I need serious help with a parent...

Post Reply New Topic

Good luck!

I feel like a lot of the people in this thread come from families less close knit than mine. My mother lives down the road from her parents in a house built by her aunt. My current level of withdrawal is already seen as egregious and constantly questioned. It's not that I can't live my own life. It's that I can't ever connect to my family in a real way again if I don't deal with one of them who would make my every return terrible and get everyone else on her side in my absence. I could go live my own life and not really contact them, but it would hurt me, my step-father, both of my sisters, my grandparents, all my cousins and aunts and uncles I see all the time, and even my crazy ass mother. I can't just be separate and distant and return to a welcome environment because I am already so wrapped up in my family that I would have to repeatedly force them away before I could just live long terms without them being in constant contact. I would have to hurt people. I'm trying to avoid losing my whole family over my mother's crazy codependent personality. It's not like she can't understand. She has a college education in which she necessarily proved she understood to some degree. I just need some way to get her to come to terms with me not needing her anymore, with me being competent and intelligent and capable of living my own life.

Also, the more research I do about codependency the more I feel like she might be less on the autism spectrum than I thought and more codependent. There are a lot of symptoms of codependency that mimic aspergers that I feel like have gotten worse in her over my lifetime. Like maybe she's just barely on or near the autism spectrum and it has contributed to her codependency, but she definitely shows at least half of every category on this list but compliance patterns, which she has too much ornery southern woman in her from her father to really have:

http://www.coda.org/tools4recovery/patterns-new.htm

Hi,
Is there any way you could get an assessment, a diagnosis for aspergers?
I know its not always possible, and often expensive depending on where you live, but if I was in your position, and it was an option, I would try that first.
She couldn't argue with a proper diagnosis (although from what you have said I suspect she'd still try) but it might help your relationship with other family members.

I was wondering if she was reluctant to accept you have asperger's because she knows that since she has similar difficulties then she must have it too. Some people can be in denial, refusing to accept they have asd at all.

I dont know what else to suggest, I suspect you have heard from her the "but thats how everybody is, I'm like that, so you don't have asperger's" type of comments?

Is she only like that with you, or have other family members or your fiance found her difficult too?

Hope you manage to sort this out

I haven't even gotten to aspergers. When I've tried to open the conversation with depression or anxiety and move into it, she has just shut down the conversation. I haven't sat down and worked up the balls to just say aspergers...

And a proper diagnoses is out of the question at least for a while. I just came back from a summer break of few and small extended school year (long summer school) paychecks, and they don't pay you until a month after the first week of school. My fiancee and I have like $200 between the two of us until our next paychecks.

As for other people, I don't really know. I mean, aside from my fiancee who she treats like crap because she's a woman taking care of me. >_> The level of competition she tries to cause is nauseating. She's always kind of distant and untrusting and quite certain she knows better than others. I suspect (and I probably should have mentioned this earlier) that it is linked to me being her first born child with someone who was out of her life before I was born. For the first few years of my life, it was just me and her. I don't really know how she is with my younger sisters, though. Despite her desire to hold onto me (and make me 9 again >_>) if she has to use teeth and nails and gorilla glue, she has a much closer relationship with my sisters than she ever did me. She puts much more effort into it. They also seem to handle her better. =/

You should take into account that she has a vested interest in you being normal. If people see you as a loner, slacker, distant, or whatever then she is the saintly mother for putting up with you and trying to help you be more normal. If you have a real issue, especially considering her degrees, she doesn't look so good. Suddenly, she is the one at fault. Or she could be like my mother and just not want to entertain the idea that you are different because to her that means there is something wrong with you. Heaven forbid she have less than a normal child. People might think it was her fault. or something. Whatever it may be, she sounds like she is invested in seeing things a certain way. There is a quote that says "if you want to make people hate you, change something." This is especially true if the change causes them to see themselves in a less than flattering light. Some people just can't handle that.

The thing is she loves less than normal kids. She herself revels in her own abnormality. She intentionally draws ire, which is systemic to her codependency. She doesn't care if I'm normal, or she would support my very normal, balanced, neurotypical fiancee who is determined to get me more open and socially adjusted. She has never tried to push me towards any sense of normality. In fact, now that I really think about it, I have had very few conversations with her about my social life because so many of them turned into her discouraging me from one friend or another. I don't think she has much real interest in me being a normally functioning member of society. I think she mostly wants me to need her forever, lots of things to need her forever. It's why she chose to work with students who will always need even the most basic level of care.

I want to thank everyone in this thread, even the people who rather frustrated me. Just having other minds to bounce ideas off of helps me think things through a ton, and I think I've realized a lot about my mother today. I feel more Quentin Compson than ever before (thankfully not as much sound and fury as I've had in the past).