Psychologist's answer:
Hello Elizabeth!
The problems of fathers and children belong to the category of eternal. Especially if there are internal unresolved problems among family members. You Elizabeth gave comprehensive information about the growing conflict with her mother. I dare to suggest that you still have a strong emotional connection with your mother and all your negative emotions of such a strong intensity with a minus sign, as "hatred" is actually the other side of the coin. You want to hear praise from her and tell how everything is fine with you, what a wonderful husband and mother-in-law you have. By doing so, you seem to be saying: “Do you see how you can live? What relationships do I like? Not what we had with you!” Yes, you can’t call your mother sacrificial and caring, she’s selfish, but your wonderful grandmother raised her like that (spoiled her). There is only one way, to change the aggressive style of communication to a calm and friendly one, to be the first to start talking not about your wonderful new relatives, but to be interested in what your mother feels and does! I dare to assume that you know very little about what happened with your mother and father, why did they break up? She didn't remarry. It seems to me that she suffered a very strong disappointment, a betrayal that she could not survive constructively. Hence the anger, tk. she longs for love, which she probably never had. After all, egoists only want to receive and remain captive to their illusions and demands for attention to their person until the end of their lives. What to do, parents are not chosen, and YOU should become kinder in this situation, in a Christian way, try to understand that her soul was probably very broken in her youth, and she may not be such a bad person. She, like others, wants attention, especially in old age people become capricious, like children. This is how you should treat her like a child. You must clearly rebuild your boundaries and not allow people who are dear to you to comment, but also not provoke (envy) with praises to your husband's mother. It’s more to say that you understand her and want everything to be fine with her, but you have your own family and you set the rules in it yourself, you are already an adult girl. So tell her, but not rudely, but calmly and with a smile. If you want to distance yourself from your mother right now, then do it! Your right to take a time out! So tell her that you don’t want negativity, love her like a mother, but you need to raise a child and take care of your husband. Call only to take an interest in her affairs, talk to yourself laconicly, everything is fine. Listen to her more and agree. That's all communication. See what will happen. Close any attempts to discuss someone. Say that you are disgusted by someone to discuss behind the eyes. Elizabeth, I dare to assume that you yourself are psychologically traumatized, you want to live the way you imagine, and your mother does not fit into the idyllic picture of your world! But this is your mother and there will be no other. Do not talk badly about her to her husband and mother-in-law. This does not strengthen your position in the husband's family. On the contrary, you need to understand that, no matter what, your mother is a dear person to you, and if you show mercy to her, despite her bad character, your new relatives will respect you even more. Why does a person lie? (I'm talking about my grandmother's funeral and my mother's lies in relation to my son-in-law) Lies are the last refuge of conscience. This means that the mother is gnawed by guilt before her mother and before you, possibly, but unconsciously, hence the aggression, from dissatisfaction, lack of love. Since you now have such a wonderful family, it is easier for you to forgive and accept your mother. VSD, probably psychosomatic nature. Probably, you were depressed by your mother and got used to carrying a grudge against her in yourself, so vegetative disorders are coming. You can’t breathe deeply, probably, and say your opinion confidently and calmly. You must accept your mother as she is and yourself, no matter what. Determine the days of communication and do everything as I wrote above. Do not focus on WHAT she said, but analyze what you feel, say and do. You need to understand why you react so painfully to it? You have to learn to talk about your feelings when you don't like something. So say: “It’s unpleasant for me to hear the negative, let’s better tell us what interesting happened to you?” Everything in life is interdependent. You change, the way your mother communicates with you will change. All in your hands. This is the main thing to understand and then you will stop being angry. After all, you are a mother yourself. You and your mother can already communicate on an equal footing, and therefore do so. I wish you to understand yourself, and through this to rebuild normal relations with your mother, especially since you are far away and apologizing, you can always hang up if a person does not want to communicate with you on an equal footing.
Question to the psychologist:
Hello! I kindly ask you to help with advice in
relationship with my mother. To be honest, I have been tormented by this question for a long time. The fact is that I do not want to communicate with her, this person causes me exclusively negative emotions. Our communication consists of the fact that she constantly criticizes me. Here in everything. Whatever I do: my husband is terrible, we bought a bad apartment, in a terrible area, our dacha is far away, I look bad and this list is endless. There was a period in my life when she helped me financially, and this causes her great regret, at the first opportunity she reminds me of this. But at the same time, she requires me to communicate with her everyday and report "what I did today." If I don't pick up the phone for a couple of hours, that's it. Starts writing me SMS: where am I? Why don't I pick up the phone. She is a mother, and I am such an ungrateful daughter and stuff like that. I’ll say right away that I tried to explain, it doesn’t work out, I’m immediately offended: for about a month she doesn’t call me, then it starts all over again. Many times I swore not to communicate with her, well, I can’t. She is the mother, she gave birth to me, the grandmother of my grandchildren. But no matter how scary it may sound, I don’t love her, she is a complete stranger to me. We have no spiritual connection with her. I was almost always raised by my grandparents. I don’t want to delve into my childhood, but I missed Her affection, love, communication, advice in some situations as a mother. I don't know my father, he just doesn't exist. This topic is closed in our family. Tell me what should I do? Do I have the right not to communicate with this person? Or am I really not a grateful daughter? Should I endure this communication?
The psychologist Gladkova Elena Nikolaevna answers the question.
Hello Anna!
I know and understand your anguish! Especially in light of comparing the lack of attention and love of the mother when they were so needed! Especially when you learned to live without all this yourself, when, despite the fact that this skill was not demonstrated to you by the person closest to you, you yourself learned to give it to your loved ones - children, husband. And now, when the rights to your love and attention are presented to you by a person who denied you this himself, your indignation and hesitation are understandable and acceptable.
Kinship, as you rightly noted, exists not only by blood, but in the soul. And if a person is not close to you in spirit, if communication with him causes negative feelings, no one has the right to force you to continue communicating with him, even if the environment insists on the opposite.
When asked why your mother behaved this way, there can be many answers. But now it is not your task to understand these reasons.
Whether the search for attention and love for herself, the fear of being left alone made her not pay attention to you, but to take care of herself or something else, the result is the same - she deprived you of attention and love.
But people like your mother will continue to chase the ghost of happiness as they understand it all their lives. And they understand it in a very peculiar way. For them, it is, first of all, to be in the center of attention, in the center of events, to control what is happening. And since the control of her own life does not seem to have succeeded to the extent that she would like, she will continue to "control" those whom she considers her social circle.
No wonder that you and your family fall into this circle, according to her deep conviction. And since such people do not know how to admit to themselves their own failure in life, they are afraid and avoid it in every possible way, the best way to restore their “significance” for them is to interfere in the lives of others, violate their personal boundaries and draw attention to their own person in every possible way.
Now about the concept of "grateful daughter." If you have doubts about what and how much you should be grateful to your mother, then I want to tell you one thing - even your birth was the decision of your mother based on some of your own considerations and debt obligations to someone no matter what, especially in front of his own child has nothing to do.
People make the decision to have children solely based on considerations of their own pleasures / displeasures. These may be selfish desires to “leave a mark”, to reproduce their genes, their own continuation in this world. It can be illusions about getting attached to someone in a relationship and keeping that someone close. This may be the satisfaction of their narcissistic desires to repeat themselves at the best, highest level, to reach new heights that people themselves have not submitted to. This can be protection from the fears of death, the perishability of all living things and the fear of loneliness and helplessness in old age. And even the desire to satisfy their needs in caring for someone, depending on the authorities, can also serve as an impetus for the decision to have a child. But to place responsibility and debt obligations for the birth on the child, to burden him with responsibility for his future life and maintenance in old age, in my opinion, is stupid and selfish. What the child himself considers necessary to do in the future for his parents, only this is his choice in relation to duties to his parents. The new man does not come into this world to take care of those who lived before him. He has other tasks and goals, in which "debts" to his parents are far from in the first place! So your gratitude can be expressed in what you yourself consider sufficient for its manifestation in relation to your mother. And it will be one that you can afford and that will not divert your attention from those to whom your care and love is now much more important - from your children and your family.
But with the fact that you have conflicting feelings about your current relationship with your mother, it may indicate that your relationship is still "dotted over" I ". And to solve these problems that have been dragging on since childhood, you would do well to decide for yourself or form some kind of clear understanding of what you still expect from your attempts to maintain a “socially acceptable” relationship with your mother. What feedback do you still hope to receive from a person who has never learned to respect other people's boundaries, to satisfy the needs of someone close, and not just their own, to be near someone who needs it, and not just use others to dull her fears and pain, which she cannot even admit to herself. Well, learn to protect your borders from the encroachments of those who, in your opinion, have no right to do this, who missed their opportunity to get closer, who, like a thief, is trying to steal happiness where they have not learned to build it themselves.
Sometimes the phrases “parents are sacred”, “parents are not chosen” do not make any sense.
I rewrote this monologue article many times. Everything seems to me that either sounds unconvincing or looks like an attempt to express childish grievances. But in the end I decided to leave everything as it is. Maybe a side view will help.
Phrases like “parents are sacred”, “parents are not chosen”, as well as other “honor your father and mother” deeply annoy me. How can you write down a mother who lived hugging a bottle, for example, as a saint? My mother is not an alcoholic, she does not even allow herself a glass of champagne on holidays. But you know, it would be better to drink (s). Childhood, which for most of us is a happy time, I remember with horror and would never and never want to return there. I was a straight A student and quiet. No friends, no clubs, no God forbid school discos. It is forbidden. “Why” questions were not asked in our family. Because for this, my mother beat me - in the face, in the stomach, tore out her hair. She was rummaging through my briefcase, in my desk - and one day she found a note addressed to a boy. I was 15 and I fell in love. There was a scandal, then I didn’t go to school for a week - I waited for the bruises to heal. And the note was innocent, something about a joint trip to the City Day. “Did you decide to become a whore? Bring it in the hem? ”, Mom said, weighing slaps in the face. I asked for forgiveness, lay at my feet, begged to stop. I considered myself vicious, bad, terrible - because I do everything wrong. That is, the fact that I fell in love, I regarded as a nightmarish act - and "corrected".
I have a congenital defect - vision problems. And the most vivid impression from childhood, from which blood still rushes to my face, is how my mother humiliated me with this shortcoming. “You are slanting, crooked, go away, creature!” My mother shouted to me, a five-year-old girl, when a drunken dad threw himself at her with his fists, and I cried and wanted to protect.
I learned to lie, masterfully, so much so that sometimes it turned out to deceive my mother. I did not understand then that the lie would still be revealed, but the punishment would be more severe. I remember losing my change of shoes. And I lied for a month that I forgot at school because I knew I would get my dose of belt. Every night I scrolled through the options: say what was stolen? Ask your grandmother and buy new shoes, exactly the same? I don't remember how, but the truth came out. That evening, the neighbors came to us to tear the raging mother away from me. Neighbors were called by the younger sister, for which she was also subsequently punished.
After school, I quite successfully entered the university, to the budget department. She left for another city. And for the first time, she sighed. No one beat me, no one humiliated my things in search of compromising evidence. Now I don’t understand - well, what was my mother so afraid of? Drugs, early pregnancy? After all, there was no reason to control my life so completely. In general, she left to study - and suddenly got married. I did not have much hope that my future husband would like my mother. A simple guy - and even without an apartment and without a car. My subsequent pregnancy is probably the very first step towards understanding, after which it became clear to me that I cannot love my mother. I'm afraid yes. To love is impossible. I was dragged by the hair for an abortion, they beat me with fists in the stomach, but the always submissive downtrodden creature rebelled. I could not, did not want and did not allow to kill my child. I was 20 years old - and I realized that from now on I am responsible not only for myself.
With my mother, a thin world was established for a short time
A son was born. A bad peace was established with my mother. She came, shouted that we were doing everything wrong, even filed documents for guardianship in order to deprive us of parental rights. She suddenly became inflamed with love for our child. It didn’t work out with deprivation, although there were chances - I didn’t work, I didn’t have my own housing. When the son grew up, checks came to the school where he studied from his mother's supply. Teachers and parents whispered, I went crazy with shame. My husband endured all this for a very long time, tried many times to “say everything”, but I stopped him. I was ashamed of my mother, I felt sorry for her. I didn't want conflict. By the way, by this time everything was fine in my own family - the housing issue was resolved, both of them worked.
I even went to a psychologist. I was advised to talk heart to heart. To be honest, I've tried it over and over. “Mom, I miss you so much! Let's just chat" - "Don't you have anything to do? Do you cook for your child at all? It would be better to do lessons with him. The psychologists were done.
Now we have three children: our son is 15, the middle daughter is 5 years old and the youngest is 8 months old. With the birth of the youngest, the final came. The fact is that we named the child the way my mother did not like. “I won’t go for this! Call it another way! ”My mother shouted to me on the phone when I was in the hospital.
And that's when everything fell into place. I understand. Mom doesn't love me. Maybe she gave birth early and was not ready for motherhood. Maybe she just does not know how to love - the fact is that she does not communicate with her own mother, my grandmother. I'm tired of begging her for love, and I've been doing this all my 35 years. She is ashamed of me, my family - because I did not justify her hopes! I didn’t become famous, I didn’t become rich, and my children are “mediocre”, and even with a different name. Yes, I “didn’t achieve much” and I don’t even live in Moscow at all, like the daughter of my mother’s colleague. But everything more than suits me, I'm happy - isn't that the main thing? All my life to prove to my mother with every act that I am worthy, worthy of her mercy - I can’t do this anymore. And in response to "your daughter is scum," I hung up. And I don't call again.
Now I talked to my grandmother on the phone and again this unpleasant feeling of iron on the tongue. They talked about my mother. It’s really just the mention of her that accelerates my anger from complete zen to an outburst of uncontrollable anger. Mother tired, in the teeth imposed. Hurry up...
But first things first.
Since childhood, my mother caused me the strongest physical rejection, I wanted to cover my ears with my hands and run away. Where it is, there is chaos and disharmony. And I hate chaos. I hate mess. I hate being wrong. I hate my mother, it seems to me even at the cellular level from my first breath on this planet.
I didn’t live with her, I ran away to live with my grandparents - my mother’s parents. I was purple for my mother's family: my father and brother. Yes, I never considered them for relatives, to be honest. So, not close acquaintances who always cause some kind of trouble.
So she lived as a "grandmother-grandfather's daughter." I felt good, I felt comfortable with them. Sometimes my mother came to visit us and it seemed that an abyss opened up under my feet: what if they take me away from my grandmother?
No, the mother's family was not dysfunctional. Just chaos and some problems that I never wanted to solve. I wanted a book and went fishing with my grandfather. Or to the cottage.
Once, on her next visit to my grandmother (she lived in another city), in response to a report on my successes at school, my mother said sarcastically: when you grow up, you learn, I will sue you for alimony!
As much as I disliked nuclear physics and disliked Einstein, I ended up with a law degree with honors. Strange motivation for choosing a profession, right? To fight off possible child support.
My mother did not know that I was studying in any music school, nor my class, nor success at competitions-olympiads. She didn’t bother to call my graduation from school, however, just as she wasn’t interested in where she entered.
My mother reappeared in my life when I was already a graduate with separate housing (thanks to my grandmother - she gave me protection) and a stable job. Came to visit, stayed a couple of days and left. Only now she left and grabbed all the things she liked without asking: cosmetics, pajamas and some other things. Those. something you don't get right away.
Then my daughter was born. "Let your mother help you!" Grandma pleaded. As a result, the mother came, lived with me for a week before the birth and three days after. My birth was very difficult, as was my pregnancy. I had a hard time dragging myself. And the mother left. Taking all the things you like: expensive winter boots, bed linen, curtains. And money. Which my relatives, knowing about my poor health, decided to pass on through my mother "for the first tooth." The amount was impressive.
I didn’t have the strength to get angry and arrange a showdown: I was sick, my child was sick.
A year and a half later, my grandmother again insisted on the arrival of my mother: I got divorced and I had to go to work. As a result, in addition to the child, my mother also hung around my neck. The mother then lived for two months and left, the daughter went to kindergarten.
And then the grandmother began to feel sorry for her daughter and invite her mother to me under various pretexts, she didn’t call her, knowing about her ability to drag everything that is badly lying .. And what do I have to do with it? I swore, but I love my grandmother very much, I had to endure. Mother came for a few weeks, then left. She always left for quiet: at night, when I was at work and always dragged. Once, having left at night, she put away the contents of the refrigerator and purse. And she dragged, not because she was dying of hunger, but because she could. Like this.
I got married and had a second child. One day I opened the door and mother and brother were standing. Gathered to live with me. I fought terribly, but ... my grandmother asked, very much. They say they will live, find a place to live and move out. As a result, these two blockheads mother and brother hung around my neck for almost a year.
Then my husband and I bought another apartment, my apartment was left empty. Grandmother tearfully persuaded me to give the keys to my mother’s apartment, she has nowhere to live! As a result, as the neighbors said, the mother came with her brother and took out the furniture in a truck ...
I DON'T WANT! You see, I don't want to have anything to do with my mother. I am 40 years old, I ate her fill. And the grandmother feels sorry for her daughter. The mother grows old and becomes even more miserable. What do I have to do with it? I didn’t quarrel with me, I just don’t want to communicate with my mother. Enough.
I have no feelings for my mother, nor any obligations.