Narcissists are slippery fish. Just when you have screwed up
the courage to confront her on some really hurtful thing she did to you in the
past, just when you have pointed out to her how hurt you feel over some
behaviour or another of hers, just as you have become clear on the fact that
you aren’t crazy and she is doing
things to hurt you, she turns the tables on you and suddenly she is your victim
and you are in the wrong. “Get over it!” she screams at you, “you are holding a
grudge! That happened ages ago! What is wrong with you? You are living in the
past! Let it go!”
Flying monkeys and even ordinarily-sympathetic friends can
be guilty of the same thing. My children were stolen from me by my MNM and
hidden from me for eight years—and I was told by a family member to “get over
it” when I wept about the loss of my children and my pain at not even knowing
if they were dead or alive. “Get over it,” this person said. “Get on with your
life.”
How do you “get over” something like that? How do you just “get
over” a lifetime of being found inadequate, not good enough, last in line,
ignored or enmeshed, and disrespected?
Just what does a narcissist or flying monkey mean when they
tell you to “get over it”? We humans are a resilient bunch, recovering from all
manner of hurts, given sufficient time and support. But such recovery requires
a grieving and mourning process which can take some time. The one thing true
recovery does not include is normalizing that which hurt us, making it “ok”
that it happened. Processing a profound hurt requires truth and clarity and,
ultimately, acceptance that it happened and that our lives can go on in spite
of the loss.
But this normal process of grief and acceptance is not what the narcissist wants from you
when you are told to “get over it.” What the narcissist means is for you to
forget or, if you must remember, make it ok. What the narcissist wants is for
anything and everything s/he does to be acceptable to you, regardless of how
you are affected. Because if it isn’t accepted by you, then you are, in the
narcissist’s point of view, holding him responsible for your hurt, blaming him.
And in a narcissist’s world, that is verboten
because it makes him the guilty party when, in his mind, he is without fault in
anything.
So what happens then? Well, if you won’t “get over it,” and
the narcissist is aware that you are holding her responsible for your hurt, the
narcissist (who believes she is never at fault) feels victimized. You are
blaming her for something that is not her fault. You chose to feel hurt by it
or, it was done for your own good, or you are really the one at fault and you
are shifting the blame onto her. Ergo, she is your victim because you refuse to “get over it.” And so the
perpetrator dons the cloak of victimhood. And, interestingly, in a large
percentage of dysfunctional families, the narcissist’s posture as victim will
be believed and you, the real victim, will be rebuked and reviled for your
attempts to reveal the truth.
The good news for you is that there are ways for you to “get
over it,” whatever “it” may be, but they are ways that the true guilty parties
and their apologists will not like.
First of all, you must acknowledge in your conscious mind
that you have suffered a loss. This means stripping away all of the forms of
denial that you have, often unwittingly, allowed to smooth over your previous
emotional injuries. This mean not rationalizing, not justifying her behaviour,
no accepting blame or guilt (but taking responsibility where it is warranted),
not denying that they knew their words or actions would hurt you, and—the big
one—acknowledging that they do not care if
you feel hurt or injured by their words and or actions. Without acknowledging
your loss, you have nothing to grieve and you will stay stuck right where you
are. But when you make yourself strip off the mask your narcissists wears, when
you confront the truth of whatever you believed your mother to be, when you
acknowledge you were wrong and that she doesn’t love you “deep down,” her own
trials and tribulations and history is not an acceptable excuse for hurting
you, for ignoring you and your needs, and/or smothering you with her needs—when
you see her as she really is and how little love and compassion she has for you,
when you acknowledge your loss of a loving, functional mother, you will be able
to grieve.
Acknowledging your loss is the first step in “getting over
it,” grieving your loss being the second. Consciously or not, you have had
expectations of your mother for your entire life. As a small child you
considered your household to be “normal” because, for you, it was the norm. But
your perception of normal began to change with your exposure to other
households and families: television and movie families, families in the media,
families in books, even the families of your friends and acquaintances. You saw
that other families were different from yours and some of them even felt good
to be exposed to. You had friends whose mothers packed their lunches or who
exempted them from chores because they had company (you), you had friends whose
mothers, by their very gestures and tone of voice, broadcasted that they loved
their children—and you recognized that this was not the way your mother acted
or sounded. And you found her wanting—and then you thought it must be your
fault so you felt guilty—because the mother is right and your observation of
normal mothers only entrenched the notion that if you were a good child, your
mother would be like those others you observed.
I can remember watching Leave
it to Beaver and marvelling that the children in the program were never hit
or screamed at. I went to the houses of school friends and observed mothers
speaking politely to not only me, a guest, but to their own children as well. I
went home and aped the behaviour of the little girls in my class, expecting my
mother to respond like their mothers, but I was never able to find the right
combination of words and deeds to free up the loving mother I just knew was
locked inside the harridan in my home. It was my fault and if I could just
figure out what I was doing wrong…
In this way the dysfunction becomes entrenched: we take responsibility
for our narcissistic parents and because we believe ourselves at fault, we never
realize that it is our NParents who need to change, so change never happens.
And so we carry with us the pains of failed expectations, disappointed wishes, and
that hollow feeling in the absence of nurturing. For these we must grieve.
Getting over the
legacy of a narcissistic parent and the betrayal of their flying monkeys takes
time.
“[They] always see themselves as victims, no matter how
horribly they’ve treated someone else. Nothing is ever their fault—they’ve
always been wronged in one way or another. To them, the problems is not their
lying, cheating, stealing and abuse. The problems is that you started to notice
all of those things. Why couldn’t you just remain happy with the idealization
phase? How dare you betray them by standing up for yourself? Encounters with
these people are like drowning in a black hole, because no matter how much they
hurt you, it’ll still be your fault.” (MacKenzie)
The problem with Flying Monkeys is that they never engage the
critical thinking portion of their brains, never stop to think “Let’s ask Suzie
why she did this to her poor old mother.” No, rather than ask you for your side
of the tale—or at least ask you for the reasons for your behaviour—Flying Monkeys
take the word of your narcissist as gospel, believing them implicitly. You find
yourself not only being betrayed and beaten down by your NParent, you find the
parent has a Greek chorus of sycophants and supporters, all singing the same
song: you are the problem. When you grow up with this, it can be very difficult
to step outside of the box they built around you and your independent cognitive
functions. Even when someone not engulfed in the F. O. G. points out what is
obvious to them, you may well fly into defensive mode, denying everything
pointed out to you and defending your NParent vehemently. It takes time for
those seeds of doubt, planted by observant outsiders, movies, books,
television, and even your own observations, to sprout and grow and weather the
attempts to uproot them by your NP, the Flying Monkeys, and even your own
emotionally conflicted self.
But when they do take root, you begin to question Life According to NParent. You begin to
seek out information, looking for clarity, for explanations. You may even start
your journey by seeking ways to up your game with respect to pleasing your N,
ways to gain their love and esteem, ways you have obviously overlooked due to
your own incompetence. And the shocks start coming as you find page after page
on the web indicating that the behaviours you have so long accepted as normal
are less than normal, they are actually toxic—abusive—and not your fault!
So how do you handle demands that you “get over it?” You don’t
accede to them.
You remember that you have an absolute right to be hurt and
angry, and you also have a right to take your own time to process the abuses
that have made you hurt and angry. You remind yourself that the rights of
others do not include demanding that you gloss over their misdeeds so that they
can feel innocent of wrongdoing. And then you take however much time you need
to process their hurts and betrayals until you can view those behaviours
dispassionately, until you can think about them and talk about them without
feeling like you have been stabbed in the heart—or the back…
With therapy and effort, you can truly “get over it.” But
you probably won’t forget—which is a good thing. In order for you to get over
it, however, you may need to stop contact with those who have hurt you so that
your emotional wounds can have some peaceful time to heal before the next
assault. And make no mistake, if your narcissist is the type who tells you “Get
over it” after ripping your heart to shreds and stomping on it, there will be a
next assault unless you go No Contact...
But that that has already been
covered.in another blog entry.
Sources
http://Book.PsychopathFree.com
Jackson MacKenzie
