It's really good to hear you say that, AN, because that's exactly what I've been thinking every time I've read that you think what happened to you was "mild", or not really that bad. You wouldn't say that if it happened to your DD, I know. God forbid. And I do think that's an excellent way to approach things, for all of us. My therapist has used that suggestion with me quite a few times but I still forget it so it's always good to be reminded of it.
OPO, amazing development! Fantastic, am so pleased for you that he finally stood up for you to your MIL, and to me it shows how far you've come internally that he could do that. Like you say, it's a really big deal for a man to side against his mother like that, to admit that she has major flaws like that. I'm not surprised that he's gone back into his shell now, it was such a huge step for him (and for you) that it will take some absorbing. It's funny, when you wrote that ost before about the "scales falling from your eyes", I meant to say then that I thought it was an amazing post, you sounded so calm and clear, like you'd really reached a place of trusting yourself inside - and I now think his action is a direct result of that. Because I do think that when we shift internally, the people around us can't help but shift too, on some level. Not that we can try and make that happen - it's always when you let go of trying to make somebody behave differently and do the work on yourself instead that it happens. Well, in my experience, anyway!
Rose, I'm so glad my post before was useful to you - I was nervous about writing it in case it was upsetting in a bad way, but your reaction makes me feel glad I followed my instincts. I still do feel very strongly that there is something very wrong with the whole set up - sinister is the right word, indeed. I think it's great if you can start calling her Grandma instead of Mum. I know it jars with me whenever you refer to her as your mother, and I suspect it does with you. But I can understand that you've been calling her that for so long, and she has been the main mother figure in your life, so it's not that easy to change these things. FWIW, not that I'm going to write to my own mother at the moment, but if I were, I would baulk at calling her Mum because it feels so false - and she is my biological mother but the relationship is so lacking in maternal love.
I agree with Sakura too that mental illness is or can be caused by the family. The psychiatrist rd laing was the first to put this forward I think (was reading about him recently and he sounds like he was a very gifted man in many ways, but was a complete tosser as a father himself...), he said that schizophrenia is caused by the family. I am not a scientist and cannot back this up but my gut feeling, my own personal opinion, is taht pretty much everything comes back to the family, including this. Which makes this whole scenario very dark indeed. I think your story really plugs me in as it were as I think there are similarities with my own family, and learning that your grandmother also lost a baby reinforces that link in my eyes. I feel like I'm only just really escaping my mother's clutches - she portrays herself as such a caring person, and always insists on how much she loves me - but it's always her own welfare she's concerned about, not mine. And that's the bottom line. And she has profited from my misery. Which is pretty evil, whether it was intentional or not.
The longer I go without seeing her, the more I realise that there is no space for me to be happy if i am a member of that family. My role in that family is to be the scapegoat, the problem one, the one perpetually in crisis, the loser, the failure, the sacrificial lamb - they need me to fulfill that role, and they can't actually cope with me not being like that. Which is why they sabotaged my wedding day when I finally was getting hitched at the age of 41. And why they have made so little effort to repair the relationship now that i am finally a mother, despite saying how much they wanted that for me - deep down, unconsciously, they DON'T want me to be happy and successful. They need someone to carry their pain, the pain they rejected themselves as being too burdensome and too scary and too much, but which has to go somewhere. I don't know how it's all going to shake down as I gradually become more amd more stable and happy. Does this make any sense to anyone else?!
Anyway, Rose, no, it's completely not right for her to have wanted you to call her Mum instead of Nan, and to lie to you, and to sideline your real mother, and to carry on pretending she's some kind of great parent when she so obviously wasn't. Hope it doesn't sound flippant if i say her comment about being "too sympathetic to be a nurse" actually made me laugh out loud - that displays a level of UN-self-awareness that is quite breathtaking, as well as being really really nasty with its implication that you're not sympathetic. Actually, it's not making me laugh now, it's just very sad.
Smithfield, it sounds like you're having a bad time at the moment and I'm sorry about that. I wish I could light a little candle for you to see your own goodness by - to try and separate it out from all the crap that was dumped on you that you have then taken on and internalised as if it were you. I think one of the worst things they do to us is not just the horrible abuse, whether emotional, physical and sexual (btw, thank you AN for your words about the relative difficulty of dealing with the different kinds of abuse, I found them very helpful) but making us feel and believe that it is OUR FAULT. If they tell us over and over again that we are the problem, how are we supposed to live with ourselves? We have to have that spark inside us, some kind of vision that we are different from the person they say we are, however little evidence there seems to be when they have controlled everything in our environment for so long.