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Other causes of voicelessnes?

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Raggedy Ann:
Hi all,

I found this web site and message board a couple of days ago.  Wow!  Voicelessness so well describes how I feel during my darkest moments, the "emotional storms" that have plagued me with increasing frequency the last few years.  It's taken me a lot of years to recognize that's how I feel, but in therapy recently I was able to describe that deep down I feel that I don't matter, and I even found that phraseology in a thread here somewhere.

I know that the source of this is my mother, however, reading all of the descriptions, as well as the formal description of NPD, she definitely was not an N.  Or at least not a typical one.   Are there atypical Ns?   Or are there other recognized avenues by which a person ends up feeling voiceless?  As many here have expressed, it is comforting to know that there are others who understand the pain (even as I am sorry for the experiences that cause them to understand), but I have yet to know of anyone else who was raised in a way at all similar to mine.  Perhaps it doesn't matter, how we get here, but I'm sure tired of feeling so odd!  Let me try to explain.

In looking at the psychological lingo, the best I can come up with is that my mom had severe Generalized Anxiety Disorder, with some Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and Hypochondria thrown in.  (This is just my interpretation, not a formal diagnosis.) These things led to one common theme I see over and over in so many of your posts about your Ns - everything was always about her; her fears, and what *she* needed to soothe them.  The good part about this is that unlike so many of your Ns, she wasn't necessarily trying to use me to build up her ego,and thus she really had no need to tear me down.  I got plenty of compliments and nuturing as to my talents and abilities, and I really don't think these were to glorify her in any way.  The bad part about it is that she did end up inflicting just as much voicelessness upon me, which led to the same sense of emotional void, self-esteem issues, lack of emotional maturity, etc. etc.  And, what she did was even that much harder to see and recognize because it was always couched in terms of how much she loved me.  There was no (or at least rarely) clearly abusive (either physically or verbally) behavior to sink one's teeth into to say "this is just not right".  No, her manipulations were so far under the covers, so to speak, that for years  I had no idea I was being manipulated.  And when I did, there was always the specter of my poor, poor, terrified mother who *loved* me so much that she couldn't bear the thought of anything happening to me, and if she wasn't with me she was always afraid I would be in a car accident, or kidnapped, or any other nameless danger.  She almost never told me that I was bad, unworthy, worthless, or any of those other terrible things many of you have talked about.  No, she got me to tell my*self* that by being so pitiful.

My mother's list of fears were long, and esp included high anxiety if I was out of her sight.  As you can imagine, this was fine when I was very small, and as far as I can tell and have heard she was a perfectly fine, loving, attentive mother when I was an infant.  The problems started and escalated year after year, however, as I had a growing need for normal development and independence, developent of self and separation of identity.  The older I got, the greater the dischord between my developmental needs and how she wanted me to be.  Oh, she could tell you that she was "over-protective" of me, but that didn't change her demands, and I don't think she ever really accepted how dysfunctional it was.  

What's most remarkable,looking back on it now, is just how little I did rebel.  Oh, I pushed and whined and cried about a few things, but most of the time I didn't even attempt to go beyond the unspoken bounds.   I was a good girl and didn't even try.  For example, I just accepted that I must come home straight after school, and not expect to spend any appreciable time at friends' houses.  I didn't have many friends anyway, since I was so undersocialized and not given many opportunities to make them.  How do you make friends when you spend most of your out of school time with your mother?  I do realize now that she also did subversive things to discourage my friendships.  Like the time a new girl joined our 5th grade and I liked her.  When I found out she lived just a few houses away, I was uncharacteristically bold one day when the new girl invited me to her house after school.  I got home, told our housekeeper where I would be (don't think from this we were rich - but my mom was so exhausted most of the time from her fears that she thought housework was a major, major imposition and was thus willing to pay someone else to do it) and went off.  An hour or so later you could hear my mother's hysterical calls for me after she got home from work and ran up the street.  She acted like I had been missing for hours and there was reason to think I'd been kidnapped or something.  I kept protesting that I had told the housekeeper where I was, but she still acted hysterically frightened and made me come home right then.  My new (and short lived) friend looked at her with horror and I never got another invite.

There's multitudes of stories in the same vein that I could tell, but I think you get the point.  One good incident like that and it would be months if not years before I'd dare do anything to scare her so again.  But in the meantime, my frustrations were growing,and I realize now that it was being pounded into me at a subsconsious level that my needs didn't matter.  That her anxieties must be soothed at all costs.   And that I was a terrible daughter if I didn't stay by her side, hold her hand, tell her she was OK, that she wasn't about to pass out, that the car driving by at night wasn't deliberately shining it's lights in our window, that the leftovers smell just fine and aren't spoiled, and on and on and on.

So by now you are probably wondering if and how I ever broke away.  The answer is that yes I did, but at a great cost to me emotionally.  I understood that at my deepest level even at the time, but without really understanding why it cost me so much.    Basically my mother was so unable to loosen the ties to give me even a modicum of adult independence, that I built up enough anger to allow me to physically go.  When I finished college I didn't even interview for a job in the same town as her, and I took a job 2 1/2 hours away.  Given her fears about driving on expressways, and her generation's inhibition to make lengthy "long distance" phone calls too often, this was enough distance to give me some freedom.  She whined and cried about it, and it was only then, when I dared to break the rules that I saw hints of the types of behavior that so many of you here post about.   But only hints.  Mostly it was poor pitiful me guilt stuff.  Only a couple of times was it openly hostile.  But it didn't take much to throw me into a tizzy.

See, despite having made a physical break, it has taken me 2 years of therapy to realize that

a) I never truly emotionally separated from her, and have been carrying  around a huge burden of guilt and shame for daring to leave my poor mother who *loved* me sooooooo much.

b) I am carrying around inside of my psyche an extremely wounded little girl who thinks she doesn't matter, and who I myself have shunned and hated because she has needs that conflicted with my mother's and my mother's must be attended to always.

I am now in the process of trying to get in touch with that wounded little girl.  Just recently I had a breakthrough in that for the first time I have actually been able to empathize with her and her situation.  I disliked her so much before that I couldn't even do that.  Now the challenge is to actually connect with her, learn to like her (which means liking myself!), and give her a voice.

In the meantime my mom died unexpectedly this past February.  That's a whole story in itself, in terms of what happened surrounding those events and another aspect to our homelife that added to the voicelessness, but it's getting late and this post is already long enough.  If anyone wants to hear more, I'll add to it.  But for now let me say that despite what you might think, the death of the person who caused your voicelessness does not necessarily resolve it.  There was a time when I thought it would.  That I would be spared having to either find a way to deal with her, or cut her off from me totally as some of you have so bravely done or are trying to do.  In fact, there was a time when I was in so much pain that I told my therapist that I wished she were dead.  I hope that doesn't sound terrible and cruel to you all, but I think that you people here are the only ones who could understand such an emotion.  What I have discovered since my mother's death is that no, I did not really want her to die.  And that it really hasn't solved anything.  I still have the emotional wounds, and I still have to do the work to try and resolve them.  And now I will never have the chance to make any sort of peace with her, except in my own mind.  I am now seeing that I might have been able to.  Might have been able to with enough separate emotional healing and setting of healthy boundaries, instead of the anger and defensiveness that I had been using prior to get the separation I so desparately needed.

But, her death is only one of the many things about her that I cannot control.  As the wise ones of you here say, I can only control my reaction to it, and everything else.  

Oh, one last little anecdote to explain my chosen username.  My mom always loved dolls, and after I left home after college she started "collecting" them.  I put that in quotes because she had no interest in them as collectors items, their value, what artisit creatd them or anything like that.  It became an obsession, and as her companion of 30 years sadly said to me the week of her funeral, as I sat in her house where you can barely find a place to sit among the hundreds of dolls, every one of those dolls was me, or her sad attempt to replace me, who was her living doll.  She was always so disappointed when I was small that I didn't like dolls, because she'd have loved to shower me with them.  As it was, there was one doll, a Raggedy Ann, that I did always like, and when she started her "collection" she bought a number of them.  "Raggedy" describes my emotions so well on many days, and so here I am,

Raggedy Ann

Anastasia:
Just read your post and have a busy day...but had to comment that I was just struck by how many of the same symptoms my mother had as yours.  My God! My mother collects dolls and toys now too.  I was shocked to find when I returned home after a little 21 year hiatus that she had this huge toy collection.  She says it is for her spoiled but cute poodle...but I wondered because I remember her buying alot of stuffed toys for my son when he was an infant.
Could the root of this narcissism just be IMMATURITY?????
My mother was less hysterical than yours (I thank God for his small favors) but she did try and control all my friendships even up thru my marriage at 32.  She wasn't so extreme as yours (poor Raggedy!), but did "monitor" my friendships--although, I admit, I did seem to pick the "right" friends.  
It was boyfriends that my mother had screaming fits over since her pretentiousness and my rebellions drew me to boys just slightly over the line towards roughness...haha!
You have had alot put on your plate with a mother like that.  How have you been working on this?
I noted you left.  I did, too.  I have never lived in my hometown since I left home at 19.  
Believe it or not, the parents were so hard on me and so horrid that when I was in a girl's Catholic college (my stepfather chose it as it was a local school but I had to pay for it...does that tell you how overbearing they were?) the Nuns knew something was wrong at home.  They suggested my parents get an appt. with a local Shrink who saw both them and me.  Know what her suggestion to me was?  She said my mother was waaaay more immature than I was and to get the hell away from them as soon as I could!  I swear, that validated the fact (when I was a teen) that there WAS something wrong seriously with THEM and not me.  You begin to wonder if it's only you sometimes.  I thank that therapist until today!

Nancy Drew:
:roll:   I was reading up on Raggedy Ann's loss of her mother, which did not end that connection...and I was reminded of something that I experience with my mother...and wonder if others feel this too:  I feel that she not only spoils (for instance) a holiday for me..She spoils my time BEFORE the approaching holiday.without even a phone call to me.  It's as though I "sense" the call coming...and begin to feel the stress even BEFORE.  I will wake up, start to clean my house, or in other ways prepare for a holiday, shp or start food prep., etc..and during those preparations, I am already being overburdened by her antagonism, or hints or remarks, which she hasn't even made yet.  (But of course, they do come within hours, or so)  She is already punishing me before she mades the phone call or comes over.  I am being stressed out in anticipation of putting up with her for the day.   I'm sure others feel this also..But sometimes I feel like this is a way that N parents reach out with their tentacles..I know that sounds awful..and I don't want to give anyone that kind of power over me....but I can't deny it.

KateW:
Nancy,

I can really identify with the holidays being ruined before you even talk to your mom. It's like an impending sense of doom. You feel that nothing you do is ever going to satisfy her. With my mom, the length of time is visited is never long enough, etc. I'm so tense when I'm around her I often have a splitting headache by the time she leaves. Maybe it would help to not see her on the holiday? That's what I did this year. It's hard, but you might find you REALLY enjoy your holiday without her. It's what's best for you, not her. I have to tell you, my husband and I had the best
Thanksgiving ever, with just the two of us! It was great.  :D

tayana:
I know what you mean about the holidays being spoiled before they ever arrive.  About three weeks before, I start to get sick knowing a major drama is about to unfold.  And I find myself walking around on eggshells around my mother, waiting for her to explode or else nit-pick about everything.

I read Ragedy Ann's post, and see a lot of my mom in that.  My mother was terribly over-protective when I was younger.  I wasn't allowed to go to friends houses or have friends over.  She went into a panic once when I went to the neighbors house (their house joined ours) without permission.  Most of the time, she refused to let me have any sort of independence or identity.  I had to wear clothes she approved of, not necessarily things I liked, etc.  And like Ragedy Ann said, I'm surprised at how little I rebelled.  I didn't really rebel until I went to college and wasn't around my mother as much.  I found little ways to rebel, things that my mother didn't consider rebellion, like listening to opera and classical music, instead of pop or country.  Those were the only things I really had control over.

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