Making peace with mother will require understanding

I am wondering whether it would be productive to try to resolve some decades-old issues with my mom.

My sibling, a “problem child” since childhood, is still dealing with a lot of issues — drug addiction, joblessness, mooching off my parents, etc.

When I visited my parents a few months ago, my mother brought up my canceling a visit last year; I refused to go because my mom had let my sibling move in, who then began doing drugs again. She said that I shouldn’t be “meddling in her business.”

It feels as though my being a part of the family is conditional on my agreeing with her.

Is it worth it to try and explore these issues with her? As she’s gotten older, she’s gotten more unreasonable about anyone voicing opposition to her insistence on continuing to support my sibling.

I have worked on resolving my own feelings with therapy, and know that I can’t change her, and can only change how I react to her.

What would you suggest that I do?

I would advise against talking this out.

The talking is (potentially) just fine; it’s the “out” that concerns me, the idea that you should go into a conversation with Mom with a goal to “resolve” anything.

Make peace with it, sure. Set a boundary. Develop a strategy for not reacting. Find a way to understand your mom better so you can respond to her better. Those are all goals for

To resolve this or talk this “out,” though, your mom would have to at least see your point of view, yes?

Going into any situation with a goal for someone else is a tough sell under the best of conditions, and by your description, the conditions here are an intractable dynamic that your mom digs into only more deeply with time.

Especially given your family’s history of dysfunction dating roughly to its origin, you don’t want this to become your area of “insistence on continuing” where your “efforts have done no good.”

Limit your goal to having an honest, productive response to your mom’s accusations — one that accurately represents your views. That’s your minimum, done right it can have the bonus consequence of erasing the battle.

To start: Agree with your mother in a limited and highly specific way. “You are right, Mom. I shouldn’t be meddling in your business, those issues have nothing to do with me.” Because she’s right.

And then: “Likewise, how I deal with the situation is business, including if I cancel my plans to visit.”

You’re worried about your family, of course. But think of it as putting on your oxygen mask first. You can’t help if you’re not healthy yourself, and that means “opposition to her insistence on continuing to support my sibling” is not an act of correction, but of conscience. It’s an outcome unto itself.

— Revisiting Old Wound With Mom