This is in addition to another post. My mother is visiting me at the moment, and I have noticed that (while I am truly happy to see her & have her with me) after a few days I become super quiet and unemotional and deadpan. I have become a little flat, and I'd like to post to see how I end up like this & perhaps there's something I can do to stop arriving at flatness & maintain vitality (around her & beyond). This is a common way of feeling when in my family of origin. Everyone seems to be much louder, fussing about & chatty, while I stay in the background mute; an observer.

Some of the feelings that lead to this are:
- frustration (a combination of many frustrations in relation to relating with her; one of this is that she is more deaf, but also I feel growing up with her she was already 'deaf' to me even before the physical deafness; the other is her over-fussing. So it's a kind of no-win situation... fluctuating between over-fussing yet not really 'hearing' or getting me.)
- disappointment (at lack of control I guess.. disappointment that she, or others, doesn't understand me or come to my level. I guess perhaps I expect her to be a mindreader.. or perhaps I have given up expressing myself to be understood?

Does anyone have similar experiences of feeling flat emotionally? Withdrawn in relationship? Does this sound to you like a control thing? Am I simply controlling? I know that she finds it disturbing when I am unresponsive; my mother in law finds it worrying too when I get quiet - she worries I'm not happy.

I do take my time to adjust to people, and I can run away from group situations. But I don't find anything so super wrong with this. But just want to be able to stop myself retracting internally (loss of vitality) & would like to understand what goes on perhaps between the feeling of stress and the instinct to clam up & just go through the external motions.