Hi Inky – thanks for advice, but I think the problem is me not my mum. I am the one who can’t shut up! But I guess having some kind of barometer of what sort of duration is ‘normal’ is probably a good idea. I think anything over one hour usually starts to become circuitous, so maybe 45 minutes is a good guideline. Thanks for your input 🙂

Hi Anita – I have to say your comments are quite on point and it is a bit painful to read that but I think you could be right. I have always loved my mum deeply but I guess on some level I might also feel a bit disappointed in her. She was never really able to make a clear decision to leave a toxic relationship even though it didn’t seem to be bringing her genuine companionship and support. I guess there is also a sense of betrayal that I still had to face up to my dad’s destructive behaviour so that she could keep her relationship at any cost. Maybe I felt that she ultimately chose her relationship over our (me and my siblings) wellbeing.

On the other hand, I think that her attempt to compensate for that with this kind of boundary-less love made me a kind of addict for that. Maybe it is not so much me disappearing into the conversation but the other person disappearing into the conversation, which would explain why I used to get quite a lot of angst when I was trying to convey my feelings about something to someone who would not respond in the same way as my mum would (and have actually been confronted about my tendency to ‘vent’ at work). Of course it is unrealistic to expect anyone to give you boundless attention with no pushback whatsoever, but maybe that is what I came to expect from others. I can now see why some people would be quite turned off by that and maybe decide that I am not really someone they want to get too close with. When I apply this idea to how I have been in intimate relationships, I suspect that I may have been craving the sensation of being fused or enmeshed and did not have a clear model for a loving relationship between two people who have clear boundaries and a clear sense of identity and can connect but not lose themselves. A previous relationship did kind of mirror that enmeshed experience and I had a sense that there was something not right about it, so I left. My most recent partner did not indulge that side of me at all and had clear boundaries and maybe that is something I found quite difficult to deal with, because I could never get that satisfaction of sort of melding into the other.

I guess what it shows is that even though we think we have left our family of origin behind a long time ago, we can still carry these patterns of behaviours around in our own heads. The scary thing is though that we are the ones who perpetuate these things and we can only change them by accepting that we are responsible for them.