Posted by cricket on May 10, 2005, at 16:50:46
It's been a bit quiet around here lately. I hope everyone is out enjoying the spring weather.
Anyway, with Mother's Day recently passed, the topic of my mother came up in therapy.
To make a long story short, my mother was an unmarried teenager when she had me. She rejected me at birth, refused to name me (said I was too ugly). Luckily I got to spend my first 5 years with my grandparents who loved me dearly. Then, at age 5, my mother got married and I was forced to go live with my mother and her sociopath (no exaggeration) husband. For the next 12 years of my life, I had to live with 2 adults who performed virtually every sort of abuse on me.
In light of a couple of things my mother said to me on Sunday about my little 5 year old niece, my T said that he thinks that my mother too and not just my stepfather is a sociopath. My T has always said a lot of things about my mother - extreme narcissist, character disorder, etc. but I think that this was the first time he himself as a psychiatrist began to wonder what the h*** is wrong with her.
The problem is that I have absolutely no feelings about my mother at all. Certainly no love or longing, but no anger or hatred either. If anything, I find it extremely boring to talk about her. I know that it may just be the defenses I had to build up to protect myself from her. Sometimes I even feel like my T is baiting me about her. He'll say things like "What you must have gone through to protect yourself from her." or "What an awful, poisonous woman." but still I feel nothing.
Is this all going to come crashing around me someday? Will I break down in my T's office and cry about how I never had a mommy who loved me? He's been putting it out there for 3 years now and still not a twinge of anything on my part. Perhaps I'm the sociopath.
Did anyone ever have such zero feelings for a parent? Did that ever change?
I guess the really strange thing is talking about my mother is so much more bland for me than the talks we had about therapy itself, my level of trust in my T, my fears about telling him things, etc. that emotionally I feel more stable. It sort of feels like we've spent a session talking about the weather.
poster:cricket
thread:496131
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20050504/msgs/496131.html