mechanics of creating voicelessness

[puppygirl]

I just got back from a week's holiday at my mother's vacation house on an island in the Adriatic.  I went because my brother was going and Nmother was getting panicky that favoured Nbrother would get bored.  Stupidly I plugged into her drama and agreed to go along. Big mistake.  I have just spent a week with Cruella de Ville.

My brother now lives with Nmother, since he had a breakdown a couple of years ago, and now he is totally under her control (ie allowed her to browbeat him into remortgaging his house and giving her all the money to invest in a risky property deal).  The deal seems to be that she treats him like an emotional cripple and looks after him and can lean on him for money when she needs it, whilst he gets an 'easy' life and has everything taken care of.  All his meals cooked, no rent, everything taken care of.

While she treats big brother like the chosen one (ie helpless and therefore totally controllable) to me she behaves like 'the ugly step-sister'.  Where she hangs on his every word, each time I open my mouth she talks through me, contradicts me, attacks me verbally for having any opinions etc.  It meant that I spend most of the holiday in silence because I was stomped on each time I opened my mouth.  On the last night I tried to have a conversation with her about how disabling it is to my brother to be treated like a cripple (I get it in the neck because I think he should be treated like a normal person - he does after all go out to work and earn a lot) and she told me I was no longer part of the family.  When I tried to continue the conversation she refused to discuss it with me saying it was just my 'story'.  I then said how can you be a psychotherapist and so unwilling to listen, and her closing gambit was 'you're just jealous of me'. 

The origins of the voicelessness that I have suffered from my whole life was clearly demonstrated to me as an adult.  I am simply not allowed to have opinions, not respected, pushed into a corner of silence. I'd like to cut off from her but do not want to lose the only good thing I can expect to get from her - an inheritance - although even that is looking less likely now she is saying stuff to me like I am no longer part of the family.  Its just so bizarre where she gets all her hostility from.  She just bristles with it and I seem to magnetically attract it from her.  It is like she is in competition with me but I don't even want a competition.

[Gail]

I'm so sorry, pg, for what you suffered on your holiday.  I think all you can do is recognize how controlling and hurtful your mother is--that her actions have absolutely nothing to do with your character.  I know it's very hard to feel so negatively about a parent who you "ought to love."  I don't have any answers as far as your future relationship except that, as you say, she could cut you out of an inheritance anyway.  Plus, I think it's an awful feeling to realize you're counting on benefitting from a parent's death when their is so much negative feeling attached. 

I don't want to say too much about it, but I've been in a similar position and don't know that the damage to your present is worth any future promise of money.  (After all, she could outlive you!)  I'm not saying that you should turn your back on your inheritance because only you know all the ins and outs of that, but there's got to be a limit on what you will put up with and what you won't.   Also, maybe if you can be almost "cold" about your relationship--recognize that she is sick and not trying, in any way, to confront her, or explain yourself, or justify your actions, it will be easier for you. 

Your poor brother--if he had a nervous breakdown a few years ago, he's probably been no match for her.  I don't think you can do anything about it, though.  Your mother isn't going to admit that what she is doing is hurting him, and it's probably best that your brother fight this battle himself, as an adult.  You can offer him support, but for his own growth, he's got to make his own choices.  Whether he frees himself or not is up to him.


Gail

[Plucky]

wow puppygirl,
if that's a holiday, give me work!
Your mom wanted you there to spew onto.   Your brother is not satisfying because he is too compliant, and she needs a henchman.   
Sometimes, even if you have grown up alongside the N germs, even if you have been ill for years and finally developed some immunity, you still need a booster shot.  These horrible experiences remind us why we move far far away from the source of the N spores.
I hope you recover swiftly and that your vaccination was effective.
PS forget the money.
Plucky

[puppygirl]

Thanks for your replies, Gail and Plucky.  I love the idea of the experience as a booster shot!  Too right!  I remember the disempowerment of being a child in the same situation, of being the receptacle of her vitriole and contempt, and not having anywhere to go other than into silence.  Thankfully I have other options open to me now.

Despite the fact that as kids she had no qualms about telling us she couldn't wait to 'get shot' of us and sending us away to boarding school for seven years, I find the idea of cutting off completely very difficult. Unlike her, it hurts me to inflict pain on others, and if there is some way I can avoid it I will. Its like she is immune to the feelings of others and I am a correspondingly hypersensitive mood-reader.

For now I just have to withdraw out of her circle of poison and contempt and try to set up some alternative plans for Christmas so I can avoid the next role on the list of 'servant girl' to her 'grande duchess' while she makes endless demands of me.

I get better at managing her as I get older, but at the back of my mind after an experience like this, I can't help wondering how any parent can dislike her child so much.

[David P]

You are struggling, like all of us, to grasp how and why parents like your's, act in the way that they do.
If your parents showed a compulsive need to control,punish ,demean and belittle ,to sneer and scowl , to undermine and withhold from you all that you value,to cruelly crush your hopes ,wishes, dreams ,feelings and feelings, to treat strangers much better that their own chiildren, to consistently betray and be disloyal to their kids and to side with outsiders against their own children, to create a home atmosphere of fear and tension in which children were'on alert', then you were raised by a parent(or parents) who had NPD( and God knows what elser),
NPD is well known and understood. It is a disease ,a crass,egocentric, self-indulgent,desructive disorder which is every bit as damaging to the family as alcoholism.

N's are as sick as alcoholics -however AA is there to help alcoholics recover. There is no 12 Step deal for N's so they continue to destroy those around them and we,continue to try to paste ourselves back together.

DP

[puppygirl]

David, just everything you wrote was an uncanny description of my mother.  I could give examples all through my childhood of breathtaking illustrations of her crass insensitivity and need to control and crush all expression from my brother and myself.  When I went to university, I felt like a see-through ghost person who had to start building myself from scratch, because I had never been allowed to develop any opinion or anything of my own other than a shell of resentment and fear.

My mother's grandparents were severly alcololic, incidentally, and I am sure there is a connection.

[David P]

Many of the contributors to this forum have had N partners and those relationships are ALWAYS damaging. However these were adult relationships and as adults we do have choices. Those of us who are children of N had no choices. In saying that an important point emerges. If your parent(s) consistently took advantage of your powerlessness as a child to crush your spirit, to belittle you and hurt your sense of self, to remind you in many ways of how'small' you were and how 'big' they were, then you probably had N parents. N parents engage their children in a perverted campaign of power and control in which the N self-indulges in an orgy of psychological attack and maime. If you ,as a child, were used as a 'waste basket' or a receptacle for your parents anger ,resentment or need to 'dump, then you had N parents. They did not love you -they used you. Loving people act in loving ways.

Maybe we need a 12 Step program to recover from the battering.