When Parents Are Too Toxic to Tolerate

[no_hypocrisy]

A patient of mine, a lovely woman in her 60s whom I treated for depression, recently asked my advice about how to deal with her aging mother.

“She’s always been extremely abusive of me and my siblings,” she said, as I recall. “Once, on my birthday, she left me a message wishing that I get a disease. Can you believe it?”

Over the years, she had tried to have a relationship with her mother, but the encounters were always painful and upsetting; her mother remained harshly critical and demeaning.

Whether her mother was mentally ill, just plain mean or both was unclear, but there was no question that my patient had decided long ago that the only way to deal with her mother was to avoid her at all costs.

Now that her mother was approaching death, she was torn about yet another effort at reconciliation. “I feel I should try,” my patient told me, “but I know she’ll be awful to me.”

Should she visit and perhaps forgive her mother, or protect herself and live with a sense of guilt, however unjustified?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/health/20mind.html?ref=health

[tigereye]

1. hmm, sometimes people change when they are near death, and have some

revelation or insight. But some folks are just as nasty as ever.

That's a hard one - I suppose it might be worth the hurt to try one more time, just to say good bye for her own benefit. I really think folks have to make peace with themselves and accept that they can't make people do what's right or beneficial to them.

[Robb]

2. Tough one. People *do* change as they age, but

...at the same time, you reap what you sow. If you're abusive to your family, don't expect them to bend over backwards for you simply because you're old.

[Chalco]

3. My husband had a toxic mother...

but he took care of her as she died and got her into a hospice when it all became too much for us to handle.

When we arrived the first time to visit her in the hospital a woman greeted us in the hall and said "Your mother has never loved you. She does not have the capacity to love. It is not your fault."

It was as if the heavens had opened up and an angel was sent to greet us. She confirmed everything my husband felt for years.