Saturday, August 14, 2010

Narcissistic Mother and Me

I came across a site today, after reading a post on the Dealing With The Inlaws board on Babycenter. I don't have problems with my inlaws, mine are with my mother (No! Really? You've never mentioned that before!). I like to read, because it helps me, just reading the advice for others. This one happened to be about Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers. A well seasoned DWILs poster advised the thread starter to google her own thread title and she would come across numerous links. I decided to do the same and came across this link. The more I looked around, I felt that growing feeling in the pit of my stomach and realized that this sounded all too familiar. There wasn't a single trait on the narcissism trait list that didn't sound like my mother. There are 44 in total, but I am pasting the ones that hit home the hardest for me.

8. She's clever. It's all subtle. She picks her moments so that there are no witnesses (or no witnesses not also under her dominion, e.g. an enabling father). This makes it very, very hard to explain to others, and adds to the crazy-making head-wreckingness of it all.

9. She talks herself up as being a great mother. "I was so worried about you," she'll tell you, but you get a hollow feeling that it wasn't true. These things are easy to say after all, and require no action or effort.

10. She divides the family to conquer it. Her children might be golden children or scapegoats. Neither of these is a good position to be in. (Note: not all Narcissistic Mothers do this - mine didn't.)

11. She's envious of all of your good things, from successes to material things. She'll try to spoil your pleasure in these things to bring you down to earth.

22. Her situation is always worse than yours. Even if you're very ill, her trauma of being the loving mother of an ill daughter is worse than yours of being the ill person.

38. She interferes in your relationships. She doesn't want anybody else to be happy without her, because happiness without her presence means she's - gasp! - not the centre of the universe. So she might stir it, sly underminings of your husband maybe, "He's not a very good provider, is he?" A classic is to keep you and your siblings at logger-heads. That way she retains control. She will talk about each of you to the others. She's like a spider at the centre of a web, manipulating you all. This is called triangulation.

43. She might be overtly and inappropriately sexual - flirting with boyfriends you bring home, for example. Thank Heavens my own mother never did that, but I've heard from enough other Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers about their mothers doing that.

One of the biggest things my mother loved to do was pit my sister and I against each other. It was constant, and she loved when we were angry at each other. She encouraged it even. I later learned that she would do things, tell me that my sister did it, just to cause more problems between us. My sister and I were 3 years apart, it wasn't needed, we fought enough on our own! Even now, I don't believe our relationship has fully healed from it all.

The sad thing is, I realize that some of my mothers sisters are like this as well. Not all of them, but two of them. The ones my sister and I lived with while in foster care, actually. I don't know their children, but I know during our stays with them (my sisters was years with one of them), we were the scapegoat children. The ones put down and treated like second class citizens. No different than when I was home.

I often wonder how I would feel if my mother were to die now. I've actually put a lot of thought into that today. I realized I would probably skip the funeral. It wouldn't be worth it to me to deal with her family. I will be sad. I know that. I'll be sad for the loss of the life we could have had.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

my mother was just like this, always ignored, downplayed, or just plain ruined every good thing that ever happened to me. She could not be bothered to attend any of my school functions, my wedding, my daughters birth. She has always pitted my 2 older brothers, they could do no wrong, against me. She always talks about me to my back to family and friends. There were never birthday parties, special presents or gifts. Any pet, doll or item that I truly loved would just magically disappear, of course she never knew what happened to them. She shuts me out of all family functions and holidays unless I ask if I can come. I always felt so unwelcome. I truly loved my dad and she was always so jealous of any interaction between us. She put me down to him constantly, when I was 50 my dad got sick and was hospitalized and had a sudden death. She shut me out of all info , staying at the hospital with him and his eventual funeral. I have not spoken to her now for 7 years and I never ever will. She can die today and I will not shed one tear.I just wonder why God gave me to her, WHY!