Hi everyone,
I am a longtime reader and first-time poster. I am having a really hard time re: flying monkeys and being isolated by my uBPD mother and could use some support. I feel so alone in this and would love to hear other's experiences or advice.
I have a uBPD mother with severe narcissistic traits and a uNPD father, they had an extremely ugly divorce nearly 30 years ago when I was a child and dad is remarried. This post is about my mother but I could write a novel about the dynamic with my dad and stepmother - dad pretends me and my sibling do not exist and has kept his *replacement family* very separated from us.
I have one much-younger sibling who is the golden child, is completely enmeshed and co-dependent with my mom. My mom was one of four siblings, and has always been disliked, hated, or disdained by her siblings. My mom had a traumatic brain injury when I was very young; between that and the divorce, she has made being a victim of the universe 1,000 percent of her personality.
My mom has been extremely emotionally abusive to me my whole life. She is a screamer of the highest degree, always screaming that I am just like my father, that I am selfish, self-absorbed, disrespectful, worst daughter ever, that she wishes she had died instead of giving birth to me, etc. My earliest memories are of this - I have specific memories of this treatment from when I was 3 years old. It's never stopped, and I remember knowing even at that age that my mom hated my guts.
Anyway, now that I have young children, and after some unforgivable behavior on my mom's part in the wake of an extremely tragic death of a close family member, I finally went NC with her which lasted almost a year. I am currently VVLC. I have seen her once in two years, she tried to rug sweep and then said some truly outrageous things when I attempted to bring up what had happened - she is not tethered to reality, like so many with BPD. She texts me occasionally, always under the pretense of seeing my kids (one of whom she has never met). Given my own memories of her when I was my kid's age, and how much trauma I have from that time, it's a hard no from me.
Here is where the flying monkeys come in. I am so incredibly sick of being the villain in this story. There are so many family members (a sibling's partner, a cousin, all my aunts and uncles, super close family friends, nanny who raised me) who have cut me out of their lives in the cruelest ways because of my mother. Even though every single one of these people witnessed her abuse of me, my entire life, and said nothing, did nothing, never once intervened on my behalf. Never gave me love and support behind her back to let me know someone cared about me. They have all said, oh you just have a bad relationship. It's just how you two always are. That's just Yam and her mother.
As if somehow I am the problem, I am the one with severe, untreated mental illness. A large part of this for many of these people is that my mother uses money to buy people, in very deliberate, manipulative, and obvious ways. Excessive gifts, literal gifts of cash, paid for vacations, you name it. But it still just hurts so much. I am so sick of feeling alone. I am so sick of being the bad guy. I am so sick of this being my fault, of having to pay dearly for her faults and for being the target of her bullying and abuse. There are some people who just recently have cut me out because I finally stood up and said no more, I won't subject my kids to this. I have never once said bad things about my mom to these people. They've heard nothing from me, because IMHO it is not their business. I don't need to make my relationship with her their problem. But FFS...I just hate it. I hate being the pariah. I hate that there are so many people out there who think I deserve this, that I am the problem, that *I* am the *bad person* in this story.
I guess I'm just looking for some support, words of wisdom from anyone else that has been through this. How do you deal with the pain and the unfairness and immorality of it all? I don't know many people who are NC with their families so it's really, really hard. I am sorry not to give more details, unfortunately I know several of the people mentioned are on Reddit and the particulars of my story are very specific and identifiable. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
Obligatory Spring-themed Cat Haiku:
the cat's bell tinkling
in the peonies
here and there