Gifts and when people make you annoyed

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I have a weird thing happen to me and I am wondering whether other people feel the same way.

I have a distant relationship with my parents and many issues from my childhood have caused a lot of problems between us and in my life in general.

Anyway, an issue from my childhood will come up in therapy which has me feeling quite angry with them and then suddenly, I won't want anything to do with any gifts they may have bought me in the past.

I don't want their gifts because I am feeling annoyed with them. So, I hide them away in a box until I am ready to get them out and use them again. This goes for things that have been given to me to use around my home, such as my kitchen or other gifts I just don't want to look at because they were given to me by a person I am not happy with at the present time.

It sounds weird I know......

I don't find this weird. I feel the same way. Gifts usually remind me of the person who gave them to me, and if I'm very upset with that person I might not want to see anything that reminds me of them.

I have this problem a lot with gifts from my mother-in-law. She has treated me horribly in the past and while I rarely have to meet her anymore, on the rare occasion that I do, she always tries her best to treat me as badly as possible and say or do something bad to upset me. She's a really nasty person. We have some things in our house that are gifts from her and I really hate seeing those things and prefer to keep them somewhere where I won't see them often. We have towels from her that I keep closed at the bottom of a rarely-used drawer and I never use those towels. If my husband takes one out to use it I subtly make it "disappear" (aka I wash it and put it back at the bottom of the drawer as soon as possible). We have a picture she made, and my husband insisted on hanging it up on a wall in our home because he likes it, but I never look at this picture because I don't want to think about my mother-in-law. We have some other stuff from her I do the same thing with them all, either hide them where I won't see them or try to ignore them completely as if they weren't there.

At times I go through stressful phases, for example when work or some extra tasks I need to do are causing me stress, and at those times I hide things that will remind me of the cause of the stress, to try to take my mind off them for a while and relax. I might hide the keys from my work or some other item that reminds me of it.

Thank you both for your replies. It's nice to know I'm not alone in this

Your welcome.

I am the same. There are a lot of things that I've thrown/given away or don't enjoy or want to think about any more because I associate them with a particular person.