TOTALLY GEEKED!

Dear Prudie,
When I was a girl between the ages of 11 and 16, my mom was in an abusive relationship with “Greg.” He has borderline personality disorder and was suicidal. Because he was a police officer, he always had a gun nearby. I had to call the cops multiple times when he verbally lashed out at me and my mom. Once, when I was 14 years old, he was screaming at the top of his lungs, banging on my mother’s door while she hid, and I picked up the phone in my bedroom and dialed 911. They showed up, but nothing was done because he was a cop and knew these men from work. I’m now a 24-year-old living in a big city. I started seeing a therapist here almost two years ago because I was feeling depressed and was unhappy in my relationships. Through therapy, I began to realize that a lot of my pain might be coming from that abusive relationship in my youth. I recently brought up my struggle to my mother and told her that I needed her to admit what she did and say she was sorry in order for me to move on and have closure. She apologized, but it was followed with excuses for her actions. She played the victim, told me I was blowing things out of proportion, and said I’m ungrateful and don’t see the good in her as a mother. She refuses to come to a therapist with me and has stated that my therapist is “making me worse.” I love my mother and I want to be close with her, but she is begging me to forgive her and to move on. I don’t know how to because she is denying my feelings. How can I move forward healthily while maintaining a relationship with my mom?

—Feeling Stuck

Dear Stuck,
You have excavated your past, examined how terrifying and unstable your childhood was, and talked out the long-term effects of such a beginning. Now it’s time to leave the excavation site and start living your own adult life. You have been with your therapist for two years but don’t sound as if you’ve found much relief from your depression and unsuccessful relationships (though relationship trouble in your early 20s is not abnormal). If you are not on medication, you may need it. But if your therapist is suggesting that healing for you will come from your mother sitting across from you and apologizing, I think you need a new therapist. You are locating the source of all your troubles today in those harrowing years with Greg. But Greg is gone—thank goodness—and your task is to fully embrace your life, not dwell on how your mother’s relationship with him will forever cast a shadow over you. Let’s say your mother were dead. In that case there would be no acknowledgment, no apology, and you would have to find a way to put your childhood in its proper place, without the notion of having closure. (I haven’t mentioned in a while how I loathe this term and concept.) Your mother is the kind of person who subjected her daughter to years with Greg, which turns out to mean she is the kind of person who can’t take responsibility for it. But that’s who she is. Your task is to find out who you are.

—Prudie