The Narcissist's Child: child abuse

It is difficult to deal with a narcissist when you are a grown, independent, fully functioning adult. The children of narcissists have an especially difficult burden, for they lack the knowledge, power, and resources to deal with their narcissistic parents without becoming their victims. Whether cast into the role of Scapegoat or Golden Child, the Narcissist's Child never truly receives that to which all children are entitled: a parent's unconditional love. Start by reading the 46 memories--it all began there.

Showing posts with label child abuse. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

She blames: Characteristics of Narcissistic Mothers Pt 22

[There are two basic types of narcissistic mothers, the ignoring type and the engulfing type. These may—and often do—overlap but most NMs have a basic style and will be primarily one or the other. Some of the following points may not apply to your NM simply because they describe an engulfing characteristic when your NM is an ignoring type—or vice versa. But our mothers are not the only narcissists we will encounter in our lives. In fact, being raised by a narcissistic parent actually sets us up to be prey for more of the self-centred emotional vampires as we go out into the world, from girlfriends who are anything but friends to lovers who love themselves best to husbands who are the mirror image of dear old mom. So, whether something looks like it applies to your NM or not, read and consider it carefully—it may give you the awareness necessary to avoid the predator lurking around the next bend. As ever, my comments are shown in violet. -V]

From “True Confessions”:

“This is all your fault, you know,” Mother said…“If you hadn’t been born, none of this would be happening, my life would be different…better. But no, you had to come along and ruin everything!”… “You know, I had it all figured out. Your grandfather, that rigid, old-fashioned old fart, wouldn’t let me go out or do anything. Oh, Pete and Gary could come and go as they pleased…they were boys, and even though Pete was two years younger than me, Grandpa let him do whatever he wanted while I had to ask permission to do just about anything other than take a pee.

“And then one night I was at a high school football game and there was this cute sailor in the stands, home from the war. And I flirted with him and when the game was over we went off on his motorcycle for some ice cream and he took me home.”

“I had to sneak out after everyone had gone to bed to see him, Grandpa wouldn’t let me go out with him because he was Hill People…you know, poor dirt farmers who lived in houses with no plumbing or electricity. But I knew he was my ticket to freedom.

“So one night, just after school was out for the summer we sneaked away and got married. He was 21 and I was almost 17. His leave from the Navy was almost up and he was going to be shipped out to China…the Navy was going to send me money every month as his wife for living expenses…and as a married woman I wouldn’t have to answer to Grandpa anymore. I could take that money, move out of the Godforsaken little gossip-ridden hick town, and live my own life, no father…and no husband, either…to tell me what I could or could not do…At least that was the plan…

“But things didn’t work out that way…Gramma Janssen wrote to the War Department and told them that he was their only son and they needed him to help out on the farm and the War Department discharged him. There went my freedom…he wasn’t going to go to China and there wasn’t going to be a monthly check from the Navy and before my father could put together an annulment…guess what happened?

“I found out I was pregnant. With you. And then it was all over for me…I swelled up like a poisoned pup. I got stretch marks all over my belly, my boobs, I got so fat I would barely waddle. Then, when I went into labour, you wouldn’t come out. I was in labour for 36 goddamned hours before they finally decided to do a caesarean section…your head was pointed from being crammed against my pelvic bones for so long! And then I almost died. I had to have a live transfusion from Grandpa because that tiny little shit-assed town didn’t have a decent blood bank. I got milk fever. You lost weight because I didn’t have any milk and those blockheaded nurses wouldn’t give you formula.

“And once I got you home, all you did was cry. All day, all night, you cried. Then you got the goddamned eczema and had raw, open sores all over you and I had to keep your diapers and your bedding and your clothes sterilized…but we were living in that drafty old shack next to Gramma Janssen’s house with no electricity or running water. And I couldn’t drive, so I was stuck out there living like a goddamned heathen, only ten miles from town, but I might as well have been in the goddamned middle of nowhere! So there I was, stuck out in the sticks with a screaming baby…it wasn’t at all what I expected, you know. You can’t put a baby back in the closet and close the door when you are tired of playing with it. I was stuck in that horrible little shack with Gramma Janssen always looking over my shoulder and telling me what to do and no way out!”

“And all because of you. If you hadn’t come along, I’d have had that annulment and found another way to get away from Grandpa. But you ruined it all.”

Always, she'll blame you for her abuse. You made her do it. If only you weren't so difficult. You upset her so much that she can't think straight. Things were hard for her and your backtalk pushed her over the brink.

My NM used to call it “backsass” and any word I said that was not in full agreement with her could be so interpreted. In fact, even agreeing with her could be dangerous if I wasn’t very careful with my tone of voice and facial expressions. I was once backhanded and knocked half way across the kitchen after she said “don’t you look at me in that tone of voice” and I, not comprehending, didn’t make the appropriate change in expression in time.

And I quite clearly remember being cautioned against “making” her abuse me. “Don’t make me hit you,” or “You can only blame yourself for this,” as she beat me with The Strap (a thin leather dog leash with the metal snap removed—it left welts that looked like whip marks) or whatever else was handy. Or, heaven forefend she should smack me with her hand and break a blood vessel! “Look what you did, you little bitch! Look what you did!! I ought to beat you within an inch of your life!”

This can cause some serious issues with children abused in this manner. Whether the abuse was physical or emotional, the child grows up with the idea that all the bad things in his life and in the life of those around him are his fault. Unless the child is unusually aware and can see the absurdity in this…or at least question (in his own mind—questioning the NM is off the table) how he came to be at fault for things over which he had no control, a child can grow up feeling guilty about things that have, in truth, nothing at all to do with him! It can also cause a kind of free-floating anxiety, a kind of living under the Sword of Damocles, forever waiting for it to drop…you never know when you are going to be blamed for something you had no part in but you know you will and eventually you just come to expect it.

This blaming is often so subtle that all you know is that you thought you were wronged and now you feel guilty. Your brother beats you and her response is to bemoan how uncivilized children are.

Of course there is always “what did you do to provoke him?” or “boys will be boys and you shouldn’t have been playing with him,” or “can’t you just stay out of his way?”

Your boyfriend dumped you, but she can understand - after all, she herself has seen how difficult you are to love.

Or, of course, you have terrible taste in boyfriends, she could have told you this would happen, or you should have expected it, a boy like that wouldn’t stay with a girl like you for long, or what did you to run him off? Or a host of other remarks that are less than comforting.

She'll do something egregiously exploitative to you, and when confronted will screech at you that she can't believe you were so selfish as to upset her over such a trivial thing. She'll also blame you for your reaction to her selfish, cruel and exploitative behavior. She can't believe you are so petty, so small, and so childish as to object to her giving your favorite dress to her friend. She thought you would be happy to let her do something nice for someone else.

Or you will have to cancel your own plans because she has committed you to watch her boyfriend’s children—and she laughs uproariously when you ask what you will get paid. Or she will borrow and ruin something of yours and you won’t dare show how upset you are about it lest she find a way to blame and then punish you. She will take anything of yours anytime she wants it and dispose of it in any way she sees fit and if you dare object, it will somehow be made your fault (you didn’t brush the dog so she gave it away, you didn’t clean your room so she gave your toys away) and if you don’t drop the subject when ordered, you run the risk of punishment.

Narcissists are masters of multitasking as this example [giving away your dress] shows. Simultaneously your narcissistic mother is 1) Lying. She knows what she did was wrong and she knows your reaction is reasonable. 2) Manipulating. She's making you look like the bad guy for objecting to her cruelties. 3) Being selfish. She doesn't mind making you feel horrible as long as she gets her own way. 4) Blaming. She did something wrong, but it's all your fault. 5) Projecting. Her petty, small and childish behavior has become yours. 6) Putting on a self-pitying drama. She's a martyr who believed the best of you, and you've let her down. 7) Parentifying. You're responsible for her feelings, she has no responsibility for yours.

This is so true of the narcissist’s ability to get lots of mileage out of a single predation. It also explains why so many people are taken in by the narcissist. When she tells them, “Can you imagine? I gave an old dress of Susan’s, one she hasn’t worn in ages, to a friend of mine for her daughter—they don’t have much money since she lost her job, you know—and I could not believe how selfish Susan was, how upset she got, when she realized it was gone! You would think she’d welcome the room in her closet, she has so much stuff crammed in there already!” She doesn’t bother to tell them that the dress is seasonal and right now it is out of season—or that maybe it is a party dress and you haven’t been to a party lately—only that you hadn’t worn it recently, which is strictly true but not the whole truth. She doesn’t bother to tell them that her friend was fired from her job for cause and they are hurting for money because she’s content to live off her unemployment even if it means depriving her child of something. She doesn’t let on that she’s getting a million self-administered strokes for “saving” her friend, for doing Susan the favour of thinning out her stuffed closet, for putting up with her daughter’s selfish, hoarding ways. So she manages not only to get seven hits on you with her altercation over taking your dress, she gets lots of sympathy and pats the back from her friends when she relates the incident, all for stealing your dress!

I sometimes wonder how the conversation went when NM gave away the dog. If was my fault for not brushing him regularly, she told me—did she use this as a reason she was getting rid of him? “My daughter wanted the dog but she just won’t take care of him…you will see how knotted his coat is…and I have to work full time, so I can’t do it. She agreed that his care would be her responsibility, but I should have known better than to believe her again…” Of course she would never mention that we didn’t get him as a puppy but as a fully grown dog whose coat was already a mess, and certainly she would never mention that her daughter was a scrawny 7-year-old with a match stick arms who was literally incapable of pulling a brush or comb through an adult Collie’s coat. No, she would never have mentioned those things because they might exonerate me and even put some of the blame onto her, being an adult who was unwilling to do the work a child was unable to do.

Narcissists blame…it is what they do…and the reason every narcissistic mother has a scapegoat child: if you blame, you must have someone to put the blame onto.

Next: Part 23. She destroys your relationships

Monday, August 20, 2012

She projects: Characteristics of Narcissistic Mothers Pt 19

In projection “... a person subconsciously denies his or her own attributes, thoughts, and emotions, which are then ascribed to the outside world, usually to other people. Thus, projection involves imagining or projecting the belief that others originate those feelings.”

Projection means that she will put her own bad behavior, character and traits on you so she can deny them in herself and punish you.

“My MNM was a master at projection. When I learned to set a proper table in my Home Ec class and tried to replicate it at home, my mother’s immediate reaction was to assume I wanted something from her. When I later asked for a ride to my Girl Scout meeting, she assumed that I was “buttering her up” so she would be inclined to give me that ride, the fact that I needed a ride every week somehow forgotten. When I did something unexpected, her response was often to think I was “buttering her up” or the contrary—“are you trying to make me mad?” There was some kind of calculating motive behind virtually everything she did and, in true projection mode, she believed others operated just as calculatedly as she did…and often she ascribed to others the feelings or reasons that would have been her own motivations.”

When I was older and spending more time out of the house, NM began accusing me of behaviours that, in all truth, had never occurred to me. Years later she resurrected some of those accusations by telling me that she never could trust me, that she knew I was “running around with men,” and other only slightly veiled accusations. I didn’t understand it when it was happening…I mean, where on earth did she get those ideas??...but thanks to my father I understood it the second time around. It was my father who explained “projection” to me and told me that the things she was accusing me of were the very things she had actually done when she was my age. Decades later, one of her brothers confirmed that her behaviour during her teens was anything but circumspect, so I ended up getting punished for things she did as a teenager, because she was projecting her behaviour onto me.

This can be very difficult to see if you have traits that she can project on to. An eating-disordered woman who obsesses over her daughter's weight is projecting. The daughter may not realize it because she has probably internalized an absurdly thin vision of women's weight and so accepts her mother's projection. When the narcissist tells the daughter that she eats too much, needs to exercise more, or has to wear extra-large size clothes, the daughter believes it, even if it isn't true.

I am really not sure if this applies to my NM or not—I didn’t see many similarities between us although I suppose her obsession with my romantic life could apply. She was quite convinced I was trying to attract the attention of her boyfriends and later, her husband. She gave me a bad time about “modesty”—sorry, but this was beachside Southern California during the height of the surfing craze—we girls lived in bikinis and shorts and tube tops. Also, my bedroom was actually one end of the kitchen—no door, no curtain, no nothing to separate it from the rest of the apartment. And, to top it off, I was not allowed to lock the bathroom door so Frank could (and did) walk in on me whenever he felt like it. But her eyes saw seduction on my part probably because that is what she would have been doing in my place.

However, she will sometimes project even though it makes no sense at all. This happens when she feels shamed and needs to put it on her scapegoat child and the projection therefore comes across as being an attack out of the blue. For example: She makes an outrageous request, and you casually refuse to let her have her way. She's enraged by your refusal and snarls at you that you'll talk about it when you've calmed down and are no longer hysterical.

It is important to realize that our NParents are not the only Ns in our lives. Having been raised by Ns, we are conditioned to respond to them in a way that attracts them. We end up with narcissistic romantic partners, narcissistic spouses, and even narcissists we call friends. And they can hurt us just as badly as our NParents—sometimes worse, since we don’t expect the kind of treatment from them that we come to expect from our NParents. As our eyes are opened to narcissism, we begin to see it everywhere, which can make us doubt the validity of our perceptions: all of these people can’t narcissists, can they? It is most of my friends and a large part of my family! Sadly, yes they can: once trained and primed by our NParents to provide NSupply on demand, we attract them like bees to honey. Over time we begin to realize some of our friends and family members are also Ns and start dropping them from our social calendars. But sometimes we have difficulty, not willing to dump someone simply because we think they might be narcissists. And then they do something, like my friend Mandy* experienced, that removes all doubt.

Mandy was going through a divorce and decided to skip her 20th reunion in favour of some decompression time with her kids and her family. A long-time friend, Allison*, was angry with Mandy for skipping the reunion and “punished” her by refusing to communicate with her for a month. When Mandy sent her a message about her lack of communication, Allison ignored the message. When she was finally over her snit Allison tried to ease her way back into communication with Mandy by “liking” some of her FaceBook posts, but Mandy confronted her about not replying to her message. Allison claimed never to have received the message, which Mandy knew was not true. Allison became very angry and told Mandy she would talk with her about it later, after she (Mandy) had “calmed down.” Since Mandy had been perfectly calm up to this point, Allison’s projecting, gaslighting and lack of empathy suddenly struck her that it was like trying to communicate with her NM. The light went off in Mandy’s head and her friendship with Allison bit the dust.

You aren't hysterical at all; she is, but your refusal has made her feel the shame that should have stopped her from making shameless demands in the first place. That's intolerable. She can transfer that shame to you and rationalize away your response: you only refused her because you're so unreasonable.

Allison was essentially demanding that Mandy put her and her wants above what Mandy and her kids needed. When Mandy refused and Allison made an issue of it, surely some part of her knew that Mandy and her children needed some time away , some restorative time with family, but she continued to put herself first…a shameless demand in anyone’s book.

Having done that she can reassert her shamelessness and indulge her childish willfulness by turning an unequivocal refusal into a subject for further discussion. You'll talk about it again “later” - probably when she's worn you down with histrionics, pouting and the silent treatment so you're more inclined to do what she wants.

While Allison actually told Mandy that she would discuss the matter with her later, completely ignoring and invalidating Mandy, some Ns take a different tactic: my ex would table a discussion as soon as it got close to resolution and the resolution might involve him accepting responsibility for something or changing a behaviour pattern or attitude. I would make a clear demand: no racist remarks in front of the children—you can be a racist if you want, but don’t teach it to my kids—and he would simply say “I don’t want to talk about this now.” When pressed for a time when we could discuss his racism and unashamed displays of it, it was always some vague future time. If I brought up again, before he made another blatant racist remark that would re-open the discussion, I was nagging him and if I didn’t shut up, he would say he would never discuss it with me. He knew that harbouring and expressing racist sentiments wrong and that he should be shamed by them, but by projecting incorrect behaviour (nagging, telling him what to do, expecting him to change) onto me, he could reassert his shamelessness and continue on with his behaviour, unabated.

Projection is actually a form of denial. The narcissist denies or minimizes her unseemly behaviour or beliefs or desires or feelings by projecting them onto you, then takes you to task for it, leaving her blameless as a newborn babe. It’s just one more of their ways of keeping their fantasy worlds intact and the rest of us off balance and compliant.

*Not their real names

Next: Part 20. She is never wrong about anything.

Thursday, July 12, 2012

Characteristics of Narcissistic Mothers Pt 2

This assumes you are allowed to have boundaries in the first place. I can’t speak for how engulfing NMs operated, but I know that exhibiting any kind of boundary to my ignoring NM was like waving a red flag in font of a bull!

You feel like an extension of her.

Even with an ignoring NM, this is true. I was the extra arms to carry stuff, legs to go get stuff, body to do stuff she didn’t want to do. Believe me, I truly believe that kids should have chores and contribute to the household they live in, but turning them into servants, especially giving them tasks they are too young to do or not giving them training or instruction on how to do something properly, that is a whole different thing. I remember my homework being interrupted to make her a cup of coffee or bring her a glass of beer, my trek from the kitchen to the bathroom interrupted to change the TV channel (no remotes back then), my entire after-school period eaten up by work totally unsuited to a child—who asks an eight-year-old to peel potatoes or to bake a cake several times a week?

Your mind is an extension of hers, too. If she can think it, she believes you will do it; if she likes it, you do too; “of course you like liver…stop being so difficult and eat it!” Autonomy is beyond your grasp because you do not exist except as she perceives you, no matter what you think!

Your property is given away without your consent, sometimes in front of you.

Pets, toys, clothes, books—you name it, she gave away without my agreement…usually without my foreknowledge, as well. I would come home and it would be gone. And the sheepdip would hit the fan if I objected or protested in any way, complete with blaming ME for the disappearance: “You didn’t take care of him,” “He made you sneeze,” “It will be easier to clean you room with less junk,” “You don’t play with them (or you don’t wear it) any more.”

Your food is eaten off your plate or given to others off your plate.

Sweets were a rare treat in our house. Until my parents divorced, we got Easter baskets every year. I don’t think I ever got to eat the ears of a chocolate rabbit until I was old enough to buy my own. Sounds petty, I know, but if you only get candy to eat once a year, can’t buy it for yourself, and your mother—who can buy it for herself everyday if she wants—steals yours, it is a big deal, especially if you are only eight years old! I could not have a treat of any kind without her “gimme a bite of that” or “gimme a chunk of that.” Do you think she shared her treats? Yah—not bloody likely!!

Your property may be repossessed and no reason given other than that it was never yours.

“I gave it to you, I can take it away!” And she did. Mostly, however, I had little to repossess. Until my senior year of high school, with the exception of some lovely things given to me by my father and stepmother, the majority of my wardrobe were cast-offs from NM’s closet. Aside from the fact that her taste was atrocious and she had a penchant for cheap, tacky stuff, these things were pretty much ten or more years out of fashion, something of critical importance to a teen aged girl. The summer before my senior year I stayed with my grandparents and worked picking crops, then spent the whole wad on school clothes before NM got there to pick me up.

She was livid, especially when my grandmother (her own mother) fibbed and said she’d already burned the tags and receipts so the clothes couldn’t be returned for a refund. I was not allowed to have money—“parents are entitled to the fruits of their child’s labours”—she used to tell me. So, whether the money was a birthday gift, a prize I won, or money I earned, she took it. Even the job I had my senior year of high school—she gave me an allowance for bus fare and school lunches out of my own earnings and kept the rest.

Nothing was mine. Everything I had was because she “allowed” me to have it, from my clothes (all those pretty new things I bought for my senior year? An extension of her closet, it her eyes) to my earnings to my time. I never had a sense of belonging, or of anything belonging to me…until I got pregnant at 17.

Your time is committed without consulting you, and opinions purported to be yours are expressed for you. (She LOVES going to the fair! He would never want anything like that. She wouldn't like kumquats.)

Oh, yes! All of those wasted Saturdays and exhausting nights while she tried to make me into the next Shirley Temple…I would have fame and she would have my fortune. I didn’t want singing lessons, I wanted to take ballet. I didn’t want to go to auditions, talent shows, singing contests—I wanted to play dolls with Janie across the road. I didn’t love being on stage like she said, I didn’t want to be in movies…I just wanted to be a regular little girl like the ones I went to school with.

And school—ok, by now you’ve probably figured out I am no dummy. I did well in school. I learned early on that, unlike home, in school if I did well, I would get praised. I loved it! I did better and better until it backfired on me: I did so well that I completed a semester’s worth of worksheets in only a few weeks. My mother was told. Conferences were held. Over my father’s objection, I was promoted mid-year from second to third grade. “Oh, she will love it!” NM assured the school officials that this is what I wanted as well. But it wasn’t. I wanted to stay in Miss Bryant’s second grade class where I could excel, not go to a new class where I didn’t know anybody or anything. Nobody listened to the seven-year-old; everybody listened to the lying mother.

You are discussed in your presence as though you are not there.

Yup, that too. Mostly a long, humiliating listing of every transgression ever committed plus the projection of motives that had never occurred to me, crowned with crowing noises about how she thwarted my evil plans. Yup—I could have been in Timbuktu, for all that she cared if I heard her exaggerations and outright lies. Nothing was sacred…not even the truth.

She keeps tabs on your bodily functions and humiliates you by divulging the information she gleans, especially when it can be used to demonstrate her devotion and highlight her martyrdom to your needs ("Mike had that problem with frequent urination too, only his was much worse. I was so worried about him!")

I don’t think this applies so much to ignoring NMs as it does to the engulfing. She never seemed to know when I needed anything, paid as little attention to me as she possibly could, and got angry if I needed anything like dental work, glasses, or allergy meds (she would actually yell at me to “stop that damned snorting and sneezing!” when her Persian cat would set my hayfever off!).

You have never known what it is like to have privacy in the bathroom or in your bedroom, and she goes through your things regularly. She asks nosy questions, snoops into your email/letters/diary/conversations.

It was made very clear to me, early on, that I was not allowed to have any privacy…ever. I was not allowed to “hang on the phone” so there were no conversations to eavesdrop on, but she regularly went through my purse, wallet, coat pockets, schools books and notebooks, dresser drawers and closet. If she found something, she had no compunction about presenting it to me for she had no shame about breaching a privacy I was not permitted to have. When I was about 12 my father (whom she had divorced a couple of years previously) gave me a dollar to use for an emergency if I needed to call him…I was serious when I said I was not allowed to have money. I kept it hidden in the toe of my shoe. One morning when I was in the shower, she found it. She beat me black and blue over that dollar, then took it away from me and kept it. No privacy whatsoever…

She will want to dig into your feelings, particularly painful ones and is always looking for negative information on you which can be used against you.

I am not sure how much this applies to the ignoring NM, although I learned early on not to let her know what I loved…that was a guaranteed way to put the object of my love into jeopardy, whether it was a pet or a book, a toy or a dress, or even a photo or letter. Later on, I learned to appear non-committal about things, including friendships and boyfriends, to keep her from knowing how I truly felt. Only if she did not know what I valued emotionally could I hope to keep it safe. I volunteered nothing of import, although I chattered a lot in her presence to keep her from thinking too deeply on any one thing.

She does things against your expressed wishes frequently. All of this is done without seeming embarrassment or thought.

Oh, you could pretty much guarantee that if I said I felt like chicken for dinner, chicken would not appear on the menu for at least a week. I was pretty good at not expressing wishes in her presence simply because I knew that was a death knell. It was as if she went out of her way to keep me from having anything I wanted.

For much of my adolescence, I wanted to go live with my father. During a rare moment of bravery I said to her “You don’t want me…you’ve told me you don’t want me…so why won’t you let me go live with my Dad?” Her reply was that he wanted me and she would be damned before she gave the man anything he wanted! I thought it very peculiar since she was the one who wanted a divorce and he had given her no grounds. I later figured out not only was she being spiteful, but that I was worth money to her in the form of child support.

Any attempt at autonomy on your part is strongly resisted. Normal rites of passage (learning to shave, wearing makeup, dating) are grudgingly allowed only if you insist, and you're punished for your insistence ("Since you're old enough to date, I think you're old enough to pay for your own clothes!") If you demand age-appropriate clothing, grooming, control over your own life, or rights, you are difficult and she ridicules your “independence.”

Now this is a peek into my life.

When I was 14 and spending part of the summer at my father’s, NM went on a road trip with her live-in boyfriend (a no-no in the early 1960s!) who just so happened to be the man my parents bought their first house from. (Nobody ever confirmed it, but I suspect this man was the reason my mother divorced my father.) As the first day of school loomed closer and closer and we heard nothing from her, we began to wonder what to do.

Labor Day weekend we got a telegram from her—she was still in Texas with her lover. They had gone to watch his son graduate from Air Force Basic Training (this is the same mother who, a few years hence, would skip my high school graduation) and weren’t coming back for a while…I should enrol in school from my father’s.

My stepmother was in a frenzy! Here she was with a well-developed 14 year old who had hairy legs and underarms, bushy eyebrows, clothes suited to a flat-chested 10 year old, and no appropriate underclothes for a young woman. In one weekend I had to learn to shave my legs and underarms, tweeze my eyebrows and wear more makeup than lip gloss. I had to learn to curl my hair and style it, use deodorant, perfume, and other feminine products, and generally grow up from an overgrown child into a young lady in the span of two days! You see, my NM had absolutely forbidden me to do such things!

Oddly, when I went back to live with her at the end of the school year, she said nothing about the more adult hair, clothes, underclothes, shoes, and make up except to complain when I told her I needed hairspray or something like that. In fact, she pretty much ignored me unless I did something she took issue with…unless I wanted something she could use to hurt me. I tried very hard to keep from letting her see what could hurt me.

One place she was inflexible, however, is that she simply could not abide anything that made me attractive to men. I had several two-piece bathing suits (that covered me pretty well—much better than suits today) and we lived near the beach. One day I came home from school and after my chores were done, went to put on a suit and head for the beach. I had to walk her dog after school, so I would usually combine that with a dip in the surf or working on my tan.

I went into my dresser and my bathing suits were gone and in their place an old one-piece of hers. Against everything I had been conditioned to do, I went into her room, into her dresser and retrieved one of my suits. I was furious—I put her suit back in her drawer and took mine back to my room.

When I got back from the beach, dog leash in one hand, chemistry book in the other—I had been doing homework—she was waiting for me. Uncharacteristically, I ignored her and went to my room to change. She followed me in with a yardstick in her hand and began yelling at me, calling me a “little tramp,” and then she hit me on the bare thighs with that yardstick! For the first time, I fought back. I went ballistic, snatched the yardstick out of her hands, broke it in half and threw it at her, then pushed her out of my room screaming that I was too big to spank like a little kid and from now on, when she hit me, she’d better do it where it wouldn’t show in my gym uniform.

Pathetic, huh?

But she never “spanked” me again. That was the beginning of the stinging slaps and marathon hair pulling…

Next up: Part 3—Favouritism

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Characteristics of Narcissistic Mothers Pt 1

It's about secret things. The Destructive Narcissistic Parent creates a child that only exists to be an extension of her self. It's about body language. It's about disapproving glances. It's about vocal tone. It's very intimate. And it's very powerful. It's part of who the child is. ~ Chris

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1. Everything she does is deniable. There is always a facile excuse or an explanation. Cruelties are couched in loving terms. Aggressive and hostile acts are paraded as thoughtfulness. Selfish manipulations are presented as gifts. Criticism and slander is slyly disguised as concern. She only wants what is best for you. She only wants to help you.

I came home from school one day and almost all of my toys were gone. She had given them to the Goodwill. She was doing me a favour because I hardly ever played with the stuff (which actually wasn’t true, she just didn’t see me playing with them because I was usually behind closed doors, hiding from her) and with fewer toys it would be easier to keep my room clean. It was my fault she gave them away...and she was helping me...

She rarely says right out that she thinks you're inadequate. Instead, any time that you tell her you've done something good, she counters with something your sibling did that was better or she simply ignores you or she hears you out without saying anything, then in a short time does something cruel to you so you understand not to get above yourself. She will carefully separate cause (your joy in your accomplishment) from effect (refusing to let you borrow the car to go to the awards ceremony) by enough time that someone who didn't live through her abuse would never believe the connection.

This sounds so much like my childhood it is creepy. My Golden Child Brother (GCBro) could do no wrong and when it did, it was someone else’s fault…like if he did not do his chores after school, I got the beating because I didn’t make him do them! If I got an “A” on my report card, it was expected; math was hard for me and when I proudly brought my grade up to a “B” I was reminded that GCBro got “A”s, what was wrong with me? I received numerous awards in high school for music and academics—she attended none of the ceremonies and I had to get rides from friends in order to attend and receive my awards—assuming I could get permission to go, that is.

When I was little she discovered I had a big voice and went from ignoring to engulfing. My whole life was about the singing career that was going to make me famous and her rich. That I would rather play paperdolls with the little girl across the street was ignored—my life was taken over with costume fittings, singing lessons, auditions, singing engagements…and I hated it. Eventually I pretended I couldn’t sing anymore and the whole thing was dropped, and NM went back to being ignoring, although she remained suspicious. It was not until nearly five years later that I joined the school choir and quickly became one of the featured singers. But NM never attended the concerts, never came to hear me sing. In my senior year, I was chosen as a featured soloist in my school choir for an all-city choir competition. At the last minute she forbade me to go…

She didn’t attend my high school graduation.

She only attended my wedding because my step father dragged her there, and then she showed up in mid-ceremony, wearing a white dress!

Many of her putdowns are simply by comparison. She'll talk about how wonderful someone else is or what a wonderful job they did on something you've also done or how highly she thinks of them. The contrast is left up to you. She has let you know that you're no good without saying a word…

The woman across the road had the perfect teenaged daughter, to hear NM tell it. I, of course, fell far short of the mark. Interestingly, NM would not allow me to use the sewing machine, the washing machine, or cook dinner but the praise she lavished on the neighbour girl for helping her mother with those tasks was awesome to behold...and I fell far short by comparison.

She'll spoil your pleasure in something by simply congratulating you for it in an angry, envious voice that conveys how unhappy she is, again, completely deniably. It is impossible to confront someone over their tone of voice, their demeanor or they way they look at you, but once your narcissistic mother has you trained, she can promise terrible punishment without a word. As a result, you're always afraid, always in the wrong, and can never exactly put your finger on why.

When I did well on something or did a good deed and told my NM, she would accuse me “tooting my own horn” or call me “Miss Goody-Two-Shoes” in a voice dripping condemnation. There was no pleasing her at all—the best that could be hoped was to be invisible and you got that by being perfect. If all of the chores were done to her satisfaction and I was out of sight, I was most likely safe. I say most likely because if she had a mood going on, either the nits would be picked or she would embark upon a recitation of my sins from the day my birth (no exaggeration or hyperbole here—she would remind me of her emergency C-section and blood transfusion and complain about her stretch marks, that I had colic and wouldn’t let her sleep and on and on and ON!)

No remark on my part was permitted, not even an “I’m sorry,” which she would have interpreted as mocking. I must sit and attentively listen, changing the expression on my face to ones that she expected (learned from bitter experience on my part) as her litany rolled endlessly on. To interrupt, to contradict, to ask questions, to fail to show the correct expression during her tirade of what was wrong with me from the day I was born was to invite The Strap, a thin leather dog lead (sans metal clip) that hung on the back of the kitchen door and left red whiplike welts when applied forcefully to the tender skin of my thighs and buttocks.

Because her abusiveness is part of a lifelong campaign of control and because she is careful to rationalize her abuse, it is extremely difficult to explain to other people what is so bad about her…

How true this is! NM went through friends like a monkey through peanuts. She was glib and charming (in an intense, slightly tawdry kind of way) and highly intelligent. She would make friends with people…never with women more attractive than she was, however…who were useful to her in one way or another. They were flattered by her friendship, and because it doesn’t occur to people that someone will lie about their children in negative ways (they might pump up a child’s abilities or attributes or achievements but not the reverse), when NM said bad things about me, people paid attention—including family members—and belived every word. This, of course, is a neat trick to discredit me in case I ever screw up the courage to speak up. And it works: when a teacher once saw the marks on the back of my legs and took me aside to query me about them, she wanted to know what I had done to make my mother so mad as to mark me like that!

She's also careful about when and how she engages in her abuses. She's very secretive, a characteristic of almost all abusers (“Don't wash our dirty laundry in public!”) and will punish you for telling anyone else what she's done.

Yup. A teacher sent me to the school nurse because I couldn’t see the black board; the school nurse tested my eyes, then called NM to tell her I needed glasses. She told the nurse I was “faking it,” that is was just another one of my “attention-getting devices” and there was nothing wrong with my vision. It was not until she was threatened by the nurse that she would call the County and report her for neglect that I got my first pair of glasses…but I paid a heavy price in haranguing, disbelief, threats of doom, and a disdainful, dismissive attitude.

The times and locations of her worst abuses are carefully chosen so that no one who might intervene will hear or see her bad behavior, and she will seem like a completely different person in public.

She even hid it from my father. He worked a part time job at night and she would make me lay across the bed, pants down, and beat me with that strap. When she was done she would warn me that if I breathed a word to my “precious father,” she would give me twice as much the following night. And yet, if you saw us out in public, you would think we were the iconic Fifties family, well-behaved (terrified of misbehaving is more the truth) daughter, mischievous little brother, loving parents… And, of course, she was always the sweet, loving mother saddled with the impossible child…

She'll slam you to other people, but will always embed her devaluing nuggets of snide gossip in protestations of concern, love and understanding (“I feel so sorry for poor Cynthia. She always seems to have such a hard time, but I just don't know what I can do for her!”)

Mine, being an ignoring mother, wouldn’t know enough about my life to say something like this and to do anything for me went against the grain—I was supposed to do for myself, if I wasn’t so (expletive deleted) lazy. But false concern can be directed elsewhere and in such a manner that it gets an ugly, painful, passive-aggressive message across to the real target. NM “felt sorry for those poor girls” next door and nearly had them taken away from their mother whom she disliked because the woman was a focal point of neighbourhood sympathy (she was a war widow with two young daughters). Oddly, my NM managed to do the exact same thing to two other mothers…express “concern” over the children in such a way as to try to get the kids away from their mothers—those mothers, of course, being her real target. By slamming other people until their reputations are in tatters, and then expressing sympathy for the children, she locks in her own rep as a “good guy” so that later, when she sets the machinery in motion to separate the kids from their mother, people believe it is an act of benevolence to spearhead taking innocent children from someone who is, in truth, a perfectly fit mother.

As a consequence the children of narcissists universally report that no one believes them (“I have to tell you that she always talks about YOU in the most caring way!”).

This is painfully true. Additionally, those who do believe them can end up on the receiving end of a smear campaign or find themselves cut firmly out of your life. Only people who believe the narcissistic mother’s slander get to stick around…at least until they learn how they are also being slandered behind their backs and move on.

My NM had a friend I’ll call Beatrix. Bea had a son a bit older than me, a great hulking, fleshy brute of a kid I’ll call Grant. I didn’t like Grant—he was clumsy and grabby and not particularly bright and NM kept shoving us together…I was about 13 and Grant was 14 or 15. One day, en route home from some event, Grant and I were shoved together in the back seat of NM’s car (with my GCBro, who was also a bulky kid) and Grant wouldn’t keep his hands to himself. At one point he tried to kiss me and shove one hand up my skirt, thrusting his tongue into my mouth whereupon I bit him. Of course he let out a roar of protest, I got a slap from my NM and we all rode in silence until we got to Bea’s house. Bea jumped out of the car and hustled Grant inside, incensed at me for hurting him. NM was also pissed at me for tossing a monkey wrench into her friendship with Bea. That he was sexually assaulting me in the backseat of the car with my brother sitting right there and both our mothers in the front seat seemed to be of no issue. “Bea thought you were such a nice girl!” NM told me later. “Guess you proved my point about you, huh?”

Unfortunately therapists, given the deniable actions of the narcissist and eager to defend a fellow parent, will often jump to the narcissist's defense as well, reinforcing your sense of isolation and helplessness (“I'm sure she didn't mean it like that!”)

I didn’t see a therapist with any degree of seriousness until I was in my mid-thirties. My own experience was positive as I found therapists who specialized in adults who had lived through abusive childhoods. But not everyone is so lucky. If you are seeing a therapist and s/he invalidates you (“I’m sure she didn’t mean it like that” or similar discounting), move on to one who is supportive. It is impossible to heal without a support system and if your therapist is undermining you or trying to get you to see things from your N’s point of view, that is not supportive and you need a new one!

Next: Part 2 Violating Boundaries

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Projection: coming from a narcissist near you—

Projection was the first clue I had that my husband James had something terribly, terribly wrong with him. When he reported having an entire conversation with me in his head, becoming angry with me as a result of “my part” in the “conversation,” and then retaliating against me as a result, I was shocked. On questioning him, however, trying to discern just what it was he thought I would say, I was further surprised to discover that, after years of marriage, the responses he imagined I would give were not even close to the kinds of things I would say. They demonstrated a complete lack knowledge about me, my beliefs, values, and even my behaviours. Further probing revealed that the real person he was responding to was his mother and for the entire term of our marriage, he had been projecting…and reacting to…her, not to me. I didn’t even exist.

Most times, projection is slightly different from this type, but both kind have a lack of recognition of the real person who is the victim of projection: the reality of the person is simply not acknowledged and the projecting person’s imaginings are substituted. In classic projection “ .. a person subconsciously denies his or her own attributes, thoughts, and emotions, which are then ascribed to the outside world, usually to other people. Thus, projection involves imagining or projecting the belief that others originate those feelings.”

“In psychopathology, projection is an especially commonly used defense mechanism in people with certain personality disorders: ‘Patients with paranoid personalities, for example, use projection as a primary defense because it allows them to disavow unpleasant feelings and attribute them to others’…all ‘the primitive defenses, such as splitting, projection and projective identification, are commonly connected with primitively organized personalities, such as’: Borderline personality disorder, Narcissistic personality disorder, Antisocial personality disorder, [and] Psychopathy.”

Narcissists and malignant narcissists differ somewhat in that the garden-variety narcissist often operates from a position of lesser consciousness of what she is doing to others, although when confronted she will invariably rationalize or justify her actions and take no responsibility for the hurt she caused. Malignant narcissists are more self-aware in the sense that they consciously create some of the hurt they inflict on others and feel entirely justified in doing so. Both, however, engage in projection and neither of them project with intentional malice…projection doesn’t work that way.

My MNM was a master at projection. When I learned to set a proper table in my Home Ec class and tried to replicate it at home, my mother’s immediate reaction was to assume I wanted something from her. When I later asked for a ride to my Girl Scout meeting, she assumed that I was “buttering her up” so she would be inclined to give me that ride, the fact that I needed a ride every week somehow forgotten. When I did something unexpected, her response was often to think I was “buttering her up” or the contrary—“are you trying to make me mad?” There was some kind of calculating motive behind virtually everything she did and, in true projection mode, she believed others operated just as calculatedly as she did…and often she ascribed to others the feelings or reasons that would have been her own motivations.

A narcissist will believe you are out to get her not because you are or that there is even any indication that you, but because she would be out to get you in a similar circumstance. I read recently about a bride who purposely chose ugly bridesmaid dresses and unflattering coiffures for her wedding party so that none of them could upstage her on “her” day. It would take a narcissist who would actually upstage a bride to think of this and project that onto the women in her wedding party.

James constantly projected his lack of integrity and willingness to “sandbag” others by assuming they also lacked integrity and had no compunctions against sabotaging their colleagues. If, in a meeting, someone disagreed with him, James would immediately assume the other person was doing so for the sole purpose of discrediting him, because that is why he would disagree with someone in a less-than-wholly-private forum: to discredit them and make them look like fools. The idea that someone honestly disagreed with something he had said in the meeting would never occur to him because he, himself, wouldn’t bother to speak up unless there was something to be gained by it: either making someone else look bad so he could look good, or to get credit for something.

Narcissists will do this projecting on virtually any topic with just about anyone. When I was about nine or ten, I was late coming home from the library so I cut through the school yard. NM chose all of my clothes and despite how badly I hated the ugly red oxfords she had bought me that school year, I wore them without protest—they were the only shoes I had and a protest could earn me a beating. In the schoolyard I was accosted by a “flasher,” a man who opened his pants and exposed himself to me. I dropped my books and fled, running across a small creek between the school and my neighbourhood. Hearing my screams, a classmate’s father intercepted me in mid-flight and called my parents and other adults who went to the school in search of the pervert. They found my library books, but nothing else.

My father was appropriately concerned for my well-being but my mother’s grim face told me another story. Sure enough, as soon as she could get me alone she informed me that she knew there was no man at the school, that this whole thing was an elaborate charade on my part to get the shoes wet and ruin them so that she would have to buy me a new pair. My protests were labelled “lies,” and I was beaten for ruining the shoes, “cooking up” a “fairy tale” to explain their damage, and for lying. She made me wear the damaged shoes for months and, when she eventually bought replacement shoes, they were ugly red oxfords like the first pair to “teach me a lesson.” The real truth was, this was the kind of scheme she would have cooked up to get new shoes and that, as far as she was concerned, was exactly what I had done. Her projection took precedence over reality, even with a horde of concerned neighbourhood parents prowling the school looking for the man who had so terrified me.

Projection occurs anyplace a narcissist might appear. Standing in the queue at the market you accidentally bump the woman ahead of you who then turns on you and accuses you of intentionally trying to damage her costly coat because you are jealous of her affluence; I accidentally lost control of the heavy door on my luxury SUV one day as I was getting out of the car and the powerful spring popped it open—and into the door of a tiny little transportation box parked next to it. It didn’t leave a mark, but the owner of the little transportation box saw it happen and, before she even reached the car, was already verbally abusing me for believing that the fact I drove a luxury car gave me the right to “slam into” other cars and damage them. That I was chagrined at the heavy door getting away from me and that I immediately checked to see if the other car was damaged did not even occur to her—no, her very insistence in attributing an unpleasant motive to me told me, on the spot, that were our positions reversed and she was exiting the luxury car, she wouldn’t care if it damaged a little econobox parked next to it—she was projecting her own subconscious onto me. As stated earlier, projecting her feelings onto me allowed her to disavow her own unpleasant feelings and attribute them to another—me.

Projection is a tool that is not exclusive to the narcissist. Anyone can use it, given the right circumstances, but in the hands of a narcissist it is one of the tools that define their lives. Where you might think—or even say—something cutting about another person when, in fact, you really are a little envious of her, the narcissist uses projection to disown her own feelings and ascribe them to others. She is then at liberty to use that projection, what is now her perception of victim, as a justification for anything she chooses to do in retaliation. It is entirely too easy to ascribe motives, beliefs, and feelings to people in the absence of information, but the narcissist hones it to a fine art…and inflicts some painful damage along the way.

You know you are engaging in projection when you say “Well, that is what I would do/want/think,” and then immediately assume that is what someone else is doing. Truth is, you might be right…but there is a pretty high chance that they would be doing/wanting/thinking something entirely different. Narcissists, with their assumption that they are the centre of the universe, find it inconceivable that other people would have different, even loftier, motivations than themselves have.

What can you do about it? What can you do if another person persists in projecting her own motives/beliefs/values onto you? In reality, not much. Projection is a form of denial and trying to get someone to give up denial is a formidable task. To ask them to see you as you really are may well be creating an impossible task and, since the narcissist is only motivated by her own advantage (she doesn’t care if you are hurt or upset by her projection, so there is no motive there), it is unlikely the narcissist will see any reason to put in the effort necessary to inject a little reality into her fantasy kingdom.

Next up: Denial

Monday, April 30, 2012

Triangulation—the narcissist’s secret weapon

“Triangulation” can be defined as indirect communication where one person acts as messenger between two others, often times altering or fabricating the message to suit the tale bearer’s objective. Triangulation is a common tool of the narcissist and it goes hand in glove with “gaslighting” (previous entry) and “projection” (next entry).

In the psychology of dysfunctional families, triangulation may take two forms: “[It] is most commonly used to express a situation in which one family member will not communicate directly with another family member, but will communicate with a third family member, forcing the third family member to then be part of the triangle.

“Triangulation can also be used as a label for a form of “splitting” in which one person plays the third family member against one that he or she is upset about. This is playing the two people against each other, but usually the person doing the splitting, will also engage in character assassination…”

Splitting and narcissistic personality disorder: “People who are diagnosed with a narcissistic personality disorder also use splitting as a central defense mechanism. They do this to preserve their self-esteem, by seeing the self as purely good and the others as purely bad. The use of splitting also implies the use of other defense mechanisms, namely devaluation, idealization and denial.”

Narcissists tend to use both forms of triangulation, sometimes virtually simultaneously. I have a friend—I’ll call her Sandra—who has a malignant narcissist for a mother, a woman so warped and evil, she would give my own a run for the money. Unlike lucky me, however, whose MNM has been dead for nearly 15 years, Sandra’s predatory NM continues to live and torment her. Not everyone in Sandra’s FOO is under the MN’s spell, however, so Sandra has some family support. Sandra’s brother regularly gets letters from their mother outlining how horrible Sandra is and going into great detail about Sandra’s terrible behaviour. Like my MNM, Sandra’s mother will take a tiny grain of truth and build on it, massage it, and twist it to give it new meaning. The brother then calls Sandra and reports the content of the letter to her, sometimes even forwarding the letter on to Sandra. Through these letters, Sandra knows that her NM assassinates her character with other family members through the same splitting technique: uncles, aunts, cousins and even Sandra’s sister, receive similar messages about her. One might be tempted to suggest to the brother that he relinquish his part in the triangle and keep the letters to himself, but then Sandra would not be aware of what her MNM is up to…and since the woman has made threats to have Sandra arrested on trumped up charges, it is in Sandra’s own best interests to know what bee is currently in her MNM’s bonnet.

One of the things that makes triangulation works is the human tendency towards “confirmation bias.” This is a subconscious mechanism that we all have and, unless we are actively aware of it and take steps to control it, we can easily fall prey to it. “Confirmation bias” is our tendency to believe things that support what we already believe (or that which we heard first) coupled with a tendency to discount things that do not support our existing beliefs. “My mind is made up, don’t confuse me with facts,” might be the motto of the person with an active case of confirmation bias going on.

It is very hard to dislodge a person who has made up his/her mind—if they listen to information that is contrary to their existing beliefs and give them credence, they may have to admit they are wrong. Even if their own observations go contrary to their belief, some people will simply discount their observations; they may believe it an anomaly or even an intentional effort to fool them. Whatever they do to discount their observations…or yours…you can be sure that getting them to change their minds is a uphill battle that may never be won.

On the other hand, even when you have a confirmation bias going, if you are bombarded with enough contrary information for a long enough period of time, especially if you seldom have an opportunity to make observations that shore up your own bias—and most especially if a few things happen that seem to support the contrary information—most of us will eventually begin to subconsciously shift our opinions. Confirmation bias is what allows otherwise sensible, intelligent people to disbelieve a truth that may well be obvious to the rest of us.

Indoctrination plays a part in confirmation bias, as does “cognitive dissonance,” which is “the feeling of discomfort that results from holding two conflicting beliefs. When there is a discrepancy between beliefs and behaviors, [or first-hand observation] something must change in order to eliminate or reduce the dissonance.” So, if you are indoctrinated over a period of years to believe that your Uncle Bob is an evil man who cannot be trusted, yet your observations of Uncle Bob is that he is a kind-hearted man who goes out of his way to help others, you may experience cognitive dissonance with regard to him. Since few people tolerate cognitive dissonance well, we are motivated to “settle” the matter by choosing one or the other: Uncle Bob is good and the people who have been telling you otherwise have been lying or those people are right and Uncle Bob is someone to be wary of. Confirmation bias will lean you towards Uncle Bob being a bad actor and a little critical thinking may push you further in that direction: why, after all, would these people lie about Uncle Bob? What’s in it for them? And, since you cannot come up with a single good reason that these good people would lie about him, they must be correct, right?

In a normal family primarily peopled with normal people, this deduction would be largely accurate. In the dysfunctional family, particularly a family driven by a narcissist, the deduction based on how normal people think and feel will be largely inaccurate, simply because the narcissist does things the rest of us would never do—like damage Uncle Bob’s reputation out of spite or as an exercise in the narcissist’s power. You think all of those people saying bad things about Uncle Bob cannot be wrong? Actually, they can—it takes only one narcissist feeding ugly misinformation and accusations about Bob to a lot of people over an extended period of time for people, especially those who do not see Bob often, to become indoctrinated to the idea that Bob is bad news. Those who have no frame of reference will uncritically accept the information they receive as truth because, after all, why would anyone lie about this stuff?

Sometimes the triangulation takes the form of “he said/she said” dramas with the narcissist in the middle, controlling the flow of information. Some people will stir up strife between others to take attention off themselves, as an exercise in power, or simply to entertain themselves. Think “mean girls” in school who play people off against each other, meanwhile keeping their own skirts clean. Suzie tells Mary that she saw Jenny flirting with her boyfriend, which makes Mary mad at Jenny and causes her to say some rude things about Jenny’s character. Susie may then tells Jenny that Mary is mad at her and even repeats some of the things Mary said, causing the antipathy to flow in both directions. In the unlikely event that Mary and Jenny stop shouting at each other long enough to compare notes and then jointly confront Suzie, Suzie can feign surprise and claim that she did see what looked like a flirtation to her and those ugly words were spoken. Neither of her victims will have a defense against her claims and the conflict may well resume, providing Suzie with endless entertainment.

Narcissists, however, seem to favour the “splitting” form of triangulation, a circumstance in which the victim is denigrated to others, often for extended periods of time, in order to make the victim to look bad in the eyes of many. Why would anyone do that? Because it is an essential first step to demonize someone, to divide and conquer, to set the stage for the narcissist’s acquisition of Nsupply.

In narcissistic households it is common for one (or more) child(ren) to be designated as a scapegoat. There does not need to be a triggering event to identify the child, although such “sins” as being a colicky baby or even a child demanding attention at a time the narcissistic mother is disinclined to provide it, may make the NM select one child over another. In my case, my NM once informed me that nobody had told her that a baby was not like a doll that you could “just put up on the closet shelf when you were tired of playing with her.” Add to the fact that I was colicky, had eczema from my earliest months, and had the audacity to get dirty when she set me out to play in a dirt chicken yard wearing starched and painstakingly ironed embroidered and pin-tucked white cotton batiste baby dresses like the one show here and—well—it seemed my fate was sealed. I was a lot more work than she bargained for and every need that had to be filled on my timetable instead of hers was an imposition. I was a disappointment, not at all what she wanted or expected, but she couldn’t take me back to the store for a refund. I was not the endless source of adoration she had expected, and so, since I would not provide her with the Nsupply she wanted, NM found another way to get it: by declaring me “bad” and difficult and (as I got older) manipulative and contrary, she got Nsupply in the form of sympathy from people. “Poor Georgia, saddled with that intractable child! How wonderful, how brave she is to be able to deal with her and keep cheerful and positive!”

By the time I reached my teens, I was virtually evil incarnate in the eyes of my NM. I was regularly blindsided by accusations of behaviours and motives that had quite literally never crossed my mind. Such things left me confused and often tearful, for I felt unjustly accused and was not permitted to speak in my defense: anything I said was labelled excuses or lies. On a weekend visit to my father’s I managed to find some time alone with him (I didn’t dare speak my mind in front of my brother, who was already well-groomed as a spy) and poured out my heart particularly about my NM’s accusations of things that I had never even thought of. “She’s assuming you are like her,” my father told me. “These are things she would do, reasons she would have, stuff she would think. It really has nothing to do with you—she doesn’t even see you, she sees what she would have done or thought or said.” My first clue about projection and how the narcissist incorporates it into her dealings.

But, of course, my father knew me…he had spent years living with and observing me at the same time NM was writing those letters back to her family telling them how awful I was. Their own brief observations of me, observations in which I was a rather withdrawn, fearful child (I once refused to “help” my grandmother make mud pies because my mother would be angry if I got dirty—despite the fact that my mother was 1000+ miles away) were offset by more than a decade of indoctrination and triangulating. According to NM, I had not been incarcerated by the juvenile court as “incorrigible” because I had “charmed” the judge; and even though the truth was that I had never even seen the judge and I was not sent to reform school for the simple reason that I had never been in any kind of trouble either at school or with the law. NM pronounced me a “liar” when I told that truth—and nobody believed me. Why, after all, would she lie about her own child that way?

Triangulation depends on one person sitting in the middle controlling information flow between others. The person in the middle is the arbiter of information: she tells people what she wants them to hear and often does her level best to prevent the others from talking to each other and comparing notes. She channels information between parties, removing stuff she doesn’t like, twisting—or even outright fabricating—information that will tend to cause her “correspondents” either take the bait and form opinions that mirror her own or be kept in the dark as to what is really going on. A narcissist’s motives for triangulating those around her are as varied as the narcissists themselves—some do it for power and entertainment, others do it to make others look bad so they can look good by comparison, others may be exacting a spiteful “payback” or retaliation for some real or imagined wrong.

But the legacy of being the victim in narcissist’s triangulation scheme can be long lived—it may even live longer than the narcissist herself. Nearly fifteen years after my MNM’s death and more than thirty years after her treachery in stealing my children and giving them to her brother for adoption was revealed, there are still family members who shun me, who believe the truth is an elaborate lie designed to discredit NM. “Why,” they ask, “Why would a mother say such awful things about her own daughter if they weren’t true?”

Why, indeed?

Next up: Projection

Thursday, April 19, 2012

Scapegoat or Golden Child: victims of narcissistic apartheid

Apartheid, a word derived from the Afrikaans word for “apartness,” was a governmental policy of segregation against non-whites in South Africa until the last decade of the 20th century. Since that time, the word has evolved to mean segregation in other contexts as well.

Like most Americans, my view of South Africa’s apartheid system government was that it oppressed the non-white members of its society while providing unjust advantage and privilege to the white members. It was not until I lived here for a while that I realized how simplistic and misleading that viewpoint actually was.

During the apartheid, not only did the non-white people live under onerous restrictions, but the whites did as well. White people could not go to certain parts of their country—they were reserved for non-whites. So, while the beautiful bathing beaches of Durban were white-only, others relegated to the rocky, less pristine shores, if a white person wished to go rock climbing or fishing, take photos of the rock formations or just sit on the rocks that were, perhaps, closer to home than the white-only beaches, he was forbidden to do so.

This may seem small, but this segregation extended to all facets of society. White people could not associate with non-whites, even if they truly wanted to. To be romantically involved with a non-white put you in danger of being jailed; you could not buy a house or even land wherever you wanted—you had to limit such a purchase to areas designated for whites. You had no freedom of association. News coming into the country was filtered to remove any trace of information that might present free options to the minds of the people; movies were censored, television not even permitted in the country until the late 1970s, and then the programming was tightly controlled so as not to provide any incentive to rock the separatist’s boat.

This is not to say that the lot of the white South African was as bad as the lot of the blacks, coloureds and “Asians” (actually, people of Indian descent whose ancestors came here as manual labourers in the sugar cane fields). It was not as bad—but it was not a life of unfettered freedom.

One of the legacies of apartheid that persists to this day, nearly two decades after its end, is the persistent sense, among the white people, that they should be privileged. They feel an entitlement to things people in free societies have known all along were not possible: complete safety, for example. The apartheid society was a police state: if you weren’t in the “right” part of town (based on your race), especially after dark, you risked arrest. Crime statistics were reported only on crimes against whites during this time, so modern crime statistics seem alarmingly high by comparison as they report all crime regardless of the race of the victim. White people in this country expect to be safe everywhere, all of the time and blame the non-white government because they are not.

White people here also have other expectations—a sense of entitlement, if you will—that comes as a legacy of their years of being the advantaged class. Affirmative action is alive and well here and when a young black is hired over a young white, both of them having the same educational background and experience, people cry “unfair,” as if it would have somehow been more fair to hire the white guy. But unlike Americans, who also struggle with a sense of unfairness with regard to Affirmative Action, South Africans are prone to “throw their toys out of the cot”—to have a tantrum about the situation that involves pulling up sticks and moving to another country where they can be terribly surprised to learn that crime and workplace competitiveness also exist!

If you have been following along with this, perhaps you have picked up the subtext: in apartheid South Africa, the non-white citizens were the Scapegoats, the whites were the Golden Children. The society was a macrocosm of life in a dysfunctional household in which the dominant parent was narcissistic. It featured such staples of the narcissistic home as triangulation (information in and out of the country channelled through a single filtering source), gaslighting (telling people their own perceptions of right and wrong, fair and unfair were incorrect), rigid control, blaming, and the creation of a fantastical unreality, an ideal state, in which everyone there must deny reality and buy into the fantasy or suffer the consequences.

In a narcissistic household, one (or more) members of the family are singled out to be the scapegoat, the one to whom the narcissists assigns blame for just about everything. I, for example, was told by my mother when I was 14 that everything that was wrong in her life was my fault—because I had been born! Taking responsibility for getting pregnant with me was not in the cards there—no, the fact of my existence was the reason her fine plans (fantasies) for her life had not panned out.

In these narcissistic household there in also at least one Golden Child, the child who can do no wrong, the child who is the spoiled darling of the narcissist. The Scapegoat may be even be held responsible for the behaviour of the Golden Child—when I was a kid, I got punished when my younger (but bigger) brother misbehaved because I was the oldest and it was therefore my job to make him do his chores and stay out of trouble. This was the case from as young as I can remember and the patent absurdity of making a scrawny 3 year old responsible for the actions of her sturdy, unsupervised toddler brother never seemed to dawn on my mother.

In a household in which there is only one child, that child may alternately be the Scapegoat and the Golden Child, depending on the narcissist’s mood and need to blame something on someone. This has got to be both confusing and crazy-making for the child but, for some odd reason, it seems perfectly rational to the narcissist.

We all have sympathy for the scapegoated child. Nobody should have to live their lives being blamed—and penalized for—the behaviours of other people, but this is what happens in the narcissistic household. But most of us don’t harbour an equal amount of sympathy for the Golden Child. Just like in our view of South Africa’s apartheid era, we sympathize with the downtrodden non-white citizens while at the same time, completely ignoring the dysfunction their more privileged brethren were trained into.

This dysfunction is pervasive and can even define who that Golden Child becomes as a person. They can be resistant to change simple because they fear—sometimes on an intellectually inaccessible level—that change will mean them losing their privilege. Look at the controversy about gay marriage: those who do not have the right to marry seek to share that right with those who do. They want to share. But the opponents are vocal in their fear that somehow extending the right to marry to gay people will somehow diminish their own marriages, take something away from them, even though they are unable to articulate how Adam and Steve getting married will have any tangible effect on their own unions. That other Western nations have legalized it with no deleterious effect on traditional male-female marriages, that it has not led to marrying siblings or pets, penetrates not. These, the holders of state-given rights, are fearful of losing something if those same rights are extended to those who have been heretofore denied them.

While there really is nothing for the opponents to lose in extending marriage rights to the LGBT community, such is not the case in the narcissistic household. The Golden Child may grow up with privilege, but she also grows up with the sure knowledge that at the caprice of the narcissistic parent, her position of privilege can be ended in a heartbeat. And one of the surest ways of getting yourself demoted from Golden Child to Scapegoat is to sympathize with that Scapegoat. The Golden Child must become a psychic “Mini-me” to the narcissist or risk the loss of privilege. And, because there is not middle ground in the narcissist’s mind—if you aren’t for her, then you must be against her—to avoid being cast down, the Golden Child must pander to the narcissistic parent, and in exchange receive the adoration and privileged treatment denied the Scapegoat.

While I was a Scapegoat for most of my life, I did have a brief period as the Golden Child. Not because my mother became disenchanted with my Golden Child brother, however, but because she found a “use” for me. She discovered that I could sing—really sing—when I was about 6 or 7 years old and decided she was going to make me into the next Shirley Temple (a well-known child star of my mother’s youth). Having been the Scapegoat for all of my years with her, I dreaded attention, as it usually meant I was going to end up getting hurt or punished in some way. My mother, however, thought to motivate me by telling me how famous she was going to make me (and, I heard her tell others, how rich I was going to make her), but the whole idea of fame gave me the shudders. It was just too much attention, which I perceived as being dangerous. But during that time, my mother spent hours sewing costumes, curling my poker-straight hair, painting my face with her cosmetics, and dragging me from audition to audition, from talent contests to nightclubs to TV programs to whatever venue she could dig up for me to stand in front of a large audience, my knobby knees virtually knocking with stage fright. She bragged about me, implying that other people’s children were inferior because they didn’t have my big talent. What she never did was pay attention to what I really wanted—something Golden Children often suffer from as much as Scapegoats. When, after a couple of years, it became apparent that I did not want fame the way she did, I was bumped from my tenuous position as Golden Child back to my familiar place among the cinders.

Golden Children suffer in ways we Scapegoats—and even the Golden Children themselves—may not readily recognize. Charlie’s brother, Alvin, was a Golden Child, blatantly his mother’s favourite. And he was a self-made multi-millionaire. But he made his money by skating on the thin edge of the law, disadvantaging others to advantage himself financially, more a con man than a businessman. He grew up without morals, without values, without empathy for anyone other than himself, including the mother who idolized him. He thought himself happy, rolling in money, but he drank himself stupid and had a string of unhappy marriages to women who were no less fixated on him money than he was. He had no respect for others, no self respect either. His mother excused his every transgression by convincing herself that he behaved no different from any other rich man, and to maintain his mother’s adulation, he had to maintain his wealth, no matter who he hurt in the bargain—himself, his estranged daughter, his brother, even 90+ year old ladies he conned into buying investment instruments that were useless to them but paid him a handsome commission.

There is a critical difference between the victims of South Africa’s apartheid regime and the victims of a narcissistic household: where the white South Africans did not have much in the way of democratic role models (that being a concept vigorously suppressed by the State) and the entered adulthood with precious few examples of another way to think or be, the Golden Child has an abundance of examples and role models, from schoolmates and teachers to television and movies to magazines and books, to exemplify a different way of thinking, a more just set of values, a more compassionate way of feeling. Upon achieving adulthood, the Golden Child does not remain trapped in the apartheid of the narcissist’s fantasy world unless he wants to. The Golden Child, unlike the white apartheid victim in the “old days,” has a feast of freedom set at her feet, a feast from which she may partake at any time. Nobody broadcasts messages of elitism to the Golden Child and suppresses messages of justice and fairness as a global phenomenon. The Golden Child, should she desire to do so, may step out from under the mantle of privilege and entitlement settled on her shoulders by a dysfunctional, manipulative parent. Unlike the white apartheid victims of 20 years ago, freedom is at the Golden Child’s fingertips and the consequences of embracing it is highly unlikely to be beatings, imprisonment, or even death.

And yet too many Golden Children will not take the freedom because they value their positions of privilege too much to jeopardize it. From small things like expecting receive the best piece of meat at the dinner table to big things like not feeling bad when receiving a family inheritance that left out the Scapegoat sibling, Golden Children receive much as a result of their assigned role in the family, often at the expense of others, and as adults, few of them find any reason to change that. And so they remain spoilt, entitled, indulged. Without remorse. Without compassion. And without coercion.

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Arrested Development

From House of Mirrors:

Let’s take a look at why malignant narcissists not only don't change but become worse. Keep in mind, they have mastered a lifetime of this twisted way of being in the world, and are always pushing their warped behavior to the limits.

All Malignant Narcissists are a case of arrested development. They live in the mindset of a child. Like a child, they know the difference between right and wrong but choose to do wrong when they can get away with it. However, unlike a child, the narcissist cannot be influenced by authority figures. The narcissist believes they are the ultimate authority on everything. They are determined to remain children who always get their way. And like all spoiled brats who control everyone by temper tantrums and bad behaviour they only get worse with the more they get away with.

“…they know the difference between right and wrong but choose to do wrong when they can get away with it…” This describes my mother to a T. How do I know she understood that some things were wrong but chose to do them any way? Because she taught me they were wrong and punished me when I did them. She also taught my brother, the Golden Child, that such things were wrong, but when he did them, I got punished for letting him.

For example, she taught us it was wrong to lie. If she suspected I was lying, I got punished (and punishment at her hands was brutal!). And yet, she regularly and easily lied, and even forced me to be complicit. My father worked two jobs, one full-time day job and one part-time evening job. When he would leave after dinner for his evening job, MNM would dress up, put on make up, high heels and jewellery and go “bar hopping,” (her term) leaving us alone. Not only was I admonished not to say anything to my father about her nocturnal activities, I was expected to keep my hyperactive, undisciplined little brother (who was bigger than I was) out of trouble while she was gone…nice trick for a scrawny 7-year-old and a husky bruiser of a 5-year-old!

On one occasion my brother found our father’s camera and disassembled it. Unable to put it back together, he got a hammer from the kitchen drawer and used it in an attempt to force the front and back halves of the camera back together. I was unable to stop him (and, truth be told, I was afraid to try to wrestle the hammer away from him lest he clobber me with it!) and when my mother got home, shortly before my father was due home from his night job, all hell broke loose. I was punished for “letting” my brother break the camera and we were both sent to bed after being told to say nothing about this, that she would handle it.

The walls in our house were paper thin and my bedroom adjoined the living room. My bed was pushed up against the shared wall, so at night I could hear what was going on in the next room. Through that thin wall, I heard my mother tell my father than my little brother had damaged the camera while she was out at the wash lines…a blatant lie if I ever heard one!...and that he had already been punished for it.

She knew it was wrong to steal, and she taught us it was wrong to steal and even punished us for stealing. But, like all narcissists, the rules didn’t apply to her, only to us lesser and unfavoured mortals.

My father liked to fish and hunt. He and my mother both had jobs to support my mother’s upwardly mobile lifestyle, and my father had a second job as well. What my father wanted more than anything was a good hunting rifle. With it he could not only indulge his pleasure of hunting, he could provide meat for the table. And to that end, my father began saving money, secreting it in the closet, far back on the shelf.

My mother, however, considered such pastimes to be “low class” and did not support his ambitions. Instead of the hunting rifle he wanted, for his birthday she gave him a solid gold tie pin in the shape of a crab. My father was a Pisces, not a Cancer, and I doubt he had ever eaten crab, so the reason for her choosing that emblem was a mystery. And a tie pin? My father owned only one tie and wore it no more than once a year. But it was gold and it was a tie pin so that when they got dressed up to go somewhere, my father would look prosperous...God forbid my mother associating in public with someone whose appearance did not shore up her own.

So, knowing the rifle would never be a gift from his wife, Daddy started saving money from his night job. And then my mother found it. I know she didn’t ask him about the money, what it was for or why he was hiding it. I know this because I still remember hearing them, through that paper thin wall, fight about it. He demanded that she give it back and she very sarcastically said she wouldn’t even if she could—it had already been spent. He was outraged, she was completely unashamed…her tone of voice was superior and condescending. And a few weeks later a new living room suite arrived, a sectional sofa and chair and several blonde wood tables, all perfectly in keeping with the trend of the day. She even got a neighbour, who was a carpenter and painter, to come and paint the living room walls to match the rosy pink chair and intense turquoise bouclé loop sofa. Daddy’s savings were gone, but my mother had the trendy new furniture she wanted that leapfrogged her into the position of having the newest, most fashionable and enviable stuff on the block.

She knew stealing was wrong…she told her children it was wrong and even punished me if she suspected me (or my brother) of stealing. Yet, when she found it, she shamelessly and without remorse, stole the money my father had been saving for a hunting rifle, something that would not only bring him pleasure but would have the added benefit of putting meat on the table (he liked to go deer hunting and a single deer could provide us with meat for the table for the better part of a year).

While Lisette states that narcissists cannot be influenced by authority figures, like parents, I am not so sure this is entirely correct. My mother, for example, moved from the northern Willamette Valley in Oregon to San Diego to distance herself from her parents (and a scandal she created that caused the people in their very small town to shun her) and she seemed to dread their visits. She changed when they were there, she actually seemed normal. It proved to me that she did know how to behave properly because she did so in front of her parents. I got no beatings while they were around, no nasty, vituperative tongue lashings, and I wasn’t punished for my brother’s misbehaviour. Life seemed normal…or at least what I imagined to be normal…when my grandparents were there.

My grandparents had several big walnut trees in their back garden and when they came down to visit, they always brought a big box of walnuts with them. I can remember sitting on the floor in front of the TV, cracking and eating walnuts to my heart’s content—I was never hungry when my grandparents were around. But as soon as they left, those walnuts were gathered up and put away, with instructions that we were not to touch them without permission, permission for which I was too intimidated to ask. Eventually they would go bad and they would be tossed out with the trash. Once my grandparents were gone, so was my mother’s “good” behaviour.

My mother had a temper and I was terrified of her when she let it loose. “…like all spoiled brats who control everyone by temper tantrums and bad behaviour…” Yep, that was my mother. I was afraid of her in general, but when she got angry—which was often—I was frequently in fear of my life. For one thing, anything could set her off. I had to wash the accumulated breakfast and lunch dishes when I got home from school (even though I was so young I needed to stand on a chair to get to the sink). My brother was supposed to dry them and put them away, but because he knew that he would not get punished for failing to do so (I would get it for not making him do his chores), both the washing and drying fell to me. If I did not put them away “right,” if I stacked the pans wrong, if I put the can opener in the wrong drawer or mixed a big spoon in with the little ones, it was a punishable offense. I have been dragged out of bed by my hair, my mother screaming almost unintelligibly at me, and pulled into the kitchen where I was told to put a glass or cup in its proper place or pick up a piece of trash that had not made it into the sack, then whipped with a thin leather strap every step of the way back to bed. Did she know this was wrong? Of course—“if you tell your precious father about this, you’ll get twice as much tomorrow when he leaves for work,” she would tell me…like a naughty child, a schoolyard bully, who threatens you with more violence if you report his bad behaviour.

They never grow out of it. My mother remained mean and angry and punitive right up to her death. When she died she had two children and four grandchildren. She had inherited a lot of money from her parents and when she wrote her will, she wrote one child and three grandchildren out of it “for reasons they already know.” One of those grandchildren she had refused to meet for the whole of his 26 years—how could he know anything? But her last act was to put the cat amongst the pigeons and create conflict and hurt feelings among her children and grandchildren for years to come. I can just imagine her writing out the will, smiling and congratulating herself for turning one of her grandchildren into the next family bully and sowing a legacy of dysfunction into the next generations. Like spoiled little chidren, narcissists must always get their way.

Facebook Group!

The Narcissist's Child now has a Facebook group dedicated to helping adults who had narcissistic parents or parental figures: this group is not suitable for children or for the parents of children whose other parent is a narcissist. Unless you or your spouse had a narcissistic parent, this group will not be the right place for you.

Because the group is classified as a "secret" group, nobody can find it on a Facebook search, so your name and membership are completely confidential.

I personally monitor the group daily. No narcs, trolls, or manipulation/attacks are allowed, and anyone who engages in that kind of behaviour will have to leave the group. The objective is to create a safe place where you can talk to each other (and me) in privacy about the journey from victim to victor.

If you would like to join, send me an email using the form at the bottom of this page (do NOT use the comment section because that will publish your email address for the world to see) telling me a little about yourself and your experiences with narcissistic parents or parental figures and why you wish to join the group and I will get back to you.

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