Healing from an emotional trauma or extended traumatic experience is a like a long, intimate dance with reality. Or perhaps a three-act ballet. We are on the stage of our own minds, surrounded by the props of our lives, dancing to the music of our emotions. Our memories flash on the backdrop or float around like ribbons in the air. Down below the stage, in the orchestra pit, a chorus puts words to the feelings and gives us advice drawn from our parents’ rules, our church’s rules, all the rules from the movies and books and conversations that have ever colored our thinking.
And our job is to dance our way through the acts.
The first act is named “Magic Thinking.” We stumble onto the stage, stunned, confused and in pain. Our first dance is denial — the “it doesn’t matter” dance. Our second dance is bargaining — the “maybe I can persuade whoever is in power to fix this” dance. The third and last dance before the intermission is anger.
This article is about anger.
The emotional spine
Everyone here who has gone through the angry phase knows how complex it is. We are indignant, bitter, sarcastic, outraged, waving our fiery swords of blame. We are also — finally — articulate, funny, re-asserting power over our lives. We are hell on wheels, demanding justice or retribution. We are also in transition between bargaining and letting go, so all this is tinged with hope on one side and grief on the other.
Anger really deserves a book, rather than a brief article. It is the end of the first act of our healing, because it really changes everything — our way of seeing, our thinking, our judgments, the way we move forward. Like the element of fire, it can be clarifying, but it can also be destructive. To complicate the situation further, many (if not all of us) tended to repress our anger before we entered this healing process.
So it may be helpful to discuss what anger is, where it comes from. What we call anger is part of a spectrum of reactions that originates in the oldest part of our brain. The brain stem, sometimes called the lizard brain, oversees automatic survival mechanisms like breathing, heartbeat, hunger, sleep and reproduction. It also generates powerful emotional messages related to survival.
These messages travel through increasingly sophisticated layers of our emotional and intellectual processing. One of those layers, the limbic system or mammal brain, is where we keep memories of good and bad events, and work out how to maximize pleasure and avoid pain (often through addictive strategies). The messages pass through this layer on the way to our cerebral cortex.
There in the thinking layer, we name things and organize them. We maintain concepts of community and identity (right and left brain), and we manipulate them continually to run our lives as thinking, self-aware beings. Beyond the thinking brain is the even more advanced area of the frontal cortex, which maintains our awareness of the future, interconnectivity (holistic thinking), and the “high level” views that further moderate our primitive responses into philosophic and spiritual meanings.
What our thinking brains name “anger” is actually a sensation of physical and emotional changes caused by the brain stem in reaction to perceived danger. The spectrum of those danger-related sensations roughly includes alertness, fear and anger. While our higher brain may see a purpose in separating fear and anger into different categories, our lizard brain doesn’t make those distinctions. It just keeps altering our hormones and brain chemicals for all kinds of situations, depending on its analysis of what we need to do to survive.
The point of this long digression is this: alertness-fear-anger responses are a normal part of our ability to survive. They travel “up” into our higher processing as the strong spine of our survival mechanism. There is nothing wrong with feeling them. In fact, paying attention to them is better for us in every way than ignoring our feelings (denial) or trying to delude ourselves about what is happening (bargaining).
The many forms of anger
One of the most interesting things about the English language is its many verb forms, which express various conditions of timeliness and intent. I can. I could. I could have. I would have. I might have. I should have. I will. I might. I was going to.
Those same factors of timeliness and intent can be found in the many facets of anger. Bitterness and resentment are simmering forms of anger related to past and unhealed hurts. Likewise sarcasm and passive-aggressive communications are expressions of old disappointment or despair. Frustration is a low-level form of anger, judging a circumstance or result as unsatisfactory. Contempt and disgust are more pointed feelings associated with negative judgments.
When anger turns into action, we have explosive violence, plans for future revenge and sabotage. When anger is turned on ourselves, we have depression and addictions. The judgments associated with anger foster black-and-white thinking, which can be the basis for bias and all kinds of “ism’s,” especially if the anger is old, blocked for some reason, and thus diffuse or not directed primarily at its source. This typically happens when we feel disempowered to defend ourselves.
All of that sounds pretty terrible and toxic. But, in fact, the most toxic forms of anger are the ones in which the anger is not allowed to surface. The lizard brain does not stop trying to protect us until we deal with the threat, and so we live with the brain chemicals and hormones of anger until we do.
Anger can also be healthy. The anger of Jesus toward the money changers in the temple is a model of righteous anger. In response to trauma, righteous anger is a crucial part of the healing process. Anger has these characteristics:
• Directed at the source of the problem
• Narrowly focused and dominating our thinking
• Primed for action
• Intensely aware of personal resources (internal and environmental)
• Willing to accept minor losses or injuries to win
Anger is about taking care of business. At its most primitive level, anger is what enables us to defend our lives, to kill what would kill us. In modern times, it enables us to meet aggression with aggression in order to defend ourselves or our turf. We expect to feel pain in these battles, but we are fighting to win.
However, anger also has its exhilaration, a sense of being in a moment where we claim our own destiny. For those of us who have been living through the relatively passive and self-defeating agony of denial and bargaining, anger can feel wonderful.
As it should, because anger is the expression of our deepest self, rejecting this new reality. We are finally in speaking-up mode. We are finally taking in our situation and saying, “No! I don’t want this. I don’t like it. I don’t like you for creating this in my life. I don’t like how it feels. I don’t like what I’m getting out of it. And if it doesn’t stop this instant, I want you out of my life.”
Getting over our resistance to anger
Of course, we don’t exactly say that when we’re inside the relationship. In fact, we don’t exactly think it, even when we’re out of the relationship. And why is that? Because — and this only my theory, but it seems to be born out here on LoveFraud — people who get involved with sociopaths are prone to suppress their anger, because they are afraid of it, ashamed of it, or confused about its meaning.
When faced with a painful situation, they suppress their inclination to judge the situation in terms of the pain they’re experiencing, and instead try to understand. They try to understand the other person. They try to understand the circumstances. They try to interpret their own pain through all kinds of intellectual games to make it something other than pain. To an extent, this could be described as the bargaining phase. But for most of us, this is a bargaining phase turned into a life strategy. It’s an unfinished response to a much earlier trauma that we have taken on as a way of life.
Which is very good for the sociopath, who can use it to gaslight us while s/he pursues private objectives of looting our lives for whatever seems useful or entertaining. Until we have nervous breakdowns or die, or wake up.
We can all look at the amount of time it took us to wake up, or the difficulty we’re having waking up, at evidence of how entrenched we’ve been in our avoidance of our own anger. It retrospect, it is an interesting thing to review. Why didn’t we kick them out of our lives the first time they lied or didn’t show up? Why didn’t we throw their computer out of the window when we discovered their profiles on dating sites? Why didn’t we cut off their money when we discovered they were conning us? Why didn’t we spit in their eye when they insulted us? Why didn’t we burn their clothes on the driveway the first time they were unfaithful?
Because we were too nice to do that? Well, anger is the end of being nice. It may be slow to emerge. We may have to put all the pieces together in our heads, until we decide that yes, maybe we do have the right to be angry. Yes, they were bad people. No, we didn’t deserve it. And finally, we are mad. At them.
Anger in our healing process
Anger is the last phase of magical thinking. We are very close to a realistic appraisal of reality. The only thing “magical” about it is this: no amount of outrage or force we can exert on the situation can change it. The sociopath is not going to change. We cannot change the past, or the present we are left with.
But anger has its own gifts. First and foremost is that we identify the external cause of our distress. We place our attention where it belongs at this moment — on the bad thing that happened to us and the bad person who caused it.
Second, we reconnect with our own feelings and take them seriously. This is the beginning of repairing our relationships with ourselves, which have often become warped and shriveled with self-hatred and self-distrust when we acted against our own interests in our sociopathic relationships.
Third, anger is a clarifying emotion. It gives us a laser-like incisiveness. It may not seem so when we are still struggling with disbelief or self-questioning or resentment accumulated through the course of the relationship. But once we allow ourselves to experience our outrage and develop our loathing for the behavior of the sociopath, we can dump the burden of being understanding. We can feel the full blazing awareness that runs through all the layers of brain, from survival level through our feelings through our intellect and through our eyes as we look at that contemptible excuse for a human being surrounded by the wreckage s/he creates. Finally our brains are clear.
And last, but at least as important as the rest, is the rebirth of awareness of personal power that anger brings. Anger is about power. Power to see, to decide, to change things. We straighten up again from the long cringe, and in the action-ready brain chemicals of anger, we surprise ourselves with the force of our ability and willingness to defend ourselves. We may also surprise ourselves with the violent fantasies of retribution and revenge we discover in ourselves. (Homicidal thoughts, according to my therapist, are fine as long as we don’t act on them.)
It is no wonder that, for many of us, the angry phase is when we learn to laugh again. Our laughter may be bitter when it is about them. But it can be joyous about ourselves, because we are re-emerging as powerful people.
The main thing we do with this new energy is blaming. Though our friends and family probably will not enjoy this phase (because once we start blaming, it usually doesn’t stop at the sociopath), this is very, very important. Because in blaming, we also name what we lost. When we say “you did this to me,” we are also saying, “Because of you, I lost this.”
Understanding what has changed — what we lost — finally releases us from magical thinking and brings us face to face with reality. For many of us this is an entirely new position in our personal relationships. In the next article, we’ll discuss how anger plays out in our lives.
Until then, I hope you honor your righteous anger, casting blame wherever its due. And take a moment to thank your lizard brain for being such a good friend to you.
Namaste. The healing warrior in me salutes the healing warrior in you.
Kathy
Dear Joy,
I think dreams like that are just our way of trying to get closure. I used to dream of my egg donor and trying to talk to her and make her believe…no luck, even in the dreams.
I also use to have frustration dreams where nothing I did worked out….I think I just felt overwhelmed.
I’m glad you are doing well and that work is going okay. I worked psych the last year and a half, inpatient geri psych but most patients were not really psych patients as they were medically sick and delusional, I was the only medical nurse there and that is why I was hired as they were soooo sick.
I also worked adolescent psych for a year and a half earlier, and yea, those little darlings could try to do you in. I made friends with the two biggest techs there and kept them by me like dobermans when I would wade into a 10 kid fight and didn’t show any fear, but gosh I was scared except for my two dobermans. LOL A kid tried to stab me one night when I got left on the floor accidently by myself and he wasn’t able to do it, but I figured it was God’s way of telling me I needed a lower stress job, so went into home care for a while, supervising visiting nurses and aids. I liked that a lot and was a good change ffrom COMBAT at a adolescent psych inpatient. Most of the kids there were budding Ps and borderlines, only had 1 or 2 that were really psych patients.
Worked in an outpatient psych community mental health unitl for a while, took over a psych md’s case load when she moved on to another place. I liked that a lot but the office manager was a Narcissistic BPD (I was warned) but couldn’t hack that so after the first time she went off on me “spitting and screaming” foam flyiing out of her mouth in front of the entirer staff I resigned. Afterwards, everyone there told me she had done the same thing to them at least once.
Fortunately I had another job in 2 days, never had trouble finding a job. Went to the geri psych unit weekend options as charge nurse until after my husband died, stayed off 3 months, went back, then worked 3 montsh and with no help (2 nurses and should have been 5) 3 patients dying, one bleeding to death, and no help. Decided I didn’t need that stress either so retired, turned in my license so I wouldn’t get a wild hair and try to go back to work. I could get it back in 30 days, but I always tell people “I will have sobered up by then”—really, my short term memory is so bad, I actually don’t think I am safe to work in a critical situation, so it is best I retired. I can still do volunteer work and I do some of that. Need to do more of it. We have a free clinic here that one of the supervising docs I worked with for 10 years volunteers there some since he retired. I also want to work with DV victims and am working on some plans for that, including starting a support group in a neighboring town.
Have a good rest and I think you are making good progress! It just takes time, as I am sure you know! (((hugs))))
Hey Oxy, Today I’m having a bad day. My Mom woke me up this morning to go to a yardsale. Didn’t really want to get up early but it was a big sale and I’m still trying to replace stuff lost in the Mold Hole. We were not in the car long before she brings up the ex. She baits me with, “I really want to tell you something, but I don’t want to upset you.” Am I the only person who can’t walk away from the loaded weapon. So of course I get this story of the ex and her seeing him not once but twice in the last week. I learn from the conversation that he knows which house I’m in because when Mom told him that she had been busy raking that he replied that the yard seemed smaller than our last house. She was a bit shocked by that because you really have to turn down a dead end street to see our driveway in order to see our cars. But she didn’t inquire as to how he knew our house. He also offered to let Mom take his daughter to the movie see was going to if she waited for the next showing since Lacey had not gotten home from school yet and she wanted to see that same movie, but he didn’t. Am I wrong at being upset with both him and my Mom. Him because Lacey can’t be a part of my life and see me in the hospital but she can hang out with my Mom. And my Mom for being able to have a civil conversation with a man who has been abusive not only to me but to her in the past as well. How can things just be okay. To me, I feel like he gets validated in his abuse every time that she is nice to him. He also does this in front of his coworkers so it says ‘see I’m a great guy.’ And he calls my Mom “Grandma.” One of the people at work said That they didn’t know his grandma lived here and he said yep that’s her. Not that is my former mom in law or my daughter’s grandma, just his. Like I never existed and he has no ex wife. It just really pisses me off. I got so angry that I set off my heart monitor. My Mom and I have gone through this time and again. Every time I blow up and she swears it is the last time. Just knowing that she has something to tell is just as bad as hearing what it is. Both force me to think about him in some way. My Mom lives with me so I can’t just avoid her. While I was on hold on the phone waiting to transmit my heart recording, she came down stairs with a blanket to curl up on the couch. I insisted that she leave me alone and go back upstairs since she has her own den up there and doesn’t have to use mine. I set my boundary and for once she obeyed my wishes. I guess having this little device go off is proof positive that this crap upsets me and it is having a physical as well as emotional impact. Almost wish that I could stay hooked up to it forever. It validates my claims as to my state of being pretty well. Any advice anyone? And I have tried in the past to tell her that I’m not interested and she just continues to question me and provoke the conversation until I say, “tell me.” Also I confess that I called his house as soon as I got home. He screens his calls so I knew it would go straight to voice Mail, only his phone as been cut off. So I call his cell. It goes to voice mail and I left a message telling him that he and his daughter can’t be in the lives of me or my family. That Mom can’t be mean but I can. That his daughter didn’t want to come see me in the hospital so He and her can forget that she ever had a grandma. I repeated that I’m on the heart monitor that I want him to stop speaking to my family and just leave us alone. He has a new girlfriend and Lacey has a new Mommy. Just go away. I know No contact but really I don’t speak to him just at him and everything I say would just play in my head all day. I hate him. I hate him. God, I HATE HIM! But I did find a great floor lamp for 3 dollars so I guess the trip out wasn’t a total waste. LOL!! Trying to keep my sense of humor before I go postal and carry out my homicidal urges. Matt, Could you get me off on temporary insanity? Just kidding, LOL. I think… My thought now that the phone is off is that maybe he moved in with his girlfriend and he wanted me to find out by Offering to let Lacey go to the movie and then Mom would have to pick her up at the new house and I would find out about it. He knows that my Mom can’t keep a secret. It is so well known that it is a running joke that fastest way to spread news is to tell my Mom and My aunt that something is a secret. The whole town will know by noon the next day.
hey guys, went to visit a friend yest who has been struggling with sobriety and her fiance wants to put me on a dating site but im not int.. Lots of horror stories about them here and i honestly think that the kind of guy i am looking for isn’t on one of those if there is a guy. Then last night a male frined of mine who is a serial dater /sexaddict on the dating site was talking to one of my first cousins. Anyway the s. even picked her up one night at the bar took her home to garage but of course couldn’t get it up. She’s my cousing and i love her, as my mom used to take her in when she was young but does it ever end. Im not saying imb etter than anyone but i have morals 100 times better and he picks up anything he can get . it all makes me quite nausesous . I have to remember where i was when he got me though, i had relapsed in sobriety and my husband had left after 18 years so i was at an all time low to say the least and he took advantage and i seriously didn’t know his kind existed. Now im struggling with humiliation, anger, hurt , just a ponopoly of shit emotions. Why did it take so long and why did i keep going back, it’s all too horrifying and defies all of my logic. Going to try and have a good day and not think so much about it all. Going to read up on all your posts too. love kindheart
Dear Joy,
Ii am sorry that you are having such a bad time, but I see so many parallels with you and your mom and me and my egg donor, who is a “Psychopath by proxy” for my P-son.
Your mother’s comment about “not wanting to upset you” is first of all, a LIE. She knows it will upset you, that is why she is telling you this. If she didn’t want to upset you she wouldn’t do things that would make you upset. She got a “pay off” by upsetting you.
Your mother is passive-aggressive, she is doing things she knows will upset you, but pretending that she is doing it “for your own good.”
You say you live with your mother. This may be something you might want to consider changing.
In any case, when she is pointing a “loaded gun” at you, you have to set some STRICT BOUNDARIES and HOLD TO THEM.
Setting boundaries for these passive-aggressive people in my life has been extremely difficult. My egg donor is the absolute MASTER OF PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE crap, and now is doing the aggressive-aggressive punishment. I am NC with my egg donor, but she really doesn’t BELIEVE it is forever, she thinks I will give in and go back to playing “games.”
I suggest that you get and read Dr. Eric Berne’s “Games People Play” and you can get a great over-view of what your mother is doing to you, and what her pay off is. It will also help you RESIST the LURE to “play games” and get upset. You obviously already know what she is doing, but this will help you to formalize it in your mind.
If she comes up with aother “loaded gun” tell her in “NO uncertain terms.” I do NOT want to speak about him at all. That subject is CLOSED forever. Then stick to it. She will most likely go into a snit of how she was just trying to “help” you or “inform you” etc. but don’t give any ground.
If she continues to do these things, then you MUST find other living arrangements for the two of you or your stress level will never go down. Joy, it never occured to me to realize what my egg donor’s “game playing” and her “enabling” etc had done to me,, how phony it all was, and how EVIL AND TOXIC it was….now I have accepted that my egg donor has no concern for me at all. Her entire focus is “pretending none of this happened” and INVALIDATING MY CONCERNS, MY PAIN, MY FEAR, etc. Your mother is doing the same thing to you. You picked up on that INVALIDATION of your feelings. Good for you!
Your mom is playing into his hands, getting a “pay off” by upsetting you, and pretending to be nice to the girl. Tell your mother in “NO uncertain terms too” that she must also cut off all contact with your X and Lacey. I realize that this may be “unfair” to Lacey, but right now we are concerned with YOU and YOUR stress and YOUR pain. My egg donor knows what my P-son tried to do to me and she is now trying (the last time I saw her by accident in a store) to TRIVALIZE what has happened and to discount my feelings and value, and my security and safety. She is rationalizing having contact with a man she knows tried to have me killed. Your mother is doing the same thing, trivalizing your pain, stress and trauma in order to keep her drama going.
It never occured to me that I would or could or should NC my egg donor, but now that I have, it has decreased my stress level to what I can easily tolerate. If I had not, I could not have survived, either physically or mentally. The various illnesses I suffered were a direct result I believe of my immune system crapping out because of the out of sight stress leve.
Getting your stress level down for a LONG time, and keeping it down is CRITICALLY IIMPORTANT to your health and happiness. WHATEVER IT TAKES, I recommend you do it, even if it is painful, in the end it will pay off. The first time I set boundaries for some “friends” who were heavily stressing me, I cried for days when I did it, and now I am so GLAD I did it because I do not “walk on eggshells” all the time any more and they are no longer stressing me. I no longer allow them to use me. They do NOT respect the boundaries I set, so the problem is theirs not mine.
((((Joy))))) hang in there JOy, my prayers are with you. I know you must be hurting from all this in addition to the problems with your X. You are stronger than you know though so keep on the road to Healing and don’t let anyone put more hurdles on the road.
Kindheart: It may have taken a long time but at least you made it through. I tried online dating over 8 years ago but I honestly would not try it again. I didn’t have any horror stories but I have heard of some. But then I have heard of people getting married who met online. So you never know. I honestly am scared to date again.
But I hope you do have a good day. I know it is hard to not think about it. I don’t know if you have read the book “The Secret” but you should try it. It talks about changing your thoughts and how to do it.
Dear Kindheart,
I totally agree that online dating is DANGEROUS.
I also think that at this time, you need to focus ALL your energies on getting yourself well and healthy and sober and not on finding another relationship at this point in time.
Again, relationships take ENERGY that would be better focused on healing YOU. They distract from your own healing, but while that may in the short term make you “feel better” the healing stops. My OPINION is that none of us need to get into a relationship while we are still so RAW and FRAGILE in our own healing journey. Just MHO.
Hi everyone. I missed you all. I have been extremely busy and will only be dropping in from time to time for the next several weeks. Here is an update on my life and situation:
The congressman’s office has told me they will be officially looking into the army’s fraud allegations toward the S. I will keep you posted if I hear anything.
My thoughts have turned away from the S and I’m now dealing with my HOA situation, encouraging involvement from other owners here. This should be resolved one way or another shortly I hope. I will probably have to let go of it, as some important people at the assessor/county clerk’s office told me the judges are usually crooked and bought and sold by HOA’s. I am not up for dealing with that level of corruption, fiesty as I may be.
I have been dealing with getting licensed as a massage therapist, as our state is now requiring it starting in April. Just in time for me to begin to think about a change of career. If anyone knows about any careers in advocacy, I’m very interested.
And finally, I’m still waiting for Citimortgage to give me an answer on my request to reduce my interest rate and loan amount.
I have recovered some of my joy in life, but still battling with loneliness and depression, in spite having a new counselor. I think I still have not learned how to really share my feelings with anyone else. It will not be easy for me to let the therapist help me. But I will try.
For those of you struggling with NC, reread your posts about what your exes have done to you. And know that they will NEVER change. We all at one point hung on for any shred of humanity we could find in our exes. And I have not read one single instance where the S ever saw the error of his/her ways.
I wish you all peace and joy and above all else, NO CONTACT from predators.
Dear Star,
That is very very encouraging news from all fronts! I wish you well with your licensing and everything else going on in your life. You sound on a very positive up note and that is really REALLY REALLY wonderful.
Finding JOY in our lives again, finding goals that we want to work toward and then moving toward those goals gives some positive energy to us as we see them take shape.
We may not be able to make the goals all come “true” but at least we know we gave it our best shot and that is all a jack ass can do! I hope your new counselor and you workk out as a good team to help you on your road to Healing! Keep you pointed in the right direction at least. We will always expect to stumble once in a while or skin or knees when we hit the ground, but getting back up and getting back on the road pointed in the right direction and not being lured off the road into the FOG of another P-relationship.
Overcoming our own fears and distrust of ourselves to know the right road is a big part of it all and sounds like you are getting your confidence back and that is a BIG +
You go girl!!! TOWANDA!!!!
Oxy, I need to put you on the payroll since I get more therapy from you than a body should for free. I know that my Mom has always been abusive but it was always taught that since she had an abusive childhood that she needed someone, everyone to cut her some slack. I do start counseling on Monday, and I’m considering medication to calm me down. I did well on a child dose of Klonopin in the past but the ex made me out to be a weak person for needing meds so I quit taking it. Of course he started his drama when I was off the meds so it just made life worse for me. I told her today after reading your post that if she ever mentions him or Lacey ever again that She is out on her bum. I can afford to live here and she cannot alone. I found and negotiated this deal so I claim this home and the rights to it. She will either play by my rules or get out. In my heart, I know that she will find some other way to punish me for whatever her issues are with me. She resents that I have always taken my father’s side against her. My Dad left because I begged him, too. All she ever did was find something to gripe about. It was constant fighting, her throwing things, always drama. I thought that if Dad left it would be better. I had hoped that he would take me with him, but whenever he tried she always found a way to guilt him in to bringing me back to her. But I set a boundary that I need to be firm with. The constant fighting is not any better for my kids than it was for me. I am allowing dysfunction into their lives. In a perfect world there is no reason that we shouldn’t be able to live together and help one another but with my Mom and I and doubt that will ever be possible.
Kindheart, I hope that you have a great day. You have such a kind heart turn it towards yourself. Be your own best friend and love yourself above all other people. Glad to know to be wary of on line dating. I had thought about it for some distant day when I might want to find love again. Not ready now for sure but it would be nice to have friends to hang out with. I meet very few people at work that are my age and single be it male or female. Church doesn’t work as a social venue for me as it just feels very phony most times as it makes me lose my true focus while at worship.
Star, Best of luck with your case. You sound like you have a plan. And at least you are busy and the focus is off the ex. Find time for you and some pleasure, too while getting your stuff done.
Funny how reading over my post it looks like my Mom is an sp too. or maybe just very much an N. When I read her the sp traits the last time she pulled her stunt and I told her to stay away from him. She actually said that the traits sound like her some. So of course he is as normal as she is and I should just get over him because it is just a breakup and lots of people have them. Of course when she went through a divorce the world came to an end and she had a total breakdown had to quit work and come here to live. Wow!! maybe I loved an Sp because it felt like being home.
Joy, I have not read over all your posts, but your mom sounds similar to mine. Being a very compassionate person, I have always tried to cut my mom some slack too, due to her neglectful mother and loss of her father at 16. What this looked like is that I always felt numb, depressed, and confused after a visit with her. I always ended up focusing on her, but she never could acknowledge my feelings. Everything was always about her. If I ever even tried to tell her how something she did was hurtful to me, she would go into her “I’m a bad mother” routine, which was, of course, mainly her way of focusing the attention back on herself. After many many years of this, I finally decided I couldn’t have a close relationship with someone who simply didn’t care about my feelings. So, sadly, I just distanced myself. I still send cards, but I don’t call or email or visit any more. Setting boundaries with her was one of the hardest things I ever had to do, but it keeps me sane. The loss I feel is more like a loss of a fantasy, because she will never be the mother I always dreamt of.
OxD, thank you (((hugs))). There must be a way to make a living at your unofficial therapy practice. lol