Mental Health
Dealing with Manipulation, Guilt, and Self-Pity
Ever since I reported on the high suicide rate of Asian American students, I’ve been thinking of writing something for them that addresses cultural conditioning.
Here is what I have observed from my own experience and coming from a first-generation asian immigrant family:
- Many asian parents are amazing at using manipulation, guilt, and self-pity to get their kids to do whatever they want, or at least make them most miserable if the kids disobey. They aren’t necessarily being malicious on purpose, they just learned it from their parents.
- I need to live the life I want to live, NOW, or I’ll die living the expectations of my parents, and do a crappy job at it anyway because I’d be miserable.
- Most families - asian or other - are pretty dysfunctional. I know I’m not the only daughter who has ever fallen victim to a mentally unstable mother. Knowing that I’m not the person this has ever happened to makes me feel less alone and more optimistic about overcoming these mental and emotional obstacles I’ve built over the years.
- I get depressed because I turn anger inwards, on myself, instead of expressing anger and setting boundaries.
- The harder I resist and try to change who my parents are, the harder I fail, because I can’t change my parents to get them to love me the way I want them to love me.
- I have learned to count my blessings and appreciate friends and my spouse for loving me the way that I want to be loved.
Up until a few years ago, I would get into fights with my mother whenever she starts to “talk trash.” What I mean by “talking trash” is making condescending statements or saying things to elicit guilt in other people or being very negative or wallowing in self-pity. She knows how to push my buttons, and I let her push my buttons.
One afternoon we were speaking on the telephone, and my mother started talking trash. She made comments like she shouldn’t have brought us to the US, and how we don’t behave like caring children because we never visited, and how her friends’ children treated their mothers so well compared with how we treated her, and if she died we probably wouldn’t care one iota.
Sound familiar?
Normally, my brain would pick up the signal to pick a fight and try to prove to her that she was wrong and that she should look at her own behaviors and that we were good kids.
For some reason I got sick of resisting that day, and something else came out of my mouth. I started agreeing with her.
I agreed that she shouldn’t have brought us to America. I agreed that we were crappy kids. I agreed that she was all alone and being ignored. I agreed that we might as well have come out from a rock. I agreed with whatever she was complaining about, and I offered no solution or reconciliation or amends whatsoever.
And she grew quiet and we ended the conversation rather well because we had no argument.
The toughest part about this technique is working with my ego to swallow the insults and offer no resistance and agreeing with something I didn’t agree with. But with practice, my ego got over it and my mother’s manipulation loosened its grip on my sanity.
The strange thing is that our relationship has actually improved since I stopped resisting, even when I have offered her no behavioral changes on my part.
I’m not going to lie and say that my emotionally and mental well-being has completely recovered from the different things I had endured with my mother when I was a little girl. To this day I still work on my mental conditioning and internal messages on a daily basis - so we’re talking about 30+ years and counting. But each day, I get a little better and I unlearn a little bit of the cruel messages I had learned to believe about who I am.
And it can get better for you too.
Discussion
10 comments for “Dealing with Manipulation, Guilt, and Self-Pity”
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yes. i feel the same way with my parents. whenever i`m not the absolute BEST in a class or group, they say my principal downgraded me because they dont like me. they say they’re jealous -__- i find this very annoying. i can never satisfy them. when i get 100% on a test, they want over 100. i feel like dying sometimes. i just can never be loved.
hello anonymous:
i’ve learned that i could never make people love me the way that i want them to love me if they are incapable of loving me that way. any effort on my part to force people to change into a certain way is wasted effort.
so, i started counting the people who love me as i am, and these may not be your parents. i spend more energy appreciating those people who build me up and relate with me the way that makes me feel good.
remember you have a choice to believe what you want to believe. you can choose not to buy into what they said about jealousy or “being liked” or even needing to satisfy them at all.
jane
I had no idea I’d find someone with a relatively similar problem as mine. I liked your choice of words “loosened her grip on my sanity” what freaks me out the most is, am I truley prepared to know the truth of whether my mother is aware of her abusive tactics or if she is oblivious to how much of a pain in the neck she can be? Some people are a certain way and aren’t aware of the damage they cause around them, especially if they have a diagnosed mental condition. Nonetheless the whole situation is very unfortunate and emotionally draining.
Hi Sandra, this is one club I hate to welcome you to, but welcome.
Does it really matter whether you find out whether your mother is aware or unaware of what she is doing? I used to think so. I thought so because I figured, if she is aware, then I would have a legitimate reason to live in my victim role. If she is not, then I would have a legitimate reason to live in my victim role.
(No, that was not a mistake in my typing.)
The truth is, it doesn’t really matter whether another person is aware of her actions or not. You can’t change it - and especially you cannot “try to be the best little girl in the world hoping to get her to love you.” If that had worked, it would have worked long time ago, when you were still a little girl.
The only thing that matters is how you have decided to live your life, see yourself, and love yourself. Regardless of how your history with your mother may have conditioned you.
My best,
Jane
Hi Jane,
This is a great article, and I think this particular flavor of parental guilting is very distinctly Asian-American.
It especially doesn’t help when you’re the only child of a needy and insecure single mom who still lives with her parents in Taiwan. My flighty and bull-headed mother focuses all of her energies, hopes, and desires onto me and what I’m doing with my life, and it’s nothing short of exasperating.
She’s never satisfied with the boyfriend, who always seems to be intruding on me-and-her time. On a good day, she’ll humor my ideas of bringing him home to Taiwan. On a bad day, she gets bitterly jealous and breaks out into tears over how much I break her heart when I even bring up his name. It leaves me speechless. She wants me to be her husband, and restore (literally) the home and property she lost when her marriage fell apart.
I don’t know what to do, except savor the days in between her phone calls and the months in between her visits, never knowing whether our next conversation or meeting will be a pleasant one or end in tears.
Does anyone have experience with reasoning with this kind of difficult, possessive mom?
Hi L,
It sounds like your mom is experiencing identity issues, namely, not really having her own identity (not sure if this is due to becoming a single mom and no longer having the identity of “spouse, wife, Mrs. so-and-so” or whether living at home with parents has something to do with that also) and therefore she has identified her life almost completely with yours.
It sounds like you have that physical distance between you yet no emotional distance. I’m wondering if you’d consider trying what I had done and just agree with her that you’re breaking her heart and not offer a solution. You’ve however accepted the burden of guilt that is not yours to bear, and as hard as this may be to hear, you may want to examine deeply why you have accepted this and allowing yourself and your identity to be possessed.
You may ultimately need to turn the tables around and become the mature parent that she is not. Imagine if you have a needy, dependent child who is no longer a child (i.e. that child has grown into an adult of thirty-something years - way past the “child needs” period) but who cannot cut the cord from you and live her own life. As a parent who looks at the best interest of the child, how would you parent her so that she can survive on her own? You don’t have to give her the boot, per se, and do something dramatic, but you may want to encourage her to develop her own independence by engaging in relationships and the world beyond *just you*.
This is by no means easy.
My best wishes for you,
Jane
Hi Jane,
I like your article, my mother raised me the same way, I could never be enough for her, and it dawned on me one day that she probably resented me for some unknown reason, I just did not know for what. But when confronted, she admitted that since the day I was born, she did resent me because I recieved attention from my father, and she no longer recieved 100% attention. And now I still try to have a relationship with her, but I know I don’t have to have her approval to accept myself today. What a spiritual awakening!
Hi Jenifer,
Isn’t it amazing that the moment we no longer needed someone’s approval, we seem to garner it more readily than when we go out of our way to desperately gain it!
I understand where you are coming from, as my personal experience has been similar. When I was young, my father gave me attention as I shown a liking to study, and he was a scholarly type. It was obvious that my mother felt left out as well as developed an inferiority complex, and as I was growing up, she accused me of acting superior and arrogant and looking down on her.
I am now more awakened to the love she was probably deprived of all of her life, and therefore, the insecurity was very strong and this led to a sense of competition when there is truly none. Of course I was oblivious to this growing up, and it made me a basketcase.
[...] a reader of my mental health website (chinspirations.com/mhsourcepage), who had read an article on dealing with emotional manipulation and parental-inflicted guilt that I’d written. The reader was so comforted by it that she said she would print it out to [...]
hi. My mom is a combination of all of the above ;P I am looking for a solution. I am feeling out boundaries, for one, in order to protect myself. I want to ask about your technique of being compliant or always agreeing. I feel that when I agree, I am being dishonest. I am encouraging her. I am often, depending on context, taking on burdens and giving false impressions. How is it healthy to, for example, agree that it is all your fault or that your intentions were ill-founded? Are you suggesting that we present two faces, one to the world and one to our mother? Wouldn’t it be wiser to just be an active listener; to paraphrase what she has said? I appreciate any insight