How we were set up…and how we may be setting up our kids…Part 2

5. Punish independence and separation. When we punish our children for growing up, we make them feel guilty for having normal developmental needs and desires which often causes deep insecurity, rebellion, cutting and other forms of behaviors that indicate failure to be able to branch out and be themselves as independent people.

Oh, I got this a lot. My GC Brother was allowed to live by the tenet “If it isn’t specifically forbidden, it is allowed.” I, on the other hand, got “If it isn’t specifically permitted, it is forbidden.” This pretty much kept me isolated and alone. When my peers were wearing make up, I was given a clear lip gloss; when I developed breasts and wanted a bra, I was ignored. I was forbidden to shave my legs and underarms, pluck my eyebrows, or any of a host of other grooming regimes that happen as a girl enters her teens. No hair curlers or hair spray, no salon cuts, no deodorant…and for sanitary needs, I had to use what NM had available. For clothes, NM merely lengthened and let out my “little girl” dresses from the previous year, even adding gussets under the arms to accommodate my expanding bosom rather than admit I was growing up.

Fortunately, at 14 I went to live with my father and my stepmother took over. When I went back to my mother a year later I had clothes, underwear, shoes and grooming supplies and skills commensurate with a 15 year old…having arrived at my father’s a year earlier stuck at about age nine. But the punishment of independence and separation didn’t stop there: I could go nowhere without permission, even at age 16 and 17. If a boy asked me to a school dance, before I could accept, I had to ask permission…and when granted, walk on eggshells and be the perfect obsequious servant lest she change her mind before the dance. I could not go to the library, the beach, shopping, hang out with my friends at the Frosty Shop…even when I had an after-school job, I wasn’t even allowed to cash my own paychecks!

While Campbell warns that this can cause insecurity, rebellion, even cutting, it can also cause depression and fearfulness, anger and resentment. At age 12 I prayed for the time to pass quickly until I was 18. I was obsessed with turning 18 and getting out from under my mother’s authority. I had no plans for my life after that magical date, but from childhood onward, my primary goal was to turn 18 and get away.

But I was an independent minded sort of kid who had feared and hated my mother quite consciously for as far back as I could remember. Some kids will become fearful and dependent, afraid to take risks or any kind of chances, afraid to make decisions for themselves. These kids can easily grow up to be timid, fearful adults who remain under the thumbs of their Nparents for the rest of their lives.

The teen years are a natural time for your child to individuate and begin to gain both independence and separation. Even if we do not squelch that drive because we wish to control and manipulate our children, if we are over-protective and don’t allow our kids to make their own mistakes (within reason, of course...you cannot give an inexperienced teen no boundaries or limits), we inhibit their development just as surely as Ns hindered ours.

6. Treat your child as an extension of you. If, as a parent, you link your own image and self-worth to your child's appearance, performance, behavior, grades and how many friends they have, you let them know they are loved not for who they are but for how well they perform and make you look good. This turns them into pleasers rather than doers, and they will always worry about being good enough.

This is probably more common in engulfing Ns than in ignoring Ns, but we can be guilty of such things as well. When we are determined to raise our families just the opposite of how our Ns raised us, for example, we are not looking to the individual needs of each of our children. Instead, we are parenting our children in the way we wished we had been parented, which is all about us and our needs, not our kids and their needs. This makes our children extensions of ourselves because we are focussed on what our needs were as children, not on the needs of our children as individuals.

This may be hard for us to hear because we have convinced ourselves that doing the opposite of what our NParents did is the right thing to do, but the truth is, neither end of an extreme is a good thing. Unthinkingly doing something because your mother wouldn’t do it…or reactively refusing to do something because you mother used to do it…has nothing to do with your child and everything to do with you.

It is natural for us to be proud of our children when they achieve and healthy for them to feel our pride in them. But we can overdo both the pride and praise, especially when the child has not put a good effort into something. Our parents too often put value on things that had nothing to do with our wants, needs, feelings, desires and everything to do with their own. We must love them and be proud of them for who they are, not for what they do or how they look. Yes, we must have standards, like cleanliness, and we can’t allow them to mutilate their bodies with tattoos and body modifications before they are of an age to understand the permanence and implications of such things, nor can we ignore achievements…there is a balance to be struck between replicating the dysfunctional parenting we received and inflicting an opposite but equally dysfunctional parenting style on our children.

7. Meddle in your child's relationships. Directing every action your child takes in their relationships -- from friends to teachers -- inhibits their maturity. For example, if your child gets in trouble at school and you immediately rush to talk to the teacher to get them off the hook, or you are constantly telling your child how to be a friend, as your child grows he/she will never learn to navigate the sharper edges relationships bring on their own.

This one needs to be handled with kid gloves…because as a responsible parent, you sometimes must step in.

One thing we as parents don’t want to hear is that our children actually are more influenced by their peers than by what we, their parents, provide for them in the way of home life, nurturing, values, and discipline. As our kids get older, however, their peers have more and moreinfluence over them, particularly with regard to the social life: drinking, drugs, premarital sex, clothing, social attitudes…as your child grows up, the attitudes of his friends on these subjects becomes more and more important. You simply cannot tell your child “you are not to see Jimmy anymore” because that stimulates resentment and, in some kids, inspires defiance. Reason may help but kids are often ruled more by emotion than reason. What is probably most effective is to shape your child’s peer group when he is very young so that when he starts school he is not drawn to the troubled, trouble-making kids in a desire to emulate them but out of a desire to help and befriend them. It’s too late to change your parenting and get the desired results when your child is already in the grip of adolescent hormones: by then, the die is pretty much cast.

 

Once your child is of school age it becomes very important to listen…to really listen…to them. If your child is being bullied, then you need to step in: for each child, the meaning of “step in” is different…one kid might need karate classes, another kid might need parental intervention at school, and yet another might need to be moved to a different school. There is no “one size fits all” solution…or even a blanket criteria as to when to step in. But taking a completely “hands off” approach is not being respectful of their privacy, it is abandonment. And jumping in at every little incident is not good parenting either, it is engulfing. Kids need to learn to handle their own issues, yes, but within limits—and those limits are set by the parents, not the kids.

8. Over-protect. When we protect our children from every problem and emotion, it creates a sense of entitlement and inflated self-esteem that often crosses the line into narcissism. They expect life to be easier than it is. They want everything done for them no matter how they behave. They then become depressed and confused when they don't get what they believe they deserve.

I don’t like the “child-centred parenting” that seems to be so in vogue today for just this reason. For one thing, I think it is misused by some parents to justify ignoring their children’s behaviour and their own responsibility for teaching, guiding and training their children to join the larger society as productive members. And for another thing, I think it gives other parents a way to infantilize their children in a quasi-socially acceptable way. Either way, self-absorbed parents win, the kids lose.

Judith Rich Harris, independent researcher and textbook author says “…The belief that parents have a great deal of power to determine how their children will turn out is actually a rather new idea. Not until the middle of the last century did ordinary parents start believing it. I was born in 1938, before the cultural change, and parenting had a very different job description back then. Parents didn’t feel they had to sacrifice their own convenience and comfort in order to gratify the desires of their children. They didn’t worry about boosting the self-esteem of their children. In fact, they often felt that too much attention and praise might spoil them and make them conceited. Physical punishment was used routinely for infractions of household rules. Fathers provided little or no child care; their chief role at home was to administer discipline.

“All these things have changed dramatically in the past 70 years, but the changes haven’t had the expected effects. People are the same as ever. Despite the reduction in physical punishment, today’s adults are no less aggressive than their grandparents were. Despite the increase in praise and physical affection, they are not happier or more self-confident or in better mental health. It’s an interesting way to test a theory of child development: persuade millions of parents to rear their children in accordance with the theory, and then sit back and watch the results come in. Well, the results are in and they don’t support the theory!”

This doesn’t mean that Dr. Harris or I endorse fathers ignoring their kids except to discipline them, nor do I advocate corporal punishment as a routine method of disciplining children. But it does mean that I think letting children run the household is ill-advised, whether it is by default or design. Children who lack boundaries (and enforcement of those boundaries) often become more and more extreme in their behaviour until they find the limits. And if there are few or no limits, the child grows up believing it is his right and due to behave however he wants, with no respect for the rights or boundaries of others.

It is my firm belief that purpose of parenting is to raise a child who, by the time he reaches the ability to care for himself, is able to integrate into his society. This means he must learn the rules of his culture and the limits his culture places on him and his behaviour. It means he must learn respect—for himself and for others as well. People who do not learn respect for the rights and feelings of others, who grow up believing the feelings and rights of others are not important, grow up to be insensitive, rude, and self-centred. In a word: narcissists.

Dr. Harris makes it very clear that a child’s genetic predisposition is a significant contributor to a child’s personality: “…personality resemblances between biological relatives are due almost entirely to heredity, rather than environment. Adopted children don’t resemble their adoptive parents in personality. I’m not particularly interested in genetic effects, but the point is that they have to be taken into account.” But regardless of the basic personality a child inherits, socialization is something that is learned, and if you don’t prepare your child for the real world because you have protected him from every form of disappointment and displeasure he encounters, when you launch him from the nest he is going to be ill-prepared for what he finds out there in a world who have no vested interest in inflating his self-esteem, tiptoeing around his feelings, and smoothing out the rough patches for him. Children need to learn coping strategies just as much as they need to learn to not touch a hot stove, and when you deny them the opportunity, you infantilize them, making them dependent on you rather than independent.

Regardless of a child’s inborn personality, he needs to learn the basic rules of his society and why it is important to abide by them. He needs to learn about respect: that other people have feelings and rights and that they are just as important as his. My kids used to moan about being taught and expected to use table manners but my theory was a simple one: when he lives on his own, he can eat with his fingers if he wants, but if he is ever in a situation where he needs nice manners, like having lunch with a prospective employer or being seated at a banquet table with the rich and powerful, he will have those manners tucked into his memory banks to be trotted out when he needs them.

And you have such a very short time to begin inculcating them with the values that help will them become happy, productive people for the rest of their lives. Once a child starts school, he begins widening his peer group and new influences, influences over which you have little or no control, will start coming into his life. And the older he gets, the stronger those outside influences will be. You have the first five to seven years of your child’s life to give him a good foundation. From then on, you are still a teacher, coach and guide, but your child will be weighing what you say against the information he gets from other sources. And this is not a bad thing: it is the beginning of critical thinking, an invaluable life skill. But children do not have the life experience and wisdom of their parents, nor are they as capable of making intelligent choices over emotional ones…and that is where you come in. You have to learn…and learn early…to tell them “no” and make it stick. It helps them to learn how to deal with disappointment and helps you to steel your heart to their tearful pleas.

Parenting: the most difficult job in the world to do right!

How we were set up…and how we may be setting up our kids…

I read…a lot. Virtually every week day (weekends belong to my husband), I am perusing one article or another on the web and in magazines, or ploughing my way through another book…or revisiting a book I read some time ago but reread periodically to keep the insights fresh in my mind. Most of the things I read I find interesting, but few of them do I find worthy of sharing with you. But when I do find one, you get it, my thoughts on it, and a link so that you can go read it in its original context.

And so I have found another one to share with you…this one about how to screw up your kids emotionally. Reading it from the standpoint of an ACoN, I am seeing it from two perspectives: what our narcissistic parent(s) did to us and what we may inadvertently be doing to our own kids. Sherrie Campbell, PhD and licensed Psychologist, recently published an article on Huffington Post entitled “8 Guaranteed Waysto Emotionally F*ck Up Your Kids,” and I thought it was nothing short of brilliant. Dr. Campbell opens her article thus: [as usual, my comments are in violet]

“Our children are the lights of our lives. We all start off as parents envisioning nothing but success, love and happiness for them. However, these dreams often do not manifest because they are not getting the important things they need to become disciplined, mature and motivated adults. The following are eight parenting f*ck-ups that will guarantee your child will suffer from depression, anxiety, anger, tense family relationships, problems with friends, low self-esteem, a sense of entitlement and chronic emotional problems throughout his or her life.”

1. Ignore or minimize your child's feelings. If your child is expressing sadness, anger or fear and you mock them, humiliate them, ignore or tease them you minimize what they feel. You essentially tell them what they feel is wrong. When parents do this they withhold love from their child and miss opportunities to have open and vulnerable connections teaching them to bond and to know they are loved unconditionally.

It is my guess that we have all experienced this at the hands of our Ns; some of us were even told outright that our feelings were wrong, that we did not hate our mean cousin, we loved him, or that we were not allowed to feel or express in any way sadness or anger or hurt or fear. I can remember flinching as my NM raised her hand for some innocuous reason…but I was within striking distance, and I unthinkingly flinched. Once she could get me alone, I was informed on no uncertain terms that I was never to do it again, under penalty of a beating. No expressions of emotion were allowed, including fear, except as permitted by my NM.

But what about us as parents? We are so hypersensitized to criticism that we hear criticism from our children in the form of their anger, fear or sadness? While we may not mock or humiliate or tease our kids for their feelings, do we ignore them by refusing to address them, by trying to kid or bribe them into a “better mood” or by taking their emotions so personally that we feel assaulted by them? Kids can pick up on that last one and quickly learn to hide their feelings from us for fear of making us upset…how fair is it of us to parentalize them in such a way?

Children need to perceive their family as a safe place to express their true feelings. We can teach them acceptable ways of expressing themselves…no hitting or name calling or tantrums past an appropriate age for them, for example. It is part of our job as parents, after all, to teach kids how to deal appropriately with their emotions, not to stifle or deny them, or be afraid to show them. We may not stifle our kids in the same ways our parents did to us, but are we discouraging emotional honesty in our kids in different ways?

2. Inconsistent rules. If you never talk about your expectations, you keep your child from knowing how to behave appropriately. Children live up or down to what you expect. Rules give them guidelines and boundaries to help them define who they are, good and bad. If you keep your child guessing and life is vague, they will begin to act out to find the boundaries themselves, which leads to low self-esteem and problem behavior.

This has to be my all-time pet peeve as a child: inconsistent rules. Not just inconsistent from one day to the next, but inconsistent from one child to the next without explanation. I recognize you can’t give your 8 year-old the same freedom you give his 16 year-old sibling…but does he know the path to earning that freedom for himself? Or does he view it as an arbitrary and capricious dictate from you or his other parent?

Are your expectations of each child reasonable? How do you handle having different expectations for different children? My NM would tell me, as I struggled with 8^th grade Algebra, than my 5^th grade brother was getting an A in math…so what was wrong with me? Do you expect your artistic child, who took two years to memorize the multiplication tables, to get the same math grades as your technokid who taught himself quadratic equations from the internet? Do you take the time to explain to each child why you have different expectations from each of them? Or do you simply create a “one size fits all” set of expectations and reward those who achieve and penalize those who don’t?

Are your expectations consistent from one day to the next? Do you contradict yourself and leave your child to figure it out? In the 1950s, when I was a child, working mothers were rare and those who had a full time job, like mine, worked in environments where their kids couldn’t call them on the phone multiple times per day. My NM would call home at the time she expected us to be home from school (and woe betide me if I was not there to take her call!). She would then issue instructions and we were expected to follow those instructions and have them done before she got home from work. If her instructions were not clear, I couldn’t call back for clarification and I quickly learned that that which was correct yesterday was not necessarily correct today: yesterday I could go out after my chores to play with a neighbour child…but today I am in trouble for doing it, and with no warning that the rules have changed.

In an environment where little or nothing is predictable, where everything seems to hang on the moment’s mood of the parent, children become stressed. They have to learn to be hypervigilant because their world is capricious and unpredictable, inconsistent and therefore frightening. There are more ways to be inconsistent and capricious than the ways our NMs did it…are we doing it differently, but doing it just the same?

3. Make your child your friend. Never share all your worries, concerns and relationship problems with your child or ask their advice. If you act helpless and defeated to your children they will never learn to respect you and will treat you as an equal or an inferior because you have used them for your own therapy. You must show your children you can stand up to problems, face your challenges and handle life through all the stress and come out on the other side. Be real, have your emotions, but do not burden your children.

This is a peculiar one because some of the things we say to our kids…or our NParents said to us…don’t sound like we are parentifying (or being parentified) but if you think about how a child perceives “We can’t afford it,” or “Your mother is a spendthrift,” or “Your father left us because he’s a faithless jerk,” you may get it.

We are not our children’s friends, we are their teachers and guides. We can be compassionate and kind in that role, but sometimes we have to be tough and immovable. One of places we must do that is in setting boundaries and one of the boundaries we must set is the one between adult things and children’s things. When we fail to set and enforce that boundary, when we allow our children to be our confidantes and give them information about the household and family that is outside both their ability to control or even truly comprehend, we unburden ourselves by burdening them.

If you have ever worked in a company you know that, unless you worked in certain departments, knowledge of the company’s finances was none of your business. And if you did work in finance, accounting or purchasing, you also knew that the information you knew from doing your job was confidential and not supposed to be shared with other people outside of a “need to know” basis. There was a firm boundary drawn between the executive management and the regular workers, too…because they did not need to know because the knowledge was not part of their jobs.

In a household it is little different. You, as the parent, are executive management and some of what you do or know simply should not be shared with your children. If finances are tight, why worry your kids any sooner than absolutely necessary? It is enough to let them know at the time a change has to be made, and probably not wise to explain changes in terms that can worry them. “We can’t afford it” may be the truth, but children have no control over the income or expenditure and kids tend to blame themselves… “maybe if I ate less…” “maybe if I sold my dolls and gave the money to Mommy…” Be careful how you explain changes in their world because they can take on guilt that does not belong to them.

If you discuss your marital or relationship woes with them, you are parentifying. Contentious discussions between you and your significant other belong in private, not in front of an audience, even if that audience is only your kids. Complaints about your partner belong in the ears and on the shoulders of your age-appropriate friends, not your kids. Kids perceive this as a requirement that they take sides and if your kid takes a side and then you and your lover make up, the kids still has taken a side and is unlikely to ever be a neutral, uninvolved kid again. It also makes them insecure: in a society in which half of all marriages end in divorce, your kid likely has friends from divorced families. When you fight in front of your kids, when you burden them with adult concerns—even if you have convinced yourself that because they are members of the family and should therefore know—you make them worry that their home may break up as well. And again, kids take on blame for this, thinking if they only behaved “better” (as opposed to normally), their home would not be on the verge of disintegrating.

There are times we must all unburden ourselves, but our kids are not the ones to dump it on…that is why we have family, counsellors, friends, and journals. Kids should have bad news over which they have no control handed to them only when the event is imminent: “Daddy and I are not getting along well right now, so he is going to stay with Uncle Pete and Aunt Sue for a while…” Announcing it too soon gives them time to suffer and brood and, if you call it off at the last minute, they will have not only suffered needlessly, they will now find the foundations of their world irrevocably damaged. Your children are not your friends, they are your charges, you have responsibilities towards them and authority over them: exercise them both.

4. Put down your child's other parent. If you never show affection and love to your partner/spouse in front of your child, the child does not develop a barometer for what love is or what it looks like. If you are always putting your spouse down and rejecting him/her, threatening divorce, you create a chronic state of anxiety for your child. If you are already divorced and you remain cold, distant, bitter, angry and blaming of your ex-spouse, you are sending the subtle message to your child that your ex-spouse is the cause of the divorce and you need to be the preferred parent. This is parent alienation.

There is a further aspect to this: children know they are part of you and a part of their other parent. Even if your partner is not the child’s biological parent, if your child has bonded with this person, you put the child on the horns of a dilemma when you start making noises that denigrate your (former) partner. The child may feel that if Daddy is an evil, cheating bum, then if he is half Daddy and half you, then he, too, must be, at least in part, evil and cheating and a bum; if the child has bonded with a step parent or long-term live-in love and now that person is an evil, cheating bum, the child now questions his ability to choose good people to bond with and may have difficulty with later attachment. You can alienate your child not only from his absent parent but from all emotional attachment later in life. And you can even alienate your child from you if you are not careful.

When I was a kid, my parents separated numerous times (although I don’t remember most of them). But I was afraid of my mother and I loved my father because he was the parent who, despite having limited home time, spent positive time with me. I was not afraid of him, I trusted him, I loved him. My NM was good at the boundaries thing, at least when it came to kids making incursions into her privacy, and all we knew about their separation was what she told us. And what she told us was uniformly bad…what an awful man our father was, how he moved out of the house and left her with no money, how he abandoned us and paid no child support, didn’t send anything for birthdays or Christmas, never called to see how we were.

I never believed a word of it and the more she talked against my father, the more I despised and distrusted her…pretty strong emotions for a 10 to 12 year old. When the truth finally came out, I learned I was right to have trusted my father because virtually everything she had said was a lie: either a twisted version of the truth (yes, he had gone off with another woman…but she wasn’t a cheap chippie who lured him away from his happy little family, she was someone he had met during a previous separation and dumped when Mother wanted him to come back home…and picked up with again when NM threw him out yet again) or an outright lie—he had sent cards, money and presents for birthdays and Christmas and NM had kept the money, destroyed the cards and rewrapped the gifts and said they were from her. In the end, all of her poisonous remarks against my father merely backfired: I hated that she said such awful things about someone I loved (even if they might possibly be true) and I hated her, once the truth came out and I discovered just how much she had lied to me.

My oldest boy did not know his father growing up…we moved across country when the boy was two. When he was 16, he flew to New England to stay with his grandmother for a few weeks and to reacquaint with his dad. When he asked me about his father I was very careful to not follow in my mother’s footsteps. When he asked, I merely said that we were much too young to marry and we were very incompatible, me being from a laid-back California lifestyle and him from a more patriarchal old school New England culture. We just did not get along and we eventually separated, then divorced. I did not tell him that his father drank overmuch, barely brought home enough money to support us (he drank half his pay check up at the corner bar before he even got it home), that he was as free with his fists as he was with his foul language, that he had tried to kidnap the boy when he was a baby, to be raised by his alcoholic mother, or that he had a violent, controlling streak. We lived 3000 miles away…he didn’t need to know this. When he went to New England to see his father, I had not seen the man in 14 years…who knew what kind of person he had become in the intervening years? He could be sober and own his own business, for all I knew…why taint the boy’s mind with expectations that could be 15 years out of date? Why tell him that his father had only agreed to our divorce if I would exempt him from paying child support? What good would it have served?

And so my son went off and had his holiday and he came home and didn’t say much for the first few days and then he took me aside and said “My dad wants me to move back and live with him…” I started to come up with reasons that wasn’t going to happen but before I could get further than saying “Well, maybe I can sent you out for the summer next year…” he interrupted with “You don’t understand…I don’t want to go…why didn’t you tell me he was such an asshole?”

My son felt nothing but contempt for his father, but none of it was my doing. He had seen with his own eyes that his father was controlling, irrational, and a brutal drunk…he had hit his latest wife at the dinner table in front of him and her four kids. I never had to say a word against the man…he showed his true colours when given a chance and while my son is aware of what kind of a man his father is, he knows that he is his own man and not like him at all.

Never undermine your child’s love for his or her other parent. Not only is it unfair to the child and reflects badly on you, it could backfire on you as it did on my mother. And if your ex truly is the ex from hell, raise your children with love and reason and they will most likely figure it out for themselves.

Tomorrow: Parts 5 through 8

What if she said she was sorry?

It is probably our favourite fantasy: something happens that awakens our narcissistic parents to the reality of their treatment of us, they realize how much they have hurt us, and they feel remorse…and then they apologise.

What if that really happened?

We are all at different stages of recovery from growing up with a narcissistic parent. Some of us are just realizing that our peculiar parent is a narcissist, some of us are well beyond that gut-wrenching discovery and are busy learning how to perceive and react to the world from a place other than that of victim. But some of us get stuck in a particular place, a place borne of denial and futile hope: we somehow believe that if our narcissistic parent would just “wake up” and see how they hurt us and then make amends, all would be right with our worlds.

I am sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings, but if that is where you are, it is time to pull up those stakes and get unstuck because it ain’t gonna happen. Ever. No matter how long you wait, no matter how paralyzed you are, no matter what you say or do, your narcissistic parent/spouse/sibling/boss…whoever the chief narcissist in your life is…will never, ever accept responsibility, never, ever, feel bad for hurting you, and never, ever, give you a sincere, heartfelt apology. It just ain’t gonna happen.

How can I be so sure? Because if that person does accept responsibility, if s/he feels remorse and then is motivated to issue a true apology and undertake sincere efforts to make amends, that person is not—cannot be—a narcissist. Narcissists have no empathy, no capacity for remorse, and no motivation to humble themselves for the benefit of anyone save themselves. If the person is capable of compassion and empathy for the pain s/he inflicted on you, then that person simply is not a narcissist.

Assuming the narcissist in your life truly is a narcissist, then, you have to start examining your own expectations and why you have become stuck in this fantasy that “If she would just say she was sorry, things would be OK.”

Would they? Maybe in the beginning, while the euphoria lasted but eventually, you’re going to come back to earth and the resentment and questions will begin. “What took you so long?” “If you acknowledge now what you did was wrong, why did you do it in the first place?” “How is it even possible to make amends for decades of emotional abuse?” “What is in this for you?”

Do you expect that apology to be a magic balm that will cure all of your pain, your anxieties, insecurities and maladaptive behaviours and beliefs? What are you going to do when your narcissist apologizes…really, sincerely, apologizes…and after the initial elation wears off, you still feel suspicious, wary, guarded, and hurt by all of the past transgressions? What if your phobias and anxieties don’t melt away, what if your fears and pain stay right where they are? Then what?

Hopefully, enlightenment—and ultimately the realization that you just can’t sit by passively and wait for someone else to make it better because, no matter what your narcissist does or doesn’t do, nobody can make it better but you.

I know this isn’t the message most of us want to hear. We know we have been victimized and we look to the perpetrator to make it right. But can it ever be made right? There are no “do-overs” in real life and neither you nor your narcissist can turn back the clock and do it again. The point you are at today, the dysfunction, the pain, the anxiety—all are a product of what has gone before today. It has shaped you and conditioned you, given you your values and beliefs. No amount of apologies or “doing better” from your abuser can take that back or change what is inside you today. Just as you cannot change another person, nobody else can change you…only you can do that.

Some of us embrace the idea that we have control over our recovery, but I think most of us go through a period of believing that if our abuser(s) would just step up to the plate and acknowledge wrong doing and say they are sorry, everything would magically be all right. And some of us get stuck there, believing that they can go no further until that acknowledgement and apology are forthcoming. But we control what we believe and believing that it is someone else’s job to fix our hurts is not only untrue, it is self-defeating. The longer we cling to the belief that an apology will magically fix us, the longer we insist that it is the therapist’s job to make things better, the longer we will be stuck and miserable in the legacy of the narcissistic parent.

We have to take responsibility. Not for the acts that hurt us, of course, but for our recovery. It may feel wrong…after all, you didn’t create the situation so why should you have to fix it?...but in real life (not our perfect fantasies), we often get stuck cleaning up other people’s messes. To refuse to do it is to accept the mess as part of your life…and if you are choosing to accept it, then you really don’t have any business complaining and feeling ill-used about it. You have made the choice to tolerate the situation and do nothing to change it, and the consequence is that at some point, people you know will start rolling their eyes when you start to talk about it. If you don’t like something in your life, it is your life and therefore your responsibility to change it.

Narcissists abuse and they don’t take responsibility for the hurts they inflict. It is what they do and, just as you must accept that dogs bark and cats meow, you must accept that narcissists hurt people with no sense of guilt, remorse, or responsibility. Even if your narcissist did have a sudden flash of insight and conscience, what can s/he do? Drop a plate on the floor and break it…now say “Oh, I am so sorry!” to the plate. Is it fixed? Of course not…and getting an apology—even a sincere one—from your narcissist won’t fix what is wrong with you, won’t assuage your pain or feeling of emptiness, anymore than your apology to that plate made it whole again.

What I am saying here is that you don’t really need an apology or even an acknowledgement of wrongdoing from your narcissist because receiving one improves nothing. What you really need is to get up and take action: look at your beliefs, challenge and change the ones that are holding you back; change a pattern of behaviour that victimizes you, like calling your mother every day and letting her rant at you; stop thinking you are helpless or that someone else is going to rescue you from your unhappiness—only you can do that, and you can only do that when you take action.

Don’t worry about doing it wrong: as long as you are not hurting yourself or anyone else, you aren’t doing it wrong. The exception to that, of course, is the narcissist and her flying monkeys and other minions. Some narcissists will feel hurt (or enraged) that you are changing the balance of the relationship, that you are no longer playing the role of doormat, whipping post, scapegoat that was assigned to you. They will use anything to push you back into your role and restore the balance of their lives, regardless of the cost to you. Their feelings, their comfort zone is paramount. But the truth is, your feelings are no less important and deserve no less respect than theirs. And if they won’t take care not to hurt you, if they disrespect you as if it is their right, then you are absolved of the admonition to not hurt them. Oh, don’t go to an extreme and bully or physically assault them—of course that is out of bounds. But what is not out of bounds is for you to refuse to allow yourself to be manipulated by their rage or cries of distress. You are under no obligation to subordinate your feelings and well-being to theirs, especially when they have been sacrificing your feelings and well-being in order to make themselves feel good.

Would you feel remorse for smacking a blood sucking insect as it feasted on your flesh? Then don’t feel bad about disengaging from the soul-sucking leech that is your narcissist and put your respect and concern where it belongs: on you. Only by focussing on your own well-being can you escape, and they know this: if they can keep you focussed on them, their feelings and how you are hurting them, you’ll never be able to focus on yourself long enough to escape them. And that is just how they like it.

Food for thought...

On my way back...

Just a brief update...

The bronchitis developed into a cold and between the two of them they triggered an asthma attack that has been going on for nearly a week. I have been on three kinds of cortisone (pills, inhaled powder, and nebulized mist) since Saturday, as well as the antibiotics and if it doesn't start clearing up soon, I am going to have to go to the hospital for chest xrays in case I'm incubating a case of pneumonia.

The worst part is, the meds make my hands shake uncontrollably so it is difficult to type. It is a special kind of torture to have things rolling around in your head that your hands cannot spit out onto the keyboard! I'm not too bad right now...it has only taken me 15 minutes to type this...but I haven't taken my mornings meds yet. Once I do, I won't be able to type for 8 to 12 hours due to the tremors.

So I am here, I'm not ignoring you (I read every email and comment that comes in), and I am SO wishing I could write back or post something new. As soon as my hand tremors resolve, I'll put up something new. In the meantime, I am becoming acquainted with daytime TV (can't even hold a book steady enough to read!) which, as far as I can tell, is total drek!

I hope this finds you all well and on the path to happiness.

Hugs to you all

Violet

I will be back...

Sorry I haven't been around much lately...the lawsuit with the Tenants from Hell heated back up and I've been stuck in the computer and filing cabinets dragging out all our evidence and responding to a litany of the most outrageous lies and speculation you have ever heard.

The stress has taken its toll and I have come down with a serious case of bronchitis...I can barely breathe, so I'm not sleeping well and, of course, that affects my ability to think and write.

I promise that when this is finally over (I sent the materials to my lawyer yesterday so now I just have to get over the bronchitis), I will be back.

Hugs to all of you!

Swan Waters

I still have 10 free memberships left for the Swan Waters forum for adult children of narcissistic parents (see my previous entry).

If any one is interested, please email me using the email form at the bottom of this page (MUST be via email) and I will be happy to send you a coupon code you can use when you sign up.

Cheers and Hugs to all of you

Violet