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.
Clarissa's Blog 
great truth, i was for your best interests, how often do we hear it, the narcissists are not normal people, it’s a power game, they get your confidence and then try to control you, it’s as if they are possessed by a bad spirit or an unforgiving nature, next time you meet your ma, tell her the truth, you are not her!, great post
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“next time you meet your ma, tell her the truth, you are not her!”
– That’s one thing that is likely to make her lose her mind. 🙂
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has she not lost it already trying to control you?
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I remember you saying that your parents are getting old and you’re thinking of having them live with you someday. I can’t imagine how that would be possible without you going crazy!
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I was trying very hard to make things better. And it did seem for a while that my mother was settling down and becoming more normal. One thing I did not anticipate – because it’s still hard to accept it – is that she was simply biding her time until she could deliver a really mortal blow.
I know, I’m an idiot, but I honestly thought she was getting better. Everybody warned me to prepare for an attack, and I didn’t.
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I had an aunt who was verbally abusive to her daughter (I don’t think she was an out and out narcissist but she was probably on the spectrum). She mellowed a lot as she got older but the old pattern could still pop out from time to time, mostly kind of random and weak but still hurtful.
Older people are physically weaker and often tired and don’t have the energy for full time carrying on the patterns of middle age. That doesn’t mean the desire’s not there, just that the follow through is often too much work.
An old narcissist is probably a lot like a tiger or chimpanzee adopted by a human. It might be affectionate and even like the human (to the extent it has emotions) but it’s still a wild animal and liable to badly hurt the human who thinks of it as a regular pet.
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My mother hasn’t worked in 20 years, has zero responsibilities and tons of energy. She is going nuts with sheer boredom. I have a friend who also has an abusive mother. The only difference is that her mother is 25 years older than mine. But all she does all day long is driving the whole family nuts and there is always energy for that.
I don’t really believe that old age will make this better.
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“tons of energy. She is going nuts with sheer boredom”
I’m sure there are tons of things she could be doing. She could try to learn French well enough to function and then volunteer somewhere or take (or teach?) community education courses or start a hobby. But if other people don’t exist for her then none of this would occur to her.
Or she could buy a dog. Though I imagine your mother with a dog is probably every nightmare you have rolled into one convenient package. But if pet ownership can help convicted criminals it might be able to help her. Okay, maybe a kitten.
“there is always energy for that” ….. “I don’t really believe that old age will make this better”
If you replace “this better” with “her safer to be around” then I agree. Though my new best guess is that she has mellowed some (though not nearly enough to let your guard down for a second).
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“I’m sure there are tons of things she could be doing. She could try to learn French well enough to function and then volunteer somewhere or take (or teach?) community education courses or start a hobby.”
– I know! We have suggested all of this time and again, but she isn’t interested.
“Or she could buy a dog. Though I imagine your mother with a dog is probably every nightmare you have rolled into one convenient package. But if pet ownership can help convicted criminals it might be able to help her. Okay, maybe a kitten.”
– Another brilliant idea. But it won’t work because you cannot completely control an animal, so she will not be able to have it around. You should see my mother’s reaction when her 4-year-old granddaughter refuses to, say, interrupt her meal to start playing with grandma. She goes into a rage that lasts for weeks. Any attempts at explaining that this is a small kid, she isn’t trying to be hurtful, she was simply hungry and wanted to eat before playing are futile.
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Is she telling this to anyone who’s opinion you care about and who would believe her?
This is far more of a problem when she’s the one in control of your social setting. When that’s the case, you are likely to meet perfectly nice people who you might like to get o know better but are nonetheless friends, relatives, etc. of your mother, and so will either actually or potentially give her the benefit of the doubt if it comes to a conflict.
I’m lucky enough that the only friend of my mother’s who’s opinion I’d care about in any way would not use my mother’s opinion to judge me, but would form her own opinions, which, I guess, is the reason why I care about it in the first place.
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After I read the original list you linked, I printed it out and took it to my therapist. She told me that she had been suspecting, based on my descriptions of her, that my own mother was a narcissist, but that she was glad I figured it out without her having to tell me. It’s made therapy so much more productive now that I have a name and a template for what was before the seemingly irrational and random moods of my mother.
This also explains why she took some of my money from my college fund and used it to buy a Louis Vuitton purse, which I never forgave her for, deep down…
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“This also explains why she took some of my money from my college fund and used it to buy a Louis Vuitton purse, which I never forgave her for, deep down…”
– Oy vey. It seems like you and I are sisters. 🙂 I’m so sorry, this is a really bad misfortune. But you are in therapy, so this is already a great progress in the direction of finding freedom.
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It’s been about a year now since I started, and my last free session (After which I get the very reasonable rate of $70 per session) will be in March 2015. I have a lot of work to do, but I’m a remarkably fast learner and, according to my therapist, much more willing than most to accept how much of my dysfunction is changeable rather than being an innate part of me rooted in my soul or my amygdala.
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If you realize that you are not doomed to suffering by your own innate evilness of any sort, you will progress fast. I never doubted you’d do well in spite of the great hardship you’ve had to experience.
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Yeah, I had all of this going on as well, but with a patriarchal rhetorical dimension as well, which apparently was very, very convincing for onlookers.
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What, like I didn’t have the patriarchal rhetoric involved? 🙂 I’m just getting there.
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Sounds good. But what I learned from my experience is that I really had expected feminists at least to be on my side, but they turned out to be as gullible as everyone else, if not more so. Hence, we have evidence (or at least I do) of a bankrupt movement. It really does get boring hearing how women are emotional and overreacting, when that tendency is not in my character at all. Actually, I tend not to react emotionally to things, but to try to figure them out.
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I’m starting to think that much of these narcissistic attacks have to do with people of the spiritual middle classes being able to communicate more effectively with others of the spiritual middle. If you can imagine that everybody has a structure to their psyche, then some soul structures will be very amenable to bumbling through life in a semi-conscious state and will enjoy this as the optimal level of life possible for them. This bubbling along and this half-consciousness can probably feel like mental toughness to those who do it, or at least they are free to convince themselves that this is what it is. And others, who notice that people like me point out things with more nuance, will imagine that I am only using nuance because I’m scared or fragile, and that in the absence of my fear or fragility, I would simply bumble along, half-awake and half-asleep and not feel anything. In that case, I would have become assimilated and would be mentally tough. But it hardly seems worth it living life in that way, and one can easily be blindsided and partially or fully destroyed. Having a different soul structure from that one somebody who belongs, inherently, to the spiritual middle-classes, the bumbling mode is not my optimal state. It’s not that I feel jealous of it, and I am not hurt by not being able to switch off my mind and go into automatic mode. I’m just not convinced by the defensive rhetoric that this is a form of toughness.
But my mistake, before, was imagining that those who like me who have different soul structures can speak to those who like to bumble. The bumbling ones are militantly aggressive against being educated, so they resort to control mechanisms, which often look a lot like narcissism..
It is true that they are more self-centred than the higher spiritual caste, and that in all sorts of very significant ways they “know not what they do”. They really are just relating things to terms they can understand. “Why doth Jennifer not simply bumble along? Why does she read a book? She must be insecure! It has to be very painful to read a book, so nobody will do it unless they have something wrong with them.”
This is how they read all of their own fears and anxieties into my character, when I am just not like them to begin with and have different needs. Being switched off and resigned is not one of my needs. Those of the spiritual middle classes imagine it must be very painful to be fully alert. Sometimes it is — but mostly, even in pain, there is a huge amount of ecstasy. But one has to imagine that for the spiritually middle-class person, this looks like ego-denial, and vulnerabillity to real things.
Can I go so far as to say that a lot of intra-family warfare might be due to jealousy and misunderstanding in relation to someone in the family being more intellectually gifted than the parent?
But the parent in question will still have the advantage of being able to relate his or her concerns directly to other middle-class people, who will have similar moods and feelings about those who break with convention, so as to think for themselves. These middle-class types have the benefit of always being implicitly understood.
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“Can I go so far as to say that a lot of intra-family warfare might be due to jealousy and misunderstanding in relation to someone in the family being more intellectually gifted than the parent?”
Perhaps, but this description does not ring true for my family. I am the most intellectually gifted in my family (and can say things like this without much in terms of guilt over being prideful), but the abuse could and did involve any member of the family (“why aren’t you more handy?” to my father, “why couldn’t you have better grades, like your brother?” to my sister, “why couldn’t you be more sociable and outgoing, like your sister?”). If anything, my intelligence was lauded and rewarded, so long as it translated into status well (good grades, getting into a good school, etcetera.)
Additionally… I can’t speak for souls, but sociologically, my parents were not exactly/fully middle class – they both came from rural families, went to university, and settled in a city. As for the bumbling…
Here’s how I think the ‘middle class’ element does play in: my mother was raised by a family of alcoholics, was scarred by the experience, and decided to not create a family like that again. Her image of good mothering was essentially ‘middle class’ – make sure the children have breakfast and dinner, keep the house spotlessly clean, keep house accounts in order, and the children will be happy and content, and she will be happy by proxy. She succeeded at every one of the tasks, but was miserable regardless. But because this was an aspiration of hers, she couldn’t simply drop it, and because her only experience actually living it was negative, the only guidelines to the enterprise were the inchoate general impressions scattered around the common mindscape.
So I consider that it may be possible that she thought that if she was hitting all the checkboxes and it wasn’t working out, then someone else in the family must not be pulling their weight. So then, any option available – sweettalking, manipulation, threats, or downright terror is used to push others into behaviours that outsiders could recognize as “the good family stuff.”
But this isn’t bumbling, exactly, no? This is failure to bumble.
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Ah, Very interesting. But I think it is SPIRITUAL (or spirited) bungling. People who have really good insights into the world can employ a more deft response to problems than your mother did. They have a much better map or outline of the problem, from an intellectual perspective and so they can address it and solve it with much more nuance than applying a blanket recipe of a regular life and status seeking.
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My father who is an extraordinarily intelligent man has completely absorbed my mother’s vision of the world and is now happily playing her game. I don’t believe this is about intelligence or knowledge. I think there is a severe trauma at the root of narcissism. And it is trauma that people consciously choose not to treat
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I must confess that I am actually using the terms spiritual lower class, middle class and upper class in a nuanced way, which already implies a great deal about psychological health. You have to be a bit psychologically unhealthy — unsure of how to map the world on your own — to be so easily pulled into someone else’s game. At least I think so. But perhaps I am expecting too much of people, as usual. I really think that spirit or spiritedness or geist has a somewhat different meaning from simple, measurable intelligence, at least in Nietzsche’s writing, so I get my views from this.
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Well, I imagine it was not a regular life for her, but more a crusoe-like crashing on an unfamiliar island and trying to figure out which fruits and berries are edible by their colour alone.
If that fails, that’s a different kind of failure from that of choosing to only ever eat blueberries, right?
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“If that fails, that’s a different kind of failure from that of choosing to only ever eat blueberries, right?”
It may be!
Something I am thinking of lately has to do with what I see as being a tacit notion of class relations in tyhe writings of Georges Bataille. But we would be speaking of spiritual class relations. So the way I see it (and let us leave behind the really lower levels, which he tackles in ‘the psychology of fascism’) there a level of middle-class spirituality which is based on the presupposition of exchange relationships. The middle class is very absorbed and obsessed by equivalencies. We can see in this sense it is very logocentric, since a word will always have the same meaning for it, no matter what the context. But a word is also a coin, that has a certain set value and one ought to be able to obtain a certain set measurement for that coin. The idea they have is that people can be equivalent and situations are equivalent (perhaps always presumed to be so) and this furnishes the basis for competition, as one equivalency races off against another of its sort, proving, somehow that it is ultimately more than equivalent (the bourgeois miracle of miracles, that is always, somehow expected).
But the spiritual upper crust have no need for equivalencies. Everything is simply what it is, without ascribing any meaning to it that would facilitate exchange. Things are not for sale.
And then the lower levels, those who are disowned by society as a whole, they are not equivalent either, but have a lot of the stored up energy for evil in them that society disavows about itself.
But you can tell a middle-class person (in spirit) because they do not seek to understand anything deeply, but immediately invent equivalencies on the most fragile basis of reason. They can’t see deeply enough into things to realize that there are no equivalencies.
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Man, your family is so totally my family that it’s scary. Except for the part where she made sure the children had breakfast and dinner (our mother was supremely indifferent to these things), this is my experience word-for-word. Wow. Scary shit. I had no idea I had a twin somewhere in the world. 🙂
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Found today:
Чем отличается нарциссическая травма от нарциссического характера
http://imja.livejournal.com/2299258.html
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The distinction is artificial. At the root of every narcissistic personality there is a trauma. But adopting the narcissistic way of being requires a daily choice + propitious circumstances (I.e. People who don’t leave you and let you beat them up.) I’m wary of giving too much support and understanding to narcissists because I don’t want to replicate the situation where their traumas once again outshine those of their victims.
We all have some sort of trauma or several. But not all of us choose to feed other people to our traumas.
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