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When I was very young, my mother and her parents (who were a very big part of our lives, enmeshment) were very big on the idea of children being "mature" and "sophisticated for their age". I'm not sure exactly how I know that was prized by them. It might have been something I heard said about my brother, when he was being discussed among my mother and any of the other adults in our orbit. It was possibly even said about me at times, but I think that my brother was better at the act than I was. He was a little older and probably had more of a grasp on the concept. In any case, I was thinking about it today and  thinking about how I was never properly a child, but nor have I ever properly grown up. I think the thing that hurts most about my life right now is that on some level I am still back there, stuck waiting for some kind of permission to grow and achieve and become my own person that I've never really been able to understand.

I'm sorry.  I didn't mean to hurt you.  Please come back. 

I'm guessing from your recent lack of contact that the email I sent after you were unable to visit recently hurt your feelings.  I didn't mean to do that. When we talked a few months ago about your fear of my expressing strong emotions, you told me that I can do that in email because that you can digest it without having to react right away, so I thought an email would be okay.  I wasn't looking for drama, I simply wanted to let you know how something you said came across to me, and to suggest a way we might communicate more harmoniously in the future.  On reflection, I realise that the tone of my email was more aggressive than I meant for it to be, and I regret that.  I miss you, and I hope you will come back soon.

Today's version:

I'm guessing from your recent lack of contact that the email I sent after you were unable to visit recently hurt your feelings.  Grow up.  You've had a relationship with me for thirty years and yet you still can't give me even the slightest benefit of the doubt.  When we talked a few months ago about your fear of my expressing strong emotions, you told me that I can do that in email because then you can digest it without having to react right away.  And I believed you, more fool me!  I wasn't looking for drama, but you hurt me and I thought you might care enough to want to know how you could avoid doing so in the future.  The tone of my email was snippier than I meant for it to be, and I do regret that.  I wanted it to be calm and neutral, but I guess I was just too hurt, and man, I'm human too.  Can't I have a little grace, after all these years, after how much I've given you?  How much of our time are you going to waste with this silent treatment crap?  I hope that you honestly don't know how much it hurts me when you ignore me, because I'd hate to think that you would intentionally put someone you claim to care about through this kind of pain.

I'm guessing from your recent lack of contact that the email I sent after you were unable to visit recently hurt your feelings.  I didn't mean to do that. When we talked a few months ago about your fear of my expressing strong emotions, you told me that I can do that in email because that you can digest it without having to react right away, so I thought an email would be okay.   I wasn't looking for drama, I simply wanted to let you know how something you said came across to me, and to suggest a way we might communicate more harmoniously in the future.  On reflection, I realise that the tone of my email was more aggressive than I meant for it to be, and I regret that.  I miss you, and I hope you will come back soon. 

My idea is that if I liked myself more I'd take better care of myself. But maybe that's backwards. Maybe it's that if I took better care of myself I'd like myself more. Chicken/egg? I long to take better care of myself, but, plans, resolutions and positive self-talk notwithstanding, I just don't seem to quite be able to do it.

I always have this idea that "maybe tomorrow it will be different." Tomorrow I will feel better, do better, be better. I need, of course, to start making "tomorrow" into "TODAY". It could happen. Maybe that's what my theoretical positive self-talk tape needs to say.

Oh, san, thank you so much for your reply and for your understanding.  What you've written here is exactly what I'm talking about.  It's such a huge burden, that we have no choice but to carry.  So unfair!

About a year ago, I got some positive self-talk tapes (well, not really tapes, digital files, but Gen X thankyouverymuch), and have listened to them nearly every single day.  Of course I knew better than to believe that "You can change your life in just 30 days!", but still, I would have hoped for more improvement than I feel I've gotten after a whole year.  I've thought about putting the script into first person and making a recording of it in my own voice, but I'm afraid that if I did it would not sound sincere and that would make me feel even worse about myself.  I think the very phrase "self-esteem" has negative connotations for me.  I think that in my household it was sort of a putdown, like saying someone was egotistical.  And then there's the word "esteem", with which I realise I have a certain history.  Here's a weird one:  When my stepfather and my mother were first married, he gave me a copy of his Pulitzer-prize-winning book about something-something-American-history that he had inscribed "to (my name) With love and esteem, from (his name)".  What a strange gift to give to a small child.  What a strange thing to inscribe it with.  I was maybe 6.  I didn't know what "esteem" meant, although I understood it to be positive.  I know that when my mother and stepfather got married, she told me that he was excited about us being a family because he had three sons and had always wanted a daughter.  I think from these I got the notion that I would be appreciated and treated kindly by my stepfather.  Which of course I was not.  So perhaps I associate the word "esteem" with a broken promise. 

Thank you for the kind words, friends.  I wish I could see these things in myself that other people see.  All these years later, I'm still suffering from being a kid with parents who said one thing and did another.  I'm really tired of attributing everything that's wrong with me to things that happened over half a century ago, but the thing is, these things are true.  They happened and they hurt me, and I try and try but don't seem to get past them.  Maybe for a minute here and there. 

Right now I am really feeling those whole sections of myself that didn't grow up and are eternally still trying to please or appease a world of adults who didn't want me.  For a lot of my life, I thought that my mother was the bad guy and that my father was okay, but I have come to realise how gravely he failed me, in how many ways.  Aching right now are memories of all the times I did stupid kid things because I didn't know better, and instead of being taught, I was credited with bad intent and emotionally punished.  Emotionally punished, because nothing in the houses of my parents was ever so straightforward as consequences for actions. 

I have lived since young adulthood with "My mother kicked me out of her house and sent me to live with my father because I'd become too much of a problem to her", but it took me until quite recently to process that my father did a different version of the same thing.  After I graduated high school, he sent me away to a completely unsuitable university situation because it looked good on the surface and it was easier than figuring out a realistic option for me.  He then put me in a mental ward for three months because I committed one of the most classic acts of teenage stupidity that exists (getting drunk at a party and passing out on someone's front lawn looking for help).  After I was released from the hospital, he told me I could not live in his house anymore and sent me out into the world with a manual transmission car that he spent about an hour teaching me how to drive, a small monthly allowance and the instruction to find some kind of a job.  That within perhaps six months I had totalled the car and gotten and lost three or so jobs and dwelling places was covertly represented as my own fault.  I blame myself constantly for not doing more with my life, but honestly it's kind of amazing that I even survived the transition to so-called adulthood. 

Oh, what could I have been if I'd had even the slightest little bit of nurturing?  I was always told that I was smart, creative, capable, "gifted", whatever, and that with my putative talents I could do or be anything I wanted to.  But how the heck was I ever supposed to do or be anything when for my whole life, all I could learn was whatever I could figure out for myself (usually the hard way)? 

I've had the death-wishing voice a lot lately. That provokes my fear of death and my feeling of being trapped, as well as angst about my age and my worry that the rest of my life will go by in a flash and I will never change anything, never do anything with myself, never realise the mythic potential I have spent my life being told and believing that I have but being unable to tap. I feel it, I stuff it down, I push it away, but it comes out in weird yelly dreams and deep inertia.

I am trying to figure out how to stop regret and self-hatred from ruining the rest of my life.

Boy do I get tired of emotional control sometimes. Sometimes I really just want to have tantrum. A big cathartic explosion of chaotic and unreasonable feelings. A purge of everything I spend all my time and energy to hold back, transmogrify, warp, morph, justify, minimise, neutralise, intellectualise, contain. I want it out of me, all of it. Kicking and screaming. I want to disturb, unsettle, frighten, distress like I used to when I was a kid and there were no holds barred when protesting my unjust treatment and my unmet needs. But then be comforted, tended to, understood. Validated. Helped. Soothed.  Loved. Like I certainly never was back then. I want to be taken care of. I'm so sick of having to be an adult when I was never allowed to be a child.

Every single minute of every single day I'm struggling through life, pretending there's more to my existence than a constant battle to stay one step ahead of anxiety and pain and fear. I am so tired.

Thank you for these insightful and compassionate replies, friends.  I appreciate your perspectives, and have been doing my best to work with them.  It's really hard.  Everything is really hard.  I get so discouraged sometimes, feeling that nothing I can do is enough.  NK, I really like your idea about engaging with those bad feelings, standing up to them, but it's difficult to challenge those underlying negative narratives.  I think one of my inner children is actually my mother, always lurking, ready to attack and undermine me.  My own worst bully seems to be built into me.

The other day, I realised that I have actually been fairly successful in life relative to the things my mother implicitly (and in some ways, even explicitly) taught me were important when I was a child.  These things are, finding someone to take care of me financially, being sexually adventurous, and not being fat.  Thinking about that really messes with my mind.  I know I'm a "better person" (more compassionate, more self-aware, less narcissistic) than my mother, but that doesn't really seem like enough measured against the thought of all the things I could potentially have succeeded at if I'd had better examples to follow. 

I'm feeling very low today, very bad about myself. I think what I'm supposed to do with that is acknowledge it, let myself feel it and not try to repress it or talk myself out of it, and then let it go. But I have trouble with the whole "let it go" thing. I don't seem to know how to do it, not with this, not with big things, not with anything. I get stuck in my negative feelings and can't seem to get out. Sad. Today I really feel like my mother's daughter, and that is not a good way to feel. I'm like a black hole of neediness with no real self.

hey, bach, could she be showing signs of dementia/alzheimer's or something to that effect?  it sounds very paranoid to me.  not that i'm trying to find an excuse, but it sounds like a trip to a doctor might be in order.  such behavior is intolerable and it's awful that your brother is going thru this and that you have to watch it happen.  so very sorry it's happening.  still, no excuse for her treating him like this.  love and hugs

It might almost be easier to deal with if these were signs of dementia/Alzheimer's, but I don't think they are.  She goes to the doctor frequently for all kinds of things, and never once has her mental competence been questioned.  The sad truth is, she's always been like this, completely allergic to ever taking responsibility for anything.  She always finds something or someone to blame for anything in her life that she's unhappy about.  There is always a reason that it's not her fault, she didn't do it, it was an accident or beyond her control or a genetic flaw, SOMETHING.  She is perhaps less filtered and more virulent about it in her old age, but nothing happening here is out of character for her.  I think that she knows that she is getting too old and frail to live by herself in that house, and deep down she does want to be someplace safer and more suitable, but along with the fact that she hates change and is very attached to the past, she is FURIOUS about being in that position.  Therefore someone has to be the villain, and now that her husband is dead, my brother is the only candidate.  She has more than once told me in the tone of a cute or funny story about the "terrible things" she said to her late husband when they had to give up their apartment in the city and were in the process of moving to the beach house full time, and how lucky she is that he put up with it.  Well, he was her husband and chose to spend his life with a manipulative woman-child who was highly skilled at getting what she wanted while getting him to take the responsibility for deciding, and he was a pretty nasty person himself, so whatever, but my poor brother who has plenty of his own problems is only trying to do his best and does not in any way deserve this.

My mother is torturing my brother, and I'm so upset for him.  The short version of the long story is this:  My mother lives in what used to be my grandparents's summer house.  The house is a big part of our family history.  My grandparents bought it in 1950.  My family spent summers there when I was a kid in the 70s, and my mother continued to spend every summer there until 2004 when for various reasons she took it for her primary residence.  I'd love to tell more about the history of that house in our family, but if I did I'd get bogged down in all the backstories and sidestories and never get to what I came here to write about. So maybe some other time.  In any case, ever since my mother's husband died in 2021, she started talking on and off about moving to a senior living community at the beach two towns over from the house.  It's for "active seniors" and not an assisted living facility, but it does have community spaces, a dining room where meals are served, and on-site support in case of problems or illness.  The house has not been maintained very well, and is not a particularly senior-friendly house to begin with.  It's a vertical house, three stories of tiny cluttered rooms, lots of stairs, and in the past few years there have been various issues related to the lack of upkeep such as leaks and pests.  Last year was particularly difficult in that area, as well as in some health problems she experienced, and at some point she seemed to affirmatively decide that she wanted to move.  The problem was that you have to buy into the place, and there were no units available.  So for a number of months the talk was about how the house wasn't safe or comfortable for her anymore and how she hoped a unit would come available soon so she could move.  Finally a unit            came available.  My brother came down from upstate to take her to see the place, and a decision was made that she would buy it.  She signed the contract and then all of the sudden she wasn't so sure.  Complicating matters was that the closing got delayed a few times by the seller.  Finally the sale was completed, and guess what happened?  My mother decided that she does not want to move.  What's worse is that she has decided that she NEVER wanted to move, that my brother forced her to buy the apartment and wants to get her out of the house so that he can have it.  This is of course entirely untrue.  He has repeatedly assured her that she doesn't have to move, that the apartment can be rented out or resold, that she can stay in the house if that's what she wants to do.  And actually, this isn't even half the crazy, merely the craziest part.  She says a lot of things, many of them contradictory, and all so out of touch with reality that I can't even put them into coherent words.  But the big issue is that all my brother was trying to do was help her and make sure she has a safe, comfortable place to live, and what he gets for that is hostility and wild accusations.  It's so upsetting I can hardly stand it.  I want to tell her to stop being so awful to my brother, but I know there's no point.  She just keeps doubling down.  Yesterday he told me that she said that he should have known better than to take her seriously about wanting to move, and that she vaguely threatened suicide.  What, and I can't stress this enough, the ****!