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

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

[There are two basic types of narcissistic mothers, the ignoring type and the engulfing type. These may—and often do—overlap but most NMs have a basic style and will be primarily one or the other. Some of the following points may not apply to your NM simply because they describe an engulfing characteristic when your NM is an ignoring type—or vice versa. But our mothers are not the only narcissists we will encounter in our lives. In fact, being raised by a narcissistic parent actually sets us up to be prey for more of the self-centred emotional vampires as we go out into the world, from girlfriends who are anything but friends to lovers who love themselves best to husbands who are the mirror image of dear old mom. So, whether something looks like it applies to your NM or not, read and consider it carefully—it may give you the awareness necessary to avoid the predator lurking around the next bend. As ever, my comments are shown in violet. -V]

It's about secret things. The Destructive Narcissistic Parent creates a child that only exists to be an extension of her self. It's about body language. It's about disapproving glances. It's about vocal tone. It's very intimate. And it's very powerful. It's part of who the child is. ~ Chris

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next: Part 7. She's envious.

Triangulation—the narcissist’s secret weapon

“Triangulation” can be defined as indirect communication where one person acts as messenger between two others, often times altering or fabricating the message to suit the tale bearer’s objective. Triangulation is a common tool of the narcissist and it goes hand in glove with “gaslighting” (previous entry) and “projection” (next entry).

In the psychology of dysfunctional families, triangulation may take two forms: “[It] is most commonly used to express a situation in which one family member will not communicate directly with another family member, but will communicate with a third family member, forcing the third family member to then be part of the triangle.

“Triangulation can also be used as a label for a form of “splitting” in which one person plays the third family member against one that he or she is upset about. This is playing the two people against each other, but usually the person doing the splitting, will also engage in character assassination…”

Splitting and narcissistic personality disorder: “People who are diagnosed with a narcissistic personality disorder also use splitting as a central defense mechanism. They do this to preserve their self-esteem, by seeing the self as purely good and the others as purely bad. The use of splitting also implies the use of other defense mechanisms, namely devaluation, idealization and denial.”

Narcissists tend to use both forms of triangulation, sometimes virtually simultaneously. I have a friend—I’ll call her Sandra—who has a malignant narcissist for a mother, a woman so warped and evil, she would give my own a run for the money. Unlike lucky me, however, whose MNM has been dead for nearly 15 years, Sandra’s predatory NM continues to live and torment her. Not everyone in Sandra’s FOO is under the MN’s spell, however, so Sandra has some family support. Sandra’s brother regularly gets letters from their mother outlining how horrible Sandra is and going into great detail about Sandra’s terrible behaviour. Like my MNM, Sandra’s mother will take a tiny grain of truth and build on it, massage it, and twist it to give it new meaning. The brother then calls Sandra and reports the content of the letter to her, sometimes even forwarding the letter on to Sandra. Through these letters, Sandra knows that her NM assassinates her character with other family members through the same splitting technique: uncles, aunts, cousins and even Sandra’s sister, receive similar messages about her. One might be tempted to suggest to the brother that he relinquish his part in the triangle and keep the letters to himself, but then Sandra would not be aware of what her MNM is up to…and since the woman has made threats to have Sandra arrested on trumped up charges, it is in Sandra’s own best interests to know what bee is currently in her MNM’s bonnet.

One of the things that makes triangulation works is the human tendency towards “confirmation bias.” This is a subconscious mechanism that we all have and, unless we are actively aware of it and take steps to control it, we can easily fall prey to it. “Confirmation bias” is our tendency to believe things that support what we already believe (or that which we heard first) coupled with a tendency to discount things that do not support our existing beliefs. “My mind is made up, don’t confuse me with facts,” might be the motto of the person with an active case of confirmation bias going on.

It is very hard to dislodge a person who has made up his/her mind—if they listen to information that is contrary to their existing beliefs and give them credence, they may have to admit they are wrong. Even if their own observations go contrary to their belief, some people will simply discount their observations; they may believe it an anomaly or even an intentional effort to fool them. Whatever they do to discount their observations…or yours…you can be sure that getting them to change their minds is a uphill battle that may never be won.

On the other hand, even when you have a confirmation bias going, if you are bombarded with enough contrary information for a long enough period of time, especially if you seldom have an opportunity to make observations that shore up your own bias—and most especially if a few things happen that seem to support the contrary information—most of us will eventually begin to subconsciously shift our opinions. Confirmation bias is what allows otherwise sensible, intelligent people to disbelieve a truth that may well be obvious to the rest of us.

Indoctrination plays a part in confirmation bias, as does “cognitive dissonance,” which is “the feeling of discomfort that results from holding two conflicting beliefs. When there is a discrepancy between beliefs and behaviors, [or first-hand observation] something must change in order to eliminate or reduce the dissonance.” So, if you are indoctrinated over a period of years to believe that your Uncle Bob is an evil man who cannot be trusted, yet your observations of Uncle Bob is that he is a kind-hearted man who goes out of his way to help others, you may experience cognitive dissonance with regard to him. Since few people tolerate cognitive dissonance well, we are motivated to “settle” the matter by choosing one or the other: Uncle Bob is good and the people who have been telling you otherwise have been lying or those people are right and Uncle Bob is someone to be wary of. Confirmation bias will lean you towards Uncle Bob being a bad actor and a little critical thinking may push you further in that direction: why, after all, would these people lie about Uncle Bob? What’s in it for them? And, since you cannot come up with a single good reason that these good people would lie about him, they must be correct, right?

In a normal family primarily peopled with normal people, this deduction would be largely accurate. In the dysfunctional family, particularly a family driven by a narcissist, the deduction based on how normal people think and feel will be largely inaccurate, simply because the narcissist does things the rest of us would never do—like damage Uncle Bob’s reputation out of spite or as an exercise in the narcissist’s power. You think all of those people saying bad things about Uncle Bob cannot be wrong? Actually, they can—it takes only one narcissist feeding ugly misinformation and accusations about Bob to a lot of people over an extended period of time for people, especially those who do not see Bob often, to become indoctrinated to the idea that Bob is bad news. Those who have no frame of reference will uncritically accept the information they receive as truth because, after all, why would anyone lie about this stuff?

Sometimes the triangulation takes the form of “he said/she said” dramas with the narcissist in the middle, controlling the flow of information. Some people will stir up strife between others to take attention off themselves, as an exercise in power, or simply to entertain themselves. Think “mean girls” in school who play people off against each other, meanwhile keeping their own skirts clean. Suzie tells Mary that she saw Jenny flirting with her boyfriend, which makes Mary mad at Jenny and causes her to say some rude things about Jenny’s character. Susie may then tells Jenny that Mary is mad at her and even repeats some of the things Mary said, causing the antipathy to flow in both directions. In the unlikely event that Mary and Jenny stop shouting at each other long enough to compare notes and then jointly confront Suzie, Suzie can feign surprise and claim that she did see what looked like a flirtation to her and those ugly words were spoken. Neither of her victims will have a defense against her claims and the conflict may well resume, providing Suzie with endless entertainment.

Narcissists, however, seem to favour the “splitting” form of triangulation, a circumstance in which the victim is denigrated to others, often for extended periods of time, in order to make the victim to look bad in the eyes of many. Why would anyone do that? Because it is an essential first step to demonize someone, to divide and conquer, to set the stage for the narcissist’s acquisition of Nsupply.

In narcissistic households it is common for one (or more) child(ren) to be designated as a scapegoat. There does not need to be a triggering event to identify the child, although such “sins” as being a colicky baby or even a child demanding attention at a time the narcissistic mother is disinclined to provide it, may make the NM select one child over another. In my case, my NM once informed me that nobody had told her that a baby was not like a doll that you could “just put up on the closet shelf when you were tired of playing with her.” Add to the fact that I was colicky, had eczema from my earliest months, and had the audacity to get dirty when she set me out to play in a dirt chicken yard wearing starched and painstakingly ironed embroidered and pin-tucked white cotton batiste baby dresses like the one show here and—well—it seemed my fate was sealed. I was a lot more work than she bargained for and every need that had to be filled on my timetable instead of hers was an imposition. I was a disappointment, not at all what she wanted or expected, but she couldn’t take me back to the store for a refund. I was not the endless source of adoration she had expected, and so, since I would not provide her with the Nsupply she wanted, NM found another way to get it: by declaring me “bad” and difficult and (as I got older) manipulative and contrary, she got Nsupply in the form of sympathy from people. “Poor Georgia, saddled with that intractable child! How wonderful, how brave she is to be able to deal with her and keep cheerful and positive!”

By the time I reached my teens, I was virtually evil incarnate in the eyes of my NM. I was regularly blindsided by accusations of behaviours and motives that had quite literally never crossed my mind. Such things left me confused and often tearful, for I felt unjustly accused and was not permitted to speak in my defense: anything I said was labelled excuses or lies. On a weekend visit to my father’s I managed to find some time alone with him (I didn’t dare speak my mind in front of my brother, who was already well-groomed as a spy) and poured out my heart particularly about my NM’s accusations of things that I had never even thought of. “She’s assuming you are like her,” my father told me. “These are things she would do, reasons she would have, stuff she would think. It really has nothing to do with you—she doesn’t even see you, she sees what she would have done or thought or said.” My first clue about projection and how the narcissist incorporates it into her dealings.

But, of course, my father knew me…he had spent years living with and observing me at the same time NM was writing those letters back to her family telling them how awful I was. Their own brief observations of me, observations in which I was a rather withdrawn, fearful child (I once refused to “help” my grandmother make mud pies because my mother would be angry if I got dirty—despite the fact that my mother was 1000+ miles away) were offset by more than a decade of indoctrination and triangulating. According to NM, I had not been incarcerated by the juvenile court as “incorrigible” because I had “charmed” the judge; and even though the truth was that I had never even seen the judge and I was not sent to reform school for the simple reason that I had never been in any kind of trouble either at school or with the law. NM pronounced me a “liar” when I told that truth—and nobody believed me. Why, after all, would she lie about her own child that way?

Triangulation depends on one person sitting in the middle controlling information flow between others. The person in the middle is the arbiter of information: she tells people what she wants them to hear and often does her level best to prevent the others from talking to each other and comparing notes. She channels information between parties, removing stuff she doesn’t like, twisting—or even outright fabricating—information that will tend to cause her “correspondents” either take the bait and form opinions that mirror her own or be kept in the dark as to what is really going on. A narcissist’s motives for triangulating those around her are as varied as the narcissists themselves—some do it for power and entertainment, others do it to make others look bad so they can look good by comparison, others may be exacting a spiteful “payback” or retaliation for some real or imagined wrong.

But the legacy of being the victim in narcissist’s triangulation scheme can be long lived—it may even live longer than the narcissist herself. Nearly fifteen years after my MNM’s death and more than thirty years after her treachery in stealing my children and giving them to her brother for adoption was revealed, there are still family members who shun me, who believe the truth is an elaborate lie designed to discredit NM. “Why,” they ask, “Why would a mother say such awful things about her own daughter if they weren’t true?”

Why, indeed?

Next up: Projection

But she’s your MOTHER!

I remember being quite sure, at age 8, that I hated my mother. In the logic of my child’s mind, you loved everybody except those who hurt you for no reason: and that was exactly how I viewed my mother: she hurt me for no reason.

Our society idealizes mothers. It is as if, the moment that first baby pops out and draws breath, the woman involved is somehow sainted. And while it is true that becoming a mother is a life-changing event, for some women those changes are not necessarily for the better.

Let’s face it—there are a lot of “not nice” people in the world and a goodly portion of them are women. And of those women, a significant number of them reproduce. And not all of them are converted into loving mothers by the act of giving birth—some of them remain “not nice,” and now have a helpless infant to add to their list of victims.

One would think that is the most tragic thing of all—a helpless innocent being delivered into the hands of a not-so-nice woman for whom birth was not the pivotal emotional event in her life, but it’s not. The most tragic thing is that the rest of us, imbued with the notion that all mothers love and adore their children, don’t give credence to children when they complain—we don’t even notice the signs in kids who don’t complain—about being treated poorly by their own mothers. Those children are victimized twice: first by their unloving mothers and then by the clueless who invalidate the experience of those children by saying things like, “Well, I am sure she had a good reason,” or “You don’t mean that…of course you love your mother,” and “of course your mother loves you…” when they know nothing of the kind.

We all know about women like Susan Smith who drowned her two young boys when they became a burden to her, Andrea Yates who spiralled off into a psychotic episode in which she drowned her five children in the bathtub, or, more recently, Casey Anthony, who was acquitted of murdering her child even though most people consider her to have “gotten away with murder.” We seem to have a digital mindset when it comes to mothers: either they are loving, adoring creatures who would do anything for their children or they are evil, unnatural, murdering harridans. No room in the middle for anything else.

But the truth is, it is somewhere in the middle where the self-absorbed narcissistic mother falls. Few of them premeditatedly murder their children, a la Susan Smith, and a likewise small number fall into the grip of madness like Andrea Yates and methodically kill their offspring. In fact, most narcissistic parents don’t kill their children at all, and a fairly large number of them don’t physically abuse their kids, either (although the malignant narcissists do). No, narcissistic mothers torture their children psychologically, emotionally, sometimes by design but no less often simply as a matter of their approach to mothering.

It should come as no surprise that the emotional abuse the child of a narcissist suffers is no less devastating than the physical abuse other children may suffer. Bruises and welts fade but cruel words retain their ability to draw emotional blood long years after they were first spoken. Couple cruel words with demeaning attitudes and behaviours, make it the child’s earliest experiences that are then stretched out over an entire youth, and you have a child’s entire life one of pain, fear, denigration, and lacking in demonstrations of love from the one person a child should feel emotionally secure in the presence of: her mother. This tragic situation is compounded by outsiders, people who neither acknowledge nor understand that, in order to be a nightmare of a mother one need not murder or even beat their children, one must only not show them love.

In one of the rare moments that my mother and I were able to dialog about the misery that was my childhood, my mother claimed, “But I did love you…I wasn't just any good at showing it,” to which I replied, “from the point of view of the kid, your not showing it was no different from it not existing at all: if you didn’t show it, how was I to know it existed?”

Typical of the unempathetic narcissist, she then shrugged it all off, excusing herself and blaming me: “Well, you should have known. I was your mother, after all!” She waxed poetic about how she had looked forward to my birth through her difficult (she gained a lot of weight and was unwieldy) pregnancy and how eager she was to have me home. She apparently forgot, however, that when I was only 14 she had revealed to me that having a baby was nothing like she had expected and, typically narcissistically, she blamed “others”—“Nobody told me that I couldn’t just put you back on the closet shelf like a doll when I got tired of you,” she had said.

At 14, my daughter had a phone conversation with her grandmother in which my mother expressed her disappointment in being a mother. “I never should have had kids,” she told my daughter, “I should have had cats instead.” This sent my daughter running to me in tears, feeling that her grandmother wished she had not been born. “If she never had kids, then I wouldn’t be here!” What could I say? I am sure that “your grandmother doesn’t always think before she speaks” was insufficient, but how to you respond to something like that? My daughter felt crushed, rejected, unwanted, without a single blow being struck, without any kind of emotional altercation, and from a great distance. Imagine feeling like that every day of your life and the perpetrator is your own mother.

We imagine mothers to be loving and to have their hearts full of love for their children but, unfortunately, this is not the case. Some mothers demonstrate dreadful favouritism, something that cannot help but be noticed by the children. All children are hurt by this, not just the unfavoured child(ren). A favoured child—called a “golden child” by some—learns that it is ok to dislike one (or more) of his siblings, that exploitation is an acceptable behaviour, and justice, fairness, is optional. Charlie’s brother was a perfect example of a grown golden child and he was insufferable, particularly to Charlie. Arrogant and supercilious, self-aggrandizing and boorishly rude, his mother excused his behaviour to me once by saying “Oh, he’s a millionaire—millionaires are like that!” My own brother learned early in life that nothing was his fault: no matter what he was supposed to do, if he didn’t do it, I got punished for not making him do it. My N ex-husband, James, once explained right and wrong, as it applied to him, thus: “if I don’t get caught, then it was OK.”

People observe parents fawn over the Golden Child and assume that they are capable of that kind of “love” for all of their children. It therefore stands to reason that if a parent is treating another child differently, not as well, that the child has somehow earned it. What people outside of the narcissistic sphere miss is that the narcissistic parent is not demonstrating love to any of the children: what passed for love in the observer’s eyes was merely narcissistic supply being nurtured.

Many people downplay the significance of emotional abuse. The emotional pain of being rejected, ridiculed, demeaned, particularly by one’s own family, is cruelly long-lasting. During my marriage to James, the malignant narcissist, I once told my therapist that I wished he would hit me. She was, appropriately, horrified. I had to clarify by saying that if he would hit me, leave a bruise or a mark, I could point to it and say “Look! See the mark he left on me? See how he hurt me?” and people outside our little pas de deux would recognize that I had been victimized, that I was hurt, and that he was the one hurting me. But because the bruises and pain were invisible to the casual observer, my pain went unacknowledged, thereby increasing its effect because I was alone in it. It eventually drove me to suicidal ideation—anything to stop the pain.

As devastating as it is to be in a relationship with a narcissist as an adult, we do have options. We can explore our pain on the internet, with empathetic friends, with professionals whom we pay to help us sort out the confusing morass of our feelings. Children, however, young, vulnerable, inexperienced children, have no such options. Little kids believe what they are told, especially by their parents, and so they grow up believing that something is wrong with them (or, if the child is the Golden Child, a sibling). Charlie believed he was stupid, when he was only dyslexic, because his mother told him so repeatedly, because the school put him in remedial classes (but didn’t address his dyslexia), because his brother believed and treated him as such. Charlie didn’t believe he was deserving of a nice place to live or a decent wardrobe or even of being loved. One of the reasons Charlie married me was because, in his own words, he “liked how he felt” around me.

You see, I never saw Charlie as stupid, I saw him as having a remediable problem. And I not only told him that, I showed him. I didn’t judge his problem—I have problems of my own that I do not expect to be judged for—I simply helped him find ways to get around his dyslexia, ways to deal with it. And little by little, Charlie’s self-image changed and he began to realize that not only was he not stupid, he wasn’t deserving of the shabby treatment his family meted out to him.

And that is perhaps the absolute worst legacy of being saddled with a narcissistic parent: coming to feel that you deserve their bad treatment, somehow feeling that the ill treatment and low regard your family demonstrates to you is warranted. You go from being called a “stupid” or “worthless” or “hopeless” child to believing yourself to be a stupid, worthless, hopeless adult—and deserving of every iota of crap that the people in your life drop on you.

At the age of 8 I knew something was wrong with my mother, not me. My mother somehow knew I felt this way and she was brutal in her efforts to bring me to heel. And while much of her behaviour towards me motivated unwise and self-destructive behaviours in me, I never lost sight of the fact that there was something wrong with her, not me. My therapist told me that I had a “strong inner core,” and that not everyone has that—some people succumb and believe themselves to be at fault—like Charlie did. But with or without that strong inner core, we go through our childhoods being assaulted and invalidated not only by our parents, but by the adults around us who persist in their belief that all mothers want only what is best for their children and children who complain about treatment at the hands of their parents just “don’t know what is good for them,” or they are exaggerating the direness of the situation or they provoked their parent to take unfortunate action. The children of narcissists are seldom validated by others, not even by members of their own family.

It is time to stop the knee-jerk reaction so many of us have when children complain. Just as we once minimized and discounted children’s reports of sexual abuse, we still minimize children’s reports of any kind of abuse that doesn’t leave a livid bruise or an ugly scar. But the fact that you cannot see them with your eyes does not mean the bruises and scars are not there. Sometimes you have to look with your heart.

Narcissists are Delusional

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 are delusional. They refuse to confront reality. Like a child, they use illusions and distortions to maintain their fantasy about themselves and the world around them. And everyone is expected to play along. If you refuse to play your role in the narcissist's fantasy production then the narcissist child screams, cries, and stomps her feet declaring that something is wrong with you.

Narcissists are not delusional in the sense that they see little green men or hear disembodied voices telling them to kill the local sports team or have worms living under their skin. They aren’t schizophrenic or hallucinating. No, narcissists simply don’t deal in the truth. They have fantasy perceptions of themselves and the world around them (and the people in it) that they convince themselves are real. Rather like a child, they live in a pretend world. And like a child with an invisible friend, it is very, very real to them.

Narcissists are very good at projection. They are good at rewriting history to suit their ends. They are masters of taking a grain or two of truth and cooking up a huge messy pot of lies. And they are positively brilliant at making themselves believe it all, even to the point of trying to destroy those who would drag them kicking and screaming into reality.

James (my N-ex) was brilliant at projecting. I used to walk around the house feeling like I didn’t really exist, that when he looked at me he saw someone entirely different, someone I didn’t recognize, but someone he did. One day we were going to take the kids up over one of the local mountains to a valley park that had picnic tables, a small lake and riding stables. Since my car was too small, we were going to take his.

Because he was too busy with TV and some financial program he was watching, we were running late. If James had been obsessed with these financial programs and magazines as a way to grow some investments and wealth, that would be one thing, but James was focussed on “one big score,” to use his phrase. It would be too mundane, too ignominious of him to simply earn and wisely invest to make money. No, he had to find an edge, an angle, a way to make others gasp in awe at his brilliance in coming up with a viable get-rich quick scheme…that, or he had to find a way to do it illegally and not get caught so he could gloat over it. Knowing this about James, I had little patience with him sacrificing time with the kids for yet another foray into the fantasy of being a sudden zillionaire.

The plan had been for me to get the kids ready while he took the car out and filled the gas tank and, because the car had a slow leak, top up the radiator. He was then to stop by a sandwich shop and pick up our order. Meanwhile, I would be getting ready and gathering up the rest of the stuff we would need like blankets, hats, sunscreen, drinks, etc. He groused and mumbled when I insisted he turn off the TV and get going because we were almost ready. He left and came back in amazingly quick time.

With the kids in the back seat and the picnic in the trunk, we headed up the mountain. But only a third of the way up the car started to misbehave. It was making rattling sounds in the engine and losing speed. But James kept driving. After it became obvious that the car was definitely in trouble and I yelled at him to pull over, James gave me a sidelong glance and his mouth formed into a sly smirk and he did. I slid into the driver’s seat, only to see that the temperature gauge was pegged to one side—the car was grossly overheated!

When I asked him if he had put water into the radiator, he said he had not. When I asked him why, he said he had not had time, and since I was in such an all-fired hurry, he gave me what I wanted. When I asked if he realized that running the car dry could seize up the engine, he gave me a contemptuous look and said “of course.” I was so flabbergasted, I couldn’t speak.

My oldest son and I saved the day by getting water from a helpful nearby farmer and filling the radiator before we resume the chug up the mountain. Despite James’ effort to derail the day, the kids had a good time and we made it home safely. But I was still angry with James and still baffled as to what he was thinking when he decided to strand us on a mountainside with a car he had deliberately caused to malfunction. I got answers, but it was the shock of my life!

Once the kids were in bed I asked him what was going on with him that afternoon. He professed to not know what I was talking about. So I asked him point-blank why he had not put water in the car.

“To teach you a lesson,” he said with a completely straight face.

“Huh?” I asked. “What do you mean?”

What came out of his mouth next made the hair on my neck stand on end, it was so creepy. While he had been gone getting the gas and the sandwiches, he had had an entire conversation with me in his head! It was of the “if I said this, then you would say that, and then I would say this and you would reply that” variety, and I listened slack-jawed as he recounted his fantasy conversation. And it made him very, very angry with me!

“Who were you really talking to, James?” I finally asked him. “I would never say those kinds of things—that’s nothing like me. I actually asked you to get water in the car, so why would I get angry with you for taking the time to do that?”

“Well, that is what my mother would do to my father…” I didn’t hear the rest of his sentence—I didn’t need to. The alarm bells were going off in my head, epiphanies were falling like dominoes behind my eyes, realization was creeping over me like a cold chill. I was no more to him than a blank screen upon which he projected his mother. Every word I had spoken, every opinion or belief or value I had voiced in the previous six years were never heard by him, never taken on board because they were drowned out by his projection of his mother onto me. I did not exist!! He knew nothing about me or who I was or how I felt or what I believed because none of that could pierce that projection of his mother. We were together for another seven years and he never did find out who I really was.

My mother had her own kind of delusions. She was the neighbourhood paragon (pretty ironic, considering we had to leave our small town in Oregon under the cloud of scandal she had created!). Judgmental to the nth degree, mother took it upon herself to save the neighbourhood from the woman next door, Mrs. McKenzie. The war she waged on that poor woman was awful! Narcissists think that they way they think is the way we all should think, that their likes, dislikes, beliefs and values should be shared by ALL of us. But most of all, they think they are the centre of the universe and any attention given to others is attention taken away from them.

At the time we moved into our house (I was in the first grade), Mrs. McKenzie was the object of neighbourhood sympathy. A war widow with two young girls to raise, she worked nights as a registered nurse to support them. The girls were a couple of years older than I was and, like their mother, tall and rail thin. People on the block felt sorry for Mrs. McKenzie and, because she had no husband to do the work (and precious little income), her house was a little shabby and the front garden rather unkempt.

My mother, however, did not share the neighbourhood sympathy and went out of her way to blacken the woman’s reputation, spying on her and making up the most outrageous lies and spreading them up and down the street. By the time she was done, Mrs. McKenzie sold her house and moved away and my mother was basking in the glow of having saved our neighbourhood from what she had eventually convinced herself was a terrible danger.

In later years she convinced herself that my children would be better off in the custody of her brother, despite the fact that he and his wife had failed their state’s home study for adoption on three separate occasions. That I had a welfare worker investigate my home and write a letter for the court that my home was fit and so was I, NM convinced herself she was “rescuing” my children from me. She went to her grave believing herself a “hero” and the champion of those poor kids, even though the reality was her entire family stopped talking to her and the damage she did to those kids continues on to the present day, fourteen years after her death.

Narcissists do not see anything they do not want to see and when they can’t find what they want to see, they make it up. This can make the people around them crazy. Because they can be charming and glib, narcissists often bring a lot of people to their point of view, even professionals like therapists, social workers, judges, law enforcement. In the hearings I had in juvenile court, we drew a judge who could see right through her…and she knew it. The judge told me to return to court in three weeks with a letter from my local social services agency, attesting to my fitness, and custody would be settled in my favour…he had NM sussed out! So what did she do? She filed an emergency petition for guardianship in another (higher ranking) court before the juvenile court hearing was scheduled, and drew a judge who was taken in by her false sincerity and the perjured testimony of my uncle. (This uncle, BTW, apologized to me years later with the truth finally came out.) When she could not persuade the juvenile court judge to take up her delusions, when the judge required more than unsubstantiated accusations and asked for proof from a trusted source, NM knew she had to change the venue and find someone to corroborate her accusations (among others, that I was a drug addicted prostitute). By the time it was all over, eight years later and I had regained custody of my children, NM believed her own lies and, despite most of the family finally embracing the truth, my daughter continues to believe them. “Why would a mother lie about her own daughter?” she once asked me. Indeed…when that mother is a narcissist, she will lie about anything and anybody—and believe those lies—in order to get what she wants.

This propensity for creating and believing their own reality can make the people around them crazy. It alters the perception of reality and sucks people into things they might never have otherwise entertained. When practiced on children, it can interfere with their ability to trust, to apply critical thinking, to make good decisions. When a child’s life is based on and guided by lies, that child grows up unable to tell lies from truth and their ability to function is compromised.

Narcissists have no peers. In their delusional world, no one is equal to them. The world is made of entirely of inferiors (most of us) and superiors (those whom they aspire to be like). Narcissists, for all they are full of themselves, do have people they admire. James once had a boss he admired so much he dressed like him and angled for assignments that allowed him to travel internationally, like his boss did. Unfortunately (for James), none of his get rich schemes came to fruition so he was unable to be as rich as his boss and therefore was never able to relegate him to “inferior” status.

Narcissists truly believe they are above the law…and that they are so clever that they can fool the police and therefore are not in danger of getting caught. In the months leading up to our separation and divorce, James began leaving things around that were highly incriminating…but proved he truly believed that even his most outrageous scheme was “doable,” meaning he could get away with it. I seldom entered his home office—he was an egregious slob—but went in one morning to vacuum. Collecting dirty coffee cups and glasses from the desk, my eyes feel on some drawings and notes left on the desktop in his precise, draftsman-like hand printing. Basically, he was drawing up plans to turn our huge family room (larger than a two-car garage) into a marijuana farm and to use the neighbourhood teen agers as his sales agents! Conspicuous by its absence was any mention of me, causing me to wonder what his plans were: either he was planning to get rid of me or his delusion of wealth via drugs included me going along with the scheme.

James loved porn and simply refused to acknowledge that not everybody else did. It was his firm belief that everybody liked porn, he was just one of the morally superior who admitted it. We had dinner guests one night and he ended the evening by putting on an XXX rated video for the guests, one of whom was a female co-worker, to watch! They excused themselves early and never accepted another invitation to get together, and he couldn’t seem to understand why. When I told him they were probably offended by the porn video, he didn’t believe me, and if they left because of it, it was because they were hypocrites.

The ways in which a narcissist can delude him/herself are limitless. Because they live inside their delusions—these delusions are their “reality,”—any attempt to deal with them on a rational basis is futile. The delusions narcissists engage in are not harmless fantasies but dangerous to those around them, because trying to reason with a narcissist is like stepping through the Looking Glass—remember, Alice was the only rational one in there.

Narcissists feel entitled

From the 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 feel entitled. Like bratty children, they expect favourable treatment and excessive amounts of attention and adoration despite their unsavoury behaviour. They feel special and exempt from living as others do. They have no desire to grow-up. They feel entitled to remain a spoiled, foul natured, controlling child.

One of the things that strikes me about my mother, looking back, is the double standard she lived by. Narcissists hold others to a higher standard than they hold themselves, and they exempt themselves from the very rules they hold others to.

She absolutely hated it when people dropped in on her, especially when her parents paid her a surprise visit. And yet, she regularly dropped in on her friends (when she had some) unannounced and later, when I was an adult, dropped in on me without warning. Why did she hate drop in visits? Because of the potential of catching her off her guard, her house a mess, herself not dressed—maybe even in the middle of one of her narcissistic rages and meltdowns. She had an image she conveyed to the world and in order to maintain that image, she needed notice of impending arrivals so that she could be sure everything was in place. Of course, she gave no such warning to others—how else could she catch them out in something that she could squirrel away as potential ammunition to use against them later?

She had no boundaries where other people were concerned, especially me. Of course her own boundaries were rigid, fixed, and zealously guarded: my brother and I were not allowed into her bedroom, for example, unless we were specifically invited and stood to be punished if we so much as opened the door. Or, rather, I stood to be punished, because if my younger—but bigger—brother misbehaved, I got the punishment for “letting” him. I was actually forbidden to have boundaries, something that was to have serious repercussions for me later in life.

By the time I reached my teens, my mother was giving me her cast off clothing in lieu of buying me new ones for school. Not only were they dreadfully out of date, but cheap and tasteless—she had always had tawdry taste and it just got worse as she got older. But between gifts from my Nana and my stepmother, and my summer job picking berries and beans, I managed to pull together a decent wardrobe by the time I entered my junior year of high school, something that did not escape my NM. In fact, my closet became the extension of her closet, despite the fact that I was slimmer, especially through the hips. My stepmother, who had excellent—and expensive—tastes, bought me several wool pencil skirts with coordinating blouses, skirts I loved and cared for carefully because my mother would not stand the cost of dry cleaning. By the end of the school year, every one of these skirts was stretched out in the butt, making them baggy on me when I tried to wear them, because of her incursions into my closet. One skirt—and a brand new top—was even ruined beyond repair by her, without even an attempt at an apology or an offer of recompense or replacement. What was hers was hers, and what was mine was hers, too.

She felt entitled to snoop, not just when I was a kid but when I was an adult as well. Anything she wanted to know, it was her right to know. Right to privacy? Only she had that. Being a malignant narcissist, violence and intimidation were part of her repertoire, so to object to her predations—like going through my purse, gym bag, dresser drawers or coat pockets—was to invite retaliation, both verbally and physically. I learned early not to say “no,” not to object to anything another person expected of me, because I would get hurt as a result. I couldn’t even allow my facial expression to convey anything lest I get smacked, so I learned to school my face into a blank, something that still happens without thinking in times of stress. I learned to make myself numb to her predations—then to all predations—then to all forms of stress—and to make my face reflect only a numb compliance.

Charlie, my late husband, had such a mother as well. Charlie was a magician with his hands…he could build anything. But Charlie, who was dyslexic, had failed to graduate from high school and because of his reading problems, his mother labelled him “stupid.” His younger brother. Alvin, was not dyslexic and he not only graduated high school, the family sent him to college (Maman said she would have sent Charlie to college if he wanted to go, but he was too stupid—whether she meant too stupid to grasp the opportunity or too stupid to make it through, she never made clear). Alvin was a self-made millionaire and very clearly Maman’s darling. The fact that Alvin’s millions were not cleanly made, that he was regularly in trouble with state regulatory agencies for the less-than-honourable methods he used to make his money, didn’t bother her a whit: Alvin was a millionaire and that excused everything otherwise unpleasant about him. Charlie was an afterthought…except when she wanted something. When she bought a new house and needed a deck build, she called Charlie. She expected Charlie to drop everything and come build her deck…and she expected him to pay for all of the materials, supply free labour, and do it on her timetable, regardless of what his plans might have been. If Charlie demurred, if he asked for money for supplies, if he didn’t get it done on her time-table, he got the sharp side of her tongue…and everybody in the family heard about it for months, even years, afterward. Charlie did not have the option to refuse…he was her son and she was entitled to the fruits of his labour long past the time he was married, a parent, and a homeowner himself. She monopolized him until he was done with whatever she wanted, then ignored him until she needed him again.

Charlie couldn’t say “no” either. His narcissistic mother was the only one allowed to draw boundaries, and those boundaries were one-way only. The problem with this kind of entitlement on the part of the parent is that children learn very early that there is an unpleasant consequence for noncompliance, no matter how outrageous the demand, and come to believe they have no right to say “no.” In later years, when the threat of repercussion may be long past, the person still believes they have no right to say “no,” and this can lead them down destructive paths they might not otherwise have taken.

This inability to say “no” cost me time (agreeing to do things I didn’t want to do), money (agreeing to donate or give or spend, even though I could not afford it or did not want to), and self-esteem. This last came from my inability to say refuse sexual advances from dates. This led to a promiscuity problem that perhaps could be more accurately called “date rape,” in that I initially resisted but if the man was insistent, I did not feel I had the right to say “no.” Lurking in my subconscious lay the fear of retaliation for refusal, and so I complied. This was the later effect, however—I was sexually molested by a neighbour at about age nine because I was afraid to break away and leave: he was an adult and I was compelled to submit to anything an adult might want (heavens, if I had to lay across the bed while my mother striped my bare butt with a thin leather strap and not move or cry out, how was I to know it was OK to run from a neighbour who was holding me securely in his lap, one hand under my skirt??). I was also sexually molested by my stepfather at age 16 for largely the same reason. I, of course, gave both men a wide berth after my experiences with them, not an easy thing to do with regards to my stepfather in a tiny one-bedroom apartment in which I slept in the kitchen!

The narcissist’s sense of entitlement extends beyond family members and friends. Narcissists believe that rules are made for other people and that they are exempt. James (now my N-ex) and I were going to work one morning in his car, and he was driving. The freeway ramp we needed to take to get to work was stacked up as usual and James simply drove onto the right shoulder of the ramp to pass all of the waiting cars—something he did every morning. I had complained about this (I am a “wait your turn” kinda gal) but his reckless, retaliatory driving after my complaints were scary enough to shut me up. On this particular morning I could see that there were several police officers standing in the grass just off the shoulder with ticket books in their hands and I warned James. He ignored me and, sure enough, he got pulled over and given a ticket. He was outraged! The fact that he had driven that shoulder every morning for weeks, in his mind, made it his right to do so, and he was livid at the police for “taking away” that perceived right.

But the story doesn’t end here. The following morning he did exactly the same thing and got another ticket and he was even angrier the second morning that the first, accusing the cops of setting up a “trap,” and his ticket entrapment and therefore unjust. This was not his last stupid car trick, either. Driving the kids home from some event one afternoon, James ran a red light. There was a police car behind him and when the police car didn’t pull him over, James took that as permission to run red lights and proceeded to do it again! And he was angry and verbally abusive to the officer when he got pulled over and ticketed again, because after he didn’t get nailed for the first light, he felt entitled to run the next one.

This kind of entitlement can be unbelievably petty: I once bought English muffins at the market because they were on sale—ordinarily we could not afford them. From that day forward, James complained bitterly about no English muffins for breakfast: he was entitled to his English muffins and I was a withholding bitch to refuse to buy any more! And it can be huge: I knew someone once who broke into an old house that appeared to have been abandoned and stripped it of antique furnishings, dishes, and a host of other lovely—and collectable—things. “Nobody is using them, so why shouldn’t I have them?” was his rationale. But the house and its contents was part of an estate that was being litigated and he was merely rationalizing his thefts, as narcissists are wont to do.

Children are born feeling entitled and they raise holy hell when their needs aren’t met. It is programmed into the as a survival mechanism—baby cries, Mama feeds, baby survives. Young children have no concept of “others” as existing for anything other than their own survival and entertainment. They have no empathy, compassion, or remorse (ask your infant how bad he feels about keeping you up all night…). But children are supposed to outgrow this infantile narcissism as they become socialized, they are supposed to learn that they can’t have everything, that they must share, and that the feelings of others are just as important as their own. Some children never grow past that sense of entitlement, that feeling that they…and what they want…supercedes the feelings, wishes, and needs of everyone else on the planet. It is this arrested development that leads to their epic sense of entitlement.

Narcissistic parents

Not all child abusers are narcissists, but all narcissistic parents abuse their children. They cannot not abuse them, for it is the nature of narcissists to see others, including their own children, as sources of ego gratification—otherwise known as “narcissistic supply”—regardless of the consequence to those suppliers.

Narcissists are supremely entitled individuals who lack conscience or remorse for the pain they inflict on others. They are the people who believe that if you get your feelings hurt as a result of something they did or said, that is your fault for either being “overly sensitive” or even for “choosing to feel hurt”—because they truly believe that you could have chosen not to feel hurt by their insensitivity.

But there is a class of narcissist, the “malignant narcissist,” who takes things a step further. These people actively seek to hurt others in countless ways, both large and small, for the sheer pleasure of “winning.” To the malignant narcissist, in any contest of will, in order for him/her to “win,” you must lose, and you must suffer in the bargain. Narcissists are the ultimate control freaks and the malignant narcissist must not only control but inflict punishment as well. Having a malignant narcissist for a parent is a terrifying thing…

My mother was a malignant narcissist. But in the Fifties, the time of my childhood, there was no word to describe personality disorders like narcissism. Society surreptitiously swept ugly things under the rug unless a situation was so bad it was impossible to look away. The mythology of motherhood reigned supreme—all mothers loved their children and children who presented with bruises and welts and other signs of abuse were deemed “troublemakers” for having provoked their mothers to such extremes in the name of discipline. Somehow, nobody seemed to pick up on the cognitive dissonance between the “innocence” of childhood and the ability of such an innocent to provoke physical violence in the person who supposedly loved the child more than anyone in the world: her mother.

Growing up under the rule of a narcissistic parent, especially a malignant narcissist, is a terrifying, emotionally agonizing, spiritually impoverishing experience. Lisette, of the blog House of Mirrors, describes what it is like to be in a relationship with a narcissist:
.    • Being rejected and denied value as a person
.    • Being degraded and having your self-worth and dignity as a person degraded
.    • Being exploited and used for the narcissist’s profit or advantage
.    • Being terrorized by intimidation, control, coercion, and stalking
.    • Being denied care, affection, and attention of any kind
.    • Being dismissed, humiliated, manipulated, and belittled
.    • Being violated by pathological envy, greed, and entitlement
.    • Being plundered, pillaged and systematically destroyed
Narcissistic abuse tears at a person’s self-worth and manifests in social withdrawal, anxiety, fearfulness, depression, self-blame and self-destructive behaviour. It results in feelings of guilt, shame, inadequacy and powerlessness."

Narcissists come in both genders, every shape, size, colour, ethnicity and belief system. They are often charming and engaging when first met, and it is not until the narcissist has his or her claws deep into you that you begin to realize that there is something “not right” about the person. That usually begins to happen when you begin to deny the narcissist something that s/he believes s/he is entitled to have. It doesn’t have to be something big—it can be something as small as five minutes of your attention at a time you need to focus on something else—the narcissist is entitled and if you deny him or her, the narcissist will be miffed…and somewhere down the road, you will get punished.

Narcissists have long, long memories. They never forget a slight, real or imagined. And they feel entitled to redress that slight, over and over and over again. There is nothing rational about their perception of being slighted, either: a narcissistic mother may feel that the necessary tasks of motherhood, like paying attention to the needs of her children, are excessive demands on the part of the child, demands for which the narcissistic mother will ultimately exact revenge.

For the narcissist, it is “all about me!” When my first child was born and I was lying in a hospital bed after having a Caesarian, my mother, father, and his second wife came to visit. My stepmother commented on how pretty my new baby girl was, my father inquired as to how I was feeling, and my mother tried to engage my father, from whom she had been divorced for eight years, in reminiscences of her Caesarian when I was born, and how much worse hers had been than mine (I was able to laugh, her stitches hurt too much to laugh, etc.). My surgery, my new baby (their first grandchild) and all my mother could talk about was herself!

One of the favourite tools of the narcissist is called “gas lighting,” after the 1944 movie, Gaslight, starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer. According to Wikipedia, “Gaslighting is a form of psychological abuse in which false information is presented with the intent of making a victim doubt his or her own memory and perception. It may simply be the denial by an abuser that previous abusive incidents ever occurred, or it could be the staging of bizarre events by the abuser with the intention of disorienting the victim.” Narcissistic parents use this tool to rewrite history, to make themselves look blameless, to even deny some events ever occurred. My NM abandoned me for adoption when I was 2, keeping my baby brother. Her own parents told me this and I lived with them for nearly two years until they were able to get my mother to take me back. When queried about this, however, my NM denied it ever happened. My father and my other grandparents, one aunt (on my father’s side) and an uncle on my mother’s side all support my grandparents’ tale, yet NM maintained the fiction that it never happened for the rest of her life. Today, 14 years after NM’s death, at least one of her “flying monkeys” keeps the lie alive, accusing me of lying about my abandonment! (Actually, she claims all 46 of the stories below are lies, even though she was not witness to any of the events and wasn’t even born when most of them occurred! Such is the power of a narcissist to hoover people to their sides and completely suck out their brains!)

I will explore the narcissist and his/her tricks in succeeding posts, and in particular I will focus on the Malignant Narcissist and the legacy of dysfunction and damage they leave behind. But first—46 stories from real life, a life shaped and distorted by a malignant narcissist mother…

The Long and Winding Road

She heard her name over the loudspeaker, followed by her number. Geeze, she thought, heaving herself up from the narrow bunk. What did those soul-sucking leeches want with her now?

“Roll up!” came the disembodied voice, followed by a flurry of chatter amongst the girls. Roll up? Her? There must be some mistake!

Matron Delgado was walking by and she caught her attention. “Did I hear right? They called me for roll up?”

Delgado smiled…she was probably the most humane of the warders and smiled often…and nodded. “Yup, I seen the orders come through this morning. Roll your stuff up and before the hour is done, you are out of here!” Forty-five minutes later she was standing on the sidewalk soaking up the first sunlight she had seen in three months.

It was weird, she thought, discharge papers in hand. She had come here with two bulging suitcases and high hopes of making a new life for herself and was leaving less than six months later with absolutely nothing except the clothes on her back and half a pack of hand-rolled cigarettes. She laughed, briefly and bitterly…if she lit one of those up here on the street one of these hick cops would mistake it for a joint and toss her right back in the slammer. Nope, she’d keep her niccie fit under control until she got good and out of town. She started walking briskly towards the southern city limits, heedless of the beating sun and the choking dust that boiled up with each car that raced by, her outstretched thumb ignored. She had no money, nothing she could pawn…not even a dime for a phone call---not that she had anyone to call…but she was going to put as much distance between herself and this Godforsaken outpost in the desert as possible.

At least Lobo had rescued Bunny and not left him in the ransacked apartment to die of hunger and thirst. She had liked that little rabbit, her first pet in…well, a long time. He was a quiet little bunny that liked to sit on her lap in the bed while she read. She worked nights, so she was home during the day while the rabbit was restive, and he had hand tamed easily with her constant attention. Lobo was a reliable friend, if a little slow upstairs, and it was he who broke the news to her that the place had been stripped after the police had hauled her and Tiny and Horse away after Michelle’s implausible accusations.

Hearing another car coming, she flipped her long hair over her shoulder and turned to face the traffic. Striking a post that she hoped would appeal to men without being threatening to women, she pasted an expectant smile on her face and stuck out her thumb. The car whizzed by, alarmingly close, an immaculately coiffed woman with impeccable nails at the wheel, her perfectly painted lips curled in disdain. “Bitch,” she muttered, choking in the gritty cloud of dust that swirled around her. “Fucking stuck-up rich bitch!”

The thing about endless foot-slogging is that there was nothing to do with your mind but think. No distractions, save the occasional car and the certain-to-be-dashed hopes that it raised, nothing to take the mind away from gnawing on the knots that bound the intellect and psyche. She could indulge in the fantasy of what she would do to Michelle if she ever got her hands on her, but revenge, ultimately, was a fruitless pursuit. It wasted her time, time she needed to be focussing on getting some kind of shelter, food, work.

Work. How the fuck was she going to get a job? After the cops had hauled her and the guys away and Michelle had made her “statement,” the treacherous little tramp had come back and stolen everything and left town! And it had taken the bonehead of a District Attorney three fucking months to realize that the bitch had conned him, that she had used the cops to gain her own ends, and she was not coming back from Ohio, where she was undoubtedly comfortably ensconced in a flat furnished with stolen household goods, wearing stolen clothes, and dancing in stolen…and really expensive…hand-made costumes.

She shook her head, pulling the long tresses up off her neck and wishing for a rubber band to make a ponytail. Her hair acted like a woollen scarf and on a day like this, she didn’t need it. She didn’t even have her goddamned purse…it had been left in the apartment when the police hauled her away, so now Michelle had her wallet and ID as well. And her only pictures of her kids… Her kids…her step faltered and her breath caught, but she stifled the prickling behind her nose and pushed the thought away.

Well, Nana had always told her when she made a mistake, she must examine it and find the lesson in it. Surely she had made some kind of mistake here… She had come right home from work that night. Stripping might look like an easy way to make a buck, but it was damned hard work. She ate like a longshoreman and had trouble keeping her weight up, and worked up a drenching sweat with each set…which was twenty minutes out of each hour, on stage, exercising, under hot lights. She was tired when her shift was over and she usually just had a bite, then went right home. It was winter…it was three in the morning…it was cold outside…and she heard something like weeping in the stairwell. Tiny was asleep on the sofa, Horse was laying on the bed reading comic books, but she had to be the Good-fucking-Samaritan and open the door.

She found her co-worker and across-the-hall neighbour, Michelle, huddled in a thin sweater on the outside steps, crying piteously. She had forgotten her keys and was stuck outside until her boyfriend came home, which wouldn’t be for at least another hour. Michelle was freezing, tired, and frightened and she, like the soft-hearted, gullible idiot that she was, invited her inside for a cup of coffee and a little warmth.

There didn’t seem to be anything amiss. They sat in the kitchen, soon joined by Horse and Tiny, and drank coffee, smoked cigarettes, and told stories. Michelle seemed fascinated by the biker lifestyle and Horse obliged her by showing off some of his weaponry, and Tiny, who didn’t have a girlfriend and thought Michelle was a prime candidate, gave silly adolescent demonstrations of his size and strength by lifting the woman off the ground with one arm and even bench pressing her full weight. When they heard a car door slam, however, Michelle turned stiff and pale. “It’s Mitch!” she gasped, heading for the door. “He’s going to smack me good for this!”

Noting that no one seemed to understand, Michelle wrung her hands. “He’s very jealous. He’ll think I’ve been sleeping with the guys…he’s gonna kill me! You gotta unlock the door!”

“It’s unlocked,” Tiny said, reaching to open it, but in her panic, Michelle had stuck the little bolt. Crying in earnest now, shaking the doorknob, the woman was making herself hysterical.

“Hey, hey,” she said soothingly, drawing her back from the door so one of the guys could unstick the bolt. “Just tell Mitch that you were over here talking to me about costumes…that I wanted to sell a couple and you were looking them over.” Michelle quieted a bit.

“Here,” she said, thrusting a beaded gold satin charmeuse halter gown into Michelle’s hand. “Tell him you are thinking about buying this one and model it for him…ask him what he thinks.”

Michelle nodded, blotting her tears and running mascara with the back of an index finger. Tiny had managed to free the stuck bolt and open the door. Michelle met Mitch on the landing to the sound of “What the fuck?” in startlingly loud tones, considering that it was now four o’clock in the morning. She could not hear Michelle’s reply, but the door across the hall opened and then quickly slammed. It was late, she was tired, she went back to her own apartment and went to bed.

At first she thought the noise was just part of a dream. Slamming doors, men shouting, bright lights flashing around the room, but a rough touch on her arm brought her suddenly awake. Someone was shining a flashlight in her eyes and demanding she get out of bed. “Get out of here before I call the cops!” she yelled in response, one hand shielding her eyes. “And get that fucking light out of my eyes!”

“Lady,” came the snarled reply, “This is the cops! Now get your ass out of that bed!”

The asshole wouldn’t give her even a modicum of privacy for dressing. She slept in the raw and he rudely ogled her toned dancer’s body as she grabbed the nearest clothes…her grease-and-oil stained biking jeans and a thin T-shirt. Knowing there was nothing illegal in the house and that she had broken no laws…at least she didn’t think she had broken any laws…she was not terribly worried, just irritated as hell. She was tired, she wanted to sleep, and these assholes had nothing better to do than roust them at…what?...six o’clock in the morning? She shoved her feet into a pair of boots and when she stood up, the officer put a death grip on her upper arm.

“Hey!” she tried to yank her arm away. “Don’t bruise the merchandise! Ain’t it enough you got a free show, cowboy?” The officer just scowled and began to drag her out into the living room where Horse and Tiny were handcuffed, a small pile of weapons piled on the coffee table…a pile that, ludicrously, included her kitchen knives and a box cutter from the kitchen drawer. She knew her gun was legal, and what house didn’t have knives? She still wasn’t worried…there was nothing to be worried about.

But when the handcuffs were snapped around her wrists and the cops opened her door and a red-eyed, bruise-faced Michelle looked out from her apartment door, she felt a twinge of unease. Mitch stood protectively nearby, his arm tightly around the woman’s shoulders, one meaty hand grasping the back of her neck. She felt a prickle of alarm go up her spine as she was led down the stairs into the chill predawn air. Just what the fuck was going on?

Her intuition told her this was a great deal more than a simple roust and toss of her apartment, and when the officer snapped open her handcuffs, wrapped her arms around a stinking, sticky creosoted telephone pole, and snapped the cuffs on again, that vague sense of unease began to grow to something more akin to fear. Something was really, really wrong here, and she was beginning to get an inkling what it might be.

A dusty pickup pulled over to the side of the road ahead of her, interrupting her reverie. She jogged up to the open window and stuck her head in. “Where ya headed, Mister?” she asked. She wasn’t taking any chances that the guy would say he was headed her way as a ruse to get her into the truck for other, nefarious, purposes.

“California,” he replied. “How far you goin’?”

“California,” she grinned, opening the door and climbing into the air conditioned coolness of the cab. “You got anything cold to drink?”