[littleowl2006]

I am pretty sure that I got my depression from my mom.
It feels like this doesn't belong to me. Usually I can handle things in my life, I feel fine, I can talk to people, I can be open and straight forward and have my own opinions.

Then my mother gets involved. A stupid conversation with her, and suddenly a very old despair hits again and 1000 emotions break free and I am this burdened confused and abused child again. It just sucks.

My mother makes me so sick sometimes. I love her, but it just hurts so be close to her. She is in denial about many things, she thinks she can handle everything alone, she pretends all the time, she has no self-worth and is so hard and defensive and always represses her true self. She has no close relationships and isolates herself. With people she is often unreal and plays a role. Then she is of the opinion that everyone should keep everything to themselves, crying in public is devilish (I am the worst because I cry pretty often), being emotional is an invasion of her personal space and wanting to have an honest talk is me abusing her, (even though it is the other way around IMO). It has always been like that and even worse. I could never talk to her and she never protected me, instead she made me feel guilty and the worst of it all, I think she never even realized any of this.

I don't want to cut her out of my life because I love her and sometimes things are okay between us. We even had some talks over the last couple years after I moved away and started to have my own life (I am 26). I just wonder how I can not feel so crappy and depressed when a conversation on the telephone goes in a hurtful direction again and the days or hours afterwards.

Can someone relate? How do you manage to feel better or how can one set a boundary here? I declare defeat for now

[vonmoxie]

It seems to me that emotional convergence can be especially catching in families where the environment for contagion is lush.

There are several factors that determine the rate and extent of emotional convergence in a group. Some of these are: membership stability, mood-regulation norms, task interdependence and social interdependence. Besides these event-structure properties, there are personal properties of the group's members, such as openness to receive and transmit feelings, demographic characteristics and dispositional affect that influence the intensity of emotional contagion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_contagion

My own mother is both without a sense of boundaries and is deeply in conflict with herself as a result of a number of unaddressed disorders, and the truth is that just the number of miles which separate her from me on a given day still affect me deeply. While her influence hasn't on its own caused me a major depressive episode, it has been an extremely strong factor which may indeed have been what tipped me over the edge on at least one occasion that I know of.

She's currently on a 10-day vacation at sea, and although I don't live with her, it's a vacation for me knowing there's zero chance of her knocking on my door. It's not entirely logical, but even all these years later it is clear to me how much the effects are still in play.

What I've found I have to do to keep our relationship within the bounds of sanity, is to always be the one to set up limits, and to do so diligently. When she wants to spend inordinate amounts of time with me either in person or on the phone, I just tell her that I've observed that we both seem to gain the most emotional health from the relationship with specific, lessened amounts of time. She can't and doesn't disagree. But I will forever still have to be the one setting up the guardrails, every single time, so that I don't get emotionally drained and sidelined. It's not a job I asked for, but it's one I need to do, for as long as I choose to stay in contact with her. Which I have. Your mileage may vary.

[littleowl2006]

wow - I didn't even know that was something I could look up. But it makes sense.

Depression can be genetic too it is in my family and actually most other people I know with depression seems to have it running in their family.