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.

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

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.

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

Maybe take a break sometimes.

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

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 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 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 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.

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.

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…

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 just looked up avoidant repetition compulsion. I can see what you mean about the pathology that is explained. It helped me understand how some people will never change and why they pic certain relationship partners.

The Hardest Person in the World To Break up With - YouTube

Why Avoidant and Anxious Partners Find It Hard to Split Up - YouTube

This are great short videos explaining it.

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.