Family Therapy - Advice and Commentary Wanted

My mom's always like "have you considered that I tell you things you don't like when we're alone because I want to give you privacy and don't want to embarrass you" and. yes. You clearly do this for my sister, in a healthy way (I think), and she does that for me, which honestly I appreciate, but.

I'm pretty sure she just gets me alone so she can say whatever she wants, and it's her word against mine when I tell people. :(

 

Are you sure?

Like actually this thread might become a "is this [list of things that have or do upset me] immature?"

 

Okay, actually, this has been bugging me all day:

My mother consistently talked about me in therapy, and does other times as well, about how I'm immature and don't want to be a real adult and don't understand how the world works.

And my last therapist talked a lot about how I was really mature, and really emotionally mature, especially, and competent.

And it does feel very undermining, for my mother to emphasize this so much, when, actually, I feel pretty competent and mature? I don't know.

 

Yes I´m sure. Being pushed away by someone, especially like that, will hurt most anyone regardless of age. You were hurt because the person trying to get you kicked out was being an asshole.

Sympathy.

 

Yeah that is incredibly . You dont come off as immature to me.

 

Yeah, that whole "just ask any relative how happy your childhood was" is PRIME gaslighting material. Because she's specifically telling you "do not trust your judgement, trust the judgement of people who are biased towards me and WERE NOT THERE for the shitty things". So they can tell you in all innocence and full belief that absolutely nothing bad happened ever to you and from there your mother can just continue doing that same thing and you will only ever have the perception of people who were not ever there and have no idea that anything even happened.

 

She directly compared you to your 12 year old sister, a toddler, and a generic ~child~. She called almost every thought and feeling you had expressed there as well as a good amount of your actions over the past several years childish. Like. There's not much more she can do to be infantilizing. (Hi, I'm fiancee.) Edit: er. Sorry I didn't mean YOU Artemis, I meant idiomie and didn't realize that the thread would work like I was replying to you and only you.

 

It's actually more like she refuses to accept that she DID any mistreatment and would rather blame everything on exes and me (fiancee). She believes that she and she alone is a rational adult that did only good and right and that any argument against that is wrong, childish, and a threat.

 

A note about this: she also used this to discuss how I'm not helping you be any better of a person and am just coddling you and telling you that it is acceptable to be ~bad~ in all the generic ways that she may think about such as wanting to be comforted when upset.

 

You know the last time I hugged my mom was when she picked me up from the hospital after my attempt.

That might seem apropos of nothing, but it just stands out to me that we don't touch ever and she absolutely loathes providing or seeing provided physical comfort.

Like. She has described @Lebesgue Integreat and sitting on the couch together, doing nothing else than being on our phones and showing each other things, as "wildly inappropriate" because ... we were touching. We were sitting to close to each other on the couch. That's inappropriate.

 

Also I'm mad about this right now:

Every time my depressive episodes came up, my mom interjected with "everyone struggles sometimes" and that is so. Purposefully invalidating of the fact that I was depressed.

 

She also used this in therapy and decided to go off on how you're supposed to get help from people (the direct implication being not therapists but you could only really get that if you knew it) and "your family who loves you and supports you" (they don't actually do much supporting) and basically being like "I know what it is to struggle, but I haven't been 12 in a LONG time and I'm more rational and grown up now and it's hard to see things from your (immature and wrong) perspective".

 

Also, fun fact I learned yesterday:

So apparently my mother's father would punish his children further if they cried while being punished for something. And he was physically abusive, so the example my grandmother gave was, if my mother was in his way and didn't move out of the way fast enough, he'd hit her/throw her into the wall, and if she cried, he'd spank her until she stopped. This was when she was like four.

And. Neither of my parents ever did that, were physically abusive like that. But I was like, hmm, mother, doesn't that sound familiar.

But like. I do remember being spanked for crying once (but only once), and the common refrain to my crying was them saying "if you're gonna cry, we'll give you a real reason to cry." (Implying that they'd spank me.) And I very clearly remember my mother berating me for crying several times throughout my childhood, and/or covering my mouth and nose while I cried to make me be quiet. (Even if I wasn't crying anymore and just had those after-tears hiccups. She might actually have hated those more than the tears themselves. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

Like. By the time I was about 10 I generally cried silently. Because making any noise meant getting in trouble.

My mother didn't do this to my sister whose closest in age to me. In fact, what Rachel remembers is me doing these things to her. (Which is true. I feel bad about that.) But Rachel has point blank said that our mom never did any of that stuff and in fact that our mom always held her and helped her calm down.

:/ Rachel is only two years younger than me.

The first time I cried in front of @Lebesgue Integreat, I had a panic attack because of it. And I kept asking why they weren't yelling at me/if/why wasn't I in trouble. And I dissociated really badly over it.

 

She's not right. From what both you and your fiancee have said, your mom is trying her damnedest to gaslight you and anyone in listening range into believing that she's right and everyone else is wrong. But she's the one who keeps moving the date for when things started to go wrong, and she's the only one acting like not behaving how she wants means you're not a mature adult.

I'd believe that your mom never did that to your sister. That does not mean your mom never did it to you, and it doesn't mean it never happened. About the only thing that's significant about your sister being very slightly younger than you is that either your mom realized, in the space of those two years, that she couldn't get away with treating two kids the same way she treated you or (more likely), your sister gave her a golden child to go with the pre-existing scapegoat she'd made you into; ten year old kids don't cry silently, because they're afraid of making noise, on a regular basis unless something's deeply fucked up.

Seems plausible, honestly. And it'd explain why she's trying so hard with the gaslighting. Anything but her version of events being true means that she was less than a completely perfect parent who did her very best. And apparently that's something she can't tolerate.

Huh. Does she touch anyone else or provide them with physical comfort, that you can recall?

That's. Uh. "Wild" doesn't even start to cover it, honestly, because dude, if you and your fiancee sitting next to each other and showing each other stuff on your phones is "wildly inappropriate", then get me that red 'A' so I can sew it onto my clothes because apparently I am a shameless hussy and didn't even know it, what with my routine hugging of my housemate and my partner.

Like, 'sitting close to each other and sharing memes on your phone' is so tame, you could do that in front of a playground full of kindergarteners and no one (except apparently your mom) would bat an eyelash at it.

 

She mostly gives it to the youngest one, he's 11. Beyond that, xir sisters kind of force her into hugs and such at times if I'm recalling correctly.

 

Yeah, there's also like a weird age/size cut off. Like my mom was moderately physically affectionate until I was about 9 or 10? But you know how people talk about "I really distinctly remember realizing I was too big for my parent to pick me up?"? I remember being 11 and realizing that my mom was probably never going to willingly hug or initiate physical contact with me again because I'd "gotten too old" (her words) and it was "gross" (also her word). I just figured I wasn't good enough for being touched and avoided it after that. (I'm so touch starved. Which makes me clingy. Which makes people not like me. :/)

To be fair, this is a pattern with my other siblings as well. Rachel (18 turning 19) and Emily (13) have both aged out of whatever age my mother deems appropriate for touching, while William (11, but he is ridiculously unusually small for his age) has not yet. Rachel and Emily just responded to this by attacking our mother with hugs anyway, which I've been pulled into before, but have initiated only a few times and always cry afterwards, so. I don't do that.

And I don't know if this is relevant, and my mother hates when I bring this up, but: My mother did not want children. Like, ever. In her opinion, because she was the oldest and her mother was a single, working mom for most of her childhood, she basically raised her younger siblings, and she hated it. My father, however, wanted children, and by the time they'd been married for seven years, the situation was very "have children or get divorced." (Or so my mother says. My father adores my mother, and does not remember it like this at all. Then again, Rachel and I have had a running yearly bet since I was about 10 of "is this the year our parents get divorced," which my father was horrified and distraught to discover, because he would never, or so he says.)

So anyway, my mom had me, and I think she really hated it and didn't want me and I'm not sold on her saying "I didn't want you but then I held you in my arms and the mothering instinct just kicked in." (That's paraphrased and not a real quote.) And she had Rachel two years later because she hates the idea of only children. And Rachel was a difficult baby, by all accounts, and my mother also hated that. And they were thinking about having a third child, but then my dad lost his job, so that didn't happen.

My parents did fertility medication for both Rachel and me, and there was a miscarriage before and after me and I think one more, so my parents always assumed they didn't need to use protection. (They stopped sometime in grad school, when my mom was like 24. Mom didn't have me until she was 27, almost 28.) So! When I was 7/8, my mother suddenly got pregnant! Totally unexpectedly!

Rachel and I both agree that Emily is her favorite, imo because Emily is the only child, of the four of us, that my mom had because she wanted a child. (William was born because my mom didn't want an only child and felt that Emily, being 8 and 6 years younger than her siblings, would functionally be one without another sibling.) William is definitely her sickly disabled baby, and she dotes on him.

I've more or less come to terms with the fact that my mother didn't want me, but my mother's insistence that she really did love me once I was born rubs me the wrong way, mostly because I don't know how to reconcile that with my memory of my childhood. Which, to be fair to my relatives, was really very externally happy.

Also:

Are you sure about that? Because the way my family tells it (my crying silently by then was a known phenomenon) is that I just decided to be afraid of making noise, and me pinning it on my mother is me trying to like, invent a childhood where I was abused. My family is very insistent that all of the "trauma" I have and am in therapy for is just stuff I like, did to myself, somehow.

 

And there is the gaslighting at work again.

 

It's not gaslighting if I really did make this stuff up!

 

I’m pretty sure it’s very not normal for a kid to be afraid of making noise. Really, for a kid to be afraid of showing any emotion is abnormal and speaks to something fucked up going on in your life. Even if your mom genuinely doesn’t remember doing what you remember she did (she could be memory-editing herself as well as trying to do it to you), there is no way you learned that response on your own.

 

I'm incredibly sure about it, yes. Even if your family refuses to acknowledge it, you didn't just start doing that out of the blue. A learned response has to be, well, learned. If you started being afraid of making noise, there had to be something to make you go "ah, making noise causes Bad Things to happen". Especially if the fear is more profound with regards to making noise that indicates you're distressed.

Or to put it in other words: Pavlov's dogs didn't start drooling when they heard ringing bells just because they felt like it'd be a fun thing to do. That was a response that took months to instill and was the result of ringing a bell every single time before they got fed. And the response stuck with them for months even after ringing bells stopped being used to signal that they were going to get fed.

That'd require you to have actually made it up, though. And there's nothing trustworthy to indicate that you did make it up, and a hell of a lot to indicate that you're telling the truth.

Also, there's nothing wrong with wanting to be touched or needing physical contact. Needing physical contact is a normal human need the same way that needing air and food are. That your mother didn't cut you off from physical contact until after you'd gotten old enough that it wouldn't actually kill you doesn't mean it isn't incredibly fucked up that she cut you off from physical contact or that it wasn't still seriously bad for you. (Hell, it's not even just a human need. There were experiments done with baby monkeys, to see how they'd react if they were given a stiff wire-frame doll or a terrycloth-covered doll as maternal substitutes. The ones with the wire mother did much much worse than the ones with the terrycloth mother.)