Dear sossi:

I read just a bit of your recent post, am not focused enough, it being later here, but my feeling is that I wish you didn’t suffer, I wish you were not lost, I wish you had a good relationship with a partner going on. I will read more and reply further in about 10 hours from now.

anita

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.

Dear sossi:

You are welcome.

“as we went to school, there were people there too”– I am not a religious person, but I do have my favorite part of the bible, it’s the first chapter, and it starts with: “In the beginning”- our Beginning is the most powerful part of our lives, and for most of us, that beginning is Our Mothers: the ways she held us, fed us, smiled at us.. or not.

“All I know is that I’ve always had this terrible low self esteem“- “always” has the sound of..  In the Beginning.

“On the other hand i have enormous inner strength that I don’t know how to describe“- life longing for itself, life longing for more life. Nature deserves the credit, the nature of life itself.

“I feel intensely betrayed. It happens with every person”– In the Beginning, you were betrayed. And ever since, you imagine being betrayed by everyone.

“there could be weeks of very sweet and loving behaviour, next.. he tried to pick me apart.. blew hot and cold.. Approve and disapprove, good and bad, the same push and pull behaviour that leaves you frustrated because you cant win“- you wrote some of this regarding your mother and father, some regarding your ex boyfriend. Is there a difference?

anita

Dear sossi:

I have the time this morning, and a recent interest in exploring a term I used to dislike (because it is overly used and misused online): narcissism, specifically Narcissistic Personality Disorder as it relates to mothers who suffer from this disorder or from strong features of it..  aka narcissistic mothers. It is you who repeatedly brought up this term in regard to your mother.

You may not at all be in the mood to read this post, and not wish to read it- it’s fine with me: you are welcome to read or not, respond or not, however you feel. I will be developing my thoughts after quoting you, in what I expect to be a long post. My goal:  to help myself and anyone who may be reading this post, in this public forum. I will be focusing on your mother (and not on your father or your sister) because my post is about narcissistic mothers (one of which is my own), and how they affect their daughters’ lives from childhood into and through adulthood.

Only yesterday, Oct 26, 2021, you wrote: “I don’t think there are many interactions in my life that have been easy… I trust the person I’m with and then they throw a curve ball and I feel intensely betrayed. It happens with every person“, and in regard to your ex-boyfriend: The push and pull of the erratic behaviour,  there could be weeks of very sweet and loving behaviour, next, telling you that you’re the worst at this or just complete rage out of nowhere and its over“.

Almost 5 months ago, on May 2, 2021, you wrote: “My ex reminded me of my mother a lot. They were very similar in character…easygoing and playful and then able to be sharply unfair or unkind“. A month later, in June 7, you wrote about your mother: “I think I mentioned I thought she fit a narcissist profile, that I gathered this opinion over the last 4 or 5 years, and that this was probably why I put up with my ex’s behaviour as he was similar to her in behaviour. Loving, building up and then tearing down and insulting“.

– an article in Psychology today, “Why your partner may be like your parents, Is your childhood wrecking your romantic life?“, reads in part: “A body of psychological research suggests that our earliest relationships, especially with our mother, not only can influence how we are able to connect to others as adults—in romantic and other contexts—but also create internalized scripts or working models of how relationships work.. As human beings, we are drawn, on an unconscious level, toward the familiar… we do tend to choose a romantic partner who is similar to our opposite-sex parent… How do we end up marrying Mom if she’s been critical, unavailable or unloving?”

April 2021: “only a few years ago, I achieved something amazing, my first home and renovation..my mother never wanted to come and see it. When she did finally, she seemed sulky and attributed the success to her suggestions.. I felt completely deflated”, May 2021: “my mother was depressive and certainly in my teens I remember spending hours sorting out her problems with her…  a very complicated and demanding person..  the teasing that my mom liked to do. For example it was usual that when I had a boyfriend over and I was making something in the kitchen my mom would tease me and the boyfriend (as it happened with more than one boyfriend) would join in… This would be seen as a sort of bonding experience for them at my expense…  she had a lack of understanding, empathy and seemingly would turn any event back to focus on her own life and problems. You could start talking about something that was bothering you …and find yourself once again, going over her childhood issues with this friend she used to know… I have doubts sometimes about my mothers honest intentions and behaviours. Can it be a strange jealousy of her own daughters? This competitiveness and need to control that reveals itself in fights where she suddenly asserts, ‘this is MY home, MY car, MY etc.,… if suddenly.. I met some guy and we had more than (parents)… mother might end up sulking and/or crying in the bedroom because its not her spotlight.. when my parents met my ex´s parents.. My mom did something really weird though. They were sitting around a table and talking and she suddenly, like a young girl, got up and sat on my dad´s knee as she talked to them and laughed girlishly. As I was there, I thought it was highly bizarre behaviour”.

June 2021: “In the last few years I also came to see some awful jealous behaviour in (mother) regarding what little successes I had.. And for some reason I would always want her opinion when I should know better. It seems she also has a need to be more knowledgeable than me on subjects I have more experience in..my work mainly. These toxic exchanges are so common to me really that I don’t even think of it. But I know this is part of the problems I have. My mothers relationship with my father is also toxic. He never contradicts, he is subservient and feeds her need to bully…I used to get very angry about my dad´s lack of interest to protect his kids when she was unreasonable, he wont do anything to fix it. He allows her to continue behaving like a child. He would say and still would, that we need to appreciate our mother’s point of view…even when it was clear to a teenager or a young adult, that she was behaving selfishly and her temper tantrums were clearly encouraged when he helped her this way. I’ve pleaded with him to take her to a councellor as he in particular suffers the constant barrage of her thoughts himself , and sometimes her verbal abuse.. I guess even though I hate it, I take after him… I struggle to define my mother as purely narcissistic or selfish. As the children, we don’t want to believe that our parents can mean to hurt us. although her main behaviour has shown her selfish tendencies… I never thought about it when I was younger but in our family we don´t really hug or anything like that…. I learnt from a young age to rely on my own company, my own strength and my own council, which of course doesnt always work and sometimes feels like I need superhuman strength to get by”.

September 2021: “My mom seems furious with me  out of the blue and has called me selfish and ungrateful in a fit of rage over texts that escalated so fast so I switched my phone off. This happens once in a blue moon but when it does, is when I know I’m seeing the worst of my narcissistic mother and her selfish behaviour… I haven’t told my mom this story.. most likely she would not be sympathetic… she takes her anger out on her family. So the latest messages are in CAPS and says I’m the most ungrateful person she has ever met! There are more messages but I switched my phone off because its abuse…Her last message is that I should look up narcissism and empathy, its really evil and nasty…from my mother! ..when i was a young woman I tried to sympathise, to understand, to fix..my mother but I couldn’t.. I learned that no one had my back… my mother IS a narcissist.. She is currently not talking to me for an unknown reason. Its hurtful, its cruel and a mother should take the high road but my mom was never much like others”

October 2021: “if you recall I have had no contact with my parents for about a month, since my mom had a tantrum and got mad at me. She was maybe feeling left out or bored or who knows. And i was complaining a lot about my work.. But my mom doesnt understand…I can’t just quit my job as she says, and ‘do something else’ when i have nowhere to go”.

My thoughts (whatever comes to my mind this afternoon, to be added to tomorrow morning, in a second post): if there is a believably narcissistic mother out there- it’s clearly your mother: selfish, self-centered, self-absorbed: it’s ALL about her, and NOTHING about anyone else. She is Everything, everyone else is Nothing. She is stuck in a mental age fitting a young child, where she is the center, and everyone’s actions are perceived to be reactions to her.

There is nothing wrong or abnormal to be in this stage when one is an irl child, but when one is a Mother being in charge of an in-real-life child- it’s a disaster for the irl child. The irl child normally and naturally sees the actions of her mother as reactions to who (the irl child) is, and the reactions the irl child receives.. are are disastrous to the irl child’s self-image and self-esteem  (to how she sees and values herself).

This was my mother, her message: I am ALL there is, you are NONE. I exist.. you don’t. And so, I led my life as if I was None, a Nothing, and she was All, an Everything.

Very often in your posts, you focused on other people in your adult life (not on your mother): You focused for a while on the ex-boyfriend, you focused many times on work colleagues and even on strangers. In June 2021,  you wrote about people in general, people in your adult life:  “Someone is always enviously eyeing whatever I have and taking it away…it’s a repeat pattern… I think from an early age I learned that, if I had gained something, others were jealous and that always made me feel bad… Why am I attracted to witty and entertaining people only to find them mocking me and making fun that turns into hurtful cruelty?“- you are seeing your mother in every other person. I understand: there are other narcissistic people in the world, other than your mother, and there are some industries (like politics, and perhaps the real-estate industry) that attract narcissistic people more than other industries, but it cannot possibly be that .. everyone is your mother. Thing is, the Mother is so Powerful when she is narcissistic, that we see her in every person that we come across in adult life.

More tomorrow (in about 16 hours from now).

anita

Dear sossi:

Being self-centered and egocentric (thinking only of oneself, without regard for the feelings or desires of others) is a typical, healthy child development phase referred to as the Narcissistic phase of childhood and it occurs at about the ages of 2- 3 or 4. At this phase, the child says with authority mine!!, and “me!“, and relates to the whole world as being about them. In a sense it is all about them in this phase.

But when a child gets stuck in the Narcissistic phase of childhood and never grows out of it, we end up with a mother who is about me! and my!: “she suddenly asserts, ‘this is MY home, MY car, MY etc.”.

If it’s not about her, she is disinterested and sulky until she makes it about her: “I achieved something amazing, my first home and renovation..my mother never wanted to come and see it. When she did finally, she seemed sulky and attributed the success to her suggestions“, “it was usual that when I had a boyfriend over and I was making something in the kitchen my mom would tease me and the boyfriend… This would be seen as a sort of bonding experience for them“.

A child in the Narcissistic phase of childhood must develop a strong sense of self before he/she can relax that sense of ‘I’/Me/Mine so to be less demanding and to be okay with being fallible (capable of making mistakes or being wrong). This self- centeredness must change to pave the way to mental health in adulthood. To grow up able to function well in families and society, children must gradually gain both the ability to see other people’s viewpoints and feel empathy for other people’s suffering. But when a child does not grow out of this phase, you get a mother who displays “a lack of understanding, empathy and seemingly would turn any event back to focus on her own life and problems. You could start talking about something that was bothering you …and find yourself once again, going over her childhood issues“.

You asked: “Can it be a strange jealousy of her own daughters?”- yes, she is mentally still a 2-4 year old child, jealous at.. her own children. You wrote: “I have doubts sometimes about my mothers honest intentions”- her intentions: me/my/mine!, I am never wrong! and if you disagree with me, then you are wrong and I will punish you for it!

“If suddenly.. I met some guy and we had more than (parents)… mother might end up sulking and/or crying in the bedroom because its not her spotlight.. when my parents met my ex´s parents.. My mom did something really weird though. They were sitting around a table and talking and she suddenly, like a young girl, got up and sat on my dad´s knee as she talked to them and laughed girlishly. As I was there, I thought it was highly bizarre behaviour”- mentally, she is a 3 or 4 year old child, stuck in the Narcissistic phase of childhood: she must have the spotlight or else she sulks, feeling depressed.

“My mom seems furious with me out of the blue”- you must have taken the spotlight away from her, you must have made reference to your own life, to something that is yours. You said so yourself: “She was maybe feeling left out“.

Your father “never contradicts” her because he learned that contradicting her, that is, suggesting that she is wrong about anything, is followed by her punishing and abusing him: “He allows her to continue behaving like a child.. (throwing) temper tantrums.. and sometimes her verbal abuse”.

Mentally she is a child, but not nice child: she is a perpetual nasty child: a me/my/mine/ I-am-always-right/ you-are-always-wrong-and-I-will-punish-you-for-it! kind of a child. A 2-4 year old in an adult body and in the adult role of a mother and a wife.

“As the children, we don’t want to believe that our parents can mean to hurt us”- but when one parent is mentally a nasty child, she means to hurt you if you take away her spotlight or if you tell her that she is wrong. And when the other parent submits.. there are no adults in the house.

“I learnt from a young age to rely on my own company, my own strength and my own council”- because there are no adults in the house!

Growing up with a narcissistic mother and her submissive husband meant that you were not allowed your own spotlight in your own life, that your life had to be all about her and none about you. It also means that as an adult, every time you interact with her, you reinforce what she ingrained in you: that your life is not about you. She is still keeping you outside your own life, preventing you from taking ownership of your own mind, heart and life. And then, on top of it, you imagine that everyone is your mother: “Someone is always enviously eyeing whatever I have and taking it away…it’s a repeat pattern“.

It so happens that your work environment is similar to the home environment in which you grew up, but in addition to the objective similarity, you (inaccurately) project your home-life experience into it: “I’ve been working extremely hard and finding it tough, in property sales with lots of highly demanding and very entitled clients, working late, unable to manage everything i need to get done because I’m just on my own. Usually I can deal with the demands, the snobbery and the dismissive behaviours without commenting.. my boss doesnt respect anything i do and honestly seems either jealous or angry with me for I don’t know what.” (Sept 2021)- you are still trying to survive your home life by proxy, in the context of your work life:  working very hard to please your highly demanding, very entitled, dismissive, disrespectful,  jealous and angry aka narcissistic mother.

*I figure that your work colleagues are indeed competitive and maybe practicing unfair work ethics, but you add to it your experience with your mother, seeing disrespect, dismissiveness, jealousy and anger at times when it is not there, and therefore, you experience your work life as worse than it is or could be.

I don’t see a way for you- or for any adult child- to continue to interact with a narcissistic mother and be truly okay with it. You always end up paying a heavy price for interacting with her, and the price is: continuing to give her the ownership of your mind, your heart and your life, ownership that is not hers to have.

Think of your father: the price he pays to remain married to her is to accommodate her narcissistic behaviors, that is, to continue to give her the ownership of his mind, heart and life. It is not that he has the option to own his mind, heart and lie and live with her. It is either or: either he submits and continues to give up ownership of his mind-heart-life  or he moves out.  There is no educating your mother, no getting her to see the light. There is no way to .. train her to behave differently (she will find new way to continue her narcissistic ways).

You too do not have the option of changing her. To stop paying the heavy price you are still paying, you have to (1) no longer be exposed to her. In other words, to not have any contact with her, and (2) to then start the process of reclaiming ownership of your mind, heart and life.

anita

Dear sossi:

Glad you recovered enough from being sick to post. It is late afternoon here and I am not focused enough to read your post attentively, so I will be back to you Saturday morning, which is in about 15 hours from now.

anita

Dear sossi,

So here i am blaming myself for being lonely and lost in what to do. But ive struggled all my life. It would be nice to sit back and say, this is why my life has been so hard when others just cant understand it…ive always disappointed people. I could join the whatever is wrong with you club, and commiserate with other people..would that really help?

Yes, you are blaming yourself, you are very harsh on yourself, and it’s not helping. You believe you’ve always disappointed people and that there is something wrong with you. In my previous posts I’ve tried to highlight that even if you haven’t suffered physical abuse (which you’ve stressed several times in your posts), you did suffer emotional abuse at the hands of your narcissistic mother and your enabling father. And the consequences are visible today in your life.

The idea of “blaming” my state of being on my family doesnt sit well with me at all, since i always believed you could not blame others for your own mistakes or your situation

You don’t need to blame your parents. A therapist once said that healing is a fact finding, not a fault finding mission. In order to heal, you need to know the facts of your childhood and upbringing. And you need to heal the emotional wounds caused by that kind of upbringing. It’s doable. But you need to stop blaming yourself, and start having compassion for yourself as a child, and for yourself now, as a grown woman.

• This reply was modified 3 years ago by Tee.
• This reply was modified 3 years ago by Tee.

Dear sossi,

I feel for you, really. I hear you and your struggles.

Basically its lonely to deal with all this and accept, my life is not going to be like others. I know that most women my age are dealing with family issues of their own, kids and husbands and so on,

You were expected to get married, have kids, have an amazing social circle etc… and these expectations came from your mother. You not having what other women have makes you so bad about yourself. You feel like a disappointment (ive always disappointed people), and a large part of it is that you haven’t met the expectations of your mother. And I believe you’re still trying, but then failing, and it just makes you feel worse each time.

But you know what? Even if you had a perfect life and ticked all the boxes, you still wouldn’t make your mother happy and proud of you. She is unable to be truly happy for you – on the contrary, she tends to get jealous at you because that’s how narcissistic mothers are. She would find ways to bring you down and put the attention on herself.

My mother wasn’t narcissistic but she was/is wounded in different ways, and it took me a long time to realize that no matter what I do, how great successes in life I might have, she’ll never be happy. Because she was inherently miserable, and there was nothing I could do to make her happy. And boy did I try, all of my childhood and adolescence…

You wrote earlier:

But my mother was depressive and certainly in my teens i remember spending hours sorting out her problems with her. I think i believed in my early teens that i could fix these things. She must have felt very alone herself but is also a very complicated and demanding person.

I too spent hours sorting my mother’s problems, trying to make her happy, trying to make her realize that her life is good, that she has all the reasons for happiness… but to no avail, nothing I said or did could make her happy. This made me felt like a failure, like I wasn’t good enough. And it created a big wound in me… I believe something similar might have happened to you – no matter what you did and how “perfect” you were, it was never good enough, it was never acknowledged… it’s traumatic for a child.

I didnt think i had to make the choice to stay away from my parents but i see i should have instead of seeking any comfort there which was a bad choice. My mother´s negative interpretations colour my own.

That’s very true. After your breakups, you sought comfort from your parents – which is a logical thing to do – but with narcissistic or otherwise toxic parents, it doesn’t work. They aren’t able to truly empathize – they end up hurting us even more!

Every time my relationships have broken down, i have lost everything i built…my home, friends, work and social status, this last relationship was the only one where i did not move country afterwards.

This means you made the man you were involved in the center of your life and you actually built your life around him. With your ex you had not only a romantic but also a professional  relationship, right? Maybe his friends became your friends? You were attracted to people similar to your mother, whom you dedicated yourself completely, believing that they would finally give you the love and appreciation you deserve. Bit they never did in the end, did they? And you ended up without everything, because you built everything around them…

Built everything around a person who reminds you of your mother…. who will never give you the love and appreciation that you crave for… and that’s why you suffered great losses.

But none of that is your fault. You were just a little girl wanting her mother’s approval. Even as a grown woman, you were still that little girl.

That’s why I say, please try to forgive yourself. Have compassion for yourself. You didn’t have it easy. But you can turn your life around, slowly but surely. You can learn how to build your life around yourself and your own needs and preferences. You can learn how to let go of trying to please your mother… and how to make your life about yourself, not about her.

• This reply was modified 3 years ago by Tee.