Long story short: I’m going over to Mom’s tomorrow. Not really my choice, as you know if you’ve been reading along. I suppose I could feign violent illness or something, but that will simply push it to Friday.
The basic plan is to play it casual, and if she starts taking things in a bad direction, I’m willing to pack it up and leave without further discussion.
Probably not going to get much sleep tonight, which won’t help things.
No harm. No foul.
I assume this means that things went okay – if so, GOOD!
People who are experiencing abuse from a particular individual often feel violent towards them. Even if she does not mean to abuse you, if she misunderstands all your feelings and characteristics and insists on interpreting you as something you’re not, that is extremely invalidating and can be extraordinarily insulting. So I think that may be what is happening to you.
I feel that your violent urges are probably perfectly natural considering the torture her misinterpretations probably inflict on you but I hope you don’t interpret that to mean that I feel it isn’t a very unhealthy situation.
Hard to describe without going into too much detail. I hesitate to call it “abuse”, but in a way that’s the only way to describe it…. Basically she does something on a regular basis that makes me physically ill. Nothing psychological here; it’s a purely physical response to something — but she refuses to believe that what she does causes the illness, and insists that I’m exaggerating or altogether making it up. (Imagine being allergic to peanuts and somebody insists on serving you peanut butter. And if you don’t eat it you’re just being rude. Kind of like that.)
I’ve tried to get her to stop, and in the past she’s said she would, only to do it again some time later. If I push harder she starts accusing me of making threats and essentially treats me as though I’m acting horribly.
It’s not as simple as just avoiding her, as to avoid her is to pretty much avoid my entire family, which would be extraordinarily difficult for me — perhaps fatal in the long run.
At its absolute base, she simply doesn’t believe that what she does is really a problem; and if she doesn’t believe that, there’s nothing I can do.
Fred,
There is psychology literature documenting the effect you described. Maybe if you show your mom some reputable literature she will finally believe you. You can look up any of the following:
Over-excitability (Can’t think of a specific article offhand but I bet there’s one somewhere that covers physical sensations).
Synesthesia – A rare trait, considered neutral (as opposed to insanity) where your brain causes you to experiencing things coming into one sense as if it were from another sense. Perhaps your mom makes a noise, and you experience it in your stomach – that kind of thing.
Psychosomatic – A term meaning that an illness is “in your head”.
Somatoform Disorder – Some people have severe physical disorders (IE: paralysis) that are due to a psychological cause.
I think synesthesia would be easiest to aim for when it comes to finding a description that will do the trick on a trait that’s considered neutral. Anyone in my life, I have decided, HAS to know about OE. They don’t understand me otherwise. So I would recommend telling her about that, too.
You could also look up some stuff on Tesla. He had such extreme synesthesia, he actually hallucinated the sensations – but that is precisely what gave him such a huge advantage in science.
He was so easily disgusted by things he never married. An autobiography at http://www.teslaplay.com/autobody.htm has descriptions of that.
What does she do?
Now I’m curious.
If it isn’t too harrowing to describe…
“She” — You’re reading too much into it.
My mom is literally exposing me to something to which I am very allergic. As I said: nothing psychological about it. My physical response is like getting a bad cold that can last for a few days. Utterly miserable to go through, especially when it’s completely avoidable.
My wife has the same allergy, but worse. She has literally gone to the emergency room — more than once in fact — and my Mom insists she’s faking it.
It’s really quite an extraordinary mental block, because in all other ways my mom is intelligent, caring, generous, and just about every other good thing one might want to attribute to their mother. She simply refuses to believe this one problem, but it’s a big enough problem that I can’t possibly ignore it.
The fact that she doesn’t believe me of course heads straight into “liar liar” territory, so it’s a difficult situation on multiple levels. Apparently I’m either lying to her, or a complete fool (or, of course exaggerating things and being melodramatic).
She has also tearfully declared that I’m “the only one of [her] sons to every threaten” her. The threat? I’ve told her that if she does it I’ll leave, be it Christmas day or a birthday or any other time. I’m not sticking around long enough to get sick. Not ever again.
For reasons of anonymity I regularly omit details of events and people on this blog, but in this case it’s making discussion difficult.
For the sake of discussion, let’s assume that mom wears so much perfume you can smell her at fifty feet, and I’m allergic to it. It’s a reasonable approximation of the actual issue.
Oh man. That sucks. I saw that “it was physical” part, but I thought you meant to say your reaction was physical – meaning you felt it in your body but nowhere else (which could mean that you weren’t having an emotional reaction alongside it.) I can see the point in being vague, so sorry it didn’t work this time.
What if you brought your mom a doctor’s note?
Or you could ask your doctor to give her a surprise call to tell her that an allergic reaction is scientifically verified as a real illnesses, leave a message on the answering machine if need be.
Or do both.
I’ve tried everything I can. She unambiguously and quite determinedly refuses to accept that what she does is a problem.
She has literally watched me leave the house, with my wife barely able to breathe (heading to the ER), and her response later was “<gasping noises> See Fred? I can do that too.” I wanted to fucking slap her. I wanted to scream. There are very few times in my life I’ve actually been stunned into silence, but that was one of them. How can I possibly respond rationally to that level of denial?
I love her so much. One day she is going to loose her son. She won’t see it until it’s too late.
Well then maybe it’s time to jack up your strategy to industrial strength level. Get all the other family members to jump on her all at once with it. Pay a doctor to come for a surprise visit and personally explain it to her. Show her horrible pictures from the internet of people who are having severe allergic reactions. Bring her to the allergists office and get an allergy test done so she can watch the rash develop. You can’t fake a rash. An entire profession (allergists) aren’t all faking it.
Don’t let ignorance kill you. Kill the ignorance. Whatever you have to do to get through to her, its justified. Be blunt as hell and let reality slap her in the face. “This substance can KILL me! A bazillion people a year DIE from allergic reactions”
If you have to get more intense than that:
“Every time I come to your house, I am risking my LIFE. I risk my LIFE to come see you, because I love you THAT much, and you’re telling me you can’t even keep this substance away from me?”
or
“I know you’ve heard of erring on the side of caution, right? You know that no one is perfect and you don’t know everything, right? I am telling you I could DIE from this. When someone’s LIFE depends on you to be right, don’t you think it’s better to err on the side of caution and keep this substance away from me?”
Well, see, now you’re just being melodramatic. (ahem)
I’m not risking my life, just beating myself up. My wife? Yeah, she’s risking her life.
It sounds like reality checking is not intact. (hers)
“Well, see, now you’re just being melodramatic. (ahem)”
No. Melodrama is pretend. This is real.
Do you think that rebuttal would work?
It’s like telling a creationist that evolution is real. Facts schmacts.
The funny part of it all is when she says I’m just being stubborn, because I invariably point out that she is at least equally stubborn, or the debate would be over by now. (Presumably, being stubborn is okay if you’re right.) Who was it who said “facts are stubborn things”? Jefferson?
This makes me mad, too.
I see now why you have these urges to slap her. She is forcing you to choose between your family and your life.
Maybe you should scream.
Scream and cry and freak out.
Might that convince her on a level that she cannot refute?
Or what would happen if you went on strike and told her “I am only talking to you by phone until you agree NEVER to put that substance near me ever again.” Tell the other family members about your strike so that they can get involved. Or try getting their support first.
Is it possible to get the rest of the family to be activist about this, perhaps by making it clear how big of a problem this “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” catch-22 is for you?
What if you introduced her to some different ideas about logic and facts? If you challenge her ideas of what a fact is and how truth is arrived at, maybe you’ll cause enough doubt to break through the stubbornness.
I literally wrote a letter to my Mom, telling her that if she did it I would leave immediately. Every time. No matter the occasion. I told her in no uncertain terms exactly what the situation was, and what it was she was doing. I told her that I was sending a copy of the letter to each of my siblings (and did so) so that if and when I just got up and left, they would know exactly why.
Mom didn’t deign to speak to me for months. When she did, she played it off as though nothing had happened, until later when she got after me with her accusations of me “making threats”. In the time since that letter I have left multiple times–once while we were all together for birthdays and once on Easter.
The only response I’ve heard from my siblings is chastisement. Remember, I just get melodramatic to them.
I can’t think of a a more direct confrontation than putting it in writing. I can’t think of a better way to try to confront this problem. I’m at the point where I must simply stay away from most of my family, and if you’ve read the rest of this blog, you can imagine how completely crippling that will be for me. My family is my single strongest connection I have to the broad sweep of humanity. I lose them, I am alone.
Since a few weeks before Easter this year, when she sat down and gave me a little speech about how entirely justified and correct her actions were the previous Easter (e.g. no reason not to do it again, presumably), I have been obsessed with this single issue. Thus the vivid nightmare. Thus the growing knot in my gut. (I’m carrying so much stress physically that I’ve– how do I phrase this–all but ceased vacating without taking a pill for it.)
I can walk away, but at what cost?
Maybe it would be a good idea to look for new friends. You need people to be close to but you also need them to be understanding. It sounds like your family does not understand your nature at all – not your honesty or the depth of your feeling – or your allergies. People who can understand and appreciate and even respect intense emotions are out there. They’re hard to find, but if you know exactly what you’re looking for and how to spot them, its worth it. I have been lonely my whole life because I am so different emotionally – and because the types of things I care about are so different from what other people care about.
I had to do a lot of research in order to figure out how to find people like me (a certain flavor of gifted person), but I did, and I know where I can find them now. I think it would be worth it for you to look for others like you because they will have that depth of feeling with which to understand yours, they will have that same honesty with which to believe you about yours and they are likely to have allergies and so they will understand yours. I will tell you all about how to find them if you want. If you look, you can find people who accept you the way you are and believe in your true nature, instead of rejecting you.
“…and they are likely to have allergies”
LOL — Oh, is that another common trait of gifted individuals?
I don’t have a relationship to anyone in my family. They are way too ill to be close to emotionally. I can’t say it hasn’t been miserable for me but that finding people who understand me makes me feel alive again and as long as I have understanding people in my life, I don’t feel alone.
When a fetus is exposed to a high level of a certain hormone in the womb (forget which one but it sounds kind of like “tryosene”) they are more likely to develop allergies — and giftedness.
There are lots of correlations like this. Being gifted is an extremely pervasive difference.
You might be surprised to find out how much of a difference having compatible gifted friends makes for you.
Misdiagnosis and Dual Diagnosis of Gifted Children and Adults catalogs many of the health differences and personality differences as well as the many diseases that our extreme differences are commonly mistaken for and how to make the distinctions between a person with a disorder and a gifted person. It was given good reviews by two past presidents of the APA.
If you don’t believe me about giftedness causing many differences, check it out.
I will.