I've Just Realised My Parents Don't Love Me

[polymath]

It's tough to realize we didn't get from our parents what we saw, and see in other families. To realize that often our parents were just kids running from their own messed up family of origins who crossed paths with each other, shared a mutual attraction, had some good sex and out popped us. It helps me to realize that we are all the same, they just got here before we did, as did their parents. Try to imagine your parents experiencing the same thing as children you experienced with them as children. My mother is severely N. It helps me to have compassion for her to know that her father sexually abused her and her mother preferred her brother. What kind of hell that mustve been for a little girl. I have 2 little girls and cant imagine them cowering in their rooms at night afraid of dad and hating mom.

I have begun to really explore my own spirituality and that would be my advice. Not the religion of our fathers but our own individual experiences. If there is a God and we were created in his image, then regardless of who put us here, we have a purpose. That purpose may be simply to do the best job we can for as long as we can until he calls us home. I try to live each day like its my last because one day I'll be right and live by the golden rule.

I'm beginning to see why people get more religious as they get older. At some point people like those on this board get OK with whatever is in the next life. They almost look forward to it. As you get older, the pain of loss will increase and you will learn to lean on God and really begin to search him out diligently. Good luck in that walk

[Sealynx]

Justkathy,
I think this disorder has some organic roots and though there are many reasons why someone may be incapable of love or understanding others, I think the fact that our mothers tend to be so similar points to something other than just upbringing. There are some things I hear repeatedly.

1. Shallow feelings....Can be rageful one minute and sweet as pie on the phone when a friend calls. Real emotional states don't turn off and on like a light switch. This suggests to me that they don't feel anything very deeply, so the question of do they love me or hate me might be best asked as do they feel anything with passion? I don't think so.

2. A preference for negative feelings...I have heard again and again how they will start an argument if at all possible. But then if you think about it, a person who doesn't understand what a feeling is will get frustrated when other people began to express this "intangible". They are more at home complaining about something because they can use reasoning. I remember my mother would always say how silly any show was that featured complex emotions. None of the content made any sense to her and there was no way to explain it to her...you just had to feel it.

3. An inability to express genuine physical affection. Sometimes expressed as an addiction to sex which may be the only thing they want from their mate.

All of these things suggest to me that the person is lacking development in the part of the brain that controls emotion. Sex is very primal and not really an emotion as such so they sometimes rely on that. Love is much more complex. Thinking that they don't love us suggests that it is a choice they had. I'm not sure it is. There certainly isn't anything anyone has ever done that seemed to work in the getting love deparment. It must just not be there to have.

[Hopalong]

Hi Poly,

Thanks for what you said about the terror of a little girl in those circumstances. And for your compassion for recognizing that your mother was once a little girl, to whom terrible things happened. And broke her. So she was formed/forced/made into an N...some awful coping strategy, some self-obsessed thinking...and it's gotten her nowhere, because she doesn't have a self, just an endlessly circling Nbrain that is like a desperate fox in a trap, or like those heartbreaking elephants I used to see chained by the leg in the Baltimore zoo, gone completely out of their minds from their imprisonment, rocking from side to side endlessly, completely insane.

I think NPD is truly a form of insanity. Guile and cleverness and charm and even functioning, and even moments of pathos, they're all just like a big whirling dust cloud that swirls around the core creature -- a child who was so damaged they just broke. And went on and grew up and inhabited adult bodies and aped adult goals and had children and grew older and had jobs or raised kids and all the while they are really just that child. Broken, driven mad, and never coming back.

Some damage IS that bad.

I think my mother was broken by what happened in her childhood. I'll never know whether she was forced to have intercourse with her father (her story is she successfully resisted by threatening to tell her mother, but she remembers what he did to her other sister...for years). And he was a preacher.

I think it broke her. (It sure would have snapped my heart in two.)

So that's why, as much as she damaged me...it was only her fox child, that used to have a self, but was made feral (hidden in her propriety, but still feral) by the terrible things that happened in her house whne she was young.

She didn't love me much, though I defend a flicker in her that I know was real.

It's not all or nothing. I learned to look for that flicker. Every few years, there would be a moment where if I stretched my thinking way open, I could see something that I realized she intended as love. It was almost...primitive, compared to what I know love can be. But it was all she had.

Sorry to ramble. But I was moved by your compassion for your mother.

Hops

[JustKathy]

This is an interesting discussion.

Sealynx, you may be on to something when you say that Ns may be lacking in brain development. Aside from the NPD, my mother also displayed other signs of having an emotionally undeveloped brain. She seemed to be in a state of arrested development, as if her brain stopped developing past the age of ten. The baby talk, temper tantrums, even the movies she would choose to watch (Disney animation over anything complex). She always seemed like a child.

Hops, I also agree that it may be a form of insanity. The hard part for me (and I'm sure for many of us), is not knowing the origin of the trauma that was the trigger. My NM tells the story of a fairytale childhood, being an honor student, popular, etc. Some of her siblings have told me that she was a "problem child," who failed in school, and was abusive to her siblings. She has six siblings, who all grew up healthy, happy, and normal. I've never seen any evidence of M being abused by anyone in her family. If anything like that happened, no one is talking, so I've been left to try and piece things together on my own, and I'm drawing a blank.

Maybe some Ns are just born mentally ill. My mother does seem to have the capacity to love inanimate objects, like dolls and teddy bears, and also pets. Things that offer unconditional love don’t talk back. I've NEVER sensed that she loved me, and never saw that flicker that Hops speaks of.

M told me when I was a little girl that she rushed to get pregnant, because she knew that if she gave her mother her first grandchild, that she (M) would inherit more money. So I was created for profit. When my grandmother died, she split her inheritance equally between her surviving children and 13 grandchildren. My grandmother loved all of her grandchildren equally and never played favorites, was always very fair, which makes me feel that she wasn't an a N, nor did she abuse my mother. My NM, conversely, is currently using her will as a weapon, so I don't think she was cut from the same cloth as her own mother.

Some of us may never know the answer to that question: WHY? In my case, I think I just have to accept that it was what it was, and learn to move forward from there. I'd like to know the truth, but I doubt I'll ever find it.

[HeartofPilgrimage]

I think you guys are on to something here. There's a concept called "alexithymia" (literally translated: no words for feelings). People with Narcissistic Personality disorder are thought to be alexithymic. Gaslighting is a phenomenon in which they use others in close relationships to "tell them what they feel" --- they deliberately provoke emotions in others because they don't have direct access to their own emotions. Then, when the other person has an opinion or emotion (e.g., "tells them how to feel") they resent it as "being told what to do." Because they are narcissistic they of course resent being told what to do! That is why as a child or spouse of a narcissist you are damned if you do and damned if you don't.

Also, apparently it is common for narcissists to idealize their childhoods. You can't trust their accounts of their childhood. Sometimes in big families where everybody else is pretty normal, there may have been a bonding interruption with just that one child --- the mother was ill after the birth, or the child was horribly colicky, or there was a family crisis at a critical time in infancy. Sometimes the relationships just never recover.

All this is coming from my studies in infant mental health, not because I understand how this happens at an intuitive level. How can you have feelings but not be aware of them? Intellectually I can believe that it happens, but intuitively I can't grasp it.

[HeartofPilgrimage]

Me again ... for some reason the length of my last post was limited.

Anyway, apparently the sense of grandiosity and entitlement comes from a combination of alexithymia and a deep sense of alienation. Apparently alexithymia tends to be especially pronounced in relation to negative emotions. So it tends not to be as bad with positive emotions. So, they have more conscious access to emotions when what they are feeling is positive. So, you combine relative access to positive emotions with a deep sense of alienation, of being alone ... and you tend to interpret your sense of not belonging as being because you are special, better than everybody else.

I got these ideas from a team of Italian researchers ... can't remember everybody (there was a whole string of authors) but DiMaggio and Semerari were two. If you have access to psychology databases, I can find the name and journal if you are interested and want to read the whole thing.

I post this kind of stuff because I think it is positive when forum members' intuition dovetails wonderfully with what research is saying. It is very very validating (not that we need validation for our experience, but often we feel as if we need validation).

I don't think forgiving somebody and realizing that they are the ones that are defective means that we have to get back into a relationship with them so that they can continue to beat us up and destroy us. I just think that realizing the depths of their problems strengthens our understanding that WE were not the ones that were defective. After realizing the depths of the damage inside of my own mother, sometimes I look into her eyes and instead of seeing the judgment that's always been there, I see somebody who doesn't have all the puzzle pieces connected.

[Sealynx]

I don't think forgiving somebody and realizing that they are the ones that are defective means that we have to get back into a relationship with them so that they can continue to beat us up and destroy us. I just think that realizing the depths of their problems strengthens our understanding that WE were not the ones that were defective. After realizing the depths of the damage inside of my own mother, sometimes I look into her eyes and instead of seeing the judgment that's always been there, I see somebody who doesn't have all the puzzle pieces connected.

Very good points. I feel like the hardest part of recovery is coming to terms with the fact that they may be incapable of feeling and therefore thinking like US. Our empathy is a two edged sword. It allows us to relate well to "most" people, but  as long as we use our "empathy" to assume their motives, we are looking at them from a point of view they can never assume.

Because we have gotten angry at times, not played fair and then felt bad about it, we assume they are capable of the same process and keep judging them for not going there. As you pointed out, the process for them, either because of organic or inorganic mental illness, is likely to be very different. They may not start out with anger, but confusion, after which they go through a process of trying to obtain information to react with. However, just because this part of them is broken and we can understand that doesn't make them okay to be around. Whether a person is intentionally or unintentionally dangerous to your emotional well being does not matter.

[SilverLining]

This is an interesting topic.  With my FOO, I've come to realize what the parents think of as "love" really isn't.  It's a form of twisted attachment.  They love playing a certain power role.  They love having people who provide narcissistic supply.  They love the exciting "event" when offspring come to visit.  They love having people they can forever feel superior to.  But all of this doesn't add up to real love or concern for a separate independent human being.   Real love is not something they are capable of.   

I was confused about this for a lot of years, because when the offspring left the house, all of a sudden the parents started talking love and family on a continual basis.  I never heard the word love in my FOO until I was in my 20's.  But when the offspring started leaving and the parents were threatened with facing up to their own problems, all of a sudden they started to talk "love and family"  It was too little too late.   Later I realized it's much easier for them to pretend to love somebody when that person isn't around on a daily basis and they can "love" the images in their own heads.   

[Sealynx]

Silverlining,
I have seen a similar pattern in my FOO. When we come home our mother has "appearances" planned for us where we are chauffeured around to the homes of her new friends. They often seem as puzzled as we are about the visit. It is as if we are commodities and not people.

My N aunt did the same thing with my niece. Her father is Vietnamese and one Christmas when my sister's family came to town my aunt planned for her to visit with a friend's son who collected "Asian Things". It was all about my aunt making a grand entrance with an "Asian offering" for the boy to play with.

Never did it occur to her to wonder how my niece would feel about being singled out in this manner or that the ethnicity of the child had no bearing on whether the two would get along. To her it was the perfect way to entertain my niece.

[SilverLining]

Silverlining,
I have seen a similar pattern in my FOO. When we come home our mother has "appearances" planned for us where we are chauffeured around to the homes of her new friends. They often seem as puzzled as we are about the visit. It is as if we are commodities and not people.

Hey SL.  That's exactly how a visit with the parents goes for me.  My mother always has a series of "appearances" planned,  and there's no discussion of whether the offspring might prefer some other sort of activity.  It's an exciting event for the parents, but meaningless for me.   I've gone along with it for the past few years, but it might be time to crank up the "chill" level a bit more.  I feel like any time spent around the FOO is a total waste.   

[Hopalong]

Rings a bell for me too.
NMom was obsessed with appearances (so I felt I didn't really matter) and orchestrated appearances.

She used to say when her guests were over (about me):

Doesn't she look like a young Jackie Kennedy?
Speak some French for my visitors!

Poor thing. She was kind of hollow.

Poor young me too. (Older me is much happier...)

love
Hops

[Bettyanne]

HI Twoapenny and Sealynx,
I am just saying hello.  I miss chatting with you both,
Hugs,
Bettyanne

[Sealynx]

Hi Bettyanne,
Great to see you here!
S

[getnbtr]

I don't think that N's have ever or will ever love. Hate seems to be what I have experienced from both my NM and then from my NH. The better I do the more hurtful they become. That's not love. They can say the words but that's about it. I hate looking into their eyes because all I see is masked hatred!
It's just way too sad for me to know that I have allowed this to happen to me with my husband after going through this with my mother. They are real swindlers with no conscience.  I haven't talked to my mother in about 15 years after my children began hiding from her and physically getting sick when she came around to belittle us all. When we let her know that her behavior would not be tolerated any more, she responded with, "I don't do that", that same old story. She moved last year and I received my school pictures sent to me by one of her neighbors...it is so good to have this board. Not many people believe what I have been through. N's have a way of hiding and attacking behind closed doors really well.

[Ami]

I don't think that N's have ever or will ever love. Hate seems to be what I have experienced from both my NM and then from my NH. The better I do the more hurtful they become. That's not love. They can say the words but that's about it. I hate looking into their eyes because all I see is masked hatred!
It's just way too sad for me to know that I have allowed this to happen to me with my husband after going through this with my mother. They are real swindlers with no conscience.  I haven't talked to my mother in about 15 years after my children began hiding from her and physically getting sick when she came around to belittle us all. When we let her know that her behavior would not be tolerated any more, she responded with, "I don't do that", that same old story. She moved last year and I received my school pictures sent to me by one of her neighbors...it is so good to have this board. Not many people believe what I have been through. N's have a way of hiding and attacking behind closed doors really well.

((((((getnbtr))))))