Why we stay

Despite having Low Contact and No Contact available as tools to help us deal with our NMs, many of us do not take advantage of them. We continue to expose ourselves to their toxic ways, perhaps hoping “this time it will be different” or justifying our complicity in our own victimization with such rationalizations as “I don’t want to miss my sister’s wedding,” or “how can I deprive my kids of their grandparents?” or even “I won’t let her push me out of this family and win!” I have to wonder: if you had it on good authority that someone had put a contract out on you, if you attended that wedding, that reunion, that Christmas dinner, there would be a sniper lurking with a gun pointed right at your heart and he had been paid to shoot you dead in front of all and sundry, would you go anyway? Would those “reasons” for going still motivate you, despite the certain knowledge that would be shot and either seriously wounded…maybe even killed…if you showed up?

Ok, some people are so sunk in denial that they would go anyway, but wouldn’t the majority of us stay away, fearing for our lives? We would fear physical wounding, even death and take steps to protect ourselves, even though we know that, if only wounded, we would eventually heal. Despite that knowledge, however, we still fear the pain of injury and the possibility of death, the painful healing process, the potential for being maimed and even permanently crippled by the injury. We shy away self-protectively, preferring to protect our bodies…and our kids and spouses from any potential stray bullets…over contact with our families and NMs.

So I have to ask: why is your psyche…and the psyches of your kids and spouse…not as important as your physical body? Why would you protect yourself from being shot and maimed or killed, but not protect yourself from the predations you know, from long and painful experience, will be an inevitable part of having contact with your NM and her flying monkeys? Why is it not OK for her to kill your body, but it is not only OK for her to kill your spirit, it is so OK that you help her by serving yourself up, like a Christmas turkey, for her consumption?

Have you asked yourself this? Have you ever even thought about it? Are you thinking about it now? Why do we do this to ourselves?

The answer is simple: we expect them to change, to be different this time. Why we expect that change, however, is not so monolithic.

It isn’t really hope that keeps us stuck in the earlier stages…the “living in hope” stage comes later, when we have exhausted everything else and hope is all we have left. Once the penny drops and we realize we are dealing with a parent who is dysfunctional, before we reach that “living in hope” stage, we first go through many of the stages of grieving…and we may even get stuck in some of them.

Wikipedia reports “Studies of pedagogy, the process of teaching, suggest that the patterns of grief are one way of describing the basic patterns of integrating new information that conflicts with previous beliefs.” How apropos this is for us! In becoming aware that something is wrong with our mothers, in processing the information that they are not the loving, nurturing beings we expected them to be—and realizing that their negative behaviour towards us was not our fault—don’t we follow the Kubler-Ross grief dynamic? Remember the stages do not have to occur in any strict order…and they can happen simultaneously. I found it fascinating too learn that the stages of grief are virtually identical to our patterns of integrating new information that conflicts with old. We get stuck when we are unwilling to let go of the old information and accept the new…when we cling to denial and a preferred belief rather than embrace a new and painful truth. Sometimes we want to have our cake and eat it to: to acknowledge intellectually that our NMs are cold and unloving and did not love us in the way we deserved and needed but, at the same time, emotionally cling to the notion that she does love us, “in her own way,” despite abundant evidence to the contrary or…more tellingly…that we have the power to win her love if we could just figure out the “right” thing to do or say or be.

Denial, the first stage of grief, is something we are all familiar with. We somehow feel compelled to protect our NMs at our own expense, to take blame for her cold and unloving behaviour and attitudes towards us, to deny that her unloving behaviour comes from an unloving heart. We would rather believe we were not compliant enough, obedient enough, loving enough: we committed an endless litany of sins that turned our otherwise good and loving mother against us. We are at fault and we feel guilt for it. If you look at this notion rationally, it makes no sense: a truly loving mother will love her child no matter what…and most definitely through the natural mishaps and mistakes of childhood. You do not have to earn your mother’s real love with perfect behaviour and anticipating her every whim: mothers who require that of their children do not love the child, they love the behaviour.

We, as a people, find it difficult to say…and accept… “I don’t know” as an answer to anything. Myths are spawned by this inability, as we naturally fear the unknown. To name something is to potentially have power over it…or at least over yourself in its presence. Early man knew this…their priests and shamen came up with stories to explain lightning and tides, storms and seasons, even the transit of the sun across the sky. “Knowing” the cause of these things, even if such knowledge involved magic hammers, horses and chariots pulling the sun, and thunderbolts being hurled from a mountaintop, was less frightening to the people than not knowing at all. And so, when we face the sad fact that our mothers did not have a natural mother’s love for us, it is less frightening, less painful, to blame ourselves than to admit we don’t really know why. It also gives us a feeling of control over something that, in fact, we have no control over at all.

How is that? Because if we believe that we have some fault in an on-going event, we also believe we have the power to influence it by changing our faulty behaviour. And it is this belief that keeps us stuck, stuck, stuck.

How many times have you thought that if you were only smarter, prettier, more compliant, less clumsy or forgetful, more able to read her mind, she would love you more? It is amazing what a love-starved child…or adult…will do to gain what she identifies as love from an unloving parent: a 14 year-old-girl in England allowed her mother to artificially inseminate her so that her mother could have a fourth child to raise because “If I do this . . . maybe she will love me more.” As long as we think our behaviour influences the dispensation of love from our narcissistic parent, we willingly participate in the manipulation believing, like the English girl, “If I do this…maybe she will love me more.”

The second stage of grief is anger. Many of us engage in both denial and anger simultaneously, angry that our siblings are treated better than we are, angry we are denied that which our peers take for granted, angry that our expectations are repeatedly disappointed. If we have ventured a step or two out of denial and realize the truth of how we are being abused, our anger may escalate into rage and hatred. Too often, however, we feel guilt for our anger, guilt for thinking “badly” about people we are, according to our cultural norms, supposed to love and trust unconditionally.

The third stage of grief is bargaining, and this is where we fall into that false sense of control: “if I do what she wants, she will reciprocate by doing what I want.” The problem is, she won’t…and then you have a disappointed expectation to deal with, which may well trigger more anger. But if you are stuck in the bargaining stage, you will be wracking your brain for new and better ways to elicit the desired response from her, keeping the cycle of denial, anger, and bargaining going indefinitely.

Depression is the fourth stage of grief and it precedes acceptance. Depression is, in itself, a kind of denial, a final refusal to accept the truth even while knowing what the truth is. During this stage you are perceiving the truth but not yet ready to embrace it. A lot of people get stuck here, vacillating between it and earlier stages, all in an effort to put off embracing the final stage. This is where getting stuck in hope happens: unwilling to embrace the finality of acceptance, unwilling to fully acknowledge the truth of an NM’s lack of emotional connection to the child, we get stuck here, relying on hope to come to the rescue, clinging to a futile and childlike hope for our wish…that our NMs will magically morph into loving, caring mothers…to miraculously come true. It is not until we are willing to relinquish that wish, that hope, that we can move on to the final stage of grief:

Acceptance. Here, you come to terms with the unpleasant and unhappy reality of your mother. You know that she is the one who is at the root of her lack of love for you, not you. You accept that nothing you can do will elicit love from her because she doesn’t have it to give. You stop trying, you stop feeling guilty, your anger begins to wane. No longer hiding behind anger and rage, no longer shielding yourself with denial, you stop bargaining and you start actually feeling the hurt that you have been hiding from for so long…and it feels good and cleansing to feel those feelings, weep over them, and purge them. You may not entirely give up hope, but you now relegate it to a faint flicker in the place where you keep your latent belief in magic and miracles: you know it probably will never happen and your life is no longer held hostage to it.

And you feel free. You feel free to walk away or to stay: her barbs no longer have the power to wound you to your very soul. You may even feel sorry for her, knowing how inadequate she really is and how desperately she tries to conceal that from everyone, including yourself. You no longer feel compelled to bargain for something that does not even exist, you don’t have the desire to deny the reality of who and what she is, and if you are angry with her, it no longer controls and interferes with living your own life.

Why do you stay? Because you continue to expect, in one way or another, that she will change. As long as that is a part of your beliefs, you cannot be free. As long as you harbour the belief that she will one day, through a mechanism still unknown to you, realize she loves you and then will be motivated to communicate that to you, you stay. Locked in a prison of pain, you hold the key to your freedom in your own hands, if you would but use it. It is your belief that she has love for you and you have the power to somehow release it that keeps you where you are. And only you have the power to let that go.

Action vs Reaction: are you still being controlled by your narcissist?

It’s something I have heard over and over again…and something I have said myself: “I just do the opposite of what my mother would have done…” And just as I did, we often say this with a touch of pride, as if mindlessly doing the opposite of what some personality disordered person is doing somehow mysteriously conveys some kind of superiority or correctness upon us.

The truth is, when we choose an action primarily because it is the antithesis of what someone else would do or would want us to do, we are rebelling. It doesn’t matter if we are choosing a partner, a lifestyle, a personal style, or our parenting techniques, if we make choices based on opposing someone else, we are engaging in unthinking rebellion rather than making wise, well-considered, adult choices.

In some ways, this may appear to work out okay, but if you really think about, living your life in reaction to someone else is not really living your life, is it? It is living the opposite of someone else’s.

When I was a kid, I used to envy one of my classmates, a boy I will call Kevin Greene. He was obese and dressed like a miniature old man, and always had his hair slicked down like the stereotype of a budding actuary or accountant. He was pasty-white as if he never saw the sun, ungainly and lumbering in his gait and unpopular and shunned by the other kids, but his mother doted on him. And, being a child who was largely invisible to her mother (and grateful for it because that meant she wasn’t finding new ways to hurt me), I found myself very envious of Kevin because his mother quite obviously adored him.

In a time when even first graders walked to and from school unaccompanied by an adult, Kevin’s mother drove him to school. It was obvious that his family had money because Mrs. Greene wore fur coats and Kevin emerged from a big black Cadillac in front of the school in the morning…on the days he attended. He was absent a lot: all he had to do was tell his mother he didn’t feel like going to school and she called him in sick. I don’t think I took really sharp notice of Kevin until the morning he arrived shortly after the bell rang and he and his mother walked into the classroom after lessons had started. I remember her being tall and draped in what I was sure was a mink coat that reached down past her knees, and lipstick as red as my mother wore. Kevin stood a bit behind her, dressed in his ubiquitous brown trousers and white dress shirt and boy-sized necktie, an ice cream cone in his hand. Ice cream for breakfast!?! I hardly ever even got ice cream for dessert! I was instantly smitten with his mother…she must love Kevin very much to not deny him anything, I thought. Today, I find myself wondering what Mrs. Greene's mother was like...

When I had my first child, I was immediately determined not to treat my precious little baby the same way my NM had treated me: whatever she had done, I was going to do the opposite, and that, I believed, would give my child a much better start in life than I had had. It’s probably a good thing I was dirt-poor in those days and couldn’t afford to spoil her because I had no real parenting plan outside of doing the opposite of what my NM had done with me. I was fortunate to have had a good role model in my step-mother, so I could imagine her in my situation and try to figure out how she would respond to certain challenges, but still: my primary parenting plan was simply to do the opposite of what my mother had done.

This, it turned out, was a really bad idea. First of all, in taking this tactic, I was rebelling against my mother and her ways, not addressing my child and her needs. I had an ignoring mother whose positive attention I would have done almost anything to gain: my daughter was not nearly so needy as I was and, in retrospect, I am sure she found my attentiveness perhaps a bit engulfing. My decisions regarding my children were not necessarily based on what was appropriate or good for them at a given point in time, but on what my mother would have denied me. Sometimes that was a good thing…they got an open and honest and age-appropriate sex education…sometimes it was not, as they were indulged to the degree my budget could stand and deprived of any sense of responsibility in their early years.

This living my life in the opposite direction of my mother backfired on me in other ways. Rather than make decisions about my own life based on thought and weighing the pros and cons of a possible choice, I made quick, easy decisions were based more on what NM would not have done or what would upset her if she knew. “So there!!” I seemed to be saying with my actions, “You can’t control me! I can do what I want!”

Well, I could do what I wanted, but I wasn’t necessarily doing that. Instead, I was doing the opposite of what she wanted, not the same thing at all. It literally took me years to figure out that my mother was still controlling my life, but now I was the one who was doing it to me: she put in the programming and years and miles later, I was executing the programming without any input from her…just in reverse. I was still locked inside that little box she constructed around my mind and my spirit, still making choices within her paradigm, still seeing my life through her set of filters.

It can be difficult to conceptualize that, in doing the opposite of what your NM wants or expects, you are still being controlled by her. But when you live your life in a way that is calculated to give a giant middle finger to someone else, you are not controlling your life and your choices, you are making choices centred around sending a message to another person. I found that I vacillated between trying to be the good daughter and mother and being the shocking rebel: neither persona was really mine, neither had my heart really in it, neither was what I wanted to do…except, of course, that I wanted to show her!!

You begin to live a truly independent life, you begin to be your authentic self, when your choices in life are not influenced by the censure or approval of another person. That doesn’t mean you reject input from others: others may see things you do not, may have input you really should consider before making up your mind. But when you do make up your mind, you do not do it with the reaction or feelings or expectations of others as a consideration: you do it because you have given the decision due consideration and made a choice that works for you, regardless of how others may think.

When I was a young woman, miniskirts were just coming into fashion. I wore them because a) they were in fashion and b) I had great legs that looked good in short skirts. If I had thought about it, I might have worn them…and worn them even shorter…because my NM would have been scandalized by the abbreviated length. But NM was not really into fashion and had never allowed me any forays into it, so I had no idea what she might think or say (she wore shorts in hot weather, so why would I think she would be scandalized by miniskirts?). Years into the trend she came to my house and I was wearing a very short shift dress and she tut-tutted about the “appropriateness” of my hem length, so I later discovered that she thought such short skirts were “trampy.”

My initial decision to wear miniskirts was based entirely on my own thinking on the matter: I never even considered what my NM might think. Had I known, however, that my NM thought them “trampy,” and I decided to wear them anyway, that would not necessarily be a rebellious act on my part. But, if I knew she thought they were trampy and I filled my wardrobe with them and made sure they were short enough to give her palpitations, then that would have been an act of rebellion against my mother rather than a choice purely made for my own reasons.

When we live our lives in reaction to others, we are living for them while our own lives pass us by. We make choices based on them, not on us. Rather than look at the banquet spread before us, we focus on the rye bread that NM loves: she loves it so I will hate it. She hit me when I was little so I will not discipline my child; I never got the toys I wanted so my child will get every toy she wants; my NM hated red, so I will wear red whenever I can, even though it doesn’t look so good on me; NM was stingy with money and lived in a crappy part of town so I will live in a great part of town, even if I can’t afford it; NM had to have a brand new car every two years so I will make a virtue out of making mine last as long as I can, even if it looks like hell, breaks down every week, and costs me more in repairs than car payments on a new one. She was profligate, so I will be parsimonious; she wore expensive jewellery so I will be superior by refusing such unnecessary and showy adornment; she thought higher education made her better than anyone else, so I will drop out of college after the first semester… Whatever she values, you devalue; whatever she holds in low esteem, you elevate. And in the meantime, your real life passes you by while you live in reaction to hers.

Becoming proactive with respect to your own life is not an easy thing. When you have lived your life in reaction to someone else’s, you don’t really know what you like and dislike, what you want and don’t want, not even what you need and don’t need. You have not done the life experiments to determine your own tastes and what appeals to you, and in many respects, you have not explored life outside of your NM’s paradigm. Have you looked at the gray area between NM’s position and your completely opposite stance? Have you looked beyond the two choices you have given yourself—be like NM or be her opposite number—to see what other options you had?

I was fortunate to have spent time with my stepmother and my grandmothers and through observing them (as well as being under their control) I became aware that there were more choices than beating children in the name of discipline or abandoning discipline altogether. I became aware that there were other choices than making my children into household slaves vs absolving them of all responsibility. I learned that there are other ways to talk to children than barking orders like a drill sergeant, that there is a difference between clean enough and impossibly spotless, that that unstructured time is good for a kid, even if it makes me a little anxious.

In exploring my own life, I discovered I had to take those assumptions I inherited from NM (and was rebelling against) and examine them consciously: to literally sit down and say to myself something like “NM doesn’t like lamb so we never got it at home: I must eat some lamb to see if I really don’t like it or I am just adopting her prejudices.” I had to apply this attitude to virtually everything in my life, to all of my likes and dislikes, until I created for myself a body of tastes and preferences, values and ideals, that actually reflected my own rather than aped or resisted hers. I learned I’m not too fond of lamb, either…and I really don’t like fish. I learned that I really don’t care what ethnicity or colour another person is, but I care very much what kind of human being s/he is. I discovered that assuming everybody else is stupid, like NM did, put me in a position of not being able to learn from them. I learned that I liked ethnic food, I didn’t like really high-heeled shoes or very tight clothes…or baggy ones, either. I discovered I liked to think and that humour based on humiliating or hurting people really isn’t very funny. I discovered that money is important but it doesn’t necessarily buy you the life you want. And I learned that you not only can’t change other people, if you want to, there is something wrong with you that you are unwilling or unable to accept people as they are.

Some of the things I learned were in direct opposition to NM’s attitudes and beliefs and behaviours; some of them agreed with her (like the lamb); still others weren’t even related to her ways…I discovered life outside her box, things she had never considered, had no experience with, expressed no opinions on.

You really do have more choices than toeing NM’s line or flinging yourself in the opposite direction: there is a whole life out there that is uniquely yours, a life in which some things are in parallel with your NM, some things are the opposite, and everything else doesn’t even relate to her. And to be truly free of the control of your narcissist, that is the life you must live.

You can live this life even if you aren’t NC or even LC with your N: all you need to do is break the bond in your own heart and mind, the bond that keeps you acting either in accordance with your NM’s expectations or in defiance of them. That is a choice you can make at any time, the choice to live your life through your own likes, dislikes, tastes and choices. To do otherwise is to live under your NM’s thumb or to live in a continual state of rebellion and defiance and, believe me, that gets tiring after a while.

Your life belongs to you and you should live it for yourself, not for your Ns, not even for your spouse or your kids. There will come a day your kids fly the nest and your NM has passed on and if your spouse predeceases you, and your whole life has been lived for someone else, you will be alone, bereft, empty. I found myself in just such a situation in 2000: my kids were on their own, my NM was dead, and my husband unexpectedly died. But I was not bereft or empty. I had long since become my own person, knowing myself well enough to be able to weather those first months of grief, then going on to rebuild my life. I was not empty or bereft because I had an identity of my own rather than one predicated on my service to husband and children or in rebellion to my NM. And this is what you deny yourself when you live for others or in reaction to another: your own independent identity, your own life, your own self.

Self examination is a good thing: narcissists don’t engage in it because they deny the possibility that anything in their lives needs changing, but for the rest of us, it is a productive endeavour. Ask yourself: am I living in reaction to someone else in my life? Or am I living a life created though my own independent choices? You might be surprised what you learn!