BellaOnline Forums Family Daughters Emotionally Abusive Mothers

It is great to read so much stuff on daughters by other people and to actually feel understood. I have very good and supportive friends but not yet met one who really understands my numerous issues with my I mother.It has only been a therapist who once told me my mother was a narcissist and had a personality disorder and that a relationship with her was very destructive for me. I cut her off for a while and then she admitted to being an alcoholic. I really thought that this would bring about a fresh start for us but I am now discovering that despite her improvement and not drinking, the personality disorder and narcissism is the same and so are our issues. I will be leaving my country in a few months and we are currently not speaking so I am considering cutting her off again. Thankfully after a few years of therapy, meditation and self help I am much more functional and in control of my emotions. My heart goes out to the people writing the above posts as I can really appreciate the pain,anger and frustration caused by an emotionally abusive mother and how difficult it is to cut off completely and understand one's own feelings and actually get there and liberate oneself.I have recently distanced myself from my brother too as he seems to act in similar ways at times and I am happy with that.Thanks also for the book suggestions, I will check them out.

It's amazing to know that I am not the only one having to deal with this. My mother has been emotionally abusive ever since her and my father got a divorce. I was 9, 21 now. I feel like I have almost been robbed of my adolescence because of what I have had to go through. I feel like my personality has been altered. To her, I can do nothing right. Whenever there is an opportunity to fight and tear me down, she takes it. But I never hear one word of praise or support. It hurts so much, because I still live with her and have to go through this everyday. It's so draining emotionally to the point where I just have to break down and cry. Her own family knows of the way she is, they think that she is miserable, but I know they can never see the full extent of her. She never admits to the way she is, she is completely oblivious. Sometimes I think that she is just so gone that she doesn't even know how she is acting, which is so frustrating in itself. She never apologizes. I feel like I am trapped in this prison of a house. I feel like there is nothing I can do. She has this way of turning her rage on and off with a flick of a switch. One minute she will be screaming in my face, the next minute the doorbell will ring with my boyfriend outside and she will become this friendly outgoing person. It makes me want to scream. I feel like even if I try to do something, no one will believe me because they will be talking to this nice, friendly person. My boyfriend has no idea what I am talking about when I try to tell him how bad she is. All he sees is one side of her. I can't take it anymore. For so long I have told myself that it is no big deal, because I see the way that other people love my mother, I tell myself that I am just overreacting. But I feel no love in this house. I don't feel like I am loved in this house at all. And I know that is not the way that you should feel when you are home. I know that I don't deserve to live this way, I just don't know what else there is to do. Lately I've learned to shut her out, I can literally choose not to hear her when she tries to speak to me. I've learned to be able to cope with her more and I know that what she is saying has nothing to do with me, and that it is just a product of her misery. But its just hard when it is a constant part of your life.

Everyday I think of ways to kill myself. I hate my mother and at 23 i can now honestly admit that. I was raised in a big family home by my mother. My father supported me on and off in my teenage years but he was never physically or emotionally available to me. My mother is very controlling and demanding. She and her elder sister raised me, we were poor and had to struggle alot but the two of them often with held things from me because they though it was useless or that i did not deserve it. Eg, I could not go out with my friends as a teenager, because I had no clothes to wear, my mom would nto buy me clothes and she also thought going out was stupid and that I would get into trouble. The few times i was ever allowed to go out with friends I had to be the one to organize everything. I had to pay for a cab to take all of us and pay for a cab to bring us back. I was also held responsible by my friends parents for their behaviour and whatever they did while we were out together. Now that I am 23 i still live at home and unfortunately my fiance has had to move in with me because his mom kicked him out and we both had nowhere else to go. His mom emotioanlly and physically abused him as a child growing up and withheld monetary support of his education. So he left school with no certification. My mother and aunt dominate us, insult us and belittle us constantly. As a teenager they expected perfection from me. They expected maturity. It was always some comment about how i am mature and not stupid liek other girls my age. Or some comment about "your not stupid you won't go and make the mistakes the other girls make, you are smart you won't get pregnant." They held me above others and they would constantly criticise other teenage girls around me to the point that i was afriad to let them know that i was going through the same things all the other girls were going through. I was raped when i was 15 and the most my mom did was threaten the boy and told me i was stupid for hanging out with him in the first place. She has never spoken to me about how i feel. Last summer i got pregnant by my fiance and my mom curse me, she told me i was fat and stupid and ignorant and that my fiance does not love me and that I should have an abortion. That she was dissapointed in me and that I will never learn. At 4 months i miscarried due to all the stress I was livign through. I became even more depressed and I was diagnosed as depressed by a psychiatris. My mom says i'm lazy and that eventhough i am depressed I should get up and do the stuff i need to do. She and my aunt have bullied me my whole life, withholding money, and love and emotional support from me. My mom forces herself on me by not allowing me ot do things for myself. Whatever i do is never good enough and she needs to fix it. She would wash my clothes, press my clothes etc and she wants to dictace what i eat, if i can go into the refridgerator, if i can use the stove etc. She wants to dictate when i have sex with my fiance or if i should have sex with my fiance. She tells me where i can and cannot work. She will nagg me until i leave a job if she does not want me ot work at the particular place. She is unforgiving, and says that i do not love her and that i am ungrateful and thta i am lucky that she loves me. I am a university student. I have been at university for 3 years and i have not even completed my first year yet. I have been depressed for years, unable to consentrate, unable to function. All i want to do is cry. I am trapped my fiance is poor, I am poor, we are trapped and everyday i cry because it feels like I can do nothing right. I am sorry i worte so long, it is just that seeing this forum is the first time besides talking to the psychiatrist or my fiance that i have been able to say what i feel.

Hi BabyJoy,

I am sorry that you are having difficulties. I hope that you can find some help. I'm glad you have someone to talk to.

I know we are in hard economic times but if you or your fianc�e have any resources you should really separate yourselves from the situation. You have to find another place to live so you can start building yourself back up.

I hope that things look up for you and that your psychiatrist knows your feelings. Please be honest with them about thinking about suicide.

I have somewhat of a different story. As far back as my memory serves, my mother shared everything with me. My father and mother always had difficulties in their marriage. I know this because my mother always told me. She would dictate every single detail of their fights and their arguments. Often they were about how to deal with my younger brother and me. Other times they were about financial and communication issues. She would always tell me these things. She'd come to me a mess. Tears would be streaming down her face and she would often be sobbing. This started when I was young, probably nine or ten. I found out when I was eleven that my dad frequented strip clubs. These were things not appropriate to tell an eleven year old. I was always expected to listen to these issues she had. At the time she had me convinced that my father was a monster for doing all these horrible things to her. Yes, infidelity and forms of adultery are wrong, but they should bear no meaning on what sort of father he was. My Dad has always been very attentive and unlike my mother, he never discussed his issues with my mother because he realized that it was seperate like any good parent would. The worst part about it was she would ask my advice. I would feel guilty if I didn't know what to tell her. But looking back, I see how ridiculous it was. I was a child. She expected me to be her friend and confidant. She came to me for relationship advice about my father! The more I think about it, the angrier I get. I never got to have a mother. Whenever I had a problem and came to her for advice she would simply state "I don't know." She never had any advice for me.Though she always expected it of course. She and my Father divorced about two years ago. I was nineteen at the time. I stayed at a community college and lived with her and my brother becasue I felt my mother would not make it without me. She would ball and sob each day after work. She would as usual ask me questions regarding life and what I think she should do with hers. She would complain each day about how lonely she was and how I just don't understand how hard life is for her. The crazy thing is I found myself always asking what I was doing wrong and why she wasn't content with being me and my brother's mother. Shortly after divorcing my father she met my step father. he's anice man, but not three weeks after she met him she decided she would quit her job and move with him. My brother and I were simply out of luck. I felt so betrayed and angered. I had a full time job all the time I lived with her during college so i didn't rely on her for money but I still felt abandoned. Luckily my Grandmother being the sweet woman she is took my brother in and he now is getting maternal love he deserves. I tried to provide that for him but i'm just his sister. He knows I love him and alwasy will. My mother had convinced my brother, like she did me that because my father and her had divorced, that he wanted nothing to do with my brother, as a result my brother has refused to talk to my father for two years now. despite the many attempts my father has mad eto have a relationship with him. I live on campus at college now and I've had a lot of time to reflect. I can't believe how much of my young adlut life I just let her abuse me. I feel stupid for feeling so responsible for her. ANd now she calls me and tired to talk about her relationship with my stepdad. She has gotten irate with me and hung up when I refuse to listen to it. I have tried to confrot her about how she has always relied on me way to heavily and how I wish she would let me be the daughter for a change. She plays the martyr card and is so mellodramatic. She states "well i guess i'm just a horrible mother! I ruined your childhood." She dismisses this sarcastically like it's not a big deal, the things she's put me through. I don't understand how a mother could be so self involved. Mothers are supposed to be nurtuing and encouraging. Even as far as my education goes she has to compare her own experiences in life to mine. I can't ever just speak. She alwasy has to lasso the conversation back to where it's about herself. I'm happy now though. I see that she was wrong and I believe, I don't know if there are different opinions but I beleive this was abuse. UGh I'm just glad I live on my own now and my brother's away from it. Hopefully we'll turn out funcitonal . I know one thing, I will treat my children with age appropreateness and I will never share privat issues of my marriage with them. That should be none of their concern. My job is to always put them first. I promise to do so.

Oh I'm so happy to have found this forum. My mother also falls among the definition of emotionally abusive. I knew at 12 or 13 that something was "wrong," but I caught the brunt of it so my brothers didn't realize what was happening. They just chose to stay out of her way when she went on a tirade. I can recall being 6 and her forcing me to take piano lessons because I had said I wanted to, but after a year, when the teacher pushed me too hard, I wanted to quit. My mother to this day won't let me forget it that I'm a quitter. I'm now 37. As a child, when she would fight with one of us - it was a fight with all of us. Usually she would argue with my dad, then she wouldn't talk for 3 days to any of us. My brothers and I never understood what we did wrong, but she included us in her anger. She wouldn't cook for us, or wake us up for school, she would force my dad to do it all when he worked like a dog to keep her in her fur coats, she was supposed to be the stay at home mom. Well, that was what she decided. My dad always wanted her to work. She NEEDED to work. She needed to have something else in her life, but she was too lazy and too much of a martyr. When I was a teenager she constantly told me that the boys who liked me only liked me because my father was a "lawyer" and they thought we had money. When we would shop for clothes and she was in the dressing room with me, she would pull at the fabric as if I was a size 20 trying to get into a size 4, and act like there wasn't enough fabric to stretch across my fat body to zip up. Truth was, I was 5'3 in high school and 110 lbs. Last time I checked, that wasn't fat. She has dismissed everything good that has ever happened to me in my life, and told me that I can do better, and that what I'm so "happy" about just isn't enough. When I pitched an article to a bunch of magazines and Glamour Magazine responded with interest, I told my mother. She said, "Oh, that's not going to be easy. You have to interview people..." She trailed off talking about how "hard" it was going to be, and implied I was too stupid to figure out how to craft an article when I'm a writer who many people have followed the online work of for years. She then said I should write for the New York Times - so apparently I'm too stupid for Glamour, but now in the same conversation Glamour isn't good enough for her. Considering this was my first attempt into print media, and freaking GLAMOUR responded, I would say I'm doing pretty well. Now I'm engaged and the wedding planning has commenced. My fiancee and I are doing all of it, but my mother, who said she wouldn't even be coming to the wedding, has slowly conceded to help. We thought if she was mildly involved that she would turn around her sourpuss attitude and show up. But she couldn't resist insulting everything from my ring, where my fiancee bought it, the stone and setting that's "out of style" and that he paid too much for it - even though she doesn't know what he paid, she only knows where he got it from. My fiancee is also (not surprisingly) not good enough because he was married before. She is demanding we get a prenup and that we tell her all the details of our finances so she and my father can prepare this and protect their precious inheritance money. Apparently no one, including my fiancee, has ever loved me for me. They all are after my "money" that they think I have because my parents live in a rich town. She insults every single thing about me and I'm sick of it. I'm just waiting for her to not show up at this wedding. I already have my "goodbye forever" letter in my head. She didn't go to my brothers wedding because he didn't kiss her a** enough, and she'll miss mine too. My therapist said she is so far beyond a narcissist and so angry that no amount of therapy could help her. My father almost died on two separate occasions and she made both of those occasions about her, from one end to the other. He was almost dead and she was at a bar bitching that he was going to be the death of her. If you're a teenager and reading this, I'm sorry to say that the odds are that it won't get better with your mom. The best you can do is cut your losses as soon as possible and get out from her clutches. Check out a book called "Will I Ever Be Good Enough: Healing the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers." by Karyl McBride. It's the best there is out there, but the things my mother does still trump the worst of what is in that book.

It's so incredible and so healing to find this site and to read all of your stories, ladies. Goddess bless you and the broken roads you've all traveled. You are so beautiful and so strong. I'm 24 and I feel so much like so many of you. I've done so much reading on Borderline Personality, Passive-Aggressive Disorder and emotional abuse and I'm not sure where my mother fits except an emphatic "all of the above!" My childhood was much the same as so many of yours; the constant fights with family members, slowly driving each away. First my father, then my brother and now me. The non-interest / neglect and otherwise just belittling. Now as an adult (I still live with her since I cannot afford a place of my own yet) it still continues to this day. If anything, it has gotten worse. I have battled hard to achieve my education and I've never given up on it for more than a few months at a time. I dropped out when I was 13 and now I'm 24 and set to graduate. I never took the easy way and went for lesser courses or graduation programs or tried to fast-track myself. But even eleven years later she still picks at me for dropping out. Any college course I've shown interest in, she's belittled me for. That I wasn't smart enough or good enough at one of the pre-reqs for or that it would simply be too difficult; afterall I'm just a lousy dropout. Then she belittles me for not graduating (yet) and being in college. It's impossible to please her or get her to say anything positive, even if I come back with A Grades. I'm a mother myself now and her favorite thing to do is to pick at my parenting skills. She's told me several times that I'm a bad mother, that I'm a selfish mother, that I'm doing what's convenient for me instead of what's best for my son. Then she'll turn around and say "You know I think you're a good mother." when I call her out on her attacks. It's entirely frustrating since I was adopted at 3 and she's never been pregnant, birthed, breastfed or dealt with newborns at all herself - but feels that she has every right to criticize and judge me on all of the above. My son is 5.5 and is far healthier and happier than I was at his age or any age. Of course she takes credit for that too, even though we can go days without even speaking to her. She picks at everyone around me and her; her friends for having crisis and not noticing her new outfit or haircut (seriously). My son's father for not working (he's taken a couple years off work after the death of both his parents), for not finishing something he mentioned to her, even being sick gets those same little digs and passive-aggressive demeaning tongue-clicks. Even my online friends get the same judgments. Holidays are beyond miserable. Regardless of which one it is, everyone has always gotten too much stuff and there's always side-comments to that effect. Any time I buy my son anything, she has to ask how expensive it was and then make it about her and how I owe her money for something or other - even if I've just given her $300 the previous week. But if she buys him a $2 book we're supposed to bow down in awe of her supreme generosity, of course. I've been in therapy since I was around 13 because I believed something was wrong with me, that it was my fault somehow and if I could only do better or work harder or graduate that she might be proud of me, love me, encourage me. And certainly she encouraged my belief that it was me. I even tried several mediation sessions between her and my therapist which ended up with me having to leave the room in tears because she cannot even admit that she's wrong with a therapist there, she somehow managed to even convince my therapist that I was the problem and have her gang up on me - TWICE! Now I realize that the problem was never me. I'm not perfect and I have made mistakes, but I'm also awesome and work hard and am a wonderful mother and a pretty amazing person. The problem is HER and for some reason even though she's had a good life and done essentially everything she's wanted to do and still continues to do mostly everything she wants to do, she's miserable.

You can walk away from boy friends.. husbands.. you can even find the strength to draw a line of boundery with your children.. all of these FAR easier than ever finding the inner will to survive a toxic mother daughter relationship. I'm 51 now.. and it's taken me ten years from the time I chose to put distance between me and my mother. Ironically didnt happen until we lived about a mile apart. And if I ever become a whole person apart from her, able to see her for who she is completely, it will have been the biggest accomplishment in my life. ONLY then, if that ever does happen, can I even HOPE to have a whole relationship with anyone else in my life. I've been married for 25 yrs to a guy who I would swear is her equal.. Point is, I will never live long enough to have my life with out the effects of that first most profound relationship with anyone you can have. If you have a toxic mother, the BEST you will ever get is help for YOU. It's so hard and most of the time impossible to ever break free of that, because they are the very formation of your life. It's harder still, to get to that point of understanding.. and yet understand MORE; that YOU will have to grow up emotionally BEYOND them. You will actually have to "get older than they are'. hard bridge to gap. The hardest! SO VITAL to your mental well being. Because with out doing that.. you will be stuck FOREVER in never being able to be WHOLE YOUR SELF. You just have to find a way to move past the blame, because even though you are so very rightly entitled to it, it will harm you if you stay there. They ARE WHAT THEY ARE. But YOU can be what you deserved from her. GOD BLESS YOU AND ME BOTH!

Your mom reminds me so much of the mother of a friend of mine. Nothing that this girl seemed to do could make her mother happy or satisfied.

If she was at home she wanted her gone or badgered her enough that she got the feeling she wanted her out of the house. But then if she left her mother would blow her phone up calling and leaving alternately whining, crying and cursing messages to guilt her into returning home.


Long story short, the mom got cancer and my friend realy struggled over whether she wanted to be there for her or spare herself more misery. Her therapist advised her to be with her as much as possible but to calmly leave when or if any mind games or verbal abuse started up.

Amazingly,before she died my friend's mom apologized for her actions and seemed genuinely sorry for how she had behaved. This seemed to have a comforting effect on my friend and enabled her to make peace with her situation.

I can't imagine what made this woman treat her daughter so badly for so many years when she obviously was aware at how hurtful and wrong it was!

At the end she simply said she had made some bad choices and had taken the wrong path.

I wonder if something in people's background make them angry at the world or if they are just so miserable in their own skin that they want to pass it around?