Afraid of my mother

LegacyUser

As the title says, I am afraid of my mother. I am not sure how to explain. I am sitting here in tears as I write this after another incident.

I am living at home again after a few traumatic years. At the moment I am unemployed and I am dependent on my parents. I am seeing a therapist and he is helping me with my issues.

It is so hard for me to deal with my mother. We are completely different from each other. She is an extroverted person and I am the complete opposite. She reminds me of that woman from the TV show 'Keeping Up Appearances'. Everything is done for show, she is so concerned with her image and keeping up the image, especially in front of her family. She has always been this way, even when we were young. She was always concerned with what the neighbours think, we had to look good in front of people and kind of keep up a front. My sister had some problems with depression when she was in university. She married a man that my mother hates, he is not Irish. My mother became depressed after this and she would refuse to leave the house as she thinks that people are laughing at us.

Everything, absolutely everything is for show. There was a family wedding recently, I thought I would go crazy, she was dictating everything, from what dress I should wear. I find dealing with her so difficult as I just cannot stick up for myself. This is the problem and I am trying to work through it with the help of my therapist. What really angers me is when she uses me as the butt of her jokes in front of her own sisters. Today I snapped at her in front of everyone. I handled things the wrong way, I should not have lashed out like that. I knew that there would be trouble later on, she gets very angry with my dad for trying to keep the peace and she screamed at me just now that I would regret calling her names in front of her sisters. Then she starts screaming at my dad. I am angry at her for constantly putting myself down and my sister down and I am angry at myself for not being able to assert myself in a healthy way. Thank you for reading.

looksee

Being at home is not doing you any good. If you were in a situation where, for example, she was sick or frail and on her own and you felt you had to be there to look after her, then it might be understandable that you would stay.

But she is not, she has your father and her sisters, you need to get away and make your own life well out of reach, or you could easily find yourself stuck as the long-suffering person that has to put up with her notions and 'mind her' in her old age.

You may feel that you cannot afford to leave, or afraid of the unknown, but you owe it to yourself to create a life for yourself, she will criticise you for it and tell you you are not capable of looking after yourself, but she is going to do that anyway, you have nothing to lose.

mcmoustache

Your reaction is totally understandable. Don't beat yourself up for it.

The other two posters offered good suggestions (move out, basically) and I don't need to repeat them but I just wanted to emphasise the point that snapping at her seems like a pretty natural thing to do under the circumstances and you shouldn't feel guilty over it.