Posted by Dinah on December 6, 2007, at 11:15:42
I do.
Sometimes it makes me feel uncomfortable.
When I was a teen, I had a friend staying the night. We were putting together something to eat when she leaned over and told me "Your mother is *awful*!" I don't remember the context. Maybe she had blown up in anger, but I'm pretty sure it was behavioral rather than the fact that we had to clean the dead roaches out of our dishes. For some reason this didn't make me feel any better.
My therapist did a quantum shift on my mother a few years ago when my father was dying. He'd always pointed out some of her behaviors here and there over the years, but maintained a bit of that neutrality that comes from knowing that what I'm saying is me filtering her through my lens.
But when she screamed in front of the social worker from the hospice that she wasn't going to have a hospital bed in HER house cluttering it up, and refused to agree to have help in daily despite the fact that Daddy was not at all being kept clean, and Daddy was taken away until the situation at her house was satisfactory, my therapist started to dislike her in earnest. I'm not sure if that pushed a button in his own psyche, or if it was outside objective confirmation of what I've said all along.
Now I find myself mitigating what my therapist says about her. It's not that I don't appreciate his support or his understanding of how... difficult she is. It's more that he doesn't understand that for the first many years of my life she was everything to me. She'd taken me to go live with her parents, so Daddy was mostly a scary stranger. While she did *everything* with me and threw herself into my childish wishes. I see now that that wasn't really for me so much as she enjoyed the contact she had with others, but at the time it was wonderful and magic. And in some ways she really was wonderful and magic. I don't think you could ask for a better mom to little kids.
He also seems to idealize my father's relationship with me a bit. I adored my Daddy. But until I graduated from high school, we weren't particularly close. And he could be difficult as well, as much so in his own way as my mother. I loved him and the relationship we developed was so important to me. I miss him every day. But loving him wasn't an unmitigated joy.
I do point out to my therapist as we go along that he's making me and my father sound too good, and my mother sound too bad. I tell him how I perceive his attitudes.
But I guess I can't make him stop thinking my mother is awful any more than I could change the attitude of my friend.
poster:Dinah
thread:799113
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20071204/msgs/799113.html