So, I’m pretty placid.
Even when stressed, it’s pretty hard to get me to meltdown. I have some issues with anxiety, but while it can get bad, it generally manifests as a sort of constant nervousness, not panic attacks, and I can usually deal with it reasonably well. When something does happen to make me panic or meltdown, my first response is to hide or otherwise remove myself from the situation. I’m also extremely easy to talk down.
The thing is, while I’m unlikely to have an outburst in most situations (including very stressful ones that bug the NTs around me a lot), sometimes the situations I’m in really aren’t “most situations”. Entirely too often, actually. I’m talking about abuse from my mother. Nothing illegal, or particularly physical (though it’s hit the point where I’m starting to wish it were, as then there would be more I could do about it), but things like yelling at me and chasing me around the house for an hour (when I try to flee to avoid oncoming meltdown) because I dropped a plate of food by accident, getting snappish and angry at me when she makes a mistake, and in general just yelling at me for whatever reason (her day at work was bad, someone paid more attention to me than her, once because it didn’t immediately occur to me that she wanted help making her bed, something simple that she usually does entirely on her own). In addition to the actively abusive stuff, she also has to get someone else to confirm everything I say about anything ever, tells me things like “well if YOU understand it, it can’t be that difficult”, disregards my feelings about basically everything (example: I expressed discomfort about her yelling AWWW at me in public places when I hug my friends, she continues to do so), yells at me if I’m mildly upset but not actually acting out, when it turns out I (or anyone really) was right about something and she was wrong, she’ll behave as though she was the one who was originally correct and proceed to lecture whoever was actually correct on what they originally told her, doesn’t really listen to me (I say something, she hears part of what I say, tunes me out, fills in the rest herself, then doesn’t listen when I correct her on what I was actually trying to say), denies that she has ever made any sort of mistake on anything, and always expects me to give her validation. I’ve had to deal with this my entire life. She’s not actually a bad person, and she’s been getting better, but this is mostly a result of her being happier overall than any real improvement: the moment something goes wrong, she’s back to harassing me again. It has hit the point where just hearing her voice raises my anxiety levels considerably, and even when she’s calm I spend most of my time hiding away in my room in the basement to avoid her (I even eat down there). I’m much, much more snappish and temperamental with her than I am with anyone else; by this point, I’m basically wired to hate her, even if I don’t want to. Being around her is extremely distressing, saps my motivation, and awakens something ugly and evil inside of me, and I’m worried that either she’s gonna call the police on me in the middle of a meltdown (I’m not particularly extreme, but I do tend to yell a lot and I have hit her when cornered/not permitted to flee, which she has threatened to call the police for), or I’m going to lose complete control and do something I’ll really end up regretting.
I need to know what to do/how to handle things if I manage to get myself in trouble.
I need to learn to stay calm even when being actively mistreated.
And I need to get out of this situation. Like, now.
09 May 2014, 1:02 am
I wish I had some answers to what you're dealing with, I often think very long and hard about what could be causing my mom's behavior, her attitude toward me, etc. because it's like night and day.
