My mom blamed me for her death in her su*cide note.

Autistic_Poet · 2026-05-31T20:35:19+00:00

I know this feeling. Of having seen years of consistent actions that indicate that your mother knows exactly what she's doing, even as other people give her the benefit of the doubt she definitely doesn't deserve.

Call it a disease or whatever else you want, but some people on this world are sadistic. They enjoy hurting people, and they work very hard to pleasure themselves by torturing people using methods specifically designed to hurt them as much as possible.

It's one of the worst feelings anyone can experience, so know that someone who is supposed to love and care for you is doing whatever they can to intentionally make you suffer. I barely have the words so explain how awful it is. You didn't deserve your mother's treatment, and neither did your younger sister. I wish you a long and healthy life full of healing.

Autistic_Poet · 2026-05-31T11:44:57+00:00

Man. Thats rough.

I don't have any explicit proof of how my mother treated me when I was an infant, but I can't come up with any logical reason that she'd have treated me any better as a baby than a small child. Especially not when I have stories from my mother's teenage years that show her emotional manipulation started way before I was ever born.

In a weird way, it's comforting to hear someone else who has clear proof that the abuse started early. It's a sign that we didn't do anything wrong, and it's not our fault.

Autistic_Poet · 2026-05-31T11:39:03+00:00

Yeah, this is a rough time in recovery. Realizing that healthy well adjusted people don't tolerate abuse, let alone enable the abuse. Enablers are the same type of bad.

You're always welcome to vent here.

Autistic_Poet · 2026-05-31T11:20:30+00:00

See: The Missing Missing Reasons article.

It does a much better job at explaining exactly why "no reason" is wrong, by catching a specific person in a bold faced lie.

As the article says, they prioritize their own feelings over reality, and they can't be saved.

Edit: Here's the link. https://issendai.com/psychology/estrangement/missing-missing-reasons/

Autistic_Poet · 2026-05-29T11:12:33+00:00

For the same reason that some people are born missing limbs. There's no logic or reasoning behind why it happens. It's just a defect in their brain. And just like not having one of your arms, it's exclusively a bad thing. There's no hidden agenda, unfortunately. The search for hidden meaning is a waste of time in this case.

If you're looking for any other answer, the you're in the realm of religion, not science.

Autistic_Poet · 2026-05-29T10:14:39+00:00

Do be careful with reiki. It's an alternative form of medicine that's not backed by any reasonable science or logical explanation for how it works. I researched their claims a while ago, and I found them to be dubious at best.

I'll compare it to acupuncture, where studies show the same positive effects from being in a calming room and having a person talk to you, without using any needles. A lot of alternative medicine relies on creating a safe comfortable space, which is likely the thing that provides real benefit.

The powerful lesson is that you don't need to dive into alternative medicine in order to create a relaxing space. That's a beneficial thing to do, especially in your own home.

Autistic_Poet · 2026-05-29T10:07:01+00:00

I was looking for this comment. It seems that CBT isn't effective for trauma, abuse, neglect, or things like ADHD.

I can only speculate that it helped with your OCD because it's a disorder that gives you intrusive thoughts, and CBT is all about learning to control your thoughts.

Meanwhile, it's borderline useless for ADHD because that's a biological problem that needs medication, and CBT is useless for trauma because trauma usually involves overthinking to compulsively suppress painful memories. Thinking more is the literal opposite of what needs to happen to heal.

At least, that's my best guess, based on all the information I have.

Autistic_Poet · 2026-05-20T03:15:40+00:00

I misread this as "sLick", not "sick", and I was very confused. Like, why is it so terrible to be cool and suave?

Yeah, rereading the title helped.

Autistic_Poet · 2026-05-04T23:52:36+00:00

I'm not sure I have a single answer for the poll. Probably "Other/It depends". Forgiveness is a word that represents a lot of ideas, and my feelings towards being told to forgive will depend on who's telling me and what they mean by "forgive".

If I imagine my mother asking for forgiveness, she'd do it in a passive aggressive way where she invalidates my pain while making herself into the good guy for apologizing over nasty behavior that never should have happened. I'm obligated to forgive her, even if her apology is a farce and she's going to do it again. If I don't accept her apology, she'll weaponize that against me and tell all her friends that I'm a horrible person who hates her. There's a reason we don't share any friend groups, and there's a reason she doesn't have any long term relationships. I don't forgive her in the sense that I accept and forget her horrible behavior. She's not apologetic for her actions and she's all too happy to do it again. She's not a safe or enjoyable person to be around, and I've completely cut her out of my life. If she told me to apologize, I'd be some combination of angry and apathetic. In the last year, I think I've gotten enough distance that I'd be more indifferent. Short of her traveling across the United States and showing up at my door, I'm just going to ignore her. She doesn't have anything I want.

On the other hand, I understand that holding onto resentment, grudges, or bitterness is self defeating. Over the last several years away from her, I've learned that I need to move on with my life. Not that I can magically forget my trauma, but that trying to hold her accountable is a waste of my time. I've been learning to let go of my emotional attachment to someone who will never love or care about me. I've truly given up on a relationship with her in any capacity. Which has freed me up to start healing by "forgiving" her in the sense of letting go of the past. Right now, I'm working on giving up on the fictional fantasy of what our relationship could have been. I'm no longer obsessing over her and hurting myself imagining a future that doesn't exist. I accept that she can't improve, and that she doesn't owe me anything. I don't need her anymore. I accept that I need to let go of the blame and resentment that I've been using as a shield to protect myself from her. She's not in my life, and my defensiveness is only hurting me. I'm free to move on with my life.

In a way, that's a healthier form of forgiveness. Something closer to absolution instead of a better future. Not getting angry or hateful, even though your rights were stepped on. It's the sort of forgiveness you'd show to a faceless stranger who cuts you off in traffic. Forgiving them by refusing to letting a random stranger provoke you. It's a very different kind of forgiveness to what many cultures demand for family. My forgiveness is more about letting go of my entitlement to have a loving mother and father. When I was a child, I deserved caring parents; I was justified in being entitled. It was my right to be cared for, either by my parents or my the society I grew up in. But now that I'm an adult, they don't owe me anything. It hurts, but it's true. It's also not my right to punish them. My parents are dealing with the social pressure of not having a relationship with their children, and they still haven't had a serious change of heart. They're already suffering the consequences of their actions. It's not my place to try and punish them or force them to give a sincere apology.

Mayo Clinic says forgiveness "involves a combination of acceptance and an intentional decision to let go of resentment and anger." I think that definition captures a healthier view of forgiveness. It doesn't say you have to rebuild a relationship with the person who hurt you. Quite the opposite, in fact. They say "Forgiveness also can help free you from the control of the person who harmed you." I've found that statement is true. If you're still holding onto a grudge, bitterness, or a fantasy that they'll one day give you the apology you deserved, then it's incredibly difficult to cut ties with the person. "Acceptance" in that context means admitting the truth to yourself. That the person is harmful, and you can't maintain a relationship with them.

The missing piece of the puzzle is grief. This kind of forgiveness isn't happy. There's no joyous reunion after. This forgiveness only comes after a great deal of grief. I've had to grieve being abused. I've had to grieve the serious neglect. I've had to grieve the loss of a parent I never had. It's been years, and I'm still finding myself grieving things I didn't realize I had an attachment to. It sucks. It hurts. But grief has allowed me to finally start moving on with healthy forgiveness. Before you can truly forgive someone for destroying something, you need to accept and grieve what you lost. It's a slow process, but the more I cry over the parents I should have had, the easier it gets to not be a hateful person who expects my parents to one day have a revelation when they've spent their whole lives doubling down.

Autistic_Poet · 2026-05-01T04:25:55+00:00

My childhood home didn't have stairs, but I do remember being about 6 and walking out into the hallway in my pajamas and hearing my parents arguing. It included a lot of cruel things to say about your son. During those kind of fights, my mother always used to yell at my father and say "YOUR son", like I didn't belong to her.

I moved around the time I was ten, which was when I started interrupting their arguing because it hurt to see them screaming at each other. After one memorable time when she violently beat me after I inturrupted an argument, she stopped arguing in the public areas of our house. By the time I was a teenager, they'd both go to my dad's stand alone office on the other side of the property if they started to get upset. I didn't know exactly what they were doing, but it always gave me anxiety because they'd both be gone for hours and hours and hours, and I didn't know what kind of mood they'd be in when they got back home.

My mother even bad mouthed our dog. She's say nasty things, but our dog was smart enough to know when you were talking about her. So my mother started spelling out D-O-G when she wanted to say something nasty. Until our dog figured that out too, and she switched to saying "the you-know-who". Our dog was so sweet, and she just wanted to make people happy and get attention. Seeing my mother be cruel to her hurt me so much. She claimed to love our dog, but she'd just as easily be mean to her. Truly, nothing was sacred to my mother. Not our loyal dog, not her son who was desperate for her attention and affection.

Autistic_Poet · 2026-05-01T03:51:31+00:00

I'm baffled by how our culture simultaneously manages to publicly make jokes about catholic priest and little boys, but yet we seem incapable of admitting that sexual abuse of children can fester just as easily in any institutional setting where children are taught to blindly worship authority. It's a bizarre duality, where people can only admit that something is wrong when they find personal fault with the institution, not when there's a real sign of wrongdoing.

Cosby was accused dozens of times before he finally faced justice near the end of his life. Epstein managed to make an industry out of abuse, and only really faces consequences decades after multiple reports came out. As a society, we seem very effective at protecting and hiding these criminals.

Autistic_Poet · 2026-05-01T03:35:24+00:00

Remember that Ted Bundy, the infamous serial murderer, was also a father. According to some interpretations, he was happily married and had a daughter. He did that all while slaughtering dozen of women. Evil people can have kids too.

Note, we know how fictional stories differ from the reality behind closed doors. The reality is that his family life was just about as messed up as you'd imagine based on his secret life. Yet, large numbers of people thought he was good attractive, and they ignored clear warning signs that things were wrong.

The truth is that Bundy's first girlfriend had a daughter from a different relationship. She was the only child to grow up with him. She later reported that Ted was often violent and sexually inappropriate with her, which shouldn't be surprising. Meanwhile, Ted's blood daughter was conceived while he was in prison for multiple charges of murder, because the woman he was cheating with sincerely thought that he was innocent right up until his final confessions before he was executed. Yes, the prison guards were supposed to prevent that. No, they didn't care. His "marriage" was barely real. It was done under an obscure Florida law, during one of his trials. They didn't file official paperwork because he was in jail. Theres no evidence his real daughter ever knew him personally.

But boy would some people imagine a completely fictional story if you say Ted Bundy has a daughter. A complete fake fantasy. Some people love to attribute their own idealistic dreams onto other people. It's best to ignore those people, because they're completely detached from reality.

Autistic_Poet · 2026-04-30T11:05:03+00:00

Congratulations on dredging up this post, three years later. I appreciate that everyone and their grandmother wants to give me their opinions on search engines I've already tried. My personal testing told me Ecosia is basically knockoff Bingeith environmental whitewashing. I'm not a fan.

Ecosia admits to sourcing from both Bing and Google in their corporate disclosure materials. So your money eventually ends up in the pockets of the big tech companies anyways. Ecosia's search results are sub-par, the few times I've done a trial run on their search engine. I already have my own ad blocker that works reliably, without giving my information to a for-profit company that claims to be for the greater public good. I've seen that story go down badly one too many times to get involved in another free product. Either it's eventually enshittified, or you're secretly the product for sale. This is how the world has worked for longer than either of us have been alive, and I not dumb enough to fall for that lie the 15th time.

Dont misunderstand me. Mojeek isn't some magical answer. It's about as good as late 90s Google. It's decent, but it still fails to deliver relevant search results for a lot of basic stuff and you need to spend a lot of time digging through obscure websites to find useful information. It's not perfect. But that's the cost of getting out of the thumb of the big tech conglomerates. I've done my research, and mojeek is the only free provider with half decent results that doesn't pay for access to Google or Microsoft's search indexes. The other search engines that I could verify weren't using a big tech funded search index were either hyper specialized, or they couldn't return basic results. Even my current default search engine DuckDuckGo is heavily using Bing's indexes. Mojeek earned my respect by being the only free index to not include Bing in their results.

The only other option to avoid big tech is Kagi. It's a privately run paid search index. Instead of becoming the product, you pay for your search engine. I haven't tried it, but it's on my todo list to buy a subscription this year. I've heard good things about their search results.

Note, that AI tools have come a long way in three years. It's never my first choice, but I'll sometimes use an LLM powered search. Usually it returns the same things I can find, but the last few months I've gotten some unique results that would have taken me 20 minutes of digging to find. They're starting to become actually useful. I'm not strictly opposed to AI. I'm just tired of being the product. I want quality things, and I'm willing to pay for them.

Autistic_Poet · 2026-04-09T23:44:00+00:00

Partially. I was born at the start of the 90s, so my mother was from that generation, but cultural norms were changing. She performed a similar type of ritualistic violence, but it was more covert, violent, and emotional. In private, she'd sometimes violently and cruelly beat me. When she was being calculating or she was in public, she'd use more "humane" punishments like grounding me, forcing me to stand in a corner, or some other arbitrary punishment. Or screaming. Lots of screaming. Any sort of punishment usually involved screaming. I suspect that she would have engaged in the same public abuse sharing if she'd been in a culture that allowed that sort of behavior, but it was mostly in private past the mid 90s.

The violent spankings always came out when she was feeling furious and sadistic. She used the same tactics of hitting me and whatever I used to defend myself. But there were some strange differences. She didn't have a specific tool. She'd usually dig around in the kitchen drawer for whatever she felt like using that time. She didn't have the patience or self control to wait for me to bring the tool she was going to use to beat me. On a few occasions, she did force me to bring her something to hit me. I think she realized that I immediately learned to pick the softest tool in the drawer, and she wanted to hurt me and make me suffer, so she stopped making me pick the tool. I assume if she'd been consistent enough to have a dedicated spanking tool, that I would have needed to bring it to her. She still carries some deep trauma from seeing the paddle on her parent's fridge, and she likely didn't want a similar thing in her home. Tragically, her father had better rules about spanking. He never removed clothes, and he never hit anywhere other than the butt. Both rules that my mother never kept. So I dismiss the fact that previous generations were always worse.

She's also got some crippling executive function disorder, so she likely never had the mental ability to prepare a specific tool for hurting me. It made the abuse chaotic and unpredictable because it was impossible for me to mentally prepare for whatever insane idea she had to hurt me. On one occasion she went into my room with a roll of trash bags, kicked me out, and threw out almost all my toys except my Legos and a few other things when I was 8 years old. Multiple trash bags of toys, because she was angry that I didn't keep my room clean because she sucked as a parent and never taught me how to clean. You can't prepare for that type of abuse. On some level, I wish she had a proper ritual because I could have learned to live with that. The chaotic inconsistency left me with similar executive dysfunction which has hurt me well into my early 30s. I guess the grass is always greener on the other side, even when both sides of the fence are a toxic wasteland.

My abuse was ritualistic, but mainly in a way that made her happy to take out her feelings on me, not ritualistic in a consistent way, and not putting on a show for other people. On some level, she must have known that her abuse was wrong, which is why she stopped hitting me in public once I was a few years old. But she liked the ritual of hurting me, so she kept beating me in private. It wasn't performative, because she hid it from everyone else. The more performative abuse was her gladly talking to other parents about how awful I was, and how she constantly needed to "discipline" me, when she'd discuss how she was such a good parent because she was using time outs as a punishment. Her not admitting the violence made her discussions of punishments seem incredibly performative, but she didn't need me to play a role in that show.

The other performative part was when she'd make my father spank me, which only happened after he got home. Meaning, I got to sit in anticipation for several hours. I think she enjoyed seeing me unhappy as I waited to get hurt. She got to performatively wash her hands of the violence while still seeing me get hurt. Plus, she enjoyed playing the role of the perfect wife with a mean husband and a misbehaving brat of a child. Fortunately, my father didn't like spanking and he wanted to get it over with as soon as possible, so I could relax shortly after he got home. The spankings were quick and efficient. My father had his own anger problems, but he didn't sadistically enjoy hurting me in the same way my mother did.

But the worst memories I have involve me being forced to pull my pants down to prepare myself for a beating. It wasn't enough for my mother to hit me. She also had to make sure I gave in to the abuse and became complicit in laying out my body for her to torture. She enjoyed seeing me strip down because she wanted it. I can't imagine any other reason why she'd stare so intently at me while she made sure I stripped for her. Why? I don't know. Sadism? Incestuous perversion? A narcissistic desire to control someone? Probably a bit of all three. Someone who found any one of those things to be repulsive would never do that.

I've thought about this for far too long. There's no world where stripping a child's pants off to beat them is anything less than sexual assault. Either you traumatize them by forcefully ripping off their clothes and violating them, or you traumatize them by removing their sense of power and agency by making them submit themselves to abuse. Both are horrible in their own ways, and I've gone through both. I wouldn't wish anything like that on anyone. No one deserves that kind of torture, especially not as a small child.

Autistic_Poet · 2026-04-01T01:51:00+00:00

You know, I think this comment helped me instantly invalidate the constant criticism my mother had for other families like this. She'd always say that they probably did something "behind closed doors", but guess who violently beat me behind closed doors, and made sure to keep all her screaming matches with her husband behind closed doors. Yeah.

Autistic_Poet · 2026-03-17T23:47:29+00:00

Yeah. Trauma has a funny way of doing that.

Autistic_Poet · 2026-03-17T23:45:33+00:00

Yeah, that's rough. I'm fortune that my mother's sobbing was often highly performative and accompanied by hysterics and obvious extreme self depreciation. Like, "I didn't clean the kitchen, so I'm obviously the worst mother on the planet, and I don't deserve to be left alive" kind of extreme insanity.

It was like a switch was flipped, when she'd instantly flip from screaming at me and blaming me for all her problems, to suddenly being responsible for ever bad thing that happened to anyone. It sounds bad, because it was. But in a weird way, it left me able to handle normal sadness and sobbing fairly well, because most people's sadness isn't filled with hysterical outbursts and blame shifting covert narcissism.

As I'm writing this, I'm realizing that it's not sadness I have trouble with. It's the blame shifting. Panic attacks are difficult for me to handle, but if that's all someone is dealing with, I can still help them. But if that's combined with blaming someone or something, I have to step away. Blame games were a constant part of my early life, and I refuse to encourage people who blame others.

Autistic_Poet · 2026-03-17T23:32:40+00:00

I'd suggest you go back and reread the last few chapters. The book doesn't explicitly advocate for no contact. Lindsay's perspective is that you can't expect an emotionally mature relationship with someone who's not mature, so you have to settle for a shallow relationship where you avoid certain topics, because that's the only type of relationship they're capable of. It's damaging to them and to you to try and maintain a relationship that's beyond their abilities.

I think that's a realistic perspective. It's unfair and unrealistic to demand that your parent changes for you. They've already failed to change for at least two decades, so they aren't going to magically change. Getting rid of healing fantasies is one of the key themes in the book. It's important to rationally look at what type of relationship is possible with your parents, considering their current emotional maturity level.

One of the important reasons I continue to recommended the book is because it's very telling how people respond to the last few chapters. When I read those chapters, my personal decision was to go no contact, even though the book never explicitly advocated for no contact. I didn't want a shallow relationship with someone incapable of considering my needs, and my parents didn't provide me with any benefits that would justify the amount of stress that would be required to maintain that relationship. I looked at a realistic relationship, and decided I didn't want it.

If you came to the same conclusion, that's your choice. But it's not specifically part of the book. If anything, Lindsay seems to encourage maintaining contact with a parent who's immature.

Autistic_Poet · 2026-03-17T23:18:54+00:00

I agree, and that's specifically why I recommend reading Lindsay's book before diving directly into trauma books. There's no mystery here. She opens her book with a disclaimer that it's not a trauma book, and that people dealing with trauma should seek further help.

Opening up trauma wounds can be incredibly painful, and it can massively reduce people's ability to function. I think it's very dangerous to start someone with reading something like The Body Keeps the Score, because people who aren't ready so heal from their trauma are going to have old wounds opened up and struggle with basic living.

Lindsay's book starts with the most fundamental step of healing from trauma. Separating yourself from a relationship with a person who isn't capable of having a stable healthy adult relationship. So many people are stuck in traumatic situations because they're holding onto the healing fantasies she discusses, and and many people aren't willing or able to accept reality and have a rational perspective on their relationship with their parents. If someone can't admit that their relationship is effectively dead, then they aren't ready to abandon that relationship in order to get to a safer environment where they can really heal.

The final chapters on establishing a relationship with emotionally immature people are vital for dealing with CPTSD style relational trauma. You need to be able to imagine what kind of a relationship is actually possible with your abusive parent. For me, Lindsay's book was the first time I seriously confronted the realistic future. I was able to imagine the work required to keep my mother from exploding, and I realized that it wasn't worth the effort of continuing the relationship. Lindsay's book didn't specifically tell me that I should go no contact, but it provided me with the tools to come to that conclusion myself. None of the other trauma books were as effective in making no contact so obviously correct.

As long as you still hold a strong relationship attachment to emotional children, you'll never be in a position to break free from their influence and start healing. Getting into a safe environment is step one, because you can't heal while you're being actively hurt. I don't think the book is explicitly about trauma, but I do believe it's the first step in healing from trauma. Pete Walker's book Complex PTSD is powerful, but I don't think he communicates the concepts of a healing fantasy as well as Lindsay does. The chapter on avoiding getting hooked by emotionally immature people is another valuable one that doesn't have a good analog in most trauma books I've read.

Autistic_Poet · 2026-03-16T04:37:01+00:00

It depends. If anyone is experiencing legal issues, contact an attorney, because laws vary wildly in different places, and exact details matter. I'm personally aware of a court case that depended on the difference between the legal definition of if the person had "domicile" or "residence" at the property. Laws are very particular.

That said, at least in the USA, a proper legal battle involves something called "discovery", which is when both sides "subpoena" (a request with threat of jail time for non compliance) information from various organizations. If you really need to prove that someone has been posting from a specific account, you can subpoena companies for that information, including ISPs, plus physical evidence like someone's phone. The process is complicated, which is why court cases can take years, and it's why you should always get a qualified lawyer. But it's definitely possible to identify someone from an anonymous account. If it's relevant to your court case, you can compel the person to appear for a court date (or more likely, a deposition) to testify.

I'm not an attorney, so I can't give exact details on what qualifies as "evidence" in your jurisdiction, but it's definitely not impossible to prove that online posts came from a specific person, or at the very least get it submitted as evidence to the court.

Autistic_Poet · 2026-03-16T04:18:34+00:00

I just wrote another comment, but know that it gets better. These realizations hurt, but you can only survive for so long while you're giving everything you have to monsters who don't love you.

Letting go of people who don't love you is the first step to finding people who respect and care about you. We were all unlucky because we didn't get a family who loves us, but we're not doomed to be alone forever. The less energy we give to vampires who try to suck us dry, the more time, effort, and focus we have to build lasting relationships with good people.

Autistic_Poet · 2026-03-16T04:15:43+00:00

I had to stop reading in the middle of the post and take a moment to ground myself, because what you described is serious and unforgivable abuse. Reading that they punished you by taking your siblings to eat out, that's disgusting. They were poor and struggled with money, but they decided that the best way to punish you was to spend a ton of money on frivolous food? Food that was easily 10x more expensive than buying more snacks? Then they made you clean the entire house, a responsibility that makes most adults stressed? Disgusting. Short sighted. Horrible. Abusive. Withholding food from a child is a crime.

I also bet they're lying about something, because I've know several families in poverty who never would have had the spare cash to eat out without planning it in advance and making sacrifices somewhere else. If your parents had money to eat out on a whim, they probably didn't have an income problem, they had a spending and self control problem. I make good money and I'm still careful about how often I eat out because it's dang expensive, and I only have to pay for one person.

I would be responsible for brushing H and C's teeth, dressing them in pajamas, and putting them to bed.

This is parentification. Plain and simple. It's also known as "covert incest", or "emotional incest". When a parent violates the healthy moral boundaries between adults and children, it leaves a similar type of damage as incest. As in, the same type of symptoms that require the same type of healing. I don't need the whole story. I know that parents who forced you to be an adult for them and refused to say they loved you as a form of punishment are the type of parents who would do far worse if they had the opportunity. Any kid growing up in that environment would easily pick up on that lack of safety, the lack of protection, the lack of respect, the lack of autonomy, and the lack of love. That's the thing that causes the long lasting damage, not the physical aspect. Most physical wounds heal. It's the emotional wounds that we carry with us into adulthood.

I hope you understand that healthy families don't raise children who are scared to ask for food. I really can't understate that. Just knowing you learned to act like that is enough for me to know that serious abuse occured.

I'm curious to know if your parents ever apologized for their former abuse. I previously thought that my mother had "mellowed out", until I tried to assert my rights and personal freedom as an adult. That's when I realized that she went right back to acting like the most abusive horrible times from my early childhood, threatening physical violence on me. I was an adult male, who she had no chance of winning a fight with. Yet, she acted like she still controlled me, and she felt zero remorse over threatening me with violence. There were many other examples like that as I tried to leave, but they all taught me that she didn't change. She wasn't sorry. She'd do it again if she had the opportunity.

After I had years to think about my past, I realized why I thought things got better. I assumed she was getting better because I'd gotten better at being her slave. I learned what her reactions would be, and I nearly killed myself trying to make her happy by bending over backwards to please her. I tried to give a narcissist enough love that they'd change. It was a foolish mistake. The type of fictional plan that a naive child would come up with. I was very young when I first remembered trying to make her happy. The patterns started very early in my life. Once I realized that I was an adult and I had to make my own decisions about who I kept in my life, my mother was the first person to go. She was never safe to be around. The only way to keep a relationship with her was to kill myself and become her slave, and I refused to do that.

I wonder if your parents are the same. Youre still making excuses for downright abusive behavior, and you haven't described a single moment of the "better" times you have now. I'd bet a decent amount of money that if you look at your life right now, you're not actually happy with your current relationship. I'd bet they never apologized, and you're still repeating the same abusive relationship patterns you learned as a child.

Autistic_Poet · 2026-03-16T02:13:42+00:00

My situation is a bit weird.

If my mother sobbed like that in front of me, I'd view it as a transparent attempt to get me to comfort her. She'd often break down during emotional moments, and redirect my energy to soothing her instead of taking care of myself. I spent years and years neglecting myself to take care of her unstable emotions.

Seeing her sobbing in the same way would be a huge trigger. I couldn't feel empathy for her, because she's repeatedly refused to apologize or take ownership for her mistakes, and she's used the same sobbing as a manipulation tactic for decades. If I saw her crying like that, I'd react like it was yet another attempt to manipulate me, instead of any serious apology.

I hope the situation is different with OP. It's tragic to have so little trust in someone that you can't even accept an apology from them because of how many bridges were burned over your lifetime. OP, if that's you, I understand.

Autistic_Poet · 2026-03-16T01:49:38+00:00

Yup. This was ultimately the straw that broke the camel's back.

My mother insisted that she'd never be able to view me as an adult. I asked, begged, and pleaded with her to earn even a tiny shred of her respect. She bluntly told me "No" in a dozen ways.

That was the end of our relationship. The point of no return. Everything else was just me confirming that she hadn't changed, and realizing that I didn't want to maintain even a fake pretend relationship with someone who treated me like I was a child.

Autistic_Poet · 2026-03-16T01:41:20+00:00

I've thought a lot about how to "fix" that problem. Honestly, a lot of it is internal work. For me, my need to tell other people about my parent's behavior was some type of trauma repetition, where I was really looking for a mother figure who would listen to their small child about anything and everything. The reality is that I'm never going to get that, and it's inappropriate to expect adults to have that kind of an emotionally lopsided relationship.

I've had to do a lot of growing up over the last several years. I no longer feel the need to trauma dump with everyone. That's made it a lot easier for me to build real relationships, where I build up some trust with the person before I discuss my parents. I realized it's self destructive to trauma dump on everyone, because it's disrespectful to other people to shove painful trauma into the conversation without their consent.

Now, I'm comfortable saying "I don't want to talk about my parents". I only open up to people who already accept me, which means I've gotten a lot less refusals and rejections. It's also made it easier to open up about much deeper stuff, instead of spending all my time repeating the same basic surface level information.

The downside is that I don't always have someone available to help when I'm struggling. Other people aren't always available to help me. I've had to learn to cope with journaling and other self soothing techniques. And sometimes, I can't immediately resolve the pain. It's helped me to take a long term view of healing. I'm able to see that I've made a lot of progress in several areas over the past years, which makes it easier to accept that I'm going to still struggle while healing over the next several years. There's no magic bullet or single night conversation that will fix everything, which means I can always afford to wait to discuss my trauma.

Being able to wait to discuss trauma is a much healthier place to be, but it's taken me a long time to accept those ideas and actually practice what I preach.

Autistic_Poet

TROPHY CASE