Recently I was having a normal conversation with my mom about her upcoming visit to a state I work in the summers, Alaska. She’s been asking me questions, and I’m doing my best to guide her through the planning.
Even though she’s been asking me questions, she doesn’t seem to listen and constantly interrupts me, which tbh is normal. Today we were talking about it, and randomly she said “I feel like your screaming at me”. I immediately stood up, and whispered “I’m not screaming”. She says “I didn’t say you were screaming, I said I felt like you were screaming”. I apologized for any inconvenience I caused her and left the room.
Others in the room have assured me I was not raising my voice. I certainly was not cursing. I’m seriously at a loss, and at this time avoiding any conversation about any subject. Admittedly, I am passionate about the subject. Poorly planning a trip to Alaska can have disastrous results, such as running out of gas in the middle of nowhere. Although I’ve been trying to reanalyze the conversation, and try to see it from another direction, I’m still hurt and confused.
If anyone has advice or Anecdotal experience feel free to leave a comment.
Tl;Dr: My mom said I was screaming at her during a conversation, I was not.
1 comment
I think your mother explained it best – she *felt* like you were screaming. As in, she felt the same emotions she would have felt if you had been screaming.
I am someone who, thanks to my father, reacts extremely stressed when it comes to any serious discussion. It could be about something that needs to be planned, politics, just random important things that need to be figured out… as soon as a conversation turns serious (not loud, not aggressive, not annoyed), I am inwardly freaking out and feel as *if* the conversation would have turned “threatening” because as a child, my father used to hit me what felt like out of nowhere sometimes, as he never shows anger and his ‘serious’ voice/expressions and ‘angry’ voice/expressions are exactly the same.
With that as example, I can guarantee you that humans react differently to different things. To your mother, passionate talk might feel the same as screaming does. Maybe she felt like you were so passionate about it that you didn’t let her interrupt you as much and she percieved that as “screaming” (aka not letting her have a word in). Or maybe you were gesturing more, taking up more space, and that reminded her of someone who would always take up room/come too close when screaming in anger.
So no, you haven’t done anything wrong and it sounds like your mother has some issues with talk anyway if she has trouble to focus and doesn’t let you finish (sounds a bit like ADHD). Which means she obviously already percieves talking very differently compared to you. There are a lot of ways this could be – if she has something like ADHD, trying to focus might already be stressful and make her more suceptible to feeling overwhelmed. Or maybe the opposite is true and she doesn’t really care and just zones out and you being so passionate didn’t allow her to do that and thus, she felt attacked. No one knows. The only thing that is true is that your mother ‘felt how she would have felt if you would have been screaming’.
That, in itself, is all it is: She felt a certain way. That’s an information. Not an attack, not saying that you did anything wrong. It is now up to you to decide if you want to do something about this or not. If you don’t want to, that’s perfectly fine – after all, again, you did nothing wrong. If you do want to do something, then sitting down with your mother and asking her how she percieves dialogues would be the right option – as in, asking her if she has trouble staying focused, asking her if it is difficult for her to let others finish, asking her what exactly caused her to feel like you were screaming. Maybe you’ll learn something, maybe you won’t. If you learn something, you can then decide if you want to change the way you talk to your mother based on that information or not.