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a quick question from someone who is still new to all this!

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bunny:

--- Quote from: Yuki ---I think we're all here to learn and grow. We're all in the middle of a learning process. It's not always going to go smoothly... but we can talk about it and learn from it.

Everyone has a voice here. All of our voices are valid.
--- End quote ---


Well said.

I think the problem was that I questioned her mother's behavior; others added their thoughts to this. It was hard on the two posters to hear about mothers enabling a narcissistic husband and not protecting their kids. In fact it was traumatic. The reaction was an implication that we are the bad parents who traumatize children. That's okay as long as we can not take it personally. It shocked me at first to read it, but now I'm moving ahead.

bunny

Portia:
I appreciated your posts bunny. Hugs all round from me ((((bunny))))

mighty mouse:
Hi All,

If anything, I think the posters were very protective of Lissie and wanted to make sure she didn't take on an adult's cares and problems which were inappropriate for her age. We've all been there dealing with Ns and their enablers.

I hope she does get on with HER life and HER studies. I wish I had the opportunity to just be a kid and do what kids are supposed to do. I'm still fighting for my own identity in the world at the ripe old age of 46.

It will just take time (maybe a lot of time) for Lissie to process all that she read.

MM

Yuki:
Ns have a distorted view of themselves and the world around them, right? Their enablers do too... they often don't see the N or the damage the N is doing clearly.

Some of the things Lissie said sounded to me like her parents' distortions and denial. NOT her own feelings or clear view of the situation. Which is of course to be expected from a 17 year old who has lived with a N and the N's enabler for her whole life! I actually thought she saw her father with remarkable clarity and it sounded like she already had a pretty good grasp on what his narcissism was all about. But I thought that her parents had put her into an unhealthy role in the family, and that she believed her family's distortions about what was normal and what was healthy.

I think part of the problem was that there were a few different levels of reality going on. The reality about herself and her family that Lissie believed. And the reality of her family that some of us saw. I think Karin may have been reacting to the fact that some of us were rejecting Lissie's "reality" about her family and were instead talking about the "reality" of her family that we believed instead.

I know Lissie came here to talk about her father and instead we started talking about something else that she wasn't prepared to talk about. I feel badly for her because of that. But I also think it would have been a disservice to her to not talk about what the real problem in her life was.

Karin had mentioned something about having been married to a N and getting through it with her own kids, I believe. So maybe us talking about the mother's role in the situation made her feel attacked. But we're all here because we've been under the thumb of a N at some point in our lives, right? We've probably all been enablers to some degree... We know it's not about being wrong or being to blame or being a bad person. It's about being emotionally healthy and setting healthy boundaries.

Portia, thanks for your kind words. :)

Yuki

Anonymous:
One reason I was interested in this thread is that I have often wished that when I was 17 (or so) someone had talked to me honestly about the unhealthy dynamic in my family. It's possible that, like Lissie, I would have rejected the suggestion that my mother's practice of confiding in me and treating me like an ally against my father was unhealthy and poor parenting on her part. But at least it might have planted the seed, and maybe it wouldn't have taken me another 15 or so years to start to question my relationship with her.  

IMO, 17 is old enough to start thinking independently of your parents. I think the posters here were as careful as they could be in couching their comments in a kindly way, without being dishonest, which I don’t think would have been helpful to Lissie or anyone else.

Morgan

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