Following some counselling I have established that I have a narcissistic mother and I have taken the advice of the counsellor to set and maintain boundaries. Part of my learning curve has been that boundaries are not well received and sometimes the anger at the boundary is worse than the original behaviour. Anyway, I stumbled across a video (or the insta algorithm found me) that said you should not always communicate your boundary to the narcissist and that you can set one for yourself and maintain it privately. This has been working for a few months as one of my boundaries has been to not share personal information about myself or my family with my mother. All information is light hearted and factual in order to maintain a dialogue (I’m not ready for NC for various reasons). “X has chosen their a-levels” or Y has painted the bathroom green”.
The issue I have is that I have a lot going on in my personal and professional life and I am not sharing any of it. But what my mum sees is someone ticking along with a full but uneventful life. This means that she perceives me to be available to her to meet her needs. And right now she is very very cross with me for not being available for something. I have explained that I’m not available but she now requires me to “keep her informed” on the basis that she will then be able to better understand (or judge?) when I’m available to her.
Up until now this boundary has worked as she has shown no active interest in my life except for one area where she sensed some drama and I did verbalise a specific boundary.
Sorry that was long. Where do I go from here? I know the right thing to do will be to hold my ground and say “I don’t need to tell you, you just have to trust me” but we come from an enmeshed family with no boundaries so this will not be easy.