You're Not Crazy - It's Your Mother (6 page)

When you’re a child, your appearance, hair, cleanliness, and clothing will all be impacted by the whims and needs of your narcissistic mother.

If she’s an Ignoring Mother then your appearance will most likely be neglected. This was so in my case. I was, frankly, dirty, although I am mortally embarrassed to write this. My long thick hair was mostly unbrushed and tangled. In fact the only times I remember my mother touching me in my childhood was on the rare occasions she brushed my hair to get the tangles out, and it was a time of great fury and frustration and rage at me for the state of my hair, and great pain for me as she tugged mercilessly. But this was at an age, maybe 8 or 9, when I truly should not, could not, have been responsible for its upkeep, especially since I was never taught self-care. I also remember wearing the same vest for months upon months until it was literally grey. I had tide marks around my neck and ears. I remember aged 12 wearing slippers to school because I had no shoes. We weren’t rich, but we had money for shoes. Noone had noticed my shoes were unwearable, and I, for some reason, did not say.

Other Narcissistic Mothers proactively make their daughters ugly, fearing the competition. Shelly recalls how her mother insisted on her having a boy’s haircut, and how she hated it and pleaded and begged to be allowed to grow it, but was forbidden. Others are bought the most hideous clothes, designed to do the opposite of flatter.  This form of the abuse can often kick in, not surprisingly, at the time of the daughter’s puberty, but it can also be life-long.

Still others, however, dress their daughters perfectly. Too perfectly perhaps. They dress them like little dolls. Not surprisingly it’s often Engulfing Mothers who do this. These daughters are put into overly pretty dresses, their hair tortured into complex styles, and they are never allowed to wear shorts and climb trees.

Others are dressed very well, and even appropriately, but it’s because it’s part of the image of the Perfect Family the parents wish to project. Perfect grooming is part of this dynamic.

Ordinary healthy cleanliness, which allows for getting dirty in play, but being cleaned after that, does not seem to apply to any of these families.

It often happens that narcissistic mothers don’t get appropriate medical care for their children. I have heard so many horror stories of bones not set in time, of scars remaining where wounds did not get stitched and so on. Dentists’ visits and other maintenance type of medical care can often be neglected too.

Narcissistic mothers often don’t bother to teach their daughters the skills they need to look after themselves, e.g. personal care, and they don’t necessarily look after their daughters’ care either. The other extreme is that they expect their daughters to be responsible for themselves way too early in life. Anne remembers having to use the washing machine before she was tall enough to even easily reach the buttons.

Narcissists have zero genuine curiosity. Oh, for sure they might have nosiness. Especially if they can nose out something to your detriment or their benefit. Or if they can find out something about a celebrity which makes them feel more important for knowing it. But genuine curiosity about you, or anyone else – nope. They don’t care about your fears (except to exploit them), hopes (except to dash them), desires (except to mock them, or get the same thing for themselves).

Anything cruel she says, she says when people aren’t around. So they never hear it, and she can deny it all. Or if they are there, the cruelty is so subtle only you can see it. Maybe it’s hidden in mock-concern for you. So no one else sees the cruelty. They may well think she’s lovely with her concern and help. This adds to the isolation and feeling of being crazy.

You might be surprised that it has taken this long for a narcissist’s vanity to be mentioned. Vanity is, after all, the very first thing people think of when they think of narcissism.  They often equate vanity and narcissism. However, narcissism is far more than vanity, and might not even include vanity.

But having said that, narcissists can of course be vain. Typically they tend to be vain either about their looks, and these we call somatic narcissists, or about their intelligence, and these we call cerebral narcissists.

It is important to stress that in neither case does the narcissist have to actually
be
exceptionally beautiful or intelligent. She just has to believe herself to be this. As already explained, narcissists have a fairly relaxed relationship with the truth anyway, so this is just one more aspect to that.

Only tears of self-pity or rage, or false tears to manipulate you. Not tears like we would: tears of grief or upset or sadness for others.

Except for her own loss. So a narcissist who loses her husband will mourn what that’ll mean for her life. But she won’t mourn her husband for himself. Still less will she feel bad about him, that he has died.

Narcissists have no sense of humour beyond, sometimes, a slapstick slipping-on-banana-skin humour. They can never, ever take a joke against themselves, which of course makes sense too, right? But they can often miss the subtleties of all kinds of humour, because a lot of it depends on empathy. We laugh because we feel for the butt of the joke – but narcissists never feel for anyone but themselves and so they don’t get the joke.

Sometimes narcissists will just claim it, by assuming they’re more important than everyone else (and it’s surprising how much other people buy into that). Other times they’ll get it by being holier-than, or helpier-than, anyone else. Sometimes people who are very active in prominent roles – church, community associations, charities etc, are getting Narcissistic Supply from this. Of course, not all such people are. There are many, many genuine people there too. But the ones who are prominent, who get seen, they might well be narcissistic.

And it might include your mother. Which helps with the crazy-makingness of it all. Here is everyone else telling you how
wonderful
she is, how helpful, and yet you are the one emotionally bruised and upset every time you deal with her. Trying to reconcile those twin realities can be truly head-wrecking. One clue is to look out for Narcissistic Glow. The genuine helpers will get pleasure from it, sure, and it’s human to like being appreciated. But they won’t have that Narcissistic Glow going on.

One trick that some narcissistic mothers do is to claim some lost, would-be huge success which was in her grasp but she had to give it up raise her children, i.e. you. So she was accepted to RADA but turned it down when she got pregnant. Or won a regional singing competition, but couldn’t take it further for the same reason.

This is actually a pretty superb trick. She gets the kudos of being a wonderful actor or singer without ever having to prove herself at it or risk failure and rejection,
and
she gets to use it as a stick to beat her children with. ‘After all I sacrificed for you!’ would be the refrain there.

Narcissists are never introspective.

They never analyse their actions or motivations. Things just
are,
and by definition, since it’s the Narcissist doing it, are appropriate. They don’t need to think any further about it.

And so you’ll never get a narcissist pondering ruefully about some past mistake, or sharing a lesson she learned, or laughing at something embarrassing they did.

And so it’s like they are petrified in amber, emotionally speaking. They never learn. They never grow. They never mature.

Most of us like to think of life as a journey of growth and increasing awareness and increasing maturity. We like to learn from our mistakes so we don’t make them again. We like to improve our life skills all the time, including our relationship skills.

Not narcissists. How can you improve on perfection? And so narcissists are the same at 50 as they were at 20. They do not gather wisdom or maturity.

Very personally. Everything is about how it impacts on her, or reflects on her. And so, if you hold a different opinion to her, it can literally
offend
her. Again, given what we know about how narcissists think they’re perfect in every way, that makes sense. If they think blue is the nicest colour, then it is. And therefore if you think red is a nicer colour, a) you’re wrong, and b) you’re subliminally suggesting that
she
is wrong to prefer blue and this is back to being an attack on her.

The concept that colour preferences are simply that – a preference, and that no one is right or wrong, does not occur to them.

And I picked such a trivial example as colour on purpose, because even such a trivial example will offend a narcissist. And so, whatever you do, don’t express a different opinion on something major like religion or politics.

Have you ever had the experience of a four- or five-year-old child looking you straight in the eye, and
swearing
with total sincerity that they were nowhere near the biscuit jar, despite the chocolate smeared all over their faces? You might even point out the fact of the chocolate stains and they’ll insist that, even so, they didn’t eat the biscuits. They make no attempt, even, to explain the chocolate. Without shame they’ll acknowledge that there’s chocolate on their face, but still insist that that they didn’t eat the biscuits.

That’s the sort of thing narcissists do. They just dismiss all evidence that doesn’t fit in with their story. They may refuse to acknowledge the evidence exists, in classic gaslighting. Or they might acknowledge the evidence is there but refuse to acknowledge that that proves anything. Laura relates how her narcissistic mother quite happily said, ‘Yes, that’s my signature on that document, but it wasn’t me that signed it’.

Where do you go with that? Logic does no good at all as they will just keep denying.

I did a survey on my forum about this, and it was as I suspected. Narcissists are often very inappropriate with service staff and others who they see as being beneath them. They can either be imperious and rude, or else over-familiar.

We need to speak, too, of Enabling Fathers.

There are only three possible fathers for a DONM: another narcissist (oh yes, that can happen; lucky the DONM who has that), an absent father, or an Enabling Father.

An Enabling Father is, as the title suggests, one who enables your narcissistic mother’s behaviour. He will not protect you, nor rock the boat to even defend you. He might even proactively assist in her abuse, such as beating you on her command. He might try to ride both horses, whispering to you ruefully, ‘Ah, just put up with her, you know how she is,’ or, ‘You have to be the bigger person here,’ or, ‘Forgive and forget’.  And because we’re raised with this as the default, we don’t realise the lack of logic in those statements.

His enabling behaviour can be because he is scared of her too. It is impossible to have a healthy, empowered relationship with a narcissist. This is why many fathers leave. Those who stay are – must be – enmeshed in the co-dependent dysfunctional dynamic.

Or maybe he’s not scared of her. Maybe he needs, as is the case, I believe, with my own father, to believe his wife is perfect (because it reflects well on him to have a perfect wife, I guess), and so he and she are both in this toxic conspiracy to present her as perfect. It doesn’t mean that he cannot have petty rows with her; he does. But he always sided with her when it came to his children, and indeed he acted as her attack dog when needed.

If a father leaves the marriage, the narcissistic mother can often make it her business to estrange or distance her daughter from the father, bad-mouthing and bitching about him. So the result is that you lose contact with your father.