the finding it hard to feel emotions and know what you like. I idn't notice it really until LC/NC and then I seemed overwhelmed by emotions in some ways and began to realise who I was a bit more.

Aussiebean thank you for sharing your experiences. It makes complete sense (to me) that you would avoid putting yourself in situations with people who make you unhappy and I'm glad it gave you the space to start to figure yourself out. I think that I'm avoiding seeing my parents as much as I 'should' in order to get some space and perspective, but I still feel bound by a sort of duty to them to see them and contact them. It sort of feels like I've turned off all of my emotions to do with my mum while I'm seeing her, but I overanalyse everything afterwards and before I know I have to see her, I can never sleep and I have awful dreams. Last time I had a really un-subtle one about a panther attacking people in the street outside my childhood home

Completely agree with your point about waiting to be told what to feel, because if your feelings conflicted with your mum's then woe betide you. So so true.

Golondrina sometimes I feel that too, I think I overreact to things (on the inside). Sometimes I feel actual pangs of sadness when I'm doing really normal things like walking around the supermarket, because I remember how fucked up my family dynamics have become and I think of my parents doing normal things in their town an hour away and missing me and being upset. Or I feel like I have to squeeze DP because I feel so much love for him . So it's sort of working out what is a normal range of emotion and how much is OK to feel/show, I think?

DM's behaviour always used to make me cry when I was growing up and recently, when she was throwing one of her rages and for the first time I didn't cry, she accused me of being cold and distant and unfeeling. Interesting.

I definitely need the space to suss all of this out. DP and I are away for four weeks together in the summer and I think that will be a good time just to relax and be the two of us and I can start to work things out properly maybe.

aussie

and everyone else

to you as well, SeaEagleFeather

aussie, I'm looking for the thread you mentioned, I'll post it here if I find it.

Have a good day, everyone x

Just been searching through some other NM/NPD threads on here and I was a bit struck by one post in particular. The poster was struggling with her NM but was also questioning whether she was the narcissist (like several of us have). But she said, when her dad told her that he thought her mum was a bully, that she wondered if her dad was feeding her narcissistic supply.

I'm a bit worried that that's what I'm doing with this thread. It's like I need the validation that my mum is that bad. Does that mean that I'm seeking narc supply from this thread and from my granny and my DP etc, when I talk to them about my mum?

I think the fact that you worry you might be a narcissist means you aren't, because an actual narcissist doesn't think like that.
And, it's normal to want to talk about it all endlessly when you start to realise what's going on, it's a way of processing it. I've been NC for 4 years nearly and I still sometimes could just think about it all over and over and analyse it all and pick it to pieces, because it's all a bit overwhelming.

Your mother sounds quite similar to mine and with some of the same jealous issues surrounding your DP. I first twigged what was going on by talking about her on MN. It was a thread called my mother hates my husband.

Thank you, golondrina, that's reassuring. Do you think people like us/who've had upbringings like we have tend to be very overanalytical? I find myself overthinking everything and DP's noticed this in me too. I agree that it's overwhelming though. Some days I wish it would just stop, but at the same time, every penny dropping, like aussie said, is like a step closer to working everything out and working through all the related issues I have that have all come from having an emotionally neglecting/narcissistic mother.

The jealousy is a difficult one, isn't it? It's like a vicious cycle of 'tell me stuff about your life' and 'I don't want to hear about you spending time with DP/his family'. I know that I have jealousy issues too, maybe stemming from my parents' treatment of me, especially towards other women, because I feel I'm not good enough. I really really need and want to work on this, because I know I was awful to my first boyfriend and I don't want to be the same in my relationship with DP, but it's going to take a lot of work on my part to improve my self-esteem. I know nobody else can do that for me. I'll have a look at your thread, golondrina, thank you

It's like I need the validation that my mum is that bad. Does that mean that I'm seeking narc supply from this thread and from my granny and my DP etc, when I talk to them about my mum?

No. It means you're uncovering some of the dynamics and actually, you're fairly early on in the journey. Once you start questioning, you question absolutely everything!

Also, when your perceptions, emotions and experiences have been denigrated or denied, you do look from validation from others. That's ok.

It's ok to need reassurance and validation as long as it's not at the expense of others. Ie, if you put your needs over everyone else's then it's not ok. But you aren't doing that. Your needs have been out of the equation for far too long and you need to concentrate on them for a while.

When you start to realise things have been out of balance, sometimes people go a bit far now and then in the process of developing a decent sense of who you are and where you can ask for your own needs to be taken into account (including the need for your views to be treated with respect). That's ok, usually you settle down into a reasonable balance in the long run. Its when your needs > everyone elses and you try to fulfil them in the long term without caring about the pain you inflict, that's when you're moving into the danger zone.

I doubt you are a narc. Remember, you are talking to a lot of people who have had their fair share of narc behaviour and are skilled at spotting it, calling it out or leaving it alone. Being an anonymous forum, we are more than likely going to tell you that you are behaving like a narc and then stepping away without any guilt. So don’t worry about that. You would have been told by now.

What we do see though, is someone asking the same questions as we did in the beginning when we had no idea what the hell was going on.

I had zero concept of narcissism until I was early 30s (I feel lucky that I was relatively early in my life) but had been struggling to work out what was wrong since my early teens. Without the tools or the vocabulary, I was floundering, trying many different ideas and methods to see what worked. Some did, some didn’t. If only I had been able to know this stuff much earlier.

So here you are, navigating a life of abuse and questioning everything. And here we are, hoping to give you the tools to work through it.

It is not easy. It’s very hard. You will cry a lot and it will take years to unravel. But ultimately, you will be a happier person, better partner and a loving mother.

Try search for something along the lines of ‘my mother doesn’t like me/love me’.

It will probably come to me at 4 in the morning

I've not posted on here for a while, but the posts about mothers' attitudes towards sex have seriously hit a nerve as mine has a similar mix of prudish otherwise behaviours, which has lead to me having an unhealthy attitude myself.

Basically, for a start I was brought up with the attitude of sex before marriage is wrong. I know where she got it from, as I remember my nan stating that I wouldn't have sex without being married, would I? So far, sort of ok. But then were the comments when I was a teen of "You're not going to get a boyfriend, are you?" but also something along the lines of "You'll soon have a boyfriend and leave me". Seeing as how my mother was, basically, all the family I had this sort of thing made me believe I shouldn't have one, especially when mixed with "Your future husband doesn't know how lucky he is just now, not to have met you yet" (with the implication being that I'd ruin his life).

Moving from relationships to sex, I remember her telling me once that, when I had sex I should tell her all about it, as it had been so long since she'd had any. The thing is, I'm really not sure that was a joke.

I used to have a hairbrush that had a nice sized handle to masturbate with. I'd keep it down the side of the bed out of sight. She'd regularly find it and put it back on the windowsill, and tell me she'd done so. The thing is it would be dirty (hey, I was a teen!), so surely she knew what I did with it??? Why would you not just leave it alone?

A friend bought me Anne Summer's vouchers one year. My mum was horrified, because obviously said friend thought I'd be single forever. I pointed out sex play didn't have to be for one, but she wouldn't buy it. Eventually she reassured me I could just buy myself some nice knickers. I didn't.

I'm pretty sure she thinks I'm a virgin. Either that, or a prostitute. I am neither, but nor do I feel the need to tell her. It's not her business, but she would be insulted if I didn't tell her, so I just don't mention it.

Someone mentioned lying to others. I remember the year my nan died. She was very ill in hospital, had been for a while, and I was spending the summer with my mother. It was, understandably, very tough being with her. I know it was hard for her, too, obviously (I'm not a complete cow) but I needed time and space for myself. I had a wedding to go to so decided I'd go from there back to the place I'd been living for the past year, just to get a few days by myself. My mother wanted to meet me there, and for once I stood up to her and said no. Maybe that was harsh, but I was planning a few days of being totally on my own and I wouldn't have got that if she'd come up. There was nothing stopping her going to stay with my sister, who'd not been under the same pressure all summer, other than the fact she sees her as a separate entity, but I'm, apparently, the same as her.

A few months later we were with cousins, and one asked if she was coming to visit me. Her reply was "No, I'm not allowed!". She'd decided to interpret my request for a few days alone time as meaning I never wanted to see her just for the benefit of the relatives, as she knew fine well I hadn't meant that.

One final point re being scared to talk to her. Yep, been there, have the t-shirt. I went through a period of 6 months of not talking to her, and the sound of her voice on voicemail would give me panic attacks. More recently there's something I really, really don't want to talk about, which she knows, but she will keep asking the same questions anyway. So yes, I end up getting highly stressed before speaking to her.

TimeIHadANameChange your mum sounds very very similar in lots of ways to mine, I'm so sorry.

Re. the hairbrush thing, I'm inclined to say that she wanted you to know she knew. My mum did similar when I lived at home and I'd bought one of those cheap one-use ring things for my then-boyfriend. I went out one evening and she went into my room - when I got back, it was on the bed in its packet. In a horrible way, I think they get a kick out of you knowing they know? It must be a power play of some kind, poking their noses into every part of your life. I'm really sorry that happened to you.

The prudish/open contradiction is such a weird one too. I remember my mum asking me if I had read 50 Shades of Grey when it came out this from the same woman whose 'talk' when I was 14 was 'DON'T GO UPSTAIRS' and leaving me home alone with my first boyfriend.

"I'm not allowed," that's word-for-word what mine said about me! It is a wilful misunderstanding, she is deliberately interpreting it wrong so she can paint herself as a victim because we are such awful daughters again, it's a power and manipulation thing. Did you put her right, if you were there at the time? I struggle with the idea of my mum lying behind my back because there's very little I can do about that.

Aussie, thank you, I'm really glad you'd be honest! What concerns me is obviously I can only tell one side of the story, I can say how I see things but not how my parents see or remember things. So it sometimes seems unfair to say they were abusive because I might have misunderstood the situation.

Thank you for the reassurance. I haven't cried about this in a while, but I can sort of feel it brewing. At the moment, I feel so lonely, because it feels like the childhood I thought I had and the family I thought I had have been taken away.

For some reason, I think because they are the only people I can talk to openly and honestly about my mum, I'm suddenly very aware of my grandparents' mortality. I spoke to my granny (dad's mum) on Friday and she is so funny and lovely. I just kept thinking, god I'm going to miss her so much. Her husband, my grandad, died a couple of years ago. He was very strict in bringing up my dad and uncles and he and my dad weren't close, but he was a wonderful grandad. I miss him so much. We don't speak about him though - after he died, my dad didn't openly grieve for him (although I know everyone processes things differently) and mum definitely didn't talk about grandad with us or with my dad, it was business as usual. The one thing I do remember is going to buy funeral clothes and my mum taking the piss out of the coat my dad chose for his own father's funeral, saying he looked like he was in the mafia. I wish I'd said something, I still can't believe that that is anybody's instinctive reaction, to mock their husband's choice of coat for his dad's funeral?! It is so glaringly obvious that she has no compassion, no regard for anyone else's feelings.

But I'm trying really hard to keep a balance, because I do feel like I'm being selfish at the moment, sorry.