One Last Conversation

A client seeking to resolve a difficult relationship, came to me for help. His relationship with his mother had been clouded from his earliest years by her florid metal health issues. He came to me seeking a way to resolve how he felt, once and for all.

His earliest memories of his mother were happier ones, sitting with her in the kitchen as a very young child, swapping stories with her as she cooked. As time went on however, the family dynamic eroded, driven at least in part by the erosion of his mother’s mental health. From an early age, he was turned from being her son into being first her care giver, and then her punchbag as her mental health deteriorated.

He came to me because even with her death, he felt no release from the relationship. He still felt that it was his responsibility to have dealt with all her anxieties and troubles. He’d grown up with her needs and only her needs being addressed. She’d pour her anxieties into him, heedless, indeed disinterested in the damage caused to him. With her death, he hoped that there’d be an end, but as is often the case, rather than resolution, there was a feeling that nothing could ever be resolved.

From our first sitting, it became clear that his mother, rather than being willing to acknowledge her responsibility for the damage she had caused, wanted to continue their relationship where he supported her, while she bled him for support using a mix of gaslighting and guilt.

Things for him began to change when in an episode of unexpected honesty on her part, she described him as “the one that got away”. From there, he started to realise that theirs was a relationship not of love, as she had always told him, but of dependency and exploitation.

Our work began, oddly, as an exercise in him truly understanding her, and in understanding just how selfish, how manipulative she had been. We went through revelation, anger and acrimony, with him at one point cutting off all communication with her while we worked with Spirit on other elements of his past.

Perhaps because of his ultimatum to her, that there would be no contact again unless she acknowledged her responsibility in all this, after some time, she did finally acknowledge the consequences of her actions. In the end, she apologised for what she had done.

I still see my client now and again, helping him to resolve his feelings about a relationship in which he felt used, manipulated and abused. Things aren’t perfect; it’s the job of a medium to facilitate communication, not to resolve the relationship. But with that communication, healing is well established and he reports that so much is resolved, he can now leave that part of his life where it belongs; as only a memory.