My mom is in her late 40s and got really into tarot and “mediumship” over the pandemic and she’s trying to turn the whole thing into a business but for now is just streaming on tiktok. She went through single motherhood with me, and is doing it again now with my much younger brothers (though their father is a bit more involved than mine was).
I just spent the first half of the year in unemployment after blowing most of my liquid savings on a down payment for a home. I’m in a stable enough job now and trying to get my life back on track, but I had a really difficult week last week and I was already feeling pretty shitty when she called. She spent some time trying to offer help but this is what it devolved into. So there’s greater context here but I’m gonna just cut to the part I’m stuck on and paraphrase a lot.
I tell her that after the hour I spend getting ready for work, another hour driving in each direction to work, and 8 hours at work, I only have 4-5 hours to take care of myself and my home, and I’m additionally stressed out because I haven’t been able to get there as early as they want me and I don’t have the support I need for the job I’m doing.
Mom: Yeah, it sucks, but you have to focus on yourself so that you can do it (she’s referring to the fact that I spend some time as a political organizer. Sometimes she acts supportive, other times she holds it against me like this, and I had already made the mistake of mentioning my responsibilities with the org as a source of stress.)
Me: I know it sucks, and I have to do it, but it’s not right. I don’t think anyone should have to live this way, which is why I care so much about politics. We don’t all need to be-
Mom: You can’t change that, you can only change your own life. You need to stop caring so much about other people and care more about yourself.
Me: But Mom, things are only going to get worse for us the more we disengage and-
Mom: There’s nothing we can do about it. Would you stop trying to preach to me? The whole world is just energy and reality isn’t real (she said this verbatim). I think spirituality would really help you, but I don’t force you to talk about it. You always get mad that I’m not doing anything but I can’t do anything and I already know everything you’re telling me. What’s the point in talking about this?
Me: I don’t get mad at you, you always assume I’m mad at you or arguing when I’m just trying to have a conversation. There’s always more things to know, nobody knows everything. I’m not asking you to do anything, I’m just asking you to engage in conversation with me because this is what I like to talk about. Things can and have-
Mom: Well there’s nothing I can do except maybe go to one of your rallies, and I’m not doing that.
Me: (having never invited her to any of my political stuff, because I already knew she wouldn’t show up) I’m not asking you to go anywhere, there are ways you can engage from home-
Mom: I don’t want to engage at all!
Me: Then how am I supposed to connect with you?
Mom: You don’t want to talk to me if it’s not about politics? You know I do everything for you, and you never call or offer to help me with the house or the boys (my two vastly younger brothers) or their good-for-nothing father (who moved out years ago but she is sharing custody with), even when you were making all that money at your last job. I don’t ask for help from anyone, because I know that no one is coming to save me. I’m just trying to make my life more comfortable for me.
Me: Yes, everyone has their own shit going on! Nothing is easy for anyone in this country and it’s only getting harder! You and I are both miserable and have nobody, just because I didn’t make the same mistakes you did doesn’t mean my life is any easier than yours or that I have anything more to spare!
Mom: I’m not miserable, I’m perfectly happy focusing on my own life. That’s just a mindset you have that you need to get rid of.
idk maybe this just comes off as an unhinged entitled rant but I needed to put this somewhere. I genuinely don’t know how to reach any sort of understanding or middle ground with my mother when she has unironically declared herself to be detached from reality and immediately jumps into a defensive posture at the first hint of a disagreement or feeling inadequate. (I suppose this defensiveness has been the one consistent thing about her, it’s why we don’t have much of a relationship in the first place. Any engagement from me that isn’t completely blowing smoke is generally taken as hostile; I guess that’s why she finds chatGPT so helpful in developing her “spirituality”).
I’m so deeply envious of folks with a stable and emotionally mature adult in their lives. Those of us that don’t, wanna talk about it? 
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You know I do everything for you
I hate hate hate this line and how much it’s been weaponized. Holding your child accountable for taking care of them when they had no choice in the matter regarding the circumstances of their birth- ugh. And having this sentiment echoed literally everywhere from media to education to daily interactions with neighbors and friends is just
I swear just seeing that sentence activated my fight or flight responseI’m so deeply envious of folks with a stable and emotionally mature adult in their lives
she finds chatGPT so helpful in developing her “spirituality”
Genuinely worrying, people “talking” to chatgpt and getting advice from it terrifies me. I hope your mum gets the help she needs because she sounds even more neurotic than me, and I’m a total mess! Good luck, comrade. I wish I had something useful to say but I can only send good vibes.
Sorry you’re dealing with that. If you feel like being a shit, you could read up a little on tarot and really blow her mind. A common take on tarot is the journey of The Fool through the major arcana, and it’s very much that of a revolutionary. It’s a struggle against the norms of society and fighting injustice, toppling old systems , integrating old with new, etc.
The Temperance tarot card signifies balance, moderation, patience, and harmony, representing the alchemical blending of opposing forces (like spirit and matter, emotion and logic) to create something new and whole, often involving calm self-reflection, finding the middle path, and adapting to life’s flow.
Behold, dialectics.
“Well mom you see, my favorite card to address all this 7 of cups and 9 of swords energy is the tower. My aquarian energies are directing me towards manifesting this temperance for the collective. The system is an energy vampire bringing us all down”
I know they can understand that, but they will still be like “noooo materialism isnt real 😠”
Yeah, as if she’d let me have the satisfaction of knowing something she doesn’t know or relating to the world in a way that causes her to self-reflect. Part of growing up and healing for me has been coming to the understanding that not every misunderstanding is my fault for not having explained or related in the right way. You simply cannot convince those who do not want to be convinced.
Maybe that’s an overly defeatist reply to a silly joking comment but short of professional counseling experience I don’t see how a person, especially a child in a parent-child relationship, would overcome this level of stubborn indignation.
Also, I’m an Aries with strong Virgo influence and she’s a Cancer. Obviously. Get it together, man, you’re clearly out of your depths. I’m supposed to take advice from someone so out of tune with the energy of the world around us?
Wow she really got soo defensive even though you weren’t really asking anything of her. That’s an extremely sensitive ego…
Would you believe she spent my childhood and adolescence constantly accusing me of getting so defensive, being too sensitive, and having an attitude?
Ah, of course…
The whole world is just energy and reality isn’t real (she said this verbatim).
She’s probably currently down the rabbit hole of woo based misunderstandings/misrepresentations of real science. Non locality is experimentally verified, but doesn’t mean what basically everyone on the internet acts like it means. I’m not actually smart enough to explain what it means, or even understand it all that well honestly. But it doesn’t mean what the woo people say. It doesn’t mean that you can think your way to Mars for example. (Probably)
The energy universe stuff I’m less sure on the origin of tbh, but I’ve seen it before during my self inflicted bullshit swirlies as a common element of the recently emerging unified conspiracy theories. You don’t see as much disagreement as you used to.
when she has unironically declared herself to be detached from reality and immediately jumps into a defensive posture at the first hint of a disagreement or feeling inadequate.
Yeah. I’m noticing this element in a lot of online spaces. The AI users are so used to constant praise from their AI that if you don’t begin every reply with
"Great question! 🥰🤩 That really gets to the core of the problem at hand. Let’s break it down! 👇
1️⃣ Dora the Explorer and the Quest for the Purple Planet could ABSOLUTELY function as soft disclosure alongside Stargate SG-1"
they assume you hate them and everything they said or have ever done and you think they smell bad because you didn’t compliment their smell.
It is odd to see “reality is fake” and “we can’t improve things” in the same person though. Typically if they bring up the first thing, they’ll move onto misunderstanding theoretical physics about holograms and tend to believe in the collective hallucination sort of model but idk
Sorry for the wall. I dont even know how much sense any of this makes. I really need a hobby.
I realized at one point that I actively dreaded talking to one of my parents. It’s not that I don’t want to have a relationship with them, I do - but maintaining that relationship is actively harmful to me. I dread answering the phone. I dread not answering the phone. I dread calling. I dread not calling. I dreaded seeing them - and then they suddenly moved far enough away and that wasn’t really as much of a problem. I want to talk with them about the ways they’ve hurt me, but even when I manage to put it into words, I either regret it or at best feel like I’ve accomplished nothing.
This is what resonated with me enough to type this all out:
I’m not miserable, I’m perfectly happy
immediately jumps into a defensive posture at the first hint of a disagreement or feeling inadequate
From their words and actions, I find it hard to take them at their word when they say things like this. They’ve “come to terms” with having pushed many people out of their life, and whenever there isn’t a problem to solve, they create one - none of that screams happy to me, but it’s certainly the face they wear.
Anyways, that was all a bit of a ramble and probably not helpful. I’m sorry your mom is happy being detached from reality, but I also recognize that as a mechanism I’ve unsuccessfully tried to use to cope with the state of the world in the past.
Hopefully someone else can chime in with some ways to actually make things better instead of just being doomer.
I realized at one point that I actively dreaded talking to one of my parents. […] I want to talk with them about the ways they’ve hurt me, but even when I manage to put it into words, I either regret it or at best feel like I’ve accomplished nothing.
She gets upset that we don’t talk more; we don’t have anything in common to talk about. I humor her when she goes on about her spirituality stuff, mostly for the sake of avoiding friction, but she is actively disinterested in anything going on in my life that’s not financial or romantic (and trust me, there’s not much going on there). I haven’t bothered telling her about my stuff for so long (if ever, honestly), be it political or otherwise, that the recent events of my life don’t even come to mind when I’m talking to her. She really doesn’t know a thing about the ideas and passions that drive me, yet she doesn’t hesitate to make assumptions and assertions about me, my friends, and who I am as a person. More and more I’m realizing that’s just entirely been projection on her part.
and then they suddenly moved far enough away and that wasn’t really as much of a problem.
Funnily enough, she was actually trying to move to Florida for a while. “I just need to be by the ocean” is how she put it. It hasn’t worked out so far and I don’t think it will help her anyways. “Wherever you go, there you are” as they say.
From their words and actions, I find it hard to take them at their word when they say things like this
Oh, it’s absolutely just that thing people do. “If I say the good thing enough times and don’t acknowledge the bad thing then only the good thing will be true”. Whatever you want to call it… “mindset”, “bootstraps”, “psychosis”… seems like “manifesting” is the popular term for it right now. Essentially it’s just regressing into whatever version of reality you find to be most soothing, which really only works if you refuse to engage with anyone that disagrees with that alternative reality. It completely avoids dealing with the root of the thing that’s making her unhappy and causes her to lash out.
She is clearly miserable, she always has been. I’m sympathetic to her struggle, and I wish there was more I could do for her and for my brothers and my relationship with all of them, but I’m just not equipped to deal with her. I have my own life to live and it’s never been fruitful for me to cater to her. Here’s to “caring less about other people” I guess.
Haha, you’ve nearly compiled a best hits album
That’s awful and incredibly difficult to constructively deal with if you want to keep taking her calls (which is up to you). I realize this might come off bad, but if you want to minimize her getting defensive, maybe it would be good to not say
just because I didn’t make the same mistakes you did
Not that she didn’t make mistakes, but because this can very easily be a hurtful way to say it. Obviously that’s holding yourself to a much higher standard than she seems to hold herself to, but she has already literally and explicitly rejected reality, so I don’t think it’s presumptuous of me to assume you don’t want to lower your standards to the level of hers.
I periodically spend too much time using LLMs for self-indulgent bullshit, but I think spending a lot of time talking with them for the sake of “spiritual development” is a bigger red flag than can be found in Tienanmen Square. I really struggle to imagine how someone can feel perfectly confident in saying “reality isn’t real” unless they’re in a cult of some kind, an LLM is affirming it, or they are literally suffering from clinically schizotypal delusions or something (absolutely not saying she’s the third case, I assume it’s the second). This all seems like it’s absolutely catastrophic for her mental health, but I guess you might not have much of an ability or even inclination to intervene, which is fair enough.
I do think it’s morbidly funny how she insists that you can’t help anyone, but she can help you, and also you can help someone if it’s specifically her.
Yeah… I know I shouldn’t say those things (and of course, full transparency, what I actually said was a bit more specific but I’m not trying to put ALL our business on the Internet). I have my moments of weakness like anyone else. I blow up just like she does, and so do my brothers for that matter. I already have to moderate my tone with her so she can’t dismiss me out of hand for getting “too emotional”, so I don’t always find the nicest way to put things once I’ve lost that barrier (and honestly at that point it really doesn’t matter what I say anyways, she’s not going to hear it except to punch back). That’s not a skill that she ever demonstrated for me to have learned. To be clear, though, I’m not saying that to excuse myself from being the bigger person.
I do think it’s morbidly funny how she insists that you can’t help anyone, but she can help you, and also you can help someone if it’s specifically her.
Yep. It’s like she fully believes in whatever reality is convenient to her and will validate her feelings in the moment. It isn’t rooted in any concrete reasoning and often directly contradicts her previous assertions. If you try to correct the record she’ll just talk over you or accuse you of, again, whatever must be true for her to be feeling what she’s feeling (“I never said that”, “are you saying it’s my fault?”, “you’re so ___”, “you always/never do ___ when I ___”). Not only is it childish but it’s incredibly inconsistent, unpredictable, and impossible to keep up or relate with as a result.
You would think that this behavior would at least be limited to moments like this when tensions are high, but you would be wrong. She masks it when she can but it still comes out. So I’ve learned to let it go by without comment and deal with the feelings privately.
This all seems like it’s absolutely catastrophic for her mental health, but guess you might not have much of an ability or even inclination to intervene, which is fair enough.
You can only help someone that’s willing to admit they have a problem, and she’s explicitly sheltered herself from that reality. I wish there was more I could do, but I’m only one person, and the last person she’s willing to take advice from. If there was some service or a community that I could call on that wouldn’t just make the situation worse I would do it in a hearbeat, but we live within a brutal system that has systematically stripped away and alienated us from anything of that sort.
Yeah, I wasn’t trying to moralize about the comment or say you need to intervene in a situation where there’s almost certainly not much you can do.
Maybe your younger siblings, when they get a little older, will be able to help her? Because they’re presumably going to school, they interact with lots of people and that should hopefully at least partially inoculate them from this advanced AI psychosis. Maybe she’ll just dismiss them as ungrateful and ignorant children, but clinging to attitudes like that is harder the more the people surrounding you contradict it.
No worries, I know what you meant.
I’m more worried about them falling into the online manosphere gamergate pipeline, especially the older one who I swear gets into it with my mom just to feel something. They’re both around 10yo and all they’re interested in doing, at least when I’m around, is playing fortnite and other online games like roblox. When we visit with family they’re glued to their phones. There’s always a fight at bedtime, and probably in the morning before school just like there was with me. They already cuss like sailors in their game chats, repeating misogynist catchphrases and bullshit talking points about immigrants probably fed to them by some nazi chud they were playing with online.
They’re completely fueled by high-octane, short-term bursts of dopamine and the only discipline they have is whatever they’ve learned to cope with my mom’s outbursts; her parenting style is very much “bend and snap”, to the point that they don’t really respond to anything other than the “snap” part of that equation.
They’re good kids and they deserve a better childhood. My mom seems to think that means going on trips and having things, but that’s not at all what it means.
I’m sure that once they’re at an accessible age for it, if the whole LLM salt pillar doesn’t collapse by then, there won’t be many forces resisting their assimilation into the AI hivemind.
Maybe I’m being overly cynical and hyperbolic. To some extent yeah I get it, they’re kids, their frontal lobes aren’t fully developed and one way or another they are gonna find their way under your skin, but there has to be an adult in the situation that can see past a few hours from now and it can’t be them. It can’t be me either, god forbid I try to “mom” my mother’s children.
Idk. Maybe I’ll finally understand when I have kids of my own /s
Not that you asked. Sorry for the rant and thanks for reading.
No need to apologize, we’re just talking to each other. You’re right that my interpretation was over-optimistic and the more likely consequence of a lone parent being disconnected from reality is the kids going and being socialized only by other sources without anyone dedicated to being in their corner who actually has much authority to guide them constructively, meaning they’ll fall into lowest-common-denominator bullshit like you describe. They might grow out of it, but then what? All three aren’t left in a great place regardless.
