Dear Gigi:

In your first post about your childhood, you wrote: “(Mother) was and still is very critical. Growing up I remember never having the right body type for her, my grades never being good enough, embarrassment to discuss me with my relatives or her friends. She would always make fun of me for being introverted. Anytime we went somewhere I would get the third degree about how I’m an embarrassment.”

She gave you the following messages loud and clear:

* Gigi’s body is wrong.
* Gigi is faulty, an embarrassment.

You wrote: “I tried to turn to my mom for help when I wanted to drop a class because I was dating a guy who had tried to choke me. She said that unless I had brain damage I had no reason to drop the class.”

The message there was:
* It doesn’t matter to me (to your mother, that is) if Gigi gets hurt.

In describing her current behavior with you, you wrote: “She would yell at me to break up with whomever I was dating because they were not good enough, tell me I looked fat, my skin looked bad, my job was horrible even though it wasnt, tell me I’m pathetic for still living in apartments and using college furniture.”

Her messages:

* I am yelling at you because your feelings don’t matter to you. If they mattered, I wouldn’t be yelling. And I can get away with yelling at you. No negative consequences for me!
* Even though Gigi is has the wrong body and is faulty in so many ways, an embarrassment, that guy is … not good enough for you (huh?)
* Your body is wrong (fat, skin..)
* You are a failure, an embarrassment (furniture)

From only a few lines you shared, the same messages repeat themselves. How so unfortunate for you to have a lifetime of these same messages repeating to the present!

And you wrote later: “I didn’t even think I had mentioned the worst of it!” and “This doesn’t even touch the tip of the iceberg.”

Later you wrote about your sister: “She believes my mom had a hard life too and tries not to blame her, although she can also only take her in small doses.” I am sure your mother had a hard life and she made your life very hard, unnecessarily. She can take her in “small doses”- I must say you took your mother in very large doses. And your description of what she tells you in the present, that would be a large dose for me. I don’t think your mother comes in small doses. Each sentence she says, each one I copied here is a concentrated dose of harm.

About the article you wrote: “The article was basically saying, if I can remember, that to accept the fact that parents are human and make mistakes, and that it can sometimes be best to forgive than to hold resentment.”

Your mother is indeed human. She makes mistakes and always will as do I, as do you. But her messages to you are not “mistakes”- they are acts of aggression that were repetitive, not corrected and continue to this very day. The article may be correct about mistakes, if your mother put salt in your hot cocoa instead of sugar, a mistake. Yes, do forgive her. It tasted badly but she made a mistake.

Like I wrote earlier, when I read an article or a book, I think: is this correct? In what circumstances is it correct and in what circumstances will it not be correct? (Critical Reading).

I recommend you consider cutting contact with her, especially if she will not completely stop her acts of aggression toward you. (Although just the sight of her can trigger all her messages even if she no longer verbalizes them, in which case cutting contact may still be a solution).

If you do cut contact with her, you will still have to deal with the severe consequences of her lifetime acts of aggression against you.

Please do post again, let’s keep this thread ongoing.

anita