How a Narcissistic Mother Primes You for Abuse
The legacy endures.
Just when you thought it was safe to dive back into the dating pool, you’re swimming with sharks. Yep, even though you thought you had reached peak enlightenment and divorced your mum, you’re still attracting jerks, abusers, withholders, self-serving bastards and, worst of all, narcissists.
Just like dear old ma.
As adults, children of narcissists often find themselves in relationships where they are used to “fulfill psychological functions for others whilst also feeling a sense of shame associated with their own needs and feelings.”
In other words, mum’s abuse doesn’t stop with no-contact.
what gives?
In your first attachment relationship with your narcissistic mother you learnt that the world is unreliable. That others can’t be expected to meet your needs and that you need to meet their needs to be loved.
But, of course that’s not really love. It’s more like exploitation. Your working model for relationships is skewed from birth and you’re primed for vulnerability in relationships.
Unfortunately these early lessons about relationships aren’t easily unlearned. The scripts won’t change without a lot of hard-won self-awareness and perhaps some time out from dating.
We can do all the affirmations and thought replacements we want, but when it comes to love, we’re stuck in our traumatic childhoods.
It’s just not fair.
Sally’s Journey
Attractive and accomplished, Sally couldn’t understand why her relationships ended badly.
Every man she was involved with left her, often without any warning. She wondered what she was doing wrong. After her most recent relationship of ten years, her partner abandoned her without explanation or apology.
Peter told a mutual friend that Sally had become abusive. That he couldn’t put up with her behaviour any more. This breathtaking switch was designed to excuse his own callousness. As Peter’s lies started to unravel, I became concerned for Sally’s wellbeing - and her finances. Stuck in a business where Peter was still managing the books and controlling access to sponsors, Sally and her colleagues braced themselves for an unfolding disaster.
As we explored her history in therapy, it turned out that Peter was just the latest in a long line of freeloaders who had abused Sally’s generosity and tolerance. He hadn’t paid rent in ten years and Sally was still paying off his credit card. As she recounted his outrageous lies, I could hardly believe what I was hearing.
Sally had come into therapy wondering what she was doing wrong and whether she was “abusing” others. But she was the one being abused. All the men she dated seemed to turn into her narcissistic mother.
Sally’s mother Serena had been extremely narcissistic and abusive, abandoning her when she became inconvenient and berating her for bringing shame onto the family by expressing her grief. There was absolutely no room in Sally’s childhood for validation, acknowledgement or affection. Her mother was angry, demanding and controlling, using Sally for her own purposes and becoming punitive when Sally had the temerity to express needs of her own.
No wonder she was scared to express her emotions.
Sally also had trouble knowing her own boundaries or setting limits. She was tolerant, to the extent that she asked no questions and allowed others to treat her as they wanted. This “learned helplessness” was accompanied by a laisse faire attitude and a strange lack of affect. She didn’t express emotions and it sometimes seemed like she didn’t have any.
As children of narcissists, we have been trained not to value or even acknowledge our own boundaries, because boundaries were not convenient for our narcissistic parents. We have also been trained to view relationships as mutually exploitative rather than opportunities for intimacy and connection. For Sally the learning was in gaining the self-awareness to say no and to refrain from giving others a free pass. Although, of course we must learn to trust and become vulnerable in order to have relationships, that is not the same as allowing others to exploit us without question or limits.
In her book on overcoming parental narcissism, therapist Elan Golomb points out that narcissists view others as “automats,” existing solely to provide them with supplies of affection, approval and support.
Although they would never admit it, narcissists depend on others for their self-esteem.
When the supplies of approval and support dry up or the unwitting supplier has the temerity to ask for their own needs to be met, they are blustered, demeaned or bullied out of their requests, coming to doubt their own needs, thoughts and beliefs.
For the children of narcissistic parents, this is very destructive. They grow up in an atmosphere of power and control - and manipulation. They have been left with the damaging legacy of parental self-absorption.
For these silent victims, parental narcissism created a void where the growing child’s connection to self should be. Emotionally neglected and abused, they were forced to deny their own needs in order to be loved. As adults they find themselves playing out the scripts their parents gave them, without even understanding why.
Children of narcissists often attract others who have been similarly wounded.
We can end up being bruised or neglected, our friends and partners too wrapped up in their own wounds to take care of us. Often our friendships are one sided, with our generosity exploited by others who suddenly become unavailable when we need them most.
Or perhaps we might be the ones who take without giving, settling for relationships that are functional rather than intimate and for friends who can’t really be themselves around us. This may seem like a victory, but in the long run, we are the ones who miss out.
Fo Sally and others like her, the answers are not easy.
With time, self-awareness and reflection, we can take a look at our values and what we really want in our lives. Therapy can help us explore the reasons for our inner emptiness and lack of fulfilment.
Psychotherapy with an empathetic therapist can help us understand our difficulties with relationships and pick apart the damaging legacy of parental narcissism and emotional abuse.
As we learn to better understand ourselves and others, we can begin the difficult journey towards meaningful connection and real intimacy.
Sally needed to get in touch with herself in order to heal. Because she had been taught to ignore her own needs and emotions, she found self-awareness challenging.
Although her partners had exploited her, she rarely expressed anger. Her default emotional stance was self-blame. Sally’s mother had encouraged her to blame herself when anything in the family went wrong. She became the family scapegoat and her siblings didn’t support her, preferring to keep their mother’s approval to safeguard their inheritance.
As an adult, Sally was now a dumping ground for the hostility and greed of unscrupulous men. She was used to one-sided relationships and her self-image had been damaged by her hostile mother.
The one thing that gave me hope for Sally was that she had supportive friends who understood her predicament and stayed with her through the torment. But her closest intimate partners had betrayed her repeatedly. Just like her mother.
Your Relationship to Yourself
Because of the severe emotional abuse they suffer, children of narcissists have a depleted sense of self. Their experience of themselves is characterised by feelings of “vague falseness, shame, envy, emptiness, ugliness or inferiority, or their compensatory counterparts: self-righteousness, pride, contempt, self-sufficiency, vanity, and superiority.” The natural process of growing and nurturing an authentic identity - of becoming individuated, is distorted due to the predations of the narcissistic parent.
In order to survive this crucible, the young child must serve the parent’s needs and forget their own. As part of this process, the child often incorporates a harsh and punitive internal voice, judging them for any attempts to activate their authentic self. They will also suffer chronic shame, in some cases unconsciously shaming themselves for having needs or autonomy outside of their parent’s expectations.
People who have grown up with a narcissistic mother often appear lost and directionless. They have difficulty understanding and acting on their own values and beliefs. They may be ambitious or successful, but will often self-sabotage because they are not truly committed to their career path. Their ambitions are usually a reflection of their parent’s narcissism.
Just like Sally, people who have grown up with narcissistic mothers are locked in a continuing struggle for self definition and authentic agency and it can take a lot of hard work for them to “rediscover” themselves.
PSYCHOTHERAPY FOR ADULT CHILDREN OF NARCISSISTS
Healing your trauma wounds will help you stop forging trauma bonds.
Adult children of narcissistic mothers often have difficulty recognising the pain they experienced as children. Acknowledging the trauma of their childhood can lead to feelings of overwhelming grief or rage. Given they spent most of their childhood denying their own needs, recontacting their authentic self takes considerable work.
Therapy needs to uncover the layers of defence and “forgetting” that have been used to repress their genuine needs and values. Allowing themselves to feel for the first time, survivors can be hit with intense grief for the childhood they never had, and for their lost selves.
Therapeutic work can provide the space for self-recognition and self-compassion.
COMPLEX TRAUMA
In most cases, those who have been raised in narcissistic families will have a history of complex trauma. Survivors will have trauma symptoms such as hyper-vigilance and emotional flashbacks. But those who have suffered narcissistic parenting will also have ongoing issues with identity and self-definition.
If you have grown up in a narcissistic family, the emotional abuse you suffered is a part of who you are, for better or worse.
Because it is tied to early development, trauma in childhood gets imprinted in the brain and changes the ability to respond to stress and to have healthy relationships.
Trauma counselling can help gently unpick the trauma-based responses and reactions and allow survivors to recognise the feelings that are underlying their fraught relationship with themselves.
People who have suffered under the regime of a narcissistic parent often experience chronic shame.
Chronic shame is a debilitating condition shared by most people who have been wounded in their early attachment relationships, but for children of narcissists, it is usually much worse.
Because they are shame averse, narcissistic parents will often project their own shame onto their children and will also use shame as a parenting strategy, leaving their children with the intense and toxic emotional fallout of this debilitating emotion.
Narcissistic parents generally don’t work to “repair” the attachment relationship. They often fail to soothe their children, leaving the child to deal with stressful emotional states (including those associated with shame) on their own. Sometimes this can lead to dissociation which makes the young child vulnerable to mental illness later on.
Ongoing shame affects our sense of self and our ability to have healthy relationships, including our relationship with ourselves. Because their sense of self is so wounded, people who have grown up with narcissistic parents often see themselves as defective.
They also experience “gaps” or lacunae in their sense of self.
Their sense of self is fragmented, sometimes due to dissociation, but also due to traumatic memories and emotional flashbacks which can “hijack” survivors and transport them away from the present moment and back into their traumatic childhoods.
HOW CAN TRAUMA COUNSELLING HELP SURVIVORS OF NARCISSISTIC PARENTING?
The aim of therapy for survivors of narcissistic parenting is to integrate the fragmented self.
Because shame is a chronic part of survivors self-experience it can cause them to lose contact with the different parts of themselves. Counselling can help ameliorate some of the effects of shame and help survivors gain awareness of their responses. Therapy can also allow survivors of complex trauma to increase their self-awareness and re-activate the authentic self that has been buried in response to toxic parenting.
The non-judgemental and empathetic relationship you develop with your therapist is part of what will help heal you.
As you develop trust through therapy, you will be able to safely re-experience the repressed and vulnerable parts of yourself that have been forgotten due to childhood trauma. Through empathy and understanding, an experienced trauma therapist will help you develop compassion for these unacknowledged and traumatised parts of you.
As you gain more self-compassion and awareness, you will find that your feelings of shame will diminish. As you get to know yourself better, you will become more grounded, less hyper-vigilant and more available to yourself and to the important people in your life.
An experienced and empathetic therapist will help you come to terms with the legacy of narcissistic parenting and help you find the best pathway to recovery.
