Uncertain: Am I the daughter of a narcissistic mother?

I am a midlife female who has had a dysfunctional relationship with my mother my whole life. I am at a stage where I feel the need to understand my experience to move past chronic unhappiness. It's hard to untangle 48 years of a story succinctly enough to effectively ask for advice. This will probably be too long. I'll start with my childhood and early adolescence and move to later years in a further post.

Her:

-pregnant out of wedlock at 19, shotgun wedding, separated by the time I was three and a half
-my father effectively abandoned the family and she raised me alone as an only child, never had another relationship
-my dad told of her chronically leaving our house a mess and going off with cleaning supplies to help some other person
-long successful career as a high school teacher, impacted many students positively and is warmly remembered by most, often went above and beyond to volunteer, help or counsel
-a very small number of students seriously despised her...I always thought they had her number...but that could be my own bias.
-often took charge of planning parties and family events...always very detail oriented, very good at special touches, establishing and implementing themes etc.
-she had a gift for fun and whimsy generally
-this knack for making events and occasions seem special left me with a lasting positive sense that the world was a warm, happy, nice place
-her knack for everything else left me with a lasting negative view of myself
-she was critical and controlling and disapproving in a way that was so constant and so insidious that pretty early on I felt like I was crazy and running on helpless rage
- it has always been 'deniable' - hidden in facial expressions, a certain tone, a quick dismissal, 'loving' correction, humour, loving advice, unsolicited 'help' and so on
-only ever felt I pleased her with school performance, where I excelled, and when I cleaned our apartment to surprise her (she never really attended to this and eventually decended into a hoarding situation in her house, where she remains)
- never questioned that I was loved but never felt seen or liked for who I was, mostly only for what I accomplished at school
- recently learned of the concept of attunement - can safely say there was pretty much zero attunement, ever
- she never that I recall displayed any curiousity for who I was as an independent person. She had a very rigid view of what I should be and what a successful child looked like. Compared me so negatively with my cousins 5 and 6 years younger (they ski, they never skip school, just generally glowing and better children) that I eventually felt so inferior that I estranged myself from that part of my small family for years
- small but vivid memory that has stayed with me -being on a drive with her when I was about 10 and being proud to express that I wanted to either be a lawyer or a hairdresser when I grew up. I was just trying to have a nice talk and express some little girl independent ideas, but she shut me right down by expressing derision at the incongruity of the two choices. That immediate effective destruction of any attempt at conversation or independent expression would be an enduring theme to present day.
- way over involved in my school projects. Pushed me to excess and perfection well beyond what was age appropriate or necessary, producing frustration and anxiety and self doubt in me. Eventually I would be proud to hand in my way overdone projects. Pushed me into public speaking contests and wrote huge parts of my speeches.
- about the same age I was having a sleepover and my mom went out during the evening for an errand to the store. She took a really long time. She was my only parent and I became scared at one point, and waited at the window crying sure something had happened to her. She eventually came home and I was relieved but still crying. Her only response was to be annoyed and rejecting, like my fear was unjustified and clinging
- again about the same age she engineered a gift for my four male cousins who I had a rambunctious and very unequal relationship with. They were kind of rough and sometimes abusive of me and while we did play together there was a partly real and partly feigned sense that they didn't like me. They abandoned me in a forested rural area once and I was genuinely lost and scared. Another time they locked me in a small dark old coal cellar and left. They ordered me to clean up their rooms as the price of playing with me. Anyway, the gift she engineered was a cloth/Velcro dartboard with a picture of my face screened on it and Velcro balls to throw at it. I was in on the joke at the time, but it has made me sad a little in following years. It was just not great judgement and the wrong message to send a young girl about her value. Not evil, just kind of gross misattunement.
- I was at a summer program for the clarinet in grade 7 and tripped down a hill and cut my palm badly on broken glass when we were on an outside break. It was a really deep cut with lots of blood and it hurt. I was sent home in a cab and my mom took me to the hospital for stitches. I was not offered reassurance or comfort or sympathy. Her primary emotion, beyond an oppressive anxiety about the injury, was to be annoyed at me for cutting myself, for spoiling the balance of the opportunity of camp, and implicit and explicit subtle blaming me for the situation. Family story told often later by her with eye rolling "humour" about being sent off to band camp and ending up cutting myself.

Me:

- extremely sensitive to perceived failure by a very early age
- cried when people sang me happy birthday because I was tense and didn't know how to look or act, afraid kids didn't really like me
- engaged early in compulsive self soothing behaviours. Ate compulsively and obsessively from about age four or five. Obsessed over food and would hide it and steal it from friends and family's homes. Compulsive eating became a life long problem leading to life long obesity, with periods of significant weight loss and regain. Late thumb sucking - didn't stop until I was about 14
- increasing anger, rage and violent acting out on my part. She was never physically violent with me and rarely displayed overt anger. It was all more measured if irrational constant criticism.
- really lost the plot in my teen years

To be continued. I'll keep it shorter!

Yeah...I guess I'm not really going to end up keeping it shorter.

Continuing:

- my aunt told a story of watching a concert with my mother during my troubled teen years and my mother pointing out a young violinist and saying "I always thought that would be [my name]". I had never picked up a violin in my life and while I played clarinet in school I never aspired to higher musicianship. The whole dream and vision had literally nothing to do with the actuality of me. I was good at different things. My aunt recalled a sense of dreaming of or mourning a "perfect child".

- I lost the plot completely in my early teens. Quit high school multiple times, hung around with other troubled teens, early sex, smoked and drank, abortion at 14, ran away all across the very large country, eventually had an attention seeking suicide attempt also at 14 that landed me in the hospital in a brief coma and then on to inpatient adolescent psychiatric care.

- when I was released from that after a few months my mom and some other family picked me up and we out to dinner to celebrate my homecoming and hopefully a new start. Story later from aunt - my aunt begged my mom not to nag at me no matter what and made her promise. She promised. The moment I left the hospital property to meet them all at the car my mom started nagging and criticizing me for something utterly pointless and unimportant and just carried on nagging at various issues intermittently for the rest of the evening. My aunt told me it absolutely blew her mind. I don't even remember so common was that behaviour. My aunt said she realized then that it was utterly pathological.

- my boyfriend was killed in a terrible car accident at 21 when I was 17 and I was stunned and devastated. My poor relationship with my mom made him my whole world. I still think of his death as something that cleaved my life in two with a certain naivety and a sense of basic trust in security and a reasonable permanence of people and things on one side of the divide and the collapse of all that on the other. It was a major, major event in my life. Somebody recently sent me an old photo of my boyfriend and I at Halloween in 1983, the year before he died. I shared it with my mom when she was at my house for my birthday last month. Her only comment was a short and dismissive "I never understood that relationship. You weren't very good for each other."

- slid into too much partying and alcohol and cocaine abuse that destroyed my finances in the early 90's, until I got pregnant and quit all of it cold turkey

- just prior to my pregnancy I got serious about finishing school I had been chipping away at for a few years. I graduated from a three year community college with a diploma in IT in my mid 20s. Her comment at our celebration dinner was that she didn't get a cake because graduation would have been nice several years ago.

- I raised my son as a single mother as his father denied paternity and provide nothing emotionally or financially, and that is when her utter disregard for boundaries really ramped up as I needed her support and assistance

- she was very devoted as a grandmother, but didn't see any difference between her as the grandmother and me as the mother. The "perfect child" dream/expectation was transferred to my son

-once when my son was still an infant I developed a terrible, terrible, very not normal headache. I suspect it might have been a migraine so extreme, blinding and unfamiliar the pain. I literally had to gather the strength to just turn my head on the pillow. I really needed her to tend to my son while I rode it out or my head exploded, whichever came first. She came over to help but made me feel guilty and incompetent and self-indulgent for needing several hours to recover. I was truly incapacitated and she showed no empathy or concern, instead expressing impatience and annoyance with me. While my mom seems to have a normal if sometimes self-refracted capacity for empathy generally I can say that I personally have never felt that very specific thing from her. Again, no connection, no attunement. It was a strange situation to use as an opportunity for petty, manufactured criticisms of me. I was in fact a good, attentive, independent mother virtually all the time when my son was small - I was just genuinely ill and in need of help.

- she would use her key to walk into my locked house without knocking ever and I found it diminishing and disrespectful of my adulthood and invasive of my space and privacy. Asked her to knock when she visisted and she ignored me, but eventually complied after I had to get really angry, with an air of me being petty and difficult.

- in the same period she would do things in and around my house that I asked her not to because I preferred to do them myself and again it was just invasive. She'd arbitrarily move things or put them away where I couldn't find them. She would tidy my kitchen or do my laundry when I wanted those tasks left to me, so I could organize things the way they worked for me and my household. Again I was ignored and she repeated the behaviour over and over again. Had to get repeatedly and increasingly angry to get her to just stop. Again, treated like I was unreasonable and hypersensitive. She's only trying to help, after all.

- this is a part of a general pattern of boundary insensitivity and substituting her own judgement for the thoughts, wishes or beliefs of others. I've been told I actually like foods that I hate, or that it's "silly not to like tomatoes". When I was in the hospital to give birth she stripped the recently emptied hospital bed beside me and remade it with the same sheets to be "thoughtful to the nurses". They of course thought she was nuts and promptly put fresh sheets on, as is their job. My aunt left her nursing career when she became a mother and was a hard working homemaker her whole life. By this point she really hates cooking and it's a genuine burden to her. I brought this up to my mom once and she said "Oh, she just says that. She loves cooking." No. It's clear as day that she really doesn't enjoy it anymore to the point that it is at times an emotional strain. Many other examples.

-She repeated her way overboard 'helping' in my son's school projects. Really excessive. Would complete entire projects or essays with little or no contribution from him. They were huge anxiety creating events with fights often starting because she had no sense of balance and her need for his perfectionism way outstripped what he was learning from the process. Between her and I my son developed a destructive and avoidant anxiety around homework.

To be continued, one more time.

Final billion words:

- She has always given me a ridiculous excess of monitoring and direction and completely excessive and unnecessary micromanagement - too many examples to name - endless - right up to present day. Instructions on how to act and what to do and not to at my aunt's house whether I was 14 or 45. Monitoring/correcting/suggesting insignificant actions I'm in the middle of doing and don't remotely need her interference on. Same for things I'm about to do already. Crazy making. Buying cards for me to sign and gifts for me to give people years and years after I was well equipped and capable of buying my own. It really has felt so many times that she does not perceive me as a separate person.

-her impulse/tendency to want to diminish or wound me really does seem pathological. There has always been a near constant drone of subtler criticism and correction - the grimaces or tone of voice, the ostensibly deniable stuff couched as advice or concern or guidance or worry - it's all just overbearing disapproval, a need to control and a desire to enact rigid expectations. Despite the constancy a couple of small incidents stand out for their clarity. Being constantly ground down can make you doubt your own perceptions, but I remember these little things because they just seemed so obviously 'off' that I didn't question that they were wrong. Once night she was babysitting when my son was little and I went to a movie. I came back and as I've done a million times I tried to forge the smallest true connection - in this case a simple conversation. I said "Hi! Ugh! That was the stupidest movie.". The reply was "Well why would you go to a stupid movie?" with body language and tone all dismissive and derisive. That is such a tiny thing in the grand scheme, but I just thought that 99% of the planet would have said "Oh, what movie was it?" Or "Oh. Sorry! Why didn't you enjoy it?" and an exchange could have begun. It just struck me as so clearly sad and unnecessary to use this benign situation of a movie whose quality I really couldn't know before seeing it to undermine my judgment or intelligence or whatever she was going for there.

- another time she was doing some kind of gardening task in my yard with those little sections of wrought iron fencing that you put together to make a border or a 'frame' around something. Again I was sitting on the steps and just trying to make a connection of a simple shared conversation. I said "I wonder if they make anything like that with the sections curved so you could make a circle around something, instead of a square?" She immediately said with an air of derision and irritation, like she was talking to a moron "You can't bend iron, [my name]." This while holding in her hand, the clearly bent semi-circles of clearly shapeable wrought iron border piece. The urge to say something diminishing to me flew out so fast it wasn't even remotely logical. I mean it was almost insane. That's the way it felt anyway.

-this past week was the incident that made my finally want to dig down and see if I had a narcissitic parent, and if not what the problem was exactly. I finally realized that my efforts to connect and forge moments of true exchange and closeness were truly just going to be me running over and over into a brick wall, and I had to either learn what I could do to change the dynamic or simply accept that I could not. Earlier in this endless exposition I talked about how she had done a good job fostering a sense of optimism in me and made the world seem like a happy, special, wonderful place with her flair for whimsy and special touches when I was a child. We were in the car and I told her this and expressed that I was grateful and I wanted her to know that I thought that was a great success as a parent. She took this in and seemed happy and asked me if I thought my son felt that way as well, and I said that I did. But this moment of closeness and familial love I had seemed to successfully create disintegrated in the next moment when in the same air that my effortful words of appreciation and admiration still hung she said: "You know where you failed? Thank-you notes. You didn't teach [son] to write thank you notes. It's very important to me and it's never too late to start.". It's true that I didn't and don't focus on thank you notes with my son, but I do focus on fostering politeness and expressing gratitude and kindness. More than once I've had people approach me and tell me in some independent interaction with my son that he was so polite and pleasant and warm. Again, I had one of the those moments of "this is insane" clarity. And she was oblivious…always that obliviousness.

-I've been thinking a lot about the roots of my chronic emotional distress being in childhood lately, both by nature and nurture. I asked her at my birthday dinner recently what I was like as an infant and toddler. Just instinctively I think I would smile and answer first with genuine warmth in my memories of my infant son. She did not - she said I "just wasn't an easy child' meaning I was not generally not at ease, not relaxed, more intense, needed attention. From what I have learned about attachment theory and my projecting her very clear later misattunement backwards, I can believe that to be true. But I thought also that it was telling that her first expressed memories of the earliest me seemed negative. It said something about how she experienced me. Oddly, she then compared her and I as infants. She was just an easy child she said, where I was not. It wasn't clear where she got the information about what she was like as infant though I guess it could have been gleaned from handed down knowledge of the past or a similar conversation she had with her mom. She's over the years been generally complimentary to herself as a child and teen - she was an easy child, happy, obedient, wanted to please her parents. My grandparents have been gone since my teen years but my aunt who is three years older remembers a stubborn and willful kid whose behaviour could be disruptive to family efforts - sulking or planting herself in place if she didn't want to do something on a family trip or something. They weren't really close in part because of the age gap.

-she has defense mechanisms that are just wild, from denial to stonewalling to passive aggressive control. She is somewhat envious of her sister who has had a more traditionally successful life than my mom. (This is the mother of the perfect cousins I mentioned earlier - I think that was a total projection of her own envy of her sister on me and my perceived inferiority relative to her sister's perfect children. My cousins are wonderful, normal people, but they aren't and never were, perfect. If they had smoother and more successful lives than I have maybe it's because they're weren't pickling in the crazy!) Anyway, she looks at the perceived failures of her life - failed marriage, troubled kid, non-optimal saving and financial decisions that don't leave her with all the options she'd like, a once beautiful house now utterly ruined from hoarding, single since late 1970 - and traces it to this single event: my grandfather didn't let her go on a ski trip when she was 18. Because she wasn't allowed to go on this ski trip, she met my father. And everything else is history. It all flows from not going on a ski trip 50 years ago, rather than any of her own choices that followed. This I-couldn't-go-on-the-ski-trip regret is family lore and it's just sad to see somebody be in so much denial about their own negative agency in their life.

-My paternal uncle - a black sheep that had been estranged for some time - took his own life about 18 months ago. Even though we weren't close it made me sad and I wanted to be a support to my aunt. I expressed my sadness to my mom in an email (she was out of town) and talked a little about how I linked it all up with my mostly estranged father in my head and that part of the struggle was there. She was staying up north where my aunt was so I asked if I could stay with my mom if I took a couple of days of bereavement so I could be with family and support my aunt. That email went completely unacknowledged and so I didn't go up to stay with her for two days. I know she got it though because other family told me she had quoted and expanded on my feelings to them in email or other communications. So rather than actually acknowledge and share or support my feelings directly, she wove them into things where she could appear to be sensitive and caring to me, when if fact given an opportunity to be so she actually ignored me. My best guess

-her house is like the worst of that show hoarders. Not one room is functional and it's piled with excess items and filth everywhere. She has had no heat for maybe 18 years. No running water, no sanitation, human waste in buckets and piles. An out of control nightmare, truly. Any efforts to make her face reality are quickly forced back through denial and stonewalling and quiet, deniable aggression. She claims to have 'no problem keeping the house' she's just _________ (fill in some insanely invalid and delusional excuse)

-her large wrap around porch outside the house is falling apart, paint peeling, totally unsafe and a complete eyesore. It's piled and hoarded to a degree as well. Spindles have fallen and the whole effect is that of lean and missing teeth. She also doesn't tend to her lawn consistently anymore so that porch is the backdrop of grass and weeds that grow a couple of feet before it's addressed. So, in other words, her house is a bit of a blight on the street. Despite that she tried to prevent two neighbours from making changes to their yards to add a parking space. She took it to city hall and everything, just really up in arms that these tasteless people would be allowed to uglify the street with their extra car. Such disconnection from reality and the rights of others to live their own lives. Oh, plus she has a junked, undriveable 1992 car sitting back in her overgrown driveway for years! I mean, it's just unfathomable to see the distorted thinking.

-refuses to see her part in any of the decades long strains in our relationship. Sometimes she'll make "I've made plenty of mistakes" noises, but they don't feel sincere. In one particularly stressful and ugly fight she acknowledged in a way that was both far away and steely "I just don't see it" in reference to the things she does wrong in relating to me, and others. I think that's more the truth of the matter.

-has a very narcissistic, it seems to me, view of the choices and troubles of others. I have not been a perfect mom either and my son has not escaped unscathed, and one of the ways that has shown up is that he has not yet completed high school at 20, though he does work full time. My mom, as a teacher, gets very angry at this. She'll formulate thoughts like "I am very angry at this. Education is very important to me and he knows that. I take this very personally." In reality of course his struggles are his own, and have nothing to do with her or what she feels she needs or deserves from him. She's also often expressed various versions of "this is my name he (or I) is sullying!" whenever he or I found trouble or went off her script.

-she says things about others often that reflect an underlying belief that they are lesser than her or common in their human foibles. So and so is weak or indulgent for taking Prozac, her neighbours and their tasteless second car parking wants, just kind of generally insulting and insensitive to nuance in the human condition, where in her estimation she seems to think she is wiser, more sensitive, has better manners etc.

-often on about manners and etiquette (I have developed a mental block about setting the table correctly, so braced have I come to expect her to chastise my placement of the cutlery - it's actually become a thing where I get flustered and can't remember) and being considerate of others but will show up really smelling horribly from lack of toilet facilities and sanitation in her home and sit on your car or home upholstery. Went through past phases where she neither brushed nor washed her hair for years, resulting in a massive, unwashed, protrusion from the back of her head that probably measured a full foot, something I guess she imagined to be a bun look. Family confided in my aunt that if she didn't take care of her hair she couldn't come to a family wedding. Her hair is OK now.

-when I call she immediately acts annoyed that I've done so, or reacts anxiously like something must be wrong. In either case she ushers me off quickly. Generally speaking once she could not control the directions and choices of either myself or my growing son she withdrew in many ways. She has never or rarely achieved a true balance in parenting or grandparenting. It was either kind of enveloping and oppressive when she felt like some agency or control was possible, or ultimately kind of detached and aloof once she exhausted those possibilities. She still is supportive when asked, and still engages with us for events and holidays etc. but the interactions between those things is sparse.

And that is everything that has been swirling around my mind, needing understanding and a solution. I think I may finally have a label for all this, and I'm looking for some feedback: does my mother suffer from covert narcissism? I am sorry for the length of these posts. In trying to provide enough I have maybe provided too much, but I've lost my ability to have faith in my own perceptions. I know something is wrong, but I've never been sure what it is, or how much fault I bear.

Well! Doesn't sound like a childhood at all! We haven't got a time machine to go back and change things, unfortunately. Are you still speaking to your mother? I couldn't pick that out. Most of us on here struggle with the details. So it is better to keep it brief. Also, are you in therapy? My own impression is that your mother is sociopathic. Henceforth, it should be all about you! I think you'll be moving over to be with the borderlines soon.

solstice1962 wrote:Well! Doesn't sound like a childhood at all! We haven't got a time machine to go back and change things, unfortunately. Are you still speaking to your mother? I couldn't pick that out. Most of us on here struggle with the details. So it is better to keep it brief. Also, are you in therapy? My own impression is that your mother is sociopathic. Henceforth, it should be all about you! I think you'll be moving over to be with the borderlines soon.

Thanks solstice1962. Unfortunately it was too late to take your advice about brevity as I already had two longer posts in moderation that have now appeared above. I'm just beginning to learn about how to talk about all this stuff so I'll probably both overshoot and undershoot. Again, apologies for the length of the posts and appreciation to those who take the time to read them.

Beyond the destructive aspects of the relationship with my mother my childhood did provide a lot of good things too. I don't think about it negatively on the whole, I just need to understand it and everything that came after and everything that still is. My subsequent posts will have made clear that yes, I am still in contact with my mom. I do love her and believe she does love me and my son as well, despite the many problems and the clear limitations. I feel like I understand the concepts of sociopathy fairly well through past interest reading on psychopathy and am quite confident in saying that I really don't think that would be a diagnosis for my mom.

Interesting that you mention BPD. I have in past again through reading and personal exploration seen aspects of that diagnosis in me but I don't think ultimately I qualify. A therapist I was seeing several months ago agreed with that. I think I share many aspects of the the BPD's inner world, but not their overt behaviours or approaches. I can be quite sensitive to some types of criticism, I perceive rejection really easily and often irrationally, to the point of paranoid thoughts. However, I recognize all these reactions as extreme and therefore don't act on them. I am left trying to cognitively sort them out inside and I don't usually do anything precipitous or rash. Like Borderlines, I also have extreme emotional lability under stress, but again only on the inside. I sort myself out before choosing to speak or act, but my emotions and perceptions can swing wildly on the inside.

letsgo wrote:

solstice1962 wrote:Interesting that you mention BPD. I have in past again through reading and personal exploration seen aspects of that diagnosis in me but I don't think ultimately I qualify. A therapist I was seeing several months ago agreed with that. I think I share many aspects of the the BPD's inner world, but not their overt behaviours or approaches.

I can relate to that. There is an "acting in" or "quiet" form of borderline which enough people identify with that it's referred to by these terms.

If I didn't identify with narcissistic traits (covert type of NPD), I'd identify with that.