seperating anger for WT from my mom

by dogisgod 16 Replies latest jw friends

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  dogisgod

  I posted this earlier under the bitterness post.

  How do I seperate the anger I have being raised in the borg from my mother who forced it down my throat even after I left. She justwouldn't leave it alone. She died (now she knows "the secret" ie what comes after death) I really loved my mom. She was so controlling that she would not drive an automatic as she didn't have as much control. She didnt force things on my 2 brothers but she sure did on me and I want to just remember her and what good qualities she had but my memory of her is blanketed by the blackness of the society. Does anyone know how to do this. My counselor told me to try to see her as a victim as well. That's hard because she was not one to mess with. When I let myself think of her I just start crying...she's been gone two years.
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  JWinprotest

  I certainly don't know how. My mom is still alive and I'm finding myself resenting her big time for the same reason. I keep reminding myself of what your therapist suggested, that she was a victim, and that the witnesses came into her life at a very vulnerable stage. But when I think of the years I've lost and all the things I had to sacrifice because of her it turns me against her. The thing that really burns me is the guilt tactics she used to get us to follow her into this cult. It was relentless!

  Did you ever get the opportunity to tell your mom how you truly feel about the religion?
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  Ding

  Your mothers each thought they were following God, saving you from annihilation, and guiding you to an everlasting future in paradise.

  They used fear and guilt to keep you in line because "God's organization" used fear and guilt to keep them in line -- it's all they knew.

  Do your best to let the anger go or it will enable the WTS to keep poisoning your life.

  That said, don't let the WTS or any relatives continue to try to manipulate you back to the borg through fear and guilt.

  As a child, you had no choice.

  As an adult, you do.
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  brotherdan

  Do your best to let the anger go or it will enable the WTS to keep poisoning your life.

  That's the key. Forgiveness is therapeutic. Forgiving your mom for how she raised you does not mean that you are condoning it. It only means that you have accepted the fact, and can get on with your life.
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  Quandry

  Allow yourself more time. Two years seems like a long time, and that you should be getting over things, but it's not. You've been through turmoil and loss. Grieving takes many forms.

  My mother has been gone over three years now, and although not JW, there were issues. I've found that time does help. And don't worry about the crying. It gets it all out, and gradually you will have more peace.
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  lesterd

  Like you say "forgiveness is therapeutic" but it starts by forgiving yourself, to know forgiveness empowers you to be able to forgive others, to know yourself enables you to know others faults and how they feel about them. I'm still picking out splinters of the "truth" from my life. Having a fatalist outlook on life had motivated me not to leave anything undone, because I could be dead the next minute, as it was said the borg build a dark blanket around its members.

  Ask the question, who was or is the JWs modern day prophet, what have they prophesied and have any come true?

  The person your mother was is what you should remember. Her love, not her foolishness.
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  MrFreeze

  Just remember, your mom was probably a good person at heart but just misguided by the WT. People talk about people who are controlling like its necessarily a bad quality. I don't really see it that way. Many times people are controlling because they want what they believe is best for you. Sometimes they don't really know whats best as in the case of your mother. I do have to agree with the counselor though, your mother was a victim and frankly viewing her as that is the only thing that will help you look at her in a different light.
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  cameo-d

  My parents sold me into slavery soon after I was born. They didn't realize what they were doing. They were just going along with tradition and thought they were doing what was best for me. They thought it would give me security and protection. They did get some financial consideration for it, but still they not equate it with really selling me because the "buyers" cloaked the procedure in deception. The people who convinced them to do it spoke in a foreign language that my parents did not understand too well, and my parents were very trusting that this would be in my best interests. They did not know there would be such a trap laid for my life because of it in years to come.

  I am sure it must have been just the same with your mom.
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  jwfacts

  It is difficult. I find it hard to know if the issues I have with my mother are due to the person she is, or the person the religion forced her to become.
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  Awen

  While I wasn't raised a JW I still understand abuse. My mom was very abusive of me while I was growing up, both physically and mentally. She was one of those types who blamed me for being molested at the hands of my uncle or rather she blamed me for the rift that occurred in our family when I told her what happened. If I had just kept quiet she would still have had her relationship with her father, which I was to find out wasn't true at all. She has many deep seated resentments already in place towards her dad before I was even born. This was just one nail amongst many in that particular coffin.

  So to my point.

  It has taken me 35 years to come to grips with who she is. She herself is a victim of abuse at her mother's hands and trying to deal with the issue of being born out of wedlock (my grandfather never married my mom's mother) and then leaving her for another woman which he married two years later and had three children. Of course he had done this before. I think my Grandfather has something like 13 kids all together with my mom being the only one out of wedlock, a very big deal in the 1950's. My mom isn't perfect, she's very controlling and wants things her way and when she gets it, she still isn't happy. She's never let go of her anger towards her father and has never been able to really confront him about it. He just says "the past is the past and it cannot be undone" and course that's not good enough for her. She wants some sort of revenge, but seems unclear about exactly what she wants. My grandad cannot apologize to my mom's mother as she was hit by a truck and killed 3 years later when my mom was 19 years old.

  For myself it has been a struggle to come to grips with this person and try to jump over the hurdle that is my childhood. I think that since she couldn't control what her dad did, she made it a point to dominate every other male in her life. She's since been married and divorced 3 times and I'm her only son. All three marriages were very abusive. The first one was my father being abusive towards her. I think she married him just to escape her mom. The next two marriages had her being the abuser as a means of control on her part.

  Myself and my younger sister (born from the third marriage when I was 13 years old) have very little to do with my mother. I have forgiven my mom, but my sister still holds a grudge.

  I think my mom did the best that she could, all things considered. I many times wished for a different mom or to be an orphan but it didn't happen.

  Eventually I realized that I couldn't control how my mom behaved, but I could control how I reacted to her. I could also control whether to hang onto my resentment and stay stifled for the rest of my life or to let it go and move on with my life.

  I called my grandfather's wife a few months back and brought up the subject of my abuse and she told me things I hadn't known (I was 5 years old when it happened and don't recall much except the abuse itself, but not what happened afterwards). With this new information I came to realize I had been used by my mom to get back at her dad. She withheld his grandson as a means of punishing him because he had deserted my mom when she was 16 years old and that she had lied to me about how everything was my fault when it was she who cut the family ties.

  Sound familiar? It's disfellowshipping all over again.

  My mom is now older and still just as bitter. She refuses to forgive or seek forgiveness. I've have only known her to apologize once to me in my entire life and that was by interfering in a relationship of mine that may have ended in marriage. But she turned the person away from me by lying. I guess she didn't want to lose her punching bag.

  Suffice to say, I have forgiven her, but I keep a certain story in mind when it comes to dealing with her.

  It seems that a scorpion wanted to cross a river, but scorpions can't swim. He saw a fox nearby and asked the fox for a ride across the river, but the fox refused. "You would sting me and I would die," said the fox.

  "But you will be carrying me across the river, and if I sting you then I would also drown and die," reasoned the scorpion.

  The fox was convinced. The scorpion jumped on his nose and the fox began swimming across the river. Halfway across, however, the scorpion stung the fox on his nose. As the fox began losing strength and slipping beneath the river's surface, he cried out to the scorpion, "Now we will both die! Why did you sting me?"

  He answered: "Because I am a scorpion, and that's what I do. You knew that before you agreed to carry me across."

  I'm the Fox, my mom is the scorpion.

  So I'm always on my guard that no matter what happens my mom cannot be trusted to change. I'll believe it when I see it, but so far in 41 years of life it has happened.