How to Set Boundaries with a Trumpish, Toxic Mother

Welcome to End It Now?, a narrative advice column. In each installment, Alissa Nutting and Dean Bakopoulos will address a question from a reader who is thinking about quitting something: a relationship, a job, a habit, a project. Dean and Alissa will respond with stories from their lives and the lives of others, and then deliver a verdict: Should the letter-writer end it now, or not so much, and why? 

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Dear Alissa and Dean,

My mother and I have always had a rocky relationship, but about two years ago, when her marriage with my father began to crumble, I became her shoulder to cry on, her confidante. In this role, she consistently crosses boundaries. I’ve heard many things I’ve never wanted to know, about her and my dad’s sex life and about her sex life post-divorce. I’ve heard her call my father nasty names and accuse him of things I cannot imagine to be true.

I tried to set boundaries, softly at first and more firmly as time went on. When that didn’t work, I stopped taking her calls or responding to her emails and texts. One night she called to tell me that she “might” have cancer, but asked me not to tell anyone. Guilt immediately set in. I decided I could handle one conversation a week. Now, if I don’t pick up the phone, she leaves voicemails like: “I might have cancer and you’re seriously too busy to talk to me?” Or: “You know, one of these days I’m going to be calling you about an emergency and you’re not going to answer and how’s that going to make you feel?” I’m at the point where I dread phone calls with her. So many people have told me to cut her out of my life, but how can I do that to my own mother? I don’t want to be cold and heartless, but this kind of thing affects my physical health, my mental health, and my ability to socialize appropriately. Am I being selfish?

Sincerely,

Ungrateful Brat?

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Dear Ungrateful Brat?,

DEAN: We’re sorry it took us a little while to respond to your letter, which we read a few days before Donald Trump became the nation’s President Elect. When confronted with the imminent rollback of decades of social, environmental, and economic progress, it’s been sort of hard to focus.

But, at least in terms of your letter, the monster that is Trump, in all his horrific and omnipresent grossness, is really a prism through which we can discuss the toxic need for adulation, which your mother seems to have. Your mother doesn’t want a relationship; your mother wants your undying devotion and omnipresent support no matter what subject is at hand. This kind of need for adulation is a hallmark of toxic relationships (sometimes it can even go both ways).

ALISSA: To state it directly, your mother is being abusive. I have to put those exact words on the table.

Please try something for me? In front of a mirror, as many times as you can stand, repeat the following out loud: I am not a brat. I am not ungrateful. My mother is being abusive. You may disagree with this statement. But say it at least once, and see how saying it out loud feels.

Your mother is hurting you, and yet, when you tell her she is hurting you, she’s asking you to swallow your pain and be silent in the face of her abuse. Worse yet, she’s implying that your pain is wrong—that it’s selfish, imaginary, and misplaced.

Once, someone wrote me a long letter detailing the ways that various good things in my life—supportive, life-affirming things, including my then-new romantic relationship with Dean himself—were actually harmful. The letter insisted I was seeing my own life incorrectly. I knew this wasn’t true, but the letter’s tone was so self-assured, and so couched in terms of concern for me, that for a split second, it gave me pause. It was harder to dismiss than I wanted it to be, because it played upon my insecurities.

We often feel defective in the face of abuse. Instead of saying, I’ll stop hurting you, abusers say, You shouldn’t hurt.

DEAN: Or they’ll say that your being hurt is simply a way of hurting them!

ALISSA: We start to believe that the pain we feel is a form of weakness or underperformance. Maybe you’ve gotten the feeling that if you were better somehow—more patient, less sensitive—then this wouldn’t affect you so much.

That simply isn’t true.

In your letter, you wrote, “I decided I could handle one conversation a week.” Unfortunately, your mother doesn’t care what you can and can’t handle. The type of emotional need she’s displaying—one that makes threats for attention and bulldozes the feelings of others—is insatiable. No amount of calls will satisfy it. She wants you to solve something inside of her that’s impossible for another person to fix, no matter the level of devotion.

DEAN: Your mother’s been through a divorce, and divorce can shatter self-esteem in unimaginable ways. The late author Pat Conroy referred to divorce as a mysterious kind of temporary insanity, and, if I am honest about it, when my first marriage ended in a rather jarring way, I went through a bit of that. I found myself hanging around with anyone who offered me a rush of adulation as a balm to rejection and as a distraction from fear. I texted them, called them, met them for drinks (too many drinks), and crashed with them, always when I needed a boost, when I needed the distraction and attention. Maybe this was justified; some of them were just being good friends. But in some cases, I hurt people who thought soul-baring sob sessions was the beginning of a relationship. But a relationship wasn’t really what I was after. I was chasing a more insidious kind of support, someone who was willing to absorb and affirm all of my painful energy while needing absolutely nothing from me in return.

A normal mother-daughter relationship isn’t what your mother is after either. Even if she’s still in that post-divorce tailspin, it’s not your duty to go through that with her.

ALISSA: Even if she did have cancer, love is not contingent on taking abuse, no matter how desperate the person you love feels. You can love your mother and simultaneously refuse to talk to her until she’s able to be in a healthy relationship with you.

DEAN: Is there a reason Trump sends out tweets at four in the morning? Is it that he wakes up from a nightmare of some hoodlums burning Old Glory, and thus tweets a call for flag burning to be a citizenship-revoking offense? Or is it that he feels empty? He feels unloved? He feels the realities of the nation’s top job taking a toll on his delusional idea of self? And so he tweets something that will make his followers cheer him on as a tough, beloved visionary, and maybe distract the world from his own feelings of incompetence and unworthiness. When your mother leaves you guilt-inducing messages, or hints that she might have a terminal disease, maybe you can liken that to the insanity of Trump’s pre-dawn tweets, and not respond.

The Verdict:

Right now you can only offer your mother love, not a relationship. There’s a difference between the two. Love is the unconditional energy in which you offer another human being your highest hopes and deep compassion, though not necessarily while you’re in regular contact. It’s something you have in your heart. A relationship is much more complicated, and while all relationships are imperfect, and require an almost constant exchange of tolerance and forgiveness, some relationships become unbearably unequal. And unbearable inequality is always toxic. It can make a person, and a nation, sick.

Do the right thing, Dear Reader: End it now.

Yours,

Dean and Alissa

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