Estranged adult children

[Theestrangedone]

Hi all,

looking for a bit of moral support here. I recently made the choice to estrange myself from my mum parents and my sister and her husband as frankly I’m sick of their narcissistic behaviours.

I never had a great relationship with my mum and sister, my relationship with my dad has always been dictated to by my mum and if we ever fell out he was banished from speaking to me. I had times at home where I was sent to my room with a hard smack from my mum for things my sister had caused, my mum never listened to my version of events. Before my sister left to move out with her now husband, there would be a lot of times where my sister would stir between me and my mum and when my dad was at work they’d sit in the lounge together after sending my away and could be heard gossiping and bitching behind my back about me.

Gradually, as iv gotten older and I finally managed to move out with my current partner 7 years on that upset I felt has slowly turned to resentment. 7 years of being excluded, ostracised, excuses made for the choices to not involve me. Decisions and excuse to exclude my son, I’m 31 weeks pregnant with my second baby and after a really rough few days I finally cut contact with my Mum and Sister for good!
I’m sick of apologising for their wrong doings, I’m sick of being bullied into thinking things are my fault. I’m sick of being emotionally and mentally manipulated. Being excluded once again and having been given 3 poor excuses that were easily resolved with speaking to me iv had enough and decided ai deserved better. My children deserve better than to be trapped in this. The only person I’m going to miss and who will suffer not speaking to in all of this is my dad and my nephew when he’s old enough to work things out. There’s just so many things to say and explain what happened over the years but iv spent 32 years of my life believing I was wrong, believing it was my fault, believing that I’m a bad person.

As a mum myself I’m hurt that any parent can exclude one of their children without legitimate reasons like health issues, holidays etc. To just decide to not involve someone is just cruel. And I just hope that my children NEVER do this to each other or think I’m ever going to exclude them both from anything!

I guess my question is? How do you learn to adapt with this change? How do you begin to heal or recover?

@Conundrumseverywhere The 'good' parent gets to distance themselves from the negativity, and they get a reputation for being a saint for putting up with the 'bad' parent. In reality they are also your parent and they should have stood up for you.

Narcissistic behaviour is about splitting into 'good' and 'bad'. Narcissists can't cope with the idea they may be human and less than perfect, so they deny the 'bad' bits about themselves. Someone who pretends to be a good parent without actually doing any parenting may be a covert narcissist themselves.

www.fulhamconsulting.com.au/mental-notes/narcissism/personality/relationships

My relationship with my mum and sister are the same. My sister literally goes to the house everyday to gossip about me and to 'get the the news' which essentially means that nothing we tell my mum in confidence is ever held in confidence. She's literally told my sister about my fertility issues (then they decided together I was lying about them), about personal things my brother has told her, my salary (my sister doesn't think I deserve my salary and mum agrees) and so now I grey rock both of them & don't share anything.

That’s awful. I wouldn’t tell them anything either.

My situation is different than yours but just as toxic. I walked away from my parents about 7 years ago--and tried again at one point only to reaffirm my decision because absolutely nothing had changed. There are days where I long for a family, but what I'm longing for is the family that I never had, right? For me, the choice is a life of peace or a life of misery, because they only ever bring me just that. For me, it's better to be alone than to be with people who are committed to mistreating me. For what it's worth, I never missed my mother for even one day and my only regret was not ending contact with her sooner. It was my weak father who I missed and tried to have a relationship with again, but his loyalty to her ultimately made that impossible.

So I had my baby 14th June. My mums pretended to care and be the wonderful grandmother for a grand total of 3 weeks of his life, my sisters now pregnant with her second she only told me yesterday as she said she didnt want me to think she was stealing my thunder (it’s not bothered me in the slightest iv been really happy for her) and my mums now totally lost interest completely in her 2 grandsons, not even a daily text asking to see them. She rang me yesterday for a total for 3 minutes then suddenly cut me off and told me she needed to go so she could talk to my sister.
In fact I’ll go as far to say she couldn’t give a solitary s**t that our newborn could need some light therapy and the fact both of us haven’t been too well. I message her to say what my midwife said and all I got was an ‘oh dear - well probably have to cancel Disney as it falls on your sisters due date’. Bear in mind my mum refused to cancel her recent holiday which fell on my due date and I gave birth the day they were both travelling home.

Great, so your willing to cancel 3 days away and risk upsetting your grandson but you refused to cancel a 2 week holiday to support me? Not that I expected her to my cousins wife stepped in and I couldn’t have asked for a better partner as she kept my boyfriend busy with jobs and was so supportive of me!

But Yea that’s nice, Thanks mum!
I really don’t know why I bothered to let her back into my life, my dad just doesn’t get a look in or say as she domineers his choices and I’ll never know why i let her be around my children when all she does is cause disappointment to me and is happy to disappoint her middle grandson! Thank god my newborn will never remember this. Me and my children deserve so much better :/