I’m only a couple chapters in and thankful I started this book.
I tend to see myself as always in a healing state. Every day is another opportunity for better, practicing better actions and beliefs.
While, yes, I was the victim of narcissistic behavior – I really hate that word on myself, “victim” – I also fought back. I wasn’t the fawn type. Never was a people pleaser, never will be. But fighting back taught me many unhealthy things. So I hope you know, I never want to glamorize it.
To heal from those learned reactions I feel I have to be self-aware and choose better all the time. The more I seek out things that make me a healthier human the more I can teach/train myself and my body what is true, good, just, and beautiful – even safe.
If I can identify things I currently do or have done, even learned or thought I knew that aren’t healthy coping mechanisms I can zap them with my laser of learning. (haha!)
But really, if I can learn it, I can unlearn it.
This may not be your experience and that’s ok, but I think you should find some help walking you through your first steps of becoming a human again after leaving the clutches of a NM. And I mean that in the most loving and sincere sense. I had professional help and I’m grateful.
Chapter 1 Thoughts
The first chapter touches on the Taboo of Questioning A Mothers Love. The opening chapter immediately started with validation, which, I will say, felt good to read. I can think of countless times I expressed my pain to someone and they silenced me so quickly, appalled that I would lie about a mother like that.
” We may think we live in very psychologically aware times, but we haven’t yet managed to shake off our mythical version of motherhood — the myth that says a mother by definition is capable of love, protection, and kindness. The mother myth gives great cover to unloving mothers, who far too often operate undisturbed while their husbands, other family members and society deflect any criticism or scrutiny aimed at them. “
How many times have we heard “She’s your mother, of course she loves you!”
To which I’ve always wanted to say, “I’m not so sure, SHARON! She was definitely my first bully though.” One can only hear, “I wish I’d aborted you”, so many times before you truly believe it. But that’s what she wanted- for me to believe it. She wanted me to know exactly how she felt. For me to hurt because she didn’t like my existence. I think a part of her did love me. I don’t know what part, but her care for others was more like a faulty revolving door. Sometimes it came around for you, sometimes it didn’t.
I think good mothers should be glorified and more women should talk to each other about mothering and childrearing. We should keep learning from each other because community is important. But, I also think our society needs to take away the kneejerk assumption that all mothers are good and wonderful and shame on you for thinking otherwise. That assumption keeps abuse hidden for far too long.
Things that I underlined and made me feel something:
Pg 14. – “You try to make peace with her and find yourself pulled back into a web of criticism and manipulation. Once more you’re the ungrateful one. The selfish one. The unforgiving one. The one who will always owe her.”
Pg 15. – “Struggling with the pain and repercussions of having an unloving mother can be intensely lonely and isolating.”
Somehow I lost everything so many times over. No one understands unless they’ve been through it. No one really believes you because they can’t fathom a reality where a mother is abusive to her own children.
Pg 17. – “The great common denominator among women with unloving mothers is the longing for validation — to find someone who will say “Yes, what you experienced really happened. Yes, your feelings are justified. I understand.” Great pressure is brought to bear on daughters to not tell about the verbal, emotional, and even physical cruelties for their past and present. As you can see, for children the rules become clear early: Don’t tell anyone. Don’t even tell yourself. That’s how you learn to bury, minimize, and mistrust your own truth.”
My goodness, how we crave validation and understanding. But the response is always, “But she’s your mother surely it wasn’t this bad.” or “Maybe you were just a difficult child.” We’ve been gaslit out of understanding even our own selves for so long. Each negative reaction is a reminder, don’t tell, bury, minimize, don’t trust your own memory.
Pg 20. – “Much of their behavior is driven by forces outside their conscious awareness, or emotions they are afraid of confronting: a crippling sense of insecurity, an unshakable feeling of deprivation, deep disappointment in their own lives. As they look for relief from their own fears and sadness, they use their daughters to shore up their feelings of power or agency or control, The hallmark of all these mothers is a lack of empathy and their intense self-centeredness blinds them to the suffering they create.”
Pg 22. – “Mothers who neglect, betray, batter. […] icily unable to summon any warmth at all, leaving their daughters unprotected from abuse […] even physically abusing their daughters themselves.”
Pg 23. – “From an unloving mother, a girl develops high tolerance for mistreatment.”
This one hit hard I think. I didn’t want to sit with that statement, but I needed to. I thought back to so many times I should have stood up for myself, confronted an issue, or stopped a situation. During those times I had just accepted I will be treated this way, that I wouldn’t get better treatment. This was something I had to accept, not fight against.
Pg 25. “Narcissistic mothers don’t make us feel unloved because they love themselves too much. They make us feel unloved because they are so absorbed with making themselves seem important, blameless, and exceptional that there is little room for anyone else.”
Pg 31. – “Dana’s mother expertly shifted any discomfort she felt to her daughter, never responding at all except to say, in words and gestures well chosen for their dramatic, guilt-inducing effect, “Look how much you’ve hurt me.”
Pg 32. – ” ..any time you disagree with the severe narcissist or criticize her, her raw nerve endings tell her only one thing: She’s been attacked.”
Pg 33. – “a severe narcissist is highly unlikely to admit being wrong, no matter how egregious her behaviorm and she’ll say whatever she feels she must portray herself as being in the right. She’ll lie about what she has promised, lie about behavior, that you’ve witnessed , and lie about what other people have said and done. […] she may throw you totally off balance by denying your very reality with lines like: That never happened. I never said that. Are you sure you didn’t dream this? You have a vivid imagination.
My goodness I’ve heard each of these verbatim!
pg 34 – “Then she’ll step up the attack with criticism like: You’re so unforgiving. You’re so overly sensitive. I was only kidding. What happened to your sense of humor? You always take me the wrong way.” […] Leaving you confused and wondering if she could be right. […] when it serves them, they’ll insist that night is day and black is white. “
Again! Every single one of these!!
Pg 35. – “Yelling, screaming, and insults to your worth are common responses to even neutral comments that disagree with the enraged narcissist’s point of view. You’re judged as good or bad depending on whether you totally support her. And she may attack with all the fury of a wounded animal, with no thought to the effect her words have on you.”
For many years that was her only response to any comment or situation.
Pg 36. – “Criticism flows […]anytime they feel insecure, disappointed, or deflated. […] if you’re enjoying yourself, you must be neglecting something important, or getting in trouble.”
I remember her using the term “feeling deflated” a lot growing up. Criticism or outbursts always followed.
Pg 37. – “She used every opportunity to pick on me when I got older. I just couldn’t make her happy. […] She would say “good job” to me once in a while, but I could tell she didn’t believe it.”
A rare compliment felt forced. It came sometimes through a grimace- or worse a huge, fake smile that sent shivers down my spine. Never was it genuine.
Pg 37. – “you become afraid to try, and expect to be shot down if you do.”
My gosh, that was most of my life. This sentence felt so freeing but simultaneously infuriating. The big steps in my life I passed up just because I felt I wasn’t believed in – as if they knew something I didn’t about my own future.
Pg 38. – “The less secure a severely narcissistic mother feels, the more extreme her drama, anger and attempts to feel superior are likely to be. “
I could spend 3 years on this quote alone with experiences at home.
Pg 38. – “…some are haunted by the contrast between their “good mother” and their “bad mother” because they ay have had long stretches of positive mothering, most likely when they were young. It’s a common pattern: A narcissistic mother with relatively few stresses in her life and loads of adulation from her young daughter envelopes the girl in her world, embracing the role of teacher and idol. But as her daughter gets older, the mother begins to see her as a rival, setting off a pattern of criticism, competition, and jealousy that continues throughout adulthood.”
Unreal. I remember some calm days, mostly when I was small and my sister hadn’t been born yet. Once my sister came along, she got the positive mothering more often than I did, but she also had the bad mother often. Evidently not often enough to go No Contact, though, like myself.
Pg 41. – “My mom started trying to be friends with my friends […] she would make snide little jokes about me, as if they were her pals and she felt sorry for them having to be with me.’
This was a moment that I’d feared would come. I would read something and unlock a memory I’d rather not face all over again. Around 11 and 12, I was dealing with mean girls in school and was really finding it hard to make friends/trusting the ones I had/learn what it means to be a friend. It was miserable and at 30 I still would never go back to that time in my life. I remember a specific set of times this exact thing happened. I’d had friends over, she pulled this move. But being just around my preteen years my mind was still so easily manipulated. I just figured my mom knew something about me that I didn’t and it wasn’t really in the cards for me to have good friends. Which looking back, did 2 things, further broke my spirit, isolated me and forced me towards her further. She eventually did the same with my boyfriends in high school. Adult me is heartbroken over this realization.
pg 43 – “Reasonably healthy, fulfilled women don’t have the need to compete for their adolescent daughters boyfriends or squash their fledgling attempts to try out their passions and take risky first steps toward becoming the kinds of women they want to be.”
pg 44- “…lucky enough to receive praise when she was young, she becomes mistrustful of it when she’s older, because she’s seen how often it’s followed by put-downs. She internalizes her mother’s puzzling “go for it– but don’t get your hopes up; you’re not good enough” attitude.
God in heaven, these are the exact words I’d kept repeating in my head for so long!
pg 47 – “She often keeps you engaged in the family loyalty battle by dispensing and withholding favors in the highly charged arena of money, gifts, and inheritances.”
This LITERALLY happened this last Christmas! My sister was iced out for allowing my dad and his girlfriend to come to her child’s birthday party. To hurt her my mom gave her a Christmas gift but said “Can you get this to your sister?” Ridiculous. She’s decided to ignore her own grandchild and hurt the only child she has that looked out for her for the last 10 years to stick to this outrageous lie that she’s the victim in everything.
pg 50 – “Despite what she told you, you are the healthy one. You can change.”
The Mild Millennial 