Hello all,
I am grateful to have found this forum, and I really appreciate that you all have been willing to share your personal experiences here. It makes me sad to hear about how folks have had to suffer at the hands of such wickedness. I take comfort in the fact that there is "strength in numbers," and reading all of your accounts reassures me that I am not nuts after all.
I can truly relate to those of you who find yourselves being harrassed by narcissistic relatives. After having cut-off all contact with my parents and most of my siblings for the past three years, they resurfaced last week, escalating tensions to a new level and doing yet more damage.
Without writing a book that would rival "War and Peace" in length, I'll sum-up my childhood by saying that I was a kid who "did all of the right things"(i.e., good grades, always followed the rules, never rebelled) but it was never enough. I was raised in a strict, controlling and volatile home. I always knew that something wasn't quite right in my family, but, being a kid and all, I couldn't quite articulate what it was or put my finger on it. Whenever I did try to address the abuse(sometimes physical, mostly emotional), my Nmother would always deflect it back on me, saying that I "set the tone for the relationships" that I had with other family members, and that she, my father and my siblings were only "reacting" to how I "treated them."
Over the years, my Nmother wielded guilt like a sword. If I didn't wear a smile on my face while meeting her unreasonable demands, I was subjected to a 45-minute diatribe on why I was an ungrateful disappointment-for-a-daughter(do you know how many times I had to hear, "sharper than the Serpent's tooth is an ungrateful child"?!). I could go on with many examples of abuse that occurred over the years, but I don't want to go off on too much of a tangent.
Fast forward twenty years. My brother marries, and my Nmother and Nsisters go ballistic because my brother has the nerve to follow the generally accepted course of evolution wherein when one marries, the spouse generally takes priority over parents and siblings. My Nmother gossips non-stop about how much she hates my brother's wife, thereby fanning the flames for my Nsisters, who take every opportunity at family gatherings to mistreat my brother's wife.
I have to insert here that over the years, my Nmother usually saved her nastiest treatment for me(her attitude was that "everything was great" in our family and "look at how close our family is" in spite of me, the source of every problem in the family), but her behavior toward my sister-in-law opened my brother's eyes to what was really happening.
About three years ago, I had finally had enough, as had my brother. I gave my Nmother a piece of my mind regarding the unfair treatment being leveled at my sister-in-law, and at about the same time, my brother told my parents that if the mistreatment did not stop, he was cutting himself off from the rest of the family.
My brother and I kept our distance from our parents and other siblings for about a year, after which point our mother called us to tell us that our grandfather had died. It seems that he had been diagnosed with terminal cancer two months before he died, yet my family deliberately kept this information from my brother and me.
At the funeral, my father marched my brother and me into to the mausoleum at the cemetery, pointed to his and my mother's headstone, and proceeded to tell us that "this could have been your mother or me that got buried today." He then told us that we were to "either find a way to make peace" with our mother, or he wanted us to "go away." My brother and I chose the latter.
Fast forward two years, which brings us to what happened last week. After many years of suffering from Alzheimer's disease(the last six months gut-wrenchingly so), my husband's mom passed away. My mother-in-law was a wonderful, generous woman who was loved by so many people, and she was the best mother-in-law a married woman could ever hope for. My brother and his wife attended the wake and arrived at the funeral home the following morning for the funeral.
When the funeral procession entered the church, we discovered that my parents and other siblings had come, unannounced(and most definitely uninvited). At this point I must insert that NONE of them ever knew(or had even MET) my husband's mom or the rest of his family, despite the numerous invitations my in-laws had extended to them over the years. They never cared to know them. I can only assume that it was because it "posed a threat" to my mother's warped idea of "preserving" the "original" family unit.
At any rate, after the church service, the funeral procession exited the church and everyone went to their cars to continue the procession to the cemetery. My brother and his wife, also part of the procession, got into their car and waited to leave the church with everyone else. This is when it happened.
My Nmother and Nsiblings ambushed their car(in front of everyone), hijacking the procession in progress, and they began screaming at my brother and sister-in-law, all at once---a verbal clusterf**k, if you will. My Nmother leaned into the car window, grabbed my brother's arm and shrieked, "You're MY SON, and I don't even know you any more! What did we ever do to you?! Do you know how embarrassed your father is at the fact that his family knows about the problems in OUR family?!" My Nsister screamed, "You know, that could have been Mom or Dad in there(being buried) today!" It deteriorated from there, with my mother and sister accusing my brother's wife of "stealing" their son/brother away from his family, telling my sister-in-law that she had my brother "shackled." And then my other Nsister shrieked, "why don't you come and see your nephew some time, he's almost one now!"(she had had a baby, but the news was kept from us). My brother and his wife sped out of the church parking lot, leaving my family still standing there screaming.
The next night my brother arrived home from work to find boxes of all of the things he had given to one of my Nsisters over the years, accompanied by a note that excoriated him and his wife for their "disrespectful treatment" of my mother and siblings at the church(I can't begin to tell you how totally skewed that is--they crash the funeral of some poor person they never knew, they create a huge scene, then my Nsister has the gall to chastise my brother for his treatment of her?). Attached to the letter were pictures of my other Nsister's baby, along with a parting shot telling my brother that maybe someday if he "cleans up his act," he can have a relationship with his "REAL" nephew(a cheap shot taken at my sister-in-law---my brother and his wife have a baby nephew on her side of the family).
I apologize for the length of my reply, but I hope that my story might help someone else suffering at the hands of an Nfamily. I never knew how completely out-of-control my family was until this latest episode. My brother and I are at the point where we're wondering if we will have to get a restraining order of some sort. Have any of you had situations escalate to such a degree? I would be very grateful for any insight or suggestions. In the meantime, thank you for letting me vent my spleen.
Oh, BTW, years ago when my Nmother applied for her first job, it was for a psychiatrist's office, and after passing her typing test, her future employer asked her to spell a word---can you guess what it was?(if you guessed "narcissist," you were correct!) Suffice to say, she spelled it correctly.
