She goes pathetic: Characteristics of Narcissistic Mothers Pt 24

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- 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

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Part 24. She goes pathetic

As a last resort she goes pathetic. When she's confronted with unavoidable consequences for her own bad behavior, including your anger, she will melt into a soggy puddle of weepy helplessness. It's all her fault. She can't do anything right. She feels so bad.

I don’t think malignant NMs operate this way. But I know that “regular” NMs certainly do! I cannot count the stories I have heard from other DoNMs about their NMs going into pathetic mode just about the time the daughters feel pushed so far they are ready to go NC (no contact). These wily, crafty old bats seem to have a sixth sense for when they’ve pushed too far and begin hoovering their daughters back in with a variety of underhanded techniques, not the least of which is feigned helplessness.

When my NM was confronted with consequences of her bad behaviour she had two ways of dealing with it, often employing them simultaneously: denial and rage (which often included retaliation). My GC Bro, he who could do no wrong and had a brown nose from being so far up her butt, even said “Oh, she could be vindictive at times…” Nobody with an ounce of self-protectiveness in their bodies would directly confront her because anyone who knew her understood that her reaction would be 1) indignant denial and 2) indignant rage at someone believing she would do such a thing.

When I was in therapy I sent her a letter telling her how it felt to be her daughter, how fearful I was, how vulnerable and unprotected. In the letter I told her that I had been sexually molested as a child and that my fear of her was so great that I didn’t tell her because I thought she would not believe me and that she would punish me. I mentioned my stepfather as a perpetrator and her reply letter was appalling. First of all, it was written inside a blank card and on the front of the card was a drawing of a droopy, depressed looking little knight astride and equally droopy looking horse. It was captioned something like “I will never let you hurt me again.” I found it a peculiar choice for a reply to a letter about my perceptions of my painful childhood…I had hurt her??

The inside of the letter was vile. I could hear her, in my head, shouting angrily at me the words in the letter. The tone of her writing was one of barely controlled rage and her handwriting indicated it was written furiously. The message was vituperative, accusing me of lying, then twisting my words to make it my father who had molested me not my stepfather, then accusing me of lying again, saying it could not have happened because he was married to her at the time. None of it made any sense. It was an Nrage tantrum on paper. It was how a Malignant NM responds to the truth of her behaviours held to her face: denial and rage.

What she doesn't do: own the responsibility for her bad conduct and make it right. Instead, as always, it's all about her, and her helpless self-pitying weepiness dumps the responsibility for her consequences AND for her unhappiness about it on you.

Like MNs everywhere, Malignant NMs don’t own the responsibility for their behaviour or the consequences of their behaviour either. And while the Malignant NM might not engage in weepy self-pity, she still dumps the responsibility back onto you…and you are to blame for her being angry and for anything she does in that anger (like breaking a blood vessel in her hand when she hits you…or you “making” her hit you). In her vicious, scathing letter to me, first NM denied that it was possible for my stepfather to have molested me, but later said if it did happen, it was because I instigated it. I found it rather interesting that she was so certain of what had and hadn’t happened and who did what when not only did she not witness it, the only other participant was long dead. But, true to every other narcissist on the planet, a little thing like facts wasn’t going to get in the way of her convictions!

As so often with narcissists, it is also a manipulative behavior. If you fail to excuse her bad behavior and make her feel better, YOU are the bad person for being cold, heartless and unfeeling when your poor mother feels so awful.

Very true. And while MNMs aren’t so inclined towards feeling awful with remorse, real or fake, they have their own twist on this.

The “normal” NM will make a drama out of this but the MNM will not feel awful—she won’t even fake remorse except, perhaps, in an over-the-top sarcastic way—but she will be highly indignant. How dare you accuse her of being sneaky, underhanded, manipulative and insensitive? How dare you call her a liar…and to her face, even!! Then she will take the show on the road…everybody she knows will hear about it and, after all she did for you, all she sacrificed for you, all she gave up for you, you repay her like this?? You might even hear the old saw about serpent’s teeth and ungrateful children, and ultimately you find that since you have no gratitude for all the things she’s done for you (like put a roof over your head and food on the table), she might just stop and then maybe you will appreciate her and all her hard work.

By the time she is done, you will have been painted the most selfish, cold, heartless, manipulative, impossible daughter a mother ever had. Everyone who knows her, from the butcher to the meter reader to the mechanic to your grandparents, cousins, and aunts and uncles, will know how unappreciative and self-centred you are and how she just keeps giving and giving and gets nothing back from you other than a hard time.

If your NM isn’t of the malignant variety, she may still do this…it is critical to her self-image that she is loving and sacrificing and if your perception is different either you have to be brought into line with hers or you have to be discredited.

Any way you view them, narcissists are a nasty piece of work. It is as parents, however, that they do their worst damage, setting their children up for a lifetime of dysfunction as partners and enablers of fellow narcissists, even in some cases, to grow up to be narcissists themselves. It is not a legacy to wish on anyone except, perhaps, the narcissists themselves.

Next: Forgiveness: A mistake?

She doesn't acknowledge people’s feelings: Characteristics of Narcissistic Mothers Pt 21

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 21. She seems to have no awareness that other people even have feelings

This is her lack of empathy in a nutshell. Without awareness and concern for the feelings of other people (and animals as well), it is impossible to have empathy for them. And without empathy for others, people behave as if they were the only people in the world who have feelings.

She'll occasionally slip and say something jaw-droppingly callous because of this lack of empathy. It isn't that she doesn't care at all about other people's feelings, though she doesn't. It would simply never occur to her to think about their feelings.

This is very true…it is as if the filter that most of us have that keeps thoughts from popping out of our mouths is not present. Where you and I might think something rude or inappropriate, we keep it to ourselves either because we don’t want to look like insensitive clods or we don’t want to hurt another person’s feelings: NMs think they are right about everything and don’t expect others to view them as insensitive but as right. And the feelings of others is simply not part of an NMs thought processes—only her feelings matter.

Malignant NMs take it a step further. They intentionally say callous, cruel things for the purpose of stirring up some drama, whether it is to get a rise out of somebody or because they expect the other person to react. My MNM was a racist and didn’t care if anybody heard her, including members of the group she was disparaging. My best friend in junior high and high school was a Jewish girl and everything was fine with my NM until she found out the girl was Jewish, then the shit hit the fan. I never told my friend, but I am sure she wondered why I quit inviting her over to my house: my NM had not forbidden me to see my friend, but she had forbidden me from having a “dirty kike” in her house. But even if she hadn’t forbidden her presence, I would not have invited her anyway—it was very unlikely that NM would keep her antipathy to herself with a real live Jewish person…a vulnerable teen aged girl at that…in the house.

Her insensitivity and lack of awareness of the feelings of others, the complete lack of empathy, is best embodied in her attitude when I had a miscarriage and, due to a serious infection, nearly died. She was in California, I was in Boston, and my husband was overwhelmed with the duties of taking care of two toddlers and trying to work. Expecting a normal mother response (“Oh no! My daughter is sick in the hospital and my grandbabies need me—I’m going to Boston!”) he got a shock when she chewed him out and told him to stop calling her. Then she called me and, completely disregarding how I might feel being just out of isolation, after days of unconsciousness and the loss of my baby, she proceeded to tell me that the miscarriage was a good thing because I didn’t need “more brats clinging to my skirts,” that if I didn’t have contraception to keep my legs closed, and to stop malingering and playing the doctors to get their sympathy so I could stay in the hospital and get home to my husband and kids so he would stop calling her!

Fourteen year old girls can be hormonal, hypersensitive, contrary creatures. When my daughter was fourteen, she spent some time talking with her grandmother on the phone one afternoon and when she hung up, she was in tears. When I asked why, she told me that Grammi had spent most of their conversation complaining about her own children, finishing up with “I wish I have never had children—I should have had cats instead!” My daughter turned to me, eyes streaming tears, saying “If she never had children, I wouldn’t be here! Does she wish I was dead?” It obviously had never crossed NM’s mind that my daughter would be hurt by her words…and if she had seen my daughter’s reaction, she most likely would have accused her of “deliberately misunderstanding” and “turning on the water works for sympathy.”

An absence of empathy is the defining trait of a narcissist and underlies most of the other traits [herein] described.

If you are not sure if your mother is a narcissist or not, this is the trait to watch for. But don’t be fooled by fake expressions of empathy—narcissists, especially older ones who have had a lot of practice, often know the words and facial expressions and social conventions and can make a convincing act. It is away from the situation that you find the real person. It is what they say when they think they are not at risk of being found out that tells the truth.

In the old days, when people regularly had servants, they didn’t care what they said in front of “the staff” because they weren’t really people to them. Narcissists are much the same way inside the family and even with a few friends who share or tolerate their disorder. So, where your mother might coo and ooh and ahh over a relative’s new baby, out of earshot she will say rude things—like my NM when her aunt had a baby late in life. I was excited about having a new baby in the family…NM was congratulatory on the phone and sent the expected card and gift—it was her mother’s sister and it would not do to slight Nana’s sister—but once she put the phone down, she was nasty. Auntie was “disgusting” to have a baby at her age; she and Uncle should be “over that by now” and on and on and on. She had no joy for her aunt and uncle, no pleasure at her new cousin’s arrival…her feelings were centre stage.

Unlike psychopaths, narcissists do understand right, wrong, and consequences, so they are not ordinarily criminal. She beat you, but not to the point where you went to the hospital. She left you standing out in the cold until you were miserable, but not until you had hypothermia. She put you in the basement in the dark with no clothes on, but she only left you there for two hours.

Actually, psychopaths do know right from wrong, they just don’t care. This scholarly article explains a study done in 2009 to determine if they did or not. For those not up to reading the whole article, here is the abstract: “Adult psychopaths have deficits in emotional processing and inhibitory control, engage in morally inappropriate behavior, and generally fail to distinguish moral from conventional violations. These observations, together with a dominant tradition in the discipline which sees emotional processes as causally necessary for moral judgment, have led to the conclusion that psychopaths lack an understanding of moral rights and wrongs. We test an alternative explanation: psychopaths have normal understanding of right and wrong, but abnormal regulation of morally appropriate behavior. We presented psychopaths with moral dilemmas, contrasting their judgments with age- and sex-matched (i) healthy subjects and (ii) non-psychopathic, delinquents. Subjects in each group judged cases of personal harms (i.e. requiring physical contact) as less permissible than impersonal harms, even though both types of harms led to utilitarian gains. Importantly, however, psychopaths’ pattern of judgments on different dilemmas was the same as those of the other subjects. These results force a rejection of the strong hypothesis that emotional processes are causally necessary for judgments of moral dilemmas, suggesting instead that psychopaths understand the distinction between right and wrong, but do not care about such knowledge, or the consequences that ensue from their morally inappropriate behavior.” Psychotics may not know the difference, but psychopaths and narcissists both know what the society around them considers acceptable.

Narcissists, like psychopaths, seek to advantage themselves and simply do not care about right and wrong except as they define and rationalize it. A narcissist will blame the victim, saying “Look what you made me do,” or “Don’t make me hit you,” when, in fact, the N has many choices other than hitting, and the victim is not compelling the N to choose hitting. The narcissist rationalizes and minimizes her transgressions and fully expects the victim to do the same. And while the narcissist may well know that whatever it is she is doing may not be “right” in the eyes of the neighbours or the authorities, the narcissist’s denial of reality coupled with her ability to rationalize and justify has the narcissist convinced that the others are wrong, and probably too stupid to even realize it. Punishments of children that normal people might consider to be over the top are viewed as necessary, desirable, clever, guaranteed to be effective (even in the face of repeated failure) to the narcissist. The outrageous is normalized in the eyes of the narcissist, although it may well be hidden simply because she is aware that other people might take exception to her methods.

One of the problems this creates is that the children brutalized in this manner also normalize this kind of behaviour and punishment. It can give rise to children of NMs who, while not liking severe punishments meted out to children, wholly believe in their appropriateness, necessity and effectiveness and go on to use them with their own children, lacking other parenting tools. And the normalized inappropriate treatment is not limited to physical abuse, which seems to be more the hallmark of the Malignant NM. Psychological and emotional abuse are no less devastating—and no less likely to be adopted by the children when they become parents if they have no alternative behavioural models…this is called “having fleas.”

I once knew a man whose stepmother gave birth to her first—and only—child in her 40s. She did not want a child, she was dismayed and distressed at the whole prospect of pregnancy and childbirth—and the inherent messiness of children just added to her unhappiness. He daughter was a very headstrong child, adding further to her issues. When her two-year-old misbehaved the mother would slap the child repeatedly on any body part available and yell at her “You stop this or I won’t love you any more!” She would also threaten that her father, who absolutely adored her, wouldn’t love her anymore, or that she (the mother) would “run away from home.” Since the mother did not appear to be an N in other respects, I suspect this was a legacy from her own mother, a woman with nine children who was born and raised in the 19th century.

Whether the mother commits this kind of psychological abuse on her child out of narcissism or fleas is immaterial: the result is pretty much the same. A child threatened with the loss of love of her parents as a result of her behaviour can become terribly insecure and fearful; a child whose mother threatens to run away develops abandonment issues. And, because the mother clearly implies these dreadful things will happen as a result of the child’s behaviour, the child may also come to have an over-developed sense of responsibility, to feel anything bad that happens in her family is her fault, even if she cannot clearly see or articulate why. No mother, flea-ridden or narcissist, can inflict this kind of abuse on a child if she is aware of the child’s feelings, if she has empathy for the fear and pain this can inflict on the child. The mother with fleas may do it because she simply has no other tools for managing her child and even empathize with the child’s pain but know no other way to discipline. Hopefully, their own empathetic pain drives these mothers to seek out alternative means of disciplining their child.

But the narcissistic mother, even if she also has fleas, differs in that to her, the child has no feelings or, if she acknowledges the child’s feelings, they do not matter. What matters is the NM getting what she wants from the child, regardless of cost to the child, because what the NM wants is all that really matters.

Next: Part 22. She blames.

She’s exploitative: Characteristics of Narcissistic Mothers Pt 18

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 18. She's exploitative.

She's exploitative. She will manipulate to get work, money, or objects she envies out of other people for nothing.

I am not sure how she did this—my stepmother said NM used sex (although she also said NM didn’t like sex) but I used to be amazed at the things she got. When we first moved to California, we were dead broke. I was only 4, but I remember the battered old car, the cheap one-room “residential motel” we first lived in, and the low-income government housing after that. And yet, within two years, we were moving into a house of our own… For a long time I just assumed they bought it with a VA approved loan until one day I put all of the fragments together—she was sleeping with the guy they bought the house from! He was carrying the mortgage himself and my NM would go over to his house every month or so to make the payment. She came home with stories of his new, younger wife’s extravagances…her “Chinese” furniture, her custom-made and custom-upholstered furniture, custom-made draperies for the picture windows—even her fancy Springolator pumps. The woman was a spendthrift and was going to run Frank broke, according to NM.

It didn’t click for me until years later, but all the signs were there. And then my father moved out and NM started dating again and who did she set her cap for? Frank. And eventually she caught. And it was she who ran him broke, not Marti the “spendthrift” previous wife (whom I had met on a couple of occasions and liked very much). So successfully manipulative was she that, after Marti moved out, NM’s closet was suddenly full of Springolator pumps and dresses too small for her (size 9) that she did her damnedest to squeeze into. Marti was gone, but everything that was Marti’s, from her clothes and shoes to her furniture to her house, her dog and her husband, suddenly belonged to NM.

It took her a number of years to pull the whole scheme off: we got that first house when I was 6 and by the time I was 14 her plan had come to fruition. When Marti divorced Frank, to keep her from getting half of his assets, NM convinced Frank to sell all of his assets to her for $1 on the promise that when the divorce was settled, she would reverse the transaction. It worked but for one flaw: Frank had trusted the wrong person. NM held out and teased and basically led him a merry chase until he realized that the only way to get his stuff back was to marry her. It took me years to realize that she could engage in that kind of long-term planning…it took her less than three years to plot and pull off the theft of my children: it took her a good eight to get Frank to the altar.

Charlie’s NM was no better, but she didn’t have the patience for the long games my NM loved to play. She was more of an “instant gratification” kind of person and wanted things done now…right now…while she was standing there. When she bought a new house, she expected Charlie to drop everything, run to her house and build her a deck and a carport, all at his own expense, of course. When he was “too busy,” or “didn’t have time,” she would ignore him for months at a time, failing to invite him to family dinners, ignore his birthday, etc. Being a widower and having no other family, Charlie was devastated by this rejection so of course he complied.

This includes her children, of course. If she set up a bank account for you, she was trustee on the account with the right to withdraw money. As you put money into it, she took it out.

I never had any money—I literally was not allowed to have any! For every A I earned on my report card, my grandmother would give me 10 cents. It doesn’t sound like much now, but then you could get a bottle of coke and a chocolate bar—or a comic book—for 10 cents. I was a good student and so I would send her my report cards and she would send back money, which NM would take away and say she was keeping it for me. She kept it all right—I never saw a penny of it again. The same with money send to me in cards for my birthday or Christmas. A peculiar little game was the “fairness” game where, if she spent more money on GCBro for gifts, she would make up the difference to me in cash, usually some odd amount like $1.36 or $2.21…this was her way of proving she treated us equally. And then she would take the money to keep it for me and I never saw it again!

When I lived with my grandparents during the summers, I would pick strawberries and beans to earn money, like all of the other kids in that small town. I would save up to buy something “good” that I wanted, like a teddy bear (the only teddy bear I had during my childhood I bought with money I earned picking crops) or a doll or something. NM, of course, had other ideas and any money I had not spent by the time she came to pick me up and take me back to California for the school year, she confiscated. She said I had to help pay for the gas for her to drive all that way to pick me up and bring me home!

Wise to her ways, the summer before my senior year, my grandmother took me and all of my picking money on a spending spree at the outlet stores in Portland. I got a Janssen sweater, a Pendleton skirt, a White Stag coat—all premium brands at the time. I bought most of my wardrobe for school on that shopping trip and when NM came to pick me up and the money was all spent, she was livid. She demanded the receipts from my grandmother who, with an incredibly straight face, told her they had been burned in the fireplace with the “rest of the trash” just the night before. I thought my mother was going to explode because she never, ever threw tantrums in front of her parents—she had to control the fury that was boiling inside her and she looked like she was going to pop with rage!

When we got in the car to go back to California, as we got out of town NM asked me “How much money do you have left?” When I told her I had $10, she stuck out her hand. “Hand it over,” she said without offering an explanation or reason. I never saw it again.

She may have stolen your identity. She took you as a dependent on her income taxes so you couldn't file independently without exposing her to criminal penalties. If she made an agreement with you, it was violated the minute it no longer served her needs. If you brought it up demanding she adhere to the agreement, she brushed you off and later punished you so you would know not to defy her again.

I have heard of NMs who have stolen their child’s identity because their own credit was wrecked, so they started on their child’s. One of my brothers had a wife who stole my dad’s identity to buy a new refrigerator then failed t make payments on it. It wasn’t until the account was in serious arrears (and my father’s credit damaged) that someone actually called my dad about it. Apparently the caller said to my father “When do you plan to make a payment on the refrigerator?” and my father said “What refrigerator?” and the whole scheme came to light. Charla was quite the little N, putting out the image of the perfect family all the while stealing from families and employers alike, sending out Christmas newsletters in which she claimed to have cancer (but was miraculously healed by the next letter) and completely engulfing her daughter by a previous marriage. It was like a family joke that nobody loaned anything to Charla that they wanted back because once she had it, it was hers forever! Not one person in the family was surprised to learn her first husband committed suicide and we were all hugely relieved when she and my brother divorced.

My NM never made agreements with me—that would have meant treating me, even for a moment, like a whole human being for which she had some kind of respect. She made promises—usually involving mayhem (“You say a word and I promise you, you will be talking out of the other side of your mouth for a week!”)—and she made threats, but she never made bargains. And, with the exception of promises of mayhem, you couldn’t trust her word on anything. If she said she would take you to the library on Saturday and she changed her mind, you took your physical safety in your hands to bring it up to her. She was Queen, she was always right, and you just went along with whatever she dished out, if you knew what was good for you.

Sometimes the narcissist will exploit a child to absorb punishment that would have been hers from an abusive partner. The husband comes home in a drunken rage, and the mother immediately complains about the child's bad behavior so the rage is vented on to the child.

I am quite sure this occurs in some narcissistic households—and I have read about such things in news accounts of children being severely injured or killed: the mother has a violent abuser for a husband or boyfriend and to divert his rages from her, she says something about the child (not necessarily true) that will cause him to abuse the child rather than her. I don’t know how anyone can do this: I was married to an abusive man once and when one of our rows frightened the children and started them crying, he stormed towards their bedroom to “teach them a lesson.” He was the one who learned the lesson—never threaten my children, especially when I have a hot steam iron in my hand! (I still can’t believe I could throw it that far or that my aim was so good!).

Sometimes the narcissistic mother simply uses the child to keep a sick marriage intact because the alternative is being divorced or having to go to work.

My malignant narcissist ex-husband Jack had a mother like this. When his youngest sister, Bonnie, was about 12 or 13, Jack’s father told Jack’s mother that when Bonnie graduated from high school, he was going to move out and get a divorce and move away from their small Ohio town. Rhonda, Jack’s mother, promptly seduced Jack Sr. and got pregnant again, assuming this would keep her husband around for another 18 years.

Well, it didn’t work. As promised, when Bonnie graduated from high school, Jack Sr. packed up, moved out, got a divorce and left the state. Rhonda completely lost interest in the last child and while she made sure he was fed, housed, and clothed, she completely ignored the most basic medical care and socialization. He came to live with us when he was 16 because she could not longer manage him and he was failing school despite a genius level IQ. I had to see to braces and prep for jaw surgery, get his grades up (he eventually made the Dean’s List), teach him basic table manners and simple courtesies.

This boy had been born to patch a sick marriage and which he failed to fulfil the destiny his mother conceived him for, she virtually abandoned him. He once said to me, angry that he was being punished for a transgression, “My mother loves me! She lets me do anything I want.” He didn’t want to hear that what she was doing was neglecting him, although eventually, as an adult, he finally “got” it.

The child is sexually molested but the mother never notices, or worse, calls the child a liar when she tells the mother about the molestation.

This one happened to me. Frank was a lech and I spent a lot of energy staying out of his clutches. He was 20 years older than NM but it didn’t stop him from ogling a teenaged girl at every opportunity.

I had a great dilemma with Frank—NM never allowed me to lock doors, not even the bathroom door. If she wanted to sneak up on you and see what you were doing, she didn’t want a locked door to impede her. And yet, Frank couldn’t seem to hear the shower running when I was in it, walking into the bathroom to take a leak while I was showering behind a thin plastic curtain.

When I was 16 I foolishly put myself in a position where he was able to fondle me sexually and I couldn’t get away from him without alerting NM. That may sound odd, but both Frank and I knew that if NM knew what he was doing, he would not be the one blamed, I would. And with the black reputation she had already given me with my family, it was unlikely anybody would believe me innocent.

Years later, when I was in therapy, one of my actions was to write both of my parents and tell them about this incident. Their responses were so very different: my father was so enraged—it was like it had just happened the day before and he was furious. He said if he (Frank) wasn’t already dead, he’d hunt him down and kill him himself.

NM, on the other hand, refused to believe it. She sent me back a card with her reply written inside, a card that had on the front a cartoon drawing of a bedraggled and sad-looking little knight astride a downtrodden horse and the words “You’ll never hurt me again…” were printed on the front. In her reply she told me I was slandering the dead, but that if it did happen, she was certain that I “instigated” it. And then she seemed to get confused and twisted the whole thing around to make it look like I was accusing my own father—and her bizarre response to that was that it was impossible for my father to have molested me because he was married to her at the time. What? Being married to her was some kind of protective magic??

Now, how narcissistic is that??

Next: Part 19. She projects.

She “parentifies”: Characteristics of Narcissistic Mothers Pt 17

 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 17. She “parentifies.”

I had a really difficult time with this. Until I read the descriptions below, I could not conceive of my NM “parentifying” me simply because she seemed so capable and independent and strong, and my sense of the word conjured up images of a weak, dependent mother making her child take care of her. Boy! Was I wrong!

She shed her responsibilities to you as soon as she was able, leaving you to take care of yourself as best you could.

In a time when most mothers stayed home with their kids, mine had a job. She hired live-in Mexican “housekeepers,” illegals who spoke no English, to take care of me and my brother. I picked up enough Spanish to act as an interpreter between NM and Rosie, or Maria or Consuelo (we had a string of them) when she would call to give instructions.

When my brother started school full time, the housekeepers abruptly disappeared. Now, age 7 or 8, I was responsible for watching my brother after school, doing chores, making him do his chores. When we got up for school, it was my job to make sure we were both fed and dressed and out the door and at school on time. I had to collect him from his classroom at lunch time, walk him home, make lunch for both of us, then walk him back to class. After school I had to wash up all of the breakfast and lunch dishes, peel potatoes for dinner and do a host of other chores, all the while minding a younger brother who was bigger than I was and who refused to do anything he didn’t feel like doing. And, of course, since it was my job to make him do his chores and stay home after school, if it wasn’t done, I was the one who got punished.

I was even expected to bake a cake after school three times a week. It was to be baked, cooled, and frosted before NM got home from work. They were cake mix cakes, so that made it a little easier, but I was not allowed to use the electric mixer so the batter had to be stirred up by hand. I never figured out why an electric mixer was “too dangerous” for me to use, but a gas oven that had to be lit with a match was perfectly safe!

She denied you medical care, adequate clothing, necessary transportation or basic comforts that she would never have considered giving up for herself.

Every one of those things. I got glasses because my science teacher could see I was struggling to read the board and he sent me to the school nurse and she threatened my mother with turning her over to the county for child neglect if she didn’t get me glasses (boy, I caught a week of hell for that!!) when NM told her I was “faking” and it was an “attention getting device.” I got my first visit to the dentist at age 14 the same way—a painful cavity sent me to the nurse for help, she called NM with the same result: I was malingering and seeking sympathy. Since the nurse could actually see the cavities in my molars, she was adamant and I again caught hell. But NM got her teeth cleaned every six months, religiously, by the same dentist whom she “could not afford” to send me to until I was 14 and had four massive cavities.

She never gave you a birthday party or let you have sleepovers. Not once in my entire life. Your friends were never welcome in her house. By high school there was one friend…but then she found out the girl was Jewish and the shit hit the fan. She didn't like to drive you anywhere, so you turned down invitations because you had no way to get there. Yep…she wouldn’t even pick me up from a bus stop a mile away at 8 pm in the dark in the middle of winter. I had to walk. She wouldn't buy your school pictures even if she could easily have afforded it. The only reason I even got my senior pictures is that I had a job my senior year and bought them myself. If you look in family albums, you will see not one school picture of me—but she had no problem finding money for beer, cigarettes, cocktail dresses, and nights “barhopping.” You had a niggardly clothing allowance or she bought you the cheapest clothing she could without embarrassing herself. Yup—or she raided her own closet and gave me things 10 years out of date and totally unsuited. As soon as you got a job, every request for school supplies, clothing or toiletries was met with “Now that you're making money, why don't you pay for that yourself?” Yup—the money that paid for my hairspray, deodorant, feminine hygiene supplies, school supplies, even having my hair done for a school dance, all came from my wages—not even from the child support my father paid like clockwork. You studied up on colleges on your own and choose a cheap one without visiting it. College didn’t happen for me until I was 38. You signed yourself up for the SATs, earned the money to pay for them and talked someone into driving you to the test site. But I took the SATs and CEEBs in high school anyway, and if it hadn’t been for a boyfriend with his own car, that wouldn’t have happened. You worked three jobs to pay for that cheap college and when you finally got mononucleosis she chirped at you that she was “so happy you could take care of yourself.” I got married to a military man and she offered to take me to the commissary monthly only if I agreed to go to the base exchange and buy her cigarettes at the military discount!!

She also gave you tasks that were rightfully hers and should not have been placed on a child. You may have been a primary caregiver for young siblings or an incapacitated parent. You may have had responsibility for excessive household tasks. Above all, you were always her emotional caregiver which is one reason any defection from that role caused such enormous eruptions of rage.

I especially had trouble with this one because she never showed the least amount of emotional frailty or vulnerability. It was not until the last sentence above that it clicked for me: I was her emotional caregiver because from as early as I can remember, I had to control myself, my brother and our environment to keep NM from blowing up into a towering rage. I can recall an incident as far back as age four…Looking at the concept of being her emotional caregiver from the angle of trying to prevent her seething, raging tantrums make it clear. That was how I spent most of my early life—hypervigilant to things that would piss her off and send her into a rage, doing my best to run interference, even to the point of doing my brother’s chores rather than suffer her fury. Inevitably, when she got angry, somehow it became my fault and I got punished for it. It was in my own best interests to manage as much as I could to keep her from blowing up.

You were never allowed to be needy or have bad feelings or problems. Those experiences were only for her, and you were responsible for making it right for her.

This is very true, but I am not sure if I was responsible for making it right because, quite frankly, I don’t think she wanted it made right. She revelled in having something to complain about, especially if it was something in which she could play the innocent, righteously indignant victim. But I was never allowed to display any emotion beyond what she expected at any given time: I should be overjoyed with the meanest gift, I should be penitent when punished, I should be eager to obey her every command. Sadness, sorrow, fear, difficulty in school—those things were for me to handle without her knowledge. I was not to burden her further.

From the time you were very young she would randomly lash out at you any time she was stressed or angry with your father or felt that life was unfair to her, because it made her feel better to hurt you.

I suppose this is why I never trusted or liked her. As a young child, I literally feared for my life when she was angry, no matter who she was angry at, because I knew for a certainty that her anger would eventually come back to me. When I was 14 she spent an hour or more telling me how everything wrong in her life was my fault because if I hadn’t been born, her life would have been different. And while that was true—it most certainly would have been different if she hadn’t married and had a child before she was 18—there’s no guarantee that “different” would have also been “better.”

She made a point of telling me lies about my father, especially when he was gone after the divorce, and it was years before I realized that she had made it a point to get rid of everything I ever got attached to: my toys, my pets, even my father. I was not allowed to love anything—and somehow, depriving me of the things I loved made her feel good. Humiliating me made her feel good. Withholding approval and affection made her feel good. The only thing I did well enough for her was be her scapegoat: I was there and I didn’t fight back for many, many years.

You were often punished out of the blue, for manufactured offenses.

When I was a child I remember getting punished for something my brother did and later, NM found out he did it and actually punished him for it. And while I don’t remember what the infraction was, I clearly remember waiting and waiting for her to appear and apologize. I had already planned that I would set a good example for her by being magnanimous and accepting her apology, something I though she needed to be able to do. I waited and waited and when nothing happened and went to her and actually asked if she was going to apologize to me (where I got the chutzpah for that I will never know!).

She laughed at me. She laughed out loud. “Apologize for what?” she demanded, and when I told her, she laughed again. “Consider that punishment for something you did that I didn’t catch you at,” she told me. “Now get out of here before I punish you for being so insolent!”

As you got older she directly placed responsibility for her welfare and her emotions on you, weeping on your shoulder and unloading on you any time something went awry for her.

I know a number of DoNMs who did not have malignant NMs like mine, and they have reported this kind of thing, even to the point of confiding inappropriately intimate information about their romantic lives. Whenever your mother treats you like her best girlfriend, pouring out all her woes and troubles, be they romantic, marital, financial or whatever, that it inappropriate. It is not the role of the daughter to emotionally shore up her mother but the other way around.

Mine, a malignant NM, would never allow herself to be seen as weak and needy so she expressed this kind of thing in rages, screaming and cursing “How dare he do this to me?” or “That low-down sneaking dirty bastard…” and the like. One of my indelible memories of my NM was her mouth, smeared with a bright bloody-red lipstick painted outside the margins of her lips, filled with her crooked, yellow, nicotine-stained teeth. Always her mouth going, skewering people, raging, spitting out venom and curses and filth. If I close my eyes, I can still see it…

Next: Part 18. She's exploitative.

She's aggressive and shameless: Characteristics of Narcissistic Mothers Pt 16

 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

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

16. She’s aggressive and shameless.

This may be more a malignant NM trait—the aggressiveness—than a “normal” NM trait. All NMs are shameless, however, because they feel completely justified in their outrageous demands. And if what you are asking for is “reasonable,” why should you feel any shame about it?

NMs can be overtly or passively aggressive in how they about making their demands. A woman I know has a mother who has so effectively screwed up her finances that she is in danger of being booted out of her retirement community, along with her husband who suffers from dementia. Because the woman’s mother and father will have no place to go…except into her own home for the remainder of their lives…my friend has been manipulated into detangling the mess her mother has made of the finances and then managing them indefinitely, lest she end up with a passive-aggressive narcissistic mother and a dementia-suffering father under her roof along with her own family.

Another friend’s mother did something similar: Kelli lost her job, as many have done in this economy. She sold her house and moved in with her boyfriend but when the funds ran out, she had to tell her mother, to whom she sent money every month, that the well was dry, she was only working part time at WalMart, and couldn’t even meet her own obligations. Kelli’s mother’s passive aggressive response was to stop paying her rent (which was roughly equal to what Kelli had been sending her every month) and to continue living as she had been all along. When she was evicted, she blamed Kelli. Kelli’s brother offered their mom the use of a cottage on his property, but she turned it down. When last heard from, she was in some kind of shelter for the indigent elderly, blaming Kelli for her ignominious situation.

My late husband’s NM, whose tastes far exceeded our budget, would tell us she didn’t want anything “for the house” for her birthday or Christmas. She also informed us that she didn’t wear costume jewellery. When her heavy hints for real jewellery—far outside our budget but not that of the NGCBro—went ignored and we found other things to give her, she would punish us with lengthy silences.

Some narcissists are more overtly aggressive in the way they present their demands and how they respond to your refusal to accede to them. They will yell and scream, break things, make threats, take back (or break) things they gave you and just engage in a host of overtly aggressive acts. When Charlie’s Aunt Bea died, his mother was executor of her estate. While at Maman’s house for Christmas dinner, Maman presented Charlie with a sheaf of papers for him to sign. Charlie demurred, saying he wanted an attorney to review them first.

Now Charlie was dyslexic and he grew up feeling like he was stupid. That was because the school put him in remedial classes and his family assumed this meant he had a room-temperature IQ. Charlie and I had been together for a couple of years at this point and were engaged…and he had learned, through me, that he was not stupid he just had a perfectly manageable learning disability.

But when Charlie told his mother he wanted a lawyer to look over the papers before he signed anything, she went ballistic. She, who had called him stupid all of his life, was incensed that her “stupid” son would seek competent assistance before signing something! She accused him of not trusting her—blaming me for that—and then told him “If you do not sign these papers tonight, you are stupid!”

Charlie was stricken—I could see it in his face. So I stepped in front of him and said “He’s not stupid and you cannot call him that!”

She turned on me and in her heavy French accent said “I am heez mozzer! I can call heem anyzing I want!”

I turned to Charlie and said “I am ready to go home now. How about you?” With a look of relief, he nodded his head and we went to the coat closet to get our jacket, his mother following us and continuing to shriek abuse at us in two languages as we walked out the door.

Sometimes they are very overt in their aggressiveness!***

She doesn’t ask. She demands. She makes outrageous requests and she'll take anything she wants if she thinks she can get away with it.

When  was a kid, she took every dime, every dollar I received as gifts or earned picking crops during the summer or babysitting as an adolescent. When I was a teen, she took my clothes, my jewellery--anything I had that she wanted became hers. And it didn't stop when I grew up and had kids of my own.

One year, when my kids were small, I had the opportunity to take a temporary job out of town for three weeks during the holiday season…the money was extraordinary and I needed it. Like most young single mothers, I asked my NM if she would take the kids for those weeks while I took the job—she had pawned me off onto her parents virtually every summer of my youth, it was not like such a request was without precedence in my family. Of course, at that time I knew nothing about NPD or personality disorders and my once ignoring, punitive mother was being nice to me for a change, so why not ask? To my great surprise, she agreed.

When the time was up, she didn’t want to bring them back. She did, but she did her best to convince me it would be in “their best interest” to let her have them! This was the woman who beat me stupid as a child for the slightest infraction of rules that changed with her mercurial moods—I was going to let her raise my kids like she raised me? Not a chance!

But I was still living under the admonitions laid down in my childhood, chief among them being she was above criticism—not even sarcasm was allowed—so instead of having the kind of blow up that burned in my breast, I simply thanked her for her offer, but said my kids belonged with me.

At the time I had no idea what she was plotting but in retrospect, it became pretty clear. Within a year she had succeeded in taking both of them away from me, spirited them out of the state where she lied to a court to get a permanent guardianship (after having my parental rights terminated on the grounds that I was a “drug addicted prostitute” who neglected the children and abandoned them—none of which was even remotely true). Within two years, they were in New York, adopted by her childless brother and his wife, people who had been turned down by the state as adoptive parents through the state agencies because they could not pass the home study.

This was her response to my refusal to 1) abort my illegitimate child when I became pregnant at 17; 2) accede to her demand that I give the child up for adoption; 3) accept her withholding permission for me to marry by getting a court order permitting it; 4) come running to her for help when the going got tough, per her prediction, so she could reject me; and 5) give the kids to her when she finally got tired of waiting for me to beg for help and she had to debase herself and actually ask me to give them to her. It was payback, it was aggressive payback, and it took a lot of planning and money to pull it off but for her, the vengeance must have been worth it.

Her demands of her children are posed in a very aggressive way, as are her criticisms. She won't take no for an answer, pushing and arm-twisting and manipulating to get you to give in.

And if you won’t give in, finding ways to force you to give up whatever it is she wants. My NM spent years on a smear campaign to make me look like the Whore of Babylon. It started when I was very young, telling family members my every transgression, real or imagined, and amplifying them with the most negative spin she could imagine. If I didn’t get a fork clean when I did the dishes, I was trying to give us all food poisoning; if GCBro hit me, either I provoked him or I was a tattletale, making mountains out of molehills; I had an overactive imagination so nothing I said could be believed; if she saw me talking to a boy, or she saw a boy’s name doodled on my notebook, suddenly I was having sex with him. Anything I did or didn’t do was construed in the worst, most immoral or intentionally evil way possible. And after of hearing this coupled with some common adolescent mistakes (chiefly, I got pregnant out of wedlock at 17), there was nothing she could say about me that the FOO wouldn’t believe.

So, when my answer to her question about taking my kids was a resounding “NO!” she went on to plan B. She actually got one of her brothers to perjure himself in court and even though I had a letter in my behalf from the welfare department (I was a fit parent, I had a fit home, etc.), NM succeeded in getting a temporary guardianship based on my uncle’s perjured testimony. When I came to her house for my first scheduled visitation, the house was empty, a For Sale sign in the yard.

It was eight years before I saw my children again, eight years before I discovered the depth of her treachery: she took the kids to another state and applied for a permanent guardianship. I should have been notified of the hearing but I wasn’t because she lied and told the court she didn’t know where I was. In such a situation, you are required to publish a notice of the hearing in a newspaper of the other person’s last known address: she published in a city I had not lived in for years and she knew I didn’t live there. Because I did not show up in court to object, my parental rights were terminated and NM got a permanent guardianship. And from there it was a straight shot to my childless uncle to give him the children he had been unable to get any other way.

These women do not give up. Depending on how malignant they are, they can stalk you, trump up legal charges against you, malign you to your entire cast of family and friends, call your place of employment and make trouble: there is no depths to which they will not sink in order to get what they want and to “show you” that you cannot deny them.

And they do it with no sense of shame or remorse or guilt. After the affair with my children blew wide open, both of my uncles apologized to me for their part in it…they were good men taken in by her lies, as was the rest of the family. Twenty years later, however, NM went to her grave still maintaining I had abandoned my children and she had done the right thing. They never, ever, admit wrong, no matter the evidence stacked against them!

Next: Part 17. She “parentifies.”

She's infantile and petty: Characteristics of Narcissistic Mothers Pt 15

 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

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

15. She's infantile and petty.

“The narcissist remains stuck at the infantile level, displaying many of the characteristics of the omnipotent and invulnerable child. (Kohut, 1977).”  This is the way of the narcissist, although individual narcissists will often find their own unique ways to demonstrate their immaturity. They are classic cases of arrested emotional development, never growing beyond the young child’s belief in his entitlement and thirst for revenge against those who thwart him.

Narcissistic mothers are often simply childish. If you refuse to let her manipulate you into doing something, she will cry that you don't love her because if you loved her you would do as she wanted.

Or, if she is a malignant NM, she will not cry, she will get mad because how dare you deny her anything she wants? She will perceive you as defiant and insubordinate and insolent, even if you are 30 years old and have lived on your own for more than a decade. And, if she is angry enough, she may even decide to do something for revenge—she believes that if you don’t give her that which she believes she is entitled to, she is thereafter entitled to vengeance upon your person…and whatever it was she wanted but you denied her, as well.

If you hurt her feelings she will aggressively whine to you that you'll be sorry when she's dead that you didn't treat her better. These babyish complaints and responses may sound laughable, but the narcissist is dead serious about them.

Or you’ll be sorry when she’s gone or you’ll be sorry when she changes her will or you’ll be sorry when…the theme here is that if you aren’t treating her with kid gloves, something will happen to cause you to regret not treating her like the precious little princess that she believes she is. And that something could be an act of nature (or your overdeveloped sense of responsibility) or it could be the result of her vengeance upon you.

How do you hurt a narcissist’s feelings? Can you really? Or can you really only provoke them, “hurt feelings” being one of the masks they wear to try to convince you to do their bidding, to make you feel sorry for them, to elicit NSupply? I am not convinced that a narcissist’s feelings can be hurt, they keep the vulnerable parts of themselves so well armoured and deeply buried that striking that mark would have to occur only by mere happenstance.

But while whether or not their feelings are truly hurt may be an open question, the certainty of them being provoked by your refusal to give up the goods is not. A narcissist will be peeved anytime she is thwarted, even if it was done for legitimate reasons. And she will play on your insecurities by manipulatively wailing “if you loved me you would…” just like a teen-aged boy trying to get into his girlfriend’s panties…

When you were a child, if you ask her to stop some bad behavior, she would justify it by pointing out something that you did that she feels is comparable, as though the childish behavior of a child is justification for the childish behavior of an adult.

I find it inconceivable that a DoNM child might ask the NM to stop some kind of behaviour, but I suppose with the non-malignant type, it is possible. Asking my NM to stop anything would have resulted in an immediate onslaught of Nrage, starting with accusations of insolence and something like “Just who the hell do you think you are, telling me what to do?”

But the childish “tit for tat” mentality exists in malignant Ns as well. I can remember hearing “well, two can play at that game, missy—suppose I “forget” to buy things for your lunches next week like you “forgot” to hang out the wet laundry?” It is as if a child expressing the natural qualities of childhood, chiefly immaturity, somehow gives the NM permission to behave in the same manner, which is ludicrous.

“Getting even” is a large part of her dealings with you. Anytime you fail to give her the deference, attention or service she feels she deserves, or you thwart her wishes, she has to show you.

If I had to describe my NM in one word, “spiteful” would have to be one of the words I would strong consider. She lived to “show” the other person, no matter how petty the perceived insult. And since I was a captive participant in her little game show, I was “shown” more times than I could count.

It might have been easier to deal with if I had warning…you know, like, “If you leave your bike in the driveway again, I am going to sell it,” or some such thing. I always warned my kids about consequences of their actions (or inactions) and at one point my exceedingly stubborn youngest child had almost no toys or books in his room due to them being taken away as a consequence…but he always knew in advance what item(s) were in jeopardy and what he had to do to keep me from temporarily confiscating them. Not so with NM.

When I was about 7, we had a Collie. They are beautiful, loving animals but their coats are a misery to brush out. I had Collies again as an adult, and I used to take them to a grooming parlour because my arms were simply not strong enough to shed out those heavy coats. But at age 7, I was tasked with brushing out the dog and it was literally impossible for me to do so. NM’s solution to the problem was to punish me for not brushing Duke’s coat by giving him away. “You won’t take care of him so I’m getting rid of him.” This was to punish me for my defiance (not brushing out his coat was defying her orders). This was to show me that she was in command, not me.

She lived for moments of vengeance. When none presented themselves, she created them. She spent years blackening my name to the FOO (Family of Origin) so that by the time she decided to avenge herself on my defiance with regard to keeping a baby she wanted me to abort or adopt out, the whole family rallied behind her, not me. When she took a dislike to one our neighbours, she mounted a campaign against her that ultimately caused the woman to move and I can remember NM muttering “I’ll show her, the old bitch,” or some such noise.

When I was very young, she behaved herself in such a way that she became the scourge of our small town. All of the respectable ladies would avoid her and she was very effectively ostracized. Rather than learn her lesson and begin to behave respectably, however, we moved to Southern California whereupon she embarked upon a campaign to “show those old biddies” that she was even better than they were. We lived in a barely furnished low-income fourplex and she spent every penny she could scrape up making fashionable new clothes for the whole family and hiding them under the bed in suitcases. When the suitcases were full, she badgered my father into buying a new car (a late model used car was all he could qualify for, though) and then she packed us all up and we went back to Oregon on a “vacation” to show off our newfound affluence to the townspeople who predicted she would amount to nothing. That our affluence was a false as her bottle blonde hair, that the truth was that we lived a hand-to-mouth existence in Southern California she would never let on…she never did learn the lesson their shunning was intended to convey. She was a narcissist and all that mattered to her was the image she could convey and the vengeance she believed it wreaked on the people who had ostracised her. In her mind, they thought they were better than she was so she was going to show them that she was better than they were with her fake affluence and sham sophistication.

Narcissists do not live in the reality we do. They create their own and when they bump their noses against a reality that will not yield to their fantasy world, they cry “foul!” and believe themselves entitled to avenge their wounded sensibilities. They are the most immature and selfish people you will ever have the misfortune to meet and the wise among us avoid them like the plague.

Next: Part 16. She's aggressive and shameless..

She terrorized: Characteristics of Narcissistic Mothers Pt 14

 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

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14. She terrorized.

That, in two words, sums up my memories of my NM. She terrorized. I have no idea what went on with me and her from my birth to my second birthday, but sometime in the months leading up to it, she decided she wanted her new baby boy, but she didn’t want me anymore. She quite literally abandoned me to the Child Welfare office and, according to relatives on both sides of the family (including her own parents), she tried to give me away for adoption. I lived with her parents for nearly two years and then I had to go back to live with her. I have a few memories of that period…very few…but they involve fear. They are difficult to articulate because they are more visual than reducible to text—rather like a scary movie shot in dark settings with abruptly changing camera angles and loud, discordant background noises.

In later years she used abandonment to terrorize me or she would deprive me of possessions, pets, people I cared about. The threat of loss constantly hung over my head.

For all abusers, fear is a powerful means of control of the victim, and your narcissistic mother used it ruthlessly to train you. Narcissists teach you to beware their wrath even when they aren't present.

I wasn’t allowed to get dirty. I wasn’t allowed to do most things that normal children take as their due. By the time I was 10, she had me so well trained that I feared the consequences of displeasing her even when she was 1000 miles away…I once refused to “help” my grandmother make mud pies in the garden because my NM would not like it if I got dirty. My grandmother’s assurances that she would never know did not assuage my fears.

When I was in the fourth grade I was failing math. I had been skipped from second to third grade at midterm and nobody bothered to teach me how to multiply and I couldn’t seem to pick it up on my own. By fourth grade I was doing very poorly and my teacher sent homework home with me for practice.

In my school district children below seventh grade did not ordinarily get homework so bringing this home would enlighten my mother to my math difficulties. I was afraid for her to know because it would not result in help for the problem, it would result in punishment. I hid the homework, but I was not a stupid child, I knew the day of reckoning would come. And so, at the age of nine, every night when I said my prayers, I prayed to die before morning light. I was so terrified of my mother’s wrath that I would have rather died than face it.

The only alternative is constant placation. If you give her everything she wants all the time, you might be spared. If you don't, the punishments will come.

Perhaps because she was a malignant NM, mine was not easily placated. She was suspicious almost to the point of paranoia, so if anything out of the ordinary occurred, she was like a bloodhound, sniffing out the reason for change. It was therefore important to keep the status quo. Any peremptory appeasement moves put her on alert.

Even innocent changes put her on alert, hunting down a reason for the change, and she would not rest until she came up with something. When I was in seventh grade I learned to set a proper table in my Home Ec class. Eager try it out on my own, I hunted all the necessary things to set a proper table and proudly displayed my handiwork to my mother when she came home from work. Instead of being proud, she was suspicious. And when I later asked her for a ride to my Girl Scout meeting, she believed she found what I was “up to.” According to her, I was “buttering her up” to get a ride to the meeting—the fact that she drove me to most meetings notwithstanding.

But making sure everything was as she wanted it, every day, without fail, making sure obedience was swift, sure, and unquestioning, making sure I was out of sight as much as possible—that was how I stayed safe. And if that is placating, then that’s what I had to do.

Even adult children of narcissists still feel that carefully inculcated fear.

I find this is very true…and furthermore, many DoNMs transfer that fear to all authority figures in their lives—teachers, bosses, police, boyfriends/husbands. We end up feeling guilty for not doing things for others, doing more than anyone else, even while neglecting ourselves. Indeed, some of us learn to be proud for how little we spend on ourselves, either time or money, and how much we do for others. We don’t see this self-abnegation as unhealthy or a warped sense of value, we are proud of how self-sacrificing we are, how well we have learned the lesson. Needless to say, this sets us up for exploitation and disappointment by others, especially if we harbour a secret expectation of reciprocation. “I will stay two hours late and get these files organized and tomorrow he will be sooooo appreciative that he can finally find things…” If we don’t “go the extra mile” we are constantly bombarded with fears that we will be found wanting and dismissed which, to us, is more a personal rejection than a business decision. We live in fear of consequences from every person in our lives whom we have identified as an authority figure.

Your narcissistic mother can turn it on with a silence or a look that tells the child in you she's thinking about how she's going to get even.

Most mothers, I think, have “The Look.” I don’t think it is unique to narcissistic or other PD mothers at all. What is different, I think, is what “The Look” means to the children. If my NM gave me The Look, I had better not incur it more than once. The first time was a warning to stop whatever it was I was doing; the second time was a promise of mayhem.

I ignored The Look at my own peril, even as an adult. Most of my childhood focussed on turning 18 and being able to get away from her. I assumed it meant safety for me, to get away from her and to no longer be beneath her thumb but, sadly, I was to find out that age and distance will not stop the predations of a determined narcissist. If they decide to get even, they will, no matter how long it takes.

Not all narcissists abuse physically, but most do, often in subtle, deniable ways. It allows them to vent their rage at your failure to be the solution to their internal havoc and simultaneously to teach you to fear them. You may not have been beaten, but you were almost certainly left to endure physical pain when a normal mother would have made an effort to relieve your misery.

Yes. The misery of that huge patch of eczema on my calf—would a normal mother have sprung for the more costly hydrocortisone cream to control it instead of the cheap, greasy, smelly OTC salve NM bought for me? Would a normal mother have taken me to the doctor for the crops of boils that I seemed to get several times a year—or would she hold her child down by sitting on her and picking and squeezing the boils, all the while admonishing the child to stop screaming lest a she be “given a good reason to scream”?

This deniable form of battery allows her to store up her rage and dole out the punishment at a later time when she's worked out an airtight rationale for her abuse, so she never risks exposure. You were left hungry because "you eat too much." (Someone asked her if she was pregnant. She isn't).

Yes.

You always went to school with stomach flu because "you don't have a fever. You're just trying to get out of school." (She resents having to take care of you. You have a lot of nerve getting sick and adding to her burdens.)

Yes.

She refuses to look at your bloody heels and instead the shoes that wore those blisters on your heels are put back on your feet and you're sent to the store in them because "You wanted those shoes. Now you can wear them." (You said the ones she wanted to get you were ugly. She liked them because they were just like what she wore 30 years ago).

Yes—ugly saddle oxfords that were popular when she was in school with cheap white socks—but I didn’t even get the shoes I wanted until my grandmother bought them for me. And then NM took them because at that time we wore the same size.

The dentist was told not to give you Novocaine when he drilled your tooth because "he has to learn to take better care of his teeth." (She has to pay for a filling and she's furious at having to spend money on you.)

Yes—I got the novocaine, but I had four cavities at age 14 because I had never, ever been to a dentist before, even though I got blamed for "not taking care of my teeth."

Narcissistic mothers also abuse by loosing others on you or by failing to protect you when a normal mother would have.

Yes. I was accosted by a man exposing himself—she didn’t believe me and, in fact, punished me for ruining my shoes when I ran through a creek trying to get away from him. 

Sometimes the narcissist's golden child will be encouraged to abuse the scapegoat.

Oh, definitely yes. If I reported that he hit me, I got “spanked” for tattling, so he could beat on me with impunity. If we were in the car and he was poking me or pulling my hair or otherwise tormenting me, I had to take it silently because if she felt it necessary to intervene, the punishment invariably fell upon me. The excuses for my brother’s behaviour were legion: boys will be boys, I was being oversensitive, he’s just a little kid…etc., etc. If she spotted an unexplained bruise on me, I learned to say I had fallen down on the playground at school—if I told her the truth…that my brother did it…either she would accuse me of trying to get him into trouble or suspect I had done something to provoke him, both of which were punishable offenses for me.

Narcissists also abuse by exposing you to violence. If one of your siblings got beaten, she made sure you saw. She effortlessly put the fear of Mom into you, without raising a hand.

Well, little brother seldom got punished but she usually made sure he saw me get it. But my fear of her extended far beyond the whippings and having my pets and toys given away and her throwing my father out. She had an ability to turn off her rage in literally a heart beat and turn it back on again just as quickly, and this scared the bejeebers out of me. She could be red in the face, screaming until the veins in her temples stood out, spittle flying as she shrieked her rage and be perfectly calm and pleasant only seconds later when the telephone rang. And when she put the phone down, she could pick up her rage where she left it. It terrified me—I never knew if she was going to fly into one of those rages and not come out of it until after she had killed me.

I literally lived my childhood in fear for my life.

This kind of thing can leave a lasting impact. I remember being suicidal at age 8 or 9. Oh, not so that I would have actually taken my life, but I began wishing to die then. It was the only way out that I could see. Between the ages of 17 and 22, I made two attempts. At age 36 I came within a hair’s breadth of putting a bullet in my brain, saved by chance by a newspaper article I happened to see as I raised the gun to my head, an article about a new therapy specifically directed to the adult victims of childhood abuse.

Once you come to the place that you view suicide as a viable means of escaping an agonizing life you have been unable to change or control, you find you no longer fear death like other people do. You view it as a friend, that ace up your sleeve, that last ditch effort to have just a little bit of control in a life that was seized and taken from you before you could talk and never, ever given back.

And while I no longer engage in suicidal ideation and I no longer wish to die as a means of escaping my life—I much prefer living it—I find that my view of death has undergone a permanent change. I no longer fear it, no longer view it with trepidation, no longer wish to escape it at all costs and so many others do. It is the natural end of the cycle of my days and while I do not look forward to its arrival, neither do I tremble at its approach.

Next: Part 15. She's infantile and petty.

She's self-absorbed: Characteristics of Narcissistic Mothers Pt 12

 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

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12. She's self-absorbed.

“Selfish and self-absorbed, the narcissistic parent gives little emotional return…” That’s the narcissistic mother, all right…selfish, self-absorbed, and giving little emotional return. “…the narcissist does not really understand the concept of others, much less love for them.” 

When I was around eight years old, my NM did something that made me angry enough to want to punish her. I cannot recall exactly what it was, but I remember thinking that withholding my customary goodnight kiss on her cheek would hurt her feelings like she had hurt mine—a taste of her own medicine, so to speak.

So, when she announced it was bedtime, I got up and began my regular night-time ritual: put on pajamas, brush teeth and wash face, but instead of stopping on the way back to my bedroom to give her that good night peck, I went straight to my bed. I waited and waited for her to come to my room to claim the missing kiss. I heard the TV go off, I heard her lock up the house, I heard her go to her room and close her bedroom door and I realized, she never even noticed I had not kissed her goodnight. So self absorbed was she that my childish act of punishing a disappointing parent by withholding a token of love went completely unnoticed.

But children tend to be forgiving souls. Maybe she did notice but she figured out what I was up to, I thought…and deliberately didn’t rise to my bait. I would give her a few nights… It had no effect. I never kissed her goodnight again and if she ever stepped out of herself long enough to notice, it wasn’t important enough to her to mention.

Her feelings, needs and wants are very important; yours are insignificant to the point that her least whim takes precedence over your most basic needs.

This is how I got to be fourteen before I saw a dentist for the first time and why it took my eighth grade science teacher to notice and my school nurse to threaten NM with calling the County for child neglect to get my first pair of glasses. But while I went without essential medical and dental care, there was money for whatever she wanted to do from building custom cabinetry in the kitchen to buying the latest trends to going out barhopping while my father was at work.

We were stretched so thin financially, according to my mother whenever I wanted something, that my father had two jobs plus NM worked—yet there was always enough money for her flashy cocktail dresses, gaudy accessories like earrings made of rhinestone-studded feathers, and several nights out at the local nightspot every week. There just wasn’t enough for me to have more than one pair of shoes, and no money for the dentist or for glasses.

We had to leave our small town in Oregon because of her scandalous ways, ways that did not change once we were ensconced in Southern California. There are some in my family who speculate that my GCBro chose his spectacularly unattractive wife because, in the words of one of the older members “She’s too ugly to cheat on him—nobody would have her.”Our roots, our family connections, even our futures were casually ground under the heels of her bull-headed and relentless self-absorbtion.

Her problems deserve your immediate and full attention; yours are brushed aside.

Well, I don’t know if malignant NMs are different from other types of NMs in this regard, but in our house, nobody was allowed to have problems except NM. Any problem I might bring up would create instant suspicion that I was doing something I shouldn’t—or not doing something I should—and invited examination. With a normal parent, that’s unnerving—with a narcissistic parent, it is a terrifying prospect simply because truth means nothing to them, they will interpret their findings any way they choose, and usually they choose an interpretation that disadvantages you.

NM’s smallest problem, however, could be magnified into gargantuan proportions. I had a patch of eczema on the inside of my left calf that extended from my ankle to my knee and covered all of the full, fleshy part of the inner calf muscle. The miserable, ugly thing had been with me since earliest childhood. For me, NM bought a smelly, greasy, tar-based OTC salve called Resinol that succeeded only in making me stink and smearing my sheets with it. But when she got a rash on her wrist from a sudden allergy to nickel, a rash no bigger than a dime, no time or expense was spared to get her to the doctor and to buy some hydrocortisone cream, (relatively new and very costly) for her wrist. Later, when the nickel allergy persisted, she parlayed this into a justification for buying a gold watch since gold wouldn’t aggravate the allergy (neither would painting the back of the watch with clear nail polish, as NM’s friend Bea suggested, but that wouldn’t justify buying a Piaget watch, would it?).

Her wishes always take precedence; if she does something for you, she reminds you constantly of her munificence in doing so and will often try to extract some sort of payment.

I am a parent and I always considered such things as food, clothing, medical care and the like to be entitlements that I was obligated to provide my children…birthrights, if you will. My NM, however, did not concur. Every bite I ate, every rag I hung on my bony frame, every toy I had, medicines and doctors when I was sick—everything handed to me as a child I was expected to “appreciate.” And my gratitude should be expressed by willingly enslaving myself in her service, never asking for and never, ever expecting anything. I was a burden on her, an affliction, a money-drain which gave back nothing of value save household labour and she made absolutely sure I knew it.

“A parent is entitled to the fruits of her child’s labour.” How many times I heard that from my NM I could not begin to guess. And she collected at every opportunity—during her stage mother phase, she dragged me to talent shows, auditions, even to sing in nightclubs. Occasionally I would get a trophy, but looking back I am pretty sure that there were cash prizes along with the trophies and ribbons…but I never say a penny of it. When I was in high school, I had a job but NM took my pay checks (absolutely forbade me to cash them myself!) and doled out to me a pittance every two weeks to pay for my bus fare to and from school, to and from work, and my school lunches. When I picked beans and berries in the summers at my grandparents, she would take the money—just like she did with money I got from family members for my birthday or Christmas—saying she would “hold” the money for me. We both knew I would never see it again and that she felt entitled to it. It was payback for all the sacrifices she made for me.

She will complain constantly, even though your situation may be much worse than hers. If you point that out, she will effortlessly, thoughtlessly brush it aside as of no importance (It's easy for you/It's different for you).

Or “You created that yourself, why should I help you?” Political conservatives frighten me because they remind me of my NM. Nobody is allowed to be anything but perfect and they get to define perfect for everybody. No mistakes allowed, no quarter given, sink or swim—they have a peculiarly, selfishly Dickensian view of the world.

Before foodstamps the government distributed surplus foods to the poor. Once a month I had to make my way on the bus, with two small children, to a distribution centre where I would be given whatever foods were currently in the government surplus. Certain things you could count on every month like powdered eggs and powered milk, and most months there would be oatmeal and flour. If there was rice, you had to empty the plastic bags as soon as you got home and rinse the rice to get rid of the weevils or they would get into your cupboards and infest the flour and oats…the rice always had weevils.

Most months I also got a few cans of vegetables and meat—like a whole canned chicken—and often there was a loaf of cheese and a pound or two of butter. The government kept the prices of these various farm items up—so the farmers could make a profit—by buying a portion of the farming output so it didn’t create a glut on the market. The “surplus” food, rather than being allowed to rot, was handed out to the poor…people like me.

One day I had just gotten home with my bounty and was putting it away in the kitchen when NM unexpectedly dropped in. NM had eventually remarried after her divorce and between them, she and Frank owned 3 businesses, 4 houses and 21 apartments. She was cheap and tight with money, but she wasn’t poor. She could have offered me a job in one of the businesses, offered me an apartment in a neighbourhood where I wasn’t afraid to venture out at night, but I had “made my bed” so I…and two little kids…had to lie in it, no matter what kind of assets Grammi had or help she could offer.

And so she strolled up to my door and when admitted, she followed me to the kitchen. There on the kitchen table were two blocks of butter waiting to go into the fridge along with a block of cheese. “Since when can you afford butter?” she sneered.

Well, when I explained, she raised the roof. “I work my ass off every goddamned day of the week and I can only afford margarine,” she yelled at me. “And you, lazy welfare slut, get free butter?” The fact that I was on welfare, that my situation was so dire that I had to get assistance from the state in order to feed the kids, couldn’t possibly be more important than the fact that she was eating margarine and I was eating butter, could it? No matter how bad things got with me, she always had a trump card to play...

Gee, Mom, how about a job in one of your three companies? Then maybe I can afford margarine like you and wouldn’t have to take cast-off food from the government rather than watch my children go hungry…

Next: Part 13. She is insanely defensive