Characteristics of Narcissistic Mothers
āItās about secret things. The Destructive Narcissistic Parent creates a child that only exists to be an extension of herselfā¦.
Because her abusiveness is part of a lifelong campaign of control and because she is careful to rationalize her abuse, it is extremely difficult to explain to other people what is so bad about her. Sheās also careful about when and how she engages in her abuses. Sheās very secretive, a characteristic of almost all abusers (āDonāt wash our dirty laundry in public!ā) and will punish you for telling anyone else what sheās done. The times and locations of her worst abuses are carefully chosen so that no one who might intervene will hear or see her bad behavior, and she will seem like a completely different person in public.
Sheāll slam you to other people, but will always embed her devaluing nuggets of snide gossip in protestations of concern, love and understanding (āI feel so sorry for poor Cynthia. She always seems to have such a hard time, but I just donāt know what I can do for her!ā) As a consequence the children of narcissists universally report that no one believes them ā¦
She violates your boundaries.
Your property may be repossessed and no reason was given other than that it was never yours.Ā You have never known what it is like to have privacy..Ā She asks nosy questions, snoops into your email/letters/diary/conversations. She will want to dig into your feelings, particularly painful ones and is always looking for negative information on you which can be used against you. She does things against your expressed wishes frequently.Ā Any attempt at autonomy on your part is strongly resisted.
Narcissistic mothers commonly choose one (sometimes more) child to be the golden child and one (sometimes more) to be the scapegoat. The narcissist identifies with the golden child and provides privileges to him or her as long as the golden child does just as she wants. The golden child has to be cared for assiduously by everyone in the family. The scapegoat has no needs and instead gets to do the caring. The golden child can do nothing wrong. The scapegoat is always at fault. This creates divisions between the children, one of whom has a large investment in the mother being wise and wonderful, and the other(s) who hate her. That division will be fostered by the narcissist with lies and with blatantly unfair and favoritizing behavior. The golden child will defend the mother and indirectly perpetuate the abuse by finding reasons to blame the scapegoat for the motherās actions. The golden child may also directly take on the narcissistic motherās tasks by physically abusing the scapegoat so the narcissistic mother doesnāt have to do that herself.
She minimizes, discounts or ignores your opinions and experiences. Your insights are met with condescension, denials and accusations (āI think you read too much!ā) and she will brush off your information even on subjects on which you are an acknowledged expert. Whatever you say is met with smirks and amused sounding or exaggerated exclamations (āUh hunh!ā āYou donāt say!ā āReally!ā). Sheāll then make it clear that she didnāt listen to a word you said.
She will claim not to remember even very memorable events, flatly denying they ever happened, nor will she ever acknowledge any possibility that she might have forgotten. This is an extremely aggressive and exceptionally infuriating tactic called āgaslighting,ā common to abusers of all kinds. Your perceptions of reality are continually undermined so that you end up without any confidence in your intuition, your memory or your powers of reasoning. This makes you a much better victim for the abuser. Narcissists gaslight routinely. Youāre oversensitive.
Once sheās constructed these fantasies of your emotional pathologies, sheāll tell others about them, as always, presenting her smears as expressions of concern and declaring her own helpless victimhood. She didnāt do anything. She has no idea why youāre so irrationally angry with her. Youāve hurt her terribly. She thinks you may need psychotherapy. She loves you very much and would do anything to make you happy, but she just doesnāt know what to do. You keep pushing her away when all she wants to do is help you.
She has simultaneously absolved herself of any responsibility for your obvious antipathy towards her, implied that itās something fundamentally wrong with you that makes you angry with her, and undermined your credibility with her listeners. She plays the role of the doting mother so perfectly that no one will believe you.
Narcissistic mothers infamously attempt to damage their childrenās marriages..
To you, sheāll lie blatantly. She will claim to be unable to remember bad things she has done, even if she did one of them recently and even if it was something very memorable.Ā Your conversations with her are full of casual brush-offs and diversionary lies and she doesnāt respect you enough to bother making it sound good. For example sheāll start with a self-serving lie: āIf I donāt take you as a dependent on my taxes Iāll lose three thousand dollars!ā You refute her lie with an obvious truth: āNo, three thousand dollars is the amount of the dependent exemption. Youāll only lose about eight hundred dollars.ā Her response: āIsnāt that what I said?ā You are now in a game with only one rule: You canāt win.Ā
On the rare occasions she is forced to acknowledge some bad behavior, she will couch the admission deniably. She āguessesā that āmaybeā she āmight haveā done something wrong. The wrongdoing is always heavily spun and trimmed to make it sound better. The words āI guess,ā āmaybe,ā and āmight haveā are in and of themselves lies because she knows exactly what she did ā no guessing, no might haves, no maybes.Ā
This need is a defining trait of narcissists and particularly of narcissistic mothers for whom their children exist to be sources of attention and adoration. She has always pouted, manipulated or raged if you tried to do anything without her, didnāt want to entertain her, refused to wait on her, stymied her plans for a drama or otherwise deprived her of attention. Ā Ā Ā Ā
Older narcissistic mothers often use the natural limitations of aging to manipulate dramas, often by neglecting their health or by doing things they know will make them ill. This gives them the opportunity to cash in on the investment they made when they trained you to wait on them as a child.
She manipulates your emotions in order to feed on your pain.
This exceptionally sick and bizarre behavior is so common among narcissistic mothers that their children often call them āemotional vampires.ā Some of this emotional feeding comes in the form of pure sadism. She does and says things just to be wounding or she engages in tormenting teasing or she needles you about things youāre sensitive about, all the while a smile plays over her lips. She may have taken you to scary movies or told you horrifying stories, then mocked you for being a baby when you cried; she will slip a wounding comment into conversation and smile delightedly into your hurt face. She wants you to know that your pain entertains her. She may bring up subjects that are painful for you and probe you about them, all the while watching you carefully. This is emotional vampirism in its purest form. Sheās feeding emotionally off your pain.
A peculiar form of this emotional vampirism combines attention-seeking behavior with a demand that the audience suffer. Since narcissistic mothers often play the martyr this may take the form of wrenching, self-pitying dramas which she carefully produces, and in which she is the star performer. She sobs and wails that no one loves herā¦Ā Ā
Sheās selfish and willful.
She has to show you that you canāt tell her āno.ā
Her feelings, needs and wants are very important; yours are insignificant to the point that her least whim takes precedence over your most basic needs. Her problems deserve your immediate and full attention; yours are brushed aside. Her wishes always take precedence; if she does something for you, she reminds you constantly of her munificence in doing so and will often try to extract some sort of payment. She will complain constantly, even though your situation may be much worse than hers. If you point that out, she will effortlessly, thoughtlessly brush it aside as of no importanceā¦Ā Ā
If you criticize her or defy her she will explode with fury, threaten, storm, rage, destroy and may become violent..
For all abusers, fear is a powerful means of control of the victim, and your narcissistic mother used it ruthlessly to train you. Even adult children of narcissists still feel that carefully inculcated fear. Ā Ā
Not all narcissists abuse physically, but most do, often in subtle, deniable ways. It allows them to vent their rage at your failure to be the solution to their internal havoc and simultaneously to teach you to fear them.
She resents having to take care of you.
Narcissistic mothers also abuse by loosing others on you or by failing to protect you when a normal mother would have. Sometimes the narcissistās golden child will be encouraged to abuse the scapegoat. Narcissists also abuse by exposing you to violence. If one of your siblings got beaten, she made sure you saw. She effortlessly put the fear of Mom into you, without raising a hand.
Narcissistic mothers are often simply childish. If you refuse to let her manipulate you into doing something, she will cry that you donāt love her because if you loved her you would do as she wanted. If you hurt her feelings she will aggressively whine to you that youāll be sorry when sheās dead that you didnāt treat her better. These babyish complaints and responses may sound laughable, but the narcissist is dead serious about them. When you were a child, if you ask her to stop some bad behavior, she would justify it by pointing out something that you did that she feels is comparable, as though the childish behavior of a child is justification for the childish behavior of an adult. āGetting evenā is a large part of her dealings with you. Anytime you fail to give her the deference, attention or service she feels she deserves, or you thwart her wishes, she has to show you.
She doesnāt ask. She demands. She makes outrageous requests and sheāll take anything she wants if she thinks she can get away with it. Her demands of her children are posed in a very aggressive way, as are her criticisms. She wonāt take no for an answer, pushing and arm-twisting and manipulating to get you to give in.
She shed her responsibilities to you as soon as she was able, leaving you to take care of yourself as best you could. She denied you medical care, adequate clothing, necessary transportation or basic comforts that she would never have considered giving up for herself.
She also gave you tasks that were rightfully hers and should not have been placed on a child. You may have been a primary caregiver for young siblings or an incapacitated parent. You may have had responsibility for excessive household tasks. Above all, you were always her emotional caregiver which is one reason any defection from that role caused such enormous eruptions of rage. You were never allowed to be needy or have bad feelings or problems. Those experiences were only for her, and you were responsible for making it right for her. From the time you were very young she would randomly lash out at you any time she was stressed or angry with your father or felt that life was unfair to her, because it made her feel better to hurt you. You were often punished out of the blue, for manufactured offenses. As you got older she directly placed responsibility for her welfare and her emotions on you, weeping on your shoulder and unloading on you any time something went awry for her.
she will sometimes project even though it makes no sense at all. This happens when she feels shamed and needs to put it on her scapegoat child and the projection therefore comes across as being an attack out of the blue.
She seems to have no awareness that other people even have feelings.
Sheāll occasionally slip and say something jaw-droppingly callous because of this lack of empathy. It isnāt that she doesnāt care at all about other peopleās feelings, though she doesnāt. It would simply never occur to her to think about their feelings. An absence of empathy is the defining trait of a narcissist and underlies most of the other traits I have described.
Sheāll also blame you for your reaction to her selfish, cruel and exploitative behavior.
Narcissists are masters of multitasking as this example shows. Simultaneously your narcissistic mother is
Lying. She knows what she did was wrong and she knows your reaction is reasonable.
Manipulating. Sheās making you look like the bad guy for objecting to her cruelties.
Being selfish. She doesnāt mind making you feel horrible as long as she gets her own way.
Blaming. She did something wrong, but itās all your fault.
Projecting. Her petty, small and childish behavior has become yours.
Putting on a self-pitying drama. Sheās a martyr who believed the best of you, and youāve let her down.
Parentifying. Youāre responsible for her feelings, she has no responsibility for yours.
In part, these women foster dissension between their children because they enjoy the control it gives them. If those children donāt communicate except through the mother, she can decide what everyone hears. Narcissists also love the excitement and drama they create by interfering in their childrenās lives. Watching peopleās lives explode is better than soap operas, especially when you donāt have any empathy for their misery.
The narcissist also uses favoritism and gossip to poison her childrensā relationships. The scapegoat sees the mother as a creature of caprice and cruelty. As is typical of the privileged, the other children donāt see her unfairness and they excuse her abuses. Indeed, they are often recruited by the narcissist to adopt her contemptuous and entitled attitude towards the scapegoat and with her tacit or explicit permission, will inflict further abuse. The scapegoat predictably responds with fury and equal contempt. After her children move on with adult lives, the narcissist makes sure to keep each apprised of the doings of the others, passing on the most discreditable and juicy gossip (as always, disguised as āconcernā) about the other children, again, in a way that engenders contempt rather than compassion.
The end result is a family in which almost all communication is triangular. The narcissist, the spider in the middle of the family web, sensitively monitors all the children for information she can use to retain her unchallenged control over the family. She then passes that on to the others, creating the resentments that prevent them from communicating directly and freely with each other. The result is that the only communication between the children is through the narcissist, exactly the way she wants it.
As a last resort she goes pathetic.
When sheās confronted with unavoidable consequences for her own bad behavior, including your anger, she will melt into a soggy puddle of weepy helplessness. Itās all her fault. She canāt do anything right. She feels so bad. What she doesnāt do: own the responsibility for her bad conduct and make it right. Instead, as always, itās all about her, and her helpless self-pitying weepiness dumps the responsibility for her consequences AND for her unhappiness about it on you. As so often with narcissists, it is also a manipulative behavior. If you fail to excuse her bad behavior and make her feel better, YOU are the bad person for being cold, heartless and unfeeling when your poor mother feels so awful.
https://themindsjournal.com/characteristics-of-narcissistic-mothers/7/
