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Reply To: Healing and becoming functional

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Anonymous
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Dear Anita,

“the abusive, materialistic mother who cares for appearances, doesn’t need a healthy child, she has no use for a healthy child… But a child? A child cannot give her what she wants. She doesn’t care what a child feels inside.. If her child feels happy and healthy, can she buy anything with it?”

She cares for appearances, but it’s the reverse, she isn’t materialistic. The reason she doesn’t need an healthy child is because she act as the selfless savior with an healthy child. She prefers a broken child, so she can brag about how she’s been saving her.

But once the child is adult, two dilemmas happen :

– her adult child is broken, unfunctionnal, and people notice and tell her mother something is wrong. She takes it as a jugment of her having failed as a mother and is angry at the child, pressing her to appear normal and make a living not for the materialistic aspect she would gain, but to not fail her scenario.

– but if her adult child make a living, she will live and make a life of her own. And the mother will be alone. Really alone because everyone in her life left her because of her personality, and she’s socially isolated, without a meaning if she isn’t a mother or a savior. So she can’t have the child succeeding too much either. She needs to keep the child’s dependency, so she can have power over her.

but it was not any kind of love, not even a love of an object kind-of-love: when a person loves an object, she doesn’t purposefully break the object, does she…?”

Mental illness make people do strange thing…

“what if she didn’t love you at all.. what if she was/is often angry at you, intending to hurt you, and then doing what she can do to hurt you … and then, once in a while she feels affection for you… is that love?”

I have no idea… Do purposeful harm invalidate the affection? I don’t know. But it is messed up in any case.

“but she wants to destroy more than she wants to love.. (?)”

There definitely are a lot of times when her lack of control over her emotions, and her self centered personality, makes her need destruction more than she needs love.

Hm. So. Honestly… I never ever considered the idea my mother could NOT love me. Love me in a twisted way, sure, not love me? Then why would have beared all these years of abuse for…

At another time, I would have say it would be a relief if she ceased to love me, so we could take distance from each other and be healthy.

But this is different. Answering this message triggered enough hurt and distress for me to cry. I wasn’t expecting his kind of challenging thoughts.

I think I would be more alright if I lost her love by standing up and taking distance for myself…

The idea she might have never loved me? It would question so much of everything… It would make me doubt so much things about love. Well, I already have issues on this but it wouldn’t make it any easier.

The only comfort I could take facing this idea, would be that her inability to love me would come from her pathology, and not the fact I am unlovable. But it is equally worrying.

I am not entirely mentally sane myself. I have issues with love and be loved. And it would be distressing to think I could also not feel real love because of this.

I wouldn’t survive if I ended up being damaged on this. If I can’t feel, recognize or trust love then how I am supposed to survive emotionally?

I am scared.

once you are able to separate yourself from your mother, to really know who you are vs who she is, what is yours, what is hers– it is then that you can find your individual meaning and personal power.

I see. It seems like a long hard work to get there. I cannot say more on this tonight, but I acknowledge this statement.

Linarra