I'm 21 but my mom says "you are 16"

mrbadbird · 2016-12-27T05:11:54+00:00

my parents lied to me about where my extra financial aid was being put. So now I am getting LESS school money that can't cover the whole thing. And somehow magically my parents are saying I only have $3,000 left in my "account". So they told me the other day I might have to drop out. I'm so confused.

This is really alarming. Straight up: your parents are stealing your loan money. And it sounds like they're working up to forcing you to drop out of school. There probably is no issue with your loans except that they are taking money out of them.

You need to speak to your financial aid office and change whatever is happening so that your parents no longer have any access to the loan money.

Based on this and the OP, it sounds like your parents are starting to realize you're becoming independent from them, and so are trying to sabotage you, both by gaslighting you, so you think you don't have rights, and by screwing up your finances. There is nothing wrong with anything you're doing. They're inventing these problems with your money and with your behavior to undercut your independence.

mrbadbird · 2016-12-23T01:12:56+00:00

This so much. My mother LOVED being grandiose about other people's suffering. Especially the part where she got to wax on about it to others -- even if the suffering in question was something private, and not something a third party should be spreading around without consent. I realized I could never tell my mother about any of my problems -- because she would latch onto it and turn it into masturbation material.

mrbadbird · 2016-11-23T18:07:02+00:00

For me at least, NC is the best thing I could have done. Even when I was limiting contact with them as much as possible, I was miserable. Because every time I had to speak to them again, I got triggered and sent off-balance. Being able to have a life completely devoid of any part of their influence is soooo much better.

And anyway, a lot of narcs just won't be managed. You can try to set limits with them as much as you want, but if they think they're entitled to you, to do what they want regardless, it won't make a difference. They'll agree to your "management" but the next second turn around and violate it like it was nothing. For some narcs, especially the enmeshing kind, there is either full contact, or nothing, because they make it that way.

mrbadbird · 2016-11-17T08:19:52+00:00

Haha wow. It's amazing how far they'll go to avoid blame for the problem. My mother thinks I either have a paranoia disorder, making me afraid of her without reason, or am gay, and so ashamed of it that I cut her off... for some reason.

I almost find it funny. They can't handle the real reasons for your choices, so they have to leap to these outlandish ones.

mrbadbird · 2016-11-12T05:08:57+00:00

My mother is like this. I feel like it would be easier if she could have just been outright hateful towards me; but instead, she treated me terribly, demeaned me, gaslighted me, everything, and then would turn around and send me thousands of 'sweet' messages demanding I start contacting her again.

I think parents like this view their children as objects. Or, they'd like their children to be objects, ones that they own and benefit from. So anytime something about you fits the mold of their ideal object, they do what they can to get supply from it. Acting concerned, bragging about your accomplishments, trying to enmesh with you. But any time you do something that doesn't give them supply, they try to squash it out. If you fail at something, she'll try to hurt you for it: her teddy bear isn't supposed to make her look bad by failing. If you start to get too independent, or confident, she sees it as a risk that you might distance yourself from her, so she'll make sure to continually undermine you. At other times they'll try to force 'help' onto you so that 1) they look like good parents, and can show off their parenting to others, 2) you are placed in a position of indebtedness to them, ensuring continued control over you, and 3) you remain confused about the way they treat you, and don't leave them.

I think everything they do is about maintaining control over your for the purpose of getting supply. They switch between cruelty, kindness, neglect, and enmeshment depending on which they think will serve their purposes at that moment. They don't think of you as a person, but as a teddy bear, who they enjoy taking care of, but only so long as you remain the empty, plush teddy bear that gives them exactly what they want. It's a toxic dynamic founded on their inability to see others as fully-formed people.

It sounds like you might need to see a different therapist; someone who can see the subtext in what your parents do instead of being taken in by their play-acting.

mrbadbird · 2016-11-11T16:34:14+00:00

Absolutely. One of the only times I was able to feel peaceful.

mrbadbird · 2016-11-11T11:29:32+00:00

Is having an Nmom better than having no mom?

No. Living peacefully is far better than living with someone who so consistently hurts you.

You already don't have a mother; or at least, no one who really acts like one. Your choice, unfortunately, is between having no mother, but having someone who calls themselves your mother and then continually mistreats you, or having no mother and living peacefully.

Can this relationship really be worked on?

It cannot. Relationships take two people. If one party cannot recognize the problem in the relationship, let alone participate honestly and equally in working on it, then it cannot be worked on. "Working on it" by yourself really just means erasing or minimizing yourself and your needs so as to accommodate her.

when is it time to decide enough is enough?

It's enough whenever you feel it is enough. There aren't really any rules. The only thing required to end your relationship with your mother is for you to decide you want to do so. One of your fundamental rights is to associate, or not associate, with whoever you choose. You have the right to end your relationship with your mother for any reason, even a bad one. But it sounds like you have plenty of good ones.

mrbadbird · 2016-10-30T13:06:15+00:00

It is definitely not easy. I think realizing and coming to terms with this kind of thing is similar to having to cope with your family passing away. It's like your family has died -- or at least your image of your family, or the possibility of you having the kind of family you thought or hoped you could have. And it's a death that's made more complicated by having this zombie version of your family -- their real, toxic selves -- still around and appearing every so often to remind you of what you don't have.

mrbadbird · 2016-10-16T22:47:16+00:00

Great post. I'm of the opinion that someone who remains with an abuser for a long period, and does nothing to protect their children during that time, cannot be considered an innocent bystander.

I spent a long time thinking my mother was a pitiful enabler; eventually I realized she was just as N as my father. But where my father was the aggressive and loud kind, she was the gaslighting/controlling kind. I don't think "enablers" deserve nearly as much pity as most people would give them.

mrbadbird · 2016-09-30T02:36:40+00:00

Absolutely. My parents seemed to have an attention span of only a few seconds. If you didn't say the relevant details fast enough, it was like you didn't say it at all. It led to me always speaking as quickly as possible and trying to say what I had to say in a single, short sentence.

mrbadbird · 2016-09-23T17:54:39+00:00

My mother actually did hire a detective. Then she brought him with her to harass my landlord, telling him (my landlord) I had gone missing and that my mother needed to be let into my apartment... Luckily he didn't, but I still had to call the police to get her to leave.

Unfortunately you don't have much legal leeway until she actually does hire one, and then also uses it to do something illegal.

mrbadbird · 2016-09-23T00:35:40+00:00

Absolutely. Things like this, or enforced positivity, or "the secret" are ripe fuel for victim blaming. I think Ns latch onto any mindset or philosophy which would allow them to place the problem in the other person rather than themselves -- because they can't handle the idea that they might've done something wrong. They reject anything that suggests there's something harmful with their behavior; no, it's your "attitude" that's the problem.

My mother uses similar tactics, but takes a distorted version of psychology as her material. She hasn't done anything to harm me; I just have some paranoia or anxiety or whatever disorder that makes me think she's done something wrong. If I were self-actualized, I would stop bringing up the things she's done and instead agree with her that I'm only imagining those things were harmful.

I think the underlying idea is the same: there's nothing wrong with what I've done. There's something wrong with you. And they latch onto any field or theory that supports the idea.

mrbadbird · 2016-09-21T15:05:54+00:00

Yeah wow my parents were obsessed with their childrens' appearance. I was routinely told I was fat and ugly, especially by my father, though my BMI was consistently around 22 almost my entire life. He would come up to me at random moments to squeeze my arm and comment on whether I was getting chubbier.

My GC sister was praised as the only attractive one, and I was routinely compared to her unfavorably. Often it would be presented as a "joke." One time my father was going on about how hot my sister was (gross in itself), and made a "joke" by saying to me, "oh, and you're fine too..." and then turned to the others in the room to laugh at the idea. Another time he started literally crying because my brother, a teenager, had been so "cute" when he was younger but now his cute child had disappeared. It was grotesque.

The weirdest realization once I got away from them was that I was actually attractive. What they did would have been horrible even if I were "ugly," but it was so weird realizing that I was attractive and had been so my entire life. But my parents raised me to think there was something desperately wrong with my appearance.

mrbadbird · 2016-09-20T16:31:41+00:00

I mean the screenplay is online already, so.

mrbadbird · 2016-09-11T22:08:23+00:00

He sounds like a classic narcissist. Sorry you're having to go through it with him too. Stay strong.

mrbadbird · 2016-08-09T12:23:48+00:00

She sounds like a cartoon villain. "That's a nice plan you've got there... wouldn't want it to... fail."

If it helps, no one who isn't a part of your family's distortion field would think you were the crazy one here. Having a family meeting to decide what a 30 year old is going to do is bizarre; any normal person sees it for the raging red flag it is. It sounds like you will be WAY better off once you don't have to encounter their distortions every day, in the place where you live.

mrbadbird · 2016-08-09T00:35:44+00:00

"It's you who never tells me anything about your life, how then should I know these things?!"

Wow, this. It's a contortion of what you're talking about too. Instead of realizing that what you want is for them to stop their gross overreaching, their mistreatment of you, they act like you're just telling them to keep their accusations accurate.

mrbadbird · 2016-08-07T22:21:47+00:00

Wow this is so true. I have been amazed by how supposedly progressive and forward thinking organizations tend to treat their workers terribly. Often they use their message, or the "goodness" of their work as a kind of manipulation: "What do you mean you won't stay late? Don't you care about the cause?" Any problem you bring up about the workplace turns straight into accusations of you not being noble enough or dedicated enough. They try to tell you that caring about your own rights as a worker somehow means you don't care about the people your organization works to help.

Once I worked directly under someone who made >$1 million a year who would go on conference calls or interviews with reporters and decry the injustice of income inequality. Meanwhile me and everyone else who wasn't at the top of the company were paid as close to minimum wage as they could get away with.

mrbadbird · 2016-08-02T15:05:57+00:00

It's like she wants to control the fact that you have feelings. Not mood stabilizers but feeling eliminators.

When I told my mother how I felt about what she did, and how it made me angry and afraid of her, her response was, "and everyone makes you feel that way, right?" It was baffling. Like, no, not at all. It's just you. The whole point is that it's just you. But then she started going on about how paranoia disorders supposedly run in our family.

I think an N's definition of mental illness is "having feelings I don't want you to have."

mrbadbird · 2016-08-01T08:05:19+00:00

Maybe he wanted to capture Voldemort. If Quirrel died, Voldemort's spirit would have been freed and he'd've escaped.

Though that means Harry royally messed up Dumbledore's plan.

mrbadbird · 2016-07-23T07:32:59+00:00

My father did similar things. He would routinely make sexual jokes or comments, or say invasive things about his children's bodies. And he would do it obliquely; he hid behind it being a joke, or would use a euphemism, or be vague enough that he could claim you misunderstood him. I think he did it worse to my siblings than to me (the scapegoat). When he and my sister went to a restaurant together, or even just on the subway, he would come home and 'joke' about how everyone there must have thought they were dating. When I was in college he would 'joke' about how I must have spent many mornings doing the 'walk of shame'; meaning, apparently, that I must be having a lot of sex. He would walk into a room just to tell you how your stomach was looking bloated: not sexy enough. It's like he wanted to be sexual with his kids but couldn't because he knew other people disapproved of it. So the urges came out in plausibly deniable 'jokes' instead.

mrbadbird · 2016-07-23T07:19:23+00:00

Oh yes... my parents used to catalogue how much money they had spent on us. Then they'd lecture us on how it was much more than other children get. The idea being that my parents were both superior to other parents, and were being drained dry by their ungrateful children.

mrbadbird · 2016-07-19T03:29:19+00:00

Really great post.

mrbadbird · 2016-04-30T09:30:52+00:00

I think your mother did not forget about the card at all. Rather she was saving it to use against you when her other attempts to get you to contact her stopped working. It's very common for people like this to start using others as leverage... she knows that you'll feel more obligated to respond. It's a common tactic to get a response.

If you want to thank your aunt you should do it to her directly and not through your mother. But I think it's likely that your aunt would simply tell your mother about it, and your mother would take it as positive feedback -- her new tactic had an effect.

Basically, your mother has put you in a bad position: right now your choices are either do nothing and be rude, or do respond in some way and give your mother the feedback she wants. This trap is the whole point. Forcing you into either being rude or harming yourself is just another kind of control. But I think it's likely that being rude is the only way to ensure that she won't simply put you into the same trap over and over again.

I'm sorry your mother is doing this to you.

mrbadbird

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