Talked to my mother about a session with T and it went very, very badly

Great! And i agree the manipulation is just about getting needs met. Obviously as an adult there's better ways of doing it but either way the intent it about getting needs met.

I feel like T would tell me that even if some things I said as a thirteen year old weren't 100% accurate or ended up leaving out other potentially relevant facts, my goal as a thirteen year old was simply to get my needs met and feel safe and manipulation is not a good term to use to describe that.

It's still just this empathy thing, thinking about the pain I caused my mom and my stepdad and my brother...how do I turn it off? Even if I say it wasn't my fault, there were certain things I did or neglected to do that resulted in a lot of pain for them. And feeling their pain for them and understanding how it must have felt is just making me want to go crawl into a hole and stay there forever. Too much empathy sometimes...

You call it empathy, but it's just a symptom of being a parentified child.

Your mom didn't cut it, and you have developed into the best version of an adult you could be. Unfortunately, that comes at a high cost. I am eager for you to let go of your overdeveloped sense of responsibility and come to terms with your true role as the dependent one in this relationship. When you were younger, you were the dependent, 100%. You still are, to an extent.

Of course you want to have empathy and such- because it is very difficult to bear the full reality of the situation, but we outside, some who have been in very similar positions (I have) see the reality differently, and I might say, more realistically.

You've clearly gained a lot for your struggled, and I commend you for that. Your maturity, communication skills, empathy, sense of responsibility will all serve you well, but that doesn't mean your mother didn't screw up and deserves forgiveness when she has not done anything to earn it, it doesn't mean that you did anything wrong or villainous. It's a bit more black and white than you're seeing it (which is usually the opposite of what we'd say to someone on this board), and I say that not to criticize you, but in the passionate hope that you will relax, stop defending yourself against an ugly reality, and just feel your emotions, honor them, don't try to out think them, and heal.

I have been here too, not being sure of the exact reality of my allegations. I realized "true or not" was actually an unhelpful, less important question than 'bad enough' or not. What I said was clearly based on things being "bad enough" at home that I HAD to have change. Stagnation was unbearable. It's not the exact incident, Yearning, it's the reality that you had a story in you begging to be written, and you wrote it, and bad things have happened to you at the hands of your family, and you deserved and needed change.

I honor you for doing what you did.

If a child needs to be out badly enough to follow through... that child deserves safety, caring, empathy, respect.

Facts matter, but there is a deeper truth than can be found in racking your brain over technicalities.

Thanks, Leah. What you're saying makes a lot of sense, and I do appreciate it. I guess it's just when I stop thinking and just feel things, I really, really hate my mother for what (I think?) she did to me. But at the same time I love her and want to be close to her all the time. So it's a lot easier to just hate myself...

This is the difficult part sometimes, because I question whether I wanted to be out of that situation because I was scared of being hurt or just because I was ashamed of what I did and too much of a coward to face my mother after what I'd said.

Ugh...maybe children don't always know what's best for them; maybe I did just want to get out because I didn't like following rules; maybe I did just want to get out because my father bought me more things than my mother and I thought living with him would be more fun; maybe, maybe, maybe...

Awe, of course it is easier to hate yourself. I've done that too. It is SO wrong for our mothers to turn against us, because how can that not be the most traumatizing, confusing, annihilating experience ever?

When I've been lost in that experience, I try to reach deeper for my sense of mothering- I think of archetypal mothers, the life force of women, of mothers, like goddess figures if you're spiritual, or the warm presence of maternal figures in my life, like teachers and counselors, and I think about myself as a mother as well, and try to mother myself with compassion and caring... and a bit of indulgence. It's not the same as having one really good mother, but it is enough.

The only important "maybe" is "maybe" if the ADULTS in your life had acted like responsible adults, EVEN if you made a mistake, they would have been there, as they should have been there, to keep it from traumatizing you so much- to support you instead of abandon you, to understand you instead of criticize you.

P.S. If you were too ashamed of a lie, which I don't think is a fair assessment of the entire difficult situation, but even still, if that was all it was... don't you think it's concerning you'd go to such lengths to avoid your parents? Solid, loving, stable parents wouldn't have you in such fear of a mistake... or they'd be able to address it in a healthy way if you had a disproportionate fear.

I know...but they were angry and hurt. And I can see that. What I said was a really big deal and could have resulted in them losing not only me but my brother too. So I might have done the same if I was in their shoes. They made mistakes.

But if I can forgive them for their incredibly traumatic mistakes, then I should be able to forgive myself for my own...I wish it were that simple.

I wish I had a mother who would just love me...

I read a quote that i really liked this week and it said something like " it takes a village to make a woman" meaning that it takes a tribe of women to teach a girl about womanhood/sisterhood, what it means to be a woman etc.

No, not every parent would have done that. Good parents would not have done that. You would not have done the same, I don't believe that for a minute, not really. I would never do that to my daughter. NEVER. I am not a perfect mom, I definitely have said hurtful things to her and such. It's part of why I am in therapy, but I would NEVER give up on my daughter, not for a minute.

She didn't give up on me though. She spent two years and thousands of dollars fighting to get me back. I was the one who refused to go.

I'm talking about the moment when she abandoned you, washed her hands of you- that was the failing I referred to - of course you didn't want to go back!

I'm not saying she has no mothering instinct at all, most women do have some, but that you're so focused on forgiveness, empathy, self doubt, I think you're missing out on the really important truth: your feelings are valid. Honor them, express them, have them. I know it's hard to live with that ambiguity, but... trying to talk yourself out of them... I don't think it's long-term helpful.

In the heat of anger, people say a lot of things they don't mean...I'm glad you wouldn't do that to your daughter (I certainly wouldn't do it to mine) but I think words said in anger can/should be forgiven. My father has definitely said a lot worse things in anger, so...

This is probably right though...

Another thing to consider is everything that led to that moment, moments that break families like that don't happen in isolation, it's about the environment. I can only imagine, based on incidents you've shared here, plus that very powerful rejection, that it's not just about forgiving your mom for saying something stupid in an argument. I think you know what happened, during that day and prior, was more serious than just heated words, just one bad day....

I know, that's how I feel - I feel like it was very serious and I was very anxious and afraid. But then I wonder if I'm just retrospectively interpreting those events/feelings in light of what I want to believe, and maybe those incidents (like that incident with the Minnie Mouse that is so, so clear and vivid in my head) never actually happened and I just made them up and then convinced myself they were true. Memory isn't like a video camera; everything you think you know is biased in some way or another.

Maybe I just feel like if I was in any pain at all, it was my own fault, and I don't deserve all the empathy and comfort I get from people I tell this story to, or from my T, or from folks on PC...

See, people on PC have empathy cos we know our sh.it!!!! We know crap parenting when we see it, we know psychological theory and between us all we have about 70 billion hours of therapy hahaha we are awesome, so you kinda have to listen to us

Do you have memory problems? Just wondering why you are questioning you're entire past...I mean how long ago did you leave home? If you remember being kicked out that is most likely what happened you would know if you wanted to leave. just my opinion but she sounds manipultive....I mean why is it your responsibility to apologize because she was stressed with getting custody how is that in your hands or something you could possibly be sorry about? Did she blame it on you?

Just seems like maybe she's denying things...I mean unless you have memory problems or some disorder that would cause major distortion of memories.

And you were refusing to go for no reason? somehow it seems there was a reason you didn't want to go back to her.

No, I don't have memory problems - at least, no more so than the average person. But I've done a lot of reading about the way memory actually works and have come to understand that most of the things we think happened in our pasts are actually somewhat inaccurate, whether we forget who we were with when a specific thing happened or how old we were when it happened or details about the event, and sometimes our brains try to fill in the blanks to come up with a cohesive narrative. I feel like my brain does this sometimes.

It is about getting needs met. Difference being, there's directly expressing needs, then round about ways, of circumventing the need, where the intent is masked. It's the how's, not why's, that determines whether it's manipulative. Otherwise, everyone on this planet is manipulative, because we all, do, indeed, have needs.

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Then sounds like you are trying to intellectually rationalize a painful moment in your life. You need not dismiss your memory and feeling, just because mom cried, kwim?

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^^^ just to add. Know what happens to med school students, around second/third year in? They become like hypochondriacs, suddenly, they have every illness known to man, because they are studying it.

Learn your psyche texts, but save analysis for your T.

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T doesn't like to analyze me. Nor does she like me to analyze myself...whoops. She likes me to turn off the cognitive part of my brain and just feel things.

It's a work in progress...