The Impossible Situation with My Parents 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.

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. Since their traumatic separation, she's  desperately perseverated on the fantasy of bringing my incapacitated dad back home to her, using the only coping mechanism she knows: fighting. And as her only remaining caregiver, I receive most of it. I’ve heard Mom threaten me with lawyers even after my helping her. Like after I found free elder transit so she can still see Dad once a week since she’s car-less, or after I secured free frozen meals from Agency on Aging when I learned her weight is precariously dropping. Logically, I know her threats are consistent with the paranoia of cognitive decline, especially since she can’t remember signing the medical POA waiver months ago. Psychologically, I recognize her threats' intense re-triggering power because since childhood, I’ve never known when my 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 respectful silence before their bodily deaths. I speak this truth not to blame but to normalize the Walking Wounded who’ve raised us, who pass on the generational trauma of our broken way of living, and who we often become, 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 caretaking and new POA liability. When I feel trapped in these double binds, like now, I know it’s begging higher spiritual perspective. 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 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 is projected outside of us, 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 wounded inner child, sooth her myself, and reassure that the adult part of me is skillfully managing her mother so she can finally go play. In my mind’s eye, I protectively straddle this 5-year-old me as she digs in her beloved sandbox: I’ve literally got her back. But I already knew 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 it's programmed to do. 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 wound. I see I’m still worried I’m lapsing in my own shadow watching, whether 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, warranting the "helpful challenge" in my mom’s threats, perhaps tempering the blade of my own capacity in the fire of her combativeness: I’ve got my parents’ backs, too. I'm enough.

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 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 and 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 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. 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.