PARENTAL EMOTIONAL ABUSE

Shared Experiences & Stories: Gallery of Wounded Cubs

Ever since I reported on the high suicide rate of Asian American students, I’ve been thinking of writing something for them that addresses cultural conditioning.

Here is what I have observed from my own experience and coming from a first-generation Asian immigrant family:

• Many Asian parents are amazing at using manipulation, guilt, and self-pity to get their kids to do whatever they want, or at least make them most miserable if the kids disobey. They aren’t necessarily being malicious on purpose, they just learned it from their parents.

• I need to live the life I want to live, NOW, or I’ll die living the expectations of my parents, and do a crappy job at it anyway because I’d be miserable.

• Most families – Asian or other – are pretty dysfunctional. I know I’m not the only daughter who has ever fallen victim to a mentally unstable mother. Knowing that I’m not the person this has ever happened to makes me feel less alone and more optimistic about overcoming these mental and emotional obstacles I’ve built over the years.

• I get depressed because I turn anger inwards, on myself, instead of expressing anger and setting boundaries.

• The harder I resist and try to change who my parents are, the harder I fail, because I can’t change my parents to get them to love me the way I want them to love me.

• I have learned to count my blessings and appreciate friends and my spouse for loving me the way that I want to be loved.

Up until a few years ago, I would get into fights with my mother whenever she starts to “talk trash.” What I mean by “talking trash” is making condescending statements or saying things to elicit guilt in other people or being very negative or wallowing in self-pity. She knows how to push my buttons, and I let her push my buttons.

One afternoon we were speaking on the telephone, and my mother started "talking trash". She made comments like she shouldn’t have brought us to the US, and how we don’t behave like caring children because we never visited, and how her friends’ children treated their mothers so well compared with how we treated her, and if she died we probably wouldn’t care one iota.

Sound familiar?

Normally, my brain would pick up the signal to pick a fight and try to prove to her that she was wrong and that she should look at her own behaviors and that we were good kids.

For some reason I got sick of resisting that day, and something else came out of my mouth. I started agreeing with her.

I agreed that she shouldn’t have brought us to America. I agreed that we were crappy kids. I agreed that she was all alone and being ignored. I agreed that we might as well have come out from a rock. I agreed with whatever she was complaining about, and I offered no solution or reconciliation or amends whatsoever.

And she grew quiet and we ended the conversation rather well because we had no argument.

The toughest part about this technique is working with my ego to swallow the insults and offer no resistance and agreeing with something I didn’t agree with. But with practice, my ego got over it and my mother’s manipulation loosened its grip on my sanity.

The strange thing is that our relationship has actually improved since I stopped resisting, even when I have offered her no behavioral changes on my part.

I’m not going to lie and say that my emotionally and mental well-being has completely recovered from the different things I had endured with my mother when I was a little girl. To this day I still work on my mental conditioning and internal messages on a daily basis – so we’re talking about 30+ years and counting. But each day, I get a little better and I unlearn a little bit of the cruel messages I had learned to believe about who I am.

And it can get better for you too.

STOP Pushing Mom's Rage Buttons

My answer to the question, “How do I stop my mum from constantly descending into a huge fit of rage, in which she bringing up “bad” things that I had “done to her” from ages ago?” This adult child feels like walking on egg shells around mum and no matter how child reasons, mum descends into a rage.

You cannot change your mum, just like you cannot change anyone not yourself.

(Even ourselves: I don’t know about you, but I find myself quite stubborn and difficult to change!)

However, you can shift the dynamics of your interactions.

This is a way to then shape how you communicate with each other.

You and your mum have settled into a comfortable albeit unproductive method of communicating, that involves a lot of shouting, which then triggers an emotional “Rage” button within mum.

Once pushed, the Rage button then seeks to engage all matters that reinforces rage and why mum is righteously enraged. This leads to bringing up past issues that confirms for mum why she must be enraged.

This is why you see the phenomenon – the “cause and effect” you see.

Reasoning does not work because logic threatens the “Rage” button. Any threats will create a level of resistance equal or greater than perceived threat.

By you trying to ‘reason” with mum, you might as well be saying to her, “oh grow up, mum, stop being a baby,” which really really REALLY pisses off mum. It doesn’t matter that you don’t mean this – what matters is how mum interprets this.

A novel idea to changing the dynamics of the relationship is to remove the dance of resistance you have developed with each other.

Let mum have her feelings in a way that also removes YOUR response from feeding into this vicious cycle.

Instead of saying, “I’m sorry mum!”

Say, “It’s too bad your life is so awful, mum.”

Say in neutral tone, and keep the same level of neutrality every single time. Practice your neutral face, the way your face looks when you say something like, “this book has a blue cover” or “the monitor is dusty.”

“It’s too bad you are wronged all your life, mum.”

“It’s too bad you have such a bad life, mum.”

“It’s too bad you think your kid sucks, mum.”

“It’s too bad you believe your child has done bad things to you, mum.”

…etc.

Notice how in the above statements, YOU are not in it.

You are showing mum that you notice what she is feeling, and you are simply echoing what she is saying, without you interpreting what this means about YOU or how you are as a child or an adult.

You are being a sounding chamber, letting mum hear her own feelings.

Sometimes people need to hear what they are saying from someone else’s mouths to really hear what they are saying and how strange or dysfunctional the words sound.

Eventually she will no longer get that adrenaline rush of being engaged in a dramatic shouting match.

It may take weeks - months - years but eventually it will get boring for mum.

When there is no resistance, there is no fight.

When there is no fight, there is no “fight or flight response”.

When there is no fight or flight response, mum’s body doesn’t produce the druggy high of adrenaline rush.

When there is no druggy high, there is reduced occasion of pleasure.

This is perverse pleasure that people can develop, a sick way to remind themselves that they are still alive, and that they still “feel”.

How to Deal with a Clingy Overbearing Mother

A question on Quora asked,

“How can one deal with an overbearing, overly clingy mother without hurting her feelings or compromising one’s boundaries? I am my mother’s only child. I love her to death and I am her whole world. I’m also 30 years old and I’ve lived in different states for years, have a great career and a great life. I call my mother every day (she goes ballistic if I don’t and starts calling the police and local hospitals because she worries something may have happened to me). She also very persistently pushes her points of view on many of the things I share with her, even if I’ve told her that I disagree and that her ongoing pushiness is causing me stress… So, over the years, I began to share less and less with her, especially on the subjects that I knew from experience would cause ongoing, negative reactions from her. She has recently begun to realize that we’re no longer as “close” and that I’ve established boundaries, so she is now persistently trying to break them. I’ve tried talking to her and explaining that if only she reacted differently, we could have a better relationship, but this was to no avail. She continues to act the same way and now also to be evermore intrusive and demanding of my time and of the personal things that lie beyond the boundaries I have drawn for her.”

Let me go through some parts of your question that stood out for me:

“I love her to death and I am her whole world.”

There is a difference between loving a parent because of the life experiences and the child-parent bond that has developed over your 3 decades of life, versus a mutually parasitic dependency that will, actually, suffocate and kill any prospect of growth for both you *and* your mother.

This is not true love, but your mutual way of manipulating each others’ emotions. You aren’t in love. You’re at war, and emotional manipulation is the weapon you’ve both learned how to use. But this is understandable because this is the only way you’ve both thus far learned to identify as “love”.

It sounds like at this point you’re recognizing that something doesn’t feel quite right and you’re looking for a different way of relating with each other, a different way to love that can be supportive – not suffocating – of both of you.

"I call my mother every day (she goes ballistic if I don’t and starts calling the police and local hospitals because she worries something may have happened to me)."

Your mother has projected herself wholly onto you such that she may have regressed to the emotional dependency of toddler: very young children genuinely believe that if their parents are out of sight, their parents have completely disappeared forever. Even younger children assume that their mother is an organic part of them, and they will panic and scream when their mother has moved a distance beyond what the children have acclimated to.

Thus, your mother may have grown her life and self identity into you for so many years that she really is in a panic when you don’t “check in” predictably.

You now have a choice to make: you can be like a parent who does not want her child to panic and cry and conform yourself to the comfort zone of this child at the expense of the child’s learning independence and your own life — or you can be a parent who helps her child learn that the parent who is out of sight *will* come back.

Should you choose to make the latter decision, you can begin by telling your mother that you are going to call her much later than she was used to. If I had my way I’d say, “Mom, instead of calling you tomorrow, I’m going to call you the day after tomorrow, at 9am.”

But if she has grown so used to this pattern because you have trained her to expect your clocking-in, then you may need to take baby steps.

“Mom, instead of calling you tomorrow at 9am, I’m going to call you at 8pm, and if you call me during the day I am not going to be able to answer you. From the hours of 9am to 8pm, I am going to be fine, and you’ll be fine too. In fact, let’s talk about what you can do during those hours until we talk and you can tell me about what you did.”

You do this for a few days or a week then you draw out the time between calls to the frequency you feel works for you. Maybe it’s once a week or every other week.

"She has recently begun to realize that we’re no longer as “close” and that I’ve established boundaries, so she is now persistently trying to break them."

This is because your mother is smart, as young children who no longer get what they want are smart. I don’t fault her for pulling out all the tricks. I’ve seen them all from my 3 year old when I’m putting him in a new situation that forces him to acclimate.

I know you may find this hard to believe, but I know that when I make my child find his own inner resources, I am giving him the kind of “love” that will help him grow and learn to believe that he has what it takes to be a whole human being without my constant physical presence. I have sat in the parking lot hiding in my car crying because of the pain I feel when I see my boy screaming and crying because he knows I’m going to be leaving him even for a few minutes.

But I do it, because this is not about how I feel, it’s about how he grows. I know you love your mom, and you understand what I’m talking about. This is going to be as painful for you as it will be for her, and this means you have to put your “great love” for her above any excuses your pain will tell you.

It’s going to be hard as hell. But you will get through it. So will she.

"I’ve tried talking to her and explaining that if only she reacted differently, we could have a better relationship, but this was to no avail."

This is because she has not yet come to the same level of awareness that you may have at this point. There is no use in trying to explain to her using the same abstract ideas if she cannot understand it fully. You’ll only frustrate the both of you.

Instead of telling her what you don’t want to talk about, tell her what you do want to talk about, or find something new to talk about. You can also set some ground rules of how you will go about “talking”. If rules are violated, there are reminders, then warnings, then the termination of the discussion. Do not ever deviate from the ground rules. Eventually you will be able to have a conversation where you hang up feeling like you’ve had a good talk rather than screaming at each other or you seething in passive aggressive silence.

I hope this is helpful and I wish you strength and courage to change this course of love between you and your mom.

Why You Still Cry When Your Parents Hurt You

This is my answer to the following question on Quora:

"Why do i shed genuine tears when my parents confront me? I am in my mid 20s living with my parents. We’re emotionally closed up. We live together but never converse. I am bitter of my childhood and relations we’ve had. Is this it? I was recently diagnosed with depression and was on meds. I think i might have a problem i can’t pin. I just got back to smoking marijuana."

First, I’m so sorry to hear about your relationship, this is not a trivial factor because we all form an idea of “self” and “relationship of self with other” from adults on whom we depend. For most children, these adults are parents.

Thus the way your parents treated you and related with you forms a foundation for the way you learn to relate to yourself, treat yourself — and relate to them/treat them.

The reason why you shed genuine tears is not from bitterness, although it’s tempting to think these are tears of anger when the situation and events surrounding your growing up can cause much feelings of anger.

I think you’re oscillating from feelings of anger and sadness and denial — sometimes within the same day or even the same interaction with your parents — because you are grieving.

You are grieving for the parents you deserved but did not have, because they were not capable of loving you the way you needed to be loved. They were not able to relate with you the way you needed to be related. They didn’t know how to treat you the way you needed to be treated (with love, respect, tenderness, a full but light heart — maybe you can grasp what I mean.)

Because you are entering adulthood and begin separating your sense of self from your parents’ sense of “who you are” (and it sounds like their sense of you can be skewed, because of their own past experiences) — you realize deep down that there is a slim or no chance of that little child within you ever getting from your parents what that little child deserves in the first place (love, respect, tenderness, a full but light heart.)

This makes you grieve.

Your grief is made worse by your clinical depression and the fact that your parents inflict new wounds while opening up old wounds of your relationship, so that you feel like your soul can not ever truly start the healing process.

First, I urge you to seek treatment from licensed professionals and see whether you need medication therapy or psychotherapy — for me personally, I needed both at the beginning — later I relied on psychotherapy when I had a relapse. This is not a “one shot deal” — it can take years of effort and I speak from personal experience when I say, “I’m WORTH the effort.”

Second, I urge you not to take an escape (such as smoking marijuana, or other forms of escapes) that numbs your pain, because the only way you get through this is by living through this with both eyes wide open (metaphorically) and escaping simply delays the inevitable requirement for you to live through this and breathe through this.

Third, I urge you to consider the reality that your sense of self never really depended on your parents' view of you, that you are whole and intact as a person. You are wading through a deluge of conflicting messages in your mind — there is the sane messages you know to be true, “I am a good, I am enough, I am whole” and there is the insane messages you know to be false, “I am evil, I will never be good enough, I don’t deserve love” — you are escaping from the big battle between these two types of messages.

You know what happens when you try to fight a battle with your eyes closed, or with a broken foot, or with a fuzzy mind. Now imagine this is a battle that will keep raging on until you live through it and emerge triumphant.

And I believe you can indeed emerge, triumphant — as your whole and intact self that you’ve always been — only now you can see it with the appropriate pair of eyes and not from your parents’ pairs of eyes.

I did it, you can too.

Why Mom or Dad Doesn’t Change

There is no age limit to personal change.

But there is a real age-based burden to personal history, which prevents personal change.

If your mother has built a whole identity and life around being stressed and afraid:

She has too much personal history invested in this identity, including how to interact with her friends and family, to change this.

Her whole life… all of her personal relationships… is revolved around being stressed and being fearful, then having her psychic energy (or emotional energy) fed from helpful family members who are very distressed at her level of fear and stress preventing her from living her life to the fullest.

She is already living her life to the fullest, the way she is habituated* to live: her life is full of stress and fear. She gets love and attention from being stressed out and fearful. This much she knows. She is habituated to it. She is conditioned to this “normal.”

The only time when a person is willing to change is when the pain of staying the same far exceeds the fear of changing.

Otherwise you can have a person any age, who lacks willingness to change.

Maybe there’s no need to tell her what she already knows.

Maybe try, “Mom, you’re stressed and afraid. Guess what, that’s OK, I’m not going to try to change you. Life and everything is always going to be really stressful for you, and I know you’re used to it, and you can handle it.”

Maybe go and live your own life, and include her when you can accommodate her being stressed and afraid, and in situations where you cannot accommodate, you don’t include her.

___________________________________________

*I purposely use “habituated” because I’m equating this as an addiction.]

Toxic Families and Emotional Abuse Questions

Sometimes I get reader emails about toxic families and emotional abuse related questions. Most of the time these are questions relating to ways of “breaking free” from those psychological chains. I think many of my site visitors can benefit from my answers, and to protect the askers’ identities I will only post my answers. I hope what I share can help you in some way.

How can I accept being born into a Toxic Family?

There is nothing else you need to do about this fact, to accept this reality, because it’s already done, and you’re here. You are only “resisting” the reality that you were born into a toxic family.

[Note: I think often it’s not about us accepting this, but trying not to blame ourselves as if we had something to do with the choices and behaviors that our family members make. We cannot – CANNOT – change other people including family members!]

How can I feel good about myself without my parents’ approval?

With daily practice, and the possibility that you will not always succeed, at least, at the beginning. At the beginning you will feel like 99% of the time you can’t feel good about yourself without their approval, and maybe 1% of the time that day, you experience a momentary respite where you feel valued and worthwhile as a human being.

The secret is not to give up or believe that it will always stay 99%/1%. In time, it may become 90%/10%, then 85%/15% then 75%/25% then 50%/50% then 25%/75%.

In fact I’d say that right now I’m at 1%/99% to 5%/95% depending on my mood or day. But this is a long way from long time ago, when it was 95%/5% to 99%/1% where you may feel that you are now.

How did you do it so successfully?

As I had said above, I am not always 100% successful, and in fact, I fail often. But I fail less than I succeed now, and I consider that “successful”.

[Note: our success is really a sum total of all our little successes and failures – if we succeed MORE OFTEN than we fail, then we are ultimately successful. Remember it’s not about NEVER FAILING! That’s not being human.]

On the feelings of emptiness – or feeling empty/hollow inside

I feel that way too, and for a long time, I keep trying to fill it in some way:

“Should I keep looking for God?” “Should I start another project?” “Should I write that book I keep wanting to write for my mental health source page visitors?”…etc. etc. etc.

The truth is, most people feel “empty” sometimes, in one way or another. If we always felt full, we’d have no need to search, to ask better questions, to seek the truth, and make dreams come true. We’d be in nirvana, and there is then really little need for the human experience.

I may be wrong in this department. Remember, you’re getting this from someone who considers herself FAR from enlightenment, and still quite full of ego 🙂 I can only say that I no longer let that feeling of emptiness ruin my day.

You will come to learn that the emotional traumas of daily life may be real, but you can choose not to give it as big of a “seat” at the table of your house.

Right now look at it this way: you have given your traumatic history the biggest seat at the head of the table – a throne, at that. Your goal is to first demote it to sit at the side of the table, take away that throne and give it a smaller chair, and eventually a stool in the corner of the table, so that it becomes barely noticeable and certainly no longer in the way of your own family’s happy family times.

One strategy I’ve even tried, is to pretend this trauma is a physical form. Then I will sometimes tell it to go to a Starbucks for a few hours and let me alone. If I decide that I get too lonely and want that trauma back, I will go find it.

I hope this gives you some comfort. It’s OK to be a human being. It’s also important to recognize that people closest to us may hurt us, but no one can ever touch that part of you that cannot be truly injured by human ignorance and even malice.