Dear sossi,

I’ve been following parts of your discussion with anita, and she offered you a great perspective and a very likely explanation for the troubles you are experiencing in your life: your narcissistic mother. You asked anita:

So you think that everything i do and all the experiences i have now are basically stemming from the difficult relationship with my mother? I see the point. Maybe..its hard to correlate for me but i can see what you mean.

I too believe your experiences in your adult life are reflecting your experiences with your mother, both in your childhood and still on-going. Anita described it well on page 2, post No 387571.

Here are some false beliefs, that you concluded about yourself and other people, based on your unhealthy relationship with your mother:

I just feel like men are out to get you, like other women eventually all turn jealous and everything just goes sour. I want healthy relationships but it seems like im asking for the moon.

I worry that if i try to meet someone, i dont have really all that much to offer..no amazing social circle of happy people, no kids and no fun career.

You believe that all men are out to get you, that all women will eventually turn jealous, and that you don’t have much to offer. This is a direct consequence of growing up with a narcissistic mother. A person with a narcissistic parent has a very low self-esteem. They feel they don’t have much to offer because they were always ridiculed and put down. They’ve never received praise and validation because their parent always competed with them.

A narcissistic parent feels threatened by his/her children’s talents and successes, because it endangers their fragile self-esteem. That’s why they need to put their children down and ridicule them, so they would feel better about themselves. The child just never receives any appreciation or validation.

Someone asked me today what i dreamed of doing and i just couldnt think of it. I have feelings about what i like..im driven, hardworking , i like to make money…but passions? i feel a bit lost in the money making process…

Perhaps what was important to your mother was money and social status (including an “amazing social circle of happy people”, with your mother at the center of the circle, charming and dazzling them all, being the center of attention). You have been  striving to achieve what she finds important, never stopping to ask yourself “what is important to me, what are my values, what would I like?”

It’s no wonder, because your mother never stopped to ask you those things – it was only about what she wants. You didn’t matter, you weren’t seen as a unique individual but as a function of hers. You were there to make her happy, and it didn’t matter if it wasn’t what you wanted.

I am not writing this based on the exact things and vignettes from your life, because I haven’t read everything, but it’s what happens typically with children of narcissistic parents. It’s all about the parent, and never about the child. That’s why I believe you feel you don’t have much to offer, and you don’t know what your passions are, what you would really like, but you just follow what your mother expects from you.

I think it would be important to really become aware of how much you were programmed by your mother’s upbringing, and to start separating yourself from her world view and her wants and desires, and to start discovering your own…

• This reply was modified 3 years, 1 month ago by Tee.