Texting in Journal

Perhaps it is better that we text. I can read everything and there is hard evidence of what she has said.
Yesterday, mom (J) - I’m going to stop calling her mom, she was not and is not a mom, because to be a mom is to mother, and mothering is a verb, not a position- sent me this text;

” I do listen to you. I don’t think you’re angry about cloud as you are about something else that you’re not telling me or it’s ambiguous so that I’m not c learly understanding. There are undertones to your communication that suggest something happened to you. I know I’ve asked you before but you said you di dn’t know. If there’s something you need to me tell me then you have to be clear. Am I wrong about this? “

I responded with a “yes, lol”

In reality though, she is probably right. I am reacting not just to her words- to her insistence that she is listening to me, even though I tell her repeatedly that she isn’t. That is a foundational rejection of my experience. No, she tells me. You are wrong. Your experience is wrong. Your perception has no value, no effect, no weight. You are wrong only and simply because I say so, and there’s nothing more to it.
I experience this foundational rejection of me as an assault on my personhood. I wonder, each and every single time this ‘you’re not listening to me’ ‘yes I am’ exchange happens, am I a real person? Am I just a character in her novel, with no will and not even aware enough to correctly assess what it is that is happening to me? Is she listening to me? and I’m just crazy?
This positioning was so foundational, so ubiquitous, so pervasive, that I believed her for the first 32 years of my life.
And I believed everything that ensued from that positioning.

It’s like… waking up from a dream. I have distanced myself from her and have expressed some hard boundaries. I never would have discovered this if I hadn’t first put up those boundaries. I’m beginning to realize that the world that I knew up until now was only her version of the world.
It’s a kind of heavy cognitive dissonance. Or perhaps brainwashing. I don’t know which is more applicable.

I knew that this was something I needed to work through. And yet, ironically, I thought I could work through it with her. How incredibly naive of me! Yes, shall we just skip back to the master manipulator to talk about and deal with how I’ve been manipulated? Sure. I see no problem there.