I can sure relate to having a nutcase for a mother! Screaming on the phone because your sister took the wrong job. Boy does she have a lot of resentment bottled up in her. Yep, I’ve had those moments too. Right now my mom is ticked at me because I told her some time back how toxic she is and I don’t want my kids around that stuff. This was partly in response to my wife fighting with my mom years ago and the more recent complaints about her. I told my mom several times she should go to counseling and I sent her a few books on narcissism and Schnarch, so she isn’t talking to me. Not to worry. She’ll think up some emergency reason to call and act like everything is OK.
My mom has poor self esteeem, even though she puts forth the persona of confidence, self sufficiency, etc. Its all a façade. Sounds like your mom’s the same. There is no way you can grow up under someone like that and not have it wear off onto you. I try to understand now that what ticks me off about her is also part of me. Trying to detach from that part of me has been tough. I don’t feel intimate with her either, and I have lost a good deal of respect for her. That helps to detach from her nonsense, so I can view her like a monkey in a cage.
I can also understand the repression of feelings of anger. I used to repress them out of fear. If I showed anger, she would show even more anger, and she was willing to go as far as she had to in order to win. So it was just safer to withdraw. But once I grew older and realized what was going on, I became angry at being controlled in this way. So she was, and can still be, the source of some of my anger.
I think you can repress anger once you’ve identified where it comes from and how it is affecting you. But to just blindly stuff it will cause a lot of resentment to build up, at least that’s how I see it. So your “marital neglect” may be a passive-aggressive reaction to not expressing your anger, which I still think is a holdover from your mom. I can also see how the blame your mother would throw on everyone else has seriously damaged your self esteem, to the point that you felt responsible for rescuing others or felt you didn’t deserve anything yourself.
My wife has a friend who has an angry and verbally abusive husband. He’s got some major hangups and compulsions, and rages about the house being clean, no one touching his stuff, silly stuff like that. His wife and oldest D walk on eggshells. Both go out of their way to placate the H and avoid the arguments. A major explosion is coming in that household some day. But until then, the D pulls her hair out (she’s got bald patches on her head), has pulled out her eye lashes, is over weight, but is soooo politically correct and soooo eager to agree with everything anyone says. Yep, one day her lid is gonna blow.
As a younger Mojo, I can envision you somewhat like this girl, trying to please, walking on eggshells, surrendering herself as she tries to get anyone to accept and love her. Its really sad. This girl will undoubtedly will have major anger issues toward her father, and if she doesn’t get counseling, I see no reason why she shouldn’t marry someone just like her dad and project all her anger onto him.
