I hope you told your therapist all of that. Don't just keep the conversation at small talk. He might be waiting for you to bring up what you actually came there for.
I try! I start telling him about how I'm too attached to my mom and how I have one foot stuck in childhood, and how I've been putting my mom's feelings before my wife's, and he just starts asking me questions that don't seem to hit any significant point, and then the session comes to an end and it just seems like we spent the time chatting. After this last session he did seem like he very clearly understood what it is what I want to work on, so I'm hoping next week we can finally delve in deeper.
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Just remember, baby steps.
And it isn't uncommon for new mothers to hate their mothers-in-law, sometimes all of a sudden, especially if the mother-in-law gets pushy. And the mother in-law often seems to, if my experience and that of my mom with her mother-in-law and those of my friends are anything to go by. It's not that mothers-in-law are inherently mean. It's just there is something about the dynamic and their place in the grand scheme of things that can cause even the nice ones to get a bit too assertive and confrontational with the new mom.
I hated my mother-in-law for a year after the baby and she wasn't too thrilled with me, either, and she did get nasty and accuse me of keeping her from the baby right during a visit where I went out of my way to visit her despite suffering severe mastitis. Boy was my husband steamed about that and let her have it...and so did my father-in-law. Nobody used profanity or got up in her face or anything disrespectful or vulgar like that. They just let her know it was rather rude and harsh and disrespectful to say that to me when I am in the very midst of making a challenging effort to get the baby over for a visit. And all this happened even though we were super close friends before the baby and are super close friends even now! She's like a second mother to me.
But my hormones were very territorial and defensive and for her part this was her first grandchild out of her youngest son so she was feeling proprietary and it was a bad mix that put us at odds with each other. Now where my mother-in-law differs from your mother is that she was not overbearing before and she was a pretty cool mom. Hubby was a mama's boy not because his mom screwed anything up raising him, but because it was just the way he was for a little while, probably because he was the youngest. It's good that we dated a long time before marrying, so he could transition out of that.
Anyway, Hubby had to put her in her place and he didn't want to, but he knew who his priorities were: his wife and new baby. My husband's sister also intervened because she is always looking out for me. That first year was a cluster cluck all around. It didn't help I had post partum depression from all the stress and mother-in-law tension as well as complications from a difficult delivery.
It's really good that you are making this effort on behalf of your wife and child because trust me, you don't want to stress her to the point of post partum depression.
This is no easier on her than it is on you right now.
Anyway you really really really need to take it slow and remember this time with a new baby, especially your first, is really hard on everyone. Everyone is trying to figure out their new roles and their proper place. And your mom definitely needed a firm handling to figure her proper place. I can't repeat this enough, your mother was very out of line. She overstepped her bounds and your wife has every right to react the way she has and to still be very upset and angry and resentful. Let her vent these feelings and let the poison out without judging her or fearing that her feelings will rip you from your family.
And you need to make that transition from your parents' son to your rightful place as an independent adult and head of your own household. Don't worry, your folks don't need you picking out their nursing home just yet. Take a breath and remember, one challenge at a time. Breathe.
I don't know if you should get a female therapist or not. I worry you might be more prone to transference with a female therapist. Someone else noted you tended to be more conciliatory when a female (probably me) got forceful with you. I'm not sure how it will work out for you to have yet another woman having a go at your noggin. I worry my input may be problematic so I'm definitely going to not talk at you like you're one of my kids anymore. I shouldn't have to begin with and I apologize for that.
I wish you could take the advice I gave you previously to put your mother out of your mind and figure her out later. But I can see you're eaten up with anxiety and possibly have something else going on that affects your ability to order your thoughts right now. Are you getting enough sleep? That's usually a huge problem for new parents and makes everything seem worse.
I don't know if you've had enough time with your therapist. You didn't get your issues overnight and they aren't going to be solved very quickly. He does need to get a sense of you and who you are and even if his ramblings don't seem significant to you, they might have a certain point from his perspective.
Why don't you ask him what realistic expectations should be at this point. Or tell him you're eaten up with these anxieties you shared with us and ask for help or advice to keep your thoughts from eating at you like that in the short term, so there enough left over of you to deal with the long term. Maybe that will light the fire under his tail. Though honestly I don't know that he needs one lit under him. There is something about the intensity you display and a bit of frantic energy and persistent quality to your thoughts that makes me wonder what's going on with you.
I am not qualified to suggest anything about your health, but I'm the kind of person who likes to see all of the bases covered, so I want to ask: do you also have access to someone who is qualified to evaluate you for something like bipolar disorder or some other imbalance that could be negatively impacting your emotions and decision making process? All of the stress and changes you've undergone could have triggered an imbalance that's not chronic the way bipolar disorder is, so it is worth consulting your doctor about to determine if that happened.
If there is a biochemical component to your issues it is important to get it diagnosed and treated and acknowledged, so your therapy will be effective.
By the way I'm NOT saying I think you have bipolar disorder. I barely know anything about it, except that it causes emotions to be amplified and can negatively affect the decision making process and exacerbate impulsiveness. I've got a nephew who has BPD. I just used it as an example.
I wish I could think of this as a temporary thing, and envision a future where my wife doesn't hate my mom quite so much, but I just don't think it's going to happen. My wife knows everything about the way my mom raised my brother and me, the co-dependency, parentification, basically emotional abuse. She hates her for emotionally abusing me and my brother. And my mom is incapable of self-reflection or doing any real work on herself. Her definition of "work on herself" is to work on making peace with whatever comes as a result of her not being willing to work on herself. For example, she told me she's doing personal growth work which is helping her be more at peace with not seeing her granddaughter as much as she would like. But she might get to see her more if she would do some ACTUAL therapy work and be willing to examine herself and humble herself, etc. But she seems completely incapable of doing that, which is part of why my wife is so uncomfortable around her. As I said much earlier in the thread, she used to ask my wife to "call her out" on whatever she's doing that annoys her, and when my wife did, my mom would get defensive and say that it was all just a misunderstanding. And after my mom asked her to really be harsh with her and just be brutally honest to get it all out in the open, my wife sent her a really brutal email, which was full of stuff that my mom could have learned from and responded to and used as a way to rebuild a connection with my wife, but the email "hurt" her so much that she never replied, and she said that when she asked my wife to be brutal with her, she meant in person, a back and forth dialog, so that "everyone can be heard." She has on multiple occasions told me that she feels that my wife owes her apologies, and that a reconciliation talk between the two of them would have to be in a place of them being "equal" where neither is held as having done anything worse than the other, and apologies would come from both sides, etc. My mom always has to be in a position of power and control and determining herself whether what she did was right, wrong, rude, kind, etc, and so she can never truly apologize for anything. When she married my dad, at their wedding, she declared to everyone that the reason she chose him is because he's willing to be wrong, always willing to be open minded to something new. Before they got married she basically told him "I can never be wrong," and for whatever reason he agreed. (They have not had a romantic relationship for many years).
So, yeah, if my mom could learn to approach my wife and say "Hey, I'm really, genuinely sorry that I came across in an overbearing, disrespectful way that made you uncomfortable. I'm sorry that I emotionally manipulated my son such that you felt abandoned and neglected in your marriage. I'd really like to get along with you and I've been doing a lot of therapeutic work, and really feel remorseful for all the pain and discomfort that I've caused you" then my wife would open up completely! She'd probably be in disbelief at first, but then she'd say "Wow! This is amazing! I'm so glad! I can actually have a relationship with you now, you're finally more committed to kindness, respect, and connection, than you are to your ego," etc, and she probably would not hold a grudge for very long beyond that point.
Thing is, I just don't see my mom ever being able to do that. She cannot relinquish her control and dominance in that manner. She's physically incapable of taking one step towards introspection and ego surrender.
That's why I get anxious about the future, because I just don't see it working out, in terms of my mom. I'll have to make peace with her not being very closely involved with my family, and I'll have to really work on understanding why it makes sense that that's the case, and why I couldn't have reasonably expected my wife to be able to tolerate even a relatively close relationship with such a woman. I don't think my mom can change in the slightest, and so my wife will never be able to feel comfortable around her. However, once she feels that I am on her side, and she trusts me, she'll be able to endure occasional visits from her, I do know that, because that has already happened multiple times.
One interesting thing to note: There was a moment a few months ago where we discovered for the first time the root of the problem we were experiencing, which was that I was putting my mom's feelings before my wife's. It took as a while even to diagnose that as the problem. But on the day that we did, my wife was so relieved that we figured it out and that I now knew what I needed to change, that she actually felt no animosity towards my mom at all. She actually said "you should apologize to your mom. All this time I've been hating her, but it was really the way you were treating me that I was hating. I wouldn't even mind her visiting every week." That's seriously what she said in a moment where she felt like I was 100% on her side. Then the next visit came and I did not behave like I was completely on her side, so things spiraled out of control again. But I wonder what would have happened had I made her feel like I was completely on her side during that next visit. Would she have continued to not hate my mom so much? She now attributes her feeling in that moment I described as "over-zealous" and "delusional," but she did feel that way in a moment where she felt like the problem was solved and that I was going to be on her side from now on. So maybe when she experiences me as being on her side even during a visit from my mom, she will actually not hate her so much anymore. But I'm skeptical because at this point she mostly hates her because of the way she emotionally abused me.
As far as the bipolar thing goes, I don't think I have anything like that, but I have some sort of compulsive thought process problem, I do know that. I'm much too much in my head, and there is a compulsive nature to my thought patterns, which generates anxiety.
[doublepost=1463036391][/doublepost]Whenever I would talk to my mom about how it would go a long way if when she came over for a visit, she would apologize to my wife and let her know that she wants to work on being a more pleasant, respectful presence in our house, my mom would complain that she's being asked to come over "with her tail tucked in between her legs." God forbid her ego gets damaged or compromised at all by apologizing and admitting any sort of personal fault.
[doublepost=1463036509][/doublepost]With all of this being said, my personal wish is that my wife could just adopt the same attitude I have towards my mom: That's the way she is, she can't help it, just ignore her if you find what she's doing to be rude or inappropriate. She doesn't mean to be rude, she can't help it, she's doing her best, etc.
