Explaining narc mother to other people

[Skeena77]

Hi there,

Here is a question for everyone who has a narcissistic/ abusive mother. I have hardly any contact with her and my father is dead. My daughters don’t either as she said she didn’t want any contact with them (but then she went and told everyone that I wouldn’t let her see her granddaughters). I’m more or less feeling okay with low contact (obs I don’t feel okay with never having had a real mother, but having little contact with her is the best solution imo).

Question: what do you say to people who ask about your mum / family. Like, „are you visiting your mum for Christmas?“ etc. I’ve just started a new job in a new city and this kind of small talk happens all the time and I don’t have a good reply. I don’t want to open up to colleagues and strangers too much but I also don’t want to appear rude.

thank you other mummies for helping!

Hugs yes i cant move and actually the long this has gone on for im not going to. I pray she will die as it might stop some of the harassment. My dad thinks its no big deal. I mean why you upset they didnt take your kids yet......its a nightmare

I’m so sorry. It sounds absolutely devastating.

Yes, some of us have struggled for over 55 years with a mum who used all the oxygen in the room and begrudged you even your name.

Only recently have we become aware that there is a categorisation of disordered thinking that describes it.

People who have one in their lives often have more than one, as being raised by one both equips you to manage the situation and makes you vulnerable to normalising it.

If you don’t have one, assume you were raised with healthy boundaries, rather than we being quick to label people we fall out with.

I'm only saying it's terminology we now have readily available where once we might not have and that diagnosis in any clinical way is unlikely in most cases for precisely the reasons those with experience of family members have stated in other posts.

I needed to read this thread today; it's so so lonely when no one understands in real life. I'm too choked up to share my story today - but I appreciate each and every one of you who have to live with the daily pain of having narcissistic parents .

Agree with this. Please trust us when we say we know and recognise all the signs of a narc DM. I am now middle aged and only in recent years, realised the effect of DM's raging, mad, crazy narcissism pervades every single fibre of myself.

Some classics from my childhood to adulthood every daughter of a narc DM may be able to relate to:

• Consistent joke for more than 40 years that I was the wrong baby she took home. Got siblings to join in laughing at this.
• Rages and threats of suicide for more than 40 years, continuing to this day. Usually well timed around Christmas, New Year, birthdays.
• Being quasi religious and believing she can talk to God who answers each and everyone of her prayers. Including praying for the death of relatives she dislikes.
• Cutting out all her relatives. Including her own children but not the golden child.
• Jealous of her children and anyone else who dares to achieve anything in life. No one is as clever as her.
• Pitting children against each other by spreading gossip and talking shit behind everyone's backs.
• Faking illnesses. Minimising others illnesses, every time someone has a health issue, she has suffered more.

Want me to go on? Sorry for oversharing, that's also a sign of being raised by a narc DM.

We've both got the teeshirt then. 💐

It is awful. Could be years of it too.. I had her for xmas just the day. Plenty. Got quite controlling few years ago. We away the night. Wanted details where. I said not sure why you need to know where. That kind of thing.

Narcs never have a diagnosis or seek therapy because it’s always somebody else’s fault.

Not all narcs are cult leaders, but I bet it’s safe to say that all cult leaders are Narcs…

Some of it is so trivial it doesn’t translate well. Mine was fretting about a pudding I made. She wanted to take some home with her. Luckily I had made an extra one. She didn’t want the extra one in the glass I could spare, she wanted the bigger one in the glass I wanted to keep, that should have been eaten by one of us that evening. How an adult can tantrum about wanting an unfair share of a desert someone else made is beyond me. But part of the ‘everything in the world is mine, you only exist by my will’ attitude.

Hugs to you and all brought up by narcissistic parents. Yes, unless you’ve been brought up with a narcissistic parent you have no idea of what it was like or the lasting affect on your life. My DH of several decades, tries to understand, but he was brought up in a very traditional family.
My parents were both narcissistic, they acrimoniously divorced when I was little and continued their narcissistic lifestyle. They are both dead now, distancing or going non contact is the only way, especially to protect your own children.

Exactly this. How do you explain to friends/ partners that your narc parent really doesn't love you and will go out of their way to destroy your life, when all they've ever known is loving parents? Some of the things they do are so small and snide and insidious they defy explanation and can be seemingly written off as " petty", unless you can see them as part of the bigger picture, which in my case is decades of emotional abuse. Its Death by a thousand papercuts. Solidarity to us all.

Oh, how I get this. It's their sheer sense of entitlement - everything, including us as their adult children, belong entirely to them. We are not allowed to voice out opinions, have our own needs, have our own identities - we are there's. My narc mother would have pulled a stunt like this. If you hadn't given her the pudding glass she wanted, I assume she would rant and rave and wail -what had she done to deserve such terrible treatment, how could you treat your poor old mum in this way, what a wicked daughter you must be....

I hope today that you are doing better and I send you strength and love!

Yes, always the other person is selfish and uncaring and wicked. So terrible to hear that so often as a young girl and never to hear that you’re wonderful and amazing and sublime, just the way you are…

I pointed out the one I planned to send would clingfilm better, but she said the tall glass would have a bigger space at the top.

I stopped arguing, and sent her home with a block of frozen spiced red cabbage, some ham, and the pudding I wanted to send in a Tupperware that the tall glass wouldn’t have fitted in.

She can be surprised by kindness. She’s so stingy herself that she thinks she needs to demand and insist to be considered.

When you grow up seeing one person being appeased and given everything they want, it’s a reasonable strategy to make sure that you are that person and not the appeaser.

Gosh how apt I've just come home to your post! Went for a coffee with a good friend today and was telling her how through 50 years of my life, I never heard not one good one word from my mother about my character! Fifty years of how selfish, uncaring, wicked I am or picking over my failures, mistakes and flaws - oh, how she loves to share those with anyone who'll listen ( her next door neighbours/ strangers/ the milkman...) . Not one word of encouragement or praise for anything positive I've done. Heartfelt sympathies for us all who share the same sort of shitty family - we were dealt a terrible hand.

Good on you for not giving in, if it were me I'd want to tell her where to shove the bloody pudding - but you can't argue with the narcissist, let alone reason. So bite your tongue and seemingly capitulate, makes for an easier time of it. Can identify with the stinginess too - my mother never puts her hand in her pocket - she expects to be treated like the queen she believes she is, even if you're flat out broke or struggling. Nothing is ever good enough.

Does she have an official diagnosis?

Some people are narcissistic. They don't need a certificate. The diagnosis is Narcissistic Personality Disorder but as PPs point out, the people most likely to have it are the people least likely to seek a diagnosis because their narcissism is only a problem for others, not them.

Some people are narcissistic, nasty, selfish and cruel without it needing to be medicalised into a diagnosis. If someone was a bully you wouldn't need an official diagnosis of 'Bully' before giving advice.

I hate the way children (adult children) are disbelieved when it comes to parental cruelty.

For all of you suffering with a narc in the family, can I ask how do you move on emotionally? I can limit or go no contact and remove myself physically, but I can't shift the feelings and free myself of the pain. I'm continually replaying awful memories, especially at Christmas time when surrounded by normal, ' happy' families.

DH helped me a lot, we have managed to turn a lot of my fathers behaviour into funny anecdotes but we do tend to have quite a grim sense of humour anyway.
I was NC with him for the last 5 or 6 years of his life and it was great, very liberating. I ocassionally have nightmares where I feel really really helpless and he is just laughing at me but other than that his shitty parenting doesn't really affect me any more

I'm also having flashbacks to awful episodes from childhood and adulthood. I let them play out in my head and then I put them away. Usually I am just aghast that this shit actually happened. I have very little memory of the last 40 years or so. I just have a handful of extremely vivid and upsetting flashbacks.

I had some therapy whilst my marriage was breaking down and the advice was to try and see a bad emotion or feeling and let it sail past you like a leaf floating down a river. It's there and it will go you don't need to grab hold of it just let it float on by. It actually helped me a lot.

It's so hard though and it's so incredibly painful that I've literally had to train myself not to give a shit. My main motivation is not to pass this onto my DC.

I really understand what you mean about forgetting a lot of your life - i think for a long long time I could block it all out and then bam, hit my mid forties and it hit me like a ten ton truck. I can't put the lid back on Pandora box and the suppressed emotions are overwhelming me. I really need to not give a shit about her, but the hurt is indescribable at times. I need to try something - i like your imagining a painful emotion as a leaf floating down the river idea.

Ha! I'm partial to a bit of dark humour at times too! I think when the day comes, I'd feel so immensely relieved that she's no longer around to inflict pain anymore. I feel I've been grieving my entire life anyway for a mother I never had