Handling Duty/Obligation as the "estranger" ;

Message deleted by Gransnet for breaking our forum guidelines. Replies may also be deleted.

icanhandthemback

Thank you for your kind comments. If I'm honest, I spent years thinking it was me because my relationships outside my family were highly toxic too. I didn't realise that I was replicating what I had known all my life. With lots of therapy, lots of support from one of the kindest, down to earth people I have ever met who had had the sort of childhood we dream about, I was able to work on me. In learning about myself, I was able to look at my mother's childhood and realise that she was brought up in a toxic environment too but didn't have the sort of support I had nor the self awareness to change but I was able to put down my boundaries, avoid conflict by not challenging her beliefs whilst quietly getting on with mine. Recently, I have realised that she can still manage to guilt trip me and I have worked very hard on resisting that. Now she is in a care home, when she starts, I just tease her that her greatest talent is emotional blackmail but I am now very good at letting it roll over me. Even she has to chuckle. When she is really vile, I change the subject or leave.
We all have to deal with the toxic behaviour we meet in the best way we can. For some it will be estrangement, for others it will be finding the best way forward whilst trying to limit the damage. One of the things I noticed about my mother was that she drummed it into me that your mother was the MOST IMPORTANT PERSON in your life from a very young age. For some that makes it very difficult to extricate yourself because it goes against everything you have every believed.
I would never do that to my children. I tell them that it is important to be able to trust your parents to be truthful with them and I hope they pass that onto their children. I hope I allow them to be adults having brought them up to negotiate and to have the courage of their convictions. I am there for them if they need me but I don't expect them to need me or look after me. I expect to earn their respect. I hope I have.

Well, I'd certainly respect you if I was one of your children.

You've broken a very toxic chain, in a very compassionate way.

It's not easy to hang on in there, after a bad childhood, and it's to your credit that you have managed to do it.

Best wishes. ?

icanhandthemback your post at 13.08 was one of the most balanced, emotionally intelligent and insightful posts I've ever read on these estrangement threads. Through your own self insight, hard work, and a conscious decision that you didn't want to carry the burden of baggage from your childhood around with you forever, or replicate the past with your own children, you've come out the other side with much learned and a lot to be very proud of. The fact that you still have a functioning relationship with your mother is astonishing.

Very insightful thoughts icanhandthemback
As you say diamondlily society has moved on a great deal.

It is not always easy for one generation to see the world through the lens of another. Our perceptions are coloured by the world as we have experienced it, different societal values and pressures, modes of interaction, moral consensus, changing expert opinion and new research. I'm sure thing will continue to change and evolve for generations to come. We can all only do our best with the tools we have been given and the values we have imbibed along the way.

I also think that, for those of us bought up not that long after the end of the war, life was "harder" anyway.

Our parents and grandparents had often had a tough time during and just after those years, with very little help available, of any type.

Parents tended to be stricter, teachers most definitely were and life wasn't "child centric" as it is now.

Nothing is an excuse for some things, but, with reflection, I think it's easy to understand that society has moved on a great deal in the last 60 years or so.?

hugshelp

Lovely post icanhandthemback
It's a shame your mother was never able to move on from her own traumas and find a healthier way to be a parent. She's very lucky to still have you in her life and I have utter respect for the way you have found to handle your relationship with her.

To be fair, hugshelp, she wasn't born in an age of information or therapy. Even with 2 suicide attempts when I was a child, my mother never had the support she should have had. We are so lucky to have all this information at our finger tips to reflect on our experiences. In her own way my mother did realise her inadequacies as a parent and sent us off to boarding school when she realised she couldn't control her temper. If she hadn't, we'd have been sent to our father's control and the abuse might have been unthinkable.

With other EAC we just get it, we can see where each other is on that healing journey, we can give advice on how to handle it... we don't have to JADE with each other (justify, argue, defend explain)

For the EAC who come from abusive backgrounds I can't even put into words just how much that matters and how much spaces we can do that mean.

Lovely post icanhandthemback
It's a shame your mother was never able to move on from her own traumas and find a healthier way to be a parent. She's very lucky to still have you in her life and I have utter respect for the way you have found to handle your relationship with her.

Something I've noticed over the years is that I have had the absolute most compassion, empathy and understanding from those who had good childhoods...

I've seen it said that people who had good childhoods had no understanding but I think really too many people had various stages somewhere in between amd people often have a sense of a good childhood compared to others...

This leads to measuring others against themselves in a bit of a " well you had it better than me" amd I'm OK" sort of way

But that's not what matters

What matters is the symptoms, not the disease.

The important part is that the treatment works.

Just want to say that I think your post is very moving icanhandthemback especially when you said "Even she has to chuckle" .

Thank you for your kind comments. If I'm honest, I spent years thinking it was me because my relationships outside my family were highly toxic too. I didn't realise that I was replicating what I had known all my life. With lots of therapy, lots of support from one of the kindest, down to earth people I have ever met who had had the sort of childhood we dream about, I was able to work on me. In learning about myself, I was able to look at my mother's childhood and realise that she was brought up in a toxic environment too but didn't have the sort of support I had nor the self awareness to change but I was able to put down my boundaries, avoid conflict by not challenging her beliefs whilst quietly getting on with mine. Recently, I have realised that she can still manage to guilt trip me and I have worked very hard on resisting that. Now she is in a care home, when she starts, I just tease her that her greatest talent is emotional blackmail but I am now very good at letting it roll over me. Even she has to chuckle. When she is really vile, I change the subject or leave.
We all have to deal with the toxic behaviour we meet in the best way we can. For some it will be estrangement, for others it will be finding the best way forward whilst trying to limit the damage. One of the things I noticed about my mother was that she drummed it into me that your mother was the MOST IMPORTANT PERSON in your life from a very young age. For some that makes it very difficult to extricate yourself because it goes against everything you have every believed.
I would never do that to my children. I tell them that it is important to be able to trust your parents to be truthful with them and I hope they pass that onto their children. I hope I allow them to be adults having brought them up to negotiate and to have the courage of their convictions. I am there for them if they need me but I don't expect them to need me or look after me. I expect to earn their respect. I hope I have.

It is nothing short of commendable icanhandthemback that you have and show understanding for your mum, despite all you've been through .

Absolutely Madgran "it is possible and always nice to see".

I just want to say that the posts just above on this thread are a perfect demonstration of how misunderstandings/upsets etc can be sorted out without ending up in sarcasm and personal attacks. That is what I mean every time I say (endlessly!!) on threads that it is possible to speak honestly but with understanding and kindness even if giving hard messages! I have seen good examples between EACs, between EPs and between EACs and EPs so it is possible and always nice to see!!

Mia I’ve had similar pressures. “You only get one Mom!” gets met with, “Thank goodness for that! I couldn’t have survived two!” Which usually shuts people down enough for me to escape.

I quit justifying my choice of NC a while ago. It only seems to be strangers/acquaintances who think they have the right to question it. People who actually know me, don’t. They know who I am as a person, and if I’m to the point of estrangement, there’s serious, irreparable harm involved.

I realized I don’t need to show my pain and bleed for people who want to sit in judgment of if it meets their standards of ‘justifiable’ or not. They don’t care about me as a person, but about their views of how things ought to be.

Oh he did realise towards the end of his life. He was a broken man after mum died, full of remorse for the way he had treated her, full of remorse for his treatment of me. But it was too little too late.

When I lost my husband dad was unbelievably cruel to me, he wouldn't even attend my husbands funeral. That did it for me, the final straw.

Never mind. It's in the past. The sad thing was my sister asked me for a nice memory for dads eulogy. I couldn't think of a single one, still can't.

What a miserable end to a miserable life. But that was his karma.

Derbyshirelass please don't worry, it is an emotive subject and I'm glad we were able understand and move past it.

I think that your comment has shown me the difference between us... I didn't understand until after I estranged. O didn't learn to cope until after I estranged. She drove me to a breakdown. I tried to set boundaries from a broken relationship stance. I was laughed at. Then I was told that even if I came back I might not be accepted anyway.

I might not have understood what my mother was at that time but I do know her very well. She would have told me I had hurt her too much and she could never trust me again. She would have gone crying to everyone about it. I would have looked guilty because if I really had reason to walk away I wouldn't have come back right?

She wanted to drive me away but she didn't want to look bad for doing it.

I have to be honest I do hate that for you, and I do hate that you had to develop those kind of survival skills. It has actually made me quite emotional and I'm not an emotional person bit I could see you because you described it so vividly.

Please don't think I am trying to detract from your strength and bravery, I'm not.... I just really need to tell you this.

You are a good daughter and you would have been a good daughter what ever choice you made. The problem was always him. He has no idea what he has missed out on.

VS. Thanks for explaining how I upset you.

You are right. I was clumsy. What I meant was there isnt always a need to estrange, not if we can find another way. I'm mortified that I have given offence

What I was trying to say is that greyrocking, distancing, or what I call my "red velvet rope policy" can be quite effective too, especially if like me, you want to maintain contact with other family members.

I would cheerfully have walked away from dad and left him to it. I could also do the same to my DIL. Like my dad, she too is a raging narcissist. Both more trouble than they are worth really.

All the text books tell you that the only way to deal with a narcissist is not to, just run.....but sometimes you can't. I agree it might be the best way but sometimes you just can't escape.

The narc could be a family member or a work colleague so walking away and estranging just isn't an option. You have to make it work.

As a child and teenager I certainly couldn't escape my dad. I was stuck. I didnt understand then that he was a narcissist. I knew nothing about NPD. That knowledge didn't come until I was much older and by then I had already worked out my coping strategy. Anyway he's dead now so that chapter of my life is closed.

By comparison Dealing with DIL is much easier. I have experience and I am not beholden to her for anything. She has no dominion over me.

She has tried emotional blackmail on three separate occasions. Each time she threatened to cut me off if I didn't comply with her demands I just called her bluff and said "ok do what you feel is best". Each time she backed down.

Sometimes you just have to stand up for yourself. Of course that can be dangerous. I did it with my dad and he beat me up. But he never did it again because I wised up and learned how to stay safe.

I learned how to stay I step ahead, even something as daft as always putting an obstacle in his path like making sure there was a piece of furniture between us so he couldn't land a punch. Always making sure I wasnt trapped, that I could reach the door and run if I had to. Like the SAS always checking the room to know where the exits are. ?. I learned to outthink him and outsmart him, I did some self defence training. Don't know if it would have helped, luckily I never had to test my skills.

I paid a price though..... I had had stomach problems ever since I was a child due to high stress levels, eventually the stress proved too much and I ended up with a stomach ulcer at the tender age of 17. Fun.

Anyway It's all water under the bridge. I am here, alive and kicking, and enjoying a happy life.

Derbyshirelass your story is yours, to tell and to live as feels right for you.

It only really bothered me when you said "There is no need to estrange anyone" because we are all different people.

For me, I would have to change myself to be able to set strong enough boundaries to protect my mental health and I am a sensitive person and dont feel there is anything wrong with that. Also I am not exactly neurotypical so unable to navigate somesocial things and nuances of concersation easily.

I appreciate the apology

I'm so sorry icanhandthemback

I do understand, my mother was so damaged by her parents..

I just can't feel this love for my children, know that I would do anything to stop the cycle for them and forgive my mother for not even trying

MercuryQueen, agreed 100%. I think sometimes people do feel pressure to change their minds on that. In just this thread, people reacted very negatively towards me for saying I would give my kidney to a stranger instead of the father who abandoned me when I was 3. Apparently people think I owe him something, but they're wrong.

icanhandthemback

I'm so very sorry for what happened with your parents. It takes a lot of wisdom and inner strength to recognize what happened to your mother and maintain that relationship despite what you experienced. I hope your mom recognizes how special you are, but even if she doesn't, know that you are

As far as your dad goes, I'm glad you're free of him as you deserve peace.

Also, my boyfriend loves B&J's chocolate fudge brownie, so you're in good company lol

Your posts certainly haven't offended me, as an EAC, DerbyshireLass; you've simply given your coping strategies that worked for you. That's all any of us do.

I would just like to say if any of my posts have given cause for offence then I can only apologise.

I fully appreciate that some people might have found my way of managing my father rather than estranging him difficult to swallow. I was by no means advocating that it is wrong to estrange your tormentor,

I tried "distancing" first and it worked for me. It doesn't always work.

I can only apologise if people thought I was saying that estrangement is wrong. Far from it, sometimes estrangement is the only way,

That's a truly awful personal history icanhandthemback and I'm so sorry you had to go through it. I'd feel the same way about him as you do. Totally justified.

Gosh, icanhandthemback. How difficult for you. I can understand how you would feel relief.

I know I didn't estrange my dad but I did practise "distancing". He was such a difficult man. I was worried that I would feel guilt and remorse when he died. I didn't - just a huge sense of relief, like a great weight had been lifted from my shoulders.

I am sorry you had to deal with that icanhandthemback. You seem to have found a way of doing so that is healthy for you.