How do I improve relations with my self-absorbed mom?

Hi, Carolyn!

I need guidance on how to improve relations with my mother. While she is loving with me and my siblings, she tends to be extremely self-absorbed and unaware during conversation. She has the uncanny ability to flip even the most mundane conversation into something about her; she will interrupt, speak over, and redirect conversation in her favor. She almost never asks questions about me, my work, life, or partner — much less about his life.

When I do open up to her about events in my life, she is uninterested and distracted, only to (again) turn the conversation toward her.

Not only is this frustrating, but it hurts. I have previously confronted her about feeling invalidated, and it resulted with her in tears and acting victimized.

Carolyn, how can I help my mother actually listen and understand how I am feeling?

— Unintentionally Distant Daughter

You can’t build a better relationship on hopes that she’ll become someone else.

Your mother is self-absorbed, unaware, uninterested, incurious, distracted; doesn’t listen, interrupts, talks over, turns all conversations back to herself; and, the killer of all rational hopes, she is defensive.

In casting herself as the victim, refusing to examine either your feelings about her or your requests of her, your mother shows a clear lack of interest in changing.

You also can’t build a better relationship upon an emotional misconception — in this case, taking personally what isn’t personal.

I do understand and gladly validate your frustration with her. But when you say this “hurts,” that also says you take your mother’s limited attention personally, as a negative assessment of your worthiness of her full attention. Yet I don’t see any evidence to support this interpretation. If she is distracted and self-centered not just with you, but with everyone in general — which is not only the impression your letter gives, but also how self-absorption tends to work — then how can it reflect how she feels about you specifically?

As you’ve described them, the behaviors reflect only on her. Is she, in fact, as badly disengaged from your siblings as she is from you? Does she turn conversations with everyone back to herself?

If her failure to engage is reserved just for you, then being hurt would make sense. Of course. Acutely.

Either way, though, if you think of those as two paths on a flow chart — 1. “She does this to everybody”; 2. “She does this only to me” — then they both still end up pointing to the same square: Accept her limitations. Showing an interest in your life/others’ lives is not how your mother shows love. Period.

You do say she’s “loving with me and my siblings” — which says she has some other way of showing she cares about you. To have a better relationship with your mom, I suggest you identify exactly which of her actions lead you to describe her that way and focus on those. Meet her there, at that one clear, emotional place where you know she is able to be.

— Washington Post Writers Group