WAH in MLC with PA

[DiamondGirl]

Hi Cyrena,

What complicates things for me is that my mom (who was a major influence in many of my resulting issues throughout my life) now lives with me and so I am trying to work with her to help her understand how her issues are impacting my children too. She is very controlling and also needy with zero boundary knowledge. She relies on others for her feelings of self worth and esteem and can't stand being alone or being silent with herself. But I'm no longer angry with her about it (I was as a teen) as I see now, as an adult, that she was raised the exact same way as I was with possible abuse in her history as well (though she says she doesn't remember anything).

I'm sort of trying to stand firm and break the cycle so my kids won't have the same issues that have been passed on for way too many generations in my book!

My house is filled with animals as I wasn't allowed a dog until I was 16 years old (a zoo of love I call it). There was no way my dad would put up with animals to feed. It would have been impractical to waste money on animals whose only use was for companionship.

I'm trying to help my mom be aware of her strident tones and yelling and the affect it has on all of us in the house. I grew up with yelling and there was no such thing as simple conversations. It took me until recently to understand that what I thought was simply debating an issue, other people see as arguing. It was normal in my house growing up to hear sarcasm and negativity on almost everything. Gentle reassurance and compliments were pretty much non-existent. If I got an A, my mom would ask me what happened to the A+. Yet my brother could get Cs and she'd consider it acceptable.

Men were considered more important than women in my household and I wasn't too popular when I started standing up for myself as a teen. We females were supposed to do all the work around the house, be smarter than the men, make sure everything ran smoothly, but let the men get away with everything and anything.

I'm learning to be gentle with myself now, and to give myself a break. I had an internal critical voice in my head for a very long time and always pushed myself to try to work things out the way I thought they should be, instead of simply being and going with what happened day to day.

My mom is a constant worrier and tries to take care of every possible negative outcome before it even becomes an issue. I've gotten really good at not letting her negativity affect my moods as well lately, but it isn't easy when I'm already having a rough day.

I'm trying to train my brain to not concentrate on what might happen in the future and instead to deal with things as they come. I think I'm getting better at it.

Sorry for the long post.. but I guess I'm thinking while I type...