Short answer: When your mother says something cruel, two things happen. She says the words, and then you decide what the words mean. The Stoics taught that most of the pain lives in the second part, and the second part belongs to you. You cannot stop her from saying it. You can stop paying for it twice.
You are rinsing her dinner plate at the sink. She ate four bites of the chicken you cut up small so she would not have to work at it. From the table behind you, in the same flat voice she uses to ask about the weather, she says you only come around because you want the house.
The water keeps running. You do not turn around, because you are thirty-nine years old and you are not going to cry over a chicken breast.
Why does it hurt so much when your mother says hurtful things?
Epictetus was born a slave in Rome, lame in one leg, with no say over anything that happened to his body, and what he taught after he was freed is that nobody had ever reached the one thing he still owned, which was what he decided things meant.
“Remember that it is not he who reviles you or strikes you, who insults you, but it is your opinion about these things as being insulting.”
Epictetus, Enchiridion 20
Why this hits differently when you are a caregiver
The plain version of the idea is this. Something happens. Then, fast enough that it does not feel like a separate step, you add a sentence about what it means.
She said you want the house. You added: she thinks I am a thief. Or: after everything, this is what she thinks of me. The first sentence came from her. The second one came from you, and that is the one that keeps you up.
If you have run into this idea before, the example was probably traffic or a rude coworker. You can walk away from the coworker.
You are hearing this from the person whose opinion of you built you. When a stranger is cruel, you have forty years of your mother’s voice to weigh it against. When it is your mother, there is nothing underneath.
You are also hearing it again tomorrow. A single insult you can set down. A sentence that shows up every evening at six starts to look like evidence.
And you are exhausted, which is not a character flaw. Tired brains grab the fastest available meaning and keep it. At the end of a fourteen hour day, she hates me arrives well before she is frightened and this is the only way it comes out.
None of this makes you irrational. If your mother has dementia, some of what she says is not aimed at you at all, and knowing that clinically does not stop it from stinging. If she does not have dementia, she may have meant every word, which is worse and which you already know.
Epictetus is not asking you to pretend she did not say it. He is pointing out that between her sentence and your pain there is a second sentence, and that one is in your handwriting.
One thing you can do today
Write the three lines. You need an index card or the notes app on your phone, about four minutes, and you should do this after she is asleep rather than in the moment.
Line one. Exactly what she said. Her words, in quotation marks, nothing added and nothing softened. Not she accused me of being after her money, but “You only come around because you want the house.” Most people find the real sentence is shorter than the one they have been carrying.
Line two. What you decided it meant. Do not be polite here. “Thirty years of showing up and this is what she thinks of me.” Get it down in the ugliest, truest form you have.
Line three. One other reading that fits the exact same words and is also true. Not a nicer story. A true one. “She is terrified of ending up somewhere that is not her house, and this is the only way she can say so.”
Then stop. Leave line two on the card. You are not crossing it out and you are not calling it false. You are proving her sentence supports more than one ending, which means the ending is not automatic.
If line three will not come tonight, leave it blank and come back tomorrow. It comes easier when you are not bleeding.
When the feeling shows back up at three in the morning, and it will, read line one. Only line one. The exact words are almost always smaller than what your memory has done to them by then.
Sit with this
If the worst thing she said this week turned out not to be about you at all, what would you do differently tomorrow morning?
Going deeper with this lesson
The book gives this lesson three more practices, including one for the sentences that turn out to be accurate, plus a written reflection on the difference between forgiving someone and declining to be wounded by them. There is a journaling prompt and a worksheet page. Volume 1 covers the first twenty lessons: control, acceptance, and getting solid ground back under your feet.
