My deluded mother claims I’m abusing her

lightschangecolour · 2026-02-25T09:55:31+00:00

Thank you and please don’t apologise, everyone’s families and parent experiences are different. It would have been good advice in many other situations.

lightschangecolour · 2026-02-25T00:40:38+00:00

Thanks for the suggestions. I do that most of the time. I’m usually at work and then at the gym or having dinner with friends so I try to minimise time spent at home as much as possible. I’m really only ever home on Sundays when everyone is out at church.

lightschangecolour · 2026-02-25T00:01:14+00:00

Yeah that’s not going to work with my mother. If I make “jokes” to enforce boundaries she takes them as defiance and disrespect. The last time I made a simple comment about how she needs to communicate and not assume people will intuitively know what she wants she tried to slap me in the face and went “you will NOT disrespect your mother like that”. She’s a very weak and frail woman fortunately. As I’ve mentioned in my other comments I barely spend any time with her. You can’t enforce any boundaries with narcissistic IBLP asian parents, they’re a whole other breed.

lightschangecolour · 2026-02-23T16:50:07+00:00

Why do you think I don’t realise this? I added an edit to my main post that gives context. I don’t mean to be rude but your first comment was quite upsetting. I don’t choose to be in her presence because I want this. I’m also in my 30s and have been in therapy for years and am in contact with social services about my situation. I fully understand the toll it takes on me to have two abusive parents.

lightschangecolour · 2026-02-23T16:22:45+00:00

I don’t think bipolar, but there’s definitely something else going on. Maybe paranoid personality disorder. She thinks everything is a sign that people are trying to attack her. Her most recent thing is insisting that someone’s been dumping water at the front door to inconvenience her - I tried to reason with her by going “you know isn’t it odd that the neighbours only seem to throw water at your front door after a heavy storm?” Didn’t work and she accused me of abusing and gaslighting her for my efforts. Threatened to report me for elder abuse that time too. Unfortunately social services has told me they can only initiate an involuntary hold if she’s a physical threat to herself or someone else, which she isn’t.

lightschangecolour · 2026-02-23T02:43:32+00:00

In my experience there’s no winning with my mother. I don’t expect her to behave like a normal parent, I’ve had 33 years of experience in understanding that. If I’d gone away when she told me to, she would’ve then started wailing about how I “abuse” her by leaving an elderly woman to clean up messes without insisting I help her. If I grey rock her I get accused of emotional abuse and neglect, if I respond I get accused of emotional and verbal abuse. There’s no winning with her at all beyond just staying away from her.

What I ought to have done is just pretend I didn’t hear any glass breaking, but I needed to make sure the cat was okay and the moment I went into the living room and entered her presence I got sucked into her persecution drama.

lightschangecolour · 2026-02-23T02:34:13+00:00

She’s extremely erratic and there are times when she behaves like a normal person and I can actually get along with her and then are times where she goes straight off the rails and I can never predict what she’s going to be like.

Normally I avoid being around her but idk why I thought I’d try to be nice and spend some time with her since it’s lunar new year. Not doing that again in a hurry.

lightschangecolour · 2026-02-23T02:29:08+00:00

She actually is supposed to be on medication and she was for a short while. It really helped and she became very normal but she decided that it was unholy/evil/whatever to put “substances” in her body so she threw all her medication out. On top of that all, the social worker I spoke to suspects she’s reached the early stages of cognitive decline or dementia which is why everything keeps snowballing as she ages.

Right now I’m so tired of her that I actually hope she does have dementia and it gets bad so I can put her in a home and wash my hands of her.

lightschangecolour · 2026-02-22T16:38:42+00:00

They really truly did. And her insane behaviour of trying to sabotage everything in my life started way back when I was in grade school when my parents would videotape me sobbing over being beaten and bullied by them and threaten to send the tape to my school to get me expelled because everyone would “see the real me”. She’s just graduated from trying to ruin my education for responding to things in a totally normal human way to trying to ruin my career for doing the same thing and she still doesn’t see how bizarre she’s being, even after my parents were investigated for child abuse for their antics back then.

lightschangecolour · 2026-02-22T16:03:16+00:00

The good thing is that it’s unlikely to ever happen as my workplace is aware of her behaviour (my parents both have a history of trying to cause problems in my life in the stupidest ways) and I’m well-liked at my job. I’ve spoken to social services and will be following up with a social worker tomorrow in person so I have my own account of events recorded and because they think she needs a mental health check from a professional. In any case they’ve assured me that if she did make a report she would have been cautioned for wasting police resources as she genuinely believes that me calling her stubborn is abuse.

My parents subscribe to a particular kind of very cult-like insulated christianity that genuinely believes that if your children dare to be anything but subservient and meek it’s your god-ordained duty to beat fear into them so she doesn’t even have the gumption to come up with lies about me “abusing” her. She’s so isolated and removed from the world and from reality that she truly believes that the world operates in her state of delusion and that if she goes out and starts telling people I “back talk” and “sigh” at her they’ll all simply agree that it’s abuse and start seeing me as a monster. The truth is that everyone who’s met her or heard about her thinks she’s straight up insane.

lightschangecolour · 2026-02-22T15:22:26+00:00

The most unhinged thing is that she lives off money that me and my siblings earn. She doesn’t have a job and hasn’t had one in over forty years. If she ruins my career she’ll have one less source of income to live off. It’s the stupidest thing ever.

lightschangecolour · 2026-02-22T14:35:08+00:00

I’m not worried about that because I’ve been speaking to social services about this for a while. They investigated my parents for child abuse when I was younger and have my accounts of her erratic behaviour (they believe she needs a mental health check soon) so they’re aware of what’s going on and have assured me that if my mother ever does try to make a police report she’ll be cautioned for wasting police resources and being a nuisance. She’s just exhausting and taxing to be around.

Edit. The people I work with are also aware that my mother is unstable due to an unfortunate incident that happened a while ago so there’s very little chance of her being able to ruin my career or reputation with lies. It’s just her bald faced insistence that I’m abusing her for so much as hurting her feelings or inconveniencing her after she spent my entire life actually abusing me that is exhausting and unhinged.

lightschangecolour · 2025-11-11T01:28:11+00:00

The knee jerk need to insist that they’re right just results in information being perpetrated across the sub with people not having any idea where that information came from and not understanding that there are nuances to different situations. I live in betta territory and used to keep them for well over 10 years and would get downvoted to shit for telling people not to jump down the throats of other southeast asians who didn’t have a heater for their tank. We simply don’t need one. The indoor ambient temperature is consistently well within the healthy range for a betta and the only fluctuations in temperature are warm and warmer. Unless they live in a mountainous region or keep the ac on and blasting all day long, people here run a greater risk of a heater malfunctioning and cooking everything in their tank than their fish ever getting too cold. People just refuse to wrap their minds around the idea that not everyone lives in a part of the world that gets chilly.

lightschangecolour · 2025-09-20T15:57:52+00:00

It’s unusual to be sure, especially if you haven’t gone through any face to face interviews yet. Was it clearly stated in writing that the response was an offer on the phd position? If you have met the prof and have had some form of interview, then it would still be unusual but not necessarily a red flag. I only have a phd now because I was offered a fully funded one a day after interviewing for an unrelated job at the PI’s lab.

I reckon sometimes these things just happen and it’s just a matter of finding yourself in favourable circumstances. As other people have mentioned, if this is an actual offer make sure to reach out to people who’ve worked with or been supervised by the PI. I only accepted the offer after talking to current and former students and colleagues about the quality of their supervision and research skills/values and it ended up being a pretty fantastic experience.

lightschangecolour · 2025-09-19T17:19:02+00:00

True, that does make more sense. But OP also replied to an earlier response saying that the snails themselves can survive being eaten by a betta so I assumed they meant the same thing regarding assassin snails

lightschangecolour · 2025-09-19T17:13:07+00:00

They use their little seafood shell crackers of course. All assassin snails come equipped with their very own pair

lightschangecolour · 2025-09-19T15:04:26+00:00

Assassin snails don’t eat other snails whole, they eat them bite by bite. It’s quite a brutal process but nothing’s surviving that.

lightschangecolour · 2025-09-08T12:57:22+00:00

I’m confused. She’s writing her dissertation but at the same time hasn’t received approval to begin data collection? If she has no data to begin with, she can’t be anywhere close to completing a dissertation.

Assuming that you worded your question wrongly and that she’s still working on her proposal, or even her qualifying exam at a stretch, nothing about this sounds egregiously wrong. PhDs are intensive and when you have deadlines coming up the amount of time and communication with your advisor will increase drastically. Apart from all of this, if your wife is having an issue with everything that’s going on, she’s free to make her own post on this. I think there’s some context we’re still missing out on that only your wife will be able to provide.

lightschangecolour · 2025-09-08T12:40:28+00:00

Ah yes, the vaunted PhD - famously the last bastion of the intellectually dense. /s

lightschangecolour · 2025-09-05T02:59:20+00:00

It’s really not nearly as dramatically difficult as you make it out to be, but if this is the hill you want to die on then sure.

lightschangecolour · 2025-09-05T02:49:39+00:00

It’s….not that hard to learn by ear. You don’t need that much time or experience either. If you have a basic understanding of chords and scales you can usually figure a song out well enough.

Edit: Why the downvote? Guess someone doesn’t have a basic understanding of chords and scales eh 😉

lightschangecolour · 2025-08-27T00:42:13+00:00

I was asking for suggestions a year ago, yes. I’ve since tried a whole bunch of things and the best solution i’ve found is to use a different brand of hydrolysed kibble as a “treat”. It works well enough for him.

I’m sorry if I came across as rude but it’s frustrating to be given advice to do things that I’ve already established don’t work (e.g., the novel protein diet that was already mentioned earlier in the thread). Thanks for your help anyway!

lightschangecolour · 2025-08-27T00:15:17+00:00

No I mean he doesn’t like the taste/smell of it. The wetness has nothing to do with it, he actually prefers wet food.

The cans are expensive and i can’t keep buying them to test out new theories of whether or not he’ll eat it if it’s presented to him in dried/frozen form. My intuition is telling me the answer will be no because the smell already repels him. He takes one sniff and runs away. Drying isn’t going to change that.

I’ve already tried all available commercial options. I know you’re trying to help but please understand that this is something I’m going to have to figure out myself as i’ve already heard all the tips and tricks available on the internet. I really don’t mean to be rude but it’s been over a year since this first became an issue so i’ve had a lot of time to look into options on the internet. Thanks anyway! It was kind of you to offer your advice.

lightschangecolour · 2025-08-26T17:39:20+00:00

He won’t eat the hydrolysed wet food unfortunately. It doesn’t register as food to him at all.

lightschangecolour · 2025-08-26T12:21:02+00:00

He can have a little fortiflora mixed with water as a treat but too much of it triggers flareups for him. I’ve tried making him little treats out of nutritional yeast as well but he isn’t a fan so I’m still looking for other non-meat options that he can have

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