Recovering from a lifetime full of gaslighting.

[Metalhead]

It is now perfectly clear to me that my mother has been gaslighting me for my entire my life, and she also has managed to put everybody else in the family in her corner when it comes to this. So many opportunities for growth I have turned down due to her constantly telling me I am not good enough for them. So many instances of her telling me the most hurtful words imaginable and then telling me I imagined it five minutes later when I confront her with the exact words she just used. Always making everything about how I am hurting her when she always has been a perpetrator who sliced me up while pretending to be a victim. She is Cluster B incarnate. She does not believe she needs to take any personal responsibility for her own actions.

This is generational in my family. Her mother was the same way, and her grandmother was the same way.

I have cut most contact with my blood family in recent times down to a weekly phone call for the most part. My sister went with me to a concert last weekend, but my sister is one of the few decent people in my family.

I will never have a decent childhood. I will never know a family unit I can trust with my life. I often doubt my own perceptions and question my cognitive and intellectual abilities.

I need to bring this up to a therapist at this point.

 

[Aspychata]

This is tough to read because it's true. I can tell you that you stop numbing yourself, and that is great. But at times I can still feel raw too. It's important you are talking about this. Does the weekend trigger these thoughts? Doing anything to celebrate you this weekend?

 

[Metalhead]

This is tough to read because it's true. I can tell you that you stop numbing yourself, and that is great. But at times I can still feel raw too. It's important you are talking about this. Does the weekend trigger these thoughts? Doing anything to celebrate you this weekend?

The thing that triggered this episode was my mother telling me I should invite my cousin over to my house after he stole a couple thousand dollars worth of video games from me and after she lied to his parents and the police to make sure he got away with stealing those video games from me. I told her if he admitted and apologized for the theft, I would do that. Mom said that was very childish and immature of me because family is always supposed to forgive and forget. Mom also claims that one of my 12 step friends came into my house and specifically stole only the games I last saw when this cousin was handling them, and she expects me to buy that.

These weekly calls are going to become less frequent from this point forward.

 

[stevens]

Your family sounds like the people I went to high school with. Thank god I was an only child. My parents were OK, but my mother's siblings in most cases weren't. They've all passed along now, so it's just me and my significant other. She's the same as you, cutting off her family. They are at least as dysfunctional as what you described. Her experience makes me glad I'm an only child.

However, I'm not sure your therapist can help you recover from the gaslighting. I excelled at work for many years, got great peer reviews. Management liked me well enough to keep me around. My coworkers were often like your relatives. We tend to attract people like that. Coworkers are difficult to "choose" and even worse to get rid of. The problem is that PTSD leads to unavoidable self doubts.

This is why I detest the parts of the country that are more passive-aggressive than others (you can fill in the blanks here). I really appreciate people who are straightforward without being abusive. The hardest part of dealing with this kind of experience is truly diminishing the impact others' opinions have on you. I'd love to give you advice for this, but I haven't figured it out.

 

[Outdated]

Hi Metalhead,

Your story here upset me because it reminds me of my own family, sometimes I wonder if they’re still alive.

I was very close to my big sister when we were young, neither of us got along with our family very well but at least we had each other. I developed a very strong character and a strong ego, partly from my sister but mostly from becoming a respected tradesman, by the age of 20 neither of my parents had any influence over me at all.

That didn’t stop them from trying though, always finding little ways of reminding me of how much of a disappointment I was. This was mostly my father, by that stage my mother was just a downtrodden alcoholic who repeated his words like a parrot.

Even though they had no influence over my life any more, visiting them always left me feeling depressed and worthless. When I was in my 40s I stopped seeing them for the sake of my own mental health. I simply don’t need that sort of **** in my life.

I ran in to my father in a supermarket about 5 years ago and he asked me if I’d like to go somewhere for a coffee, I appologised and said I was too busy.

I’ve read a lot of your posts in here and you seem like a nice bloke with a big heart, someone who deserves to be given a fair go. I hope you can learn to stand up for yourself a little more. And when your mother complains tell her from me “You get what you give in this world.”.

 

[Metalhead]

Yeah, and now my mom gets off on telling blatant lies about her relationship with me. Such as how she always supported my film criticism hobby. Or about how I never told her how bad the bullying was when I was in school. Or about how I never told her that I needed to see a doctor during the darkest days of my mental health situation. Or about how she never told me to “shut up”, despite the fact that she still uses those exact words with me to this very day. Or about how I was never sexually abused and she knows this because she read a scientific study in one of her women’s magazines. This list could go on and on, but she tells lies just as easily and as casually as she breathes. She now is telling me she thinks my current therapist is bad for me because I am now telling her “no” more often. I seriously think she liked it better when I was strung out and drunk.

 

[Outdated]

I seriously think she liked it better when I was strung out and drunk.

It's possible that this is true. My father was also a control freak.

Have you ever thought of moving interstate? That's a good way to make a break.

 

[Metalhead]

It's possible that this is true. My father was also a control freak.

Have you ever thought of moving interstate? That's a good way to make a break.

When I first started getting clean off the drugs, my first Christmas clean my mother decided it would be fun to force the entire family to play Truth or Dare on Christmas Eve, four generations of family playing that inappropriate game. When I told her I was not playing that, her exact response to me was, “Sit down, shut up, you’re playing.” I was outed as gay during that game in front of family I was keeping it hidden from, and I saw the disgust in their faces. After that, I told mom I was not OK with that, and she responded by saying she should have worn a shirt saying she was proud of her gay son. Two days later, she calls me and I tell her that was an extreme boundary violation. She claims my frustration was coming out of nowhere: I hang up the phone on her then. Fifteen minutes later, she showed up at my door, crying, shouting hysterically about how I was hurting her. I stayed calm and I told her she needed to start showing respect for my boundaries. She then stormed off crying. A few hours later, she calls again and she asks me if my NA sponsor talked me into going off my Effexor. To this very day, she claims I was the one freaking out over this incident and that my anger came out of nowhere.

There is no hope for her. She liked it better when I was easy to push around. She hates it now that she no longer has any control over me.

 

[Outdated]

There is no hope for her. She liked it better when I was easy to push around. She hates it now that she no longer has any control over me.

It's possibly the most difficult lesson in life to learn, how to look at your family in the same way as you look at everyone else in the world, instead of looking up at that giant pedestal that says Mum.

It's a valuable lesson to learn though, just because they're family doesn't mean that they're nice people.

Once you realise this you'll start to have more rational reactions to them trying to guilt trip you. Public humiliation usually shuts them down for a while, telling them exactly what sort of lowlife you think they are and making sure it's loud enough for everyone else to hear, because that's the game they play. Snide remarks and digs at you in private whilst putting on a public display of being the mistreated one.

My father had all the social graces of a lawyer. Literally, he was a lawyer. And they reckon autistic people are good at masking!

 

[Metalhead]

I probably should refer to my mother as a wicked c-bomb and not feel the slightest bit ashamed about that. She relies on me getting frustrated with her so she can use my heated reactions against me as proof that I am the unstable one in this relationship. She perpetrates from the victim stance. That is who she is. A wicked c-bomb.

 

[Outdated]

Just because my father wasn't a very nice man didn't mean I didn't learn some valuable tricks from him. One of them was seeing other people in political circles trying to get opinions out of him. They'd tell him what they thought hoping for a response and he'd just drop that mask in place and tell them "You could be right there." and then walk away from them.

He left no place for any arguments or comebacks.

 

[Outdated]

And just to give you a taste of what a nice man my father was, when I was 13 one of my friends was beaten to death by the local cop, because he was black.

My sister and I were both pretty upset and Dad wanted to know why. After I explained it to him he said "What's the matter with you? It's just a boung!".

(Boung - derogatory - the noise they make when they bounce off the car's bullbar)

 

[Metalhead]

And just to give you a taste of what a nice man my father was, when I was 13 one of my friends was beaten to death by the local cop, because he was black.

My sister and I were both pretty upset and Dad wanted to know why. After I explained it to him he said "What's the matter with you? It's just a boung!".

(Boung - derogatory - the noise they make when they bounce off the car's bullbar)

Holy crap, sorry to hear about that.

My mother likes to put up a front that she is 1000% non-racist, but after my cousin stole from me, she had no problem blaming one of my drinking buddies at that time for it who just happened to be black. He also is in recovery now, and he could not have stolen those games because he did not visit me between the time my cousin handled those games and the time I realized the games were missing. Nobody else visited me during those two days. Evidence means nothing to her, though, she just claimed that evidence was circumstantial and meant nothing.

My mother also used to claim black people deserved to get beat up by cops back in the ‘90s, but now she claims police brutality is very real because her friends pushed her into claiming that position.

 

[Outdated]

I now play politics quite a lot but I have no loyalty to any political party, that's not the sort of politics I'm interested in. I'm fighting tooth and nail to prevent my country from sliding back in to those evil ways. The world I grew up in was really not a very nice place.

Another of my friends was abducted, tortured and murdered because he looked like he might be gay. He had albinism so it looked like he dyed his hair.

I don't want to see that world return.

 

[Metalhead]

When I first told my mother I was gay, it was in a fit of anger. My mother was pulling out a massive straw man argument because I did not want to watch Ellen DeGeneres’ sitcom, claiming I was a homophobe when the reality was I never liked any sitcoms. My mother knew I did not want her telling anybody about that, so naturally she told anybody who would listen that I thought I was gay, but I really was just a confused virgin and if only I slept with a female, then I would be cured.

When I went on a vacation with a boyfriend, after that she cornered me and seriously demanded to know which specific sex acts I engaged with him. When I told her I did not want to have that conversation with her and that I thought it was disgusting she was demanding that sort of information from me, she starts shedding crocodile tears and claiming she is only demanding to know all of this “because she loves me”. After she confirmed I had gay sex and liked it, she then says, “Well, I guess you really ARE gay after all.” No apology. She saw nothing wrong with any of this. She still sees nothing wrong with any of this. This is the same woman who kept on grabbing my ass when I was in high school, then she always laughed at me when she saw my entire body cringe at that, claiming I was making a big deal out of nothing and that she saw nothing wrong with how she could not keep her hands off my cute butt.

She has issues. She is in denial of all of her issues. Any attempt to tell her she is wrong is met with massive resistance. She will lie with the straightest face possible, and she will always try to get a frustrated reaction out of me so she can point at me to the rest of the family and call me the crazy one. She is pure evil.

 

[Outdated]

I think you really need to get away from that lady, she doesn't sound very nice at all.

The fact that she is your mother should not play any role in this decision, how would you react if a stranger treated you this way? Or an employer?

And no. She won't change. None of them ever do. Give up, get over it, move on. Find worthwhile friends to be your family. People will tell you that you can't choose your family, that's a lie.

 

[Outdated]

My sister was always a lot smarter than me in some ways. She moved interstate when she was 18 and ever since has refused to live in the same state as our parents. If they move to that state she leaves.

I was the soft touch that kept hoping things would get better, until I was your age.

 

[Metalhead]

Yeah, a month after I stopped drinking alcohol, I was having my mother and stepfather over for a spaghetti dinner. My mother then told me she was bringing over wine for herself. I told her she could not do that in my house. She started to press the issue and claim I was making a big deal out of nothing. I told her it was my place, my rules. She got very angry about that. Then a couple of months later, I had a slip in my alcohol sobriety. When my mother heard about that, she called me and was extremely smug, claiming that now that I was drinking again I owed her an apology for not letting her have her wine at dinner that night. I apparently was the only person making a big deal out of it, even when it was her who continued to heavily press the issue after I told her no.

 

[Outdated]

My maternal grandfather was half aboriginal, but that was a very shameful thing in his day. But he looked white so he got a white man's job and he bought a white man's house and he married an English woman. He had white children that went to white schools and he went to war as a white man.

It was his dirty secret that he believed he had taken to his grave, after he died my grandmother brought out all the old photos and started telling me some of the stories of all the different people. She cried a lot and told me that he was the very last one of his people. "They're all gone now."

Many years later my father was having another of his loud racist rants and I cut him off in the middle of it with "That's rich coming from a djiin jockey." and revealed the dreaded secret - his wife was part aboriginal.

He went in to serious denial and after that he spent years on researching the family history, but there's no records of my grandfather's family. The religious society we grew up in didn't bother with recording the history of animals.

Get a few licks in where you can.

 

[Metalhead]

My mother actually once had one of my therapists place a restraining order against her 20 years ago. I was working a factory job and I was good at it, but then people there found out I was going to Gay Days in Orlando every year. Suddenly, they started pulling random drug tests on me all of the time because of that. Then when my department got taken over by a new guy, he admitted to intentionally ordering me to send out extremely defective product because he wanted to fire me because he did not want any homosexuals working under him. And at that time, it still was legal to fire people in my state over sexual orientation.

My therapist encouraged me to find a different job. My mother decided to contact my boss’ boss to get his side of the story. He claimed there was no homophobic bullying, so my mother took his word over mine and claimed it would be a massive mistake for me to look for a different job. She kept on calling my therapist telling her not to listen to me. My therapist got tired of that and placed a restraining order against her. After that, my mother left her one final voicemail, just so she can claim she almost lost her job and her freedom because she loves me.