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

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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.

Empathetic Narcissist = Oxymoron

From House of Mirrors:

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

Narcissists lack empathy. A lack of empathy means that they don’t know what it feels like to be human. They are oblivious to the feelings of others because they have none. They are incapable of seeing how they hurt people. They lack the underlying compassion for others that keeps actions or behaviours more or less in check. So when they find themselves abandoned because they’ve hurt everyone around them, the narcissist simply denies, dismisses, and minimizes the gravity of their actions. Hurt feelings? What does that mean? No big deal. Narcissists are coldblooded. I cannot stress that enough.

The only so-called feelings the narcissist understands are their own. For example; the sting of a bruised ego; the frustration that comes with not being in complete control; anger from not getting their way; envy from wanting what others have; jealousy from not getting all the attention; fear of exposure; hatred of all their inferiors; pity for themselves; smug satisfaction.

Grammarist.com defines empathy: “When you understand and feel another’s feelings for your yourself, you have empathy. It’s often spoken of as a character attribute that people have to varying degrees. For example, if hearing a tragic news story makes you feel almost as if the story concerned you personally, you have the ability to empathize.”

And Wired.com says “…empathy—our tendency to ‘resonate’ with the emotional and physical states of other people. For example, if you’ve ever had a friend who’s both clumsy and culinary, chances are you’ve seen that friend burn himself on a hot stove accidentally. Watching this, you likely felt a pang of discomfort, and maybe even pulled your hand back, as if you, and not your friend, had been burned. My research and that of others has demonstrated that when we watch others in pain, we activate some of the same brain regions that are also active when we experience pain ourselves, suggesting that we really do ‘feel their pain.’”

Narcissists lack this ability. The may feel sympathy for someone, which is something that goes on in the head only, but more likely, sympathy from a narcissist is feigned. They simply do not feel anything outside their own selves, nor do they care to (part of the lack of empathy). Furthermore, their lack of empathy causes them to fail to understand empathy in others, mistaking it for stupidity or weakness or gullibility. It is beyond the narcissist to grasp the feelings of others.

You cannot teach a narcissist a lesson by “giving him a taste of his own medicine,” either, because he won’t get it. Either he will simply view it as being unrelated to anything he does, see it as a personal attack, or—rarely—feel the desired feelings but without any epiphany as to the feelings of his victims. He doesn’t care how his victims feel, he only cares how he feels, and if you make him feel bad, it could mean retaliation, making the only lesson learned your lesson not to antagonize a narcissist.

My mother was completely lacking in empathy. If there was any one trait that convinced me that she was narcissistic, this was it. Even real, physical hurts she downplayed to the degree of taunting or, if it was going to cost her money, rage. When I was six I fell off the jungle gym at school, whacking my chin on the way down. I needed stitches to close the jagged wound. She screamed furiously at the school for letting it happen, screamed at me for being clumsy, and told me to shut up and stop blubbering while she drove me to the doctor’s for those stitches.

I had a miscarriage at five months and was hospitalized with a massive infection—so bad that they put me in isolation. After several delirious days in the hospital I received a phone call from her, berating me for “gold bricking” in the hospital and telling me that the miscarriage was a good thing, that I didn’t need any more kids.

When her younger brother and his wife were found to be infertile, she decided my children would be better off living in their affluent home than in my poor one (she had the means to help me rather than steal my children, but declined to do so). She spent two years engineering a campaign to separate my children from me, gain a guardianship of them, and then turn them over to her brother for adoption. That my uncle's home state had failed them on the home study for a state adoption was of no import; that I did not want to be separated from my children was of no consequence; that the children did not want to leave me also did not touch her heart. She would be a “hero” in the eyes of the family if she could pull this off—a hero for rescuing those babies from the depraved environment she had convinced them I provided, and a hero for getting her darling baby brother that which he wanted most and nobody else could provide: kids. If she could have felt my pain, the pain of my children, or even related to the pain the rest of the family would feel once her lies and subterfuge came to light, she could not have possibly done what she did. But lacking empathy, her only focus was on getting what she wanted: the adulation that would come to her for her heroic deed.

My ex-Nhusband was no better. A malignant narcissist like my mother, he once told me he thought of himself as a single man who happened to have a wife. It did not occur to him that such a thing might hurt me—and if it did, he would not have cared. He was a minor executive at a major Silicon Valley high tech company, high enough in the ranks to decides on his own business travel rather than be dispatched by his boss. And so he chose to spend our tenth wedding anniversary in Washington DC, with some “hired companions,” a lot of champagne, and one of his juniors who happened to be both a friend and a neighbour, a young man who had a conscience and who came to me a few months after the event to tell me what went on and how badly he felt to have been a participant. “Drink up,” he told me my husband said to one of the escorts, refilling her champagne glass, “tonight’s my tenth anniversary!” I, on the other hand, sat alone at home waiting for the phone call that never came and he, once home, seemed baffled that I was hurt by his failure to call. “I was out of town,” he told me. “I was busy.”

Narcissists have an infinite variety of ways in which to display their lack of empathy. As I write this, Belvedere Vodka is under fire for putting out an ad that “showed a smiling man grabbing a woman, who appeared to be in fear, from behind…‘Unlike some people, Belvedere always goes down smoothly,’ the ad’s caption read.” To their credit, senior management pulled the ad immediately and apologized, but obviously someone in the organization lacks any kind of sensitivity towards or empathy for women and their innate fear of rape. No one with an ounce of empathy could countenance such an ad and, if fact, would recoil from the very thought of it. A Turkish shampoo, Biomen, is currently under fire for running an ad using old footage of Hitler giving a speech as their “spokesperson.” Any kind of empathy for the dead, the survivors, and the descendants of Hitler’s victims would have stilled even the first thought of such an ad. Only people lacking in even a modicum of empathy could have gone forward and not only produced the ad, but aired it as well.

It is hard to figure if narcissists lack empathy because they don’t care about the feelings of others or if they don’t care about the feelings of others because they lack empathy. Personally, I don’t think it matters—what matters is that they don't care about anyone’s feelings but their own even though, intellectually, they comprehend that the society expects this of us. Courtesy and manners are based on empathy, and altruism and a sense of justice as well. How many people have you come across in your life who are rude, mannerless boors not because they were never taught better but because they don’t give a shit? Cut in front of you in the queue at the market, swoop in for the parking space you have been patiently waiting for, talking loudly in movies, smoking in non-smoking areas, making their cell-phone conversations matters of public consumption…they simply do not care how you feel, how they impact you, how you perceive them. They care only how they feel, how they are impacted, how they perceive themselves.

Lincoln told us “a house divided against itself cannot stand,” meaning that we must stick together, work together, care for each other, if we are to survive and prosper. The narcissist, in his selfishness, takes the opposite view because anything you get, be it time, attention, money, advancement, esteem of others, is just that much less for him. One could say the narcissist operates on the “finite pie” theory, the idea being that there is just so much of anything to go around and any bits you get are bits he cannot have, rather like the little kid’s jealousy of the new baby because he doesn’t understand that the love his mother gives to the new sibling is not love stolen from him. The narcissist has never emotionally matured to the age at which children begin to learn empathy for one another.

Have you read the story or watched the video of Fiona, the dog found blind and nearly dead in a trash heap in LA? I could not even watch the video, the story was enough to put an ache in my heart and tears in my eyes. A narcissist, however, would be unable to relate to the dog and her heartbreaking story—the narcissist’s heart would not break. Oh, s/he might be motivated to do something—to donate money, to help another dog, even to take a dog in—but not out of empathy for the dog but rather to get the Nsupply of praise for the deed, to get bragging rights, to feel superior to others or to make others feel inferior for their inaction. It wouldn’t be about feeling for the poor dog, it would be about self-aggrandizement for the narcissist.

I suspect Ingrid Newkirk, founder of PETA, of being a narcissist based on her attempt to present herself as a saint for “saving” animals while, behind closed doors, the animals surrendered to PETA by unsuspecting owners are almost universally destroyed, sometimes in “kill vans” right outside the owner’s homes! By their own admission, in documents filed annually with the Commonwealth of Virginia, in 2011 PETA put to death more than 95% of animals surrendered to it, three times the kill rate of the public shelter only a few miles down the road. Newkirk, however, surrounds herself with an air of sanctimonious self-righteousness, believing her—and only her—beliefs about animals are correct and having no compunction about violating the beliefs and feeling of others on the way to bludgeoning them with her vision. She demonstrates no compassion, no empathy even for the animals she purports to champion for, instead of spending PETA’s $37M+ budget on rehabilitating and rehoming animals like Fiona, instead of cuddling and loving and healing the hurts of abandoned and unwanted animals, she just has them killed. Her bizarre vision, totally at odds with reality, is that animals would be better off turned loose in the wild than living as “slaves” of humans. Yah, right—my 15-year-old toothless, half deaf, arthritic Maltese who takes heart, kidney and arthritis medication daily would be much better off out there in the wild without his meds, his fleece jersey, his snug little house, and soft food delivered to him daily. Ingrid’s vision, her self-image as a rescuer of abused and enslaved animals everywhere, had nothing to do with reality, has everything to do with self-aggrandizement, and displays an almost-criminal lack of empathy where the animals themselves are concerned.

When my husband Charlie died, you would have thought his mother was the widow, not me. She made demands about his funeral and at the funeral she seized my place leading the rituals at the grave. In the first couple of days after he died, when I had had no sleep and was trying to make arrangements and still work, Charlie’s mother had to be tended. She was with me at the funeral home, at the hospital, picking out caskets, making demands about the eulogies, requiring me to dance attendance on her. I had to borrow money from Charlie’s millionaire brother, Alvin, to pay for the funeral because I did not have access to that much cash on short notice, and before he handed me the check, he narrowed his eyes and asked “when am I going to get this back?” He asked me again after the funeral. Neither his mother or his brother showed any empathy for my pain at the sudden and unexpected loss of my beloved, larger-than-life husband. In fact, his mother actually criticized me for how I told her of his death, and that I should have told her beforehand that he was “that sick.” (Even his doctor didn’t know he was “that sick!”)

I didn’t know about narcissists back then, but if I had, I would have expected this instead of being blindsided by what I took then to be abject boorishness. His mother did not shed a tear at Charlie’s funeral, dressed in black slacks and a bright lime green jacket, and simply behaved like she was the hostess at a party! Alvin tastelessly remarked “Oh, look, all of Charlie’s wives are here!” when he realized Charlie’s first wife had come to support their daughter and that I was burying Charlie beside his second wife. Because I did not expect this kind of thoughtlessness—the few funerals I had attended in the past were solemn affairs with the widow given due consideration for her grief—I was simply in shock, and when Alvin’s wife invited me to lunch after the service, I declined, went straight home, and slept for 20 hours.

One can argue that they were grieving too, as Charlie was a family member, and that we all grieve differently. What one cannot argue, however, is that my grief was not treated empathetically and after I has spent twelve years with the man, their behaviour was, at best, thoughtless. Had they had any empathy, had they been capable of it, they would have been no less solicitous than my and Charlie’s friends.

Empathy is that quality that allows us to identify with the feelings of another. It informs and mitigates our behaviour, not for gain or reward, but because we know how they feel because WE take some of that feeling ourselves. Narcissists don’t know how to do this—they don’t have the capacity and because of that, they find no value in it. They can feign sympathy, if it will help them get something they want, but to actually feel for another? Not bloodly likely!