sticks and stones

November 2, 2010

Thanks, Annie -- I have read Lawson's book and Randi Kreger's book.

They were quite eye-opening. My mother is a waif and a hermit but also very very

dependent on the opinions of others. She's a hermit who hates being alone. She

can't stand silence because it causes one to think, and when she stars thinking,

she thinks about how much she hates herself. So she spends as much time as

possible with others, going to a place where she knows others will be. She

maintains strange relationships with them as she asks them all about themselves

and can recount endless details about them, but they know nothing of her as she

offers no personal information about herself. I always wonder what they think of

this.

Like many nadas, my mother created a surface self, a false self as it were, to

show the rest of the world. She had a specific realm in which she was really

competent and this realm is where she worked and spent all her time and

concentration. About thirty years ago it got to the point where that realm

comprised everything she ever talked about. This took a bit of pressure off me,

because at that point she stopped interrogating me about my friends. (She had

spent my childhood trolling for some awful evidence about my friends that she

could later use to say that they were monsters who secretly hated me and mocked

me.)

But that realm of hers, in which other people made her feel real, was everything

to her. Now she's getting too old to participate in that realm anymore, and the

BPD (in which everything is a terrible crisis) is soaring to new heights. She

feels abandoned and rejected by those who used to occupy all her attention.

Going into paranoid spins, she feels that everyone is being incredibly mean to

her, and because of her self-loathing, she also believes that she deserves every

mean thing they say.

So what I hear is, " So-and-so basically told me I'm stupid and that I smell and

that she wishes I would disappear. That bastard! But he's right, he must be

right, otherwise he wouldn't have said it. "

Yesterday I told her, " It sounds to me from what you're saying that your misery

is all about what you think people are saying to you and about you. "

" Of course it is, " she wailed.

" What about sticks and stones? " I said. " Why does it matter what they say? "

She literally had no idea what I was talking about, and dismissed my comment

angrily, as in, " You don't know what you're talking about, easy for you to say,

no one's saying mean things to you as they are to me, you're crazy if you don't

understand. "

November 3, 2010

It sounds like you have a lot of insight about your mother's mental condition,

how she thinks, how she feels. The next step is to accept that you didn't cause

her to be that way, and you can't make her better.

See, if you are always available to her, to ease her loneliness and assuage her

fears, be her companion, etc., she will never have any reason to change. Why

should she bother to seek therapy when she has a rescuer on stand-by?

If she's very or exclusively dependent on you now, emotionally, how could she

ever handle it if you were to go on a long vacation, or if you were to take a

job in another country, or get married and move away, etc.? She needs to be in

therapy to help her normalize as much as she can.

Have you read any books about co-dependency, or attended any CODA meet-up

groups? I suggest that learning about co-dependency would give you even more

insight than you have already, in a different way.

-Annie

>

> Thanks, Annie -- I have read Lawson's book and Randi Kreger's book.