The Evolution of a Smear Campaign

I had one of my epiphanies the other night…in reviewing my last post—the one about closure—I found myself lingering on the paragraph about why my mother moved in with Nana to take care of her. I was surprised when this happened because my mother never liked her mother and was not shy about admitting it. She never stopped resenting her parents for not letting her run wild when she was a teenager and despite the fact that she snuck out regularly and finally eloped with a guy she had known less than a month, she blamed their strictness for those choices of hers, choices that ended up with my birth and the subsequent ruination of her life.

She never grew up enough, emotionally, to accede to the simple fact that during her adolescence, the social mores of the time included more restrictions for girls than boys and much different expectations. According to NM’s older brother, my Uncle Gary, my grandparents were no more strict than the parents of her peers, the girls she went to high school with, but to hear her tell it, they all but chained her to the house, they were so old fashioned and restrictive. But in reality, it was my mother who was different from the norm, not her parents. Where other girls complied with their parents’ wishes and restrictions, my mother did not. Where other girls stayed home in their beds and slept at night, my mother climbed out her bedroom window and went out and partied in places normally off-limits to the under-aged (she was 15 and 16 when doing this). In typical N fashion, however, she blamed her parents, particularly her immigrant father, for “forcing” her to such extremes in pursuing her happiness—“…if he had let me go out, I wouldn’t have had to sneak…” (An interesting aside: two generations later my daughter, beginning at the age of 14, was doing the exact same thing—without knowing about her her grandmother's antics—and also making it the fault of her parents!)

My mother never outgrew that resentment. When I spent summers with her parents and expressed a wish to stay there full time she told me that they were “different” during the summers and that if I lived there full time I would see that and I would regret it. But my grandparents were somewhat strict with me anyway and I didn’t mind because I interpreted it as a sign they cared about me. But my mother, while happy to dump me in their laps every summer, never stayed even overnight at their house. She was different when she was around them—like she was a kid again and compelled to obey…or dissemble… She had never truly grown up but remained a resentful, spiteful child, hiding her normal bold, brassy, bossy self from them the same way my daughter, at 14, hid the fact that she was wearing makeup from her adoptive parents.

When my grandmother was 69, my grandfather died in his sleep—they had been married for 53 years. For many years, my grandparents had been friends with a couple, Rob and Frances, with whom they liked to play cards and to go travelling in their Airstream trailers. Not too long after my grandfather died, Rob’s wife also died. Before long, Rob and Nana’s friendship went to the next level and soon they were married.

My mother was livid. Rob was a man of very modest means and NM was positive his only interest in Nana was her money. He had an Army pension and some income from his late wife’s estate so he could pay his own way, but that didn’t stop my mother’s projections. On each of my annual visits to my father’s farm, I would stop in and spend some time with Nana and after she married Rob, Nana introduced us. I liked him: I found Rob to be a gentleman who truly admired my grandmother—it was easy to tell by the way his eyes followed her when she walked around the room. I liked him and I was glad she found some companionship in her waning years.

When my grandmother was in her early 80s she fell and broke her hip. The surgeons botched the job, leaving her with one leg shorter than the other and her foot turned outward. The surgery had to be done again and during the second surgery, Nana had a stroke.

In the 1960s Nana and Grandpa built a large 2-story house where, after they were married, Nana and Rob lived together. But disabled by her stoke, the house wasn’t the best place for them, so they moved into a retirement village while Nana recovered from her stroke and her surgery. My mother, suspicious as ever, took it upon herself to divest herself of all of her meagre holdings in the Nevada desert and high-tailed it to Oregon, moving into Nana’s house to “take care of it” while Nana was in the assisted living facility. And that is when the real smear campaign began.

I am 70 years old—a couple of years ago I began seeing spots crop up on my skin, particularly on my forearms—that looked like purple-and-red bruises. They weren’t painful like a bruise but they were vivid and took longer than a bruise to clear up. These marks are called “purpura” and they are a normal part of aging. In older people who have sun-damaged skin (and Nana was an avid gardener in the days before the invention of sun screen), there is a thing called “solar purpura,” bruise-like spots that can be as much as 5cms (2 inches) across.¹ These are perfectly normal on aging skin and when I first saw them crop up on my own arms, I remembered seeing them on Nana’s forearms and on the arms of other elderly people.

But that wasn’t what my mother wanted to hear—even after I explained to her that this was normal (I worked in a nursing home when I was in my early twenties—I have seen plenty of elderly skin!) she wasn’t having it. My mother insisted they were bruises because Rob was abusing Nana and she couldn't speak up because of her stroke. Of course Nana could nod her head “yes” and shake her head “no,” so she could have been asked if Rob gave her those marks but my mother wrote that off saying “she’s been confused since her stoke,” and insisted Nana had to come out of that assisted living facility immediately. Rob could stay there, as far as she was concerned, just as long as he paid for it out of his own money, and not Nana’s. And there was my first clue to what was going on with this uncharacteristic “dutiful daughter” mask my mother had inexplicably donned.

She succeeded in getting Nana back to her house and she hired a home care aide to come a couple of times each week to give Nana a bath and a few other heavy-lifting type jobs. During this time NM wrote to me occasionally but wrote frequently to my daughter. The information I got was that Rob had been beating up on Nana, leaving bruises on her (the purpura), and that he was after her money but she (NM) had put a stop to it. Rob wouldn’t dare lay a hand on Nana while she was around to protect her!

Anybody who ever met the diminutive Rob would have had a laugh over this—he was a small man to begin with, and now shrunken with advanced age. He had severe emphysema and literally could not walk across a room without his oxygen tank, a little green cylinder on wheels that he towed behind him everywhere. If he had exerted the kind of energy necessary for assaulting my grandmother, he would have collapsed of oxygen starvation—the man barely had the energy—or air—to walk to the other side of the room!

But the accusations didn’t stop there. Mother scoured the house looking for Nana’s jewellery and other valuables, certain that Rob had a hand in the disappearance of anything she couldn’t find. His list of character flaws ran from marrying a rich widow and expecting her to make his final years luxurious to being a Catholic to being a wife beater to being a thief. And his whole family were no better, in her estimation.

And my mother wasn’t covert or even bashful about her voicing her suspicions and unkind thoughts. Knowing how confrontational and contentious she was, it would not surprise me to learn that she had even said some of these things to Rob’s face. After all, Nana’s stroke had rendered her speechless, so she could not silence her daughter’s poisonous tongue or lay her suspicions to rest.

This was very much in keeping with my mother’s modus operandi. In the past, my mother liked to create a crisis out of whole cloth, then swoop in as the rescuer, garnering appreciation and accolades from those who thought themselves rescued, and admiration from observers. These campaigns were invariably kicked off with a smear campaign, a series of lies that had known or observable kernels of truth but which could not be disproven. Nana’s purpura—having been robbed of speech, Nana could not refute NM’s accusations that Rob had injured her in a violent altercation. And nobody bothered to ask Rob if my mother was telling the truth: they could see the purple marks on Nana’s skin, and Nana’s daughter indignantly accusing him—not to his face, mind you—and people just believed her.

This tactic had worked for my mother on numerous occasions, as far back as the mid-Fifties when she ran a woman out of our neighbourhood by stirring up the neighbours against her. She also used the same tactics to turn the FOO against me in her campaign to take my children to give to her younger brother to adopt. It was a tried-and-true approach and she didn’t waste any time putting the accusations, inferences and innuendo to work for her.

My mother used her accusations of Rob’s abuse to justify removing Nana from the assisted-living facility so she could “keep an eye on things,” the staff’s lack of diligence, according to her, was the only reason that Rob had not been caught abusing Nana. But the only thing she was really keeping an eye on was Nana’s bank account. NM had spent the previous few years of her life living a hand-to-mouth existence in a run-down trailer in a dusty hamlet in the Nevada desert and suddenly she had a cosy, up-market roof over her head, access to endless supplies of cash, and an unprecedented opportunity for NSupply. The situation was tailor-made for her trademark MO, and she wasted no time setting the wheels in motion. She had found herself a comfy berth that was going to eventually pan out as her nest egg for the future, provided she could keep Rob’s fingers out of it.

During the time my NM lived with Nana—after Nana’s stroke—NM got Nana to make some changes to her will. Since NM is the one who told me about those changes, I will never know what exactly was changed, but at one time Nana asked me what, from her house, I would like to have as a memento of her—she wanted to put it into her will. But when her will was probated, I received no bequests. Uncle Pete also said that Nana had promised him something in the house but when the will was probated, that item was missing from the will.

My mother also told me that she had seen to it that Nana bequeathed her the house, its contents, and the money in Nana’s bank account, and that the investments and cars would go to my uncles. I have no idea what Nana’s will was before, but I know that neither Rob nor I received anything.

Like Grandpa, Rob died in his sleep one night. Fifteen hours later, Nana was also gone. When I came north for the funeral I was shocked to learn that Rob would not be buried near Nana—he wasn’t even buried in the same cemetery—that his funeral had already been held and no one from our family attended, and that his children were coming to collect his personal belongings and all they were getting was a single small cardboard box with his Missal, a Bible, his Rosary, some papers—like his military discharge papers—and a few bits of clothing. Everything else NM had already discarded or was keeping. She wasn’t even going to let them into the house—the box was on the front porch for their collection. I had liked Rob and I found it very sad that my mother treated him so shabbily but I was still a few years from the breakdown that pushed me into meaningful therapy so I was simultaneously loathing my mother, afraid of her, and yearning for signs that she might someday love me.

For the few years that my grandmother was married to Rob, my mother bad-mouthed him daily. By the time he was dead, nobody spoke his name at my grandmother’s wake. Nana had spent her last years with him, but it was as if he had never existed in her life. Nana’s funeral was well-attended with many people coming to the funeral home, the burial, and later to the church hall where each attendee had brought something to eat and a pot-luck supper was laid out for us. It was as if Rob had never existed, as if my grandmother had remained a widow until her own death. My mother had erased him for posterity, not even giving him a final resting place next to his wife. He ended up buried next to his first wife, which I can appreciate his children probably preferred, but that doesn’t undo my mother’s small-mindedness in essentially cutting him out of our family’s history like a cancer and assassinating his character from the day she found out he had booked himself and Nana into an assisted living facility when my grandmother became disabled from the stroke. He did the right thing—he was older than Nana and tethered to that oxygen bottle: he could not take care of her alone, and this way she would be comfortable with her own furnishings and possessions, but safe and professionally cared for.

But all my mother saw was the money going out of the account every month, her inheritance dwindling with each check. Better that money should go to her, but she couldn’t be satisfied with just saying “Hey, let’s put Mother back in her own home and I will take one of the guest bedrooms and be there 24/7 when you need me.” No, that would be too humble, too ordinary, lacking in NSupply—and some people might actually suspect what she was really up to. No, vilifying Rob and making him look like a decrepit version of Bluebeard gave her a plausible reason to yank Nana out of the assisted care facility, killing two birds with one stone: stopping the haemorrhage of funds that was diminishing her inheritance and covering her real motive for the move.

Smear campaigns are done for a reason. Often the reason is no more than to gain NSupply from listeners, but many times they have a much more sinister purpose behind them. I am sorry to say I did not suspect my mother’s character assassination of Rob for what it was until long afterwards. I thought it was just her nasty suspicious character in action rather than a deliberate way to discredit him in case Nana died first and she had to fight him for the estate. But through the clarity of hindsight, I can see now just what was going on, what she did it, and how well it succeeded: there is no doubt in my mind that if Nana had died before Rob, the very next day my mother would have put that little old man out on the gravel road in front of the house, a small box of possessions in one hand, his little oxygen bottle trolley in the other, and shut and locked the door.

I am sorry, Rob, that I didn’t stick up for you back then—but neither of us really knew, at that time, what she was really up to or to what lengths she would go to achieve what she wanted, which was as much of Nana’s assets as she could get her hands on. I am sorry she assassinated your character and created a bed of lies upon which she could rest a court case against you in the future, if necessary. She did the same to me, but I literally did not see what she was doing to you until it was long over—Nana has been gone more than twenty years and only today am I seeing what went down. I wish I had done more…

¹ https://www.disabled-world.com/health/dermatology/skin/bruising-limbs.php

She destroys your relationships: Characteristics of Narcissistic Mothers Pt 23

The black text is a shortened version of an original work by Chris, The Harpy’s Child. Original at https://sites.google.com/site/harpyschild/ Copyright 2007, all rights reserved

[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]

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

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Part 23. She destroys your relationships

Narcissistic mothers are like tornadoes: wherever they touch down families are torn apart and wounds are inflicted.

Yup—I have heard it over and over again, families fragmented and divided into factions of pro- and anti-NM. In the case of a woman I will call Leah, she had virtually no communication with her sister or any of the FOO on her mother’s side with the exception of one uncle, a man who is estranged from his sister (the NM) because of the way NM treats her. For years she believed her NM had succeeded in alienating her father’s side of the family as well, but after her father’s death she was to learn that they cared for her very much. But it wasn’t until after her father passed that she was reunited with his family, having been separated from them for decades because of her NM’s control of the family through triangulation. Only when Leah’s father died and nobody was notified of his death and cremation—not even the poor man’s own brother—did her NM’s true dreadfulness become obvious and people rallied around Leah.

In my case, NM successfully alienated my entire family from me, via triangulation, including my father and his family. When her lies began oozing out, when the family began to see the truth, there were those who continued to cling to the lies and with whom I was never able to re-establish a relationship. I find it not coincidental that those who continued to suck up NM’s lies were the ones who ended up with legacies from NM’s estate while I, and others who had finally had the scales fall from their eyes, received nothing except an abusive message actually written into her will.

Relationships outside the FOO are also at risk with an NM in the picture. As a teen I was prohibited from dating some perfectly acceptable young men because their surnames were “foreign,” or their fathers did not have good enough jobs or they were the wrong colour or religion (this from a woman who never, ever set foot inside a church), or they lived in the wrong part of town. She also dictated my female friendships, forbidding me to hold parties, sleep-overs and other normal adolescent rites of passage. When NM found out my best girlfriend was Jewish, she was forbidden from entering our house again. I was kept in childish dresses with no bra and forbidden to shave my legs and underarms, which made me an object of derision among my peers. When I finally began dressing and grooming myself in an age-appropriate way, it was too late. As an adult, I was alienated from my FOO and she later succeeded in alienating my own children from me.

I know of women whose romantic relationships and even marriages have fallen apart because of the interference of an NM, people whose employment and employment relationships were damaged by an NM. There is no limit whatsoever to the lengths and depths an NM will go to have her way, even if it means isolating you from everyone you have ever cared for, destroying your friendships and romantic relationships, and even giving you grief at work.

Unless the father has control over the narcissist and holds the family together, adult siblings in families with narcissistic mothers characteristically have painful relationships. Typically all communication between siblings is superficial and driven by duty, or they may never talk to each other at all.

This mirrors my own experiences and the experiences of numerous other DoNMs I know. When your NM selects you as the family scapegoat and another child as the GC, the other siblings, if there are any, will align with the GC out of self-protection. When these children are grown, those who finally see who and what their mother is may no longer align with the GC, but it is unlikely they will align with the scapegoat simply out of self-defense: they don't want to be on the receiving end of the treatment they have seen the scapegoat receive for all those years. The GCs often grow up to be “flying monkeys,” minions of the NM who will do her bidding. In Leah’s case, her NM had Leah’s sister contact an ex-boyfriend of Leah’s (like 10 years ago ex) to tell him a bunch of lies about Leah, making her look like she was doing terrible things to hurt her mother and alienate NM’s brother from her. Out of the goodness of his heart he called Leah’s uncle (as requested by Leah’s Nsister), who was estranged from his sister (the NM) to try to foster a reconciliation. It was a stupid thing for NM and GC to do because the man got an earful of truth from the uncle about the kinds of nasty things NM was doing to Leah.

Even a strong father cannot necessarily control a narcissist. Mine was strong, but when he was divorced from NM and could only see his children on weekends, what kind of control could he exert? During one of their separations, NM found out he had found a girlfriend and this upset her even though she had initiated their breakup and forced him out of the house. When she asked him to return, he broke up with his girlfriend, telling her that he had to go back for his kids’ sake (I heard this from the girlfriend who later married him and was his wife for more than 50 years). When he lived with us, she was still able to prey on me when he was at work and keep me from telling him what went on in his absence with threats of increased violence and abuse. My GC brother became NM’s flying monkey, tattling to NM about anything he could think of…even making things up…to get me punished. It was no surprise, then, that he spied on me as a young adult and embellished his observations to the point of perjury when she applied to a court for guardianship of my children. Even our Father’s strong stance on honesty did not penetrate his GC devotion to our lying, conniving NM. She played us off against each other as children, and I was always the one coming up short. As adults, she set us against each other in her plots, employing him as her flying monkey, me as the target. My brother and I have not seen each other since our grandmother’s funeral in 1994 and have not spoken since NM’s death nearly 15 years ago. The rift is irreparable.

Leah’s father was not so strong…he remained married to her NM for Leah’s entire life and that had to wear a man down. Near the end of his life, weakened with cancer and completely at her mercy, he could do nothing to control his wife. After her father’s death, Leah’s mother became even worse and Leah’s flying monkey sister joined in. She and her sister have the same irreparable rift, also caused by a predatory NM.

In part, these women foster dissension between their children because they enjoy the control it gives them. If those children don't communicate except through the mother, she can decide what everyone hears. Narcissists also love the excitement and drama they create by interfering in their children's lives. Watching people's lives explode is better than soap operas, especially when you don't have any empathy for their misery.

I think it is more, deeper, than simply enjoying the control. The power and control they derive extends much farther than simply setting their children against each others like cocks in a pit. In my case, my little brother spied on me constantly. I could not even have a word alone with my father because he would always be there, listening and ready to report anything I said or did to NM. I could not, therefore, say anything to my father about the way she treated me in his absence, complain about her unfair treatment between me and and my brother, or tell him that she left us alone at night for hours, while he was at work, while she hit the bars. Pitting us against each other made it safe for her to engage in activities that her husband would definitely find objectionable with no fear of discovery because of a blabbing child.

But they do enjoy the drama they create, the trouble they stir up. I can still remember my NM’s glowing look of triumph when Mrs. McKenzie moved away, her crusade to get her out of the neighbourhood a success, her campaign to turn a woman to whom the neighbourhood had been compassionate and sympathetic, she being a war widow who worked nights to support two young daughters, into a pariah and undesirable brought to fruition.

The narcissist nurtures anger, contempt and envy - the most corrosive emotions - to drive her children apart. While her children are still living at home, any child who stands up to the narcissist guarantees punishment for the rest. In her zest for revenge, the narcissist purposefully turns the siblings’ anger on the dissenter by including everyone in her retaliation. (“I can see that nobody here loves me! Well I'll just take these Christmas presents back to the store. None of you would want anything I got you anyway!”) The other children, long trained by the narcissist to give in, are furious with the troublemaking child, instead of with the narcissist who actually deserves their anger.

Fortunately for me, NM stopped having children after my brother was born—there were only two of us. But she still used this tactic to make him angry with me, telling him we couldn’t go to the marina (where he liked to fish) because I wasn’t done with my chores when, in fact, she didn’t want to take him to the marina. By giving me extra chores or finding fault with my regular chores so they had to be done over, she neatly shifted the blame to me so it became my fault that he couldn’t go fishing. And, because he emulated NM rather than our more peaceable father, he assumed the right to punish me which could be manifested passively aggressively by doing (or failing to do) things that would get me into trouble, or actively by destroying something of mine or physically hurting me.

When my parents separated for the final time, my father got up early one morning, fixed us breakfast, and told us that he was moving out of the house. I was devastated. He asked us, if we had a choice, which parent would we want to live with and I unhesitatingly chose him. My brother not only chose NM, he was outraged that I did not do the same. From that moment onward—I was about ten—my life was a living hell, trapped in the enemy camp. Both NM and GCBro saw my choice as a betrayal of the deepest proportions while I saw it as a way out of a life of being beaten daily for things I didn’t do or could not control.

The narcissist also uses favoritism and gossip to poison her childrens’ relationships. The scapegoat sees the mother as a creature of caprice and cruelty. As is typical of the privileged, the other children don't see her unfairness and they excuse her abuses.

Well, that is certainly how it was with me…I definitely viewed my mother as capricious and cruel. The rules changed daily without notice: what I got into trouble for not doing on Monday would get into trouble for doing two days later. I learned not to let her know what I loved because that would be the first thing permanently taken from me when she wanted to punish me by hurting me. And nothing was sacrosanct: she gave away the parakeet I had raised from a fledgling, my dog, my cats, my dolls, my clothes, my books…nothing was sacred. My brother, on the other hand, excused and/or agreed with her every move. I deserved what she meted out, I had no one to blame but myself…even when my punishment was a result of his actions or inactions.

Indeed, they are often recruited by the narcissist to adopt her contemptuous and entitled attitude towards the scapegoat and with her tacit or explicit permission, will inflict further abuse.

In truth, I could not say if she actively recruited him or not, but he most certainly did display the same contempt and entitled attitude towards me that she did. He took the attitude that nothing was wrong—she never punished him or gave him a hard time, so it must be me, not her. What I later found quite funny was, at the age of 14 I had the opportunity to live with my father for a year and I jumped at it. GCBro stayed with NM. Within six weeks GCBro was at Dad’s front door, suitcase in hand, wanting to move in as well. Why? Seems that with me gone, he got to play both roles, GC and scapegoat. He also got all of my housemaid chores. He would never say a word against her…which muzzled me in my father’s house for fear anything I said he would report back to her…but he could not live with her without me there to do the dirty work and take her abuse.

The scapegoat predictably responds with fury and equal contempt. After her children move on with adult lives, the narcissist makes sure to keep each apprised of the doings of the others, passing on the most discreditable and juicy gossip (as always, disguised as “concern”) about the other children, again, in a way that engenders contempt rather than compassion.

This was a little different in my life. Oh, she certainly kept tabs on GCBro and on at least two occasions before she died, they shared a house. But until she decided to take my kids for her childless younger bother to adopt, both she and GCBro stayed away from me. I could have fallen off the face of the earth for all they knew…I ceased to exist until I represented some kind of use to them. The juicy gossip and “concern” NM fed to the family was about me and my children, prepping them with the notion that I was somehow unfit. She got GC Bro to come visit me out of the blue, and he added his voice to her campaign. She tried to get Child Welfare into the picture, but their report was in my favour, so she didn’t go that way. By the time she was ready to launch the active portion of her plot to take my kids, she had filled the family with horror stories about me designed to raise everybody’s hackles against me and see her as a tragic figure: a mother forced to save her innocent grandchildren from her own depraved daughter.

Having been raised by a narcissist, her children are predisposed to be envious, and she takes full advantage of the opportunity that presents. While she may never praise you to your face, she will likely crow about your victories to the very sibling who is not doing well. She'll tell you about the generosity she displayed towards that child, leaving you wondering why you got left out and irrationally angry at the favored child rather than at the narcissist who told you about it.

I know of families in which this occurs—the only time this happened with me was when she got bitten with the stage mother bug when she realized my singing voice might actually make her money. I was about six years old at the time, and according to her I was going to be the next Shirley Temple and be famous…and incidentally make her rich. !!!Epiphany time—I just this second realized that NM and my NexH had this in common—it was not enough for them to work and live comfortably as most of us do—both of them were always pursuing shortcuts to fortune rather than put their noses to the grindstone and perhaps eventually amassing a small fortune through honesty and hard work, as NM’s immigrant father had done. My therapist was right when she said I had married my mother!!! Anyway, while she would sing my praises to anyone who would listen—praises that always included how rich we all would be and how we would move to Hollywood and have a Cadillac—I never got more than criticism and slaps and belittled for my stage fright and unwillingness to practice.

My memories of this period are pretty self-focussed (I was only 6 when this began, self-centeredness rather normal at this time) so I can’t say with any certainty what was up with my scapegrace, GC brother. I do, however, remember being envious of him not being required to give up his Saturdays to singing lessons and practice or having to sit still for make up and hairstyling or stand for costume fittings which invariably involved being poked with pins. Whatever he was up to at the time, we still had our Mexican “housekeeper” because he wasn’t in school yet…I don’t think his life changed much at all. But mine became a nightmare because not one minute of it belonged to me any more.

NM would brag to her friends about how much she “sacrificed” for my “career.” I don’t know if anyone realized just how selfish she was being, pursuing her dream of fame and fortune through me, who would rather be playing dolls with the neighbour girls. I don’t know if my brother resented the attention I got for all of this, but I know my father was adamantly against it and she just ignored him. She always had her trump card: if he didn’t step back and allow her to do what she wanted, she would simply throw him out and divorce him—again.

The end result is a family in which almost all communication is triangular. The narcissist, the spider in the middle of the family web, sensitively monitors all the children for information she can use to retain her unchallenged control over the family. She then passes that on to the others, creating the resentments that prevent them from communicating directly and freely with each other. The result is that the only communication between the children is through the narcissist, exactly the way she wants it.

Not just the communication between the children, but between the various factions created by the narcissist. Leah’s NM would send letters to her brother, telling him terrible things about Leah, the objective being to poison his mind against her own daughter. My NM did the same thing with respect to me. In the beginning, this kind of thing is generally done to gain something for the NM—sympathy, for example, for what she has to put up with. It is done to silence and isolate a child who might not be taken in by the NM’s manipulations, it is done to discredit the child, to set the stage for her not being believed when she reports what is really going on in the family. I, for example, had an “over-active imagination” and while the phrase “drama queen” had yet to be invented, that was the gist of how NM painted me to the family. In a situation in which numerous motives might be at work, NM always selected the worst possible one for me, regardless of what was truly going on in my mind. Over a period of years a picture of me was formed in the minds of family members who rarely saw me and when they did, the reality of me was overshadowed by the picture in their minds.

When NMs do this, it sets the stage for later predations. If everybody “knows” how bad you are, they have no empathy for you even though you are a small child. They feel bad for your poor mother and admire her courage and bravery in continuing to deal with you and even love you despite your awfulness. Cousins ignore, disdain and/or bully you. It becomes a habit to hate you, a habit to blame you, a habit that becomes entrenched and unquestioned after so many years, and it spreads from one family member to the next like a disease.

Triangulation is a powerful weapon used by narcissists everywhere because she who controls the flow of information controls the family—when you control what people know you control what they believe...and when you control what they believe, you control them—and control is essential to the narcissist in order to keep up her façade. The absolutely worst thing you can do to a narcissist is tell the truth and so it is in the narcissist’s best interest to pre-emptively discredit any who might do so, even their own children.

Next: Part 24. As a last resort she goes pathetic.

She’s a liar: Characteristics of Narcissistic Mothers Pt 8

 The black text is a shortened version of an original work by Chris, The Harpy’s Child. Original at https://sites.google.com/site/harpyschild/  Copyright 2007, all rights reserved

[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]

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

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Part 8. She's a liar in too many ways to count.

She's a liar in too many ways to count. Any time she talks about something that has emotional significance for her, it's a fair bet that she's lying. Lying is one way that she creates conflict in the relationships and lives of those around her - she'll lie to them about what other people have said, what they've done, or how they feel. She'll lie about her relationship with them, about your behavior or about your situation in order to inflate herself and to undermine your credibility.

That last sentence describes my NM perfectly. When Ns do this, often their victims are unaware they are doing it, or at least unaware of the long term consequences of allowing it to go unchallenged. It is a mistake to believe that others can see through her exaggerations, hyperbole and outright fabrications—even people you think know her well can still be blind to such things, perhaps because if they believed her capable of such a thing, they would have to acknowledge not only their own jeopardy (if she lies so egregiously about her own child, what must she say about me?), but their foolishness in making and keeping such a friendship. Some people simply cannot accept that they can be wrong or are unwilling to bear the humiliation of admitting to it.

In my case, my NM began poisoning my well when I was a very small child. She gave me to Child Services when I was 2 (keeping my newborn brother), telling them to find me an adoptive home. She started painting me unmanageable at a very young age. As I got older, the tales got worse. Most of them contained a grain of truth upon which she built an elaborate fabrication, assigning me motive and even thought processes, as if she could read my mind. If I was late coming home from school, it wasn’t because I stopped a moment to chat with a classmate, it was because I was doing something bad, like meeting a boy somewhere and doing rude things, and thinking I was smarter than she was in expecting her to believe I was chatting with Melody outside her house. The truth was, I was late getting home and told her I was talking to Melody—the rest was pure fabrication (and, according to my father, projection).

By the time I was in my teens I was the family scandal (replacing her in that role), the black sheep, the hopeless one. And, of course, teens being who they are, I had the name so I played the game, ending up pregnant and unmarried at 17. By then, my extended family would—and did—believe anything she said about me, no matter how outrageous or untrue. I was ruined in my family’s eyes and my own mother did the ruination.

The narcissist is very careful about how she lies. To outsiders she'll lie thoughtfully and deliberately, always in a way that can be covered up if she's confronted with her lie. She spins what you said rather than makes something up wholesale. She puts dishonest interpretations on things you actually did. If she's recently done something particularly egregious she may engage in preventative lying: she lies in advance to discount what you might say before you even say it. Then when you talk about what she did you'll be cut off with "I already know all about it—your mother told me... (self-justifications and lies)." Because she is so careful about her deniability, it may be very hard to catch her in her lies and the more gullible of her friends may never realize how dishonest she is.

This is an insidious form of undermining. My NM, if ever caught by an outsider (including my father or the extended family) lying about me, shrugged it off with such expressions as “Well, it’s just like her to do it…” or “You can’t blame me for thinking she did it this time as well…” or “I wouldn’t put it past her…” or “It was the kind of thing she would do—remember when she…” She would deftly turn attention away from her own transgression and falsehood and get people focussed on me and mine, real or imagined.

She also engaged in “pre-emptive lying,” often to save her own skin. If she hit me too hard and left marks that other people might question her about, she would be quick to make sure others knew something terrible I had done to justify her. Strangely—or maybe not so strange, considering what she is like in adulthood—my own daughter figured out this tactic as well. When she was 15 or 16 I sent her to her room over cutting school and she jumped out of a second story window into a thorn bush below, getting bruised and cut and scraped in the process. She then went to a friend’s house and used her bruises and marks to beg to be allowed to stay with them. I don’t know exactly what she told the girl’s mother, but I do know that it boiled down to “my mother beat me up for no good reason and now I am afraid of her.” It only took a few weeks for the other mother to figure out what was going on (now her daughter was cutting school as well), but Annie very effectively pre-empted me when it came to discussing her transgressions with her friend’s mother…the woman wouldn’t believe a word I had to say until Annie had co-opted her own daughter.

This kind of behaviour on the part of a parent can leave a child feeling hopeless and powerless. Nothing she does will be recognized, only what her lying mother says she does. Kids do not have the kind of perspective balanced adults have and because their brains are still immature (and soaked in an unstable hormonal soup), they tend not to think their responses through. Instead, they react and rebel and often the result of that is “If I’m going to have the name, I might as well play the game.” If I am going to be shunned or punished or suspected of all these terrible things—if I am going to pay the price for them whether I do them or not—I might as well get the enjoyment of doing them right along with the penalty.” Some kids, like my nephew (GCBro’s felon son) never outgrow the attitude and spend their entire lives in one kind of trouble after another.

To you, she'll lie blatantly. She will claim to be unable to remember bad things she has done, even if she did one of them recently and even if it was something very memorable. Of course, if you try to jog her memory by recounting the circumstances "You have a very vivid imagination" or "That was so long ago. Why do you have to dredge up your old grudges?" Your conversations with her are full of casual brush-offs and diversionary lies and she doesn't respect you enough to bother making it sound good. For example she'll start with a self-serving lie: "If I don't take you as a dependent on my taxes I'll lose three thousand dollars!" You refute her lie with an obvious truth: "No, three thousand dollars is the amount of the dependent exemption. You'll only lose about eight hundred dollars." Her response: "Isn't that what I said?" You are now in a game with only one rule: You can't win.

I could go on and on and on with the many ways NM lied to me, both by outright fabrications and deliberately misleading me, and by more subtle means, like omitting salient information that would change one’s view of her in a tale she told.

For example, NM once told me that her father (a German/Russian immigrant) was “too old fashioned and unreasonably strict.” Well, knowing my grandfather and knowing he was a bit on the old fashioned side (he forbade me to wear two-piece swim suits at the local pool, for example and deplored my use of make up), for many years I believed her teenaged rebellion against him was justifiable. She also told me that she was the unfavoured child, that her parents preferred her brothers and gave them all kinds of privileges and freedoms she did not have. Given that she treated me and my brother that way, it was totally believable.

But it wasn’t true. Over a period of years I picked up tidbits from various family members that indicated my NM was spoiled, especially by her father, and that she was indulged and cosseted. When I was in my late 30s I had occasion to discuss my NM’s youth with her older brother, my uncle Gary, who was angry enough with her for using him in her campaign to steal my kids that he finally broke the “no airing dirty linen” part of his upbringing and told me story after story of NM’s childhood and youth and early adulthood.

Considering the very conservative mores of the time—1940s—my NM’s behaviour was nothing short of scandalous! Yes, her father was strict with her but not because he was a control-freak ignorant immigrant—he did it in response to her antics, things that caused her to be a subject of ugly gossip and rumour—like sneaking out at night at the age of 16 and being seen drinking and smoking and riding around on motorcycles with young men too old to be dating her. She eloped with my father and before my grandfather could get it annulled, she was pregnant with me (an event for which she would never forgive me) and all of her wild ways had to be curtailed.

But, according to my uncle, not for long. Within a short time of my birth she was up to her old tricks again and she created such a scandal this time that we had to leave town. Women crossed the street in town to avoid having to walk past her, if a man looked at her his wife bashed him with her pocketbook. She became the “town tramp,” and to save both her own and her family’s face, she had to get out of town.

But none of this information was offered by NM. No, to hear her tell it, Grandpa was unreasonably strict with her and allowed my uncles to run loose and it just wasn’t fair! And when confronted with these lies of omission, what was her reaction? “Where did you hear this nonsense? From your Uncle Gary? We have never gotten along, he has always been jealous of me, and it doesn’t surprise me that he would make up such lies about me…”

She was no less blatant about telling lies about me, and to call her on them, especially when I was a child, was to invite dire retribution. First, she would deny the lie flatly, throwing in a little gaslighting for good measure: “It didn’t happen that way and you know it!” especially if we were in the presence of others. And once she had me alone and there were no witnesses, my head was handed to me on a platter: “Don’t you ever correct me again, miss, do you understand? Ever! If you do, I will beat you within an inch of your life, do you hear?”

This kind of thing fosters co-dependency. Knowing the truth in your own head but unable to act upon it or express it—indeed to risk punishment for anything other than full support of the dissembler—we learn to enable at our NM’s knees.

On the rare occasions she is forced to acknowledge some bad behavior, she will couch the admission deniably. She "guesses" that "maybe" she "might have" done something wrong. The wrongdoing is always heavily spun and trimmed to make it sound better. The words "I guess," "maybe," and "might have" are in and of themselves lies because she knows exactly what she did - no guessing, no might haves, no maybes.

This is called “dissembling” and it is something many DoNMs seem to pick up as fleas. Ns can’t be wrong because it impinges their sense of self-worth. Many DoNMs can’t be wrong as well, but for a different reason: to be wrong invites punishment. Even as grown up women, inside us the fearful child still quivers, and even though we consciously know nobody is going to tongue-lash or beat us up for our error, that trembling inner child does not. It is a difficult habit to break, if you’ve picked it up, but in the spirit of honesty, if you find yourself doing it, you need to learn to stop, for your own peace of mind.

Ns do this as a fence-sitting exercise, as a way to have their cake and eat it too. Through this type of dissembling, they attempt to placate the accuser while retaining, for themselves, their “innocence.” The worst part of the lying that Ns do is not their lying to us, it is their lying to themselves. When they believe their own lies, any chance of rational interaction is dead.

This, by the way, is the main reason it is so difficult to interact rationally with an N: you live in reality, they live in a fantasy created out of lies, and the two worlds are mutually incompatible.

9. She has to be the center of attention all the time.

She makes you look crazy: Characteristics of Narcissistic Mothers Pt 6

 The black text is a shortened version of an original work by Chris, The Harpy’s Child. Original at https://sites.google.com/site/harpyschild/  Copyright 2007, all rights reserved

[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]

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

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Part 6. She makes you look crazy

She makes you look crazy. If you try to confront her about something she's done, she'll tell you that you have “a very vivid imagination” (this is a phrase commonly used by abusers of all sorts to invalidate your experience of their abuse) that you don't know what you're talking about, or that she has no idea what you're talking about.

My NM would tell me (and others) that I had an “overactive imagination”: different words, same intent. Don’t you wonder how all of these women, all over the world, who have never met each other, come up with the same nonsense??

The problem with this is that it is invalidating. It makes you doubt not only yourself, but reality. If you saw something happen with your own eyes, heard it with your own ears, felt it in your own heart, and then are told you are imagining things, what does this do to your confidence in your ability to recognize what is going on around you? Aside from the fact that this tactic allows NMs to effectively lie by neutralizing your experiences and observations, it sets you up to lack essential confidence in yourself—it attacks your self esteem.

The self-doubt this creates is multi-faceted. For example, if you are being abused or bullied, if, when you tell your mother, she accuses you of having a vivid imagination, you have to re-define your perception of abuse or bullying or be thought a drama queen. This can lead to an acceptance of situations in which you have every right to be offended or outraged simply because your NM had caused you to re-define “abuse” or “bullying” to accommodate her lack of interest in taking care of you. If you feel ill or have a toothache or a pain somewhere and you are told it is just your imagination, you learn to ignore bodily clues that, in later years, could lead to severe illness or even death.

At the very least, it hurts to be invalidated and your concerns minimized by the one person above all others who should have your back.

She will claim not to remember even very memorable events, flatly denying they ever happened, nor will she ever acknowledge any possibility that she might have forgotten.

This was my MNM’s stock in trade. She would deny anything she did not want to own by saying “I don’t remember it that way” or simply denying it happened. There was no chance that she might have misremembered or simply forgotten—no, if she couldn’t call it to mind in exactly the way I did, then I was wrong and the subject was closed.

This is an extremely aggressive and exceptionally infuriating tactic called "gaslighting," common to abusers of all kinds. Your perceptions of reality are continually undermined so that you end up without any confidence in your intuition, your memory or your powers of reasoning. This makes you a much better victim for the abuser. Narcissists gaslight routinely. The narcissist will either insinuate or will tell you outright that you're unstable, otherwise you wouldn't believe such ridiculous things or be so uncooperative.

Breathes there an abuser of any ilk who does not gaslight? Gaslighting seems to come to abusers naturally—without comparing notes with each other, without lessons, it just seems to be a natural part of their persona. It is, essentially, a subtle form of lying. An example from my life was gift-giving time: at Christmas or my birthday is was not uncommon for me to get an envelope with some strange amount of money in it, like $1.16 or $3.62. This was NM’s way of proving she treated me and my GCBro “equally,” because however much more she spent on his new fishing rod or bicycle or skateboard, she made up by tacking this odd sum onto my pile of plain cotton underwear, socks and ugly shoes. We were treated equally, you see? And any intimations to the contrary drew “Whatever are you talking about? I spent the same amount on both of you!” reactions (assuming she was in a good enough mood to talk and not in a mood to swat me and just call me “ungrateful” or threaten “You want ‘unfair’? I will show you what ‘unfair’ really is, if you keep this crap up!”).

You're oversensitive. You're imagining things. You're hysterical. You're completely unreasonable. You're over-reacting, like you always do. She'll talk to you when you've calmed down and aren't so irrational. She may even characterize you as being neurotic or psychotic.

When I was in therapy one of the things I did was to write to each of my (long divorced) parents and tell them about sexual abuse I suffered as a child that I had never revealed to them. One episode involved my stepfather and when NM responded to my letter, she flatly denied it ever happened; later in the letter she twisted what I had written to look as if it was an accusation against my father which she also denied the possibility of occurrence because, in her words, “he was married to me at the time.”

Because these things, in her estimation, could never have happened, I was “imagining things” (just like her favouritism of GCBro, something independently observed by numerous family members but soundly denied by NM). Or I was “making a mountain out of a molehill.” Or I was over-reacting to something much more innocent. Or I was crazy and making shit up. The only time she was behind me was when something was going to cost her money: my PE teacher in the 7th grade made me sit outside in bad weather in response to my doctor’s note saying I should stay warm and benched. My pneumonia relapsed and my NM gave the school and that teacher the tongue-lashing of their lives. Her funds were imperilled and I was a believable accuser. But earlier in the year, when I was humiliated and embarrassed by the same teacher for not having a gym uniform (NM refused to buy me one on the grounds that some shorts and a shirt from my wardrobe would suit fine), there was no fierce protective Mom facing the teacher down—it cost her nothing in funds or face for me to be humiliated by the teacher for my lack of a uniform and I was over-reacting to something not worth paying attention to, in her mind. It was not until the money for continued medical care was at stake that I was supported.

Once she's constructed these fantasies of your emotional pathologies, she'll tell others about them, as always, presenting her smears as expressions of concern and declaring her own helpless victimhood. She didn't do anything. She has no idea why you're so irrationally angry with her. You've hurt her terribly. She thinks you may need psychotherapy. She loves you very much and would do anything to make you happy, but she just doesn't know what to do. You keep pushing her away when all she wants to do is help you.

Mine, being an ignoring malignant NM, was not so much into expressions of love or feeling hurt by me. And if I was angry with her, it was something to hide because I was not allowed to be angry at her or anything she did. Being angry with her was a punishable offense. But she had her fantasies about my emotional pathologies, all right—and she spread them to anyone who would listen, telling them how awful I was and painting herself as a long-suffering victim of me and my awfulness. When I was 13 I had to have a D&C for an infection—I was a virgin—but she took my symptoms to mean I was having a miscarriage and spread it about—even to my father!—as an example of what she “had to put up with” with me. At around age 12 she so convinced herself I was “incorrigible” that she tried to have me committed to reform school. Because I did well in school and because I had never been in trouble with the law, the court refused. I was not present for the hearing, which is why, in later years, I was surprised to overhear her explain to a friend that I succeeded in staying of reform school by “charming the judge.”

She has simultaneously absolved herself of any responsibility for your obvious antipathy towards her, implied that it's something fundamentally wrong with you that makes you angry with her, and undermined your credibility with her listeners. She plays the role of the doting mother so perfectly that no one will believe you.

While I am confident that engulfing, enmeshing NMs play the role of doting mother to the hilt, ignoring mothers can’t carry that off. My ignoring NM, instead, played the role of put-upon, long-suffering mother whose child was so incorrigible and headstrong that she could not be controlled. I was a “bad seed,” a kid who got into the kinds of trouble that doesn’t get you sent to reform school, like wilful disobedience and sexual precocity. This caused a lot of tongue clucking amongst family and friends and a lot of sympathy to flow towards her. They couldn’t know it was a pack of lies, and their own observations of me were tainted by her tales—why would any mother say such awful things about her own child if they weren’t true? Indeed…everybody knows that kids lie but mothers automatically love their children and wouldn’t say bad things that were not true…

Next: Part 7. She's envious.