Voicelessness and Emotional Survival > Voicelessness and Emotional Survival Message Board
Finding voicefulness......losing......finding.....practicing..
sKePTiKal:
Hi Muffin! I want you to know how much I appreciate the things you've written and your viewpoint. I've had a really tough week but I've been reading... and well, it's been like touching solid rock for me to read your updates. It's been reassuring to me to see how you're thinking and feeling about things... like I'm not crazy for thinking about things the way I do, after all! Yeah, I was seriously starting to lose it... :: weak half-hearted laugh ::
I got a good giggle out of your story about the bureaucratic peon. Poor guy! Sounds like he was so sure of himself and the facts and that was the only bit of real "power" he has in that position. Then he had to apologize...
... and admit he was wrong. Point to Muffin! :D
And that's the difference between your mom and other people, you know. It matters not whether she's NPD, BPD, or just plain mean and doesn't like you - you might never know for sure (I don't). All most of us would do anything for... including sabotaging ourselves or becoming the targets of abuse... is to have someone sincerely say they are sorry; they were wrong; and to really mean it and change their behavior to prove they mean it (because there just isn't any more trust in words after certain boundaries are crossed).
It's a sad fact of life though that some people can't frame those words "I'm sorry" or "I was wrong" with their lips, much less really and truly mean it. I don't know why... it's almost as if they fear they will cease to exist - POOF! - if they admit they were/are wrong or screwed up... as if the burden of shame for being wrong is so great (even for simple transgressions) that their emotional defense mechanisms overcompensate and go into warp drive...
... I don't know - I'm just trying to find a way to explain the incomprehensible to myself.
Hopalong:
--- Quote ---If it was Nar-personality disorder wouldn't she expose everyone to her disorder instead of saving it all up for the daughter? I don't know.
--- End quote ---
That's a very good question, MB. It breaks my heart to know you feel hated by her. I don't know that I'd dignify her destructiveness with such a massive word as hate...but I sure understand that's what it looks like and sounds like and feels like. She's just broken. She can't love you well.
My Nmother had a student she had taught 60 years ago coming by to visit her every Christmas. He adored her. I could see him just awash with sentiment, sitting in the living room admiring her. She was like a Norman Rockwell image of an elementary school teacher...just perfectly put together, a sweet-looking round face, an eternally engaging, twinky facial expression, and a lively, musical way of talking. Skillful with social conventions and always, always telling (the same...groan) anecdotes. Kind of like a female Ronald Regan. She had a sort of cloud of "I am adorable, and delightful and I am perky" kind of nature that her public persona projected perfectly. She had reams of admirers. She was twinkly. She was amazingly responsive to others in conversation. She would do girlish gasps, intakes of breath, spasms of delightedness in conversation.
Numbly, exhaustedly, I watched...for decades. She was a beautiful parrot.
So, no...I think none of them knew that she was a narcissist. There may have been an occasional confusion I saw on her smarter friends' faces. But the twinkles, and the tea parties, and the social liveliness...brought them back for more.
By the end, though, in the last hardest years, I realized she really had no close friends. One, perhaps, but Mom looked down at her, and the woman's cringing loyalty wasn't something Mom seemed moved by. Ultimately, she was alone...with me.
I do believe I, and my daughter to a degree, were the only ones who knew her well enough to hit that sharp rocky shallow that was unexpectedly close to the surface of the stream. Most others, I think, just saw the sparkly musical water.
Hops
Meh:
Hops,
I have been looking at it from the perspective as she is broken and somehow that takes responsibility away. I've noticed how no one in my family, aunt, uncles, grandparents never expected her to have real responsibility.
“She’s broken she can’t help it, she can’t help herself, he is an alcoholic he can’t help himself, or she is a bully she can’t help herself….
You know what I mean? I think I categorize a different type of forgiveness for me but don’t need to offer excuses or justifications for her??
I don’t know, just thinking out loud here.
I rather have something I call “hateful-forgiveness” It's where I forgive and let go enough for me to be healthy but stay alert and realistic enough to always remember the need for protecting myself. Or something like that I will have to come back to it another time.
I guess I bring it up because there is some interplay between forgiveness, personal strength, boundaries, self-deception, denial etc.
I wonder if thinking of her as broken is not the best way to look at it? Wondering if looking at it as hateful isn't somehow more powerful for me. Not so much about feeling bad about the situation, just thinking that "broken" is too kind absolving responsibility.
Anyways, it's not in the forefront of my mind now it's an after-thought on-going dialogue with self about mother.
I'm not feeling bad about it, I just think I slip into a state of forgetting how mean she really is because it's a dark undercurrent that she doesn't always allow to surface but it's always there.
Meh:
--- Quote from: PhoenixRising on February 26, 2011, 09:42:24 AM ---I got a good giggle out of your story about the bureaucratic peon. Poor guy! Sounds like he was so sure of himself and the facts and that was the only bit of real "power" he has in that position. Then he had to apologize...
... and admit he was wrong. Point to Muffin! :D
--- End quote ---
Glad it made you laugh. It's not that I am trying to be right and make other people wrong, it's just that my life recently has helped me find a fierceness that I never had before. That elusive thing called standing up for oneself, I think I'm finally starting to do it. I guess these people really don't know what I've been through and it feels good to me to experience what it's like to be a tough cookie and advocate for myself.
I thought he was being odd because I have gotten referrals before through these job-bank-offices without so much fuss --But it was great that I could go back to the facts over and over and that in the end I got what I needed. I needed to have that experience!
You are right about the power thing, they get a little power-thing going on. That's fine, they can be however they want to be.
One time I worked a job where I sat as a receptionist in an entrance way to a fancy corporate headquarters office. The controllers office was right next to my desk, she talked on the phone all day, when she had her door open I could listen to her and I always admired her ability to "argue".
It wasn't like nar-arguments or drunk fights it was arguing with intelligence or something else.
The controller was a petite pretty woman, she worked with a lot of tall men in business suits and she held her own, she was respected. She would be discussing multi-million dollar accounts over the phone in her office and I would just listen to her day after day.
Funny that she came to my mind because I haven't thought about her for years but maybe unconsciously I thought of her as being a role model of sorts.
Meh:
--- Quote from: Hopalong on February 26, 2011, 12:11:45 PM ---
--- Quote ---If it was Nar-personality disorder wouldn't she expose everyone to her disorder instead of saving it all up for the daughter? I don't know.
--- End quote ---
My Nmother had a student she had taught 60 years ago coming by to visit her every Christmas. He adored her. I could see him just awash with sentiment, sitting in the living room admiring her. She was like a Norman Rockwell image of an elementary school teacher...just perfectly put together, a sweet-looking round face, an eternally engaging, twinky facial expression, and a lively, musical way of talking. Skillful with social conventions and always, always telling (the same...groan) anecdotes. Kind of like a female Ronald Regan. She had a sort of cloud of "I am adorable, and delightful and I am perky" kind of nature that her public persona projected perfectly. She had reams of admirers. She was twinkly. She was amazingly responsive to others in conversation. She would do girlish gasps, intakes of breath, spasms of delightedness in conversation.
Numbly, exhaustedly, I watched...for decades. She was a beautiful parrot.
So, no...I think none of them knew that she was a narcissist. Hops
--- End quote ---
Hops, THANK YOU for sharing this, it's confirming towards my own experience. As one person looking out and feeling like I am the only one who sees it, it's something that was very hard as a child, little less difficult as an adult but still messes with one's confidence in the world and CONFIDENCE in one's own perceptions.
Makes me wonder if the nice part is a real aspect of the "nar"-personality or if the receiver of the niceness is a pawn in the nar-charade.
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