Hi all, long term poster but name changed for this.
I am trying to break free from my parents. It’s a very long and boring saga but here are the basics:
I am in early middle age, single, no kids. I have siblings who have partners and kids. I get in ok with them though I wouldn’t say we’re close. The past few years we have all come to be on the same page regarding our nutty, abusive parents, so at least that’s something.
All my memories of childhood make me sad. I only ever remember feeling alone and ashamed of myself, and particularly through my teens all I can recall is being terrified of my parents, though I can’t really pin down the reason why except that they never allowed me to be ill or upset about anything and if I was, would shame me and tell me I was an awful person who had nothing to be upset about. So obviously I hid my emotional life from them and always have done. I think to analyse it that they couldn’t cope with their own emotions or with the thought that a child of theirs was anything less than perfect with a perfect life and so they were totally unable to cope with children.
I left home at 18 and never looked back. I now have a successful career, friends and a life I like, though I’ve never managed to build a good long term relationship with a partner (I did, predictably, have a couple of badly abusive relationships when I was much younger), probably in large part because of my fear of relationships due to my upbringing. I’m happy single, however. My whole adult life I have not wanted to see my parents, have begrudged spending the minimum amount of time with them I could get away with, work colleagues have known when I was going to see them for a weekend because of the dip in my mood in the week before and after, and so on.
As they’ve got older it’s got much harder. Their relationship has descend into mutually abusive warfare and they keep trying to pull me and my siblings in to take sides, in really nasty manipulative ways. Details would be identifying, but it’s horrible. When I or my siblings tell them not to do this they take no notice and attack instead: I am a horrible undutiful daughter etc. Any boundaries set get steamrollered over. They allow no sense that I know anything about anything; one of them is threatened by my professional success and keeps lecturing me about my own subject (about which they know far less than I do, but I’m not allowed to disagree with them), and the other keeps making snide put downs about my choice of career and how worthless it is.
They also reserved the right until very recently just to turn up on my doorstep and come and stay whenever they pleased, no matter what my plans were, and expected full service waiting on while they were there. One of them has got to a stage where they wander around all night, waking the whole household.
I have spent years working on myself, being in therapy, etc, and I know I can’t change them or my past but I can change the way I react to them. The thing is, after many years, a couple of months ago after yet another abusive screed of an email, I realised I could do this no longer. I can’t change myself enough to take such treatment with equanimity and I don’t think it’s fair to ask me to. I then had a blissful few weeks of deciding I was simply going to ignore all contact from them and do me, put my own feelings first for once. I started eating better, exercising, had so much more energy, life looked so much brighter, and I lost 5kg in two months (I’ve been overweight by about 10-15 kg my entire adult life).
Then there was a blip when one of them became dangerously ill (due to neglect of their own health and inability to take any medical advice or instructions) and I got pulled back in. I have now stepped back again but this has emboldened them to start up the emails again, one minute telling me what a bad daughter I am, the next how much they love and value me, the next offering me money, and the next saying they are going to come and stay with me again. I haven’t replied to any.
I’ve left out of this post the worst of the emotional abuse they’ve inflicted over my lifetime. Right now, all I’m interested in is that I know I feel so much better when I simply refuse to engage with them, when I stop worrying about how they’re feeling or the warped way they see the world and see me, and just let myself be me and do what makes me feel alive. I think that is enough justification for me abandoning my ill elderly parents to their own devices.
However, I can’t quite stop the guilt and arguments in my head which say that I’m overreacting, that they’re vulnerable and elderly and sick, and I go through endless loops of trying to justify not seeing them. Nobody else in real life seems to understand this either; I don’t talk about it because I get a lot of judgement. So I feel very alone.
Right now I’m unsure whether to block all emails and communications and just stop responding or to send a final email and then block. Nothing I say will make them think I have the tiniest scintilla of a point, however, so I think I will just quietly continue ghosting.