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�what is Man? a miserable little pile of secrets.� - andr� malraux

"i desire to live in peace and to continue the life i have begun under the motto, to live well you must live unseen." - rene descartes

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thank you for listening.

2016-04-04 @ 9:23 p.m.

last week my therapist said, "next week we really need to explore your relationship with your mother."

heh.

so today, we did a little bit. we kind of opened up on how i am so fragile in some ways, so unsure of myself in others, and so anxious all the time. and after he said a few things it made me remember a few stories about my mother and some conversations we've had over the years. just some isolated incidents, but a few of the biggies for me.

and after i kind of breathlessly recounted all of these stories in rapid succession before i forgot the details or didn't want to talk about them anymore, he just kind of sat there for a while making this frowny face, saying nothing. and i was just kind of waiting for something, and he finally says, "i'm sorry. i'm just having a hard time understanding why a person would act like this."

and honestly, i felt so relieved just hearing that. like, my entire life i have tried in small ways to open up to people and tell them about her, and the things she's said and done to me, and i always get a, "oh, your mom's not that bad. you're such a terrible child. she was doing the best she could." or "oh, she didn't mean that," or my favorite, a skeptical, patronizing, condescending eyebrow raise and a "really? your mom is so nice." so i've always just shut down and kept it to myself because i knew i couldn't trust those people. why would i make these things up? do i really seem like a person who would just sit around and exaggerate stories about my mother and how seriously it has affected me my entire life? what i have never understood is why everyone immediately dismisses what i have to say - people who KNOW me - and defend a woman who they've never talked to for more than 30 minutes in their lives.

so it really meant a lot to be able to get some of this stuff out of my system and have a person not only believe me, but also confirm that yeah, it was pretty fucked up, man.

maybe a year or two ago i started lurking on /r/raisedbynarcissists after reading some other people's horror stories about their parents in another thread and remembering that i experienced some of the same exact things in my life. i mean, down to the very same sentences and phrases in some instances. so today when my therapist asked, have you ever read about this kind of behavior before? i said yeah actually, and told him about the subreddit. then he said yeah, then maybe you've also read that a lot of people who have personality disorders like this are kind of beyond help, you know? like some people with serious personality disorders have others in their lives who keep them in check, but in my mom's case, there is no such person. my stepdad is a doormat, my mom has no friends at all, my grandmother is too old to fight back, and since my mother is a high powered executive whose very livelihood depends on her being a soulless husk that lacks empathy, she has no incentive to change and likely never will. so he said, you know, you'll probably have to kind of just learn ways to keep your distance from her and respond differently if you're not willing to completely cut her out of your life. luckily, i read about no- and low-contact on the forum so i have already been employing that somewhat. but we have some (a lot of) work to do on confidence and personal strength yet.

after all of this, i found it interesting that my therapist said, "i find it odd that you don't seem to be angry with her." and i said "honestly? i don't know if i really know how to be angry? i don't really know how to feel or show any emotion." so i guess that's another thing to work on.

i'm supposed to be keeping notes on things i think i need to work on, as well as when i am feeling some kind of emotion or anxiety, i am to fill out this little page detailing my thought processes during and after the event. at first i was like ugh this seems so silly, but after i got home and thought about it a little bit i realized that it is probably a really good idea. i always have these insane, irrational racing thoughts in the moment, and i KNOW they're irrational when i'm having them. but i thought too, you know maybe just the activity of pausing and paying attention to them will help dial down the anxiousness a little bit. so we'll see what happens.