Thank you all for your words. I am glad I reached out and found you there. It helps.
Narcissistic wench? I don't know. She sounds like she has no capacity for empathy.
Yes. I learned about narcissism this year and am still vaguely mapping my experience with two narcissistic parents into this frame of understanding. Her comment, though, was so blunt (unlike most of the other things she says and does) that it really threw me.
it was oddly freeing after time passed,
I hope this is true for me too. I hope that maybe this one little comment stands as a sort of twisted validation of my experience, which I've needed to convince myself that I'm not the crazy lady being overly dramatic and making things up.
she said that I was the sacrifice that she had to make.
Well there's a heart wound. What is wrong with these people? It is so foreign to me that a parent could behave this way and say these things.
This shows who your mother is in a split second snapshot. She is unbelievable and...nuts? Who says that? No concept or feeling for your experience. How cruel I find her.
Yes. Narcissistic. Her cruelty comes out of her own pain and disappointment with her life...I know that. I can muster up compassion fairly regularly when I can put my own hurt aside, but the more I remember and the more I try to heal by connecting with my emotions, the harder it becomes.
Can you now choose where to place her in your life, instead of going along with where she continually chooses to be in yours?
Yeah, I hope this will help me do that even more confidently and without guilt. I've been working on the boundaries, but she quite energetically violates them in every way she can find to do so.
but by any chance is your mother religious?
Yes, that's a whole other layer of my experience that is very screwed up. The church may have played a role in her staying in an abusive relationship (though it was mutually abusive). The church also played a role in messing me up in lots of ways. One example: in one of my unsuccessful efforts to find help as a kid (I think I was about 13), I talked to the priest about what I should do. He told me I had to pray for them and follow the commandments and "Honor thy father and thy mother." That I could take strength from knowing how Jesus suffered on the cross.
She didn't do you a favour in what she did but I think she may have done you a favour in giving you the words for what she did
I think you're right. Maybe it hurt so deeply because it kind of "proved" what I have continued to doubt all along despite all the evidence.
So...on with life. I'm so tired of the past's invasion of my present. Months ago I asked my therapist to wave his magic wand and make this all go away (he gave me one of those kind looks, but didn't whip out the magic). I suppose the magic has to come from me. Ironically, it has to start with an end to magical thinking...something I've always been quite good at. So, I got adopted by two very ill people who sexually and emotionally used and abused me until I finally escaped at age 19. I tried to get help but failed every time because I couldn't really explain what was happening. I ran away a bunch of times but was too scared and lacking in resources to stay away. I played right into all of it, all my life, continually thinking that "If I only do this....whatever...everything will get better." Now I know it wasn't ever going to get better...and isn't now with my mother. That all the toxic self-criticism that rules me is a big bellowing waste of time. So, perhaps this means I'm ready to start into the next phase of my therapy and working to process this exquisitely painful past I've carried for so long.
Thank you all. I am so very grateful for your comments.
