This is one thing my mother and I went through over and over and over when I was younger.
My mother was extremely fearful and highly codependent. I wasn't. I was more of an explorer and eventually moved to England when I was 30 against my mother's will for me. She helped me get a mortgage on a home I didn't want, but I bought it because she wanted me to get it. Turns out this was because my brother needed a garage to work in when he came to visit in the summertime, and so they concocted a plan to sell the house to me without my knowing it, so that he could work there. One morning he showed up in my driveway and started working the garage as he'd always done before. After 5 years, I took matters into my own hands and sold the house, using the money to live in London England. This was during the times of the IRA bombings that I lived in London, and my mother was having conniptions fearing I would be killed in an IRA bombing. In fact the IRA was active for 25 years and there were only 115 deaths in all that time so the likelihood of them singling me out was pretty remote. In my mother's mind, this was a conceivable reality. My mother was terrified of having her kids grow up, for one thing, but then terrified of losing them which was her interpretation of our becoming adult - it had more to do with losing control over her energy source. I believe that her fear of feeling a normal range of emotions fed this fear, but the irony of that is that she lived with this anxiety always. Often people fear fear and this is what she was doing. This led to her being extremely controlling. Her inability to let go and let her children live led to a mass rebellion, which was initiated by me, of course. I was the inspiration for my siblings' standing up to my mother and her overwhelming fears which she tried to foist upon us by being extremely controlling of how we lived our lives. We'd all had enough of it. My mother alternated between extreme fear and being extremely demanding, controlling and manipulative. And this was for a couple reasons: she needed to control others in order to reduce her fears about them, and she needed to control others to gain an energy supply as hers was so depleted. She was a classic energy vampire and her vacillating between causing drama and chaos and then controlling us into erupting in fits was her way of replenishing the energy that was being taken primarily by my father. You can always tell who's the vampire and who's the victim when you see how people relate to one another. My father dominated my mother and she was submissive to him - he was the vampire and my mother was the victim. My mother tended to be the opposite with her kids - dominating and controlling us and so we were her victims. I sensed early on there was a definite pecking order in my family and it had to do with who was getting the most energy from the others. The two of highest energy were at the bottom of the heap. I was one of them and we supported the rest of the family energetically. My mother got a dog. And then a cat. They helped with her empty nest syndrome and helped to distract her from her fears, maybe even gave her some comfort, and they were her way of continuing to relate to my father who she only triangulated with. The pets became the focus of their conversations and the real issues went undealt with. Very sad.
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AuthorI have lived this nightmare and have overcome being a victim. Archives
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