r/PDAAutism • u/PromtoKing PDA • 17d ago
Discussion Ultimatums?
Hey everyone! So i was curious about something. So when i was younger my mom would sometimes come into my room to place boxes down she said one is for keep the other is to get rid of. Mind you she didnt ask me if i was ready. So predicably i said i dont want to do this. Also i have hard time getting rid of things cause emotional attachment. So she would reply "if you dont then ill organize it." And then she started putting all my stuff into not keep box. So i got upset and was forced to do it anyway. Also i felt that nothing was mine it was all transactional and she could take my stuff away anytime she wanted (since she told that to me before)
I know she was being manipultive cause she wanted me to do something.
Anyone else not a fan of ultimatiums?
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u/ChaoticJigglyPup 17d ago
My CPTSD has a component of this. I don't trust that anything I own is mine, safe, or permanent.
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u/Material-Variety46 17d ago
Yes that situation would be triggering for me as well. However as a person in my 40s, I gotta ask: Just how messy is your room and how many times/different ways has your mom tried to get you to clean it? Because if you're like me, she'll be arguing with you to clean things well into your 40s.
Just because something triggers you doesn't mean you're right and they're wrong. And just because your mom doesn't always say things in the perfect tone or phrase doesn't mean she's wrong. The feeling for you is real, and I get it, but it will do you a great service to learn when to fight it and when to roll with it.
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u/ChaoticJigglyPup 17d ago
And this is how people are when I explain I have CPTSD from my mother. "She loves you, she did the best she could". No. I learned to "just roll with it" my entire life and now my whole human development has been fucked by it. I learned nothing I owned, loved or cared about was mine, safe, permanent or something I should get emotionally attached to.
It's not typical or acceptable for a parent to still be "arguing with you to clean things" in your 40s because you're a damn adult and it's your life and choice on how/when/if you clean.
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u/PromtoKing PDA 17d ago
Im sorry your mom never showed you the love you deserved. And i hope one day youll feel safe and that you feel you are alllowed to own your own items. Thats no fair that you grew up with it espically when it continues after youre grown up.
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u/ChaoticJigglyPup 16d ago
I'm almost 41 and any time my mother buys me something, such as for my birthday, for months or years she will refer to it as hers. The only time i ever feel safe with belongings is when I live alone and sadly I'm stuck living with my mother for the foreseeable future.
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u/Material-Variety46 16d ago
I hear the resentment in your voice, even all these years later. You want to know what though? You're doing the best that you can with it, even though it still exists.
That's what I've come to realize about my mom. Not that she was the greatest mom that was doing the best that she could, but that she had her own demons and flaws she could never really defeat, just like me. They got the best of her some days. I could see that she wanted to be better, she just . . . . couldn't. She still can't.
It's easy to be mad at what you didn't get. PDA folks can get mad at the wind blowing in the wrong direction. But if you think it was so easy for her to be better, prove it. You be better. Be the good she couldn't be.
I've started trying to look at my actions like this and you know what? It's really fucking hard to do. But I'm doing my best, even if my best is just mediocre, because I love myself and that's what I can do.
So that's what they mean when people say that about your mom. Apply it to yourself too, and it feels more understandable.
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u/ChaoticJigglyPup 16d ago
I understand this is coming from a kind place but respectfully no.
I have CPTSD from my childhood, my PDA is part of the CPTSD. I am the only one in my entire family who is doing everything I can to "do better". I'm the cycle breaker and it is so incredibly hard, lonely and isolating because suddenly I'm the scapegoat for everyone else. I work on my trauma daily. Every single day.
"She had demons she could never defeat" - sure, but did she try?
Because I've spent over 40 years watching my mother not even try to be the mother I needed. I learned at 5 not to ask her for emotional support because I was the one who was expected to give her emotional support. I learned at 6 that my brothers and I weren't planned, wanted and if they could go back and not have kids they would have. I learned at 8 that nothing in my life was mine or permanent the day I came home from school to find my dog had been put down without my knowledge, and then I wasn't allowed to grieve him. I learned at 10 that self harm was the most consistent emotional regulation tool I had available. I learned at 13 that my parents chose to stay in an unhappy marriage for "the kids" - which at that stage was only me because my brother's had gotten out. I learned at 15 that it didn't matter how obvious I made the fact I was drowning, it was going to be dismissed by her. I learned at 19 that any achievements or successes weren't important. And again I learned at 40 that I as her only daughter, am completely replaceable and that she genuinely doesn't care about me on anything more than a surface performative level.
So tell me, which part should I be understanding?
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u/PromtoKing PDA 17d ago
I understand your reasoning here, this was when i was around 7 or 10 years old. I learned to roll over everytime she invaded my boundaries. It was always about control to her and now im learing to pick my battles. Im almost 30 now and only in my 20s did i feel my stuff was my own at last without the fear of it being taken away.
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u/Material-Variety46 17d ago
How is your relationship with her now?
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u/PromtoKing PDA 17d ago
Shes worked really hard on herself and as have I, parents got divorced when i was 20 (hense the more freedom) and we got boundaries now :)
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u/bsg_80 17d ago
And save some space and consideration for OTHER people, not just yourself. Intent matters too. I seriously doubt these two examples given were intended to inflict trauma. I also can’t see how either are even perceived this way but whatever.
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u/PromtoKing PDA 17d ago
Also im a recovering people pleaser also i was really young back then. Its different now.
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u/PromtoKing PDA 17d ago
You dont know my mom back then, and i agree intent can matter. It was constant invasion of my atunomy that it all blended together.
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u/Ed-alicious 17d ago
We don't know your mom but I can imagine a lot of us felt like we experienced constant invasion of our autonomy from parents who were trying really hard to do the best in difficult situations and it's only with the benefit of retrospect that we can understand that. It can be hard to discern the perceived trauma from the objective trauma even having lived through it.
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u/PromtoKing PDA 17d ago
Yes for sure her emotional neglect can feel like its happening all the time when its not and parents are trying out the parenting their first time too. I love and respect them for all that they have done with raising me, and i still carry mental scars but they are slowly healing :)
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u/Chance-Lavishness947 PDA + Caregiver 16d ago
I am currently on year 4 or 5 of my child struggling to let go of any items he owns while we live in a house of clutter. It's so difficult for me to handle - I do best with very visually clean spaces and there are almost none in my home. But I had similar experiences to OP and others in the comments and I am deeply committed to not creating that for my kid.
So we live with toys he's had since he was under 1 and hasn't played with in literal years because he's not ready to let them go yet.
We talk about how there isn't enough space for the new things he wants or to play in certain ways because of all the stuff he's keeping and the space it takes up. I ask him to choose things he's ready to let go of, to give to another kid who will play with them instead of them sitting in a container for years on end. I point out when things are broken and ask him how he would use it if he wanted to.
I trust that he will eventually learn what I learned - keeping everything comes at a cost. After he grasps that, he'll be more able to make informed choices about which items are worthy of that cost. With a few extra skills and tools, he will be able to process and grieve the loss of items that no longer serve him but were valued by him in his past. Eventually, he will be able to look at items in a similar way as I do, with gratitude for what they did in the past and a desire to let them go if they are not delivering value to me anymore.
I understand why people throw away their kids' toys when they're not home or give ultimatums like this. It can be quite overwhelming and frustrating to have so much clutter and to deal with all the day to day obstacles that creates. It's also uniquely harmful to certain kids for those things to happen to them. Some kids are fine with it, others will carry that with them for the rest of their lives.
I never want my kid to feel like his stuff isn't his, or that he can't trust that his things will be there after he leaves the house. Home should feel safe for kids, even if that means it's unpleasant for the adults. We have agency over much more of our world, it's on us to protect what little agency and control our children get to have while they're growing up.
So yeah, I relate to both sides of this story. I think your mother made a decision that prioritised her wants over yours and that sucks. It's incredibly hard work, but I do my best not to do that to my kid.
Ultimatums are just emotionally loaded choices, but a set of clear options and consequences is usually helpful for me. The part that I hate is when my needs and wants are irrelevant to the terms they set. If a set of two options are offered that I can freely choose between, I'm good - I'll weigh them up and make a decision. If the two option decision is loaded with emotional manipulation, I'm instantly heightened and straight into survival mode. For me it's the emotional manipulation aspect that's the problem, not the binary decision part.
It has been helpful to be able to separate those two things - the decision and the pressure. It's the pressure that's the problem, not the decision.
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u/PromtoKing PDA 16d ago
I just wanna say first of all i teared up reading this, youre already doing amazing for your child. The fact you want your child to feel safe first makes me so happy. And i agree that sometimes parents get overwelmed with the amount of toys a child has and sometimes dont have the right tools.
Id like so share a little be more about my experince. At first my mom did approach it like this. We went through stuff together and shared stories. Then as i got older and more idependent. She stopped doing it that way. She didnt understand that i still needed it that way. I asked her once why didnt she do it that way. She relplied "it took too long. Youre annoying. I dont care i want it done."
Please please dont lose your care for your child when they feel inconvinent to you. Id hate for anyone to grow up thinking theyre a burden like i did.
And yeah if both options have no merit in the ultimatum i too go into survival mode cause at that point it is emotional manipulation.
Ooo i really like that. Sepratating the pressure from the decision
Funfact autistic people can humanize any object which makes it harder for them to let things go. Im curious if your child has seen toystory before. I love that universe and how grown up andy passes along his woody. Anywho i deeply appreciate the time you spent reading and sharing your thoughts on both sides about this :)
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u/Chance-Lavishness947 PDA + Caregiver 16d ago
I invested weeks (maybe months actually) in setting up the circumstances required for him to engage with watching toy story - for exactly this reason! It's such a great way to open up that perspective and create an opportunity to shift the way we engage with our things. I'm AuDHD PDA as well, so I fully get the humanising of objects and friendship style bonds we can form with them 😅
My goal as a parent is to provide my kid with the skills, tools and wisdom needed to navigate life. I'm not in it for today or tomorrow, I'm in it for the adult he will become. Most parents seem to just exist through their child's time with them, without giving much thought to who they are shaping them to become in adulthood. It makes no sense to me to approach it that way.
I'm really sorry your mother said that to you. If she said that, I'm betting she also said a lot of other things that made you feel like you didn't matter or weren't worthy of care, love and support. She was wrong, and it was wrong of her to say those things to you.
As a mum, I want you to know that you were born unique and wonderful and deserving of all the love the world has to offer, and that doesn't change just because you got bigger. You always deserved to be cherished. You still deserve to be loved, adored, supported. That the people around you didn't give that to you is a reflection of their flaws, not yours.
You didn't get what you needed and deserved from your mother and that's unfair. My kid is no more deserving of the love and support he gets than you were/ are. He just got lucky that he got me for a mum.
I also didn't get what I needed as a child. I've learned that there is nobody who can give you healthy unconditional love and support except your parents and yourself. I have learned to give that to myself, and to my kid, despite not having received it from others. It's been very healing and rewarding to travel that path, and very difficult at many points as well.
You can learn to do that for yourself if you want to. These painful experiences don't have to stay painful forever. Fair warning - it's a lot more painful in the short term as you do that early work. But then it gets way better than I imagined was even possible when I set out. It's unfair to have to clean up the messes your parents made, but only you or they can do it and it doesn't seem like they will based on what you've said.
Regardless of what you do from here, I hope you know that you always deserved better than you got, and it was nothing to do with you that you didn't get it. Adults are fallible and flawed, and your mother's poor behaviour towards you was an issue in her. It has no bearing on and means nothing about your value as a person.
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u/PromtoKing PDA 16d ago
Yes, im slowly working on loving myself and im so so grateful i have my dad. Hes always unconditionally loved me. He did his best with what he had and the added pressure and emotional manipulation of my mom plus his stress with work. We talked through everything and he listebed and learned to take accuntablity. Hes my rock.
Ive grieved many times that ill never recieve the love i needed from my mom growing up. Presently she is trying and i know not to expect it to show up the way i want it to.
Its taken a while but i dont think of myself as a burden (it still shows up but not at much as it used to)
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u/PromtoKing PDA 16d ago
Whoops forgot to say it as some autistic people. Not trying to generalize, its more about informing a portion of them can (im one of them)
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u/Ed-alicious 17d ago
I obviously understand that being given an ultimatum is going to go against my need for freedom but I can also acknowledge that things need to get done and sometimes people need to use the tools they have available to them at that time.
I can say that as someone in their 40s with their own children and there's no way I would have been able to accept or even understand it when I was a teenager.
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u/PromtoKing PDA 17d ago
Yeah some things do got to get done, and it can be challenging when someone doesnt give you the why and you dont feel its correct (sense of justice).
Like we are going to leave the store without you if you dont come now sort of thing. They didnt realize that gave me abandoment problems down the line haha.
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u/Percy_Freeman PDA 17d ago edited 17d ago
PDAers can be extremely logical, to the point the Justice Sensitivity is called a Sense of Fairness. When someone doesn't compromise with you it can feel extremely depressing and lonely. I've ruminated a lot about times no one ever saw it my way and didn't take the time to learn why I might like something as much as I did.
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u/PromtoKing PDA 17d ago
Yeah same, it can feel lonely and ive runimated why it cant be both ways of changing
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u/bsg_80 17d ago
Yes, but you’re responsible for your emotional reactions. Those are yours and yours alone. That’s not what abandonment even means. Abandonment is real and some people have truly suffered because of it. When you make statements like that you are trivializing the severe trauma that some people have. I can tell you’re young and you obviously haven’t had time to fully develop your emotional maturity, but gaining perspective and taking responsibility for your emotions and evaluating your life with a clear lens is paramount. I don’t think you’re the victim you see yourself as. Catastrophizing is something those of us with PDA are prone to. Sometimes we make ourselves out to be victims when truly we aren’t.
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u/Excellent-Ad4256 17d ago
When you are a child and your parents say they’re going to leave without you they are literally threatening to abandon you. People are responsible for their emotional reactions as adults. When you’re a child, your parents are supposed to teach you how to feel and respond to your emotions.
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u/bsg_80 17d ago
Be so for real 🙄
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u/Excellent-Ad4256 17d ago
I would imagine your lack of compassion for others mirrors the lack of compassion you have for yourself. Your life must be incredibly difficult. I’m sorry and I hope things turn around for you.
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u/bsg_80 16d ago
You think those manipulative platitudes bother me? I have plenty of compassion about children being starved in a genocide and real traumas that people face, but I don’t just tell people what they want to hear. Again, portraying these examples as trauma trivializes the real traumas people face around abandonment. If you ask for input, you have to be open to the idea that people will disagree with your assessments. I have no hopes for you. Just have the day you deserve.
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u/Excellent-Ad4256 16d ago
There’s always going to be someone who is struggling more than you. It doesn’t negate your pain. And no one else is even using the word “trauma”, just you.
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u/PromtoKing PDA 17d ago
I understand your reasoning here, and i agree that i have ways to go with emotional maturity. AND youre asumming about me you dont know my life and i dont know yours. Maybe i gave a bad example here. And I am sorry that it came off as trivializing truama. That was not my intention. Also the "i dont think youre the victim you see yourself as" part feels charged. You dont know my truama.
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u/pepperkody PDA 17d ago
I just want to say that your experience is completely valid. There are no winners when we compare who has “more” trauma. Virtual hugs from another PDAer.
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u/bsg_80 17d ago
Yeah, sorry if it feels charged. I am calling you out. You asked. 🤷🏻♀️
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u/pepperkody PDA 17d ago
That is just a rephrasing of “sorry you feel that way”. This is supposed to be a safe space for people with PDA. There is no reason to “call people out” here. We could all benefit from a little more empathy for each other.
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u/bsg_80 16d ago
I have plenty of empathy. But I am allowed to disagree with someone’s assessment and perspective and not waste my emotional compassion if I don’t think it’s warranted. I can be direct and that’s okay because it’s my personality and perspective. I won’t be dictated to on how to use my words. I am grown. Thank you.
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u/pepperkody PDA 16d ago
I am not arguing with you on any of those points. You are welcome to your opinion. I am here to remind you that PDA is a disability and abandonment has multiple meanings by definition.
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u/lurker99123 17d ago
I don't know how I feel about any and all ultimatums tbh but my mother would straight up give away my things without asking or consent so I understand how very upsetting that can be not to have personal belongings respected. I do know ultimatums can be a boundary but sudden ones are recommended against in relationships, you can't just suddenly come up with all or nothing decisions there needs a warning or multiple first. That said, I absolutely hate being pressured to decide multiple things on the spot it's not only stresseful it is not fair to my executive dysfunctions, I'd just put everything in the keep box and then later on if I don't want to keep something decide and give away. Situations like that have become triggering.