AITA FOR STILL BEING ANGRY AT MY MOM WHEN I KNOW SHE DID THE BEST SHE COULD?
Your mom calls. You can tell from the way she says “hello” that something’s off.
Before she even tells you what happened, you’re already adjusting. You shift in your seat. Your voice changes. You’re listening for what she needs from you.
She’s fighting with your dad again. Your sister isn’t answering her calls. She needs help with something she could probably figure out herself. Or she’s lonely, and you haven’t called enough.
So you stay.
Because even after everything she put you through, you’re still the one taking care of her.
And afterward, you feel irritated with yourself for being irritated with her. Because she loves you. And she had a hard life too. You know what happened to her and why she is the way she is. And afterward, you feel irritated with yourself for being irritated with her.
That’s what “responsible” can look like.
And because your life works, because nothing looks that bad, you keep arriving at the same explanation:
Maybe the problem is me.
WHAT IF YOU WERE NEVER THE PROBLEM?
You’ve spent a long time trying to figure out what’s wrong with you.
Why you can replay a conversation from three days ago and still wonder if you said the wrong thing. Why one change in someone’s tone can leave you wondering what you did. Why you can know you’re people-pleasing, know exactly where it comes from, swear you’re not doing it this time, and then hear yourself say, “No, it’s fine. Really.”
You’ve been to therapy before. You’ve listened to the podcasts. You can explain your patterns so well you could probably teach a class on them.
Maybe someone finally gave it a name. Anxiety. Trauma. ADHD. Burnout.
And maybe for a second, that felt like relief.
Okay. There it is. Now I can fix it.
So you tried, and somehow, you’re still here. Still understanding yourself better than ever and still doing the thing you understand.
Because nothing about you is random.
YOU’VE GOTTEN VERY GOOD AT BEING THE PROBLEM.
Maybe nobody actually told you that you were the problem. They didn’t have to.
You learned it in smaller ways. You learned to check someone’s face before deciding whether to keep talking. To hear “I’m fine” and immediately start wondering what you did. To rewrite the text three times so it couldn’t possibly be taken the wrong way.
You learned that sometimes it was easier to say “whatever you want” than risk being difficult. Easier to explain why someone hurt you than admit that they hurt you. Easier to need less than find out what would happen if you needed more.
And you got really fucking good at it. You became the responsible one. The one who remembers. The one who follows through. The one people call because they know you’ll answer.
But when you finally get frustrated, say no, need reassurance, or ask someone else to show up for you, something happens almost immediately. You start building their case for them.
Maybe I’m too sensitive. Maybe I expected too much. Maybe I should’ve said it differently. Maybe this really is just my anxiety.
Before you know it, you’re working on yourself again.
Somewhere along the way, you got so good at understanding everyone else that you stopped asking a much simpler question: Does this work for me?
You questioned yourself.
THIS IS WHERE I START LOOKING BEHIND THE FACADE.
I’m not particularly interested in helping you become better at tolerating a life that doesn’t fit you. And I’m not going to reduce you to a diagnosis and hand you a list of coping skills.
We can absolutely use coping skills. But I want to know why you need them.
I want to know why your mom sounding disappointed can make you rethink a decision you were completely sure about five minutes ago. Why you can tell your friend exactly what she deserves in her relationship, then spend two hours figuring out how to ask for the bare minimum in your own. Why someone pulling away makes you want to become easier to love instead of asking whether you even like how they’re treating you.
I want to know why you say “it’s not a big deal” and then think about it in the shower, in the car, and again when you’re supposed to be sleeping. Why you can be exhausted, resentful, completely at capacity, and still hear yourself say, “Yeah, I can do that.”
That’s the work.
Because I’m less interested in teaching you how to calm yourself down after your boundaries get crossed than I am in why you needed three people to tell you it was okay to have the boundary in the first place.
Some of what you’ve been calling “just who I am” may be something you learned to become very good at.
You never chose them.
My job is to help you see where they came from, what they protected you from, and what they’re costing you now. And underneath all that noise, start recognizing which voice is actually yours.
AND THEN SOMETHING STARTS TO HAPPEN.
Not enlightenment in the Buddha-under-a-tree, suddenly-everything-makes-sense kind of way. Usually it’s much less dramatic.
You’re telling me that your partner seemed quiet Tuesday night, so you spent the rest of the evening trying to figure out what was wrong. I ask you why you assumed their mood had anything to do with you. You stop. “Oh, shit.” There it is.
Then you start catching it outside of therapy. Your mom sounds disappointed and you feel the urge to change your answer. Someone takes longer than usual to text back and you start rereading the conversation. You say no without attaching a paragraph explaining why you’re allowed to.
And one day, somebody is upset with you and you notice something almost unfamiliar: You don’t immediately assume you did something wrong.
These moments look small. They’re not. Because once you can see the pattern, you can’t unsee it.
Eventually, you spend less time asking, Are they okay with me? And start asking something you may not have asked nearly enough:
Am I okay with this?
THERAPY BECOMES THE PLACE WHERE WE TEST SOMETHING DIFFERENT.
You don’t learn a new way of relating to yourself just by reading about it. You learn it by experiencing it.
Because the same patterns we’ve been talking about eventually show up in therapy too.
You say something you think came out wrong and spend the next ten minutes wondering if I still like you. You disagree with me, but underneath the disagreement you’re already wondering if you’ve damaged something between us.
That’s the part I’m paying attention to.
Not just what you’re saying, but what happens underneath it. The part of you checking my face. The explanation you add before anyone asked for one. The part already preparing for what might happen next.
If I disappoint someone, they’ll pull away. If I’m too much, I’ll lose them. If someone is upset with me, I need to fix it.
And then we get to test something different. What happens if you don’t explain yourself perfectly? If you let someone misunderstand you for a minute? If you have a need, disagree, or take up a little more room without immediately trying to make it easier for everyone else?
Slowly, you start learning the difference between what’s actually happening and what an older part of you is bracing for.
Because sometimes what’s underneath your reaction has very little to do with what’s happening right now.
I’M NOT HERE TO GIVE YOU A BETTER MASK.
I want you to understand yourself so deeply that you start catching the things you used to call “just who I am.”
Sometimes we get there through EMDR, hypnotherapy, parts work, somatic work, memory reconsolidation, or psychodynamic therapy. Sometimes we spend an hour talking about something that happened last Thursday and realize we’re not really talking about Thursday anymore.
I’m active in the room. I ask questions, point things out, and connect dots. And yes, sometimes I’m going to say the thing you’ve spent years finding increasingly sophisticated ways not to say.
Not because I know you better than you know yourself.
Because sometimes you need someone standing outside the Matrix to show you where the code is.
SO WHAT IF SHE REALLY DID DO THE BEST SHE COULD?
Maybe that’s true. She loved you. She sacrificed for you. She gave you things she never had. Maybe if she’d known better, she would have done better.
And it still hurt. That’s the part you keep trying to argue yourself out of.
You think if you admit what you didn’t get, you’re saying she was a bad mother. If you’re angry, you’re ungrateful. If you need distance, you’re selfish. If you stop explaining her behavior, you’re being unfair.
So you keep putting her intentions on one side of the scale and your pain on the other.
And somehow, her intentions always win.
But your mother doesn’t have to be the villain for your hurt to be real. She can have done her best and her best can have left you with things you’re still carrying.
You can understand why she is the way she is without making yourself responsible for managing it. You can love her and need something different. You can be grateful and angry. You can stop requiring yourself to prove that what happened was bad enough before you’re allowed to be affected by it.
You don’t have to make her the problem, but you can stop automatically making it you.
FINALLY, A PLACE WHERE YOU MAKE SENSE.
Eventually, the question starts to change. Instead of Why am I like this? you start understanding why you make sense.
You start recognizing the difference between what you actually want and what will keep everyone happy. Between guilt and doing something wrong. Between someone being upset with you and you actually having something to fix.
And underneath all of that, you start hearing something that’s been very easy to lose in all the noise.
Yourself.
Not a calmer version. Not a more productive version. Not the version who finally learned how to need less, explain better, or make everybody comfortable.
You.
Finally, a place where you make sense. Ready to see what’s underneath the story you’ve been living?
Virtual psychotherapy for adults in Georgia, Minnessota, Indiana, and Tennessee.
Zelle Straight, MA, LPC, NCC, NCIAC, NCLC
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