The narcissist will either insinuate or will tell you outright that you’re unstable, otherwise you wouldn’t believe such ridiculous things or be so uncooperative. You’re oversensitive. You’re imagining things. You’re hysterical. You’re completely unreasonable. You’re over-reacting, like you always do. She’ll talk to you when you’ve calmed down and aren’t so irrational. She may even characterize you as being neurotic or psychotic.

Once she’s constructed these fantasies of your emotional pathologies, she’ll tell others about them, as always, presenting her smears as expressions of concern and declaring her own helpless victimhood. She didn’t do anything. She has no idea why you’re so irrationally angry with her. You’ve hurt her terribly. She loves you very much and would do anything to make you happy, but she just doesn’t know what to do. You keep pushing her away when all she wants to do is help you.

I broke contact with my mother after her pathological and destructive behavior towards me and my husband on the day before the anniversary of our son’s death. To me, this was just the last straw in a relationship filled with abuse, hurt, humiliation, control, and pain. What I find completely hilarious in the midst of the situation, though, is that I know for a fact that today, yesterday, the day before, and so on, my mother is repeating “Clarissa’s hurt me terribly. I love her very much and would do anything to make her happy, but I just don’t know what to do. She keeps pushing me away when all I want to do is help her” to everybody who would listen.

She has simultaneously absolved herself of any responsibility for your obvious antipathy towards her, implied that it’s 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.