Dear Sam,

I’m emotionally tired and really needing a place to vent, but if anyone has any advice about how I should handle them, that would be great.

I don’t know if you’re reading this, since you haven’t responded to anita, but I understand your frustration. You’re trying to help your family members, but they refuse help, they refuse your advice, even though just days earlier they were complaining to you, even raging, about somebody mistreating them.

I know the feeling: my mother complains a lot about having so many chores, and she is already elderly and gets tired easily. But when I suggest she could hire someone to help her occasionally (she can afford it financially), she refuses. She rather complains, portraying herself as the victim. This is just a small example, but she has been doing that forever, always finding reasons to be unhappy, and yet never doing anything to help herself.

I’ve learned to let go of trying to make her happy and help her, because it’s in vain. She’d rather be miserable.

With you, I believe you too would need to learn to let go of trying to help, because it seems like your family members prefer to remain in their anger and rage, portraying themselves as victims, rather than do something to help themselves. You’d need to let go of the urge to help them, even though it’s a normal urge – to help the people we love and care about. But sometimes it’s just impossible, and the only thing we can do is to disengage – for our own good.

• This reply was modified 3 years ago by Tee.

Dear Sam:

I experienced something similar to what you described perhaps, and maybe sharing it with you will be helpful to you (and to me): as a child- and an adult- I watched and heard my mother endlessly complain about other people (who had much more money than she did,  and easier, fortunate lives) taking advantage of her (a single mother of two who had little money and worked physically very hard for it, having a very difficult, unfortunate life). But when in their presence she was syrupy sweet to them, offering them foods, gifts and free help (like cleaning their home).

Later, when in my presence, and away from their presence- she complained about them accepting her offerings and help. I told her: then STOP giving them things, tell them that you work too hard for your money! She answered: I can’t tell them that, they will think badly of me, I’d rather die! So I said: then I will tell them (that my poor mother is.. poor, that she works hard cleaning other people’s homes, that her body hurts, that her hands are raw and red from scrubbing, etc., all which she repeatedly told me about, and showed me, out of others’ presence). Her reaction: “If you do that, I will murder you! “.

She ordered me to be nice and quiet when around those people. And so, I spent endless times watching her feeding them and giving to them, in her sweet-syrupy way. My bottled-in resentment against those people was intense. My frustration with my mother’s behavior was immense.

Looking back at this decades-long situation, I understand that my advice to her was excellent. She didn’t take my advice and even threatened to murder (the word she indeed used, translated from another language) me for it, not because she preferred to be misused and miserable, but because taking my advice was too difficult for her, causing her even MORE distress than allowing her situation to continue. She was.. too afraid to assert herself (or for me to do the assertion for her) because she was afraid of those people, of what they would think of her..  if she was truthful and assertive with them.

Also, looking back, I tried very hard to not care about my mother, and the Injustice of the situation, but I didn’t succeed: there was no way for me to disengage from the situation, to not be angry, to not suffer.

“I do need to realize that I have to fight the urge to help them whenever they release disagreements they share with others to me“- notice you used the verb “to fight” the urge to help them: here’s the urge, here’s the fight against it.. this internal fighting is all so exhausting. No wonder you are “having so much rage.  emotionally tired“, original post)

“It’s never all bad whenever I’m with them“- Every Friday evening, my mother was in an okay mood, watching a weekly television movie:  that was my break, to watch her enjoying herself, engaged in the movie. I don’t think that it is ever “all bad”, all the time for anyone when it comes to our parents and our experience with our parents: everyone takes a break from misery once in a while.

“Besides, it’s not the worst thing a person could deal with“- an ongoing Resentment (the title of your thread) can easily be “the worst thing” because too much stress lessens attention. I remember one time, being so upset, so stressed..  that I .. kind of found myself in a situation: a truck flew by right in front of me, a few seconds away from me. It was only then, being a few seconds from the fast moving truck, that I realized that I was crossing a street. I had no memory of walking into a street. Being run over by a truck would have been.. the worst thing, on that day.

anita