Dear anonymous03:

Your mother and mine have lots in common, and so do you and I, as a result. But our mothers are not identical, of course, and therefore I am keeping it in mind, so to not project my mother into yours.

Who was your mother before you came into her life/ who she is with no connection to who you are: “this angry and anxious person.. an ultra- introvert, has barely any friends, doesn’t speak to relatives much”-

– anxious and angry, non-assertive at work and elsewhere outside her own home, she feels powerless, a victim of people and circumstances. She keeps her anger in while at work because she is afraid to confront people at work; she may get angry at the post office or at the supermarket, etc., feeling that she was not treated well,  but she keeps the hurt and anger in, because she is afraid to confront the people  in the post office and supermarket etc., she is afraid of people.

And then she goes home (“Something happened at work, she’d come home”). At home she is no longer afraid because she is not afraid of you, not when you were a child, and not now; she was not afraid to yell at you then, and she is not afraid to yell at you now (“I always got yelled at. As a child.. As I grew older, the yelling continued”).

Angry at work, she controls her anger until she gets home; at home she feels comfortable to finally express her anger and feel better for having done so:  “she’d come home and scream at me for something as silly as my bag being on the couch. After she’d scream, her mood would drastically flip onto a positive one”.

You wrote: “Don’t get me wrong: she loves me and takes care of me in every way she can”- I am sure she sometimes feels affection for you, but that affection doesn’t stop her from hurting you repeatedly and knowingly. This occasional affection is a compartmentalized kind of affection– it doesn’t interrupt her hateful behavior toward you (“I always got the full force of her anger… she screams a lot…She scolds for the same thing again and again… She comments on my body, how I am too skinny, how my hair is too thin… She’d also give me the cold treatment: not looking at me, not answering me, behaving like I don’t even exist, if she would look at me, it would only be to look at me with absolute hatred”).

She is not afraid of you, and she doesn’t value you as a person with your own hurt feelings and fears, as a person who loves her so much, or as a person with rights  (“She’s breached my privacy too, reading my diaries”).

She feels that you are her own to do  with as she pleases, her belonging, a someone or something with no one to turn to and complain about her (she will not yell at a child outside home for fear of the child’s parent).

“She tells me I am her only source of happiness”- you are her only belonging, outside of furniture and other inanimate objects, that is an interactive kind of belonging, one that is useful in ways others belongings are not.

I will be glad to continue to communicate with you further. I will be back to the computer in a few hours from now.

anita

• This reply was modified 4 years, 8 months ago by .

Dear  anonymous03:

I want to elaborate on what I wrote above: when your mother screams at you, she temporarily feels better, but she doesn’t feel better long term. Screaming is not helping her mental health; it makes her mental health worse. So if you stand up for yourself every time she screams at you,  you will not only be helping yourself, but you will possibly help her by taking away her .. addiction-to-screaming, which keeps her, and you, stuck.

When she talks to you in the depressive manner that she does, if you try to say things to make her feel better, it also keeps her stuck in her addiction-to-complaining to you in that depressive manner. When she complains, say nothing. That way, she may figure out a different way to deal with her depression.

It will be good not only for you, but for her, if you no longer respond in the same ways to her abusive and depressing  behaviors.

* But what is best for you, by far, no doubt, is to live far, far away from your mother.

anita

• This reply was modified 4 years, 8 months ago by .