I appreciated the suggestion from /u/wiseclockcounter to share this in a dedicated post. May this be a lesson.

My mother is an angel. Did not divorce my dad even though he is jobless and our family is in a financial crisis. She loves me too much to hurt me with a divorce (Men love women, women love children). She was an opera singer and ditched her career to spend all her time to raise me with high self-esteem.

During the disobedience phase of my teen years, she would often confront me about my rebellious behaviors. It would follow this general trend:

She confronts. I retaliate with an educated response to assert my unwavering position. She gets frustrated and leaves the room. 5 minutes later, she comes back to confront me again to repeat this cycle at least 3 or 4 times before she came back to me and apologize for the upsetting emotional atmosphere. I knew she just wanted me to apologize to her, and I did, because the last thing I wanted was for my mother to feel like I did not love her.

This would frustrate the shit out of me, and I even called her out on this cyclical behavior. So one time, I recorded one of our arguments and that's when I realized something about all women, good and bad. They generally do not hold onto their arguments, but consistently re-direct focus on the present circumstances of their emotional state, rather than disclosing (and taking responsibility for) the root cause of it in the first place. I decided to record this because it allowed me to demonstrate instances in which I could draw upon root causes and explain to her why she had invalid arguments and inconsistent reasoning. A lot of the times when I called her out on this in the past, she would deny the literal words she said because she intended for a different emotional response and say "That's not what I said." When she really meant "That's not what I meant for you to feel when I said that." In her mind, it was unimportant who was right. It was more important how everyone felt.

So what happened when I recorded and exposed her, even going as far as suggesting that we include an unbiased third party for cross-examination? She started crying. She had a breakdown, fell down to sit against a wall while holding her hands on her face, and said, "How could you do this to your own mother?" I felt nothing but contempt for my own mother because she chose to use this behavior as a misdirection technique that simply did not work on me. She also cried every morning while doing early morning prayers, and so I think I became desensitized to her crying in general. It was literally all the time. Perhaps this was a good experience for me, because I do not feel anything for crying women, period.