An Impossible Situation Made Possible: on Perceived Threat, Part 1 in a Series

Lawyers. They’re coming after me.

I hear this every few days.

These lawyers see what I’m doing: that I’ve overstepped my financial Power of Attorney (POA) responsibilities and presumed also medical POA responsibilities, and that I won’t be allowed to get away with it.  I’ll be made to pay: just wait and see.

These threats? I hear them from my mother, my own mother, in phone calls and long, convincing texts.

My mother? She's spiraling in dementia.

I’ve heard these threats the past couple months, since my mom refused to move into the personal care home, the one adjoining the nursing home where my dad was emergency placed, to keep him safely beyond her care, with hospice’s intervention late March. My father's in dementia, too, and late stage Parkinsons. Since their traumatic separation, she's  desperately perseverated on the fantasy of bringing my incapacitated dad back home to her, using the only coping mechanisms she may know: fighting and denial. Logically, I know her threats are consistent with the paranoia of dementia, as is her forgetting the signing of the medical POA waiver she's threatening me with. Psychologically, I recognize her threats' intense re-triggering power over me because since childhood, I’ve never known when my Jekyll-Hyde mother will turn on me. But spiritually, there may be a next level here to my learning…

As backstory, I’ve been caring for both my aging parents 8 hours away and as an only child since January 2025 through their financial, medical, and cognitive crisis of such conspicuous proportions that it’s made surviving our son’s 2022 suicide seem—pardon my oversimplification—easier, when the challenge before me then seemed more simply rising to grieving well. Too, my relationship with my parents, especially my mother, is complicated. But their dual cognitive decline provides me opportunity for a sort of coming out: it's allowing me to risk publicly revealing the dysregulation I grew up in and break my polite silence before their bodily deaths. I'm mindful of the ethical breech here--I'm straying out of my circle into theirs and presuming to tell some of their story, not just my own--so I acknowledge this complication with my truth telling. But my motive is less about personal blaming and more about culturally normalizing the Walking Wounded who’ve raised so many of us, who pass on the generational trauma of our broken way of living, and who we often become in turn, until we’re resilient enough to break the cycle with inner work. Life with my parents has involved half a lifetime of recovery work and salvaging a workable relationship, only to find myself now trapped in what can feel like an impossible situation between old codependent patterns and new POA liability. The injustice I've gotten myself into makes me want to scream! But there was nobody else. When I feel trapped in these double binds, like now, I know it’s begging higher spiritual perspective.

model courtesy of mentor Deborah Plant Wilson of www.returningtowholeness.com

So I’d like to keep sharing, as I’m able, how I’m coping with this impossible situation with my parents, now a year-and-a-half in, in the hope that when any of us humbly teach what we’re learning, our struggle may ripple out to help us all. 

With Mom’s threats, what’s helping me cope today is reading a spiritual reminder that threats can be perceived also as helpful challenges. That what we perceive from the outside of us as a threat can be a projection of our own inside flagging faith in ourselves. So the perceived threat may offer us opportunity to check inside as to where we’re asked to trust our own capabilities more deeply rather than seek reassurance from others or outside circumstances. It’s a step toward becoming increasingly self-referencing rather than other-referencing, especially for those of us socialized female or otherwise conditioned to give away our power in fawning to stay safe. I bet re-conceiving of threat is also a step toward the spiritual teaching that reality originates inside ourselves and only then do we project it outside of us to create our circumstances, despite ego insisting it’s the other way around and that we can only feel safe if external circumstances feel safe. “Nothing real can be threatened.”

When I apply this teaching about threats, I first reconnect with the younger me still fawning after my mother’s approval to feel safe. So I remember I can instead reparent this inner child, sooth her myself, and reassure that the adult part of me is skillfully managing her mother so she can finally go play instead of parent her parent. In my mind’s eye, I protectively straddle my kid self as she digs in her beloved sandbox: I’ve literally got her back. But I'd already learned how to do that. What’s new is this next step of checking inside as to where I’m projecting my flagging faith in myself onto my mother and still playing her victim. When I sit with it, I see my ego is still understandably scared I'm not enough, overlooking something, messing up, because that's what the ego is programmed to do: to judge ourselves as mercilessly as that panel of Mom's fictitious lawyers. Of course I'm doubting my own capability, managing the overwhelm of my parents' legal, medical, and financial safety! Especially when my mom's venomous challenges inflame that subconscious fear! I see I’m still worried I’m lapsing in my own shadow watching, in the double bind of whether I'm doing too much for them given old caretaking patterns or too little given new compassion fatigue. So I can have compassion foremost for myself, for a change. I remember confessing to a friend my fantasy of quitting POA, and my friend asking whether I felt if what I was offering was 100% in my parents' best interests. When I realized I indeed felt faith in my integrity, my friend encouraged me then to stay with the POA. I hear myself, admittedly thanks to my friend’s external validation, ready to warrant a "helpful challenge" in my mom's threats, a higher 3rd option perspective on this painful situation: that just maybe I'm tempering the blade of my capacity in the fire of her combativeness. I realize that I’ve got my parents’ backs, too, even when Mom's fighting me every step; that I'm enough. If I hadn't been doing the work also of feeling my rage at her the whole way through these many months, this ironic appreciation I'm about to utter could sound like spiritual bypass, so... thank you, Mom?

Now to what degree I've got my OWN back and radically choose care for MYSELF first, over care for my increasingly debilitated parents, perhaps that’s the monumental challenge I write about next in this series, a challenge significant to so many of us conditioned to find our mission or worth in caring foremost for others. I am proud of my progress thus far.

In closing, I want to footnote a few other things helping me cope in this impossible situation with my parents, credit where due. I want to recognize some situational and generational privileges, especially having options like Medicaid, elder law support, and breaking the martyr cycle: options not available to my Grandmommy , for instance, when her mother faced dementia and Alice faced moving in with her, redefining her own life, likely against her best interests, from what I recall of her stories. I want to credit the Wholeness Energetics coaching modality I’m trained in and the numerous inner work sessions I’ve facilitated on myself, finding hidden subconscious beliefs and superconscious guidance at the ready. I’m probably my own best client. I’d be honored to share this modality with you, too. And I want to share my spiritual faith that everything I experience I can choose to perceive as for my highest & best growth and healing, which helps me tremendously in impossible situations, should entertaining this possibility help you cope, too.

I welcome your sharing, in the comments below or in contacting me, what my sharing brings up for you, especially if you're likewise in the throes of eldercare , a double bind, or healing your MotherWound.