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kimmydawn said:
Statements like, "You do for everybody and their brother, but I don't seem to be on that list at all" really get to me. When she follows it by "emotional punishments" and restrictions and dismissals, it hurts. I'm referring more to the blatant, and where there are no assumptions on my part.

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When things "don't fit" and I'm feeling bad and "shouldn't" be, I try to find situations in the past like that that I understand better.

When I was working at the Pentagon, I had a male boss, who was only 26 (I was 23-24) but he was a balding, little old maid of a man, Lieutenant Lloyd. Everything had to be just so, and I use to tease him by making deliberate mistakes on the new word processor machines (this was 1973-74) just for his reaction. We were working on a legal case and the person's name was "Witt" so at the end of one paper I put "Witt's End" and things like that because he was one of those proofreaders that uses their index finger to read each and every word? Really %#@&#! :-)

One day we were busy trying to get a project out and I was running around through all the various rooms of the office, across the hall to the workroom, the library, in the main office at my desk, etc. Lieutenant Lloyd needed me for something and started looking for me. He finally found me at the "binding machine" in the workroom and the first thing out of his mouth was "Where were you?" I told him I'd been right there for awhile, binding, and he responded, "No you weren't; I checked!"

Well, I started to doubt my own knowledge of myself and wondered where I had "actually" been! I had no idea how to continue the conversation? But what gets me now is that whole paradoxical feeling. Five or more years later it was followed by a boyfriend who decided if I wasn't with him, I was with someone else. I didn't know what to do with that crazy-making thought either.

Now I know myself well enough that such comments by others don't hurt or bother me, I see them as "crazy" and a flaw in the other person rather than me. I remember them when I get a whiff of a double bind; a situation where I "know"/feel one thing and the other person is calling my feelings and knowledge, "lies". I don't see it so much as expectations as an attempt by the other to tell me how to run my life or control me. That doesn't hurt or make me sad anymore, that either gets a shrug from me ("ignoring" and moving on; "What would you like for me to do for you now, Mother?") or a touch of anger if the other person is trying to do a hostile control/boundary crossing instead of an unconscious or needy one.