You're Not Crazy - It's Your Mother (5 page)

Not allowing your authentic self to exist is effectively soul murder, if I may be forgiven a bit of hyperbole. But this is how it is, effectively.

Narcissists like to be the centre of operations, the controller of information.  And therefore they often operate a process called
triangulation
which means that all information goes through them. So they’ll discourage you from speaking to your siblings, and instead tell you all you need to know about their news. And of course, in doing this they can spin the information to suit themselves and even tell outright lies. This can mean that you and your siblings (or other important people) become estranged as each is told lies about the other. This suits the narcissist perfectly as you cannot then collaborate or conspire against her. ‘Divide and Conquer’ is her motto.

Many narcissists experience, and seem to love, a variety of non life-threatening illnesses. These illnesses require medical attention and therefore provide Narcissistic Supply for them, as well as making it necessary for family members to run around looking after them, listening to them talk about their illnesses, make allowances for the illnesses, etc. There is a disorder called Munchausen’s Syndrome which is similar to this. I have not found any official link, or understanding of a link, between that and NPD. But it does seem that narcissists do use illnesses for attention.

Narcissistic mothers are very strange about presents. They are
dreadful
at buying presents for people around them, usually getting the most inappropriate gifts imaginable. This is for two reasons: first, they genuinely don’t know anyone as a person, so they’ve no idea what they’d like. And second, they really don’t care. If they were to start thinking about what the other person would like, they’d have to take time out from thinking of themselves and that, of course, cannot be.

And so you have the most bizarre examples of presents: the clothes in a style you’d never wear, the book on a hobby you’ve never shown the slightest interest in, a voucher for something you’d absolutely hate. And of course the sigh and the comment, ‘Oh you’re
so
hard to buy for’, if she feels your lack of enthusiasm.

They’re great at re-gifting, too, and again it doesn’t matter if the gift is appropriate for you, or how tatty its box is, or how obvious it has been pulled out at the last minute from the back of the cupboard.

There is, however, one occasion on which they’ll put thought into a present, and that’s when it’s a veiled dig. The diet book. The book on getting your home organised. Those they can do.

In a seeming paradox, but one which makes sense, they actually love
the act
of giving presents. I recall well the vivid Narcissistic Glow my mother would have whenever she handed over a gift. This is because it was expected that the recipient would show huge, if not fawning, gratitude. Lots of Narcissistic Supply, in other words. The gift donor is also in a slightly higher position, status-wise, as they are the ones able to bestow resources, and she likes being in that position. And then you’d have to hear the story, in excruciating detail, about how she came to buy that gift.

Regardless of what kind of present you get therefore, you absolutely
must
show huge gratitude or face Narcissistic Rage. The fuss and compliments must go on long after any reasonable person would expect, and must be fulsome and repetitive. They don’t have to be sincere, mind. Narcissists aren’t very good at detecting sincerity or its lack (again because they’d have to think about someone else to do so, and also in their arrogance they never assume that the other person wouldn’t mean it).

And in a logical corollary, you won’t be shocked to hear that they react badly to receiving presents. They can be dismissive and just say a casual, ‘Thanks’ as they toss it to one side. Or they can be downright vicious (or tearful, if that works better) as they turn on you for buying something so beneath them or wrong for them. 

But she might not …

Here’s the thing. She wants you weak and scared and isolated and vulnerable. She does not want you to be strong and empowered. So if you get together with a partner who empowers you and supports you and is good to you, she may well hate that, and may do all in her power to sabotage that relationship. Get together with a narcissist or other abuser though, and she’s quite happy ….

Narcissists often see no boundaries at all. It’s not at all unheard of for the narcissistic mother to let herself into her daughter’s house and start re-arranging the kitchen cupboards. Or ask – and expect answers to – totally inappropriate questions about topics such as your sex-life, family-planning decisions or finances. Or share equally inappropriate information about herself.

They see this as totally their right. And so they feel very thwarted and angry if you try to stop them doing it, if you try to impose natural and reasonable boundaries.

Because, thing is, narcissists
hate
boundaries. Hate them with a passion. They actually experience boundaries as being an attack on them, and will respond to that attack with huge force and Narcissistic Rage. And will consider it totally justified, just as you would be justified to use all possible force against a physical attacker.

And so if you say, for example, ‘Mum, I’d really prefer it if you’d phone before coming around, rather than just turning up’, then she sees that as an attack and will respond accordingly.

She may get offended, or just go straight to rage.

She might accuse you of emotional blackmail, and may say that in such a way that you begin to wonder if it is true.

She might say, ‘
Fine
! I won’t visit at all, then, I know when I’m not wanted!’ and in vain will you protest that that’s
not
what you said or what you meant, and you might even end up pleading with her to turn up whenever she likes, just to stop her being so hurt and distressed.

She might get upset, and start sobbing, ‘Nothing I ever do is right! My own daughter doesn’t want me!’  And you end up comforting her and assuring her that of course she does things right, and of course you want her. And so the focus of the discussion gets efficiently moved from
your
request to
her
upset, and it never moves back.

Or she might go on the attack: ‘Well it’s a bit rich
you
asking people to have manners. What about all the times you turned up on
my
doorstep, eh?’ In vain do you try to remind her that she had insisted you do that, that you tried to ring first but she didn’t want that.

And of course, she might then smear you to anyone who’ll listen, totally twisting the truth to suit her scenario: ‘My daughter told me I wasn’t to visit her any more!’

And if you think that such a dramatic response was an over-reaction to your mild request for her to ring before visiting – well, you’d be right. But because narcissists are so hyper-sensitive to
any
suggestion that they’re less than perfect, this dramatic response was, to her,
totally
justified. Your mild suggestion really was a brutal attack, to her.

And yes, there’s an irony here. As part of the invalidation, she accuses you of being over-sensitive, when the reality is that she is the one who is completely over-sensitive.

We will talk more about setting boundaries with narcissists below.

In a relationship with a narcissist, it’s always about meeting her needs, and never about getting your own needs met. This is, of course totally contrary to what the mother-child relationship should be, where it’s about the mother meeting the child’s appropriate needs.

If you have an Ignoring Mother as I did, she will not expect you to meet her needs so much – my own mother was always pretty self-sufficient and didn’t require much from either me or my siblings. But she wasn’t interested in meeting our needs, beyond the minimum that she had to.

Engulfing Mothers, now, are an endless whirlwind of needs, and so the daughter grows up trying to meet her mother’s needs, and unaware that her own needs should be met, and never getting them met

So, even as she totally demands her own needs (and even her
wants
), she makes you feel selfish for looking to meet your own needs. So, for example, if you wanted
this
dress or
that
venue, for your wedding, but she preferred another one, you’ll get told, either indirectly or in as many words: ‘Oh you’re so selfish, you know. It’s not all about you. You always want your own way. You never think of anyone else.’ And so you end up feeling really bad about being so selfish, and more than likely giving in to her wishes. 

It is a parent’s job is to reflect the child to him- or herself, so they grow up with an appropriate self-image. Narcissists twist that and they lie to us about who we are. They teach us that we are inherently flawed and there is something sinister and wrong about us. Much more about this huge topic in the section called ‘Born Broken’.

Narcissistic mothers are also very, very sensitive to criticism. In one of many ironies that narcissism lends itself to, she may accuse you of being over-sensitive and requiring that she walk on eggshells, but the truth is exactly the opposite – she is that very thing! Her ego is so fragile that she’s always on guard for any slights to it, and will react with all due force, i.e. Narcissistic Rage, to it.

For example, I remember when my mother, a devout Catholic, said, totally seriously, about some Protestants she’d met, ‘And they had a very good sense of humour for Protestants’, I couldn’t help it, I laughed. I said, ‘Mother, your prejudices are showing!.’ Cue a clipped, ‘That’s enough, Danu!’ And I, indoctrinated from birth, crawled docilely back into my box.

However, narcissistic mothers are very quick to criticise others. As everything is about her, she can have this odd way in which she takes others’ differing opinions or tastes as a personal affront to her. She doesn’t merely disagree with them, rather she is
offended
by them. This makes sense in that backwards narcissistic way, as, since she’s perfect, her opinion and tastes are the right ones and the others’ are wrong. And worse, by having those different opinions and tastes, the others are implicitly criticising hers! No wonder she’s offended.

Talking a lot can be a trait of Histrionic Personality Disorder, specifically, but many narcissists seem to have this too. After all, if she’s the Centre of the Universe then her every passing thought is of enough importance to share with the world, and every detail of her life is essential listening.

Narcissists can talk endlessly about their own events and opinions, in the most excruciating detail. They talk on and on and on until it feels like an assault. They can talk without drawing breath it seems like. This has the result of making you, the designated audience, feel like a non-person. You’re only there as their audience, not as a real person. I always used to feel, going into my mother’s presence, that I was folding the real me away, and what went to see her was a cardboard cut-out that looked like me, but it was not, in any real sense, me. The real me was totally surplus to requirements.

Once, in an experiment, I sat and listened to my mother without giving any response cues at all. I just sat and stared at her. She began talking about a holiday she and my father had just been on, even though they had both had already spent a good hour or so telling me about it. But no matter, she spoke again about it. And no word of exaggeration as I timed it on the oven clock, but she spoke solidly for forty full minutes, with zero encouragement from me, about a holiday she had literally just told me all about.

'Projection' in this context means the psychological tendency to see one's undesirable traits in another. And narcissists cannot, of course, bear to own their undesirable traits, so they have to get rid of them, so to speak, as soon as possible. So they hand them to the nearest recipient who'll take them. And their children are of course very handy for this, as they unquestioningly believe their parents.

So they’ll accuse you of being what they dimly realise they are being, but they cannot cope with the pain of that, so they’ll project it on to you.

Calling you over-sensitive when it’s actually they who are over-sensitive is one such example. Calling you selfish. Telling you that you can’t tell truth from reality. And so it goes.

The scary thing is that, of course, we believe it when we hear it. As children, we’re programmed to believe our parents, and so we grow up thinking we
are
selfish and greedy and all the bad things she accuses us of. It’s more of the head-wreckingness. And of course, when she says we can’t tell truth from reality, the evidence is there as we remember things differently to her. Truly, what chance have we, as little children, got against this?