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Meh:
You know I don't really identify with the concept of trying to please my mother and "being good enough". I do however have some sort of longing to have real conversations with a family member which wont happen. My mother generally ignores me but insists on stringing me along, she has to keep in touch. Maybe I should write down a fake script for whenever I communicate with her. To remind myself how fake and topical we are. Instead of thinking in any real way maybe I should literally just be like an actress. Maybe it's like a version of no-contact. Just a game of 100% fake contact. It sounds crazy. Maybe I need a constant reminder that it is more or less only a game and nothing more. A script is sort of a non-reaction? Maybe I should force myself to read it from paper each and every single time. She would never even notice. Instead of thinking or process any content or convo, it would just be a canned statement. I guess the reason why it seems helpful to me on some level because it's a non reactive not getting involved, not elaborating, not really responding to content. It's intentional.

We really do lose out with Narcissists, either unknowingly participating in their games or knowingly playing their games.

I do project something on to her. I project "she is aware, she is a smart person, she has to know what is going on, maybe she cares". I just shouldn't give a flip. I think maybe it would be good for me to have a self mantra. Sort of like people who are already prepared for solicitors at the door.

A preface to every interaction with her. tell myself "This is bogus" and then read my script to her which is really "I'm okay" "Yes I'm feeling better" "No I didn't notice the advertisement at the grocery store". "Have a good day".

The horrible thing is that I think I have always been trying to have a real conversation with her. I don't think I ever fully quit.

On some level I think I am also been envious that she has conversations with other people, her neighbors, her sister. Perhaps they are all tinted with Narcissism.

I don't think my mother has ever been jealous of me like some daughters experience. She definitely has a real problem with me.

My mother also didn't treat my brother better than me, she ignored both of us. She does seem to treat her siblings better than she treated my brother and I. She has gone out of her way to help her sister and her sister's daughter. Which was hard to understand. Her sister, my aunt was also very quick to say that me and my brother were "screwed up". Somehow it's almost like we got blamed somehow for being "screwed up". It doesn't bother me as much as it used to, I'm older. All I really can do is permanently discard them. There is nothing else to do with them. I can see how it was a mutually acceptable understanding between my aunt and my mother to include my aunt's daughter but not me. My aunt is one of those people who is very openly judgemental about anyone she sees as beneath her and it very much comes down to wealth, it works for my aunt to look down on me and that also works for my mother as well. It works for them. My mother is very aware of what is happening in the life of my aunt's daughter. The dynamic does seem clear from a Narcissistic imbalance. One time my mother was telling me how she had to help with a birthday party for her niece. I felt shocked thinking wow that is unlike my mother. In reality other people get a different person with her. She is not the same person to me as she is to them. I don't have to explain that to any relative at any point. I feel like someday my aunt is going to tell me how I am so wrong about my mother. How I have to help her out etc. In my mind that is the scene that plays out. My aunt telling me I am fucked up and selfish for not giving some sort of time and energy to my mother. Maybe it won't play out that way. Who knows, who cares. It's just I need the scene to get out of my head I guess.

Something has vaguely dragged on for years even with ongoing attrition.

Best fake scripts you use on Nars anybody? 

Meh:
I can see how my mother's plight may have been her trying to be some "good girl" and never being good enough. She clearly had some messed up relation to her own mother (my grandmother of course). Not something she has defined clearly, I only know my grandmother was a drinking party type. Some articles etc. seem to say Nars are deserving of our sympathy. Perhaps they are deserving of paid sympathy if they go sit in a therapist's office for sympathy. I don't think I should have much sympathy or anything for her as it seems like just another catch. Page 70 & 71 in this book have a little visual diagram of hierarchy. Its helpful somehow to see it.

Maybe daughters of Nars are maladaptive and maybe there are individuation issues but in some ways aren't we also more of an individual on some level because we grow up alone more or less. One wonders.

I am wondering what else I need to do for myself, maybe be more proactive. Maybe I am self-sabotaging. I often do tell myself on a daily basis, I feel old, I look old, I am aging, it's too late. I mean to be frank there is truth to it. We run out of time in life. At the same time it's probably not the most productive Self-Talk. I mean what am I really saying to myself. It's kind of a fear of running out of time to figure things out, make things better or something. I don't know. Regret or losses. Accepting losses. At a certain point one can tell oneself "there is still time there is still time, to get sorted out". Then at some point in time it just hits wow, look at the past decade and how much I didn't sort out. I mean life sweeps us up carries us on, we just keep living. There have been times when I was just burnt out on thinking about Narcissism.

Okay I am writing a lot here. I'm just trying to work through this book. I decided to read it so I'm doing it.

pg 72--" as she makes natural, resonable demands on her mother, who is unable to meet them, the mother becomes resentful and threatened, and projects her inadequacies onto the daughter...."   

I've always felt that any demand was too much, one really learns to be undemanding I think. I'm not really sure that my mother projected her inadequacies onto me.

I can see why she ignores me there isn't anything in it for her. I'm an inconvenient aftermath of a marriage/divorce between two emotionally needy N's. She has gone out of her way to point out that her current marriage is the happiest time of her entire life. Really the only reason she has insisted on keeping in touch with me was probably she was reporting her "good daughter" activities to her mother and spouse (my grandmother). Who is now dead.

So maybe there will be less contact, maybe it will just trail off. And zero effort on my part at all.

Where there is no real relationship. OR a messed up one- however one wants to define interactions with N's. Maybe it's not about how we relate to the N person. Maybe it's really about how we RELATE to the relationship. It sounds like mumbo jumbo psychobabble. But really the N relationship is already set. They dynamic is just there it is what it is. It's probably more conflict than it's worth to go no contact etc. So maybe it is a form of taking a step back and relating to the relationship. Knowing that it's fake, seeing it as such, always keeping that in mind. Why give it any more significance than waving at the mailman (which people don't do anymore wave at mailmen) but anyhow.

In these self help books there is this phrasing of how Ns are not "able", "capable" of supporting their daughters, of being good role models etc., being loving parents.... It's been hard for me to fully believe this. Some part of me just thinks, it's not that they can't it's more that they don't want to. I've always thought it seemed like there was more choice involved than a full on brain defect against love. Isn't that what these books are basically saying but with different words. "You have a brain defect and you can't love your children" sounds like a pretty serious diagnosis. Or is it really that they can't love anybody. Or is it selective. Is maternal Narcissism really a case of a mother can not love her daughter because of this whole thing about the mother sees the daughter as an extension of herself... I don't fully get this. It sounds esoteric. What if N's don't have brain defects what if they really are just crap people and nobody wants to accept that it's possible to just be crap.

I mean I definitely think too much is put onto the shoulders of mothers. I do. I'm not a parent I don't know how hard it is or isn't. Defintely my FOO left me with an "emotional legacy" that was very confusing for me in my 20's. Who knows what it did to me in my 30's. Here I am writing and writing and wondering in my 40's am I still needing to overcome something. If so why the heck haven't I figured it out by now.

There are so many factors that feed into a person's life. Def a lot of time spent on wondering, what is wrong with me, what is wrong with them, who am I, who the hell are they, where am I going, how did I end up here.

I don't like self help it seems like just another product. I guess at some point I feel like I maxed out on it. I don't even want to read this book but I'm going to. Maybe I'm lazy.

Really DON'T want to think about it anymore. Over analyzing. OCDing. Reading articles, expert opinions. Wouldn't it be nice to just be OKAY. To just get on with it. No hangups. Maybe I'm tired and bored of self reflection then again maybe I am just lazy lazy lazy.

I'm going to be honest self reflection does make me feel like I am thinking in some insane OCD sort of way.

okay I am angry and tired and I should probably just sleep now, N families really do leave some sort of tangled up mess, but am I REALLY still affected by it, maybe I just have short comings all my own that have NOTHING to do with my FOO, how would I know the difference, regardless at this point no matter where or how it came to be any short coming I have is 100% mine now  gee

I just feel like I have been slogging along like a zombie mainly at work and in life maybe. Maybe my mental acuity has naturally declined, maybe I'm bored, maybe I have way more deep seated emotional problems that are impacting me, it really just feels like the culmination of doing nothing about it?  I don't know. 

Analyzing is work it gets to a point where whatever was interesting at first about it wears off and then it's just exhausting. And who isn't analyzing, normal people the ones just living and enjoying their lives. And the N's they are not thinking too hard about ANY of this because they don't care and they got what they wanted. Is anybody else in my neighborhood reflecting on what their mother did or did not do many years ago... probably not. maybe I don't know

Hopalong:
I love hearing your response to this book, G.
You are connecting with something, interrograting it, finding yourself in parts of it, finding your mother or relationship description in parts of it.

This very process, even though it may feel like all questions with no firm answers yet, is what can change your life, I believe.

Just in broad strokes, I heard:
grief (how deeply you've yearned for a meaningful connection with her)
coping ("gray rock" contact, letting go of hope reality will be otherwise)
interrogating (she's withholding just from me? is Nism fixed? why can't it be more clear?)
creativity
frustration (OCDing on book, hard to stop)

I can relate to ALL of it. I was like a "sock monkey" when young. Eventually I learned that affection and appreciation, those beautiful motherly things I yearned for, were going to have to come from other sources for me. And that I learned I would first have to practice being affectionate and appreciative toward myself. When I genuinely learned to like myself (and release the habit of low self-esteem that comes from a mother who is organically incapable of connecting with a child's need for the sort of love that inspires and comforts the child, gives him/her confidence) -- even though I too was a loner for a long time, seeking out isolated jobs, places to live....eventually the practice of loving-kindness toward myself made it easy and fun (as opposed to hard and terrifying) to risk connecting with others.

Good relationships, bad relationships, meh relationships. I had a lot. And they gradually added up to knowing how.

Community stuff helped me enormously. For me, the UU church filled the gap. It does (or wherever) begin to feel like family, when you go sit there week after week after week. You do become part of a community that can be there for you.And you can join in on being there for someone else from time to time so you feel good about the balance.

Whatever "formula" we each figure out, as individuals, that makes our lives work better and our hearts hurt less, is the winning one.

I love that you're in your "self lab", G....creating, listening, asking yourself things. If books stimulate that, why not? When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron was a huge eye-opener for me....

Hugs
Hops

Meh:
There is always a lot of questions and conflicting info it seems. In this book I'm to the section "How Narcissistic Mothering Affects your Entire Life". Just absorbing this title requires some sort of question because there is also this thing of who takes responsibility for what. I guess a person can decide to take responsibility but also know that we do have inherited problems I guess that we ourselves didn't create but have to cope with. Ns often say or insinuate we are at fault. You know how there is all so the messaging that "we are responsible for our own lives nobody else is". I guess affecting and responsibility are two different things. I just feel like I'm not even allowed to acknowledge that maybe N Mothering does effect my entire life.

Probably I'm not an over-acheiver. I sort of wish I was it's seems like the only positive mess up that comes out of N parenting.

~~~ pg 91  "it is time to take an inventory of whether or not your activities fit your own value system (rather than your mother's or your internalized critic"  ........  K. McBridde  from the book

I mean how many people sit down and ask themselves what their value system is ever?  So much activity is auto pilot or survival. Combo zombie auto survival pilot.

Not valued, not acknowledged never celebrated this is what my N did. I can't say that she critizied me like this book points out. My issue isn't so much *not being good enough* .. The phrase that I would say strikes a chord with me instead is  *not being important to anybody*. Yes that is definitely a thing for me. Maybe it impacts how I interact with people. idk

On some level what N's did to us, we continue to do to ourself according to this book. I guess which makes sense.

I'm definitely more of a "Whats the Use?" so called self-sabotaging daughter type. I guess. I did take anger out on myself though I'm not sure it seems 100% self sabotage. Yeah I don't think I fit the book personality categories clearly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xvgLh-dc3E

lots of the anecdotes from women who are self-sabotaging or under achieving say they were diagnosed with depression at some point & that they just didn't DO the things they wanted to do.

Meh:
There are loads of people who are not successful in life. I mean they make the world go round by working every job nobody else wants to do. It's really hard to pinpoint something like this and say Oh yeah this is definitely a psychological/emotional N family legacy.

How highly stressed out we must all be at times. It's like the general rule is to be anxious or depressed in general as a baseline and then ADD some other run of the mill daily stress ON TOP.

I think I was stressed out as a kid. To think for some kids the main stress they have is when their parents tell them it's bedtime. It's really unfair. Or a makes one sad knowing things might have been different.

The first half of the book I'm reading it's interesting, validating, reminder of things I've read before more or less. The actual self-help part of the book in my mind is going to be rather barfy. I'm just annoyed by it because I think people and problems are too complicated for someone to write some chapters about how to change. I really think a lot of people don't change and for good reasons. Also the self-help formats. There is almost a self help book for everything which is kinda weird in itself.

When the author writes: but there is Hope!  I think gee, that sounds phony and formulaic. Rolls eyes. But I'm going to read it.

If I was going to write a self-help book I would disguise it as a non-self help book. Informational. Because selling hope is like selling snake oil, selling a political idea.

I reject the idea that it's a solvable problem in some cases, def not simple to solve in any case. You really don't get things back that you have lost a lot of times.

Yah this is going to be BS, a paper collage is coming up. now I rememeber why I got burnt out on self help books
 

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