It’ll be wild if he actually gets back to me but I sent him an email asking if he remembered me or my mom. I remember next to nothing about those sessions which is why I’m praying he remembers and gets back to me. Me and my mom have very different recollections of the past, I feel that on an emotional level she grossly underserved me, while she feels she was a perfectly adequate mother. Honestly it kind of feels like gas lighting. The really crazy making part of this is that she is a very good person. So good that the fact that she won’t acknowledge her wrong doing makes me unsure of reality and my own perspective. I dont understand why she can’t look at the past, I don’t understand the complete absence of guilt, it makes me crazy. Don’t get me wrong I don’t want her to suffer but I would like some vindication. What do you think is going on here? Do you think it’s just too painful to acknowledge the truth for her?
It might just be a difference in perspectives. All parents screw up at times, and kids have no frame of reference for what is normal beyond what they personally experience. The parents know what specific challenges they were dealing with at those times, and have perspective on how other people handled it. My own mom was raised by a physically abusive alcoholic who kicked her out when she was like 16. She compares her own screw ups to that, and sees herself as better in comparison. It made her dismissive of any complaints we had about her. We didn’t have an abusive alcoholic to compare her to. We just had her better moments versus her worse moments. We were correct that her worse moments sucked. She was correct that they weren’t as bad as what her dad had done.
She worked really hard to overcome her upbringing. She resents having it pointed out that she did not fully overcome it. I get the mentality. I try not to do that with my own kids, but I’m sure I also have my own blind spots that I am resistant to thinking about. I’m doing a better job than my parents did. They did a better job than their parents did. Hopefully my kids will do a better job than we did.
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