Dear Rachel:

You are welcome and we can continue to communicate on and on.

“My mom then tells me I need to confront him and tell him he’s making a mistake.. Whenever one of my siblings is acting up or in trouble, my mom contacts me to vent about it and ask me to fix it somehow”-

– you think that she wants you to fix the situations she vents to you about, but did she ever take your advice? For example, if your fix-it idea was that she should confront your father herself- did she take your advice?

Was anything ever fixed according to your suggestions to your mother?

I am guessing not. Maybe you felt flattered by your mother allegedly looking up to you as a fixer, but I don’t think she really looks up to you as one able to fix what she cannot fix. I think that she is giving you an emotional reward (a feel-good reward) so that you will continue to listen to her intently (trying to figure out a solution) while she vents to you, providing to her an attentive audience.

In other words, I don’t think that she wants your guidance and wisdom. She wants to vent to an audience who will listen attentively. She gives you a motivation to listen to her attentively: to figure out a solution (that she is not interested in).

The benefit that she gets from venting to you is relieving her tension, feeling calmer after venting. She is helping herself to you.

“It’s hard to feel sane when you’re surrounded by insanity”- like I said, I don’t think that your mother has been interested in your fix-it ideas. When it comes to your sister, she told you “to talk to (your sister) and force her to act differently”- that was her fix it idea. And it didn’t work out, did it, not for your sister, not for you and you are still “surrounded by insanity”.

anita