My [23F] mother [49F] is sad and lonely, but doesn’t understand that her personality pushes people away

My mother has always been a.. difficult.. person. She used to be very explosive, insisted that she was always in the right, everyone else was just being idiots. Everything had to be done exactly how she wanted it and if not, she screamed at me and my father. Obviously, we weren’t exactly on the best terms and I mostly just feared and resented her. There were good times too and sometimes she could be normal or even nice & funny, but it all depended on her mood.

My father died when I was 14 in an accident which was obviously traumatic. For a while my mom seemed to go completely crazy, threatened suicide and screamed at me more than ever before. After the worst was ‚over‘, our relationship began to improve. She now treated me more as an adult. She was still controlling and negative however.

As I became grew up and moved out, she tried to stay controlling, but I got better at just ignoring her and removing any influence she still had over my life. This produced a few more arguments, but we slowly arrived at the point where we are on ‚civil‘ terms and she largely keeps out of my decisions. However she is still ultimately kinda draining to be around. In the last years I’d visit home for holidays and her birthday, but more because I felt like I should than actually wanting to. We are very different people and while we can occasionally get along really well, I don’t really like staying around her for multiple days at a time.

It has become quite obvious in the last years that she is lonely and not very happy. She did get a boyfriend a few years ago but they also seem to argue often and it’s clear she’s not really happy with him and just stays because she can’t find anyone else (she has pretty much said that to me directly). Many of her friends have turned away from her and tbh I think after my father’s death, many of them only stayed in contact out of guilt anyway. My mother just isn’t a pleasant person. She’s negative, critical and headstrong. For example she constantly gets into arguments with all the other tenants in her house about completely unimportant things and thinks she’s in the right. I do feel bad for her because, I mean, she’s widowed and now her only child is barely in her life. I do believe that she has some sort of personality disorder or something, so that she genuinely does not understand why she’s pushing people away and what she could change. But I find that every time I see her, it’s stressful & often a negative experience even if we don’t argue. Her negative attitude tends to drag me down & make me anxious and when I have no contact to her for a longer time, I feel much better about myself.

So.. do I need to feel guilty for largely ‚abandoning‘ her? Is it possible to have a kind of ‚long distance‘ relationship with a difficult parent that is doable for both sides? Idk.

—

**tl,dr:** My mother is a super negative and difficult person, I kinda don’t like her very much. How to handle this relationship as an independent adult?

Submitted May 28, 2019 at 07:27AM by Electronic_Wind http://bit.ly/2VWPcUr