by woundedandmended » Mon Oct 14, 2013 6:16 am
Hello mspurplepearl. I know I am quite late to this discussion, but I hope you still check the replies to your post. I myself only found out I was the scapegoat daughter of a narcissistic mother this past April, so I'm only starting to reach out to others who share a similar story.
I really hope you have put your life back together. My heart truly goes out to you. I hope anyone who reads this finds my story helpful. I will only share something brief here, as my story is quite long and complicated, but I know I need to start getting these things off my chest in order to begin the healing process.
I always knew there was something seriously wrong with my mother. I didn't know exactly what it was, but my heart told me that the way she treated me wasn't right. There was so much hostility there, so much contempt in the way she talked to me, the way she always rolled her eyes and sneered at me, always trying to keep me down, always disapproving.
No wonder I always compared her to the mother in the movies "Mommy Dearest" and "Flowers in the Attic." Yes, she was, and still is, that kind of a mother. Self absorbed, always bragging about her accomplishments, always demanding that her children and grandchildren crowd around her to watch her cry her crocodile tears.
She demands nothing less than a complete and utter devotion and adoration. She has published three books at my expense. I devoted long hours to editing, designing the covers and even ghost writing large parts of them, only to find out that she took credit for all my work. But this is really quite nothing compared to what she stole.
She stole 20 years of my son's life from me. The moment my boy was born, she snatched him away from me and pushed me aside like I was some rented womb she could dispose of. The way she got me to acquiesce for so long is because she enslaved my mind with religion. She would constantly remind me that depriving her from her divine right to be a grandmother was going against God, and that it was a sin to stand up for my own maternal rights.
For 20 years, I internalized all the pain I felt every time I tried to go near my son and he would kick and scream to get me away from him. He became my mother's child, and she was constantly telling him, "don't listen to her, she's crazy, she's sick, she needs help."
I was undermined, humiliated, made out to feel like I was the evil daughter every time I cried out in rage because I was being separated from my only child and I couldn't find a way to reclaim him.
Today, none of my siblings talk to me, and my son came very close to never wanting to see me again after he moved out. The only sibling that still has somewhat of a relationship with me constantly defends her and tries to gaslight me into thinking that she's the victim, that it's all my fault that she never loved me, that I'm the one to blame for everything, and that Mother has suffered so much because of how rebellious I've been.
Fortunately, I started seeing the light when she came home one day and actually bragged about how she'd been diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder. "Oh, yes, she said. I am a narcissist, alright. I feel superior and I see people like $#%^."
I know it sounds really hard to believe, how a 60 something-year-old woman who teaches junior high and has a masters degree and a credential can behave like that, but she does. She takes pride in being a narcissist because her own mother was a narcissist, and she used to punish her by humiliating her in public and calling her stupid in front of her friends.
All that pain she felt when her own narcissistic mother tortured her emotionally she has taken out on me. In order to get away from her, I had to go live in a homeless shelter. I had to sell my car and throw away most of my belongings because I didn't have a place to store them.
I literally went through hell, because I had resorted to doing drugs to drown all the pain of her abandonment and disdain. Especially so, because my son had come to perceive me as a useless junkie who was crazy and couldn't hold a candle to his dear sweet grandma.
Little by little, I have been able to put my life back together. I went to rehab and finally got off the drugs, then moved closer to my son, and we started going to church together. Nowadays, I can finally say that I have a normal, functional relationship with my boy.
I finally got away from the dark shadow of the malignant narcissistic womb that gave birth to me. I still have nightmares though, and I wake up overcome by rage and pain for all the years she stole from me. I know I can't take that back. I know that time is gone, but at least I know I can reach out to other scapegoat daughters who can understand where I'm coming from.
I want to encourage anyone who has gone through something like this to please tell their story. The dynamic of the narcissistic mother and her scapegoat daughter is not addressed in the mental health industry. Psychiatrists just want to pathologize and prescribe drugs instead of addressing the source of the problem.
So many daughters out there are suffering because they don't understand the dynamic, because no one tells them that it's not their fault that they were born out of a vampiric womb that only wanted to consume the life out of them.
Scapegoat daughters, I know it's painful, but we have to tell our stories, so that doctors finally catch up and start treating us effectively instead of pumping us full of drugs. Drugs may help with symptoms but they don't eliminate the problem.
The problem is the fact that we want that mother love so desperately, that we're willing to take all the blame ourselves. Society has to know about us. This world has to hear our plea because nobody believes us. It is a very disturbing truth that no one wants to confront. Yes, there are many Mommy Dearests out there. There are many self-absorbed, superficial, vain, egotistical, Flowers-in-the-Attic mothers out there.
It's time their daughters came out of those attics where they kept us trapped all our lives. Don't eat the poisoned donuts any more. Reclaim your lives. Reclaim your children. It's okay to leave and never look back. It's okay to never, ever, talk to them again. It's okay. There is a loving God out there who is not going to punish us because we couldn't honor the vampiric wombs we were born from.