When our daughter referred to her birth mom as “Grandma” and me as “Nana,” I sobbed and felt a knife going through my chest. My heart is broken. If I ever hear my daughter call her birth mom “Mom,” I don’t think I could ever recover from the pain and trauma.
I'm going to extrapolate wildly here based on my own life/work out some of my own stuff here for a minute, okay?
These phrases sound so familiar from dealing with people in my own life, who when confronted about their controlling behaviour would say, they knew it was controlling and wrong, they never wanted to do that, but their distress over their perceived loss of relationship was so severe that no other reaction felt possible for them. Which sucks, because it puts a lot of pressure on the target to just take it and be controlled because the person can't help it, and they're in such pain. And I believe their distress is that severe. I believe their pain is that intense. It's awful. And the way they respond to it poisons their chances of having comfort and security around the thing they think they need, because they wedge their target into a position either of being controlled or doing the thing that they've set up to hurt them most: pulling away.
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When our daughter referred to her birth mom as “Grandma” and me as “Nana,” I sobbed and felt a knife going through my chest. My heart is broken. If I ever hear my daughter call her birth mom “Mom,” I don’t think I could ever recover from the pain and trauma.
I'm going to extrapolate wildly here based on my own life/work out some of my own stuff here for a minute, okay?
These phrases sound so familiar from dealing with people in my own life, who when confronted about their controlling behaviour would say, they knew it was controlling and wrong, they never wanted to do that, but their distress over their perceived loss of relationship was so severe that no other reaction felt possible for them. Which sucks, because it puts a lot of pressure on the target to just take it and be controlled because the person can't help it, and they're in such pain. And I believe their distress is that severe. I believe their pain is that intense. It's awful. And the way they respond to it poisons their chances of having comfort and security around the thing they think they need, because they wedge their target into a position either of being controlled or doing the thing that they've set up to hurt them most: pulling away.