I think I'm done trying to reconcile with my family

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DarkLight

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I’m not even sure what we’d be reconciling to, anymore. I feel like my mother’s always pushing to reconcile to this sort of idealized image in her head of a happy relationship - and image I upheld as a kid to avoid “backtalk” or “bad attitude.” I’m not a child and we can’t go back and start over and do it right. I don’t feel at this point that there’s enough of a real, healthy relationship there to repair. I would be happy if we each went about our lives on our own.

It feels like a scarlet letter - like a big, dirty secret you have to keep from everyone else. Most of the time, the default assumption seems to be that anyone not on good terms with their parents must be selfish or immature. The exception is if you can point to some form of severe and obvious abuse - being beaten, raped, or starved, or something on that level. Especially within our churches, it seems that few people can conceive of not continuing a relationship with a parent. It’s not honoring your father and mother, it’s not being charitable to them, it’s acting like you’re more important than they are, all that. Part of growing up is coming to understand that your parents aren’t all that bad.

I don’t know what the path forward is going to look like. I’ve had years of therapy and never saw it did any good. I would like to know that my faith community will support me, but I suspect I can count on few to understand.

Prayers appreciated right now.
 
You are in my prayers.

Sometimes, the most charitable form of honoring your parents is a healthy distance. And sometimes it is simply impossible to have any kind of meaningful relationship.

I will tell you, that time is often a big healer. You need the wound to heal, and only time can do that. It you attempt to keep rubbing salt into it,

I am not a psychologist by any meand. I only have over 70 years of experience going for me.

Who knows? Maybe in a few years, you will be able to approach each other as adult friend to adult friend, rather than a warped shadow of little kid and scary parent. It can happen, but it’s gonna happen naturally, not by forcing things.

Again, you are in my prayers.
 
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I will pray for you. This is a difficult trial to go through. God bless you 🙏
 
My wife has a very strained relationship with her mother (her father has passed). My wife was severely neglected as a child, and my mother-in-law said some horrible things to my wife when she was young. My wife felt as you do - that she had a scarlet letter. Still, I encourage my wife to try to reconcile their relationship. My mother-in-law is trying in the only way she knows how. It’s difficult for my wife, but she tries.

My point is that perhaps you should continue to try to reconcile with your mother. Perhaps having a heart-to-heart with her is a good first step. Or just calling periodically for short times to see how she is. Start with little things. You only have one mother and father. You don’t want to regret losing them without reconciliation. That could haunt you for the rest of your days.
 
Sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do for your own mental and physical health.

I’m frankly more mystified by people who don’t cut off their toxic immediate family, or at the very least draw strong boundaries, than those who do. However, I’m kind of a cold person, I don’t have any siblings, and my parents weren’t toxic. My mother could be a huge pain in the neck at times, and we had some big conflicts from time to time, but she wasn’t mentally unwell and there were always many positive aspects to the relationship.

I think when you talk about “default assumption” and so forth, you’re talking about a very small group of people. Sometimes other extended family members such as aunts and uncles, who have their own family issues and loyalties, may judge one’s behavior towards a parent. There are also a handful of people outside the family who may be nosy enough to impose their own judgments on your family situation even though they don’t really have a clue about it because they’re not part of your family and may not even know your parents. But the vast majority of people outside your family situation are unlikely to judge, because they don’t care. They’ll give it a passing thought, “oh, Darklight has trouble with her mom, hm” and then they’re on to the next thing while you’re still worrying that they’re judging you.

You may get a few comments like “remember, you only have one mom” from people . This isn’t so much judging as it is just recognizing both the gravity of the situation, and also the fact that many people in society rant about their parents and may have even suffered through significant family dysfunction, but do not really want to cut off their parents. I know one person who had family dysfunction so bad that she became an emancipated minor while still a teenager, had to move in with another family, and attend a special school for teens with problems. I would have expected this person to just cut off/ stay distant from her parents, but instead she developed a huge attachment to them as an adult (despite still having severe conflicts with them) and when one parent died she grieved more excessively than most people I know who had good relations with their late parent.

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(continued from last post)

In any event, the way you choose to live your life is your business, not anyone else’s, so don’t bother yourself about what other people think. I would suggest however that you be careful about seeking support from social groups other than therapy groups or others who understand how best to deal with the situation. The reason I say that is, I’ve seen a lot of people seek support via their social media friends or groups for help with some personal situation, only to become very depressed or upset when someone “says the wrong thing”. The person who “says the wrong thing” often does not mean to say the wrong thing, they’re just so unfamiliar with the particular situation, not having lived through it themselves (or having lived through something different but that they think is similar) that they don’t know what the “right thing” is to say or don’t understand that the person posting is seeking a particular response. I know many years ago when social media was a newer thing, I would post responses to some people saying, “you shouldn’t worry so much about this, it’s no big deal” because to me as an objective outsider, it really wasn’t a big deal that they had a fight with their sister and decided to stop speaking for a while, and I was trying to set their mind at ease, make them feel calm about their decision. But to them, it was a HUGE deal and I would then get yelled at for being “unsupportive” when I didn’t mean to be.

God bless
 
DarkLight said:
I don’t feel at this point that there’s enough of a real, healthy relationship there to repair. I would be happy if we each went about our lives on our own.
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Then live your life on your own. Ypu need to do what’s best for you. Maybe something will change in the future, maybe it won’t. But sometimes we have to cut ties that harm us.
And frankly, it’s no one else’s business, at least not outside the family.
 
Sometimes we have to learn to share space with the people we don’t get along with. I have learned to share the same state with certain people that I didn’t get along with.
 
There’s a difference between who you don’t get along with, and toxic people. You cannot force someone else to get along with you. Unfortunately, there are some people who will see the problem as that you won’t be a doormat for them. I think people are starting to recognize this can happen in a marriage, where one partner believes it to be their right to dominate and control the other (and I have seen her behave that way towards my father as well). I am seeing that the same thing can happen with a parent, where the child is expected to be submissive and compliant all their lives - typically even as a minor going beyond the compliance that one ought to expect from a child, but certainly as an adult.

The message I have gotten from her, as both a child and an adult, is that it is her right to speak to me and to treat me however she likes, and me being upset or unhappy with anything she does is intolerably rude. As a child, it manifested in punishment for “backtalk” or “bad attitude” or something - ironically, sometimes even after being forced to tell her what was wrong. As an adult, it manifests (once I’ve managed to get her to acknowledge that the issue is something for her to deal with at all) as rage at me for accusing her of wrongdoing. There’s no way I’ve found in my years of knowing her to bring up any problems or set any boundaries with her that isn’t seen as just being mean. And since I’m just being mean, it’s completely unreasonable to expect her to actually change any hurtful behavior or respect any boundaries I have.

I suspect this would come as a surprise to her. I have told the issues to her, but I can’t make her hear them.
She seems to have shut things down to where anything I say that doesn’t uphold her image of herself as the perfect mother is just sort of deleted. All she remembers is that I was saying some nasty things that couldn’t possibly be true, or something. Or I was just rambling on about my problems but there was nothing in there that she needed to be concerned with.
 
In an ideal world yes. But when dealing with toxic personalities, that is not always possible.
Sometimes it is better to cut ties completely, an opinion that has been confirmed to me by a priest.
 
I used to persist with one or two people for years. I realised that what I couldn’t handle was their rejection of me. I didn’t persist for their benefit I realised that I persisted for mine, and yet by persisting I hurt and damaged myself far more than by simply suffering rejection and moving on fairly swiftly.

There’s an idea that perhaps you can turn this person around, that somehow they will come to appreciate your value. Sometimes they don’t. I held a bee once, it stung me, I still like bees but I don’t hold them any more.
 
It can be hard to not feel like if you’re not good enough for your family unless you pretend to be someone else, you’re not good enough for anyone else either. Therapy can be iffy, I suspect for rather the same reasons it tends to fail with abusive marriage relationships. Got a lot of advice on how to fix relationships from therapists before I figured out you can’t fix a relationship with someone who doesn’t want to fix it. Thought for a long time I was just doing it wrong.

Its hard to not worry about what other people think. And I suspect it’s harder for people with toxic parents.
 
You are in my prayers.

I just came out the other end of an absolutely awful holiday season with my parents. I definitely understand why you feel like you feel…
 
Sometimes the best way of honouring your parents is to have no direct contact but to keep them in your prayers. This is what we do with FIL.
 
You are in my prayers too.

I agree that you may need to cut out relationships that are toxic to your well being.
 
I am assuming you are being humorous here.

We do not have to live with toxic people. In fact this in itself is loving for the toxic person in question. Why? If we continue to relate to them as they see fit, we enable them in their sin.

Calling them out on their sin is tough love.

Sometimes we just have to say “enough!”.
 
angel12 said:
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DarkLight:
you can’t fix a relationship with someone who doesn’t want to fix it.
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This. THIS is exactly what many of us have had to learn. It’s usually a very hard lesson.
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Yes. The way I heard it put - as far as the other person is concerned, the only problem is that you’re standing up to them. The relationship was great for them before that! That’s what they want to go back to.
 
All I have to say at this point is hugs, dear, and I will keep you and your fam in my prayers :pray:t2::pray:t2::pray:t2:
 
Honestly my big worry right now is that if I’m not in enough contact they tend to go into overdrive trying to figure out “what’s wrong.” Only any answer that puts any blame on my mother isn’t accepted, so the reaction to “I don’t want to talk to you because of your behavior X, Y, and Z” is “something must be wrong to make DarkLight say a crazy thing like that, I have to push harder to find out what it is so I can fix it.”
 
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