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IJustWantToTalk
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Trig Apr 19, 2020 at 11:25 PM
  #1
This post is all about my experiences dealing with an emotionally abusive parent. I've found that there are not many places to look for help on this topic and even fewer people to talk to.

I've been dealing with an extremely emotionally and sometimes physically abusive mother. I want to preface that I love her and care about her greatly. Her actions are ultimately of her own volition, but I do not blame her for everything that's happened. She has PMDD which is essentially PMS but to a greater extreme. Along with this, she has manic depression / bipolar disorder. I cannot confirm, but I also suspect a history of anger management issues.

My mother has gone through a LOT throughout her life, much more than she's ever expressed to me. I respect her for being able to push through the tough situations in her life and I respect her as a person. I do not want this to seem as if I'm badmouthing my mother or exposing her or her problems. I am simply seeking help or at least someone to talk to about it. I cannot talk to my friends or teachers about her and her problems, which has caused me to bottle everything up since the second this emotional abuse ensued.

I would also like to say that this is what I have experienced, and I am sure that people are dealing with situations I cannot even begin to fathom. I do not want to downplay their experiences and I also do not want to downplay mine. This is not a sob story that I want people to read to feel bad for me. I'm simply trying a new tactic to deal with my problems. I'm reaching out to find someone to talk to.

I have never met my biological father nor do I know his name. I never had a father figure until the age of about 10 or 11 when my stepfather entered the picture. My stepfather has his flaws, but he is a genuinely good man and I love him a lot. My mom was a single mom up until then, and she took good care of me and my sister. At this point, my mother had not been diagnosed with PMDD nor bipolar disorder so she did not have anything in place to help her deal with her situation. Once a month my mom becomes extremely irritable, unreasonable, harsh, and spiteful. She is extremely extroverted and makes decisions based on emotion rather than logic. To go along with this she is one of the most passionate people I've ever met. All of this combined leads to her being VERY loud. She has always been a yeller. Most of my childhood memories are my mother yelling at me, yelling at my sister, yelling at someone on the phone, you get the idea. She's also exceptionally intelligent. So when she's screaming at you it almost sounds like she has a point. When I was younger I would take what she said to heart. As I've gotten older I have come to realize that she repeats herself, constantly. Not using the same words over and over again, but rather expressing the same thing over and over again in different ways. Put everything together, and once a month you get what I call "attacks". An attack is never unprovoked, but very easily provoked. For example, tonight my mother had been drinking a lot by the pool. My stepdad had been cooking dinner while she was outside and brought her a plate to eat. My sister and I were both busy doing things so about 15 minutes later my stepdad called us into the dining room to eat. My mom became upset because she wanted to eat dinner as a family. So she essentially told him that. He said okay and that he's sorry for that happening and he will do better to communicate with her. She didn't think this reply was good enough and it was evident she was becoming irritated. To me, I saw this was probably going to turn into another screaming session for her. So when he went to work in the office and she started to follow him, I went in there to try and prevent a fight from happening. She steadily became angrier and I did my best to distract both of them. This usually ends things and the night goes on, but tonight was different. My mom had been drinking a LOT and it was obvious the rational part of her brain had left a while ago. She decided to start screaming about how terrible it was of him to do what he did, so she started picking up random things off of his desk and throwing them HARD at him. I immediately got up to stop her, but by the time I got there she had already slapped him, HARD. So I grabbed her and brought her out of the room. All while this is happening she is screaming her head off, definitely loud enough for people two houses down to hear. (We've had the cops called to our house multiple times over the years because of how loud and "passionate" as she likes to say she is) My stepdad gets up and both him and I try to subdue her because by this point she's hitting both of us. Then we try to talk her down, but that just led to her slapping me in the face HARD. My stepdad saw this, and tried to get her in a bear hug to get her to the couch so we could coax her down but she resisted and they ended up falling. On the way down my mom's leg hit a doorhandle and caused a relatively bad gash in her leg. So she starts screaming louder. We all stop and attend to her leg to make sure she's okay. Now my sister is with us, screaming and yelling trying to get my mom to stop. When she has these attacks the hardest thing to understand is that she is completely irrational. She can articulate like a normal person, make points like a normal person, but it isn't her. She turns into a different person. After we attend to her leg, she begins to scream at all of us. She keeps saying the same thing over and over again, that she just wanted to eat dinner with us. We try to calm her down which initially works but she ends up being angrier than when she started. Yelling and screaming more and more to the point where my stepdad cannot take it anymore. Mind you its been going on for about 3 or 4 hours at this point. So as he's trying to leave she REALLY blows up, screaming bloody murder. If you didn't know what she was yelling about you would think that she was being tortured. All this time, her yelling has been extremely insulting and spiteful. Being extremely childish. Using extremely vulgar words, unnecessarily vulgar. My stepdad ended up calming her down a little bit for about thirty minutes, but then she blew up worse than before. She went ballistic, putting a hole in the wall by slamming a chair in it, reached for a vase and threw it at the ground with all of her might. My stepdad was subduing her at this point and barely stopped her from grabbing something else. She has prescribed medication but doesn't want to take it because my biological father became hooked on opioids prescribed by a doctor. So we ended up convincing her to take the Xanax prescribed to her. At this point, she just laid on the ground in the middle of the kitchen and began yelling and screaming random things at all of us. I calmed her down and made her feel secure and made sure she felt appreciated and slowly she became herself again and went to bed. This is a description of just one "attack" and they have happened a lot throughout my life. They have caused me a lot of pain and sorrow. Personally, the physicality she has does not bother me, I can get hit or slapped and it will not cause me any emotional distress other than maybe a spike of anger. I usually don't have anyone to talk to about it so I decided to just try and reach out, so if you have any ideas or words of advice I'm glad to hear them. I also wrote most of this in one sitting so my apologies if some of it is difficult to understand. This experience is also not a representation of my mother. She is very caring and understanding and humbled but when she has a bipolar episode this is what I have to deal with. It makes me extremely anxious and stressed out and often interferes with schoolwork, which in turn causes more stress and anxiety.

Last edited by atisketatasket; Apr 20, 2020 at 09:49 AM.. Reason: Added trigger
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Default Apr 20, 2020 at 10:56 AM
  #2
Hello and welcome to PC!

Your post is very well-written. I can see the love and care you have for your mother, and how you don’t want to betray her with revealing her abusive behavior.

One thing you are not taking into consideration is that she is fueled by alcohol. She is not just acting out due to mental illness. She is drunk.

Is your step dad strong enough to tell her that her behavior is unacceptable and that she needs to stop drinking. Her drinking is causing these abusive rants. None of you should have to be subjected to it.

My mother goes off, but she does not drink. It is her natural reaction, and my late father and my step father both did nothing to discourage her behavior. No one told her it was unacceptable! She simply says that she’s a screamer and makes no apologies for it.

I went through my own thoughts about my whole situation, also my own issues that I took on as a result of my family history. At this point, I am amicably close enough to Mom, so as not to be estranged. But no where near as involved I had been, which fed a toxic dynamic. She won’t change, and she’s now elderly and sick. So, I appreciate the time we have left. I feel very similar as you do about her.

But, you have a factor that your whole family can come down on Mom about- her drinking. Heck, I’d even secretly video tape one of her drunken rants and show it to her. Maybe your family can gang up on her and tell her it is unacceptable.

But, mine never did.

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Smile Apr 20, 2020 at 03:11 PM
  #3
Hello IJustWantToTalk: Thank you for bringing your concern here to PC. I believe this is your first posted thread. Welcome to Psych Central.

One additional forum, here on PC, that may be of interest to you will be the Survivors of Abuse forum because, based on what you wrote, it sounds to me as though you are a survivor of abuse. And you may not realize now how much the experiences you're having with your mother are going to affect you in your adult life. So here's a link to that forum:

https://psychcentralforums.com/survivors-of-abuse/

And then here are links to 12 articles, from Psych Central's archives, that (hopefully) may be of some help. You didn't mention, as I recall, if you are female or male. But I'm going to go on the assumption you are female. And so I'm also including a link to a blog, here on PC, on the subject of the knotted mother / daughter relationship:

8 Ways to Help Your Bipolar Loved One Cope

Bipolar Disorder and the Family

15 Signs You Have Toxic Parents

10 Tips for Dealing with your Toxic Parents

https://blogs.psychcentral.com/imper...busive-parent/

https://blogs.psychcentral.com/imper...dium=popular17

https://blogs.psychcentral.com/recov...-in-adulthood/

https://psychcentral.com/blog/behind...-if-she-could/

https://blogs.psychcentral.com/recov...dium=popular17

https://psychcentral.com/lib/what-ar...do-i-get-some/

https://psychcentral.com/lib/tips-on...relationships/

https://blogs.psychcentral.com/imper...ur-boundaries/

https://blogs.psychcentral.com/knotted/

I hope you find PC to be of benefit.

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Default Apr 21, 2020 at 05:36 AM
  #4
How old are you and your sister?

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Default Apr 21, 2020 at 03:18 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by sarahsweets View Post
How old are you and your sister?
I'm 17 and my sister is 14.
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Default Apr 21, 2020 at 06:38 PM
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Welcome to pc

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Default Apr 22, 2020 at 03:56 AM
  #7
Hey @IJustWantToTalk: I am sorry you have to go through this at such a young age. It doesnt matter if your mom has PMDD or anything else she is abusing you and your sister and your dad. Its not ok. What does your dad say you should do? What is his plan? Is it just to let her go on the way she has been or does he want it to change? Violence is never ok. I am assuming this isnt the only time this has happened and its unfair to you and your sister. You are only 17 and she is 14 and its not fair that you have to be in the thick of it with your mom- this behavior is unacceptable. Is your dad happy? Are you? Has anyone sat her down when she is calm to tell her this isnt ok? What is the plan for when this happens again?
Quote:
Originally Posted by IJustWantToTalk View Post
This post is all about my experiences dealing with an emotionally abusive parent. I've found that there are not many places to look for help on this topic and even fewer people to talk to.

I've been dealing with an extremely emotionally and sometimes physically abusive mother. I want to preface that I love her and care about her greatly. Her actions are ultimately of her own volition, but I do not blame her for everything that's happened. She has PMDD which is essentially PMS but to a greater extreme. Along with this, she has manic depression / bipolar disorder. I cannot confirm, but I also suspect a history of anger management issues.

My mother has gone through a LOT throughout her life, much more than she's ever expressed to me. I respect her for being able to push through the tough situations in her life and I respect her as a person. I do not want this to seem as if I'm badmouthing my mother or exposing her or her problems. I am simply seeking help or at least someone to talk to about it. I cannot talk to my friends or teachers about her and her problems, which has caused me to bottle everything up since the second this emotional abuse ensued.

I would also like to say that this is what I have experienced, and I am sure that people are dealing with situations I cannot even begin to fathom. I do not want to downplay their experiences and I also do not want to downplay mine. This is not a sob story that I want people to read to feel bad for me. I'm simply trying a new tactic to deal with my problems. I'm reaching out to find someone to talk to.

I have never met my biological father nor do I know his name. I never had a father figure until the age of about 10 or 11 when my stepfather entered the picture. My stepfather has his flaws, but he is a genuinely good man and I love him a lot. My mom was a single mom up until then, and she took good care of me and my sister. At this point, my mother had not been diagnosed with PMDD nor bipolar disorder so she did not have anything in place to help her deal with her situation. Once a month my mom becomes extremely irritable, unreasonable, harsh, and spiteful. She is extremely extroverted and makes decisions based on emotion rather than logic. To go along with this she is one of the most passionate people I've ever met. All of this combined leads to her being VERY loud. She has always been a yeller. Most of my childhood memories are my mother yelling at me, yelling at my sister, yelling at someone on the phone, you get the idea. She's also exceptionally intelligent. So when she's screaming at you it almost sounds like she has a point. When I was younger I would take what she said to heart. As I've gotten older I have come to realize that she repeats herself, constantly. Not using the same words over and over again, but rather expressing the same thing over and over again in different ways. Put everything together, and once a month you get what I call "attacks". An attack is never unprovoked, but very easily provoked. For example, tonight my mother had been drinking a lot by the pool. My stepdad had been cooking dinner while she was outside and brought her a plate to eat. My sister and I were both busy doing things so about 15 minutes later my stepdad called us into the dining room to eat. My mom became upset because she wanted to eat dinner as a family. So she essentially told him that. He said okay and that he's sorry for that happening and he will do better to communicate with her. She didn't think this reply was good enough and it was evident she was becoming irritated. To me, I saw this was probably going to turn into another screaming session for her. So when he went to work in the office and she started to follow him, I went in there to try and prevent a fight from happening. She steadily became angrier and I did my best to distract both of them. This usually ends things and the night goes on, but tonight was different. My mom had been drinking a LOT and it was obvious the rational part of her brain had left a while ago. She decided to start screaming about how terrible it was of him to do what he did, so she started picking up random things off of his desk and throwing them HARD at him. I immediately got up to stop her, but by the time I got there she had already slapped him, HARD. So I grabbed her and brought her out of the room. All while this is happening she is screaming her head off, definitely loud enough for people two houses down to hear. (We've had the cops called to our house multiple times over the years because of how loud and "passionate" as she likes to say she is) My stepdad gets up and both him and I try to subdue her because by this point she's hitting both of us. Then we try to talk her down, but that just led to her slapping me in the face HARD. My stepdad saw this, and tried to get her in a bear hug to get her to the couch so we could coax her down but she resisted and they ended up falling. On the way down my mom's leg hit a doorhandle and caused a relatively bad gash in her leg. So she starts screaming louder. We all stop and attend to her leg to make sure she's okay. Now my sister is with us, screaming and yelling trying to get my mom to stop. When she has these attacks the hardest thing to understand is that she is completely irrational. She can articulate like a normal person, make points like a normal person, but it isn't her. She turns into a different person. After we attend to her leg, she begins to scream at all of us. She keeps saying the same thing over and over again, that she just wanted to eat dinner with us. We try to calm her down which initially works but she ends up being angrier than when she started. Yelling and screaming more and more to the point where my stepdad cannot take it anymore. Mind you its been going on for about 3 or 4 hours at this point. So as he's trying to leave she REALLY blows up, screaming bloody murder. If you didn't know what she was yelling about you would think that she was being tortured. All this time, her yelling has been extremely insulting and spiteful. Being extremely childish. Using extremely vulgar words, unnecessarily vulgar. My stepdad ended up calming her down a little bit for about thirty minutes, but then she blew up worse than before. She went ballistic, putting a hole in the wall by slamming a chair in it, reached for a vase and threw it at the ground with all of her might. My stepdad was subduing her at this point and barely stopped her from grabbing something else. She has prescribed medication but doesn't want to take it because my biological father became hooked on opioids prescribed by a doctor. So we ended up convincing her to take the Xanax prescribed to her. At this point, she just laid on the ground in the middle of the kitchen and began yelling and screaming random things at all of us. I calmed her down and made her feel secure and made sure she felt appreciated and slowly she became herself again and went to bed. This is a description of just one "attack" and they have happened a lot throughout my life. They have caused me a lot of pain and sorrow. Personally, the physicality she has does not bother me, I can get hit or slapped and it will not cause me any emotional distress other than maybe a spike of anger. I usually don't have anyone to talk to about it so I decided to just try and reach out, so if you have any ideas or words of advice I'm glad to hear them. I also wrote most of this in one sitting so my apologies if some of it is difficult to understand. This experience is also not a representation of my mother. She is very caring and understanding and humbled but when she has a bipolar episode this is what I have to deal with. It makes me extremely anxious and stressed out and often interferes with schoolwork, which in turn causes more stress and anxiety.

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Default Apr 29, 2020 at 07:42 PM
  #8
I'm sorry to hear this. It definitely sounds like you're all needing a lot of support. I really feel for all of you and your mom.

There needs to be a Safety Plan in place. I'm thinking when she's in escalation mode, the best thing to do is STAY OUT OF HER WAY. Being hands on with her will increase the problem and hurt everyone in the process. Come up with a designated room with a lock and have a cell phone available.. perhaps use a code word when it's time to act on it. If she trashes the house, so be it. If she's being unsafe, call 911. If you need to go outside to be safe, do so.

When she's at baseline, there needs to be a family meeting to discuss a course of action. Be supportive and choose a date that's away from her PMDD. Alcohol needs to be addressed and eliminated from the house, as well.

I also think dad needs to frontload this to her, first, maybe via text, to see if she's even willing to have such meeting to come up with a plan. She needs to hold herself accountable and not use her illnesses to abuse. Your sister and yourself are minors so I wouldn't want you holding yourself responsible for her care. At the same time, you need to advocate for yourselves and help & understand what the Safety Plan will look like.

A family counselor will help create something with you and naybe even attend the family meeting, too.

I'll be honest, if this behaviour continues, it's best that your mom seeks treatment outside of the home (and not live there). I'm sure she's a wonderful person and her behaviours are dangerous. One day she may throw the wrong item in the wrong direction and seriously hurt someone.

Please get help!
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