Dr. Seltzer clearly explained this entire dilema of anxiety. His writing carried me from tot to adult in concise and comprehensive language. Thank you for helping me to see myself as I evolved from a child with unmet needs due to a volatile environment. I was constantly searching for the mood of both parents before addressing either of them. I lost myself while in this search.

Dr. Seltzer's writing has helped me to understand why I evolved this way. It is truly like a light switched on. Thanks!

.

Leon,

Thank you for the absolutely thorough, thoughtful post. I realize now how ridiculously sensitive I am to negativity.

I guess a good litmus test for me as I work through this will be my own work environment. I work with all men whose idea of friendly banter is to verbally slaughter one another. (Some of them used to be navy submariners who out of boredom would duct tape each other to light fixtures!)

I'm going to start at the beginning of your blog because this is great stuff..

Love and peace,
YG

My parents and well entire family put the dysfuntion in the word "dysfunctional" for sure. They still do!

My T is all over me when it comes to me parenting my son...probably because of what I went through but I feel I am doing 200% better than what I was given.

He has said a few times to me "not to get my needs met through him"...I don't see how I'm doing that and so far my almost four year old is happy, loving and quite a hoot!

I usually get that comment when I tell a story (I think the story is cute!) for example, how my son sometimes comes into bed with us and brings his three stuffed animals, box of color forms and his blanket...he comes in at various times and is beyond cute carrying all this stuff into the bed.

We laugh. I'm not sure that a child coming into bed at night is ALWAYS a bad thing. he doesn't do it that much anymore and I think its because we haven't made a huge deal out of it.

Anyway, another good article!

Hi.
My mother and I had a horrible relationship. I was physically, mentally, and verbally abused by her through most of my adulthood. It wasn't until 3 years ago, when she passed,that I was able to have some kind of life. I am 57 years old. I'm sure this affected my family but I always tried to put them first and I at one point had to say enough and did not see my mom for the last 3 years of her life. I figured, what I didn't have when I was younger I could have it with my own family. And I did what I could to be a good mom and wife. I wanted a loving, caring, close family.
My daughter is 31 and my only child, married her pen pal from the UK, and is expecting her first child.
She went to the UK first to be with her fiance, they came back here to get married. A wedding that she said that I should plan in 5 weeks and she had very little to do with it. They went back to the UK and lived for 2 years but they wanted to come to the US to live. My husband and I are sponsoring him and when they came home they stayed with us for 6 months. I made the basement into a living area for them so they would have privacy. Them and their 4 cats, even though I have allergies to cats. We charged them nothing to live there. We helped them move, even though I get disability and my husband is older. Never once did we get a thank you or shown any appreciation. No big deal, right? Family helps each other out.
I suggested that she call some of the family and tell them they are home now. And if they want to do something together. She says no. That they don't care enough about my daughter so why bother. They can call her. She yelled at me and accused me of telling her what to do.
She criticizes things about the family. Makes everyone feel like she is better then them. Her husband says things to inflame the situation also.
She has nothing to do with them and now she wants nothing to do with my husband and I but mainly me.
When she got pregnant, anything I wanted to do or buy or make, she says no to. She says that his family should beable to do things because they aren't here to see the baby when it is born. She says that when the baby is born, they will be going back to the UK to raise the baby because she doesn't want the baby to be brought up around me and the family, but mainly me.
She has hit me with some issues about her childhood that I was totally unaware of until now.
Apparently I made my problems with my mom her problem and she feels burdened with being the only child. She said that I have baggage and that I should take care of it. She told me that her feelings about me have changed and that she needs to distance herself from me so that the "cycle" can be broken. She says it is best for her, her husband and her unborn child. I give her space but I don't want to totally abandon her. I want her to know that if she needs me, the door is always open. She is pregnant and I worry about her. I even asked her mother in law to watch over her during her pregnancy. I told her that she doesn't want me in her life.
I have no idea what happened. I am not a meddeling mother or mother in law. I always felt good about that. I thought maybe because she is pregnant, that hormones had something to do with it. I didn't raise her to be this way. She is cold hearted and cares nothing about other people. People should come to them, ask them out and do for them. Her and her husband do nothing for anyone. They brag about things and money. We were called "white trash".
She says that she wants to break the "cycle" but I don't think she can with this kind of behavior.
Did I do something to cause this kind of behavior?
I tried to be a good person, a good wife and especially a good mom. She always told me I was a good mom. I don't know what to do. Right now my heart is breaking and I feel like just letting her go. It sounds terrible but if I did the best I could all these years, especially lately, what else can I do?
I feel like she has conditional love for me and unless I do things her way, we can't have a relationship. My mother was like that. I find that my daughter has some behavior traits like my mom had.
So, how does she think that she is going to break the cycle when she is doing the same thing as I did. I had to distance myself from my mom. I didn't want my daughter around my mom because of her behavior.
It hurts because I didn't do to my daughter what my mom did to me and yet I am being treated the same.
I don't know if this is fair to me. I brought her up for 18 years and now I feel like I have to apologize and make it up to her for the rest of my life.
What is so important to me, like family, is now something I don't have. How ironic and sad.
Need a neutral prospective...help!

PS...Sorry about this comment being so long.

Dr. Selzter,

I was severely burned as a toddler; my mother an alcoholic (and probably suffering from borderline personality disorder) blamed me for the accident calling me a 'bad boy' and telling me that she was 'going to tell my father.' For the next two months or so, I endured debridings of the burns on my inner thighs and part of my genitals. I was held down by my mother and father while a strange man (pediatric burn specialist) ripped the scabs off my burns to enable the burn to heal from the muscle tissue out. Only, I thought my father hated me and was trying to kill and castrate me. I am now 58 years old almost 59 and it is taken me that long to separate from this early internalization of myself as 'bad.' From what I have been able to put together, I became bonded with my father/mother around that perception of being 'hated' and 'bad' and so I lived my life expecting others to reject me and hate me. 'Hated' and being 'hateful' was not what I wanted as a toddler but it was the only 'emotional connection' that I had with my father in that most vulnerable 'dying' experience when I needed some human connection to 'survive psychologically.' Oddly, my survival depended upon being 'hated' and 'hateful.'
It took many years of therapy and help to see that I no longer need to see myself as 'hated' and 'hateful' in order to survive; that I would not disintegrate into nothingness by accepting that I can be loved and accepted as I am. Recently, I had a dream where for the first time I was able to accept my father's touch as a touch of affection and to recieve it as such and to experience that as healing both for me and for him.

Dear Dr. Seltzer,

I am 45, happily married, have two very high needs sons (one ADHD and the other bipolar), and grew up with a variety of parents and step parents who were abusive, self-centered, and had various personality disorders.

Over the years I worked hard to maintain relationships with my parents and step parents (father married twice, mother married three times). It seemed like "the right thing to do." As I got older, I realized that these relationships were a serious hardship on me.

About four years ago, my father died. After he died was the first time I felt comfortable putting his picture up with the rest of the family pictures. He scared the heck out of me...he had a violent temper his entire life. In fact, a few hours after he died, as he was still in the bed in the living room, I accidentally kicked one of the wheels on the bed, and *ducked* for fear of him hitting me! Yes, I ducked from a dead man.

That moment truly made me realize the depth of the fear he had created in me.

During the time I was visiting (my family lives across the country from the rest of the extended family) and helping take care of my father, and my siblings, and step-mother, while they freaked out over his dying (he was only in his sixties, and a real health nut) my mother treated me very strangely. Poorly. Nastily.

It finally occurred to me that she was actually jealous of the time I was spending with my father! She called me on the phone, crying because I was the *only* person who could help her choose the tile for her $100,000.00 upgrade to her house. Yes, she had an interior designer working with her. It took me a while to figure out this was just an excuse for her to get my attention.

At one point she had a raging fit at my ADHD son who was only 7 at the time. She wouldn't believe me that he had made a mistake, and hadn't intentionally tried to damage her car. (The "damage" was a small scrape that came out with rubbing compound.) She raged for about a half hour, and acted confused when I told her my son was afraid of her.

That event triggered a whole lot of memories that I didn't generally visit, about all the terrible things she had done to me, both as a child and as an adult.

After my father died, I came to realize that I could handle not having my father, so why did I have to wait until my mother died to stop having a relationship with her?

Long story short, she continues to say to this day, that "the door is always open" and "she has always loved me." But she doesn't realize that SHE has any responsibility for our estrangement. She doesn't realize that she doesn't seem to really love anyone. Her narcissism rages on, and she never goes to counseling (even though she promised she would) to work on her issues.

She isn't going to change. I know that. And I know that I can never tell her any of my plans at all, because she will always find ways of saying hurtful things. At least now I can laugh that her idea of a complement was to tell me that she knew I would become famous one day, because she could imagine being interviewed just because she was my mother. Sigh.

My question, given that long, but still so minimal of a description, is this: is there any benefit to having some relationship with her? I don't even really know if I would be doing this for my benefit, or for hers. She and her husband push this issue without end.

Oh, and I do make sure she sees my husband and kids...she is always on her best behavior with them, because she knows I will block her if she is ever mean to them.

I know that one of the big reasons she wants to be in a relationship with me is that not being in one embarrasses her in front of the family. Not because she "loves me."

Any advice? I'm in therapy, but I'm asking you because after I read your article, I came to feel that you have an excellent grasp of this kind of issue.

Thank you,

Anna

Thank you for your article!
I am at a point where I must become proactive in my relationship with my mother, as well as in life in general. My mother has her own issues, and is not a bad woman, but there has been a psychological dance between us that I realize I must overcome to function as a confident adult.

Her childhood was not rosy, but she and all her siblings went on to become medical professionals and independant finacial achievers. My parents had a sour divorce when I was 11, and my father (who was pretty distant my whole life) left her with a serious debt that she overcome in just a few years. She is a hard worker, but during her divorce and even now, she has not ever come one step closer to healing from the experience, and cracks under pressure regularly when I am the only one around, something she has always done. My relationship with my father holds it's own communication problems and difficult issues, but she, until now (I am 33) talks about him, my paternal side and blames everything on his being crazy and abandoning "us". Both my parents during that change demanded my constant attention and anxiety. This cycle is a well worn loop in her mind and in how she speaks to me.

After her disappointments in life, her constant message has been...be prepared for the worst, men are evil and cannot be trusted, and everyone else's life was perfect. I am very sick of this.
I developed a health problem in my mid-twenties and it took years to gain the correct diagnosis.
I delt with my own health problems and had major surgery last year, which I moved to another state to discover the cause and treat, to keep her well-meaning control on the back burner. It worked! and I am proud of that achievement.
She cannot see this as an empowering victory but rather as a near miss and yet another stroke of bad luck on "us".
Yet now, as in college, she makes grand gifts intended to help me, but really enable me to remain the child, and her the adult. I think I have always known this, but thought "hey, this is help, I need to take it".
She is not aware of this, and anytime I try to talk to her, she cannot talk about it or it turns into a fight (with me taking the role of the bratty kid, and her the martyr). Her response has always been, "well, what else would you have done?". I must stop this to grow!

After my illness and surgery, I am now back in my home state, attending school. She unexpectedly decided to buy a house and let me live in it until I can purchase it from her. This sounded great to me, and a deal I thought would help me through my recovery, but I now once again feel like I am in a soft cage. And although I am a bright talented young woman, the message has always been...but are you talented enough? Or, you do not try hard enough, you are lazy. Or the world is scary and out to get you, so take no risks! I also find that I am intimidated with relationships with men, and always feel either threatened (what do they want from me?) or stifled by my relationships. I am at ease with people I am not interested in, or do not challenge me.

I know I have the power to overcome these things and be in control of my life. Her message has been that money is what makes one matter--and I think I hate thinking about financial issues, or any choices due to money anxiety. My inablity to make choices out of doubt holds me back. I think it all comes down to self-esteem and anxiety.

Are there any good books or other resources out there to help guide me towards a less co-dependant, more effective life? I'm ready to work on this!

Thank you for your article!
I am at a point where I must become proactive in my relationship with my mother, as well as in life in general. My mother has her own issues, and is not a bad woman, but there has been a psychological dance between us that I realize I must overcome to function as a confident adult.

Her childhood was not rosy, but she and all her siblings went on to become medical professionals and independant finacial achievers. My parents had a sour divorce when I was 11, and my father (who was pretty distant my whole life) left her with a serious debt that she overcome in just a few years. She is a hard worker, but during her divorce and even now, she has not ever come one step closer to healing from the experience, and cracks under pressure regularly when I am the only one around, something she has always done. My relationship with my father holds it's own communication problems and difficult issues, but she, until now (I am 33) talks about him, my paternal side and blames everything on his being crazy and abandoning "us". Both my parents during that change demanded my constant attention and anxiety. This cycle is a well worn loop in her mind and in how she speaks to me.

After her disappointments in life, her constant message has been...be prepared for the worst, men are evil and cannot be trusted, and everyone else's life was perfect. I am very sick of this.
I developed a health problem in my mid-twenties and it took years to gain the correct diagnosis.
I delt with my own health problems and had major surgery last year, which I moved to another state to discover the cause and treat, to keep her well-meaning control on the back burner. It worked! and I am proud of that achievement.
She cannot see this as an empowering victory but rather as a near miss and yet another stroke of bad luck on "us".
Yet now, as in college, she makes grand gifts intended to help me, but really enable me to remain the child, and her the adult. I think I have always known this, but thought "hey, this is help, I need to take it".
She is not aware of this, and anytime I try to talk to her, she cannot talk about it or it turns into a fight (with me taking the role of the bratty kid, and her the martyr). Her response has always been, "well, what else would you have done?". I must stop this to grow!

After my illness and surgery, I am now back in my home state, attending school. She unexpectedly decided to buy a house and let me live in it until I can purchase it from her. This sounded great to me, and a deal I thought would help me through my recovery, but I now once again feel like I am in a soft cage. And although I am a bright talented young woman, the message has always been...but are you talented enough? Or, you do not try hard enough, you are lazy. Or the world is scary and out to get you, so take no risks! I also find that I am intimidated with relationships with men, and always feel either threatened (what do they want from me?) or stifled by my relationships. I am at ease with people I am not interested in, or do not challenge me. I constantly want to run away, but feel helpless. I think she feels helpless at times, and does not want to be alone in this.

I know I have the power to overcome these things and be in control of my life. Her message has been that money is what makes one matter--and I think I hate thinking about financial issues, or any choices due to money anxiety. My inablity to make choices out of doubt holds me back. I think it all comes down to self-esteem and anxiety.

Are there any good books or other resources out there to help guide me towards a less co-dependant, more effective life? I'm ready to work on this!

I have come to the conclusion from my own research and behavior that I have anxiety attachment and possibly borderline personality which possibly stemmed from my childhood turmoil.

I never felt a close bond with my mother, and she did some cruel things to me up til early adulthood. One major conflict is her knowledge that I was sexually abused and her lack of outrage or protection or validation of it. She even said it was not a ‘life changing’ event to get over it. My parents were narcissistic passive /aggressive types that practiced mind control and withheld emotional nurturing. We were not allowed to cry, express anger, or express ourselves as individuals. The parents were the center of attention and I felt like I was being buried alive all the time and withdrew and had anxiety, depression and self loathing as early as I can remember. Sometimes I’d hide in the closet and cry where they would not see me.

Now, I can’t form healthy relationships, have extreme lack of confidence, need to rescue others jeopardizing my security, alcohol dependency, suicidal thoughts, and fits of rage. My boyfriend said he can’t ‘fix’ me so he deserted me and I fell apart had had emotional breakdown… extreme self hatred, from his abandonment and rejection that I can’t seem to let it go. I am unable to trust, connect , or establish boundaries. I am usually with abusive men, who control me or I too am emotionally abusive by attacking at a misperceived threat or suspicion, or by showing too much emotion and anxiety. I wonder if Borderline Personality disorder comes from this undeveloped sense of self and anxiety attachment from childhood? As Augusten Burroughs is quoted as saying “good parents are luxury items”, but the lack of nurturing still wrecks lives. I wish I could have them in my life, and it’s expected of me. However, being around my parents now causes me anxiety and to feel like the trapped little girl. Some parents do not do the best they can. If only, they could admit to their mistakes, it might help.

I don't think people realize how important it is to make a wise decision when it comes to choosing your life partner. The greatest gift a mother can give to her children is to truly love her husband and the husband to truly love his wife. And it's difficult to love someone that treats you like crap.
People don't seem to realize that they're already hurting their unborn child or children by choosing the wrong man or woman to be with. When you think hard and deep about it, choosing who you want to marry and have a family with is the hardest decision we can ever make. I can only imagine the hurt Tiger Woods is doing to his kids.
My ex girlfriend grew up without a father or father figure in her life. Because of the bad choices her mother made. She never met her father, so she has abandonment issues and cant fully trust men. And felt that I was going to abandoned her like her father did, so she abandoned me before she I could abandoned her. I would of never abandoned her. But I think she felt the relationship was getting too good to be true, and that eventually I would leave her like her father did. Unfortunately it's something only she can fix herself or with the help of a professional. I fear that she will eventually let her guard down to the wrong guy and have children with him and her children will turn out the same or worse and the cycle will continue with her kids.

Excellent article Dr. Seltzer!

Allison's post up above could be my post, down to the age of my parent's divorce, the illness she went through, and the way her mother views the world through a lense of fear and lack of faith in the world around her.

I have always had a strong bond with my Mother. She did not with her own mother, who actually was emotionally unavailable and at times cruel to my Mom.

At this point in my life I am realizing as I finally become more functional as an adult my Mother is behaving strangely and marginalizing a lot of what I do and the decisions that I make. It is frustrating and demeaning, but after reading your article I can see how the dependence I had on her is something that without, she feels insecure and on some level I think she feels that I will no longer love her unless I am dependent on her, which is so sad and not true.

Your article has crystalized for me so many emotions I have felt lately, and frustration. As well, my Mom's behavior I find sends me into a spiral of despair despite the fact I am strong enough, aware enough, and mature enough to establish and spell out my boundaries now.

Thank you for your insightful article. It has helped me to see my challenges ahead for myself.