My mother was mentally unbalanced. She was emotionally cruel as I was growing up and our relationship deteriorated to nothing as the years passed. She died two years ago and has since haunted me, occasionally, with the cruelest of dreams. In my dreams she ridicules me of everything - from the way I raise my children to my personal life and relationships. How can I resolve this? It frightens me, just as she did when I was a child. Thank you for your help!

--Kathie, Age 40, Winter Park, FL, USA

Hi Kathie -

I am sorry to learn of your mother’s mental illness and of the subsequent emotional distress she caused you. Families always bear the brunt of these emotional hardships.

I think all too often when dealing with people who are mentally unstable we lose sight of the fact that these people are ill, and therefore do not have a great degree of control over their behavior and actions. The mentally ill can drive us up a wall! They can be phenomenally cruel and consistently unreceptive to our attempts to please, to help, to make things better, and to mollify. What is so difficult about mental illness, though, is that we always seek to explain the behavior from a rational, logical point of view. We look for explanations and causality where, in reality, neither exist. In a normal relationship, if someone is upset you try to talk with them, figure out what is wrong, and together you can work at resolving the problem. When someone is mentally ill, though, they don’t respond to normal avenues of treatment. Soon enough, and logically enough, we arrive at our wit’s end. Often we have no recourse but to walk away - in order to preserve our own sense of the usual give-and-take of healthy relationships.

I suspect you feel a measure of guilt, exacerbated since your mother’s passing, regarding your decision to extricate yourself from the clutches of this relationship. If it was anyone but a parent or other family member, your decision to exit the relationship would not cause you the agony that it does, nor would it cause you to doubt or second-guess yourself. To the contrary, it would be etched in your memory as one of the most defining and self-affirming decisions you ever made.

It is an uncanny characteristic of human behavior that we tend to blame ourselves when relationships fail or don’t work out. I am sure you are aware of a phenomenon that frequently occurs in children of divorced parents. The children internalize the divorce and soon are convinced that they were the cause of the divorce. If only they’d been better kids, Mom and Dad would have been happier and wouldn’t have had all those fights. If only they’d done better in school... It’s a simplistic logic, and it’s what we call in the psychology field an “error of attribution.” We’re assigning blame, or causality, where it doesn’t belong.

If you wish to resolve the doubts you have about your own participation in the relationship, I recommend that you try to adopt as realistic assessment of the situation as possible. It may be true that your mother could have benefited from earlier detection or better treatment of her illness, but there is no use debating these issues now. Your mother has passed away, and her life, in many ways, certainly was tragic. This is reality. But I think you need to let yourself off the hook a bit as to what caused your mother’s horrible behavior. It was out of your hands - and, to tell the truth - it was out of her hands as well. Next time she comes to you in a dream, tell her that you know she does not mean those cruel things she is saying, remind her that she is dead, and tell her that you hope her soul is resting in peace.