Usually I get emotional flashbacks around my mother when she's scripting or saying something intentionally undermining, demeaning, or invalidating. She has about 4 or 5 topics of conversation she's willing to have with me (or anyone, really. She doesn't know how to have organic conversations outside of her scripts) and most of those include trying to provoke me into being emotionally reactive. They are conversations she knows we disagree on (my opinion differs from her script/narrative and she knows it), or conversations she tries to "do over," because she didn't like how they ended. When I explain my perspective, no matter how I do it, these conversations, without fail, ends in her yelling and just displaying a range of unpleasant behaviors, including projecting her worst insecurities and behaviors onto me and reinforcing her "victimization" and me as the scapegoat.

So, I have learned to avoid those topics. I have learned to deadpan. I have learned to not voice my perspective. Which is terrible, I know, but it's classic grey rock and better than the alternative devolvement the conversation usually follows. It doesn't stop her from bringing them up, though. For two reasons: Because she NEEDS me to agree with her version of things, and if I don't, she wants me to be emotionally reactive about it. So I'm always at an impasse when they're brought up and end up intensely triggered, because I cannot voice my own truth without having my scapegoat role reinforced. So, no matter what, those conversations end up with me having emotional flashbacks for days. In the past, when her script has triggered an emotional flashback and I displayed it, cue the gaslighting and insinuations of, "this is what proves my point. You are sick. I never meant anything of the sort like that. You are out of your mind. I'm just trying to have a conversation. I don't know what you think this is." Then she gossips to the whole family her version of things all couched in concern for "my mental state" and how I "hate her and the family" etc etc. So. I have learned to grey rock. I deadpan. If I can't find a way to exit the conversation (read: script), I tell her I'm not comfortable proceeding with it and shut down any subsequent questions or plays of innocence she has or displays. I go quiet. I do not react. I respond to her with pleasantries and nicities and with respect, but never depth and authenticity. Because the whole point is to get me to react to "prove" she's "right" about me. I appear fine. But inside I am seething and dying and dear God waiting for her to leave so I can cry out my flashback for the next week and just get it over with.