Hi Pennyplant;
I've read all your posts and thought about them. My comments inline: take them, leave them, dissect them, whatever works for you.
It feels like I'm still too close to it. Still not able to separate out the traits from just plain old having been so used to my upbringing that I thought it was normal all those years. Now I know it was not. But I'm still somewhat at the beginning of the discovery stage, I think. Having a hard time understanding how I could have parents who perhaps truly did not care about me anywhere in there.
I too have found it very confusing and difficult. I go back and forth from one resource to another to my own life and back to the resource as understanding comes to me. It's very difficult to see the forest when you're deep inside it. One thing I find extremely helpful is writing. One night I was looking at a description of narcissism and saw "They are very bad gift givers." It was a lightbulb moment. None of the things I was reading
seemed to fit my Nmom (though in fact they all did) but the gift-giving - she is a world class bad gift giver.
So I started a list. I would write down something she did that I really hated her for, then follow with an example. It was like doing a jigsaw puzzle. Once I got one piece, a whole bunch of others would fall into place. For me, the writing was really key. My list ended up being the basis of the essay.
One time I was riding on the back of my sister's bike and fell off. She accidently ran over my arm. I freaked out because I was afraid it was broken and a blue lump immediately appeared on my elbow. I ran crying to show my mother and she reacted by pointing at me, laughing hysterically at me and basically making fun of my tearful, frightened reaction to having been hurt. She sent me back out to play.
This is a good example of narcissistic multi-tasking. It seems quite typical that narcissists ignore their children's pain and deny them basic medical care. The elements may be
1. Not wanting to waste money and effort on a scapegoat child.
2. Resenting your demand for attention that is
only hers.
3. Taking an opportunity to terrorize you. Now you know to fear her. All narcissists are bullies, and bullies find it hard to resist an easy victim.
4. Punitiveness. Narcissists are very slippery because they are so good at separating cause and effect. You may have incurred her wrath for something prior to your injury, and this was payback.
This next story is the hardest one to tell about. My husband is the only one I have ever told this one to. I was about three. My sister was about two. It was winter and my mother was trying to go somewhere with us, probably the grocery store or laundrymat. But the car got stuck in the snowy driveway and she just couldn't budge it. She was incredibly frustrated and angry. Any young mother in that situation would be.
That's not true. A mother who was an adult might be resigned, or accept the situation with humor, or make the best of it by going out to make a fort with her kids in the snow, because she recognized that getting angry about snow is the very definition of pointless. Your mother's frustration and anger were the result of her own emotional malfunction. Becoming enraged was very infantile of her, but then, narcissists ARE infantile.
I understand that part so well. We went back in the house again, in defeat. And something small I did, or my sister did, was the last straw. It set her off in a rage. We were in the kitchen. My mother was sitting in a chair spanking me but it just wasn't enough punishment. So, she grabbed me and held me under the shoulders as high as she could and dropped me to the floor from that height. I landed on my tailbone. It took my breath away and I could hardly cry, just moaned. She did the same thing again and maybe one or two more times until she came to her senses and realized that I might be severely hurt. So, then she was frantic and made me get up and walk it off. I remember how wobbly my left leg felt in my hip joint. She made me keep walking around in a circular path through the house until she was satisfied that I didn't need to go to the doctor or hospital.
This was clear, unambiguous, child abuse. Under current law, if a teacher or doctor had been present, that person would have had criminal liability if they failed to report her to the authorities. If a police officer had been present she would have been arrested. It was also extremely narcissistic. She took out her frustration on a small child. At the age of three, she used you as her punching bag so she could feel better, even though she could have paralyzed you with such battering. Nor did she ever "come to her senses." She stopped because she thought that she had damaged you and that she was going to get into trouble as a result. Had she come to her senses, she would have taken you directly to the hospital, even if she had to lie about the reasons. Instead, she forced you to walk around so she could reassure herself that she wasn't in any trouble. Had you actually been injured the walking could have made it worse. From your description, you may have dislocated and then relocated a joint, as little kids have very soft joints.
My Nmom did not do anything that grimly horrible, but she loved to whale on us with a wooden spoon. My brother came in for a lot of wooden-spoon beatings. Her arm would stretch as far as it could over her head and she would bring the spoon down as hard as she could while she screeched that he was a bad, disobedient child. (That too, is unambiguously child abuse by modern standards.) Whoever got hit, she would drag that child into the same room as the other child before she started beating so the other child would be terrorized by having to watch. I feel sure your little sister was present when your Nmom was battering you as well. Narcissists love their "twofers."
This particular incident has never been talked about. I'm sure if I confronted her about it now she would deny it completely.
I am also sure that she would. "I don't remember that" or its cousin "You have a very vivid imagination" are stock phrases in the vocabulary of every abuser.
Immaturity, lack of empathy, I don't know what this is. I see there is a pattern. But I don't know what to call it. I have heard all the stories of her own childhood where she had several severe illnesses or conditions due to her parents having waited too long to seek medical or dental care, due to lack of money. Was she too traumitized at this point to trust doctors? Too uncared for to be able to care for me?
Then she had the obligation not to create children she was unable to care for. It isn't just-one-of-those-things. It was a choice on your Nmom's part.
My sister was not denied care or medical attention when it was obviously needed. She was the one who acted out. I was the one who could take care of myself. Maybe it was as simple as that.
This is a giant red flag to me. So far your description of your Nmom is simply of an abuser. Some abusers are narcissistic. Some are not. But one thing narcissists do is to scapegoat one or more children and lionize one or more others. The scapegoat child becomes the child-with-no-needs. The scapegoat child learns to take care of herself because no one else is doing it and may be eerily adult at an early age. This is what I called "parentification."
My mother's mother suffered from untreated depression her entire life, perhaps even post-partum depression. There was no mother/daughter bond between my Grandmother and any of her four daughters. Period. Anything they did with her or for her was through a sense of duty or obedience only. Grandmother's brother was diagnosed bi-polar but refused any treatment. So, serious chemical imbalance runs in the family. My mother was raised in this atmosphere.
This is very unfortunate. Mental illness in a parent has the same effect as narcissism, alcoholism or drug abuse - it creates an unstable atmosphere for the children.
I don't think she has a chemical imbalance herself. She is very selfish, materialistic, etc.
This is another red flag for me. Narcissists, by definition, are extremely selfish. That sometimes comes through in materialism.
She never got excited by our accomplishments as children. Only worried about how much effort she would have to make to attend a concert or ceremony of some sort.
That is because 1) she is selfish and thinks only in terms of how it will affect her and 2) it was a wonderful opportunity to let you know how insignificant she found you. She let you know, completely deniably, that the accomplishments you thought so great were just a burden. My Nmom came neither to my high school nor college graduations. At the time I graduated from college she was dating a jerk who had a son for whom jerk would have been an improvement. A judge had given Jerk Jr. a choice: Jail or the coast guard. He chose the Coast Guard and six weeks later graduated from their boot camp. My Nmom went to his graduation instead of mine. Once again, she let me know how unimportant I was to her, completely deniably.
Then I remember that summer she got mad about my friends who often bragged about themselves and what nice things their family had. So, she made me wear this award medal to the park one day so these friends could see how smart I was. I felt stupid. It was so inappropriate. Nobody even noticed my stupid medal, luckily. But what an odd thing for her to make me do. And how obedient I was to go through with it even though it made me very uncomfortable to do it.
This is CLASSIC narcissism. I've said previously that what makes narcissists different from run-of-the-mill abusers is that they are bizarre, freaky, weird, "not-normal." Every child of a narcissist I know has some of these stories of strange behavior. In this case she was responding to the narcissist's most tender trigger: envy. Narcissists are extremely envious and she went off the deep end as a result. All of a sudden the accomplishment that was such a nuisance when she was moping about having to go to some assembly became a big deal, because she was going to use it to
show them.
I couldn't have certain colors of clothing, red or purple, because they would "clash" with my red hair.
My sister had to wear a lot of brown because brown was a good color for her.
Another color memory: When we made Christmas cookie cutouts, we could not have any blue frosting, even though there was blue food coloring, because there is no such thing as blue food. It probably only came up as a subject because blue was my favorite color. My mistake.
"Rules" like these made me even more self-conscious than I already naturally was.
This was something I didn't put into my essay because I didn't understand that it was narcissistic at the time I wrote it. Narcissists are very rigid and have many unnecessary rules. Though I didn't write about it, long before I knew what narcissism was I was aware of my parents "unnecessariness" as I called it. There was just no real point to so many of the things they insisted on.
Made me a very tense, uptight child. And a very entertaining target for neighborhood bullies. Of which there were many on my block.
The children of narcissists are targets for other narcissists, who recognize their training and vulnerability. When I was a high school freshman I was targeted by a teacher who was a different kind of narcissist - a child molester. It wasn't until I understood my upbringing that I figured out why he picked me, the poorly dressed, lumpish little smart girl. I wasn't cute, but he figured I was easy. I wasn't, thanks to the hole card I had in my back pocket: the understanding that if he laid a hand on me my non-narcissistic father would have killed him. So I escaped, but others didn't, and my freshman year in college he went to prison.
My parents told me to ignore it. What clueless people they were. My father did actually have some sympathy for my plight. My mother did not seem to have any sympathy or understanding.
Your mother wasn't clueless. She knew what was going on. She didn't care. She didn't have empathy for your pain because she was a narcissist but there may have been another reason too: Narcissists often let other people do their dirty work. So many of them really enjoy their scapegoat child's pain. So they rarely protect their kids and even encourage those who abuse them. My mother commiserated with my molesting teacher over how "difficult" I was at parent's night while my father stood silently giving him the hairy eyeball.
Afterall, she had been fairly popular growing up. What was wrong with me? She often wondered that aloud.
Of course! It would not have had the desired demeaning effect if she had kept it to herself! My Nmom often compared me to herself, always unfavorably. She had been so popular, so cute, she had such narrow feet (I kid you not), how come I was such a bumpkin? They love those kinds of putdowns. They simultaneously let the narcissist praise herself and diminish you by comparison.
My father was afraid it was because I was like him, and that idea made him feel guilty and gave him a lot of grief.
He sounds like a decent man. It's too bad about his Asperger's. It's a disability over which the sufferer has little control, but it severely impairs the ability to parent.
My mother always said I was like my father's side of the family and not like her at all. She would pick on characteristics of mine that were like my father. Anything about me that was like her, she just didn't see or acknowledge. "Look at how you hold a sandwich just like your father!" "Your eyebrows sweat like like your father's!" "You are just like your Aunt Polly!" (my father's sister, who my mother didn't like). It is true that I take after my aunt in many ways, but it sounded like an insult when my mother said it.
It was meant to be. Narcissists deliver clever little putdowns all the time, but they are very careful about their deniability. If you had turned on her saying "Don't talk about me that way!" she could have said "What did I say? All I said was..." But her air of pleasure gives her away. She knows you're hurt. She's loving it.
This is also a perfect example of narcissistic weirdness. Eyebrow sweating? Sandwich holding? Give me a break.
I never was just me. I was never fine just the way I was. There was always something that should be fixed. If anyone was paying attention at all that is.
I think this speaks for itself, of a life of being constantly told how inadequate you are, of a life where no one paid any attention to you because it was all for your Nmom.
I fully agree with you that you must look into your past for the keys to your future, in part so you know how to protect yourself against your Nmom. They often DO get worse with age, and they'll turn you into a servant and bring you down with them if they can. It is critical to learn her game and to detach yourself completely so that doesn't happen.
The up side of all this (if there is one) is that you've survived in spite of her. Your memories are crippling, but like the three-year-old self, but you've limped on, gaining strength with each step you take on your own. That independence is a prize and it frees you from her expectations and demands. Now you can focus on healing yourself and taking care of yourself, and let her take care of HERself - something she has demonstrated she does extremely well.
Chris2
