Dear Candice88,

you’re welcome.  It’s good you realize you need to protect yourself from your mother until she is refusing to take responsibility for her actions.

Regarding you taking on a mother role with M, perhaps it’s not really surprising, because you did say you need to parent your mother too:

We have a better relationship now, but I still feel like I have to parent her.

You also said you had an adult-adult relationship with S, before he cheated. In psychology, there is a term called character structures. Steven Kessler wrote a wonderful book about it, called “The Five Personality Patterns”. There is one personality pattern, called the “compensated merging pattern”, in which the child doesn’t receive the necessary love and nurturance (like it happened in your case), but then builds herself up and becomes a care-taker to their parent, so that she can still be in a relationship with the parent, and feel loved and needed. So the child doesn’t collapse but finds strength in this care-taker persona.

But it’s a persona, it covers up the original trauma. The person can live relatively normally with this persona far into their adulthood. But when something happens, some triggering event, this persona is shattered and the person reverts to their old traumatized child self.

I believe this is what might have happened to you. You might have been coping quite fine in your youth, you said you even had a job in a diner at 15, which means you were quite resourceful – despite your trauma. You might have functioned like an adult, perhaps even with a touch of this care-taker persona. This is how you entered the relationship with S. And then it all came crashing down when he cheated on you.

Do you feel this is what might have happened?