Challenging Family Relationships

My main psychological issue is I get emotionally dysregulated. Some of the closest people to me are the triggers.

My goal is to stop my reactivity while still staying in these relationships, and to individuate. I know this is a huge challenge. All the experts say end these relationships, in general. When they are this toxic, they should be ended. I agree, but feel I can’t.

So, I want to keep talking about it and thinking about it. Yeah, I know I am still ruminating.

The problem has always been with my husband and my mother. The emotional dysregulation surfaced after married for a few years, after childbirth. But my mother was the OG of emotional abuse who started it when I was a child.

I’ll just jump in here—

I’m at a good place now with my mother. I call her every few days and ask how they are. She will rarely call me. She has an attitude that her children must all call her, and she should not have to call us because ‘she is the mother’. If I keep the conversation superficial, I can end the call without incident. I have to be careful to not take the bait she will do to me. I am pretty good at this now. Much as I try, though, I’d say 8 out of 10 phone calls, I hang up somewhat upset.

There’s a whole movement encouraging victims of narcissistic abuse to go no contact. I won’t do this with my mother. I actually really do love her. I see all the good there is in her together with all the dysfunction. It has been a symbiotic relationship between us, so I am not free of lots of bad behavior with her myself, antagonistic. I was fighting for love, respect, to be seen. Whatever, I now get that I can’t ever truly get that from her because she is not capable.

This past year, I moved far away from her. She says I abandoned her. When we moved, I invited her to move with us, to be closer to us. I made it a point to let her know I was not abandoning her. She didn’t want to. My sister told me she had told her, “Why would I want to do that?”. Yet, she still says she was abandoned. That’s what I’m dealing with here. Mom’s a piece of work.

When you get married you go where your husband goes I figure. It doesn’t mean you’re abandoning your mother.

Maybe take a break from mom sometimes. If you get upset after talking to her

Maybe take a break sometimes.

That’s an interesting view. There’s no rule about wife having to go where husband goes. This is 2022. Not 1822. Often husband would go where wife’s job takes her or both decide to go or stay or marriage might end because one is not going to move and have their reasons for it

Hi Tisha I miss seeing you here. Glad yo see you back.

Aging parents could be a challenge. I hear you.

My dad often flat refuses help but then complains about not getting help. It’s constant push pull. It’s hard for the elderly to come to terms with aging and they often make it hard on the rest of us. This dynamic is so common

When I got married, I did go where he wanted to go. He had the career and was the sole provider. I was working for my parents at the time. I gladly gave up working to get married, and was happy with where he chose to live. It was close to both our parents, yet far enough that they weren’t too on top of us. We lived there for nearly 30 years. We started having kids right away. So, I was a stay-at-home wife and mother. He wanted that, encouraged that. He didn’t outright demand I not work, but he always told me I didn’t need to. He really liked me being available to do everything for our family without any conflicts.

The problem was it wasn’t marital bliss. I have been miserable, emotionally disturbed in relation to this. It became a back/forth struggle relationship. Probably part of it is an element you touched upon Lokebee, I just went along with him. I never had a strong sense of identity. I still don’t, am working on it.

Yes, part of what my mother has habitually done is exactly that; complain about not getting help then refusing it! She is immensely contrarian. So there’s never any making her happy. She makes it impossible. I guess she just wants to be miserable. She and I do not have that in common. At least, I don’t do that.

There are things she did/does that I swore I would never do, so toxic and abusive. For the most part, I succeeded at never doing them. However, this is my main issue with myself… I compulsively became like her in the conflict with my husband way, differently, There is a trigger he activates in me and I “act out” and have meltdowns.

I am working hard at trying to stop this vicious cycle.

I really missed everyone here and thought of you all often. I’m so glad to see so many familiar people are still here! (Not that I am happy you are all here dealing with issues, just that I am fond of you all). I had stopped posting because I felt I was addicted to being here, so stopped cold turkey. Plus, maybe I am a bit avoidant…

I am so appalled that i have, all during my life, acted EXACTLY as my mother did, mostly towards me, but at home in general. Loud, obnoxious, self-righteous, selfish, and always right. Or completely passively, like my dad. I was either the abuser or the abused. Most of my relatives (i have 60 first cousins, altho some have passed) see my mother as a saint and me as the horrible daughter. I feel like wtf she never allowed me to BE me. But there IS a me, unknown to her little mind, that i always was and am now beginning to manifest.

Im glad youre back.

I frequently ask the age of someone and the age of a parent as in your case Tisha. There are other elements that have significance as well because of how different people grow up with certain traditions and messages that they grow to believe are the right way to be and raise their family to also believe.

From what you have shared of your mother, yes, she practices unhealthy behavior patterns. You did not really notice it for a long time as well as the affect it had on you. When you begin to see how unhealthy certain behaviors really are it can have a rather great impact on how you feel. This can lead to a lot of discomfort and confusion in one’s self.

Your mother engages in whatever behaviors that provide her with a sense of control. Yes, it’s disordered behavior patterns, but she doesn’t see it that way and probably never will. That is a hard thing to learn to accept in a parent. She is a product of her generation and at this point she is pretty hard wired to practice these methods she has grown to believe are justified.

You have been slowly working on how you react. This is not an easy task and can at times become very uncomfortable at times to the core of who we are. It’s not a bad thing that you have moved farther away. It’s also not unusual for a controlling person to show displeasure as you have described. Yet, there are things we must do for our own mental health.

Hi TishaBuv, I'm glads to see you back here. If I recall correctly, you were raised in a Jewish family, as I was.

Anyway, much of what you've posted about you're mother reminds me (very much) of the way my own mother behaved- and I fear, I, too, will behave.

I am trying to heal myself and grow emotionally, and it is a huge challenge. It’s been a sporadic, frustrating, confusing journey with therapists. I finally have one now, just had one session and can’t see them again until the end of the year because they are so booked up. I am hopeful about this one. The diagnoses given during that time, though varied, were essentially correct. I really understand it now. It’s really difficult because there’s me and then there’s the pathology of the others who are closest family and have conflict with me.

The toxic back/forth relationship is called approach avoidant repetition compulsion. I have been stuck in this for decades and am desperately trying to stop the dysfunction while staying in the relationship. It’s been three days without incident and counting…

Hi Beth!
I call it pure bred and bat shyt crazy. There was a lot of trauma for generations in these families. It makes sense that a lot of pathology is passed down. At least we are learning and shining a light right here and now.

God bless you, TishaBuv. I'm wishing for your dreams to come true.

Thank you BD! I dream of being emotionally stabile and my rocky interpersonal relationships to become healthy. Miracles do happen!

I want to maintain contact with my mother in the healthiest way I can, which is low contact. This is working fairly well. Being careful with my words in conversations is a work in progress to do this dance successfully. It is going pretty well atm.

I want to maintain and improve the relationship with my husband. Also, being careful with myself is the plan I am working on. We are on day 4 without me getting upset and crying. He treats me very well for the most part. We really have a healthy relationship outside of where it is totally dysfunctional. The research I’ve done trying to figure out why this is happening is staggering. It’s an intimacy issue on my part, maybe related to a sexual assault I had.

Then there is the semi-estrangement with my sister S. I’m putting it all on this thread. It’s not that I have such rocky relationships with everybody. But I have a few. I have stopped trying to connect with her after she repeatedly blew me off in crazy passive-aggressive ways. She discarded me, essentially over I wanted emotional validation from her because our mother was falsely accusing me of something and vilifying me. She outright told me, “I care nothing about you”. This was four years ago. I tried to discuss it. She deflected. She then proceeded to do several passive-aggressive things to me, other sister, and to our mother. There was a shady incident she and her husband did that could have ended in our mother being wiped out financially. This really had little to do with me. I was part of other family who talked sense into our mother who did not go for their bad plan. This caused a further rift between her and the rest of the family. So, she has basically discarded everybody. But, there may be a group text once in a while among us. It’s not total estrangement, just complete emotional distance. I also believe it has a lot to do with her husband behind it. The bad idea was not her idea. It had to have been his. She just went along with it without thinking of the disasterous consequences. Or she just really didn’t care about Mom. Or maybe she intentionally was doing it to screw us. Thankfully, it didn’t happen, crisis averted.

I am uncomfortable with feeling disconnected. I have a Norman Rockwell fantasy that I have a loving family. Though I am extremely low contact, and experts would say that is the best thing to do with toxic relationships, I am very bothered that it is the way it is. I bang my head in the wall wanting love from people who do not have the capacity to give it.

So I am dealing with the dilemma of if I should reach out at all including her as family- even as simple as a Happy holidays or if I should just stay no contact. The uneasy feeling is within me and only me. I seriously doubt she thinks of me at all. She truly doesn’t care. She told me the truth and meant what she said. This is so hard for me to accept because I want the fantasy. Ugh.

It even became worse recently when she recently had her daughter contact my son to tell me about another family member event at the very last minute, refusing to contact me directly. So I unfriended her, her husband, and my niece on facebook. Very immature of all of us, I know. I guess when something becomes this toxic it’s best to just move on and learn a lesson from it. I never go on facebook anyway and don’t think she’ll even notice. Mom ruined facebook for me, trolling for narcissistic supply, and the reason for the fallout that led to the discard from S was because of family drama I got into on there. I feel so small and stupid for all this unnecessary, infantile drama. I know how bad I sound. But this did happen. It was a house of cards that fell at the slightest breeze in my FOO and Mom made it all worse instead of helping her kids make up.

When someone has an emotional disorder, they usually do things that are very risky, antagonistic, unhealthy. I have been a loving daughter, sister, wife, mother who didn’t do anything to hurt anyone except I made a single, stupid comment once on facebook which started this huge implosion that ended in the estrangement with my sister, honest to God, hard to believe i know. I’m not looking for sympathy, just need to vent.

It’s understandable the grief you experience seeing the family you wanted to exist is not as close and caring as you had hoped.

I have been badly traumatized by what my older sister did the last years of my parents lives. She manipulated my parents into giving her way too much control and proceeded to extort as much of their money and personal property for herself. I have had to have a lot of help and therapy to survive so many cruel and calculated things hinge my sister did.

Sometimes the worst people are right in ones own family.

I have definitely learn to look at people in a very different way. The person I thought my sister was really doesn’t exist. I was giving her qualities she did not and does not have. So not only did I have to grieve my parent’s deaths but also the death of the person I thought my older sister was too. It’s strange grieving a death of someone in your mind and that person is still alive.

I remember your situation with your sister. That was a terrible betrayal, financially and emotionally.

It’s hard to wrap my head around, but I just have to accept I have no more relationship with my sister.

She was very distant to me from when I was born until I was in college. She had no interest in me. I was ten years younger. I’m not sure that’s so common and typical for girls, but it was treated as normal in our family. She and our other sister, who are closer in age, didn’t get along either. Sister S was the family jokester. She would give people mean-spirited nicknames that everyone thought was hilarious. (Understanding all the narcissism now is not lost on me). When they left for college, I could care less. She quickly married a much older man, a father figure.

That’s when our father passed away, and Mom remarried. I was raised like an only child. She would visit Mom around once a year. I enjoyed her visits. She was the life of the party. But, I realize, there was never any discussion that was emotionally warm and nurturing. There was never any of that love expressed that I feel such a craving for now. I just never noticed the lack there of at the time.. I had the feeling that, as a kid, I was so insignificant in our family, I wasn’t included in any of the adult goings on until I was an adult. I felt very left out, unseen, very emotionally invalidated in general.

When I was in college, she came to visit me because she was there briefly for business. That’s where our friendship began. Still, she would only see me because she was visiting Mom. I would eventually go to visit her, once I met my husband. She was always light, fun, and, I now see, completely superficial. From 1982-2018 I never had a single conflict with her.

We were supportive of each other’s families. We were loving aunts to each other’s kids. She came to see plenty of my kids shows, came to their events. Looking back, though, I see there was some resentment from her. Our mother’s narcissistic ideals of what success looks like- my sister rebelled against it. It was not her nature. She was a tomboy and extremely down to earth. Her philosophy is ‘you are nothing, you are nobody, you are at the bottom of society and that’s the way it should be’. She raised her kids this way, and they had behavior problems in school, both ADHD. *I think ADHD is undiagnosed in her, me, Mom, and others in the FOO.

I married a man my sister felt was the opposite of her philosophy, who met with the ideals of our mother. So, I think she harbored some resentment there, looking back. This also became contentious in 2018 due to the political atmosphere. He was a republican, and my FOO were completely whipped up along with the rest of the country, escalating with the Kavanaugh hearing. They turned against both of us, just because they knew HE was a rep. They were openly, aggressively hateful toward us, even though we never had any discussion with them about anything about any of that, giving them our opinions whatsoever. This is when the unfortunate fb post happened. I expressed my hurt at the lack of civility. I stupidly called out a family member, simply saying that, simply tagging her name. Naively, I was hoping for a peaceful discussion and connection. I wanted reassurance of their love in spite of what they assume are differences of opinion over politics. Silly me. That was totally faulty thinking on my part. But, you wouldn’t think that would lead to complete discard by your FOO.

It wasn’t about my single, rude post, which I immediately deleted and apologized for. It was just the way our dysfunctional FOO operated. It was primed to fall, and I caused the chain of events because I asserted myself, wanting to be seen and validated in a completely emotionally invalidating family.

But this sister wasn’t even a problem in this stupid fb flame out. It was after Mom inserted herself into it talking about me behind my back, distorting the whole thing to stretch into confabulation that I said horrible things to her that never happened. Mom was on the warpath against me. She does this. We know this. Over the years there have been many times where she has done this to all of us. We have always commiserated with each other, supporting each other as we have been victims of Mom’s unwarranted wrath.

But this time was different. When I reached out to S for emotional validation at the very least, but honestly wanting her to say something to Mom on my behalf because I was not guilty, and wanting it to stop, she essentially turned on me. She rudely blew me off. That was all there was to that fight. It was just a couple of texts. Then it got worse from there. I took issue with how she treated me. I wanted an apology. I asserted myself. I was emotionally dysregulated over the whole FOO turning on me, especially now how she discarded me. She refused to discuss it, deflected like nobody has ever seen, an alligator twisting. I was so hysterical I asked my husband to help me with that call. It was him trying to talk to her. He got so frustrated with her deflection, changing the subject, he started yelling, the call blew up, that was that.

It was a case of both of us felt we deserved the apology from the other. She said I should apologize for involving her in the first place. The only way I involved her was I asked for emotional support because Mom was vilifying me. I felt she should apologize for withholding that and so intentionally rudely blowing me off. Neither of us ever gave those apologies. I was shut down every time I tried to discuss it with my mother. Mom was over her rant, as she always get over it and acts like nothing ever happened. I was just too disgusted with the way my mother is, and this incident was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I had it with the narcissistic games. I was demanding to be seen! Well, I never got that. I got permanently discarded instead by my sister, and I have been walking on eggshells as usual moving forward with our mother, who has just gotten worse in her old age.

Yeah, that’s what this was about. I was trying to get the respect I have not been given all my life in my family. I still didn’t get it.

And no, I didn’t give my sister the apology she wanted either. I shouldn’t have to apologize for asking for emotional support from her. And she made me feel so small, and oppressed as she would keep saying to me and other family members, “When T is ready she will call me.” It’s toxic pride. It was like she was taunting me, trying to make me feel so small and humbled, to go begging her… yuck. It was such an awful feeling, I don’t feel like I can ever call her again.