Non native speaker on a throwaway account, please bear with me.
I (F26) am still a student in a country where it is socially acceptable and the norm to rely on parents up to a certain age, because university is too demanding and cost of life too high to balance that and a proper job, so I live with my parents (F59, M63).
I’m clashing with my mother lately and I don’t know what to do to improve my relationship with her. She’s always been a very “let’s solve this issue on a purely pragmatical point of view” person. Due to health issues and childhood abuse from my verbally and physically violent father, I’ve never been an easy child to raise. I have the feeling she’s always done the “right thing”, sure (take me to therapy, take me to doctors) but she’s never really been there for me emotionally. Never sat down and tried to talk feelings, because everything is a problem that NEEDS a solution and she NEEDS to find that solution.
If I so much as try to express a negative feeling, from frustration to (unfortunately) suicidal ideation, she simply goes “there’s no need to feel like that”. Verbatim.
But that’s not the issue. I mean, it hurts, but I have made peace with the fact she doesn’t have the resources to comfort me and she never will.
The issue is, despite years of therapy that have quite literally rewired my brain, I still feel very insecure around her specifically, maybe as a direct consequence of said treatment, so when she gives me her “solutions” I snap and I get defensive, which is mostly me trying to affirm that “I am an adult and I don’t want to be treated like I can’t fend for myself”. She doesn’t seem to get it and keeps acting this way.
We don’t really fight as we’re both very self-aware of our own shortcomings, but the mood gets sour over the stupidest things, really, and it’s a pattern we can’t seem to break. Just today, I was casually saying something about not being able to get an event ticket online with an age discount: the ticket was available online, but only full price. For the age discount, me and my partner (M27) will have to go on site an hour earlier. Both my partner and I don’t care, we’ll go earlier, have a nice walk and even get ice cream. It’s a non-issue, a non-obstacle I will calmly walk around. My mother always wants to explode these kinds of obstacles with her mind: she started saying stuff like “surely there’s another way” “what a bother” and the devastating “you could instead do X”. I got defensive, because I’m an adult and I literally was NOT seeing any issues and certainly not expecting fixes. I only get defensive with her, because I always get the feeling that she thinks I’m unable to do things myself, or that I do them “wrong”.
She made me feel like I overreacted in my defensiveness, and probably I did (though this time I just said “it’s not so complicated” in a snappy tone). To be fair, she makes me feel like I overreact, always.
How do we work on this? If I try to make her notice the pattern, she says her intentions were different and I always misinterpret her.
TLDR: mother (F59) always focuses on fixing problems, real or imaginary, rather than how I (F26) feel, or worse she finds problems I hadn’t even thought about. It ends up reinforcing my insecurities as literally nothing goes unscrutinized.
Sorry for the wall of text and the weird phrasing and thank you in advance.
Comments
Ok so! I come from a similar situation in terms of: I was living at home around the same age & clashing very hard with my dad, who I have always had a great relationship with. It was HARD. I wanted him to know I am an adult and don’t need his advice or thoughts or opinions on every tiny thing.
I tried hard to remember I was living in his home and to just let it be, but it’s so hard when every tiny thing was being scrutinized, and he wasn’t respecting my personal feelings.
While I have worked on myself in therapy to help with this, one of the best pieces of advice came from my brother, who had dealt with a rocky relationship with my dad at times. He told me exactly what my dad had been telling me, but in a different way – my dad truly just wanted to be heard and listened to. Whether or not I took the advice was completely up to me in the end (and yes sometimes it would get more opinions, but again he just wanted to be heard). Letting him say everything he had to say, and asking him why he felt that way, helped him to respect my personal decisions in the end. He knew I had listened and taken it in. Then I could do what I wanted. It became more conversation and mutual respect, as opposed to an adult lecturing their child.
Let your mom know that you feel this way. Show her that YOU are open to communicating your feelings. Let her know you want to build the adult relationship with her, as opposed to feeling like you’re being lectured. And then practice it, truly. Pause before reacting, let her talk. Ask her questions. Show her you do respect her the way she wants to be respected, and hopefully the rest will fall into place.
It’s hard because you’re both navigating the fact that you’re now an adult. It takes practice and a lot of patience.
Quit telling her things!
She isn’t going to change. You can’t control people, only you’re reaction. Walk away when she sucks.
Stop telling your mom things- she can’t comment on or give you solutions for issues she doesn’t know you’re having.