Grieving the Good Stuff

[Humming_bird]

Ugh, the holidays. I hate that I hate them. My memories are mostly of conflict that I am apparently at fault for.

I've known for a while that my dad has a personality disorder, or several, and I've had my suspicions about my mom, but her behavior tonight was truly insane. (I'll go into it more perhaps in another post). It's confirmed to me that she almost certainly has BPD and that I need to make some serious changes to how I engage with her, especially from within my own head and heart.

I think what feels hardest here is giving up on the good stuff in our relationship. Sometimes she can be really kind and thoughtful, and I can have a lot of fun with her. There are many parts of me that have just been trying for years to fix things so that I could have access to those parts of her. Now I feel like I'll never be able to enjoy any of it, ever again. It makes me so, so sad. I just don't have a mom, but it's like she's a mirage just out of my reach.

Has anyone else experienced this feeling? What do you do with it? Does it ever get better?

I really hate Thanksgiving

[Leonor]

Hi Hummingbird,

Yes, I've experienced the disillusionment of realizing the "good parts" of my mom are just that - parts, and not her essential self. They are moving facets that change in the light, and not the true and steady core of who she is. She has no steady core of self.

For decades, I twisted myself like an Olympic gymnast to try to make the "good" part stay in place and keep the distant, confused or mean parts at bay. That usually meant just reflecting her wonder-onder-fulness-ess back to her. Other times she was in a good mood while I happened to be nearby. Her positive attention was intoxicating: she is a witty, charming and brilliant person.

But she is also fragile, egotistical and brittle. When she breaks, her words cut like shards and she seethes in a cold, hard anger. I remember feeling out of breath after hearing some of the insults she tossed my way.

Now that I'm a mom, I realize that my love for my children is a warm, mushy, boundless, exuberant thing. It's unconditional and affectionate and humble and grateful. It's laughing too loud at silly jokes and cheering too loud at their little league games and savoring the little crayon heart doodles. And it's always, not just sometimes or when I'm bored or when things are going my way. I'm not a perfect mom, but I love my children for their perfectly unique, special little selves and my greatest delight and honor has been to mother them into adulthood.

That's the kind of love healthy moms experience, and it's the kind of mommy love we all deserve.

[Blueberry Pancakes]

Hummingbird - I agree with what Leonore posted so beautifully.

I think a lot of us do see the good stuff with our parent and try so diligently to duplicate the conditions that brought out that side of them so we see it more often. I believe it is however something we cannot guide and is instead something about them that governs it.   
     
You ask if it gets better and what you do with all that. I think it can get better, but it does not get better by any changes brought about by our parent. I think what helps is acknowledging what it is and then detaching your own level of happiness or sense of value from how your parent treats you. It is sort of just witnessing their behaviors and letting it stay there. Then redirect your focus on what you know is good about you, good in your life and peaceful in your heart.   
     
I think being in any level of contact you can continue to see the contrast though. The sadness and grief can occasionally bubble up especially during the holidays. It can be a repetitive and deliberate practice to re-focus, but it can offer grounded-ness in something that is sure and stable.

[treesgrowslowly]

It's heartbreaking. I agree with Leonor. Some people do not have a steady core of self. One day you get behavior a, the next day (or hour) you get behavior b.

This has to do with their insides and their minds / brains doing whatever it is doing.

As the adult child of a narcissistic parent, I had to realize that some of the 'core self' stuff that developed in me has just never developed in her. And when I learn about the research into trauma and its impacts, it is becoming more and more clear to me that we cannot hope to change what is going on inside parents who have these issues - like a lack of a steady core of self. No daughter or son, no matter how much we try, can get our parent to develop a core steady self. And that is what is missing for them. 

The less foggy I got, the more reactive people got. Because I was "leaving" them behind. I was no longer willing to caretake them. I wonder if this is maybe what you're going through as well.

The changes you are making are important for your own health and your own life, and living your life with more joy and less stress.

That said, when our immature parent has known us to be there and that we stayed / came back no matter how they behaved, they will not want this to change. Ever. Back when we were children, we had no choice, we had to stay, and their BPD or other stuff was running wild and we had no choice but to be there for it. Then we grew up. We became able to live apart from them, and decide how often to see them. This rattles many an immature parent.

I think that it really depends on what they can handle and manage. I do not think it has much to do with us at all - some of us here on the boards have parents who could not tolerate any change once we became adults. If we refused to go along with all of their erratic behaviors, it was their way or the highway.

Some of us have parents who had the attitude of "hey, you put up with me when you were 6, what's changed?" Like they really don't get it. Yes we put up with your crap when we were 6. What were we supposed to do?

I think that some of us have parents who hoped we'd stay 6 forever.

Ok, but none of us here stayed 6. We all grew up.

Some people on the boards here have parents who can tolerate that we are now adults. They can spend 2 hours with us without reverting to intensely odd behaviors. But honestly it just really depends on them and where they are at mentally and cognitively in their own life. I've had no luck in this department at all. I was met with only entitlement, that as an adult I was fully expected to continue putting up with everything I put up with when I was 10. Full stop. No discussion, no debate.

At that point, the parent is basically saying to their now adult child "yeah, I'm too disordered to provide any sense of safety at all".

But others here have parents who are not as far gone. Maybe the good parts can be enjoyed by their adult kids. As long as their adult kids know how to cope with the hand they've been dealt - that this parent does not have a core self that is to be relied upon for emotional safety. Once the parent reverts to other behaviors, the visit / phone call is basically over at that point. For some of us, there were only minutes before the parent reverted. We are stuck protecting ourselves from a lot of psychologically damaging stuff that they are capable of once "nice parent" time is over for them.

You asked if things can get better. Here's what I've learned. What can get better, is our own understanding of what is going on for us, and for them, and what we want to do about it. What may never get better, is their behavior or functioning.

What hurts, as an adult child caught up in this, is the grief that I don't have a parent with a steady core self. What Leonor wrote is so real. Life is completely different for those of us with a core self. Even when we are not feeling well, we still have a core self that we're still in touch with. Our own parents didn't / don't have that. I'm still absorbing this fact, to this day. I do not know if my grief will ever end. 

I tried to do what you're describing. In my case it wasn't possible, because of the stuff my parents have going on inside of them. Things like, let's just have a pleasant 30 minute phone call, or a nice 1 hour visit...my parents were incapable of it. But that's them. Some parents are able to tolerate that, but mine were not.

[NarcKiddo]

My mother is uNPD. I am low contact and employ various methods to protect myself, mostly grey rock.

Like Leonor, I would do my utmost to keep the nice part around me when I was a child, and, indeed quite far into my adulthood.

Since starting therapy I have taken a long, hard look at the nice part. And I have realised that much of it is not truly good, or fun, at all. It was just much better than the alternative. I am not saying my mother is totally bad or that she is incapable of occasional kindness or that she is incapable of being good company. However, the vast majority of her behaviour (if not all) is transactional. I no longer want to pay the price to access the pleasant and the fun. It's hard to deal with the realisation that it was indeed a mirage, but knowing that I probably would not enjoy it much, if at all, were I to experience it again helps me a little.

[Cat of the Canals]

I am not saying my mother is totally bad or that she is incapable of occasional kindness or that she is incapable of being good company. However, the vast majority of her behaviour (if not all) is transactional. I no longer want to pay the price to access the pleasant and the fun. It's hard to deal with the realisation that it was indeed a mirage, but knowing that I probably would not enjoy it much, if at all, were I to experience it again helps me a little.

I tend to feel this way as well. There are occasional moments with my PDmom that feel genuinely pleasant. (Oddly enough, in these moments, I get the sense that it's like she "forgets" to be bossy/demanding/judgmental. It never lasts long.) But quite a lot of her pleasantness is self-serving. I often find it off-putting these days, because I can sense that it's fake and done so I'll be easier to manipulate.