Is This Estranged Mom Gaslighting? Therapist Reacts!

How do you feel hearing this mom's story?

Why air out and expose your family issues with your daughter?? It’s an attempt to control her from afar. A public humiliation attempt.

"I did everything i could" except actually listen to what the daughter had to say.

Yeah no one autistic has ever heard "you sound like a robot." Good frigging job mom!

I owe you because when i was a baby you didn’t let me choke to death.

“I can’t make her… I can’t make her… I can’t make her…” Exactly.

The way she talks down about the child she wants back.

"When she talked to us she sounded like a robot." That is called gray-rocking. It is the a common survival tactic when talking to a narcissist. You give them as little ammunition as possible with which to hurt you.

What a passive aggressive mom. She’s justifying her behavior by crying out to the public at large. Her poor daughter.

"She doesn't care about how we feel" Ya'll don't seem about how she feels either, so I'd say you're even!

People ARE talking it through before cutting people off. I tried so many times to tell my parents exactly what was wrong, but nothing ever changed. They never apologized. They continued to be emotionally stunted and disrespectful of really basic boundaries. Abandoning them was showing up for myself.

Putting time and resources into your child is just basic care. You don't get any rewards for that!

When the mother admits that she found her TikTok, made a snide comment about her content, and showed her cyberstalking on the couch, you have to translate this through the lens of toxic narcissism,, she is letting her daughter know " I am watching you, I found you!" It is her exerting control and trying to trigger her daughter. My NPD mother emailed my previous employer to tell them about how awful I was to cut her out. I have been in NC for over ten years. This is pure gossip disguised as concern, it was her saying, " I found you and I will humiliate and smear you into a reaction!" Lucky for me, my employer saw right through it and helped me with a Cease and Desist.

Sending the daughter self-help books puts the problem clearly and fully on the daughter. Also, the feeling that she will "get over it" as if it is a silly phase totally belittles the daughter.

You are much more sympathetic than I am. I don’t find the mother genuine at all. To me she embodies the “passive aggressive cutting remark” if that makes sense.

I recently heard a therapist say that children will treat their aging parents in need the same way their aging parentes treated them when they were little and needed them.

I'm a person with ADHD and autism who left her parents and biological family at large over a decade ago. I feel lucky. I was born, I believe, with independent critical thinking faculties that protected me from accepting and integrating the scapegoating, bullying, and other abuse my immediate and extended family offered. If I had been diagnosed with neurodivergence as a younger person, I would have been pathologized by this family. That situation would have been intolerable. I cannot imagine any non-toxic way forward, for anyone who is different or who draws the short straw in a power dynamic, with an emotionally or otherwise abusive family. Furthermore, our collective / societal understanding of ADHD and autism is stereotypical at best, based on a very narrow lane defined by diagnostics that only address how neurodivergence expresses itself in white men and boys. When 80% of women, girls, and people of color with neurodivergence go undiagnosed, we are working in a world where equity is neither achievable nor valued. The so-called professionals have a lot of work to do to catch up with the community.

It is the smirking that gives it away.

As a parent, being estranged from my oldest son for 5 years. If you truly love your child and want them in your life, you look at how you contibuted to the loss. If you just want your child because you think they owe you that, you dont deserve it. I made changes and even though i dont know why this womans problems were, self reflection is the beginning. We are all close again. I have a good relationship with all 3 of my adult children. And my 3 grandchildren. It starts with you .

Instead of reaching out and offering to go to therapy or get more clarity, this mom dismisses and disrespects her daughter’s wishes. She calls her letter an “angry outburst.” She cannot fathom that she is a huge part of the problem. I’m older than this woman so it’s not a generational thing. Her arrogance is astounding.