Hi Anita,

Thanks for your reply and your detective work!

Yes I guess that sounds quite inconsistent. I think what happened in my family is that I kind of decided at some point that there was a ‘good’ parent (my mum) and a ‘bad’ parent (my dad). This is because my dad was very critical and quick to anger and also tended to try to ‘defeat’ others in intellectual debates rather than listening and responding calmly to others opinions. I can’t really say that she stuck up for me that effectively, at least not in the past. I think she always felt quite intimidated by my dad too so wasn’t really able to defend us against his anger and criticism. I suppose I feel that I developed an extremely defensive relationship with my dad while I had almost no ‘defences’ with my mum possibly to the point of not having any healthy boundaries either.

I guess another element which may help to make sense of this, is that I would often engage in long discussions about other people in my family with my mum (about my dad, my sister or brother). So as well as kind of compulsively sharing every aspect of my life with my mum, without thinking whether it was really an appropriate thing to share, I would also discuss other family members problems with her. I stopped that pattern last year but I guess I hadn’t realised there might be anything fundamentally ‘wrong’ with my relationship with my mother. And that has meant that I haven’t been able to identify the cause of some of my own behaviours that have turned out not to be particularly constructive. While my relationship with both parents has definitely changed and matured over the years, I think on some level I still held onto this idea of a good and bad parent. That is why when I have a crisis I immediately turn to my mum and don’t really talk to my dad much.

I guess what I am now wondering is whether that experience of sort of having no boundaries is actually the experience of unconditional love that I may have thought it was. I think it has kind of laid a foundation of being a bit dependent on others for that level of emotional support and sometimes others just can’t give it to you or you actually need to find some emotional resilience within yourself.

Does that make sense?

Thanks for the very interesting responses again.

To VJ – that is some very good advice. I have looked at your link and I will definitely try to consider those before I speak. I have noticed that I definitely tend to want to find a way to connect with anyone that I am speaking to and I suppose sometimes I lose my sense of purpose for what I am saying and just say something (anything?) to connect with the person I am speaking to at that time. Also, I think I will look more deeper at Rumi’s writing, I have heard the name many times but haven’t read much yet.

To Anita –  I think you have revealed something to me which has probably been hidden from view. I think it is very difficult to acknowledge that you have anger or resentment towards someone that you love, especially when you have sort of given that person a privileged position vis a vis my father. I think I have to finally admit to myself that both my parents were involved in unhealthy relationship dynamics and that neither of them had the strength to call quits on the relationship completely or on the other hand to speak openly and honestly to me and my siblings about what was really going on with them. We witnessed the breakdown of their marriage and then were expected to watch them ‘get back together’ in a kind of ‘backdoor’ way (that is after several years of not living full time in the family home, my dad just kind of started living there again) but without actually being given any explanation about why they were getting back together and whether we as the kids had any opinion or say over how the new relationships were supposed to be negotiated. My dad came back and sort of wanted to ‘assert’ his right to being an authority figure in the home after having abdicated that for several years and we were supposed to just accept all of these things without question. But you can’t erase your own memories and you can’t stop your own questioning of what is happening. But all of those things get pushed inwards and I guess that means there is anger or resentment there. But because I still needed the love and support of my mother (rejecting that also would have been too painful) I deflected my anger away from her and focused it all on my dad. In my mind my dad was the ‘perpetrator’ and my mum was the ‘victim’. But at the end of the day she should have taken responsibility for her own part in the mess.

Hi Anita,

Yes my mother has admitted that she did not really pay enough attention to me or my siblings during the years of turmoil. But I think at the end of the day those words still feel quite impotent because there are still unhealthy dynamics between my parents that have never been clearly dealt with. Also the fact that she can speak so openly with me about all these issues and yet they never reach the ears of my father is also an unhealthy dynamic in and of itself. I believe that means that I have been ‘triangulated’ into their relationship which is actually quite a disturbing thought and also extremely irresponsible of my mother. I think as a result of that triangulation I still carry around this notion of myself as the ‘family saviour’ but in fact I am just playing the game too and at the same time neglecting my own personal life in the process. I cannot somehow strengthen my mother’s inadequate will with my own, to give her the strength to live her own life and then to finally become the strong mother figure that I always wanted and who could give me a model of how to live my own life. That constant striving to make her something that she was not in the past and maybe can now never really compensate for is exhausting me and has also led to the hollowing out of my personal life. Hard to admit, but I think it can only lead me to more inner peace if I can accept it.

Thanks for the comments and the article.

Through this thread I have been able to gain a big insight into one of my major stumbling blocks in life. I have realised that this fear of ‘dissolving’ into other people because I didn’t learn healthy boundaries growing up has actually hindered me from really opening up to other people. I often have a great deal of anxiety related to how I should interact with other people and the extent to which I allow others into my life. This anxiety can also cross the line into obsessive thinking. I have now realised that the major trigger for this kind of anxiety and obsessive thinking is when I need to negotiate the boundaries of a relationship, whether that be a friendship, work relationship or intimate relationship. And at the bottom of it is my fear that I will not be able to assert my own boundaries with people. So the easiest thing is to just avoid opening up to others. But constantly pushing people away only leads to unhappiness.

Anita, you said that you hoped that I could exit the triangle that I was in. What I am starting to realise is that exiting the unhealthy patterns does not need to be through solving those problems for my parents and ‘fixing’ them but through understanding how those patterns re-emerge in my own life and finding ways of creating new patterns in my own relationships. That is probably easier said than done, but at least I have some major insights to help me on my way.

Thanks for all the posts on this thread, I really value these contributions.