My Support Forums - View Single Post - Cold Mother Syndrome/Emotionally Absent Mother

nonightowl · Dec 10, 2021 at 03:49 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hope Mikelson

It's like I am reading my story, except a few lines here & there Stay strong dear . I can understand your pain.

Same here.

BTW, I like your username, as she's a character on Legacies on the CW. I assume you watch the show and/or like her character as well?

Until I joined this site and saw this forum called CEN, I didn't even know they had a name for it. It makes it official, like I wasn't imagining it. It's "legit". I joined in 2008 but don't know if this forum was there or not.

I get validation from reading this thread, knowing it's not just me and apparently more common than I thought.

My own mother obviously favored her first born (male) child over me. And oddly, she never wanted to speak a WORD about her OWN mother. She just wouldn't answer me. She wouldn't even say "I can't talk about it" or "It's too painful honey." That being said, she didn't use terms of endearment at all. And I have no pictures of my grandparents (maternal), and I don't even know what their names were.

Seems she cut herself off from her family, as she had sibings too which she didn't discuss at all either. My guess is that this dynamic was generational and she did what HER parents did: Be emotionally unavailable.

Also therapists have said not being answered as a child brings back those feelings as an adult, when somebody doesn't ANSWER me---be it on email, voicemail, text, online. It REALLY pisses me off and now I know why. My own mother wouldn't answer me about HER mother. Or what was on top of the stove. I was too little to see up there; I wondered what was up there but she didn't answer me. I knew she cooked or made food on that strange thing (it was to me, I didn't know what it was called a stove, LOL), but I didn't know what she was doing or what was there I couldn't see!

Unfortunately I'll never know why she was like this, as she's been deceased since 2017. Therapists have said she probably had no good role models herself. Though it explains things, it doesn't make it less painful. I often wonder if she was even aware of how distant and cold she was a lot of times. And I know if she was still alive, she'd never answer me anyway, as always.