My grandmother has undiagnosed ADHD (the source of me, my brother, and my mother’s ADHD actually was HER mother), and undiagnosed histrionic personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder. She steamrolls people in her intimate life but is very interested in keeping up appearances. Her being histrionic means she has always perceived us to be living in a Norman Rockwell illustration where she is the loving, nurturing grandmother and we are the sweet little grandchildren. The relationship is the complete opposite, and ever since I was in elementary school I’ve known that our relationship is not a common grandmother-granddaughter dynamic. She is abusive verbally, and she saves her sharp tongue mostly for my mother and for me. She was physically abusive to my mom when she was growing up, but distance has changed that.

I’ve had little contact with her since I was a little kid because she moved to Florida when I was about 8, but she wasn’t missed. Going to her house was always an ordeal because I would be expected to behave in a certain way, scolded if I didn’t, and there were a lot of prohibited activities and places and nothing to do there for little kids. She didn’t even keep toys or books around, and the gifts she’d give us were things that she would want for herself. She has no concept of empathy, and that is a huge problem in our relationship.

I have a very small family so there aren’t a whole lot of people to talk about, but Grandma is the #1 person we don’t want to be around.

She has kept in contact with my brother, but not with me, and I know that she doesn’t think as much of me because I’m not a boy. She’s nicer to him, and he doesn’t understand why I don’t ever want to talk to her, why I am so uninterested in what she has to say. She can’t give him advice really but does heap all kinds of praise on him that she’d never give me.

I think that past trauma (she’s British and was a teenager during WWII in London) has warped her but she has never actively done anything to change herself. As we’ve grown older, I have noticed her intransigence increasing and learned that I will never be able to please her. She has horned in on two out of three of my graduations, even introducing herself to my friends as “my favorite grandparent.”

It’s hard to describe how I feel about her. I don’t hate her, but I know don’t love her. I don’t even like my grandmother. I internally roll my eyes when she is mentioned, and my biggest fear is turning into her. She is a misogynistic bully. She is hypercritical of all women, but especially me and my mother. I don’t know what made her this way, but at the same time I’m not interested. As someone who’s been bullied all her life, I don’t put up with it from anyone, least of all my family members. Yes, some people are jerks, but only with family are we able to know some of the reasons why they’re jerks. If they themselves don’t know those reasons, they can’t stop being jerks. I don’t think anyone should be obligated to interact with someone abusive, and now that I’m an adult I can finally make these decisions for myself.

Oy, that didn’t make a whole lot of sense. I appreciate being able to talk about this because I feel that it’s one of my dirtier secrets having a horrible grandmother. I just didn’t know that it was more universal than I thought because you know, nice girls don’t talk about that stuff.

I too had an awful grandmother, and since she was the mother of the father I’m not close to, and I lived with my mother a thousand miles away, it was easy to cut her out of my life long before I turned eighteen. The thing is, cutting myself off from her verbal abuse also cut me off from my cousins, since everyone gathered at her house and my custodial parent wasn’t part of that family anyway. I’ve only reconnected with the cousins closest to my age since the advent of Facebook, and I’ve never met any of the cousins who are more than eight years younger than me. Maybe their parents should have fought a little harder to stay in touch with me. Maybe all those other families who put up with difficult old people could find a way to gather without that person. But I missed out on my cousins because I refused to be verbally abused by my grandmother, and I bet lots of otherwise sane adults don’t act because they fear the same thing.

Spot on, Becky, and in the end, it helps the survivors, too. Case in point, at my mother’s funeral a few years ago, I felt like I was going to scream if I heard one more positive, glowing thing about her. I loved (and liked!) my mother deeply, but she was a notoriously difficult character and had an extremely sharp tongue to match. Hearing only glowing, rosy reports of her (or hearing her faults fa-aar too subtly alluded to) felt so wrong, and so untrue that it really made me feel crazy for a moment. Fortunately, one of her cousins came up to me and very kindly simply acknowledged her difficult-ness, so to speak, and it instantly made me feel 1000x better and de-crazified. My immediate relatives would be very mad if they knew that happened, i.e., think it completely inappropriate, but I am really grateful her cousin did it.

@rodriguez – The situation you describe with your husband and daughter would happen occasionally (rarely, fortunately) in my family as well. By the time I was in my late teens, I figured out what was going down, but I just wanted to say I’m glad you stuck up for yourself. It took me too long to understand what was happening in my family and it actually helped me take my Dad off his pedestal a bit, which was healthy for me in the end. Props to you!

@annaj – My Mom really made the effort not to pass down some of the favoritism/sexism from her Mom, too, and I’m grateful for it, as well.

Yes, she lived through more than 60 years of verbal abuse from my paternal grandfather. She also chose not to leave and was a true co-dependent who thrived on the drama her relationship created.

Yes, she verbally/emotionally abused the women in the family (esp her DIL and only granddaughter). I saw less of her interactions with her daughters, but I would be surprised their mental issues had nothing to do with the way they were raised.

Why did she do it? There are many possibilities, but I can’t say I cared enough to try and figure that out. What became crystal clear is that both I and my mother were somehow *less* than my father or brother in her eyes.

I am critical of that. I will not stand that sort of bullshit and chaos in my life. Hence my choice at 18 to never see them again, except at weddings and funerals. I have no regrets.

I don’t talk to much of my extended family anymore – they may think what they like but I have better things to do with my time than convince people, who share a tiny fraction more of my DNA than a stranger on the street, that treating me as less is wrong. Perhaps I should try more. Can’t say I give a damn though.