| Emotional
Intelligence | Emotionally
Abusive Mothers Heidi
I was talking to a teen recently
who feels responsible for making her mother happy,
stopping her mother from being depressed, etc. The mother
recently told the teen she is so upset with the teen that
she has thought of committing suicide.
To make sure there is no confusion,
I will clarify that it is the mother who was
talking about killing herself. By doing this she is
laying a huge, huge, huge guilt trip on her teen daughter
who already felt overly responsible for her mother's
feelings and happiness or lack thereof.
Take just a moment and think about
that, please. Think how you would feel if you started to
believe you could be the cause of your mother killing
herself...
.
.
.
This teen already told me once she
wants to make good grades because "that brings
smiles in the family where there aren't many
smiles."
(March 2008 note - I have
decided to say that the teen whose mother did this is a
teen in England who I will call Laura J.)
I would call this emotional abuse
on the part of the mother, but the teen doesn't agree and
won't report her mother. And in my experience, the
authorities wouldn't do much anyhow. They would probably
just recommend counseling for the teen (not the mother),
then talk to the mother briefly and see the teen once a
week for a few months without putting much effort into
really changing anything, especially not the mother. Even
though this mother, in my view, is quite clearly the
source of the teen's depression and extremely low
self-image, the social workers would most likely not
confront the mother or try to remove the teen and put her
in a more emotionally supportive environment.
There are probably a lot of reasons
for this. I wrote a little about this on another page.
The link is below. Now I will return to my rather long
introduction to the Heidi story...
As I talked to this teen, who I now
refer to as Laura J., or LJ, she told me her mother had
been complaining because LJ had not been doing much to
help the mother in the morning, so she felt a need to
"make it up to her." This reminds me of that
the characteristics of adult children of alcoholics that
Janet Geringer Woititz wrote about. (link below)
Knowing how responsible Laura J.
feels for her mother's feelings, and how easily she falls
into the guilt traps her mother sets, I said "Do u
think she forgot that she's the one who got
pregnant?"
Then later I said, "Just for
laughs, ask her sometime who got her pregnant...then say
'Well then don't u think he should be helping u
now?"
Then I remembered Heidi and her
mother. And I thought "At least Jess's mom is not
trying to do what Heidi's mom did....
So here is the story of Heidi and
her mother so you'll know what I mean.
---
When I was
living in Florida I met a lot of "new
age" people. I won't go into details about
what I think of new age stuff, but I will just
say that many are looking in the wrong place for
answers and healing -- Crystals, aroma therapy,
meditation, yoga, channeling, etc.
Well, one of the people I
met was Mary. Her daughter was Heidi. Heidi was
about 14 or 15 at the time. She was one of the
first teenagers I really started listening to,
other than Zoey, who I wrote about in my
parenting chapter of my 1996 book. One day Mary,
Heidi and I were all out together. We somehow got
on the topic of souls choosing which families
they want to be born in. Now if you are not
familiar with this it will probably sound pretty
wacky. But here is what some people believe.
They believe a soul is
floating around somewhere before it takes human
form inside a baby. They believe it looks around
for a family in which it can "learn what it
needs to learn", or some such thing.
So Heidi told me that day
that this is what her mother had taught her. She
told Heidi that Heidi chose to born by Mary. Now
this seems laughable to me now, but I swear I am
not making it up. Do some searches on new age
stuff if you want and you will probably be
shocked by some of the things you find if your
not familiar with it.
Anyhow, I quickly thought
this is a really convenient cop out on the part
of Mary. That way she can escape all
responsibility for her failures as a mother.
Heidi, by the way, did not know who her father
was. Mary herself wasn't sure because she had
been having sex with several guys at the same
time in her "hippie" days. She thought
it was probably a guy who lived in Oklahoma.
Heidi showed me a letter to him which she'd
written. She said "I don't want you to pay
money or anything. I just want to know who my
father is." I cried when I read that letter.
It really affected me.
Heidi had all kinds of
problems as a teen. One was being raped by her
boyfriend. She didn't want to report it, said she
loved him etc., even though she was crying and
telling him to stop and he didn't.
Heidi needed someone to
love her and accepted this kind of treatment
because she was so desperately trying to fill her
unmet emotional needs. Her mother simply couldn't
fill Heidi's needs for love. She had too many of
her own.
Heidi also told me she
would often come home to find her mother having
sex with someone on the couch and other times she
could hear them when she was in her bedroom. Her
mother had one sex partner after another,
something which her mother admitted. Her mother,
by the way, was very interested in crystals. She
worked for a while in a store in Dunedin, Florida
selling them. She also had her own little new age
bookstore and coffee shop there. She was more
interested in reading about crystals than in
reading about parenting.
Anyhow, I asked Heidi if
she really believed that her soul had chosen to
be born by Mary. Then Mary interrupted and said
in a very authoritarian tone, "It's not a
belief. It's a fact!"
All I could say was
"ok...."
What else can you say to
someone like that? If anyone has any suggestions,
please let me know.
Steve
Hein
April 17, 2006
Salta, Argentina
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Links
Janet Geringer Woititz
Why social workers don't do more
New
Age
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