Dear joanna:

I like what you wrote in your recent post. Being gentle with yourself is the right thing for you to do. It is the only way for you to make more and more progress in your healing. I would like you to heal, to experience a gradually improving well-being.

In all of my communications on the website, I believe that this is the first time, on your very thread, that I come across a case of a mother clearly refusing the daughter’s offers to correct what the mother complains about and accusing her daughter for having bad intentions. Other than my mother having done these two things, I did not read about another mother (or parent) doing these two things until I read your account yesterday, not that I remember.

Taking the things-in-the-kitchen incident. She told you angrily that it was wrong of you to put your things in the kitchen, going on and on about how wrong it was. But when you repeatedly offered to remove your things from the kitchen, she refused your offer.

But then she did something else, she accused you of being a shady, or a bad person for offering to solve her problem (being angry by the things being in the kitchen, the mess) and your problem (your distress at her going on and on about it).

You offered to do the reasonable thing, a reasonable solution to the problem, but her response is that your very reasonable solution (a win-win solution as it will resolve her anger and your distress), was an effort on your part to “show her (something)”, to hurt her somehow. She presented your reasonable solution as an intentional effort on your part to hurt her.

She took your sane win-win solution and presented it as  an intentional act of abuse on your part against her.

You understandably asked: how do you defend yourself against an accusation like that? I ask: how do you defend yourself against insanity, or in other words, when your logic is rejected, where do you go for a solution…

If your logical, clear, neat, sane solution gets chewed by your mother and spit out as an illogical, unclear, messy, insane goo, how do you communicate with that person?

I was wondering: did your mother accuse other people as well for having bad intentions against her, for trying to show her?

And what did she mean by showing her?

anita