Greetings. For my intro, below is pretty much what I wrote to Dr. Grossman. Looking forward to being here. I'll post more details about Mom later.
I'm one of several posters from Dr. Karyl McBride's board on
Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers who are migrating over to this board.
I was raised by a mother who I have now identified as having NPD, so my
primary interest is unravelling my relationship with my mother. I have an
older brother who was the golden child, and I of course was the scapegoat.
My parents divorced when I was 5. My father is also "off"--verbally
abusive, passive-aggressive and anti-social, but he does show a bit of
interest in me and who I am.
I've known since I was very young that my mother was not like other
people's mothers but I still blamed myself most of the time. My journey
has been a long one, starting in about my early 20s when I think for the
first time stopped blaming myself for my failures and realized that my
parents were more or less monsters (of course it's not that black and
white, but that's where I was at at the time). I've battled depression on
and off for years--never clinically diagnosed, but once characterized as
"chronic low-level depression". My brother, however, was hospitalized more
than once for depression, including after one incident where he came after
me with a knife. We are close now despite our troubles growing up, and
consider this something of a miracle, and definitely a blessing. He gets
the whole Golden Child/Scapegoat dynamic and defends me when Mom is being
unfair.
My mother is a compulsive hoarder as well. We grew up in a house where we
were not allowed to have people over, and eventually we had no hot tap
water or laundry facilities. Despite numerous attempts at intervention
(one effort on my part was characterized by her as, "Trying to get me
thrown out of my house"), almost two months ago her house was condemned by
the city. This was an event my brother and I had been anticipating for
some time and it brought out the best in my brother and I and the worst in
my Mom.
I thought that hoarding was her primary issue, though I'd read plenty of
self-help books and done tons of therapy in order to get over her toxic
parenting. I joined a Yahoo group for Children of Hoarders and discovered
many people, mostly women, whose mothers not only were hoarders, but also
had the same character traits as my mother. Some of the traits we noticed
were "monologuing", complete disinterest in our lives, blaming the
children for the mess growing up, having an endless supply of excuses, a
tendency to believe "Wonderful Strangers" over members of their own
family, etc., etc. As you can imagine, the experience with that group has
been very validating.
With this most recent family crisis, I don't know what finally clicked,
but I realized that Mom's hoarding was the least of our worries, it was
the narcissistic personality traits that were really causing my problems
with her. And of course during the crisis her negative behaviors came out
in full force. While working behind the scenes to get help for Mom
(sending a letter and pictures of the house to her Dr., talking to the
city, trying to hire a professional disaster remediation company) I was
also exploring narcissism online. I knew I needed to steer clear of Sam
Vaknin's writings, and eventually I stumbled across Dr. McBride's website,
and read her book, as well as "Why is it Always About You?" So I want to
learn all that I can about recovering from my narcissistic parent(s).
In the past few years I have made some big strides in my healing journey.
One piece of the puzzle was being diagnosed with AD/HD--Inattentive Type
at age 40 (I'm 42 now). This helped me begin to understand why, despite being
"gifted", I still feel like a screw-up (took 18
years to get my bachelor's degree, underemployed, bad with personal
finances, etc.). My Mom always said there was something wrong with me. It
turns out that there was! It came as something of a relief.
I'm still in "underachiever mode", can't seem to find a satisfying
romantic relationship, and time and time again seem to be befriended by
people who see me as a "project" who also turn out to have narcissistic
traits. I'm noticing a lot of patterns, like those of
dependence/co-dependence, my doing things a certain way because that's
what I needed to do to survive growing up, a "what's the use?" mentality,
and other related things that I know I need to change if I'm going to
really be happy.
So I'm ready to take my healing one step further. I've read some of the
essays on this site and I like what it has to say. Fully recognizing
that my Mom has no idea who I am and doesn't care to know, though painful,
is going to help me move on to the next step, which for me is learning to
deal with my triggers and choosing healthier people to relate to. Of
course my real goal is to once and for all be who I really am. I feel
invisible and voiceless so much of the time, I dread confrontation and
"getting in trouble" and the occasional progress I make feeling confident
and empowered often turns back into feeling stuck.
After a couple false starts, I'm seeing a lovely therapist who finally
figured out the correct AD/HD meds for my particular brain, and now she is
helping me with my family issues. But I only see her once every couple of
weeks. I've always enjoyed online support boards, especially for the
validation of my experiences. Even among the recovery community and in our
culture in general, there is a lot of emphasis on forgiveness and "moving
on", that I think just reinforce our guilt about our anger at and
disappointment in our parents. People don't really get how insidious NPD
is unless they have experienced it themselves, so they tend to minimize my
experiences. That's why finding a supportive online group is important to
me.
Thanks for listening!
