My mother has done nothing but ruin my life - is it too late to fix myself?

Q. I never really thought about writing a letter about how I feel – as I feel so stupid to talk about how my relationship with my mother has been so bad. Everyone warned me not to get close to her as I would realise the mistake later in life and I see what they mean now.

My father has been gone my whole life and my mother has done nothing but ruin my life. Every fruit you can imagine that grew on my tree she cut off. What I mean is that every relationship, everything I had and loved and was dear to me, she completely trashed and not just trashed – she went to the full extent of damaging all my relationships and my self-esteem plus my love for myself and my ability to trust another person to the point of no fixing.

It is as if I’m the plague and everyone hates me. I get that I don’t have a good and understandable personality because I don’t understand what direction in life I should take.

A. It is good you are now seeing the damage that has been done to you and are seeking to do something about it. Clearly there is a need for you to build a sense of self that is separate from your mother and while this is difficult, given the intensity of the relationship, it is not impossible. You need to make a decision about how to relate to your mother from now on and then you can build the strength to put this into action.

The first choice is whether to have any contact with her at all or if you need to take a long break from her in order to gather the resources to resist the negative intensity that is your relationship. It is very difficult to cut someone so close off completely and the danger is that you may need to tell yourself she is a monster in order to do this – this can leave you permanently in the position of victim and that is a powerless and belittling role to adopt.

However, taking a number of months or longer off from your contact with her may be a good decision in your life but this needs to be done in a confident and self-regarding way. Perhaps writing to her saying you will be back in contact following a period of self-development and telling various relatives of this plan (so a different version of the story will not happen behind your back) would begin the process.

We are enormously influenced by those we spend the most time with and it is a well-documented fact that our parents carry huge sway over our sense of ourselves. That you had no father to mediate your mother’s influence left you no option but to try to keep her on-side as a child – in order to survive. This demonstrates the need to install (new) good people who are close and care about you in your life. The problem is that your self-esteem sounds so low following the years of emotional abuse and manipulation you have suffered while living with your mother. Can you invest in long-term counselling or psychotherapy as at the very least, this is now required.

There are low-cost options available and the registering bodies, the Irish Council for Psychotherapy or Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy can guide you on this. Often the result of a very selfish parental relationship is that a person struggles to create and maintain good and meaningful relationships so a suggestion is to volunteer with an organisation where you know you are going to be in the company of good, altruistic people. Over time this company will begin to have influence over you and you might find your essential goodness is reflected back to you from your colleagues. This is a slow process but one worth investing in so that you begin to have knowledge of what it is like to be with people who do not want to take anything from you.

Your mother is someone who needs help – she has destroyed the one person in her life who was guaranteed to love her. She is not someone powerful but she has such insecurity that she cannot allow her daughter to shine. The chances are she has very low ability to regulate her emotions and little self-awareness. It is not your job to fix her but it is your job to make a life for yourself that is worth living. You can have your mother in your life as long as you see her as she truly is and let go any expectations of a mother’s regard.