Our 6th visit to the Stately Home.....

[oneplusone]

Hi all, took the liberty of starting a new thread. Keep on posting!

Recently my therapist said that he thinks I still have a lot of anger in me and I didn't believe him. I thought he just wanted me to keep going and keep paying him. But I've had an argument with a close friend which has made me think he might have been right. The things she did that upset me weren't massive, just a collection of little things. I had a right to say that those things upset me but I should have found a good way to say it which caused minimal upset. Instead, after an initial outburst which 'opened the floodgates' a load of venom came flooding out which was too much for the friendship to recover from. I have now really upset people and feel very ashamed.

I can see clearly how the things that upset me link in with things from the past and how the incidents, even though small, reminded me just a tiny bit of past events, and that was enough to trigger feelings much more intense than the present situation 'required'. I thought I had dealt with it all but I obviously haven't if all these intense feelings are still bursting to get out! I'm so good at denying to myself any angry feelings that I have that I didn't even know I was angry really until it burst out of me.

I have the excuse that there had been new 'developments' wrt my 'problem relative' recently and I was feeling a lot of stress and couldn't withstand much more, then things with my friend upset me on top of this and I went a bit 'insane' I think. Well it's a reason but it doesn't excuse me upsetting people so much.

I feel a bit funny about saying sorry sorry sorry it's all because of my issues and have people think 'you can't blame everything on your issues all the time, you can't hide the fact that you are a bitch behind your 'issues'. But I know deep down that SO MUCH in my life IS affected by my issues and I hate being a 'prisoner' to them like this. I feel pretty pathetic. I thought it was all sorted and I want it sorted, now, and done with. How long does it take fgs! I was feeling so much better, for quite a long time, and this feels like a big setback.

Thanks for the response.

I have decided not to bring up everything in my letter but only more recent events (which are enough in themselves) and to lay out what I want.

Have written letter but want to keep for a week and then reread and possibly rewrite.

Thank you

OSAHM, thank you. I can so relate to your recent post. Being fed up with this never ending process and seeming to always blame everything on my issues and after a while people thinking it's just an excuse. And i thought i was much better as well like you. I know things are improving as my eczema is soooo much better these days and i used that as a sort of indicator as to how i'm doing.

But there is always something else. I felt hugely angry at DS just now. He was whining and being a normal 3 year old but i just felt so angry at him and i am sure he was just triggering me. And i think i have worked out what i am angry about; it's something my MIL did which was just so cruel and nasty and is possibly one of the worst deliberately nasty things anybody has ever done to me in my whole life. I want to write about it but find it hard because it was so hurtful and it's also very hard to get across just how much she hurt me simply by describing the incident. But also i am wondering if even the incident with my MIL is in itself a trigger for things that happened with my dad. I don't want to make her a scapegoat for things my dad did/said. But at the same time she has certainly done/said so many things that make her an abuser in her own right. I am going to tell DH tonight about the incident with her and see what he thinks. At least now he is far more open to accepting that his mother has been very nasty and bullying towards me, he no longer tries to defend her or put a 'spin' on what she has said/done to make it seem innocent/harmless. Even that makes me feel a bit less isolated. I think that has been one of the worst things for me in all of this. Whenever i have told my sisters things about our parents they have defended them and DH used to defend his mother and they all made me feel totally alone, as if there was nobody who believed me or understood me or even simply accepted my story. I suppose that's why Alice Miller talks so much about the importance of talking to an 'enlightened witness' about your experiences as you are unlikely to get the understanding, validation and acceptance you are looking for from those around you which i can see now has been my mistake.

I haven't seen my counsellor for a while. Am going to see her next week but i think i might start looking for another one as i never felt the current one really and truly 'got' me iykwim.

StartFresh, could the fact that you stop short of describing what actually happened be holding you back from processing it properly?

If you could get past the 'exposed' feeling you get from writing it on here and write it, as fully as you can, describing every aspect of it and how it felt, would it help your brain to put it in order? Also, as you write, be aware if any past events come into your mind, even if you can't see how they are related to it at first?

OSAHM, I am sure you're right. It's like the most memorable (in a bad way) incident with my dad, I still find it hard to write it down fully on here. I remember reading in a couple of books about feeling 'shame' about things that have happened. And i think that's how i feel and maybe it's why i can't post or even talk about it with my counsellor. I think I feel shame about what happened even though i was the victim and it should be the perpetrator who feels ashamed of his/her behaviour.

Was just reading another very interesting thread about whether bullies were aware of their behaviour and the effect it has on their victim. In my dad's case I think he had NO self awareness. But with MIL i think she does know exactly what she is doing but doesn't care about hurting my feelings. I don't think she ever thinks about other people's feelings, just her own; a classic narcissist.

What would it take for someone eg Therapist to be able to persuade you to talk about it properly?

OSAHM, I don't know. I think it totally depends on who it was I was talking to. If I felt comfortable with them and had a feeling they understood me and 'got' me, then I feel I could open up. I don't feel that way with the current counsellor, perhaps that's why I didn't talk about it with her? I always thought it was just that i wasn't ready etc, but perhaps it was also partly that i didn't feel i completely trusted her in the sense that she would really understand what i was saying and how badly i was hurt by the things that happened.

I've looked at this thread for ages and not quite understood the meaning of 'Stately Home'. I think the penny has dropped and I wondered if I could join you? Please?

SC, sorry it is a bit obscure isn't it? It came from something somebody posted years ago. Of course you can join, have you read any of the 5 previous threads?

DH finally admitted the other day that his parents did not think I was right for him ie he had made a mistake by marrying me. So I haven't been imagining it all, the sense I always got from his mother that she didn't like me. All the nasty, snidey, remarks and put downs and even worse the cruel and extremely hurtful remarks about my eczema were real and not in my head. I am angry once again at DH as I knew all along I hadn't imagined how nasty his mother had been towards me but he, DH has always tried to make out that it was me, that i was being oversensetive etc, or that his mother didn't mean any harm, that she was just a bit tactless and didn't always think before she said something. When all along he knew I was right, he knew she had been deliberately nasty to me, because he knew his mother didn't like me.

This whole thing just gets worse and worse, the more DH and I speak and the more he opens up. I just don't know what to do anymore. He made me feel so much worse than I did already by his mother's nastiness, by defending her and appearing to be on her side, against me.

I feel like I have had enough. I bought the book 'Toxic in Laws' and was going to read it thinking it might help with the problem i have with MIL, but it turns out DH is the problem once again. He seemed to think that now I was better,(ie not terribly depressed and unable to cope with very much and my eczema is better) his mother would see that I wasn't the awful useless wife to DH that she had thought I was and she would therefore be a bit nicer to me and all of a sudden we would have a great relationship. That i would somehow forgive and forget her nasty, cruel and bitchy behaviour towards me whilst I was ill, because she had now decided i wasn't all bad and would be a bit nicer to me. I don't know which one i hate more, DH or his mother (and father as he was complicit in all of this, like the silent partner whilst his mother was the mouthpiece), as it seemed like it was not only MIL who has disliked me all this time and thought i wasn't good enough for DH, but also DH himself.

When i was ill, things were very difficult for both me and DH. But does that justify MIL to be a complete b*tch to me because i was unable to be a proper wife to DH during that time? I can see she was acting out of concern for her son, but how does being so nasty to me help matters? Did she think i had deliberately got ill and was refusing to get better or something? I just don't understand how somebody can be so nasty to another person. I am so glad I have decided to have no more contact with her, although how this arrangement will work in the long term I don't know.

And DH is totally convinced that every single one of our problems is down to me and he and his issues have played no part at all. But all that has happened is that my problems have been so great and overwhelming that it has appeared that they were causing all our problems, but now I am so much better, I can see that my problems were masking issues that DH has, but he is refusing to see them. But I am just so tired of it all, I do want to start afresh, but on my own, just me and the DC's. It was so nice when DH was away (because he walked out), I felt so free, as if all my burdens had been lifted from my shoulders. Being with him and trying to make our relationship work is such hard work, is it really meant to be this hard?

Hello all, me again, just wanted to get some thoughts out of my head. For a long time I have thought that I was a 'loner'; the sort of person who preferred their own company etc. But it has dawned on me (a little late in the day i suppose) that actually I am not a longer, I love company and being around people, it's just that for such a long time, i had unknowingly been surrounding myself with the wrong sort of people. The sort of people who didn't care about me or my feelings or who had no interest in seeing me and getting to know me and appreciating and respecting me for the qualities i possess.

I am beginning to realise, now that I am making more friends with 'healthy' people and i have far more realistic expections from my friendships, that I do like being around people and that there are people who will treat me well and with respect and that my friendships can actually bring me happiness. It sounds so simple and obvious now but for so long so many of my relationships brought me nothing but unhappiness, pain (which i suppressed) and disappointment, it was all i knew. Now i am beginning to experience something different, i am seeing things in a whole new light. It's like I've stepped into a different world, the world where people who were not so badly damaged as i was have been living all this time, from i have been excluded til now. It gives me such a feeling of optimism and hope for my future, that I can be happy, I don't have to live the rest of my life with a certain low level of depression/unhappiness that i was beginning to get used to because even that was better than the severe depression and misery i was feeling not so long ago.

I do know what you mean StartFresh, as having a few nice people to see made a massive difference to me. I then started to feel that maybe I wasn't as weird as I thought people saw me as (if they could put up with me), and that made me more confident about talking to more people, which made me feel even better etc.

I can't believe I've been so stupid as to mess it up with one of them. We have both apologised to each other so there is some hope, but not sure what will happen next.

One of the thoughts I had was that some of my other, less deep, friendships would not have the same problems even though I can imagine those people doing similar things. But I have lower expectations of them. I just enjoy doing stuff with them, having a laugh with them and having people to be with. I'm not expecting them to be perfect.

I'm not sure where my thoughts are going with this. I'm just wondering why I gave her a hard time (the woman I've just had the argument with) and not the others. It's like I expected some kind of perfection that I also expect from DH! I'm wondering if I expect too much and fixate on a few individuals who I expect to 'fix everything'. I know I expected DH to 'rescue' me and make everything ok and never do anything even slightly wrong.

I know Therapist would go on about 'projection' and say that I project onto people all the qualities that I want them to have and make myself believe they are the person I want them to be to fulfil various needs. He said it is similar to what happens at the beginning of boy-girl relationships and during the 'honeymoon period', which can be short or long, they think each other is perfect, then in time they start to see how the person really is and that they have faults and imperfections just like anyone does.

It makes me cringe to say this for some reason but I know that I am always searching for someone to be my mother, father or sibling (instead of the ones I had who were 'inadequate'). It just annoys me that everything comes down to all this stuff and I've gone on about it all so much and for so long. I don't want to be so pathetic that I'm using my past as an excuse all the time for my failings and mistakes and for lack of achievement in some areas.

When I first met my birthmother I knew how I wanted her to be and she did not fit this image. Her faults were glaring me in the face (by her strange behaviour towards me) but I would not accept what she was really like for a long time. I couldn't accept that this person who I had wanted for so long was not the person I had imagined. I kept thinking of her the way I wanted to think for a while and found it really difficult letting the truth in and having my fantasy image slowly shattered over time. I do feel I have been a bit unfair to her by being so upset with her for not being exactly how I had imagined. I regret that I have hurt her with different 'rejecting' ways because I couldn't/can't handle everything.

Feel a bit like an intruder and haven't rad all these threads, there are too many but "skimmed" quite a few. I just wanted to say that I think there are some amazing women on here posting about such intimate, sensitive things in your lives. Most of you sound so very articulate and insightful about your difficulties and in this way can reach out to others. I just wish some of the women on MN who post about being in dreadful relationships in which their children are clearly suffering would read some of the things that women like you have endured in the past and how that has affected you through your lifespan. Maybe then they would make different decisions to protect their children while they have the opportunity.

My very sincere good wishes to all of you women out there who are dealing with these situations with such dignity and courage.

NanaNina, your post has made me cry and I don't even know why. Your words are so sincere, you seem to 'see' how much we have suffered and how hard it has been for us to rebuild our self confidence and self esteem that was shattered by our parents. Thank you for posting, it means a lot and reinforces what I said in my previous post that not everybody out there is like my parents and sisters, that there are, for want of a better word, good, kind and decent people out there.

OSAHM, fwiw, imo, I think your therapist is probably right about the liklihood that you are projecting your unmet childhood needs onto certain friends and then being so hurt and disappointed when, in your childhood eyes, they let you down. I know I have certainly done that til now and am stil doing it to a degree but with far more awareness meaning that I am hopefully managing my expections more realistically. But it has taken me a long time to get here, so perhaps you are not quite there yet.

I realise that I am also searching and hoping that the next new person I meet will fulfill a motherly/sisterly role in my life. I think the fatherly role I have already projected onto DH and then many times blamed him when he didn't live up to my unrealistic expectations or the child in me felt let down by him. What I have done now is adjusted my expectations and realised that in some ways DH can fulfil a father type role in my life, but he cannot be a father in all ways and at all times to me and somehow by realising this, I feel ok and our relationship is better for it.

I have just read the book Toxic In Laws by Susan Forward, and I wish I had read it years ago. MIL, FIL DH and myself are all in there. DH has agreed to read the book with me so we will be doing that over the next few weeks. He admitted the other day that in order to cope with his mother's constant and hurtful sniping, criticism and barbed comments he has had to develop a 'coat of armour' around himself so he does not feel the pain caused by her vicious tongue. It is such a breakthrough both for him and for us, compared to not that long ago when he wouldn't even admit his mother was tactless never mind vicious and malicious.

It is sad that I also have toxic PIL as there was always the possibility that I could have married somebody with genuinely loving parents, but it was not to be. . Although from what it says in the book, it is quite rare for a person to have completely non-toxic PIL, unless perhaps they have done a lot of work on themselves and sorted out their own childhood issues which I think must be quite rare in mine and DH's parents' generation.

I think and hope the scales are slowly starting to fall from DH's eyes about his parents and that he will gradually start to let go of the illusion of his perfect parents and his perfect childhood. If he can develop even a little bit of awareness about who they really are and about himself, i am sure it will bring us so much closer.

The post made me well up too but was so lovely and true so thank you. I have even said to my husband if ever we were to plit and he left for another woman i would never try to stop him seeing our daughter. Yes people should think of the affect they are having on their kids!

On a different note. My therapist is saying we have choices. Again same as wtsafresh I always want my sister etc to 'understand me' and to change things. My therapist says it may not be possible and what do i do? Let it destroy me by carrying on hoping or make to choice to move on. Sound simple doesnt it and i even feel frustrated at my therapist. I mean is this is? Accept the situation with family and live knowing this is it and so i am not depressed anymore? I know there is no magic pill but how on earth do you simply make a choice not to think about the situation etc when it eats you up?

The posts about friendships on here i have to say i have done the same but now i see it am on a different path.x

sb9, yes your therapist is right, about the fact that we have choices about the way we respond to a given situation where we have no power to change it, but, it is oh so hard to do in reality.

It took me a long, long, long time, and many, many posts on here, where I felt like I was going round and round in circles, saying the same thing over and over again and seemingly ending up back at square 1. ie getting nowhere fast. BUT, in can see now in hindsight that i was slowly, and gradually and painfully, inching my way from being emotionally attached and dependent on my sisters and needing them to fulfill certain unmet needs in me, to being emotionally detached from them, not being dependent on them and no longer needing or wanting them to fulfill some of my needs. I would have to go back and read through my previous posts on this issue to be able to work out how and when things started changing for me. But it was definately a long, painful and drawn out process. However I am there now and can tell you it's most definately worth it, to be free of the terrible feeling of being dependent on somebody else for something you need, where that other person clearly does not care in the slightest whether she gives you what you need, nor indeed whether she actually causes you harm as well.

Something OSAHM said on here came back to me today. Something about her therapist thinking she still had a lot of anger stored up inside her. (Perhaps when she thought she had got all her anger out?) Because I have too. I think I am beginning to realise that as you become consciously aware about things from your past that you were not consciously aware of before, (but these things had always been there and were not 'new'), you can feel a fresh and new wave of anger and the only reason you didn't feel it before was simply because you did not have the conscious awareness before about certain things that you do have now.

I have realised just how much my parents completely believed that I was inherently bad and defective (and that I was born that way) and how they always looked for a completely external source to themselves to find a reason for my 'problems' (be they emotional, behavioural or physical such as illness). Eg. they thought my eczema was food related when it was as I know now, caused by their emotional neglect, abuse and damage; they thought my 'behavioural' problems ie my anger and hostility and unpleasantness towards them were due to those qualities being an inherent part of my character when in fact the cause of my behaviour was their abuse and neglect; they thought my mental problems (depression) was due to an inherent defect in me when it was as i now realise due to them and their abuse and neglect.

I am amazed at how they could so completely fail to even once look at themselves and their behaviour and never wonder whether they had done anything to cause any of my problems. I am angry at how they also made me believe that it was just me, that i was just born 'wrong' or 'defective'. I look at myself now and realise that, like all of us, I was born 'perfect', 'intact' like all babies are, and that any 'defects' or damage that I gradually started showing signs of as i grew older, were entirely caused by my parents. I can see through the huge improvement my skin has shown, how my eczema is gradually disappearing as I process more and more stuff from my past, that I was always inherently 'perfect', 'complete', 'healthy' and that over the years my physical ailments, my behavioural problems, my mental problems, were all simply evidence or symptoms of the damage caused by them.

That is not to say that even the most loving and caring parents do not inadvertently and unintentionally cause damage to their children, but i believe that those sorts of parents are able to look inwards at themselves and know and realise that they have done so. They do not blame their children for their own faults and flaws and failures and believe their children were born with 'problems'. They have the capacity and courage to look to themselves before they look outwards for the cause of any problems and believe that to effect change in others, including their children, they must first change themselves. My parents of course never did this, they complained about the way i behaved towards them as i got older, but never once thought they could be to blame in any way for my hostility towards them. And of course it would never have occurred to them that if they changed their behaviour, that I might start then changing how I responded and reacted to them.

And my sisters are showing themselves to be as 'outward' looking as opposed to inwardly reflective as our parents in their apportioning of blameworthy behaviour, which makes it so much easier for me to keep my distance from them.

WTSAfresh, re the stored anger - as well as it coming out as the memories come into our conscious mind, I think there is something else which makes me not realise I am angry. I am scared to be angry. My fear of it makes me in denial of it. I'm scared of feeling angry in case I act angry and that anger makes someone else angry with me. I'm also scared that I will be humiliated for being angry and whoever made me angry will carry on doing what makes me angry even more. This will make me feel I have been weak and ineffectual at standing up for myself. It will also make me feel unimportant - another thing I fear.

This is why I act as though everything is ok all the time even when it isn't. I actually make myself convinced that everything is ok. All the time, anger is building up and I don't even realise. Then when I can't hold it in anymore, an outburst happens in some form and I don't even know I'm doing it until I've done it. It is as though it came from nowhere and surprised me. It has caused a bit of a problem on the few times it has resulted in an outburst. I've recently lost a close friend because of it. I'm so not in tune with my anger. What do I do about it?

So much of what you say I can relate too. The choice business though, that is so hard. I am so up and down with my moods as well. It is so hard to deal with anger i always find myself feeling sorry for the other people. I mean i am angry with mum for never really having an opinion, for sitting ont the fence and fer always talking about hersel yet when i feel anger i find it so hard as she is like this due to her own lack of self esteem. My father is probably a control freek becuase his dad was and used to beat him. My sister is messed up and nasty because of our family divorce and stress we had i beleive she has a personality disorder. So there i go again,. i feel guilty for feeling angry ;(

gosh excuse all the typos!!!

OSAHM, unfortunately it's very hard for us to know how to correctly deal with our emotions in the moment as it is something we did not grow up doing.

I remember not long ago I had been thinking a lot about things DH had said and done which had hurt/angered me but I said nothing at the time. I remember feeling a huge surge of anger in me and I knew it was my buried anger from the past. It was just luck that I had the house to myself that afternoon when my anger struck and I got out my baseball bat (which i hadn't used in a long time) and went to DH's office and got one his favourite things (nothing expsensive!) and smashed it to bits! And it felt sooooo good to do that. To be able to just let my anger out and at the right person and in a way that did not harm anyone.

I can understand you feeling scared to be angry as I would not have actually faced DH himself with my anger. Can you work out clearly in your mind who you are angry at and why and then when you really feel the anger inside you (I feel it like a force/immense energy) find a 'safe' way of releasing it? Who do you feel angry at? And why? What did that person say/do to hurt/upset/betray you? You don't have to answer, but just thinking about these things might help clarify things in your mind.

I have had a strange time recently. I have had a lot of talks with DH about things he/his parents have said/done in the past which have hurt me deeply. There are a couple of incidents where I felt so betrayed by DH, i felt he had been so disloyal, I felt i had been blamed for things which weren't my fault without him being willing to listen to my side of the story and siding with his mother and another time where I felt he and his mother and father had colluded to do things behind my back. And I honestly don't know whether I am/was overreacting to these incidents which would indicate that they are in fact causing suppressed childhood emotions to surface where i felt the same sense of betrayal, disloyalty, collusion against me, by my family.

There is no doubt that there were many times as a child when i felt all my family were against me, that they talked about me behind my back and colluded against me, all in their absolute determination to pin all and any blame for anything unpleasant on me. And they would also just tell each other things about themselves and what was going on in their lives, but i would always be the last to know or worse than that, i would rarely be told some family news, i would usually find out completely by accident ie if somebody let something slip by mistake.

As always, at these times as a child, i would 'register' what had happened, how i had been hurt by my family, but i would never actually show or even feel the associated emotions with feeling betrayed, colluded against, and so I suppose it makes perfect sense that the situations with DH and his parents triggered these buried emotions. Perhaps also i had unrealistic expections of DH. That once we were married he would somehow always be on my side no matter what, which is of course one of the important things i had been missing as a child and must have been longing for and craving all my life, and I thought, wrongly i now realise, that DH would fill that void. But of course it was impossible for him to meet a need in me that my parents should have fulfilled and of course i was bound to end up feeling hurt/betrayed and disappointed by him. I should as always, be directing my anger at my parents for never being on my side no matter what and for keeping family 'secrets' from me and encouraging my sisters to do the same and for always blaming me for things; neither of them ever thought about me, about how i would feel to always have the whole family working together against me/seperately from me. In a subtle way it is a different feeling to the loneliness and isolation I also felt, the feeling of having nobody to support you/on your side/be on your team. I was always fighting my battles alone, it was always the rest of the family against me, even if they didn't all always speak out against me, nor did anybody ever take my side either, so the effect was the same.

I realise i must have had my guard up all the time as a child, as i knew there was only me, so i had to be on 24 watch all the time. If i had had somebody i felt was on my side, we could have taken turns and during the other person's shift i would i think have been able to let my guard down and relax a bit and know i was being looked out for/taken care of. But i have never known that feeling, of what it is like to be able to relax and know there is somebody there looking out for you. I realise i still can't fully relax in this way, even now, as i still don't feel confident there is anybody on my side looking out for me, not even DH. I can never ever fully and totally relax. Again perhaps that is why i like being on my own as that is the closest i can get to putting my guard down as i know there is nobody about who can potentially hurt me.

I had a situation where a friend's son was being aggressive towards mine, upstairs with the other children, out of adults' sight. He had been 'told on' several times by different children and then really made my son cry by jumping on him (the older kids said). After that, when I heard my son cry again, I got cross and had an outburst as I felt that the same boy kept being aggressive and his mother did nothing and acted like nothing was happening.

I am angry with her but I'm also angry because it reminds me of being upstairs as a child, being bullied by my brother or abused by my grandfather, out of sight of my parents, who acted like nothing was happening, even when I told them. I can't let my son feel that I will let bad things happen to him and nobody will do anything about it. I had tried to not be sensitive to this sort of thing, with the same child being aggressive over time, because I knew I might feel it more than I should because of my issues. This is one reason, as well as fear of making people angry, that I hadn't said anything before. It seemed worse though on this occassion and my feelings burst out.

After this outburst, everything that ever upset me about my friend seemed to come pouring out - and yes, I know people say you shouldn't bring up all your past grievances in an argument. And also I did it by text and letter - yes I know that is cowardly.

It is easy for me to find links between all the things I told her about that upset me and stuff from my past, but I won't go on about it all now. The thing that confuses me is, how much of the anger is towards my friend and how much is about the past. If lots of it is about the past does that mean I shouldn't feel angry with her at all? Does the fact that I have issues that relate to the things I got upset about mean that I'm not allowed to be angry with her in the present? Does it mean that none of it is her fault and anyone who triggers my issues should 'get away with' it because I can't judge how much they were in the wrong and how much it is just my issues being triggered?

I have apologised to her several times for overreacting but should I have to keep apologising (she isn't 'forgiving' me so far)?

She knows a lot about my life and I tried to explain in the letter how the thing with the boys fighting triggered my issues. She would be able to see that as she always seemed to understand me well when I've talked about things. She also knew that I was having a bit of a bad patch with some new 'developments' in my family which had really mixed me up and were making me feel sick with worry. I was feeling stressed and under pressure and she knew all about this. I feel she should be able to understand why I reacted the way I did and should be able to forgive me. She had accused me in a letter (before my letter) of not valuing our friendship but I feel she doesn't value it because she has 'ended' it.

Maybe just because I was going through some stuff doesn't mean I can 'take it out on' her, but she has snapped at me before, quite horribly on one occasion, and Therapist thinks that I should see that occasion as understandable and not be cross with her about it because I know she was worrying about some other things at the time.

...but then again, she didn't bring up everything that had ever annoyed her about me. But when she had a go at me for getting arsey about the original thing - the boys fighting - it reminded me of how she gets snappy when she is under stress and I've always let her off for it, but it seemed I wasn't allowed to do the same. And accusing me of not valuing the friendship wound me up even further as the letter had an 'ending the friendship' feel about it which meant she was the one not valuing it enough to talk about things and try to resolve them.

I was feeling that she was really saying - if you value our friendship you will let me treat you however the hell I like without complaining. That made me start thinking about whether I had been a mug all this time and whether there were other things I just 'let her get away with' because of my fear of complaining - and the things my mind came up with, I wrote in my letter. Now it seems it was too much and there is no going back from this. It was too much like a long list of criticisms.

I think I reacted even more to her letter, by writing a more 'venomous' one back, than I did to the original incident about the boys fighting.

OSAHM, it sounds difficult. If your 'friend' has been 'snappy' with you a number of times, and you have not said anything, it sounds to me as if you have been unable/unwilling to set some boundaries in the relationship from early on. So perhaps your friend sensed that she could behave quite badly with you and you wouldn't say anything. So then she was very surprised and shocked when you did eventually 'explode' at her and all your past grievances came out, grievances that she might have thought she had already 'got away' with.

Without knowing your friend myself, I get the impression from what you have said that it may be hard to salvage the relationship. But I wouldn't give up all hope, leave it for a while and give yourselves both time to calm down and take a step back and perhaps in time, you might be able to re-open the lines of communication. That is if you really wnat to.

I realised i didn't want to even try and re-establish the friendship i had had with the mum friend at my DD's school where her son got overly attached to my DD and we ended up having a major falling out over it all. Looking back now, i realise perhaps i should never have got so close to her so quickly in the first place and also not allowed our respective DC's to get so close too. In effect, I should have set some boundaries in place from the start and taken the relationship far more slowly, but at that time I had no idea how to do that and just went headlong into the relationship witrhout any idea of the possible pitfalls as I was so pleased to have made a 'friend' at last.

I have really come to look at all relationships, including those with female friends, just like those with men. All the same rules and bits of advice apply. ie take it slowly, don't appear too keen or desperate, get to know each othersd first, set boundaries as to what is and is not acceptable behaviour early on, lots of open and honest communication etc etc.

I find that I do more 'observing' now before I get close to anybody and by doing that I have often spotted behaviour that I don't like and if at first i might have thought that person might be a potential friend, i then hold back a bit until i know her a bit better before investing any more in the friendship. It's very early days yet, but I think for me, the cautious approach is crucial to avoid being hurt and disappointed over and over again and also for me to have realistic expecations about what i can hope to gain from the relationship. I wonder whether i am perhaps too cautious and hold back too much and therefore stop people getting close to me who might turn out to be good friends. But I am also far more patient than i was before and feel i am willing to wait and take the relationship very slowly and if it is meant to be then it will work out. It sounds so much like one would describe a 'romantic' relationship with a man, but it is to me, kind of the same, trying to find and make close female friends who will be longterm friends hopefully.

I'm sure none of that is really of any help to you but i just wanted you to know that i have had similar experiences and i suppose i have learnt something from them, perhaps I am learning things now i would have learnt a long time ago had i had 'normal' parents.

Thank you WTSAfresh. I recognise that you are right about people treating me a certain way because they think it is ok, or they think they can get away with it, because I don't complain. And then when I do complain, because they had thought I didn't mind, they are shocked and upset. I recognise it because it has happened to me before. You probably won't remember but I have written about it on here ages back, when I had an outburst at a work colleague who hadn't realised until then that his behaviour was affecting me so much.

People have done things to me, all through my life, because they can, because I've been too weak to stand up for myself.

My friend is not really bad like some of the people from my past life though. I don't think she even thought she was doing anything bad. I get the impression that she thought that if someone valued her enough, they would let her get away with any faults and fully accept her by doing this. Pointing out what I see as her faults, seems to be to her, like saying - you are not important enough to me for me to forgive you for being imperfect.

I can understand her reasoning. But, if her faults started to make her treat me in ways that made me unhappy, surely I am allowed to say something?

She has said to me before, when we were talking about how people often take their negative feelings out on those closest to them, who they trust the most, that she has often treated her mother badly by talking to her nastily because she knows that her mother will not reject her for it. In other words she has done it because she can. This is what makes me think that she sees people letting her get away with her treating them imperfectly as proof that they value her.

She has also talked about her father being quite bad tempered and talking to her mother quite nastily and her mother putting up with it for years and years, sometimes thinking about leaving, but never going through with it.

I know that I need to learn how to be assertive with boundaries from the outset in relationships. It worries me that if I've got to this age without being able to do it, will I ever be able to do it? I feel I will get scared next time a situation arises and I will chicken out of standing up for myself. It is making me think about avoiding close friendships in the future, which I know is probably not the healthiest way to think.

I think I better read a book on it. Does anyone have any recommendations?

Sorry have been so quiet for quite a while now. Have been trying very hard to get to grips with my rage, and also trying very hard to get to sleep earlier, which has made getting on here problematic. Am still reading posts though and rooting for you all. Re the friends thing - I've been in that situation a lot, where the power balance is completely unequal - no surprise when you grow up in a family where the power balance is so utterly skewed - and it's still not fully resolved, but I'm a lot more aware of what's going on these days. I had one friend who was in my life for years and years and years and once I realised that I was unhappy with the way she treated me on some occasions, I started trying to raise it with her, thinking she would want to communicate and improve our relationship blah blah blah. EXACTLY the same thing I tried to do with my parents and brother, proceeding from exactly the same flawed reasoning - ie that these people fundamentally care about me and it's just a mistake or a misunderstanding that they keep treating me like crap. Guess what, every time I tried to bring something up with her, she got really angry and turned it all against me, and the unvoiced subtext was that I'd better be careful or she would abandon me. She always talked as if the way she thought about things was the ONLY valid way of seeing things at all, and I was committing a serious infraction of the rules by daring to want to have a viewpoint of my own. She decided what friendship meant to her, and therefore that was what friendship meant universally, no discussion allowed.

Obviously the only way you'd put up with that is if you felt very, very powerless, and I did, so I buried it all for a long time - she was one of the very few friends I had, and certainly almost the only one who'd been my "friend" for that long, and she was so "normal" and successful compared to me that I was probably grateful that someone like that wanted to have me in her life, I probably always hoped that proximity to her might rub off some of her success on me! Of course it was completely the opposite, it just highlighted the appalling, glaring differences in our lives, and she never, ever really took seriously the struggle I was going through to try and emerge from the pit I'd been thrown into.

It came to a head for me when I had my miscarriage after the first IVF - I realised that I didn't want to share any of this information with her at all, that I didn't trust her to be genuinely caring or sensitive, that I didn't trust her full stop. I knew without a doubt that she wouldn't say or do anything that would make me feel any better or feel understood, and that she would almost certainly say things that would make me feel worse, while appearing to be sympathetic and "good" (a knack she had). She had witnessed my struggles and my pain for long enough without ever acknowledging either the severity of the issues I was facing or the courage I had in trying to tackle them; she was another one of those people who offered me conditional friendship - I was allowed to be her friend as long as I showed only the sides of me that she liked, and abided by her rules, but she was never, ever, ever remotely interested in knowing the "real me".

StartAfresh, we've both talked about this before I know, this thing where people only "love" the you they want you to be, not the you you are. Anyway, to cut a long story short(!), I had also been thinking for some time that there was not much point in being friends with someone for 20+ years if after all that time there was still no real trust or intimacy, so my miscarriage was just the catalyst it took to finally act on my feelings and cut her out of my life. And I'm still very glad I did, very glad indeed. I couldn't actually tell her why - I didn't have the strength at the time, and more importantly, I knew she wouldn't actually listen to me anyway, so I just stopped answering her calls/texts/emails, and while for a time I regretted never having the chance to vent my anger at her for the way she'd treated me for all those years, now I just don't care and I'm just glad she's not in my life. It felt like the worm turning in a way - all those years she'd never thought I would be the one to abandon her, seeing she always had the upper hand in the power imbalance, and it gives me some satisfaction that in fact I did. My therapist always referred to her as "punishing" when I told her about the way she behaved to me, and that's very accurate - she was very judgemental, quite hard and rigid and controlling, and those are the kinds of people I sincerely want to avoid in my life now.

Anyway, so partly what I'm saying is to you, OSAHM - is this person really someone you want in your life? Does she make you feel valued? Does she like you, the real you? And what the hell is so wrong with defending your son from being bullied anyway? And why wasn't she intervening? Do you like her, the real her? If she has been upsetting you for so long, is she maybe not the nicest person to be around? You asked if your anger was apporpriate, well IMO of course it links back to your childhood situation, everything does, but that doesn't mean you don't have the right to get angry about things that are genuinely happening in the present! In fact it could be very healing for you to have actually got angry with someone who was allowing your son (and by proxy, you) to be bullied:it's like standing up for him and for your childhood self at the same time. I don't think you have anything to apologise for. Maybe in some ways you finally had a healthy reacion to her and her behaviour - you couldn't contain it any more, and you let rip, and so yes, all the other stuff came out too - well, good for you! About time someone stood up for you and if no one else is going to do it then who better than you yourself!

OK, I don't know if things are really that cut and dried, but all I want to say is - is her "friendship" really such a loss?

OK, really got to go now - don't know when I'll make it back on, but love to all.

Hahaha, thank you for your thoughts Bop, I am thinking about them before I respond fully. I'm not sure why I find it funny, it's not really, just that I was expecting people to think I was a bitch! I think it is really kind that you have tried to make me feel you are 'on my side'. It feels like something I always wanted. I wish someone would have been on my side back when I was the child being bullied. You have made me feel a bit comforted, so thank you as that is quite a big thing for me.

I was thinking that maybe what happened could push me into the next stage of my processing of everything and that would be something good to come out of it.

I feel a bit reassured that someone else could be friends with someone for years before they suddenly think there are things about the friendship they aren't happy with. The fact that we had been close friends such a long time and I had never really felt the negative things I felt til recently was making me doubt my judgement.