Your N is long dead—now what?

Mostly we talk about Narcissistic Parents from the standpoint of those who are still living and tormenting us. Some of us have deceased NPs, but we were already aware of their negative impact on our lives before they died. But there are those among us who do not realize the negative impact those parents had on our lives until they are long dead.

So, what if your NP is long dead and you are only just now realizing the fact that the problem was not you, after all, it was that now-dead parent? What are the implications of such a realization and how do you deal with it, cope with it, heal from it? The situation, while sharing many elements with those whose parents still live and torture them, is quite different when the parent is dead, particularly long dead.

There are two distinct advantages to embarking on this journey after the NParent has passed on: 1) because they are gone, they are not regularly adding to your burden of pain, and 2) you can no longer cling to the hidden hope that if you could come up with the right word or deed, the door to your NP’s stony heart will open to you. These are issues for many ACoNs whose narcissist parent still lives: they continue to add to the adult child’s pain and the adult child often continues to hope—often subconsciously—that there is a chance the parent will “wake up” and see the pain their child is in and step in to assuage it. When your NParent is dead and gone, neither of these issues are on the table.

On the other hand, the adult child of a dead NP has to deal with guilt, both self-imposed and often from well-meaning (or not-so-well-meaning) outsiders for “speaking ill of the dead,” for telling unpleasant truths about someone who is no longer about to “defend him/herself.” And while those of us whose parents were living as we wrestled with our demons, did have them to go to, to ask “why?”, to call to account, the truth is, very few of us ever actually do that. Not only do we recognize the futility, we also recognize that it is in just such a scenario that the NP flourishes the weapons of fear, obligation and guilt—the dreaded F.O.G.—to obfuscate truth and send us fleeing, confused by gaslighting and rolling in guilt for not “honouring” our parents.

So how do you approach this if your parent was already long dead when you figured out that you were the adult child of a narcissist? You start by recognizing that none of the abuse was your fault no matter what your parent told you and no matter how you have reframed it to make it your fault. It was never your fault. Ever. It was the responsibility of your parent to correct and discipline you, yes—but it was your parent’s choice as to how to do that, and the choice to use abusive methods rests solely on that parent.

You cannot excuse your parent making those choices because “she had it tough” or “he didn’t know better.” Unless that parent was isolated from the rest of the planet—no books, magazines, newspapers, television, radio, internet, movies or personal visitors—your parent had the opportunity to learn new ways to discipline. Even if s/he was raise in an authoritarian cult with no connections to the larger world, if your parent was sufficiently emotionally engaged with you, s/he would feel empathy for the pain and fear s/he inflicted on you. That s/he did not feel that empathy, that s/he did not wish to protect you from the pain and fear, is more germane than the fact that s/he may have suffered the same kind of treatment as a child. The very fact that you were her child and she was not motivated by her love for you to find methods other than the hurtful methods used on her is critical because she did not hurt with you. An empathetic parent will suffer pain for inflicting pain on his child; that pain will motivate the parent to find another way to shape and mould and discipline the child without abuse.

Understand that hurting you in the name of correction and discipline was a choice your parent made: there were other choices to be had and an abundance of resources, even “back in the day” before the internet. I had my first child in 1965 and there were magazines and books available even then. My mother was a brutal authoritarian who raised me with slapping, beating with a belt or strap or stick or shoe or whatever came to hand; she browbeat and humiliated me, shamed me, and set up situations in which it was impossible for me to succeed and then punished me for my failures—that is the kind of behaviour that passed for discipline in my mother’s house and I could have very easily just adopted it. But I went to the library and read voraciously during my first pregnancy, everything I could lay my hands on for ways to raise a child without hitting and screaming and humiliation and shame—and I was only 17 years old. If a 17-year-old girl who was raised with brutal physical discipline and crushing emotional abuse could grasp that there were other ways to raise a child, ways that did not damage the child emotionally, and pro-actively seek out information about those alternatives, then what excuse does your parent have? The truth is, your abusive parent had every opportunity I had (and likely more), but s/he simply had no interest because s/he was not sufficiently emotionally engaged with you to want to guide you without hurting you.

Once you realize and accept that it was not your fault that your parents abused you the next step is to assign responsibility where it belongs: on the deceased parent and his/her choices.

Cue the guilt goblins: this is where you become overwhelmed with guilt for thinking so badly of this person who did the best she could with what she had and now you are thinking bad things about her and she’s not here to defend herself…guilt! guilt! guilt! Icky, terrible, awful-feeling guilt! Are you going to shed those guilt feelings by excusing your parent for choosing abuse over compassionate discipline? Or are you going to shed the toxic guilt that has been programmed into you to keep you away from the truth by embracing that truth?

Ask yourself: how do you know she did the best with what she had? Could others have done better with the same? Or with even less? (Remember—1965—I had no TV, no radio, no newspaper subscription—and there was no internet—I haunted the library and got answers that way.) And how do you defend the indefensible? This person emotionally abused and manipulated a little kid—someone who was incapable of self-defence—for her own advantage.  

Author Anne Lamott once said “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write [speak] warmly about them, they should have behaved better.” Notice she doesn’t make an exception for “people who can’t defend themselves because they are dead.” It is my thought that if someone is okay with going to their grave without acknowledging or apologizing for their transgressions against you—which means those transgressions have not been resolved—then it is not only acceptable but healthy and normal for you to seek resolution on your own, after they have died. Their life is over—even if their reputation is stained by your telling the truth, their life is over—and yours is not. And the life and reputation of a living person is far more important than the reputation of someone who can no longer feel the sting of humiliation or the pain of rejection or the emptiness of feeling unloved.

It is wrong to shame and guilt a person for telling the truth. And that holds true whether that truth telling is simply admitting to yourself that your NParent abused you and s/he was wrong to do so, or if it is telling your entire family what s/he did to you. It is wrong to guilt yourself and it is doubly wrong for others to lay guilt and shame on you for telling a truth they would prefer not to hear. It is doubly wrong because 1) shaming someone for telling the truth is, in effect, demanding that the person lie and 2) expecting someone to lie about their lives in order to protect you from unpleasantness is reprehensible—it expecting someone to sacrifice their integrity so that you can be live comfortably in denial, so that you don’t have to face something you don’t wish to acknowledge.

Some of us will feel angry at that departed parent, others will find themselves going through the stages of grief again. Yet others will try to cling to our denial, to keep the parent alive in our hearts and minds by emulating or at least defending the deceased. Some of us were devoted to our parent, we loved them—he was your Dad, she was your Mom. But part of waking up to the reality of having an N parent is realizing that the parent we believed we had was not necessarily the person s/he really was.

Denial is a powerful thing. We use it to make the unbearable tolerable. Some of us forget the stuff that hurts, others remember things differently from the ways they actually occurred. Still others will simply remember a saint where, in fact, the late parent was an egregious sinner. How we live with the spectre of the deceased parent is as individual as we are, but too many of us sanitize our memories lest we feel guilty about speaking ill of the dead and betray the commandment about honouring our parents. But healing is about truth and at some point you are going have to face up to it and make a decision: move on or stay stuck? Do you want to heal or do you want to keep your illusions intact? Because they are mutually exclusive.

Truth about someone means acknowledging the bad as well as the good. It means letting go of that protective layer of illusion that has allowed you to believe that your parent loved you as much as you loved him. It is recognizing that actions tell the truth and when words and actions conflict, believing the words is the path to denial, believing the actions is the path to truth…and the truth, when you are dealing with a narcissistic parent, is seldom pretty. It is painful—really gut-wrenchingly painful—to come to the conclusion that your parent didn’t love you, that his convenience, his football game or his bottle of whiskey or his cronies were all more important that you were. I divorced a man who used to call and set up a visit with his two little kids and then just simply not show up. Two little pre-schoolers dressed up and waiting for Daddy, excited to see their father, and he just doesn’t show up. When asked later why he didn’t come, his excuses would range from “car trouble” (then why didn’t you call?) to he overslept and then it was too late (then why didn’t you call??) to he didn’t want to miss the playoffs (then why not call rather than leave the kids just hanging?). His words said “I love my kids,” but his actions clearly showed that they were the last item on his list of priorities. Where did you fit on the list of your deceased parent’s priorities?

My mother would rather have bought herself gaudy cocktail dresses and heaps of flashy costume jewellery than take me to the optometrist; she got her teeth cleaned every six months—I did not see a dentist for the first time until I was 14 and had massive cavities. On the one hand, one could argue that we didn’t have much money and kids in that kind of household often have such things as glasses and dental work put low on the household priorities. But on the other hand, in a household headed by a fully functional, loving parent, such things as cigarettes, liquor, and revealing evening wear do not take precedence over the health and welfare of the children.

One of the advantages of coming to this juncture after your NParent has died is that you can stop collecting evidence. Oh, you may have to do some brain work to recover suppressed memories, but there is no new—and potentially confusing—evidence being manufactured daily, which is very much the case for people whose NPs are still living. Dealing with a static situation is much less confusing than dealing with one in which the dynamics can change at the drop of a hat.

But, there are disadvantages to dealing with this when the NP is dead—you can’t test the situation to see if your discoveries are, in fact, correct. You can’t ask questions to see if your NP has a plausible reason for their behaviour and, of course, there are always those who make it their business to criticize and find fault with your search for inner peace because they think the dead should be enshrined as saints and you are busy exposing their idol’s feet of clay.

I don’t really have any answers here—my NM was very much alive and in fine fettle when I went into therapy. She had another dozen or so years to inflict herself and her maliciousness on me and the rest of my family. It was clear that there was no love lost between us, that there never had been. She was a predator and I was her favourite prey—that began before I can remember (and I can remember a few things back to age 2) and it continued until after she died, her Will a document of both generosity (to some) and character assassination ( of others). But I continued processing my experiences of being her daughter for many years after she died and I found it was somewhat easier, since I wasn’t constantly fending off new assaults or trying to integrate her latest inconsistent behaviour into my picture of her.

What was not easier, however, is the lack of reinforcement after she died. In her last years we had contact once or twice a year and each time I came away from a visit or put down a letter from her, my tank was topped up: I was reminded, sometimes forcefully, of why we were estranged and why we would always be so. Once she died, I found myself in the amazing space of second-guessing myself, my convictions, my own memories. I became less emotionally engaged (probably due to lack of reinforcing provocation) and the distance that brought caused me to start thinking of excuses for her. It was hard, sometimes, to remember just how awful she was to me. Time may not heal all wounds but it does dull the pain and therein lies the trap: as the pain dulls, so does your conviction of the need to protect yourself and that can lead to new pain.

My best advice in this is to journal. Especially is s/he has died. Write an account of your experiences with your NP—the experiences that hurt you, why it hurt, how it hurt, what s/he should have done under those same circumstances. Funny thing, when I did that, I realized just how much choice she had, how many options she had at her command, and it made me seriously question why she invariably chose brutality, both physical and emotional. She did not learn this from her parents—her brothers confirmed that as well as my experiences of living with them for multiple summers. Writing things down kept them accessible to me as I puzzled out seemingly conflicting things: her ability to scream at me and, in half a second, be speaking sweetly and calmly to a friend on the phone. Write things down so that you collect the body of evidence that your subconscious will quietly sort for you, kicking up little “aha!” moments and the occasional big epiphany.

Remember that none of their behaviour was your fault, it was their choice, and you have never had any power over their choices. In the long run, it is easier to sort out the dynamics of the parent who died, leaving a fixed legacy for you to work with, than the living parent who continues to add insults and injuries, but neither is stress-free.

Disrespect and rudeness--really?

What is does it mean, to be rude? The Google search function turns up “…offensively impolite or bad-mannered…” but that is rather subjective—who determines when impoliteness or bad manners becomes offensive? Obviously the person who is perceived as being rude doesn’t think he’s being rude at all, while others—whose minds he cannot read—perceive differently. The Cambridge Dictionary¹ defines rude as “…not polite; offensive or embarrassing…” Again, subjective: that which I find offensive you might find hilarious.

Years ago there was a standard of behaviour to which the majority of people agreed constituted basic manners. Things like saying “please,” “thank you,” and “you’re welcome.” Saying you are sorry for causing someone else inconvenience or hurt. Children asking to be excused from the table. Not interrupting others while they are speaking. Waiting your turn for something. Calling before going to someone’s home. Respecting the privacy of others. Respecting other people’s wishes with respect to their own persons and property. Being a “good sport” when losing and gracious when winning. These and many other small courtesies were handed down to each succeeding generation as the lubricant that oiled the wheels of society. Without small, simple courtesies practiced by the majority of us, regardless of class, society broke down into a chaos of ruthless competition. The definition of rude was not subjective or ruled by the perception of either the recipient or perpetrator, the definition of rude was codified—it was anything that violated the basic code of manners that permeated the society.

Narcissists understand the codes and narcissistic parents use them to their advantage. In a society that largely ignores the traditional courtesies, narcissistic parents are in their element: they can teach their children the kinds of behaviours and responses they want, call them “manners” or “courtesy” and shape their children the way they see fit.

When I was growing up we were taught basic manners first in the family and next in primary (elementary) school: teachers would require us to say “please” and “thank you,” wait in a queue or raise our hands for our turn at something, to share with others. Girls got a more expanded version of it in the higher grades during compulsory Home Economics courses. We had books and newspaper columns by well-known etiquette mavens, books that might show up in a young adolescent girl’s birthday or holiday swag. And we learned from TV shows like Leave it to Beaver in which the young Beav and his adolescent brother Wally were counselled on manners by their mother, who was backed by their father. But we also understood that there were different rules for adults, rules that forbade us to do things until we were “old enough,” among them smoking, drinking, driving cars and—my eagerly anticipated favourite—moving away from home.

It was this “rules are different for grownups” that gave people like my mother their power. They could demand adherence to the rules of etiquette from children without reciprocating because their rules were different from ours—“Do as I say, not as I do” was a common refrain around our house. Of course, I knew adults who were courteous, even to kids, but I understood this was not required of adults, that courtesy was a one-way street where children and adults intersected.

Another thing my mother inculcated into me—and which was largely supported by society in general—was the notion that children owed respect to adults…all adults…no matter what. So an adult could berate you loudly and rudely in public and you couldn’t say anything “disrespectful” in return without risking getting into trouble over it. So if some grouchy old neighbour threw handfuls of garden manure at you as you walked by their garden, bellowing at you not to trample their flowers, you were allowed to say “I didn’t walk through your flower beds,” but if Grouchy insisted it was you, you were disrespectful to “talk back” and insist on your innocence—because at this point you were supposed to take it to your parents and let them handle it. If you had clones of Ward and June Cleaver for parents, this worked. But if you had the narcissistic Wicked Witch of the West or Captain Bligh for parents, this didn’t go so well. Instead of being able to go to your parent for support and defence, you had to keep quiet…and you learned that people older than you could get away with shit you couldn’t.

Most people grow up understanding they are supposed to respect their elders and give them deference. Unfortunately, if your parent was narcissistic, there was an added dimension to this. At the age of individuation, at the age where normal families begin loosening the reins of control over their kids, helping them to learn to handle independence and to start thinking of themselves as adults, narcissistic parents tighten the screws. Even if they ostensibly give you the freedom to come and go like your friends do, sign for your driving license, etc., they do not stop thinking of you as a child. They believe they are doing you a favour by allowing you to participate with your peers—and they see no value in helping you to become emotionally independent.

When these children become adults, their lives and choices are often ruled by those narcissistic parents. The parents have taken up residence in their heads and those parents remain in control. I had a friend who, in her 30s, was lamenting her single state. I offered to introduce her to a couple of guys I knew, engineers who made a good living and would, in my opinion, make good husbands and providers. She declined because her parents wouldn’t approve of these guys because they were ethnically different from her. She, personally, didn’t care but she couldn’t go against her parents’ biases. Another woman I used to work with had a hard core controlling mother who demanded that my co-worker pay her rent and utilities. This left my co-worker, who was a clerical worker like me and a single mother, scrabbling for pennies at the end of every month. When I asked her why she did this she said “Because she’s my mother.” I knew nothing of narcissists in those days but I suggested that she tell her mother she needs to pay her own way and my co-worker blanched. The very thought of standing up to her mother literally made her feel faint. She was in her early 40s.

We get taught that inside the family circle, our parents not only hold the power, they hold it until they die—sometimes even after they die, depending on their will. We are not supposed to contradict those parents or even think differently from them. As children that is naughty and we court punishment; as adults were are deemed disrespectful, insubordinate and rude. Due to the conditioning of our childhood, we fear being found wanting by our parents. Even when we know we are too old to be spanked or grounded, the visceral fear is still there. Depending on the kind of parent we had, that fear may be mixed with guilt and shame. But any way you slice it, doing—even thinking—anything that our parents would disapprove of brings us anxiety and even fear.

So what happens when we grow up and put enough distance between us and our Ns that we begin to have contrary thoughts? What happens when you develop the nerve to disagree with your mother face-to-face and not back down, or find the courage to tell her she’s wrong or to call her on her bullshit? Well, depending on the type of NM you have, you can get tears, push-back, or outrage—but in every case your NM is going to perceive you as both rude and disrespectful. Narcissists rewrite definitions of words and phrases to be more self-serving. My NexH, for example, when accused of never compromising, indignantly informed me that he compromised all the time. When asked for a definition of compromise he came up with this: he gets what he wants and I get everything that is left. Narcissists not only rewrite history, they rewrite the damned dictionary.

As children we don’t know any better and we accept those definitions. So when you are actually individuating and becoming independent, your NParent redefines it as rebellion. When you tell you NM that she can’t give your child cookies twenty minutes before dinner, she calls you disrespectful. When she invades your private space and you ask her to leave, she sees this as you being rude. And so do you! Even if you have reached the point where your intellect recognizes that you are not being rude or disrespectful, you can still feel like you are!

Believe it or not, there is no rule in the books of etiquette and tomes of manners that says it is rude or disrespectful to disagree with your parents. There is no prohibition against upsetting your mother or disagreeing with your father. There are rules against such things as browbeating others with your point of view, showing up at a person’s place of work or residence uninvited, and demeaning others both publicly and privately. There are even polite ways to deal with people who persist in these behaviours and, simply stated, it is to ignore their presence as if they are not there. It is called “The Cut” and old fashioned guides to etiquette delved deeply into the various kinds of cuts and when and how to employ them. It is an old, tried-and-true, absolutely correct method of dealing with people who persist in imposing their bad manners on you: you simply do not engage them in any fashion, up to and including shutting the door in their faces if they appear at your door uninvited and having them escorted away by security or the police if they refuse to take the hint and decamp.

Narcissists instil that sense of being rude or disrespectful in us as children for a reason: it allows them to control us. When we are little, we are shamed and even punished for a behaviour our parent identifies as rude or disrespectful. We learn from them what it means and we believe them. We internalize it and it becomes part of our core beliefs. Once we have it internalized, they no longer need to threaten or imply punishment because we do it ourselves: we shrink away from assertive and autonomous behaviours because we now believe such behaviour is rude or disrespectful. We also believe it is a one-way street, that they can be rude and disrespectful to us, it is within their purview as our parents, but we cannot reciprocate because that is unacceptable.

We will remain their emotional zombies for as long as we permit ourselves to buy into those self-serving definitions that underpin our inappropriate feelings of guilt and shame and wrongness. As long as we feel like we are being rude (which we react to by feeling shame) when we are doing no more than asserting our autonomy, we are still being controlled by the Ns who conditioned us to accede to their wishes in all things.

But the truth is, they are the ones who are being rude and disrespectful, not you! But until you use those feelings of shame, that fear of retribution, that anxiety that comes over you whenever you think independently, until you use those clues to lead you to the reality, to the real definitions of your behaviour, you will continue being controlled by them remotely. You have to stop in the middle of that attack of shame, and think. Yes, it is difficult. Yes, you may not realize you have to stop and think until you are in the middle of the attack, it doesn’t matter. Once you realize you are reacting, make yourself stop! Put your mind to work. Acknowledge you feel like you are being rude but are you really? Is asserting yourself rude? No, it is not. Is having an opinion or belief that differs from your parents rude? No. Is failing to or refusing to live up to their expectations rude or disrespectful? No. Is disappointing them bad? No again. None of those things that they taught you are true. They lied.

They LIED to you. They redefined all of those things to condition you so they could control you. And as long as you continue to react as programmed, they are in control, not you, no matter how far away you live, no matter how long you have been NC.

What you may not yet realize is that you are the one who has all of the power in the relationship. That’s right—you have all of the power! They have managed to con you into not seeing that and allowing them to continue controlling you as they did from childhood. But you can stop that at any time—at any time you choose.

The thing is, it is not going to be easy. You are going to have to fight yourself, your own feelings, even what you perceive to be your instincts. They aren’t your instincts, they are programmed responses that are actually overriding your instincts. It is going to take work and effort on our part. It is going to take recognizing and stopping automatic responses and substituting the appropriate responses until they become habituated. It is going to take recognizing that it is your Ns who are being rude and disrespectful to you, not the other way around, and then putting a stop to it. It is not easy…but it is well worth every iota of effort you put into it.

1 https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/rude