Did you find therapy helped regarding narc mother?

[Jourl]

Not sure this is the right board to post this question, but I wondered if anyone had experiences of going to therapy to help heal / come to terms with the realisation your mother is a narcissist?

I'm unsure if it would be of benefit although all I can do right now is constantly listen to podcasts and realise just how toxic she was. I do want someone to talk to but I'm not sure if a therapist is what I'm looking for or if it helps.

I didn't find it helped at all when I was going through fertility issues.

I had therapy as a 20 something with a trainee counsellor. I am not sure, all it did was make me focus on her more and reinforce the dynamic. Also I find reading about toxic parents makes me focus on the toxicity.

What I do find helpful is going for walks and practising the acceptance commitment therapy approach. It's basically accepting/identifying/allowing space for my emotions and not dismissing them.

That's now developed into me thinking about how I parent myself and what I need - a firm loving internal parent - and the kind of language I use with myself, and to mentalise what a good enough mother is to me. This has been a helpful approach for me.

Mine was a narc father, but yes. It's helped me massively.
Been going for 3 years now and it's been life changing.
Like the previous poster said, it's been teaching me to allow myself to feel, to breath, to not be perfect all the time, to be kind to myself. Basically teaching me to love myself the way my parent should have loved me but never did.

Mine was my father and they referred me to a counsellor for psychological child abuse and it was the best thing that ever happened to me

It helped in understanding that it was her not me.

Nothing I've tried has helped with the impact.

I have coping strategies but my life is still impacted daily by it and I haven't seen her for 12 years just because no matter howuch inner child, inner voice, core value work I do and have done, it's still there. The damage is a fundamental part of who I am.

It gets easier but it's not the same as not having had that experience.

I did and what helped me was coming to terms with the fact that my mother genuinely has mental health problems. I try to imagine that if it had been a physical issue, such as loss of sight, I would have been sympathetic about her inability to do things that other mothers do. I wish she wasn't a narc but I can't change that and she can't or won't recognise that there is anything wrong with her behaviour. As PP said, the problem is her, not me.

I have been NC with my mother for over a decade. Over the years I have considered counselling/therapy a lot, especially because I have a dread fear that I won't be a good mother to my own children because of my experience of being mothered. I function very well and am happy but there are clearly some residual effects on me - not in terms of mental health really, but more in my ability to form and maintain relationships, although I am happily married, and I can be quite 'detached' emotionally.

I have sort of wanted to address these things, but ultimately don't want to upset the apple cart so to speak. I'm not sure if starting a process of unpacking and analysing things from the past might actually do more harm than good, if you see what I mean? None of it would change anything and because I have been NC for so long, I have been able to put a lot of the actual trauma behind me.

It's a hard one and I've never really known what the best thing to do is...

This is what I need really - I am very hard on myself and in those 'name three things you love about yourself' type quizzes, I couldn't even pick one because perfection was the only option when I was a child, and I'm not perfect.

But I do worry that dragging it all out into the light after all this time might retraumatise me.

I really understand your concern.
It's about finding a great therapist who you feel safe with.
If that means you have to try a few to eventually end up with the right one, then so be it.
But a good therapist won't retraumatise you. They will make sure they strenghten your emotional coping skills first, before they start digging into your traumas.

Thank you for you're replies. I do think I'm not going to get much more out of it than I already am from doing my own work. The main things I'm looking at doing is breaking any generational trauma I can etc and ensure I don't copy her style of parenting.

Did anyone find their siblings also realised and that they did end up growing closer?

I've gone NC with my mother and step dad but still in contact with sister who I'd love to grow closer to, I do find she's an amazing individual but we haven't ever been close.