I wish I had a significant other that loved me enough to see me through this. I had a boyfriend that helped me be strong and I loved him dearly! But he died 3 years ago of cancer. She never attacked me when I was with him because she new he would let her have it!!!!
You are here with us, now. We are all in different places in our healing and in our learning to stand up to people we love who treat us badly. I am much like you in that regard. I seem to see the other person's point of view ~ what they need, why they might have behaved a certain way. I do, and maybe you do too, need to learn how to believe with all my heart that I merit being treated well, and to speak up right away when I am not being treated well. It feels like I am so aware of the other person's emotional reality that I respond to that sense of upset than I do to the words they say, even if they are way out of line. I am not sure why I do that, but I do know it would be better for everyone ~ for me, and for my family, too ~ if I could see how things evolve more clearly, and in a less other-centered way. It seems that your boyfriend protected you in the way my D H protects me. I would be vulnerable in so many ways if he were not here to stand up for me.
I am working on myself so I can learn to recognize it when I am being victimized or verbally abused. It's like I don't even see it when things begin to be out of balance. If I could recognize when things are getting out of balance sooner,
and if I could see that, however they feel about it, the other person is not coming from a healthy, loving place, then I would be able to respond appropriately before the situation gets to crisis point.
I am working to recognize that it is not my fault when things do get to crisis point, and to stop taking responsibility for "fixing" things. There is a phrase we use here on the site that helps me see with more clarity: It is what it is. Implicit in that phrase, in those words, is the understanding that I did not create this bad (or good) situation alone. The other person bears equal responsibility, and I cannot fix it
for them. And sometimes, I cannot even fix it, for me. Which means there is nothing I have to do, or even, that I can do when bad things happen, but take care of me and try not to hurt anyone else, and just be there and stay present and accept that, for right now,
it is what it is.
That has been a valuable thing for me to know.
The concept of detachment parenting has been helpful to me in this regard. There is an article on detachment parenting pinned to the top of the Parent Emeritus site. If you haven't read it yet, I think you might find some of the concepts outlined there helpful in changing the way you think about your interactions with your child.
I am sorry this is happening in your family.
Sometimes, we need to learn that we cannot change what they are doing. We may not even know why they are doing what they do. We need to learn how to take ourselves out of that circle of worry and guilt and fixing.
It just is what it is.
And we need to learn to be okay with that, for now.
And that is a surprisingly hard thing for me to do.
But I am learning it, and that is working well for me, and for my family, too.
I wish I had a mother I could talk to...you are never there for me emotionally.
This is not true. You are very much there for this child, or you would not feel badly enough about it to have searched for and found us and this site.
So this is one of those things that is her business or her opinion, or is a statement designed to hurt you to the point that your attention will focus only on her. Maybe, she is jealous, not because she has a legitimate point, but because she is angry when anyone else in your family has your love and attention.
So, she is wrong, in this case. There is not a way for you to change how she sees things. So, you are okay then to do nothing for right now, not even to feel badly, or to consider her point of view. You are everyone in your family's mother and grandmother. That is how it is supposed to be. Everyone all together creating family, not one person always trying to focus your attention and concern exclusively on her and her children, to the exclusion of the other children and grands.
That happens in my family, too.
I had my other grandbaby for the day
You have a right and a responsibility to love all your grands, and to see them as often as you like, without defending yourself to your daughter. It's like she is threatening to punish you if you don't turn away from your other grands and only be grandmother to hers.
She is very wrong to do this to you, and to them.
Even if she cannot get you to turn away from them, to exclude them so she and her child can be like, the sole survivors, she destroys the good feelings you should be cherishing right now from having spent that time with your other grand.
So everyone loses, and she gets to be the king of the family and everyone else gets to not matter. And that is a hurtful thing, for everyone but the daughter.
Even her own child is a victim.
She told me I need to search my evil soul and find out who I really am! I need to go to church more because there is something really wrong with me!!! I am such a weak person, every time I think I am going to become a stronger person she buries me once again!!
Actually, this is not true, either.
Another lie from this daughter.
I think you are not weak. You are like me. I have no problem at all with saying what is true
once I see it. Maybe that is why the daughter said such horrible things about your essential self, about your being evil, and about your needing to go to church
more.
Since she said "more", I think I hear that your spirituality is an important part of who you are. That is why her attack this time was worded as it was. Your church and your spirituality must be a reliable source of great strength to you.
This daughter wants you vulnerable to her, and without any source of strength, it seems like to me. She wants you to feel foolish, and to question the one place you feel strong, now that your protector, the man you loved and who loved you, is gone.
Do you think that could be true?
I am not so spiritual that I can claim to know enough about religious things with any certainty, but my sister is. She says those same kinds of things to me that your daughter does to you, but from the superior position of someone who knows more than me, and is right ~ about me, and about everything.
Maybe your daughter is doing the same kind of thing.
My sister told me once, after I finally figured out what was going on and said so, that she walked with the Lord and that perhaps He would mend our relationship, because she was done.
So, there you go.
So far? The Lord seems to have been pretty much on my side, lately.
:O)
I just know she is going to keep me from my grandson now and that breaks my heart!!!
There is another concept I learned here on the site. It is called "catastrophizing". That is when we believe our abusers and then, believe the worst thing they threaten us with is what is really going to happen. And it might happen that way? But it probably won't.
And even if it does, we won't be able to fix that. Your daughter really could take her children out of your life.
But you cannot fix what she does. Part of the reason she threatens you this way is because she wants you broken.
I don't know why. It has nothing to do with you. Mental illness or personality disorder, so they say, have to do with genetics. So when we tell one another, here on the site, that we did not do this and so, we cannot fix this, that is a true thing. And we can take a small measure of comfort there, and stop bending over backwards to fix it.
When we are in the thick of it with someone who is abusing us, and who is using our love and our good will and our gratitude at our blessings to hurt us, we become confused and so sad and search so desperately and with almost single focus to find the thing we did that was hurtful or wrong. When we do not find that thing? That is how we can know we are dealing with an abusive person.
Not to name call or judge them, but just to know our true situation. That way, our response to them and to the situations they create will be correct.
This happens in my family, too. Those same patterns are happening now between myself and my own mother and my sister.
So this has been so helpful to me, to see myself in your situation, so I can be stronger, too.
I wish us both well, and I am glad you found the site, too.
Cedar
storm that our children tend to create. Until you learn to deal with it, your best responses are probably short, simple, noncommittal phrases. This will help you to stay out of the drama as much as possible. 
