Quotes from Narcissistic Mothers (& support for their victims) Thread 3

[01Name]

Following on from this thread: www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/4610023-to-ask-for-your-quotes-from-narcissistic-mothers?page=39&reply=120137262, started by @itsgoodtobehome as a tongue-in-cheek repository for anecdotes of appalling remarks/deeds from parents/siblings with rampant NPD. It morphed into a place where those of us suffering the effects of such behaviour could share experiences, solidarity, advice and support. It continued to a second thread here: Quotes from Narcissistic Mothers (& support for their victims) Thread 2 | Mumsnet I hope this thread can continue the good work of its predecessors. Your voice will be heard; your opinion and thoughts matter. You are welcome and valued here. The world is a better place with you in it, despite what you might have been conditioned to believe by those who brought you into it. x

My narcissistic mother taught me very early on - through her behaviour and treatment of me, that family, that blood is not thicker than water. You wouldn’t accept abuse from a stranger, why would you accept it from a family member? Sadly, so many people do and this is how generational trauma gets perpetuated.

Because of her behaviour, because of how very emotionally immature she is, dangerously so, I realised also that you don’t have to automatically respect your elders, just because they are older, because it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are wiser in any way, or that they know better than you. Of course, there should be a baseline of respect for everyone, but actually respect is ultimately earned.

Growing up I believed that she was never, ever wrong, even when clearly she was very wrong, often. Her motto was always “I am always right, even when I am wrong!”. So messed up.

Yes, our mothers trained us perfectly to meet their every need as a child, it's not wonder we are the same as an adult.
My adult life and self doesn't feel real. I feel like I play at being a grown up.

And the babyish voices?!

Mine would often slip into ‘infant speak’ using silly names for things and putting on a child like tone, mostly to me and not very often in public - unless she was trying to get someone (usually male) to do something for her.

I wonder now if it was all part of an emotional immaturity because she would also act like an irrational and petulant toddler.
”I don’t like cream cakes, take them away!”
”But you liked them last week?”
”I don’t like them now!”
“I hope we’re not going to XYZ because I HATE XYZ!”
”If we go to XYZ, I’m just going to sit in the car! (and ruin it for everyone else)”

Or wait until I served a meal and would then announce that she never eats chicken/broccoli/whatever because it makes her ill, when I bloody well knew she did and had specifically cooked ‘whatever’ because I was aware that she could be awkward.

She also had this odd way of referring to herself quite often in the third person or as ‘we’
”We don’t like cream cakes”
”We never eat cream cakes”
”Narc Mother hates roast chicken”
“Broccoli makes Narc Mother feel ill”

I too am a people pleaser and find it hard to stick up for myself but I'm getting there!

Yesterday at work I quite rightly told my line manager about something he did to compromise me calmly and firmly. It was so hard but I did it.

I'm no longer young and I'm not having it anymore. I had decades of trying to please my DM, then boyfriends, friends, bosses and it's got me nowhere really.

We are all playing catch up to get the fuck away from these spiteful, jealous women but we are doing it!

@JohnPrescottsPyjamas - my DM would constantly try to get others to baby her or baby herself.

She would simper, blink alot, pout, sulk and scream. She used to make me feel sick the way she would do this with men.

She too tried to use food as a weapon. She had a limited range of food she ate. Plaice, chicken (only the breast), beef, sausages, milk, very weak tea, biscuits and white bread. And only small often childlike portions because apparently she didn't have a big appetite. She would have a go at my DF and his family who ate well because she thought it was greedy. Yet she was the size of a house (not in her head though).

Every tiny little thing was made into such a big deal because she refused to grow up.

Like your DM they do it for attention.

Touché to that!

This baby talk has triggered a weird
Memory
Years ago i dropped round dear friends house.
Her younger sister was there with a new boyfriend - 21.
NM was entertaining- bringing food , drinks etc.
all perfectly normal- except the way nm was being with the young lad.
Now bearing in mind NM was mid sixties and though little she carried a lot of weight - she was giggling away like Brigette Jones
I was highly embarrassed and still haven't worked out exactly what was going off. (Suffice to say the boyfriend didn't last long)

Completely the same. Especially in my relationships. I let a narc control me for 20 years until he died in 2020. I’m sure I didn’t see it was wrong at the time because this was the type of “love” I got from NM and thought it was very normal.

Food was definitely a weapon.

Like your NM, mine was a good size but made out she ate like a bird and would make a point of either refusing food served to her - even though I knew it wasn’t things she disliked - or leaving most of what she was served. Usually with a snide comment that she “liked her food cooked properly” or “it wasn’t hot enough” This often happened in restaurants too so and was unnecessary and embarrassing.

And yes, in her mind she was a svelte slip of a woman. She would comment quite brutally about others weight and how greedy they obviously were and how could they let themselves get to that size!

She would tell others that she only ate salad and fish or was a vegetarian, depending on which way the wind was blowing, but I know she enjoyed a stonking great blow out on the quiet too. She also used to say how she hated gin as it made her feel sick, but certainly never refused a G&T when offered.

Her cupboards were full of biscuits and chocolate bars, so she was clearly ‘preloading’ before she went out so she could maintain this appearance of restraint and moderation.

The food thing is part of the script. My sister was (is) anorexic and its no wonder. Being the 'right' weight was part of the pressure we were under. I never managed it as I'm a but overweight so have been shamed for years. Mum is also quite big but pretends she hardly eats.

Re. The restaurants. Mum us obsessed with having the best table, usually 'the window seat'. She is SO embarrassing in restaurants thinking she's the only customer, needing the best of everything

Mum also has a different voice for every occasion. It shoes how fragile her ego is. If she's with her 'very wealthy' friends (as she calls them), then she has her posh voice on.

"A Moment on the lips, forever on the hips" anytime I had a piece of cake or sweet. The she laughed as if it was a joke if anyone outside the family heard - it wasn't! I still rebel and hear that in my head when I indulge my sweet tooth.

Mine would always say "Little pickers wear bigger knickers" if you reached for a snack outside meal times

Omg the restaurant thing I can, unfortunately, relate to. No table is ever good enough and the way she speaks to the staff is mortifying, always so snooty and arrogant. My mother is absolutely a narc and my father her enabler. Both of them physically and emotionally abusive throughout my childhood. I always knew from a very young age something was wrong with my mother, unfortunately I learned later in life (during therapy) that my father was also an abuser, that one hurt as I always thought he was on my side. Sad how I could think that given that he was also, very obviously, abusive but he was the lesser of two evils.

Like all of you I could write an essay on some of the batshit stuff my mother has come out with, I’ll give a few I can think of.

tie your hair up, your face is too round to leave it down. She then encouraged me at about 15 to join weight watchers with her, I was a size 10.

youre a whore. In relation to having a boyfriend at 15, who I ended up being with til 19. I think this was a lot of projection tbh as from what I have put together I think she may have been the promiscuous one as a teen.

your sister is such a lady, everyone says so, not you though, you definitely wouldn’t be called that (accompanied with a demented laugh).

you’re giving me a heartattack. When I said I wouldn’t visit a (golden child, if that’s even possible ?) cousin in hospital who has just had a baby when I was newly pregnant and sick. I went, of course.

Both my parents are mental, I think my mother is a malignant narc or worse. Total people pleaser for most of my life until the last couple of years since therapy. I’m now LC but can see NC at some point. Being in their company actually makes me sick, all my mother does is bitch about people/“friends”/ strangers.

the day I became a mother was the best day of my life, I look at my two beautiful babies faces and can’t imagine a world where I would hurt them like I’ve been. If I can do one thing right in life it’s that my kids don’t have to recover from their childhoods.

I knew someone who found a lovely boyfriend when she was about 20 years old and nursing, and her mother was jealous and used to flirt with the boyfriend. Sounds similar. Really, really embarrassing and how awful of the mother!

I think I mentioned this one in the very first thread - but physical touch.
I couldn’t bare her touching me. I don’t have a problem with hugging and cuddles with my DH and my now adult DCs, but she would want to grab my hand or would want me to put my arms around her - but I couldn’t. I’m not sure if this was a deep seated revulsion and memory of her physical abuse of me as a child, but even when she was dying, I felt repelled by the thought of even stroking her arm.

When I was little, she would grab my arm in an apparent attempt to ‘prevent’ me hurting myself and then subtly dig her nails into my flesh until it was painful and I cried out, then she would innocently ask me what was the matter.
I was regularly slapped for things I didn’t even realise I had done and she had this old knobbly Irish walking stick made from blackthorn that was regularly used as her weapon of choice when she wanted to really pile on the abuse.

As others have said, having my own children has somehow helped enormously. She always told me that one day when I was a parent, I would be exactly the same as her - as though that somehow justified her behaviour - but I’m not. I’m still the same child who knew she was wrong when I was experiencing her treatment of me and I’ve never used any of her methods of ‘discipline’

I’m not the perfect parent. I’ve made a lot of errors but hopefully learnt as I’ve gone along. I’ve not always handled things well, but my children have never been frightened of me and as a family we can, and do look back and genuinely laugh about some of those moments and situations that seemed so serious at the time.

I could never do that with my NM. It was all about rewriting history ensuring that she was cast in the most favourable light with absolutely no mistakes on her part and maintaining the myth that my childhood and upbringing was perfection.

I've got photos when I was a small baby of me on her lap but I've got no memories of her ever hugging me. My DF was very affectionate.

I remember one of her friends being sympathetic to her and she was shaking and gibbering. The second her friend left she stopped and walked around with this huge grin. She clearly thought she had conned this woman. To what end though? Just the thrill of conning someone? And she never did it again.

All those people she put before me and not one of them helped her when she divorced (as she wished) from my DF or at any point after. And yet still she gave some of the money to a friend from school she hadn't seen for decades. I had lost my home such as it was and she didn't give me any. She didn't even try to contact me to see if I was ok.

She lived an entirely pointless life.

None of us are perfect but we've done the best we can. Our DMs deliberately did a shit job with cruelty.

@CherryGarcia23 and @Turquioseblue do you have any insight into why they were so horrible to you ?
Are their siblings the same ?
Are narcs born like that or does it develop ?

I am very lucky to have an amazing Mum and it truly is eye opening to read of the terrible experiences you had.
Wishing you peace and love in your lives now.

@LadyEloise1 I can’t answer for the other posters but I can say from my own experience, if that helps at all.

I’ve always suspected that intergenerational trauma is at the root of my mother’s behaviour/issues, but I don’t know much at all about her upbringing. It just seems to be the most logical explanation for her treatment of us - that something similar happened to her at as a child and she was triggered by us/traumatised/otherwise affected by either her childhood or having children, or both.

That said, her own mother was a trained counsellor, so presumably open to talking about emotions etc. DM’s sibling is also nothing like her.

That makes everything seem a lot more complicated, as there’s no obvious cause I can trace. I’m reading a lot at the moment about trauma to try and piece together her behaviour towards me, in terms of how I can heal but also what may have happened to her to make her like she is/was.

It’s a question I’ve often tried to fathom out.

All I can think it might be is about power and control. My NM was certainly brought up in an abusive household herself - although her 3 siblings didn’t appear to become narcs themselves - but she was the eldest, so possibly the environment had the most effect on her?

She never achieved very much career wise or seemed to have much satisfaction in her life, and only ended up financially secure because of my father. However, she had a permanent chip on her shoulder about others success, particularly women, and could never give anyone credit for it. It was always because they ‘knew’ someone, had just been lucky or had ‘clearly slept with the right people’ She always denied it, but was very envious and concerned of others perceptions of her.

Because her early life was so chaotic, she seemed to crave attention as an adult and would manipulate situations to be in control. If the weather was hot, she would always be cold and vice versa. If someone commented how nice something/someone was, she would always find fault. One week she would love a certain food, next week she would ‘hate it and it made her ‘feel sick’ etc etc. Maybe this was her way of attaining the power she didn’t have as a child and her treatment of me was a reflection of what she received from others?
Coupled with my theory that narcs seem to remain emotionally childlike and not move to the next development stage of empathy and understanding their impact on others, would explain a lot of her behaviour.

I can’t really justify it, but I’d very much like to understand why some become narcs and most people don’t. It won’t change anything but it would help me process my own experiences.

Thank you for replying @RenewableNewt and @JohnPrescottsPyjamas

I am speechless. Delighted you have gone NC, your mother sounds extremely damaged and damaging.

You are not alone. I am pregnant and went low contact with my mum about 2 months ago for various reasons. I have enjoyed my pregnancy so much more as a result of not speaking to her more than is absolutely necessary.

Wishing you the best of luck with TTC :)