Oh fuck - more personal shit
Aug. 12th, 2014 01:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marlowe1The people at the place where Mom is staying and wants to move into as an assisted living situation have just informed her that they don't take Section 8, which means that she would be left with $95 after social security to live on for the rest of the month. She is upset. Mostly, she needs to get into assisted living and hopefully one that actually does take section 8, but instead of asking her social workers for help in this (and to be honest, the social workers are probably pretty inept and overworked), she is talking about trying to move back into her apartment that has been condemned.
And I can't tell her anything. It's another round of "I am going to get my stuff out and I will take care of it" delusion. This is the strategy that her hoarding addiction devises a couple times a year when confronted with the fact that "I'm not a hoarder, I'm just a collector" is untenable. She lies to herself and tells herself that she actually has the ability to get rid of her stuff without major emotional trauma. It's like she completely forgot putting herself into the hospital trying to get rid of her stuff and the amount of screaming that she did when I was throwing out her craft magazines. Actually, scratch that. She isn't forgetting it. She's rationalizing it. That's just past as if she suddenly became a different person in the month since she went into the hospital and now transitional care.
She honestly thinks that she can move back into her apartment, get rid of her stuff and not be bothered with the bi-annual fire inspection. She envisions this wonderful long term project where she slowly goes through every single item she has and puts some of it in the trash and some of it in a box to be sold to a willing store.
Hell, she even said that she was going to take books to Half Price Books but that day Mokie died (her old orange tabby - he was 20 so he was going) and so she couldn't. And the other 150 days since his death have equally compelling excuses for her inability to carry out a plan even as lame as bringing 20 books to Half Price and getting a couple of dollars for it (and then confirming her bias against selling anything).
And she hung up on me. The problem is that there doesn't seem to be any middle ground between her delusions (she doesn't have a problem, and even when she admits to having a problem she can totally handle it) and the reality - she needs to get into assisted living for her own mental and physical health and there is no way that she can move back into her apartment.
And to get all Freudian up in here - that woman that I was totally crushing on - she employed similar strategies when talking about how she wasn't an alcoholic. Sure, she drinks every day but she doesn't think that she has a problem because she's too honest with herself and her old drinking buddy is now in AA but that woman said she didn't have a problem. And she may just go a week without drinking, because she really can do that - and now that she is dating a guy who is bipolar and self-medicates with Scotch, she's really happy and she's totally capable of going a week without drinking.
My reaction to that was "oh why isn't she drinking with me?" as opposed to hearing every addict excuse in a slightly different form. I mean I heard it, but I was too busy with my emotional neediness.
And I can't tell her anything. It's another round of "I am going to get my stuff out and I will take care of it" delusion. This is the strategy that her hoarding addiction devises a couple times a year when confronted with the fact that "I'm not a hoarder, I'm just a collector" is untenable. She lies to herself and tells herself that she actually has the ability to get rid of her stuff without major emotional trauma. It's like she completely forgot putting herself into the hospital trying to get rid of her stuff and the amount of screaming that she did when I was throwing out her craft magazines. Actually, scratch that. She isn't forgetting it. She's rationalizing it. That's just past as if she suddenly became a different person in the month since she went into the hospital and now transitional care.
She honestly thinks that she can move back into her apartment, get rid of her stuff and not be bothered with the bi-annual fire inspection. She envisions this wonderful long term project where she slowly goes through every single item she has and puts some of it in the trash and some of it in a box to be sold to a willing store.
Hell, she even said that she was going to take books to Half Price Books but that day Mokie died (her old orange tabby - he was 20 so he was going) and so she couldn't. And the other 150 days since his death have equally compelling excuses for her inability to carry out a plan even as lame as bringing 20 books to Half Price and getting a couple of dollars for it (and then confirming her bias against selling anything).
And she hung up on me. The problem is that there doesn't seem to be any middle ground between her delusions (she doesn't have a problem, and even when she admits to having a problem she can totally handle it) and the reality - she needs to get into assisted living for her own mental and physical health and there is no way that she can move back into her apartment.
And to get all Freudian up in here - that woman that I was totally crushing on - she employed similar strategies when talking about how she wasn't an alcoholic. Sure, she drinks every day but she doesn't think that she has a problem because she's too honest with herself and her old drinking buddy is now in AA but that woman said she didn't have a problem. And she may just go a week without drinking, because she really can do that - and now that she is dating a guy who is bipolar and self-medicates with Scotch, she's really happy and she's totally capable of going a week without drinking.
My reaction to that was "oh why isn't she drinking with me?" as opposed to hearing every addict excuse in a slightly different form. I mean I heard it, but I was too busy with my emotional neediness.
