Obviously this is a really personal question so I'm desperately sorry if this is worded wrong or is inappropriate to ask. You've talked a lot about the awful things that happened to you as a teen and child, but you still share a property with your mom and I'm interested in how you manage that? This is not a "why do you have a living situation that might not be 100% ideal" question it's more like. "How do you maintain a relationship with family who has deeply hurt and traumatized you/ how do you decide if that's worth doing?"
GOD I WISH I KNEW THE ANSWER TO THIS QUESTION 😂😭
it's like... just an ongoing process for me, tbh. there are definitely circumstances under which I would have cut my mom off, and for some part of my life that was not an option because I was reliant on her materially. which I still am partly, so that's part of the answer. the other part of the answer is that my mom has come to understand that my perspective of what happened to me and my childhood is the objectively correct one. it was a really tough process for her and I think she deals with a lot of guilt about it but she has actually apologized to me about it and she has changed quite a lot of her behavior in our interactions in the last 10 years or so. there are still a lot of things that are really hard for me about maintaining a relationship with her and I think... honestly... it sounds terrible, but there are a lot of things that I won't be able to fully process until she dies. that feels so so so bad to type lol but like. I dunno. probably other people who have had abusive childhoods and parents understand what I mean. that doesn't mean I WANT her to die like I really don't!!! but there are some things that I just can't face directly while she's still here.
I try to set boundaries about what I take on in our relationship regarding her feelings, because that is one of the really big ways that she abused me as a kid, and she has been pretty amenable to me setting those boundaries and has handled me telling her that she is responsible for her own feelings now pretty gracefully all things considered. the thing about my mom is, and I'm sure that this is true for so many people, she herself was of course the victim of horrible horrible child abuse from her mother. and our family is just incredibly toxic and bad and. there's just a LOT of generational trauma. like A LOT!!!! and so I really deeply and viscerally understand why she is the way that she is. and I care about her a lot. you know, she's my mom. I think it's pretty hard for us to not care about the people who brought us up even if they did an abysmal job. ideally I would like to not be reliant on her at all in any way, and I would like to live a bit further from her. I think that that would be better for our relationship. on both sides. there are some things about my relationship with my mom that I have just sort of had to accept. like the fact that emotionally, I am the one who has parented her? because while it is good that she has come gradually to understand my perspective on my childhood, it does mean that I've had to hold her hand and help pull her up the sheer cliffside of processing her OWN trauma. which was never my job. in fact as the parent it was her job to help ME with processing hard things. and I have a lot of conflicting feelings about that because I'm glad that she's been able to make that progress but at the same time... I feel a lot of resentment. you know. that's what I needed from HER. it's not fair that not only did I have to bootstrap my own fucking emotional development (the hardest thing I have ever done,) I also had to help HER do that. screams into pillow.
anyway those things are all pretty specific to my situation and I don't know if any of them are helpful to people in other situations that are different than mine. I think that there are a whole lot of situations where people are more than justified in going low or no contact with parents who have done similar things. there are definitely people in my family who I would be no contact with if it were at all possible.
being disabled complicates stuff like this so much because a lot of the time it means that it's simply is not materially possible to like. divest ourselves of our families in the way we might be able to if we were fully financially and physically independent. so. I really feel everyone who is dealing w similar stuff with their families.
