Dear Lea:

Unless your mother talked highly about you too, she should not have talked highly about your cousin. It was wrong of her to do so, naturally a child would think: why doesn’t she think highly of me?? Also, when she told you about your cousin that “she has never failed”- it can’t be a true statement, no one.. never fails. When she states a falsehood like this, she is communicating to you an unrealistic expectation that indeed it is possible for you too, to never fail. What happens next is that when you fail, you get anxious and wonder: what’s wrong with me…

You wrote that when you feel “stressed/ anxious/ sad”, she tells you “then rest”, or “c’mon, shake yourself and go.. you can’t fail”- here it is again, that falsehood, that it is possible to never fail. Plus, your mother herself is very anxious and stressed and at times depressed- you shared that in your previous post. And yet, she has no empathy for you when you experience the same feelings as she does.

“she tends to see me as emotional support”- she told you about her issues with an aunt, and accused you of not caring about her problems. And yet.. she doesn’t care about your problems, one of which is that she is burdening you with her problems. A child is not supposed to emotionally support the parent; the parent is supposed to emotionally support the child.

“I told her ‘you OVERWHELM me with your issues and all your negativity, so just STOP it'”- she should have been aware that she should not share with you about her issues and negativity, let alone share a lot of it. When you told her that she has done so, she had no excuse to not be aware of how she has been overwhelming you. And yet, she responded by.. sending more negativity your way, in a passive-aggressive way, overwhelming you.. more (“she spent the next week walking around the house like she was the victim.. her voice changed, it became extremely acute and I could barely hear her)”.

You shared that when you were a kid you were enrolled into a very famous global modeling agency (I am guessing it was your mother’s idea and that she enrolled you?), that you were not overweight, but your mother criticized your weight anyway: “You become fatter, you should do sport”, “Look at you, you’re fat”, etc. When you were pursuing your first bachelor degree, working 10 hours per week, sleeping poorly and eating a lot of junk food, you called your mother to share your distress with her: “I told her I felt extremely bad.. What she said? ‘OK but.. you took weight’ and nothing more”- again, no empathy from your mother + criticism.

You shared that in your earlier years, as a child, because you obediently accepted your mother’s choices for you- she “hasn’t.. been like that”, but as you grew older and started making your own choices.. she has been like that.

“She admires people for what they represent (perfection.. She wants me to be perfect but also wants me to need her”- she has the distressing feeling that she is inferior, but she is too anxious to look within herself and look at why she is feeling this way.  Instead of looking into herself (which would make her anxious), she is distracting herself by looking at you, looking for your imperfections, pointing them to you.

* Her greatest imperfection, by the way,  is her lack of empathy for her own daughter.

“For a long time I wondered why I felt so.. out of energy every time I went back to my hometown.. SHE drained everything from me…. My mental profile is .. highly sensitive/ empathetic.. This is extremely exhausting”-

– Every young child is very sensitive to her own mother, every young child feels a lot of empathy for her mother.  It is very common for mothers to take advantage of the very sensitive, very empathetic audience available to them: their own children. (Nowhere else can a mother find a more sensitive and more empathetic and attentive listener than her child).

Feeling empathy for too long is exhausting. There is a term used to describe this kind of exhaustion in health care professionals, such as therapists, nurses and social workers. It is called “empathy fatigue”. What is true to a professional, is truer to a child who feels intense empathy for her mother.

You wrote about the guy, “he doesn’t take. He gives. This is the main difference between him and the other guys.. They took from me but they never gave… he gives as much as I do. He never takes advantage of me, he never tried to fool me, to use me”-

– it is also a main difference between him and your mother: she takes, she doesn’t give (what she gives you is not for you, it is for herself), she takes advantage of you and uses you (ex. taking advantage/using your empathy), and she tries to fool you (ex. pretending like nothing happened, and not telling you the truth otherwise).

“I tried so many times to explain why her attitude was so negative to me, she always refused to listen to me. After a suicide attempt when I was 16, we had to go to a therapy together. The therapists were by my side, they tried to explain to my mother the same things I tried to explain but still, she refused to admit that something was wrong with her”-

– she did not look into herself after her own daughter attempted suicide. It is extremely unlikely that she ever will.

anita