When she was a child, Nadia always had to be there for her mother – and rarely experienced the other way around. Since she has built her own life, she has therefore broken off contact. But now she has a guilty conscience.
Dear Ms Peirano,
I’m 40 and I’ve worked hard to be okay. Now I live in a loving partnership, have a sweet daughter, a job that I enjoy and a great circle of friends.
It wasn’t easy for me as a child. My mother was a difficult woman. It was always about her. We moved twelve times when I was at school, she had six “steady” relationships and countless male acquaintances. Two of these men really scared me, one also hit me. My mother’s hand slipped often too.
My mother really only took care of herself and I was the listener and help for everything.
I really just want to put a tick under my childhood, but it’s not that easy. I’ve been in therapy for a while and have worked through everything and now understand what happened.
Even as an adult, my relationship with my mother was anything but easy. She made me feel guilty for having such a good life while she’s ill (as a smoker and someone who hasn’t exercised, also through her own fault). She caused discord between my husband, my daughter and me. And kept calling at night because of some supposed emergency. Actually, it was all about attention.
I’ve cut ties with my mom for well over a year, and once I’ve worked through that (and the guilt that came with it), I’ve been doing really well. While I was still angry with her, it was also nice to be out of her constant troubles and just go about my life.
Now the thought creeps up on me whether I shouldn’t forgive her. She didn’t know any better. She too had a difficult childhood without a father. And besides, she is an old woman (75). Maybe I’ll blame myself for not being there for her when one day she’s gone.
Just forgiving is not that easy. Psychology guides keep recommending this to let go and become free, but I just can’t do it. There is still too much anger and resentment.
What do you advise me?
Best regards
Nadia H
Dear Nadia H,
First of all, I would like to congratulate you on having managed to build a great and whole life for yourself! That is a great achievement and it must have taken a lot of effort! And all this despite the lack of a role model and in view of the enormous amount of adjustment you had to make as a child. You can be proud of that.
Your mother overshadowed your childhood. She didn’t focus on you, the girl, but on herself. You were the one who suffered. Constant moving, changing schools, and breaking up of friendships can be very frustrating, upsetting, and potentially traumatic for children. They can jeopardize school performance and impair social learning considerably.
In addition, your childhood roles reversed: your mother behaved like a needy child, and you slipped into the role of the caring, stable adult. That’s a huge challenge for a child, and apart from that, this early responsibility deprives the child of the opportunity to be a child. Being a child means being allowed to learn, to play, to gain experience in the knowledge that someone will take care of you and help you if you get hurt. For you, on the other hand, being a child must have been extremely exhausting and overwhelming.
I can therefore well understand that you are exhausted by it. Your need to focus fully on your family, friends and work is perfectly justified.
And the disturbances from your mother, who also messes up your perfect world (or maybe wants to mess it up?) and apparently still doesn’t take care of herself, probably bring you to the limit of your patience and far beyond.
In modern psychotherapy there are many approaches (e.g. acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), mindfulness-based approaches, working with the inner child, in which people learn to recognize their feelings, to name them (it is often a mixture) and Above all, to accept it without judgment (!!!). That means: You can feel everything you feel. Without any ifs and buts, without any wrong or right. Only in the second step can you consider how to deal with your feelings. That means: I can admit to myself in private that I’m in love with my attractive neighbor.I shouldn’t act it out if I care about my husband.
You feel a lot of anger and resentment towards your mother. And you feel the desire to draw a line and not let her into your life again.
And at the same time you feel guilty, probably because you learned from your mother in your childhood that your mother’s feelings come first.
First of all, accept this mixture of feelings and say to yourself: I feel this and I feel that and there is also this feeling…
And that’s fine, that’s perfectly fine.
And then it’s about whether you should forgive or even “have to”. Dear Nadia, you don’t have to do anything. You are free to decide!
Because the pressure to just say “I forgive you, mother” after all the suffering can be extremely stressful if you don’t feel like it. In addition, if you take care of your mother in the not too distant future, you would have to continue or even increase the hellish minus business you were in as a child.
How about if you have one modern form of forgiveness try: namely to clarify the conflict? Parents used to be in charge, children were not allowed to contradict and had to swallow. And that’s why all they could do was forgiveness: the children have worked so that their feelings no longer burden them. And religion has played its part.
Today – fortunately – everything is discussed with each other. It is no longer said in families: Christmas is duck! But: “What do we want to eat for Christmas?” And then there is an exchange, and in the end vegan dishes might end up on the table.
And that’s right: talking to each other, exchanging positions, finding compromises.
You suffer from the fact that you were never really allowed to vent, but always had the impression that you had to swallow everything – or break off contact if it was no longer possible.
How about telling your mother how you were growing up, how you felt and what was terrible about it? And also show her how a contact should be that feels better for you? And make it dependent on the success of the clarification to what extent you support your mother in old age? If you can’t do it on your own, look for family therapy/ systemic therapy/ professional conflict management and invite your mother there.
I can imagine some of the resentment going away when you tell your mother the unspeakable (namely Her side) and would also set limits (my cell phone is off after 8 p.m., so you have to call the ambulance if you have to). And also speak up if your mother does something that bothers you again (eg playing you and your daughter off against each other). This would make you lose the fainting you had as a child.
I assume that clarifying will be very exhausting and tough, but you could release a lot of frustration from your childhood by holding out and then balance again and again how much contact with your mother you want to have at the moment. And you can tell her that.
It would be a completely new way: clarifying conflict instead of swallowing it. But a much more interactive and dynamic way than setting yourself the task of forgiving everything single-handedly. Because it’s also your mother’s job to wipe the slate clean.
Just think about it.
Best regards
Juliet Peirano