This post is all about my experiences dealing with an emotionally abusive parent. I've found that there are not many places to look for help on this topic and even fewer people to talk to.

I've been dealing with an extremely emotionally and sometimes physically abusive mother. I want to preface that I love her and care about her greatly. Her actions are ultimately of her own volition, but I do not blame her for everything that's happened. She has PMDD which is essentially PMS but to a greater extreme. Along with this, she has manic depression / bipolar disorder. I cannot confirm, but I also suspect a history of anger management issues.

My mother has gone through a LOT throughout her life, much more than she's ever expressed to me. I respect her for being able to push through the tough situations in her life and I respect her as a person. I do not want this to seem as if I'm badmouthing my mother or exposing her or her problems. I am simply seeking help or at least someone to talk to about it. I cannot talk to my friends or teachers about her and her problems, which has caused me to bottle everything up since the second this emotional abuse ensued.

I would also like to say that this is what I have experienced, and I am sure that people are dealing with situations I cannot even begin to fathom. I do not want to downplay their experiences and I also do not want to downplay mine. This is not a sob story that I want people to read to feel bad for me. I'm simply trying a new tactic to deal with my problems. I'm reaching out to find someone to talk to.

I have never met my biological father nor do I know his name. I never had a father figure until the age of about 10 or 11 when my stepfather entered the picture. My stepfather has his flaws, but he is a genuinely good man and I love him a lot. My mom was a single mom up until then, and she took good care of me and my sister. At this point, my mother had not been diagnosed with PMDD nor bipolar disorder so she did not have anything in place to help her deal with her situation. Once a month my mom becomes extremely irritable, unreasonable, harsh, and spiteful. She is extremely extroverted and makes decisions based on emotion rather than logic. To go along with this she is one of the most passionate people I've ever met. All of this combined leads to her being VERY loud. She has always been a yeller. Most of my childhood memories are my mother yelling at me, yelling at my sister, yelling at someone on the phone, you get the idea. She's also exceptionally intelligent. So when she's screaming at you it almost sounds like she has a point. When I was younger I would take what she said to heart. As I've gotten older I have come to realize that she repeats herself, constantly. Not using the same words over and over again, but rather expressing the same thing over and over again in different ways. Put everything together, and once a month you get what I call "attacks". An attack is never unprovoked, but very easily provoked. For example, tonight my mother had been drinking a lot by the pool. My stepdad had been cooking dinner while she was outside and brought her a plate to eat. My sister and I were both busy doing things so about 15 minutes later my stepdad called us into the dining room to eat. My mom became upset because she wanted to eat dinner as a family. So she essentially told him that. He said okay and that he's sorry for that happening and he will do better to communicate with her. She didn't think this reply was good enough and it was evident she was becoming irritated. To me, I saw this was probably going to turn into another screaming session for her. So when he went to work in the office and she started to follow him, I went in there to try and prevent a fight from happening. She steadily became angrier and I did my best to distract both of them. This usually ends things and the night goes on, but tonight was different. My mom had been drinking a LOT and it was obvious the rational part of her brain had left a while ago. She decided to start screaming about how terrible it was of him to do what he did, so she started picking up random things off of his desk and throwing them HARD at him. I immediately got up to stop her, but by the time I got there she had already slapped him, HARD. So I grabbed her and brought her out of the room. All while this is happening she is screaming her head off, definitely loud enough for people two houses down to hear. (We've had the cops called to our house multiple times over the years because of how loud and "passionate" as she likes to say she is) My stepdad gets up and both him and I try to subdue her because by this point she's hitting both of us. Then we try to talk her down, but that just led to her slapping me in the face HARD. My stepdad saw this, and tried to get her in a bear hug to get her to the couch so we could coax her down but she resisted and they ended up falling. On the way down my mom's leg hit a doorhandle and caused a relatively bad gash in her leg. So she starts screaming louder. We all stop and attend to her leg to make sure she's okay. Now my sister is with us, screaming and yelling trying to get my mom to stop. When she has these attacks the hardest thing to understand is that she is completely irrational. She can articulate like a normal person, make points like a normal person, but it isn't her. She turns into a different person. After we attend to her leg, she begins to scream at all of us. She keeps saying the same thing over and over again, that she just wanted to eat dinner with us. We try to calm her down which initially works but she ends up being angrier than when she started. Yelling and screaming more and more to the point where my stepdad cannot take it anymore. Mind you its been going on for about 3 or 4 hours at this point. So as he's trying to leave she REALLY blows up, screaming bloody murder. If you didn't know what she was yelling about you would think that she was being tortured. All this time, her yelling has been extremely insulting and spiteful. Being extremely childish. Using extremely vulgar words, unnecessarily vulgar. My stepdad ended up calming her down a little bit for about thirty minutes, but then she blew up worse than before. She went ballistic, putting a hole in the wall by slamming a chair in it, reached for a vase and threw it at the ground with all of her might. My stepdad was subduing her at this point and barely stopped her from grabbing something else. She has prescribed medication but doesn't want to take it because my biological father became hooked on opioids prescribed by a doctor. So we ended up convincing her to take the Xanax prescribed to her. At this point, she just laid on the ground in the middle of the kitchen and began yelling and screaming random things at all of us. I calmed her down and made her feel secure and made sure she felt appreciated and slowly she became herself again and went to bed. This is a description of just one "attack" and they have happened a lot throughout my life. They have caused me a lot of pain and sorrow. Personally, the physicality she has does not bother me, I can get hit or slapped and it will not cause me any emotional distress other than maybe a spike of anger. I usually don't have anyone to talk to about it so I decided to just try and reach out, so if you have any ideas or words of advice I'm glad to hear them. I also wrote most of this in one sitting so my apologies if some of it is difficult to understand. This experience is also not a representation of my mother. She is very caring and understanding and humbled but when she has a bipolar episode this is what I have to deal with. It makes me extremely anxious and stressed out and often interferes with schoolwork, which in turn causes more stress and anxiety.