You're Not Crazy - It's Your Mother (7 page)

 

Chapter 3
The Effects on Us of Being Raised as the Daughter of a Narcissistic Mother

 

We wryly call NPD ‘the gift that keeps on giving’. The effects on us, as women who were raised by a narcissist, are seemingly endless.

Before we go into this list, let me acknowledge that it’s a fairly depressing list. But there are a few things to keep in mind. The first is that all these issues are totally reasonable and logical reactions to the twisted and abusive upbringing. They’re not a sign of anything intrinsically wrong with you. The truth is that:

You are not broken in need of fixing.

You are perfectly and wonderfully made.

You are, rather, wounded in need of healing.

But yet, there are many issues we do have to deal with. Here’s a selection.

We often have problems with perception, and think we’re crazy.

Here’s the thing: children are programmed at an extremely deep level to believe their parents. This is wired into us by biology, by evolution. Reason being, the child who believed her parents’ comments about danger, without needing to prove it for herself, survived to pass on her genes more than the child who didn’t. This system works really well when the parent is well-meaning and telling the truth to protect the child. The system fails when the parents are lying to the child to protect their own self-image or ego.

The result is that you are getting two contradictory pieces of information. The first is what your own perception tells you: what you saw, what you heard, what you experienced. The second is what your mother insists that you saw, heard and experienced.

And given how insistent narcissists can be, combined with our natural propensity to believe our mothers, we come to believe
their
version of events over our own. This truly is head-wrecking.

There is
no
security in a world where we cannot (as we think) trust even our own perceptions. How do we know what reality is, if we cannot (again, as we think) judge it correctly?

We come to think we’re crazy. Which is a totally logical thing to think – all the evidence is there, right?

And this, therefore, is the biggest gift, of the many many gifts of realising your mother is narcissistic and has been lying all this time, a gift so pivotal that it forms the title of this book:

You are
not
crazy.

You are perfectly sane.

Your perceptions
are
valid and right

You
can
trust your own reality.

Now, knowing this rationally is one thing. Believing it at a core level is quite another. We talk more about beliefs later in this book, and will deal with that issue then. For now, just park the doubts along with the guilt.

It feels like we were born broken.

Many DONMs have a deeply buried sense that we are inherently flawed. That there is something twisted and evil and nasty and noxious and poisonous about us, and that we were born that way. It’s part of who we
are
rather than just something we do. This brings with it a huge all-encompassing sense of shame.

This belief is partly us trying to make sense of the fact that even our own mother did not love us, because in a child’s logic the mother is perfect, and so if she doesn’t love us, it
must
be a flaw in us rather than in her.

But often it’s also a direct, if veiled, statement from our mother or parents too.  They more or less
tell
us this!  They tell us that only they know the real us, and it’s not a pretty sight, and only
they
could possibly put up with us, knowing the truth about us. All our friends, they suggest, would abandon us in a heartbeat if they knew what we were
really
like.

This is confusing, because at some level we know we’re not
that
bad. But yet, we are accustomed to believing their ‘knowledge’ over our own perception, so we come to think we
are
that bad, in some vague unspecified way. And this badness is even scarier for being unspecified. How can we fix it or cure it if we don’t even know what it is?

I lived in terror of finding out just how broken I was – this awfulness was too big and too dreadful to be even faced up to or acknowledged full-on. And so they were able to keep me docile and quiescent for years with the veiled threat to show me exactly how awful I was. I called it, in my own mind,
The Horrible Danu Mirror
. Once I looked in it, there would be no more hiding. I would know exactly how deformed and grotesque I was. And so I dared not look into the mirror; I dared not let them tell me details of how bad I was. And the threat to show me the mirror kept me compliant for years and years, well into middle-age.

Now I know that there is no such twisted and grotesque ‘me’. That the real me is a normally flawed but mostly decent and kind and genuine woman. An ordinary, averagely-nice human being in fact. And coming to realise this is another gift of what I call the N-realisation.

It was, of course, not just me who experienced this toxic emotional blackmail. Many other DONMs do so too.

As Kate says: ‘
It’s utterly cruel. Basically what we're talking about is brainwashing a small child into believing they are fundamentally completely unlikeable, leaving them terrified that someone is going to uncover this fact and therefore living their life pretending in order to cover up some problem they don't even have! As children we were forced to join their cult of fakeness and facade without any clue what is going on.’

As a direct result of this brainwashing, we end up feeling huge all-encompassing shame about who we are. And we carry that shame with us every second of every minute of every day. A constant companion, that we don’t even know is there because we’re so used to it. But it colours our experience of all elements of life.

In my absolute opinion, this, along with lying to us about our perspective and making us think we’re crazy, is the worst element of the abuse they perpetrate against us.

Lisa says: ‘It is an awful tool that they use against us. My NM told me that it was easy for me to have friends since I only show them my good side, but the family knows the “whole” me. I have felt split in two for years...the “real” me (the awful, selfish, mean, ungrateful, angry, self-centred one) and the “other” me, the one where I am pretending not to be those other things! Isn't that terrible? The other thing my narcissistic mother would say, to further drive her points and her power over me home ...“I know you better than you know yourself”.’

And Miriam experienced the same: ‘It's a really sick trick and mind-game to undermine a child's sense of self. The message is “Even if you think you're ok- we know the TRUTH about you”.’

We expect our own perfection.

Our Narcissistic Mother told us a Big Lie. She told it subliminally if not in actual words. And The Big Lie was this:
If we tried hard enough we could win her approval and her love
. If we were good enough, or wise enough, or beautiful enough, or
that-magical-unspecified-ingredient enough
. In other words, if we achieved perfection, she would love us.

It was a carrot she dangled before us, always.

As part of that lie, any of our normal foibles and failings were treated mercilessly, and were a source of great shame, and even perhaps a way of totally dismissing and invalidating who we were as a person. No wonder it's so hard to accept being wrong, never mind experience the joy of it.

The thing is, she told us this Big Lie from birth. So of course we believed it. Why wouldn't we?

The interesting thing, though, is that we then enter the conspiracy ourselves. We tell The Big Lie to ourselves.

Why?

Because to let it go leaves us powerless, and we cannot bear to think of that possibility.

If we keep believing The Big Lie then it seems as if the solution is in our hands. And that makes us feel better. The relationship with our mother
can
be fixed. All we have to do is, try harder, behave better, find the magic key, no matter how long it takes to find, or how much energy we devote to the search or what else we're not doing that we could be doing.

The reality, however, is that the solution was never in our hands. There was nothing we could have done to win her love or approval. Withholding those things gave her her power because it kept us clingy and focused on her. So she kept moving the goalposts to make sure we never were perfect enough, or good enough.  It was a quintessential no-win game. But we didn’t know that.

And so we continue to believe that we have to strive for this elusive perfection, that at some future time we’ll succeed. And therefore, we take over where she left off, beating ourselves up for not being perfect. For being human. For making normal human mistakes.

An interesting, albeit challenging, exercise is to make a point of listening to your self-talk. That internal chatter that goes on all the time, but that we’re not aware of unless you listen. Try to make a point of tuning in. You may be horrified at how abusive you are to yourself. If you make a little mistake, ‘Oh that is so
stupid
! You’re
always
doing that. Can’t you do
anything
right?’

The trick then is to try to speak kindly to yourself when you hear that chatter. Like you would to your own child. We had a phrase we used with our son whenever he did anything stupid: ‘That wasn’t your best idea’. It was a way of acknowledging the error without shaming him or identifying his Self with the event. It was so good to hear him, as he got older, identify things the same way: ‘Whoops, that wasn’t my best idea.’ Isn’t that a gentler and kinder way than the dialogue above?

So maybe speak to yourself like that. ‘That wasn’t my best idea. A better idea would be to do it this way.’

Try to come to a place where you accept your own imperfections. Where it’s okay to be less than perfect. Because you
are
less than perfect; it’s the human condition. And that’s okay! That really is okay, no matter that she lied to you and told you differently. You might as well beat yourself up for not being able to fly.

But of course this means you’ll never win her love, seeing as you’re not perfect.

But you know, that wasn’t going to happen anyway. You know that, deep down, even if you understandably struggle to accept it. So you do not have to continue on the toxic hamster wheel, running, running, trying to win her approval but getting nowhere.

You can step off that wheel. You can step off whenever you like.

The price of stepping off is to let go the hope that the relationship can ever be fixed.

The reward is freedom. And energy to do things for
you
. And peace.

Learning to accept your imperfections can take time, of course. And so it could still happen that as you read through the rest of this list about the impact on DONMs of having a narcissistic mother, that you’ll feel shame and disapproval of yourself for having these issues.

Don’t!

Seriously, don’t. The thoughts might come, but again, just park them for now. You can’t help thinking them, but you can help believing them.

We might be like a bird behind a window.

You know that famous phrase about the definition of madness: It's to keep on doing the same things but expecting a different result.

And we DONMs do that with our mothers. We keep going back to her hoping that
this time
it'll be different. This time she'll be the mother we need her to be. This time she'll support us in our grief, applaud us in our success, be good company with no agenda. This time she'll accept us as we really are, and love us for it.

And she never does.

When I think of this dynamic (which I, too, did for far too many years) I think of a bird flying fruitlessly into a window, again and again.

It breaks my heart. It breaks my heart for me, and for all of us.

I do understand this pattern, and I do forgive myself for doing it, as I hope you can forgive yourself.

We feel we’re powerless against her.

DONMs can often be in a state of learned helplessness with regard to our narcissistic mothers. It makes sense since, when we were children, we
were
helpless to protect ourselves. But that no longer applies.

You have more power than you realise. There is nothing they can really do. Their Narcissistic Rage is only toddlers’ tantrums, and can be seen as such. Their Narcissistic Huff is just a sulk.

So they have no power really.

Now having said that, narcissists can try tricks. Narcissistic mothers have been known to report their daughters to Social Services for abuse of their (i.e. the daughters’) children, just out of spite, for example. But even then, the falseness of the reports were soon exposed and the narcissist’s power was gone.

So, be realistic about what she can do. If there is anything, prepare for it as best as you can. But also don’t think she can do more than she can.

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