parental disengagement, mis-attunement

Another thing that seems to be taking a really long time to sort out is: How could my parents be both largely uninvolved in my upbringing in any engaged, emotional sense and yet have such a profoundly negative impact on my sense of self?

I think the answers are all there, already, meaning that I've thought them and/or written them down, possibly repeatedly, but haven't yet been able to assemble the pieces into a coherent picture. The puzzle analogy, again.

And also that first sentence contains what I believe is a well-known, long-understood, very common pattern recognized by various study-ers (?) of human nature: The disengaged parent. I'm not sure I've seen that particular term used, exactly, but that seems to be getting close(r) to the right word to capture my sense of the parental units' behavior toward me.

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My parents were not 'permissive'; they were, instead, insanely stingy, unbelievably un-generous, not only with money, but with their time and emotional energy as well. They made every smallest request or need on my part seem like some absolutely unreasonable demand, with which I was going to turn their lives into a living hell. Forget about asking for a bicycle or a puppy or anything beyond the barest, most basic survival needs; I wonder if my early fondness for old, worn-out clothing came from the fact that most of my stuff came from the Goodwill, and I would never dare asking for anything new for fear of being criticized in some way? (As an adult, I loathe spending money on nearly everything, though there are a few things I spend money fairly freely on, such as food - to my mind, food, being the basic building block of the body, is a really stupid place to pinch pennies. A classic penny wise, pound foolish move [not the word I want].)

The other thing that keeps coming to mind is my mother's apparently absolute inability to see me as anything other than an extension of her own needs. That is, anything that I said or did that was congruent with her wants and needs at that moment were seen as Good; anything I said or did that went against her wants and needs of the moment were seen is inherently bad.

(Pulling out eyebrow hairs at the moment, from what I think of as my 'anger venting' mole, in the middle of the left eyebrow - whenever I get to this mixed0-up tangle of emotions - shame that I'm 'bad', anger that *I* can never get *my* needs met, even now, so many years later; fear that I'll be 'caught' saying 'bad things' about my parents, and then cycling back around to anger because, don't MY feelings count, too?)

Putting the above 'aside' at the center: How do I break the cycle of guilt/shame/rage that I encounter whenever I think about my parents, especially my mother?

I had a self-talking-to time a bit ago (a few hours ago?) where I was having an imaginary 'conversation' with my father, setting 'boundaries' with him that I was never able to set a s a child: Saying no, telling him to go away, telling him to 'stop it', whatever 'it' might have been at the time.

My mother is harder - both she and my father saw me as inordinately responsible for her emotional health and well-being from at least as early as the age of six, if not before. They put me in charge of 'taking care' of her - I was her 'minder', as the Brits say.

And this is not a woman who was mentally or emotionally incompetent in any - usual? - sense of the word.

I'm not really sure what happened there. She (according to dad, and to *her*?) was vulnerable, and fragile, and in need of protection. And so, said 'protecting' fell to me, as soon as I was old enough to be 'shamed' into it, which I think was around age 7 or so. But my experience of my mother? was that she was mean, and spiteful, and made vicious, snippy remarks.

It's only occurred to me recently that maybe the reason nobody else seems to 'know' about any of this is that she only did/does it when no one else is around?

So I've come up with the idea that I must only be around my mother in the presence of 'witnesses', which, at the moment, I think, means my nieces. They may as well be exposed to the inner working of the family early on, eh? Disassembling the Wizard right before their very eyes, so they can see how his 'smoke-and-mirrors' machines work. Give them the tools to take the sonofabitch apart themselves, later on. Which they will surely have to, given that their upbringing seems to be echoing much of the same shit I grew up with. Sigh.

It's