Dear Buddhajackson:

I thought about a few useful suggestions to give you without your answers to the questions I asked. Here they are:

1. Do not display affection for your girlfriend when visiting her mother’s house, or in any place where her mother is present. Do not hold her hand, hug her, kiss her, tell her that you love her, none of these things, not in the presence of her mother. Reasons:

-it makes your girlfriend very uncomfortable, it increases her anxiety: “She pulls away from me even when her parents aren’t around because she’s afraid her mom will suddenly walk in”. This means when you display affection for your girlfriend in her mother’s presence, you are harming your girlfriend.

-it makes her mother very uncomfortable (“she wants to vomit”) and angry. She can’t help feeling this way, she doesn’t choose to feel this way. It is automatic. So even if you would feel differently in her mother’s place (“if I had a kid I would be thrilled..”), her mother had different life experiences from yours, and therefore she feels differently. When you visit your girlfriend’s mother’s house, her mother is your hostess and you are her guest. It is your duty as a guest to respect your hostess by not causing her unecessary discomfort in her own home.

-you don’t spend much time in her mother’s presence, so you have plenty of time to display affection for your girlfriend away from her mother’s presence, it is not a situation where her mother is always there (“we don’t see them very much”, them being her parents).

2. You forcefully kissed your girlfriend on the neck, causing her a hickey. When her mother saw that hickey, she “screamed at her, calling her a wh***” . Maybe your girlfriend didn’t mind hickeys before her mother’s reaction, but now she minds. I imagine if your girlfriend receives a future hickey from you, once she sees it, the image and sound of her mother’s screaming and calling her a name will pop into her mind and she will feel very uncomfortable. So don’t add to your girlfriend’s anxiety with future hickeys.

3. You wrote about her mother: “She has little outbursts, but they don’t happen often and like I said, we don’t see them enough for it to be a huge problem”- her mother’s outbursts probably happened way before you met her daughter, and are responsible for much of your girlfriend’s anxiety. Even though each outburst doesn’t last long, the waiting in-between the outbursts lasts a long, long time. An abused child waits fearfully for the next outburst, afraid to say the wrong thing, afraid every time she sees the parent unhappy, waiting fearfully. So “little outbursts” are “a huge problem“!

It is important that you and your girlfriend let her mother know that her outbursts must never happen again, not a single outburst, no screaming at her daughter, no calling her daughters names. Her abusive behavior toward her daughter must stop.

anita