Feel like I can never be a real adult...am I stuck being a child forever?

[Contra_Mundum_1]

The thing with my mother…it’s not just her itself. It’s that there’s such a difficulty with relying on someone and yet criticizing her behavior. Especially a child criticizing a parent. I’ve found most people will go way out of their way to justify her behavior, and that saying there are any issues at best gets you admonished to be more respectful, and at worst gets you labelled rebellious and ungrateful.

I have experienced this myself. People would ask me about the problems I had with my dad and when I would tell them they would immediately start justifying him. It was driving me crazy. So I started giving one reply and repeating it until the person would either stop asking or would be willing to listen to me and not dismiss what I had to say. I basically said that whatever he gave me in financial terms I had to pay back in another way. I said that nothing was given to me for free and that I suffered a lot because of him helping me. I repeated and repeated and it worked eventually.

Maybe having something like this would help you when you encounter such attitudes. I have learned that it changed nothing if I go into detailed explanations on how exactly he hurt me and manipulated me, and it would only make me feel worse when talking about it.

 

[DarkLight]

I have experienced this myself. People would ask me about the problems I had with my dad and when I would tell them they would immediately start justifying him. It was driving me crazy. So I started giving one reply and repeating it until the person would either stop asking or would be willing to listen to me and not dismiss what I had to say. I basically said that whatever he gave me in financial terms I had to pay back in another way. I said that nothing was given to me for free and that I suffered a lot because of him helping me. I repeated and repeated and it worked eventually.

Maybe having something like this would help you when you encounter such attitudes. I have learned that it changed nothing if I go into detailed explanations on how exactly he hurt me and manipulated me, and it would only make me feel worse when talking about it.

Maybe. Part of the problem I face as well is the number of people who still seem to think it’s just easy to go out and get a job that’ll get you proper insurance. Or the assumption that government money is easy to get. So I get told a lot that if it were “really that bad” I’d have found a way to be completely independent by now. Or people looking for what’s wrong with me that I’m “choosing to depend on her” when the reality is there just aren’t any good options out there!

 

[3DOCTORS]

Sometimes the simple phrase “It’s complicated” is useful, at least for the ones who will get the hint and drop the subject.

Also beware the armchair-quarterback amateur psychoanalysts. I had to ditch some of those who were friends at one time, because my brain got to hurting from all the ham-fisted dissection attempts . . .uch: