My Mother the Narcissist

Dear Cary,

I hate my family of origin.  I recently discovered that I grew up in a mostly narcissistic family, with a narc mother who subtly but persistently projected her own guilt and shame and anger about her situation onto us, her six children.  During those childhood years, we – my siblings and I – felt so much compassion for her suffering. It seemed like almost overnight our father had left her high and dry after 20+ years of marriage to live a more unburdened lifestyle without the responsibility of a large family.  He took his whole paycheck with him and from what I understand did not consistently pay child support, if at all.  They are both immigrants.  Our father was someone who would hit/beat our mother early in their marriage and also cheat and drink a lot, but never hit the children. He was mostly absent as a father.  Looking back it seems like our mother was angry about the burden of having been left to care for all of these children.  Having broken English and no education, she found a job at a nearby fast food restaurant which, as it turns out, she actually enjoyed.  As children, we knew we were poor, were ashamed about it, and felt something was terribly messed up about this situation.  As a result, we – especially the youngest three kids (ages 8, 14 and 16 at that time) felt such a degree of responsibility to help that whatever money we made at our little jobs would go straight to our mother, from our hearts, without a single second thought.  The financial help continues to this day.

Fast forward 20 years later and our mother has become a massive pain in our side. She never moved on from our father and all the other “betrayals” of her past, and now subtly accuses us of abandoning her.  We resent this because we are simply trying to live our lives and pick up the pieces after a not great childhood.  At the age of 40, I am just now beginning to realize how manipulative and controlling our mother was or, at least, has become. Almost every time I talk to her I get a migraine, nauseous, or act out later in some way.  We have all tried to tell her in our own way how the way we grew up has caused real damage to us, as we felt unseen by her. Whenever anyone tries to bring up something along the lines of her not being such a great mother and the almost exclusive reason why we have such severe anxiety and depression today, she basically either shuts down and ignores us for several weeks (complaining to one of us about the other) or tells herself more victim stories and sometimes turns it around saying something disparaging about us or even quoting some “Honor Thy Father and Mother” directive from the Bible.  She can’t tolerate any notion that her conduct as a parent has been damaging and, whether it is conscious or not, continues to refuse to see us as individuals who deserve to be valued and respected. Instead, she self-obsesses and is becoming more delusional as she ages. None of us can tolerate being around her more than a few hours.
So as I said earlier, I hate my family.  With all of us now in our 40s, we are disconnected from each other apparently, as I’ve recently learned, because we are bonded by our trauma and not by an actual real connection that was based on love, as would be the case in a healthy family.  One of us, the youngest child, took his own life some years ago in his 20s.  It was deeply shocking as he was always the most morally principled, had no vices, and fought bravely as a U.S. Marine.  In my opinion, it wasn’t so much his war trauma as it was he had no sense of himself as a valuable individual, no healthy way of processing feelings, and had done it after breaking off the only serious relationship he had ever had.  Even after the suicide, we still to this day are unable to show emotions towards our siblings and mother and anyone else for that matter.  Since the suicide, some of us have gone our separate ways and have had little to no contact.  Recently, one sibling got married and just stopped calling all of us, for reasons we don’t know.  So, I am angry.  I hate the constant rejection that happens in this family. I am so hurt by this constant trauma, the continuous denial and dismissal of our lived experiences.  Is it sad to say that I look forward to my mother’s death? I just can’t deal with her anymore. She always talks about how she can’t wait to die anyway, as she “has nothing to live for” even though her children lead respectable lives and are raising her grandchildren with all the love and care we never had.

Thanks for reading,

Trying to Avoid Being Bitter in California

Dear Trying to Avoid Being Bitter,

She’s never going to give you what you want.

That’s a hard thing to take. But that’s the way it is. She’s never going to give you what you want and she’s never going to change. Accepting that fact is hard.

What you need, my friend, is distance. Not physical distance but psychological distance, emotional distance, the ability to not respond emotionally, which means not asking for the thing that you’re never going to get. I t doesn’t mean not having any emotions. It just means not responding with those emotions, not making demands on those emotions, not looking to her as someone who can make things better because she’s not going to make things better, she’s only going to make things worse. And if you put yourself in her hands as you have many times over your life because she’s your mother, you’re just going to get hurt again. So you can have those feelings, but you have to learn not to let those feelings drive your interaction with her. You need a form of emotional discipline I guess you’d call it.  Which  means accepting that the relationship is not ever going to be what you want it to be. And accepting that is a little like accepting a death, a thing that is permanent, that you cannot change, that is beyond your control. A thing that is done. Beyond you. In the hands of God. And that’s it. That is the first and most crucial thing you need to do if you want to escape this painful cycle.

Because you keep asking, you keep wanting to get this thing that, I guarantee you, you’re never going to get, not if your mother is a narcissist, it’s just not in her nature to give you what you need. So the best you can hope for is some kind of peaceable interaction and coexistence, which you can only achieve through finding some emotional distance. To find that emotional distance and to accept the facts of this relationship involves surrender. It involves surrender to the truth, however distasteful the truth may be, however distasteful surrender may be. This involves, as I would put it, surrender to the awful truth. That people are made a certain way and nothing can be done. Nothing.

It’s not easy to come up with this. It’s like learning a new swing, or a new language. Maybe it’s not that hard. Maybe it’s more like a new yoga pose. But it does take time to find the correct position and then to hold it like a yoga pose, to rehears it, to rehears simply hearing, observing, feeling, but not arguing, not requesting, not requesting anything, because whatever you request is going to be withheld. That is the pure nature of it.

If you work at it, if you can find yourself in a position of safe neutrality where you behave with dignity and kindness toward your mother but you refrain from any conversation that involves you suggesting she recognize something that you think would make it better—if she would only recognize what she’s done, if she would only recognize your own pain—it’s not going to happen. Not if she’s a narcissist. She’s not going to recognize your pain. That’s the whole thing with a narcissist.

So … and none of this is going to make any difference to her. It’s not going change her, it’s not going to educate her, all it will do is take the sting out of these interactions for you. It’ll take the trauma and the triggering out of these interactions, if you can find that spot from which to regard your mother with compassion but secure and distant compassion.

After an encounter with your mother, sure, you may be left with, I don’t know, a feeling of emptiness, a feeling of anger or regret, wishing that if only you had said this or said that, and that’s just crazy, hopeless bullshit. Believe me. If you have a conversation with your mother and you walk away feeling, oh, if only I had said this, or said that … please, my friend, that’s just part of the syndrome. It’s part of the syndrome and if you catch yourself having that kind of regret, please just find a way to let it go, because there was nothing you could do that would have changed the outcome except to maintain your own lofty, calm, compassionate distance. You know, you might walk away from an encounter with your mother feeling angry. But if you can bring yourself to accept that whatever this is, just as if it were a physical malady, just as if she were sick in the hospital, or wearing a leg cast, or rendered suddenly mute,  anything. If it were physical and visible, you would probably find it easier to accept. I think that’s it: The fact that narcissism is not a visible, physical malady but a pattern of behavior which will always leave you empty and always leave you trying to get at something you’re never going to get.

And it is sad to face the actual truth of it! But you have already faced that truth. It’s obvious in your letter that you already know what it is. You just haven’t practiced the routines, the behavior routines you need to use to put your understanding into action.

You probably still want her to acknowledge the pain that she caused you. You have to accept the truth: she’s not going to acknowledge that. She’s never going to give you that. She’s never going to face up to and admit her part. As far as she’s concerned, she did everything perfectly, and anything bad that happened was somebody else’s fault, or it was just an accident of history. This is the lens through which she looks out at you and at all of us. When she looks out at you, and at the rest of us, she sees flawed and problematic individuals who are only going to cause her more trouble as long as they keep insisting that she’s this or she’s that. She can’t see it and she’s never going to own up to it and that’s hard to take but that’s the truth of it.

In that regard, this is the key sentence in your letter. You wrote: “Almost every time I talk to her I get a migraine, nauseous, or act out later in some way.” So that tells me that almost every time you talk to her she is getting the better of you. You are falling into her trap. You’re going to have to learn this self-defense that I have been talking about. This pose of dignified and might I say powerful emotional distance that’s grounded in complete acceptance of whoever she is and complete acceptance of the fact that you’re never going to get what you want from her.

The game is over. The game really is over. You are grown up now. You’re not a kid. She’s not responsible for you anymore. She doesn’t owe you anything. The game is over. The damage is done. You have to protect yourself in the present. And it hurts. Of course it hurts. It’s pain. And it hurts. But you don’t have to act out on the pain. If she wounds you, try to soothe the wound. But she’s not going to help you. She’s not going to admit to you what you want her to admit.

So, if you’re emotionally hurt after talking with her, take care of yourself. Do something nice for yourself. Just admit it: Yeah, you’ve been hurt. You’ve been injured. But she’s not going to make it better. You’re going to have to make it better yourself. Do whatever it takes to feel better. I don’t know what that is. What do you do to take care of yourself when you’re emotionally wounded. You probably have ways. Maybe you take a bath or eat your favorite food, I don’t know. But it’s not acting out to take care of yourself. There’s a difference. If you’re acting out, you might be doing something destructive, or something wasteful. But if you’re soothing yourself, if you’re caring for yourself because you’re injured, that’s a good thing. You can do that. You can do that. And you can congratulate yourself, too. You can build yourself up after being torn down by her.

A narcissist will leave you empty and torn apart. You know that. So you can congratulate yourself for having survived another deadly encounter with the narcissist. And again, again, again, I keep saying and saying and saying that she really is out to hurt you. And when she hurts you it really does hurt. But that doesn’t mean it’s something you can fix by getting her to own up to it. She’s never going to do that. She can’t! She can’t do it! It’s not even like she’s refusing. She can’t do it. It’s not going to happen. A narcissist is not going to change. It’s up to us.

And, listen, can I just say this too? Given our recent political history in America, this would be a good time to suggest that we, those of us who are affected by the behavior of narcissists, we should know the number one thing we need to not do is vote another narcissist into public office. We should never do that. We have the power not to do that. And if you’re like me, you can recognize a narcissist when you see it. Utterly self-absorbed. You sense that seething anger underneath and the blaming and the shaming and the constant maneuvering.

So … But that’s an aside. This is not about politics. This is about you and your understandable difficulty accepting, and protecting yourself.

So, I’ve just got to say I wish you luck. And I know you can do it because, like I say, it is not really a matter of gaining great insight. It’s simply a matter of adopting a pose of distance that gives you power and protection, and also allows you to act with dignity and compassion. To just not be a victim of another narcissist.

We’ve had enough narcissists in our lives.

So. Accept that she’s the way she is and she’s not going to change. Find a way to hold your ground, maintain and emotional distance with dignity, power and compassion. Also, choose when to end the interaction. When you sense that the tractor beam of her narcissistic power is starting to reel you in just get the hell out of there. Don’t let it happen. Take care of yourself. That’s it from me. Thanks. Ciao.