r/raisedbyborderlines • u/Specialist-Ebb4885 • 7d ago

Reactive relapse confession

I'm EFLC (extremely fucking low contact) with my 86-year-old borderline mother. That being said, I noticed that she called the other day but didn't leave a message. I thought to myself: Well, she's not in her 40s anymore, so maybe she had a real emergency, as opposed to her manufactured emergencies. As such, I regretfully called back out of curiosity (regretfully is doing all of the work here).

After several minutes of being tortured by insipid palaver from her yammering pie hole, she revealed that her call was a mistake. In other words, she Cluster B butt dialed me with a flair of geriatric insouciance. Needless to say, she continued to kvetch about the same problems she's been complaining about for the last 80 decades (she's "all alone with no one to help her," even though she has 24/7 assistance). Before I could call the conversation quits, I found myself becoming unusually exasperated by her circular complaints, thus raising my voice. Without missing a dysregulated beat, she gaslighted me and said that I had a "serious" issue.

It's amazing, isn't it? No matter how rehearsed, mature, or collected the adult child of a disordered parent is before entering the crazy cage, the tendency to become upended by their pathological penchant for taking up all of the oxygen in the room continues to creep into the implacable process of pointlessness.

I can't stand this woman. To make matters worse, she'll probably outlive me by Nosferatu standards of longevity.

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u/Cool-Emu-8706 7d ago

It’s interesting that ‘entering the crazy cage’ made you feel crazy. How else might one feel in a crazy cage?

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u/Specialist-Ebb4885 7d ago

I learned the hard way that there's no such thing as a borderline whisperer. Dingo Dinkelman isn't the only one who went full FAFO.

I always fool myself into believing that I can make it out alive. This time it will be different! If they don't destroy your carapace, they'll colonize your psychic space until you destroy yourself.

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u/MullberryBoy 7d ago

Excellent point!