I like your article and your answers very much. Actually, I am a Chinese.

Recently, I’ve read several articles about emotional manipulation. Unfortunately, I found that I am a typical person with emotional manipulation issue. It is until now I figure out why my girlfriend dump me. I really hate myself, but I don’t know a way to cure this mental illness.

I’ve searched almost all the articles talking about emotional manipulation written in Chinese. However, these articles just tell me how to recognise people with the issue of emotional manipulation and how to deal with these people, none of them have taught me how to cure this psychological illness if someone found himself has this problem.
I found this illness so terrible and I don’t want my life ruined by this.
Fortunately, I know English and find this website.
Could you please help me? Do you to how cure my desire of emotional manipulation? I do want to get rid of it no matter how hard the solution will be.

Sincerely
Andywu from China.

I am in such a tough spot here. And have been ever since my younger sister and mom started disagreeing on almost everything. That was when I was in HS. I’ve always been in the middle, and I’ve never liked my roles as mediator, snitch, protector, interpreter, cushion, you name it, I have been in the middle of it all. Currently, my sister’s 6 y/o daughter lives with us (parents and me), while my sister is living with her boyfriend, with whom she has a 2 y/o son with. From the time I graduated from residency up to December 2011, I took care of my niece daily, even had to skip many dates or outings since I had to watch her. I even told my mom that she was lucky to have me at home all that time to act as a nanny, which she was very happy about, because she could do as she pleased, at least until the evening, which would be my time “off-duty”. My only request was come January 2012, I’d be hands-off the nannying so I could focus on my examinations. To which my dad and her agreed to. But, with a manipulative, controlling, selfish mother, I knew this would never be something clear cut and regular.

True enough, it wasn’t. Whenever she wasn’t “feeling well” or was “too tired” or “too busy with the house renovations” or had a “meeting with the church ladies and bible group” (the list goes on), she never thought twice about letting me fill in. It got to the point (twice already) that I had to talk head-on about really having to focus and to not be a nanny AT ALL. It worked, for awhile. Problem is, when I CAN help out, I do, but I’ve noticed that when I do that, my mom starts to abuse my voluntary help and begins on a daily basis to guilt-trip me into taking care of my niece. I love my niece, but there’s one thing you have to understand: I generally do NOT like children. So taking care of her for 9 months was a HUGE thing for me. I did it because I wanted to let my mom relax awhile, and I love my niece. But seriously, laying the responsibility on me is not right. What my mom likes to say when she’s really angry is why can’t I take care of her and study at the same time, I should be able to handle it because there are many student-parents who do that. Also, that is what parents do, she says, so I should do it. Her favorite argument is WE ARE A FAMILY (so do what I say). WTF kind of reasoning is that! FYI MOTHER, I AM NOT A FREAKIN’ PARENT AND I AM NOT GOING TO SUFFER FOR THE MISTAKES MY SISTER MADE!! Also, my sister is NOT dead or incapable. She wants to take my niece in, but it’s my PARENTS who want my niece to stay at our home 5 days out of the week! My sister says “but who will care for her when you have chores to do?” and my mom quips “it’s ok, your sister is at home anyway”. My activities are limited because I have to act as nanny for her, and my mom doesn’t even acknowledge that. To her, it’s my obligation because she says so.

Our fight earlier on was because she asked me to give my niece a bath, and when I refused, she said she doesn’t understand how I can go out visit my friend at the hospital or give time to have my dog groomed, but not use my precious “break time” to give my niece a bath. If break time meant becoming unnecessarily stressed and agitated, then I would gladly give my niece a bath. (remember, I do NOT like children nor taking care of them in any way) When I still said No, she ended up screaming at me, telling me how selfish I am, how MANY parents study and care for their children at the same time (ohmygod.i am not a parent.how unreasonable her argument is!!!), blahblahblah. It’s the usual no-respect-for-her-kids-because-they-are-her-kids principle she has built upon since we were young. We never had privacy, she always rummaged through our desks looking for and reading our diaries, and up to now, during lectures, repeats things we wrote when we were prepubertal, to strengthen her argument about us being bad seeds and ungrateful children. Also, this is quite weird, she says we have no right to ask her to leave the bathroom while we are on the toilet because she is our mother and she has seen all our body parts (I wonder if she’s the only one who does this? she really loves to bother me while I am doing #2, talking/shouting/ranting 3-5 steps away from the toilet bowl, and gets SO UPSET when I ask if we could talk after I am done. I don’t understand why she can’t give that piece of privacy! It drives me NUTS!)

My opening story is long, so sorry, but i had to get it out. I am SO frustrated and I’ve been this way ever since highschool. As a child of a controlling manipulative conservative mother, I was never allowed to spend time with my friends outside of school, hence was unable to form very close friendships with HS peers. During college, my mom allowed me to go out, but only until about 7pm, preferably only once a month. During medschool, I rented an apartment (medschool was so hard but living alone and only having to see my mother one day out of 7 in a week made up for it), but my mom expected me to be at the apartment at all times after school hours, or at the most, be back by 10pm. I had to make a very difficult decision for intership: either I applied for a position at my medschool, which meant another year of paying 11k/month for my rent (my dad was out of work at the time, so they paid out of their savings), or apply for internship at a hospital near my home, meaning I had to live back home again. I chose the latter, being that I felt bad about the financial expense when I could be saving them 132k for that year alone by living at home. During that year, it was difficult to adjust being scolded and nagged everyday after 4 years of blissful separation, but I got through it. Rather, tolerated it. It’s their home, I should obey the rules, right? Mother relented to allowing me to go out once a week, with a 12mn curfew. Residency came, and same thing, once a week was more than enough. If she noticed I had consecutive outings, she’d be on my back about it nonstop for a few days. Sounds benign, but the things that count in a horrible mother-daughter relationship like ours are the small daily things. Like, even at 30, I am not free of telling white lies about where I am going, who I am seeing, or my plans for the night, because she scrutinizes everything I do, where I go and what time I’ll be back, and if it were up to her, I’d be home ALL THE TIME. Problem is, when I DO satisfy that request of hers, she complains that I spend too much time with my bf (but we’re HOME in the DEN, what more does she want?!), and forces me to sleep at 12mn because she knows that I AM TIRED AND I NEED TO REST (wtf). Also, she doesn’t see the importance of having friends who you can not benefit from. Friendships to her must be a take-take relationship, otherwise, who needs them. They will just end up using you (she used to relish telling me and my sister that; that we didn’t need friends, just family, because in the end, our friends will just use us, turn on us and eventually desert us until there will be no one to turn to but family!!!-she repeated this with zeal)

She prefers I stay indoors after work hours, because if I am out often, what will other people think? I’m not allowed to commute because I might get raped or killed, and in her opinion, parents who allow their children to commute do not love their kids as much as she loves my sister and I.

I am very skilled at filtering my stories on just about anything; when I was young, I learned to not be open about a lot of things, especially stories about other people or friends, because in an argument, she loved to recall these stories and use them against me. My bad for bringing them up (yes, everything is my fault and never hers). I can say that I have perfected the skill of acting open with her, at the same time not being open at all, just so I can keep the nagging at bay. She probably tells her “friends” (I use that term in the most loose way possible) that we have a close bond because I talk with her, but that is soooo far from the truth. Being truly open with her is voluntarily (and stupidly) opening an enormous can of rotting worms and having them stuffed in your mouth piece by piece, making you savor each and every bite and not allowing you to vomit nor spit, not even a little. It’s pretty much a direct road to depression, self-loathing and despair, and I’ve learned from it.

My friends have some pretty crazy mothers and fathers to deal with themselves, but the difference between their parents and my mother is that their parents have redeeming qualities. My mother does NOT. She gives, but with ulterior motives. She treats household help like the poor people they are. When she donates money, she would prefer to have her name written on the envelope and have it announced during an event where many people could hear of her “generosity”. She has repeatedly told my sister and I that we have no right to get angry, or to frown, or to be sad or mad, because we are just her children. What she says goes. Opinions (not to her liking) are unheard of in our household, and to try to have one that doesn’t sit well with her is a one way ticket to an endless sermon that could last for days, even weeks.

Like you, I used to think my dad was so kind for loving her, but now that I am mature and know better, I know that by being agreeable and wanting to avoid confrontation, he only cultivated her unacceptable behavior, creating more of a self-righteous monster throughout their 37 years together. But, we must remind ourselves that women as strong-opinionated, aggressive, and calculating as her know how to pick their men, and they like them passive and weak. Minus points for my dad. He rarely fights for us, and when he does, he never wins. If he does, they’ll be on non-speaking terms for awhile. No one wins with her, and that’s the way she likes it. I’m appalled sometimes when my dad tries to help around the house, and she shuts him up by telling him to mind his own business, he doesn’t know anything about the house so he should stop trying to help. On the other hand, there are times when he adds nothing contributory to her household rantings, and she gets SO angry at him, berating him for living in a house that he knows nothing about! Crazy, I tell you! She acts like she is so misfortunate to have a husband who does not know his way around the house, sleeps all the time when not in the office, plays golf on his off-days, visits his relatives during weekday lunch break, and can’t keep a desk clean! Yes, those are her “woe is me” complaints about him. Doesn’t she realize that she’s lucky to not have a cheating husband? that he has NO VICES but golf? that he provides for us SO WELL (yes we are very well off, probably the only silver lining in my life-with-mom saga) without wanting much in return except to peacefully sleep off the weekend?? she puts him down all the time for enjoying basketball tv, for loving golf, for loving sleep, and for having a messy desk. Seriously, I am NOT exaggerating. Those are the main reasons she feels she deserves to be treated like a God; because she has to “put up” with a “man like him”. And she is so evil, she talks smack about his family every chance she can. About his sister (my godmother who is one of the KINDEST, most SELFLESS persons I know) who does things without thinking and is too stupid (because she is too kind) for her own good; about his other sister whose son committed suicide (I think because of his overbearing father), that she was never there for him and she allowed him to be raised by his nanny, which she should never have done because it made her less of a mother; about his aunt who she just doesn’t like (because my parents loaned money from her to build our house, and she was asking for them to pay her back, which my mom felt was inappropriate [omg, you should see my mother when someone owes her money...she will be at their back DAILY until she is paid; not only that, she will see to it that she spreads the word of how evil they are for borrowing money they can't pay back on time!!]). The term DOUBLE STANDARD sooo sums up what type of person my mom is. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. She’s uber skilled at turning situations around in which the other person will end up being the villain, never herself (for she is great and divine and untouchable).

My dilemma at the moment is I am getting married in July, and she (the controlling person she is) has planned out our life. She had our old home renovated (she attests to having used “blood, sweat and tears” to have it fixed up so nicely, my fiance and I should be grateful to her because NO OTHER PARENT would do what she has done for us), and has literally FORCED ME to “ask” her for it. She did this because she said she doesn’t want us to blame her in the future for giving us the house, so she wants us to “be humble enough” and ask for it, out of our own free will. Free will my ass. Since it took months for her to hear even a peep of a request from me regarding the house, she one day practically forced it down my throat. “Do you want the house? DO YOU want it? DO YOU??!??! DO YOU?!?! DO YOUUUUUUU?!??!?!?!?!?!” complete with menacing eyes and “you’d better say yes or else I’ll eat you alive and spit you out!” kind of look. You know how manipulative she can be. I had to say yes. Truthfully, I’d rather live in my fiance’s small condo unit. That way, we wouldn’t have my mother barging in at any and all times of the day, rearranging our furniture, basically running our lives, feeling that she has the right to make decisions for us because we’re technically living in her house. I knew it was too good to be true for her to not ever meddle in my lovelife, but that fantasy fizzled last week. She’s starting. She suggested that my fiance change jobs in order to better provide for me; it doesn’t matter if he enjoys what he is doing now (he has a small business that he enjoys managing because he feels that he is helping other people by providing work for them, and promoting Philippine-made products at the same time), because he’ll probably enjoy a boring desk job if it brings him more money. That’s another thing with her-her life is based on MONEY. You are worthless if you aren’t from a similar background. Or at the very least, not worthy to be treated with respect. I LOATHE that about her. Why she much make everything about money is beyond me. She can’t understand why my sister, despite how “priveleged” we are in life, chose to be with a man who lives in a townhouse in an ugly part of town. She can not FATHOM why she did that, up till now. (to be fair to her, she enjoys living there because there is no pressure to live a certain way or act a certain way; his mother is completely accepting and kind, non-judgemental, and open-minded, traits our mother do not and have not ever possessed)

What can I do? I am so torn. I can not be financially free from my parents because I still have a clinic to set up, also, refusing the house would really equate to being disowned. It’s a no-win situation. If I were the least bit unstable I would have probably committed suicide a long time ago, or even possibly have physically hurt my mother in some way. My sister, that’s another issue. She’s always had it worse than I did, being the younger, rebellious one. She slashed herself numerous times, had bfs early, did badly in school, wasted her nursing scholarship in the US, married early, got pregnant, is currently being annulled, got pregnant again, and finally left our home. Now, every time she is here to visit or just have a family meal, our mother finds some reason to start a purposeless argument, and they end up on bad terms. And mother wonders why my sister doesn’t come around often. Hmm.

Being her daughter is extremely difficult. She’s hard to get along with; when she gets angry at one person in the house, she must spread that anger to everyone else as well; everything makes her angry if she’s not in the mood; to get on her good side, you must say yes to what she wants and must always have a smile on your face (because no one has a right to be upset in this household, it is not our right).

My sister and I are adopted. I sort of feel that my mom treats us like property, and since she “bought” us, she deserves to get what she “paid” for. Why couldn’t she get robots instead? I feel she would be happier with them than with us. Robots don’t feel, they don’t have emotion, they can’t talk back, they can be intelligent, and you can program them to be affectionate with you and even worship you. My mother probably feels that she a right to getting what she wants from us because we were so “lucky” to be chosen by her. Hence, we owe every second of our lives to the woman who made us who we are today. She used to love reminding us that she has taken care of us since we were babies, so we should forever be grateful. I think that the fact that we haven’t lived up to her expectations just pisses her off. Not a good deal in her book.

I probably did something really bad in my past life to have been abandoned by my birth mother, only to find myself in the arms of a freak. Unlike your other letter senders, I can’t bring myself to respect or love my mom wholly; maybe I love her “just because” she is the woman who raised me, but I can never LIKE her as a person because I don’t agree with the way she acts and how she treats people. She is hypocritical (I am not religious because she was my main role model for religion growing up-who can put his/her total faith in a God who this CRAZY person worships?!), self-serving and unkind. She is a horrible excuse for a woman, and since I know there is no way out of this until her death, my only hope is that she passes before my father does, because if he dies before her, I, being the older child, have no choice but to take her in. What a terrifying thought.

The only lesson I have learned from living with her is to NOT be like her. I told my fiance that when we are married, he has to TELL ME when he feels I am crossing boundaries. I don’t want a man who agrees with everything I say and do just because he wants to avoid arguments, I want someone to tell me when I am wrong, when I am being mean, when I am turning into someone I vow never to be like.

Oh, when will this cycle ever end. I have given up hope for her to change or become kind and understanding. She has only gotten worse through the years. There was a time I liked her, but I was prepubertal then; you only see the best in your parents at that age. When I tell my friends about her, they ask, is she menopausal? I guffaw and say, yes, 15 years ago!!! They laugh. They actually get a kick out of my “crazy mom” stories, and I even have a friend who offered to make a comic strip out of our “situations”. Oh, wouldn’t that be fun. My mom, the one person who wants people to think she has created the perfect family, would be the main character in a comic strip about a homemaker from hell. Nice.

Everyday is a struggle. I want to become the best me I can be, but how can I do that when she wants to control every little step I make, every one of my decisions, from what I’m wearing to how I talk on the phone, from how I act around other people, etc etc. I’m only 30, but I can’t see how life can be better for me, whether or not I pass the boards or get married, because she will always be there, controlling my life, criticizing my decision, putting me down when I decide to do something she disapproves of, and now, trying to control my fiance’s life as well.

One thing’s for sure. I will not have children unless I will be the one caring for them. Most definitely, I will NEVER let my children be raised by her. The cycle will stop with me.

I grew up feeling alone and severely trapped in life because of my relationship with my mother. It’s more or less wrecked my life and my self-confidence. Which is weird, because I consider myself to be an ambitious person. I really want to put myself out there. There’s so much I want to accomplish, but my relationship with my mother is holding me back.

Only now I’m turning to self-help books to re-teach myself to think and react and evaluate myself so I know how to deal with her behavior better. I wish I had met people like this sooner.

You know, I do feel bad that I’m not the perfect daughter or everything she sees in everyone else’s daughters or what she sees in celebrities on Korean TV. This made me greatly dislike myself. I am upset that I can’t be what she wants me to be, at the same time I realize no matter what I do I can never be what she wants me to be.

For example- she wants me to be extroverted and more outgoing. She wants me to spend more time with her. But every time I go out with her or try to be more social, not only am I insulted, but the people I associate with are insulted too. She still call me ugly or fat in public and then she wonders why I hide myself all the time.

I’m very understanding. It’s not just her. She learned this abusive behavior from her own family. Pretty much everyone in my family is like this. And while I feel bad for her, I can’t be an emotional sponge for this kind of behavior. It’s not healthy for me.

I understand that she’s ultimately thinking of me (or at least I’m trying to remained convinced of that even though I acknowledge that it might not be 100% true). I want to help her, but it’s so difficult being around her and I don’t feel like I can help her without throwing away everything I enjoy about life.

I might be smart and understand English, but I am her daughter… not her husband! I want her to understand this.

I want to get along well with her. She’s my mom and even though there are times I hate her, she is still my mom. I know I probably will never get the kind of mother-daughter relationship that I see from other people (and I’m jealous), but I still would like her to be proud of me just for being me… and not because what I do happens to line up with something she wants.

Sorry for how long this is. But thank you for this article. Knowing I’m not by myself really helps me a lot. And it makes me realize even more that if I continue to feed into her destructive behavior, I could be stuck like this forever.

Wow–I see this post is still relevant even six years after it was first published! I stumbled on your website after I had a fight with my mother which was, as usual, over something highly trivial but ended up in tears and left me feeling completely incapacitated to do anything else. I Googled “fights with parents” and found tips on how a mainstream North American teenager (haaaaa I wish I were still a teenager, then maybe we’d have an excuse for our fights) might communicate with his/her parent, but I wanted something that was more culturally-specific (I know from experience that many of the tips they suggested wouldn’t work), and I found this page.

First, I’d like to thank you for sharing your experiences with everyone. The solidarity that we, complete strangers, might feel for each other is so wonderful.

It is hard to remember that I cannot expect a rational and reasonable adult conversation with my mother, that we she will never accept responsibility for anything negative until at least five years has passed if at all, that my mother does not intend to guilt-trip me but rather she learned this from her mother (and from what I hear, her mother is much worse). It is hard to remember that some times, my mother is looking for a fight and there is no way out of it no matter how much I watch my words. It is hard to remember that despite our fights, we still love each other. It is hard to remember that I cannot change how she views me, or that I give her the power to make me upset. It is, most of all, hard to remember that I don’t need her approval.

What your post suggests makes perfect sense–on paper. But I don’t know if I’m able to resist asserting myself when I feel she is being unreasonable. I feel like, as an individual who was raised in a very western, individualistic society, I need to set my boundaries of what is or isn’t appropriate for her to say to me, or an appropriate or inappropriate way to have a discourse with me, or else be forever walked over. I need to honour myself! I need to practice speaking up for myself, but I’m not sure that will ever be possible without just more heartache and tears! Is it really the best to just accept and stop resisting? Is there no way for me to relate this in a way that even the most “Asian” of Asian moms will understand? Is there no way for my mother to finally see me as an adult who is capable of carving out my own life with my own relationships, and that the role I expect from her, my mother, is to stop being so childish and to support me emotionally the way I think mothers should?? (okay, okay, I know I’m asking for too much with that last one, haha)

Sometimes, I catch myself saying, “I told you so!” or being passive aggressive. Sometimes, I find it hard to forgive people and I hold meaningless grudges. Sometimes, I have a hard time saying I’m sorry. When this happens, I cringe, and I hope that I won’t continue down this road and end up like mom-junior.

In any case, thanks again for sharing your story with the world and for allowing this space for dialogue about this issue. It really means a lot.

My brother and her constantly talk trash to bring me down. She talks trash about my married life to my mother in law and I notice the my mother in law is now keeping a distance from her. The reason was that my mom told her that my wife and I should not have a 2nd child until we own a home.

At this point I have not had a sincere conversation since jan 2012. I keep my visits to a minimum and sometimes skip the gatherings but send my wife and child. This prevents any tension from when we are in the same room. I have no say at all when the tension is in her home that I grew up in. However, I try hard to block out the guilt and manipulation but still do feel very much hated with big anger from her. I do this to stay strong for my wife and daughter who need me. I appreciate any advise even if means to keep things at a very minimum to keep my wife and daughter unaffected. I really want to escape and make visits only twice a year but I do not know if it is the right thing to do.

Until I read what everyone has written, I didn’t believe that it was possible that I was being “emotionally abused” I’m currently 20 years old, trying to get into university, and still living with my parents. For many years, I was depressed and at that time, I thought it was due to excess stress from school. Now, I realized that what has been causing all this was likely my mother.

Since I was little, my mother would completely control me, and mold me to become just like her. Frequently, I would hear her say “My mother did the same to me as I’m doing to you”. What’s different though, was that my mom didn’t care much about my grades (on the outside). Yet, in order to please my mother, I studied long and hard, trying to be a perfect daughter. I became somewhat like her robot. I liked what she liked, hated what she hated, though inside, I didn’t feel this way. I felt that if I wasn’t like her, she would disown me and wouldn’t love me. Eventually, I became this person who wore a mask constantly, because I was scared to be unloved.

A year ago, I met a wonderful man who helped me conquer many of my fears about going into the world again, after being so isolated. My mother makes me feel guilty whenever I go out with friends so eventually, I lost all my friends. I’ve been wanting to apply to a university, which just so happened to be located in the same country as that wonderful man. He’s persuaded me to be who I want to be, to be successful in my own dreams. Eventually, we just fell in love.

My mother found out about this man and she went completely crazy. She forbid me to continue on to university, forbid me to see this man, simply because he was not rich nor very smart. What really upset me was that she had never met him, yet still judged him so. My parents were not rich and both of them didn’t even have as much education as he had. After this, my mother isolated me at home, not allowing me to go out, yelling at me whenever she felt angry. She told me that I had disappointed her and that it was wrong to have given birth to me. Simply because I fell in love with someone she deemed “not good enough”.

What made things worse was that I had two older brothers, both of whom have made their own choices in girlfriends. None of us are born perfect, none of us chose “perfect” companions. Yet I’m the only one punished for it. My brothers even went so far as to convince my mother that she was doing the right thing, and hating me for not thinking about “the family’s future”.

First, they destroy my self-esteem, then they destroy my future, then lastly my heart. Would it be wrong for me to want to escape, even if it means that I’ll be “bringing dishonor”?

Natalie

You have every right to be angry, and I don’t recommend shutting down your anger: anger is the correct and appropriate feeling in light of what you have been through. Yet we can also channel that anger in ways that do not further harm ourselves. This is why some people exercise, some people punch pillows, some people find a safe place to scream out loud for as long as they need to scream. Whatever it is, have a controlled outlet that lets you safely get angry, because it is NORMAL to be angry. I’ve been told (and I believe to be true) that depression is anger turned inward. Because you have been angry for a long time, and you have turned this anger inward even as you recognize that you did not deserve abuse, depression manifested as this intense anger turned within. So when you ask what can anger do — anger is a signal that something major has happened that begs to be released in a safe manner.

The point of living is to be the broken chain in the cycle of abuse and violence in your family: you must live on in order to change your family tree because you are the one who have gained this awareness and level of understanding about what is a healthy way of relating with loved ones, and what is not, including friends who aren’t really friends. There is no need to get back the years, these years are the battle scars you’ve earned and not to be ashamed of. You have come this far and you have survived and you have retained the good and kind person you were born as — this was never lost.

Now that you have earned your freedom through so many difficult lessons, work on truly setting yourself free to live the kind of fulfilling life (and it can be VERY SIMPLE, free of phony bells and whistles and status symbols that superficial people care too much about and make a sport of competing after) you deserve. And you can have it, it is yours to gain.

I wish you well, I wish you to be happy, and I wish you to be safe.