1. < Depression & Anxiety

Problems with adult children being extremely critical

Posted by junkartist @junkartist, Mar 16, 2021

I am at the absolute bottom trying to hang in there, have people to talk to. This has been going on all year. Starting with my oldest being viciously critical of me. I finally backed off of arguing with her and we are communicating online. She just recently sent me a sarcastic email, but I didn't get into a conflict with her and replied calmly to her.

About October, my middle child stopped talking to me. If he did, he sounded very angry. I don't know what's been going on with him, but I suspect it is related to telling her I talked to her father more than a year ago. (She broke relationships with her family, maybe 2 years ago.)

I felt much better when all of my 3 children talked to me on the phone at Christmas. In the last month, my youngest son, who is gay, told me that he was having mental health problems because of not getting what he needed as a gay person when he was young. Before, he always seemed happy and affectionate. I did not know he was gay until he came out after college. He has given my husband and I a book about emotional neglect.

I am extremely low, obsessing about negative things (of my whole past), and generally moving through molasses I have a supportive husband, some good friends, and a good therapist.

Thank you for listening.

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thisismarilynb | @thisismarilynb | Mar 24 9:32am
In reply to @junkartist "I haven't posted for a long time. Problems with adult children got worse. My youngest had..." + (show)
@junkartist

I haven't posted for a long time. Problems with adult children got worse. My youngest had my husband and I, plus his two siblings read a book called, "Running on Empty, How to Recover from Emotional Neglect". We did and had an online conversation with my youngest child, which was enlightening and showed me problems of which I was unaware/

The author of the book wrote that many good people could cause emotional neglect, but proceeded, in my opinion to be brutally critical of parents.

My other two children are not communicating with me for reasons of their own. It has about broken me.

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These stories are not a "nice" read. But children do not come with instructions and you can only do the best you can. My youngest son and his family have thrown me under the bus. There is no communication. However I still have a close relationship with my older son. Go figure. I now know why I made mistakes. During grief counselling my therapist diagnosed me with complex PTSD due to childhood abuse from my mother. I finally got the courage to leave her and moved far away. I call myself a survivor but yet I made mistakes because of her still being in my head. I sent my youngest son a long email and acknowledged the mistakes I made and accepted responsibility for them and apologized. But still this did not help. On the other hand, when I shared my diagnosis with my older son, he was so supportive and just asked why didn't you tell us? A cousin of mine shared with me that her middle son and wife have broken off communications with her. It all hurts and we do what we can but it still hurts.

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