First, I travel for work so starting tomorrow will be offline for a week.
Second, I'm really interested in GS' peach ice cream story. The hostility and punitiveness is classic N, as is the deniability. You don't get your children removed from your custody for making them have a particular flavor of ice cream. He wasn't making your brother overeat, or eat non-food. You may have done the same thing to yourself at times - "I don't really like this cheese, but I'll finish it then I won't get it again." What makes it abusive is the intent. He wanted to humiliate your brother. He wanted to make all of you afraid that you also would be the victims of the same kind of humiliation. He enforced conformity to his every expectation, no matter how slight. He also poisoned an insignificant sweet food for all of you, so peach ice cream must have tasted like ash to you ever after.
What I wonder about, though, are the pronouncements, such as "The only good peach ice cream is home made". My mother AND father both had their quirks with respect to such things and I wonder if that's a symptom of narcissism - the need to obsess about trivia, or is this something normal people do too? Maybe this isn't the right forum to ask, but if a lot of people have experienced this kind of rule-making and judgment over trivia, it would suggest that it is narcissistic.
Stormchild:
Your reason for not seeing your Nmom reminds me of one of my Nmom's final acts of hostility. It was a perfect example of attention-getting through a manufactured health crisis, which is a favorite trick of the Nparent. It allows her to elicit painful feelings from the child and forces the child into the position of servant. I will tell this story just as a validation for those of you who divorced your Nparent, a choice that I believe is probably the only healthy one for the great majority of children of Ns.
My mother has Meniere's disease, which causes spells of severe dizziness. Her Meniere's worsens when she travels, but she denies that and travels anyway. She gets to go on a trip, and when she comes back sick, she gets to bid us all to dance attendance on her. There's no down side to it.
I was staying with her while I worked at a site one hour's drive from her house. It was foolish of me, but I had not allowed her to see me in five years, and she had had therapy and seemed to be behaving better. So I thought I would have some time with her and save the company money. My usual routine was to leave work at 5, drive to the gym, work out for an hour, then drive 10 minutes back to her house and make dinner.
Wednesday night, about 15 minutes into my workout, I hear myself paged at the gym. I go out to my car and get my cell phone, which had been off. I found two messages from my mother, saying "I'm having an attack. I need you to come home!" I was immediately angry. I knew I was being manipulated, but what should I do? If there had seriously been an emergency, and I had continued my workout when I heard the page, I would have felt horribly selfish and guilty. The correct action at that point would have been to call her back and ask her if she could manage the attack on her own, but I knew that her response would be accusations of selfishness and cold-heartedness, and insistence that she was so afraid, and pathetic and all alone, and how could I do this to her (unspoken: when she was giving me a place to stay). In addition, my question would have been twisted and used to malign me to other people later. I also knew if I just rode out my sense of guilt that there would be some, worse punishment later. At that point I had also already left the gym, and would have to pay again to go back in. I was in a no-win situation. So I went home. As I walked in the back gate, my phone rang again. It was her again, anxiously wondering if I had gotten her message. She said she had had me paged twice at the gym, and was worried because she hadn't heard anything from me. I went into the house to find her standing, trembling and unstable, at the bathroom vanity. I asked her what she needed and she said she needed water for her medicine. I got that and gave it to her and she took her pill. I turned down her bed, got her a bottle of water in case she got thirsty, and she went to bed and was in bed until the next morning.
She needed me to come home just to get her water? She has managed these attacks before. Still, when something like that happens, you're scared and you want support. Pretty heartless of me to complain, even though my exercise is my major stress release, and the only thing that allows me to keep off a major weight loss. And, after all, I was staying in her house. It would be pretty damn ungrateful of me not to give up my work for one day when my poor mother was so sick. So I guess it makes sense.
Still, I was disgusted and creeped out, and so I thought it through a few more times (and in the meantime, when I worked near her, I stayed in a hotel and didn't contact her.) Let's do the math :
5 pm: I leave work.
5:30: The first call comes to my cell phone, about 30 minutes before I pass by her house on my way to the gym.
5:45: The second call comes to my cell phone
6:10: The first page comes to the gym
6:20: The second page comes to the gym
6:30 The third phone call to my cell phone.
After I figured out the math I realized: she had hung around, sick and dizzy, for an hour, rather than take a pill and go to bed. She did it so I would see her standing, pitiful, scared, pathetic and in need of care. It was a setup to get pity and attention. That's why I felt so sick. I had been emotionally fed on, cleverly and deniably. She had given me a place to stay and she wanted a payment for that. The payment was the usual: the solicitation of feelings of guilt and pity, on which she would feed. Her only problem was that I had stayed away from her for so long that she had lost confidence. So, like a bad fisherman, she checked the trap too often, and gave herself away to the prey. Had she simply waited until I came home from the gym and pretended the attack had just started, I would never have known. She also blew her cover story because she wanted a little sacrifice too. The feed is so much better if I can be induced to drop something important to me to run to her side. Waiting until I came home would have allowed me to have my workout, and wouldn't have inconvenienced me at all. Letting me have a workout wasn't desirable in any case, as that allowed me to be successful at maintaining weight loss.
Her greed and avidity gave her away. It had been so long since she had an emotional feed from me. She just couldn't resist the full meal even though it meant leaving an electronic trail. (I suspect she also didn't realize that she was leaving that trail).
Then I realized two other things: She had probably gotten sick much earlier than 5:30. It was just a little TOO convenient that the attack had come on just as I was leaving work. But what if she had called me, say, during lunch, when my cell phone was on? I couldn't leave my work site without a lot of trouble and I was an hour from her house. I would have asked if she could manage the attack herself and if not, I would have called 911. Neither of those options was desirable. She cleverly waited until I was in range to set out the lures for the pity feed.
As I analyzed and thought through this incident (which was, of course, wholly deniable on the surface, and way too long and convoluted for anyone to listen to otherwise) I realized that she had had me over a barrel. She was so cleverly manipulative, and so willing to go to extremes to get her sick attention, that there was no way I could stop her. As long as she could contact me, she could work out an excuse to demand my attendance on her. I might even end up forced to care for her if the authorities became involved. Like Stormchild I realized that only cutting off contact could stop her.
This is, again, a recourse that most psychologists deplore. Nina Brown's suggestion is to just let the narcissist's hurtful comments go past you, i.e., just ignore it. How do you stop the narcissist from the kind of emotional torture that Stormchild and I describe by "ignoring it"? How do you prevent hostility disguised as helplessness? There's only one way: divorce.
And the therapy she'd had? That's a laugh. [/size]
My Nmom still has my cell phone number. I need a new cell phone. I believe I'll get a new number when I buy it today.
