Why does she do this?? My Mother

[lolaflores]

Every single time I mention ANYTHING...she makes no comment other than to tell me about someone up the road who had that.
I have ongoing back pain (had it done 9 years ago but seems to be back to square 1)
At the moment, I am walking with a limp
"What's wrong with you?"
"Back is playing up "
"Oh, I was with (insert name of someone ) the other day and she has that..." and off she goes into some convoluted explanation of the over all situation.
Its getting worse the older she gets.

I keep as much as I can out of her reach but it seems even the speed of our internet connection is a topic to have light thrown on it by someones experience.

My DH is being sent overseas for work. Like a fool I mentioned it as it's going to be quite a change to life. Again, no comment on how that a going to work, just a lengthy story about someone she knew once. I finished the call a bit abruptly. As a rule I dont call her because the conversation is so one sided but can anyone help me understand this? If I understood I would get so wound up.

This is what my step dad does. You can see him frantically thinking of
"An example where he can elevenerife you"
"Someone you both know who can elevenerife you"
"Someone he knows but you don't ....."
"Someone he doesn't know either, friend of friend"
"Someone off the TV"
"Make it up completely if all else fails"

I will never get past the actual point/topic for he is off trying his best to have done it better and bigger.

Infuriating!!

Mil is on another level with it and will try and bring it round to historical events and tell you frigging Anne Boleyn did xyz.

Christmas Day is a blast

I can make no assumptions about how my mother feels about me. He was never one for emotions as such never mind expressing them.
This habit of hers has been been eternal. It it is probably fall out from such low self esteem.
She presumes everyone is better than her and that anything connected to her is shit. She doesnt speak to whats left of her family and that has been the case for years. Yet rings my brothers ex wife for chats. Then will call me with all the updates
DB and SIL had a very acrimonious divorce ut DM appears oblivious to the fall out.
I feel bad for feeling so irritated but it's more of an accumulation of decades of it. And there have been a couple of incidents where I wanted to crawl under a stone age was so relentless. The faily of my DS boyfriend who are very reserved Nd quiet. Ahe was like a side show and seemed oblivious to the blank looms around the table.

Thay last post is riddled with typos. Do excuse

@CagneyNYPD1

I get this from my dm. I put it down to a combination of reasons. She sees me as the strong, capable one out of me and my siblings. So even if I am poorly, it does not occur to her to offer sympathy or help because in her eyes, I always cope.

Also, she does it for something to say. It's her way of contributing to the conversation.

Thank you for decoding my mother for me!

@Puffalicious Lol, I’m 53 and I have a 12 year old. I wasn’t describing my own values at all, but I know that to some extent I internalised this way of thinking from my own parents and their peers when I was growing up. My parents were born in 1925 and 1936 respectively so their own parents were born in the Victorian age and it really made a difference. My comment was about upbringing. I didn’t want to make assumptions about the OP’s age or her mother’s age so I said ‘50s at least’ in order not to leap to any conclusions that the mother was elderly.

It still seems to me that the conversational style that the OP is describing is one which was perfectly normal and acceptable when I was younger. OP talks about her bad back, DM talks about neighbour’s bad back, OP should then take cues from this to say ‘Oh really? Yes, that sounds like what I’ve got. Do you know what painkillers she was on?’ etc, and the conversation progresses like that, swapping bits of information. Like someone said above, it’s basically the same as a chat forum, but in real life.

Talking about someone else isn’t necessarily a derailment of the conversation, and I think OP is reading her mother’s conversational style wrong. This led me to suspect that the OP might be a lot younger than me and her mother closer to my age, but it seems not.

I've no idea why she does it either. My "D"M is a raging narcissist as well. We are low contact , well fairly low I usually see her for 30 minutes a week in her own home. I leave if she's being vile and she never comes to my home. I've had to learn how to protect myself.

I also do the grey rock thing. I listen to her ranting or describing her friends/neighbours problems then I saw oh well and go home. Can't remember if she's ever asked anything directly about me or my family or when I volunteered anything.

thisisnotmyllama I get your point now. I'm flying the flag for the nearly 50s!

The distancing theory is a good one @milesjuppismybitch

It's like they registered that they heard it and reflected that proof back but as they dont know what feel themselves, they cant really ask you about your feelings. All they can do is say "snap the next door neighbour"

I have managed to disengage to some extent with DM. It seems that if there is a boundary, she feels compelled to breech it be ones set by family or even society.
It always seems to be one rule for the world and a totally different set for herself.
IIf I tried to talk to her about my self, that was dismissed and she would launch into what happened to her and how much worse it was.
In the end I realised I was removed from my experiences and feelings because she was stomping all over them.

It's about never being listened to.
If this is Narcissistic behaviour then I reckon I've had one parenting me and only realised it

Sorry, dissassociative not distancing

Mine is the same. Spent 3 hours out with her yesterday afternoon and she rang this morning to tell me how lonely she was! It's wearing but I just try to shrug it off

There is the push pull of guilt too isnt there? Ashamed to feel irritates by her and recognise that aging has it's own features like any stage in life and I hope my kids are more patient with me.
So confusing

I have a relative like this and I find it really helpful to simply take the phone away from my ear and let her rabbit on till she's run out of steam. Then I pick it up again and carry on with what I was saying.
It gives me back some feeling of control without upsetting her, which would likely send her into victim mode.
She honestly has never seemed to twig that I'm doing this in the 30 years since I first tried it. Either that or she doesn't care as long as I pretend to listen.

Aaaaaanyway.... (as SIL often says when she doesn't want to listen to your point of view because her opinion is the only one that counts)...

My car has lost a bit of oomph lately and I have been wondering whether it needs a service or it doesn't much like the new E10 unleaded fuel. I mentioned it to DH this morning, whereupon he launched into a 10 minute diatribe about all the things wrong with his vehicle, completely ignoring the possible issue with mine.

It's not all hormonal menopausal women of a certain age. So there.

OR...are we expected, as women menopausal, post and perinatal, to have the mental room for everyone's shite?
To budge up our own needs to accommodate the sludge at the bottom of everyone elses filtration systems?
Like when someone dumps all their stuff on you with or without your consent?
You are not actually supposed to be part of the conversation but just meant to be a receptacle

Not perinatal. Perimenopausal.
Ffs
Or even perinatal. I dont think it matters to some

I know, for decades my family projected their low self esteem on to me. My dad went to a psychiatric hospital with paranoid delusions and depression for the first time when i was about 13 or 14. Yet when he got out of hospital, i took on the label "paranoid" in our family. I did try to reject the label immediately but was then labelled sensitive. When i realised recently that all of this historic labelling of me was text book projection, i decided No More and made that clear. And they all, mother, brother and father have acted like the victims of me. How dare I insist they stop.

I literally have no right in the family system to reject their projections.

They want me to respect their right to be the receptacle.

I dont want to be nc with them but it's going to have to be low contact.

Respect their right to make me their receptacle I mean

QueenDanu that is family dynamics isnt it? There is only 1 that ends up in front of the psychiatrist but is representing the rest of them. I wonder was this your dads job before you?
It's the question whether we engage isnt it. And the hook, because we are part of that system concious and unconscious.
To remove oneself is for ones own well being and to stop the cycle too.
My DM used to try and convince me my eldest DD was deaf/autistic/dyslexic/"slow'....on and on.

Wow, that is infuriating, to have a label put on your child.

I can see now i did everything wrong, played in to their labels. They shut down communication and stonwalled me when i was trying to communicate "my side" to them when they were honoring their right to label me iyswim. So i shouted at them. Well, there was emotion in my voice which they label "shouting". So now their narrative is all the abuse they"ve endured at my hands.

I shouldnt have tried to get through to them. I should have backed away and allowed them to have their distorted views.

I suppose it's good news ive had this epiphany in the last 18 months but i wish id figured this out privately and not even tried to tell them that they had to stop calling me paranoid/sensitive and worse glossing over previous decades of calling me paraoid /sensitive.

Apologies for the me-rail!

🍷🍷

Is she not just relating to what you say, by saying she knew of someone with something similar?