My mother did something this past week that hurt. Hence the floodgates opening on your thread! The timing was just right for me to let it out, so out it came. Usually I keep contact to a minimum and detach as much as possible.
I was thinking about your thread though since yesterday, and was dissecting what actually goes on in my head.
Maybe if I changed enough, my perception of my family would change and become acceptable.
Maybe if I changed enough they would change too.
Maybe if I stay away for awhile I will come back to find they have changed.
Maybe I've simply seen it all in the wrong light, and with time I will see it all differently.
Well, the truth is that with awareness, my family doesn't look better to me, in fact it looks worse.
That wasn't the outcome I wanted.
I wanted it all to be some great misunderstanding of each other, and then we could find out that we were really a good happy family after all, a family that had simply misunderstood each other, and with new understanding we could see each other's point of views and everything would be hunky dory.
Instead what I have gained is a greater understanding of my mother's manipulation. Manipulation that was always there, and I didn't see, because I couldn't believe that my mother could actually be anything but a good person with a big heart like she tries to come across as. That she had to be that; and that I had misunderstood and simply needed to dig deeper and see things in the right light. That the problem was in my perception. Then everything would be ok!
That's not the truth, and the truth hurts.
What I'm trying to say is that we can become better people ourselves, and it doesn't necessarily make anyone else a better person. You can put lipstick on a pig....
So you can work on yourself to be more successful, more worthy of respect, more open minded, more accepting...and other people don't have to change at all if they don't want to.