Parents, Narcissism, and Healing.
Sometimes growing up means leaving behind people you love.
When my mother came home after a long shift to find her house in shambles — a dirty dish tucked away where it shouldn’t be, a washing machine full of wet clothes going moldy, or an unkempt bathroom — she would line her daughters up and strike us with a belt. She’d go up and down that row until someone confessed. Whoever confessed faced additional punishment, for the triple-crime of having done wrong, lied about it, and gotten her sisters punished. The others were sent off to lick their wounds. My mother would go to her room and lock the door.
The next morning she’d emerge, all smiles and willingness to put the past behind us, to embrace the new day. A blank slate. Sometimes we’d go out for breakfast, or to the movies. We’d be happy. Happy enough that we’d do our best to forget the pain of yesterday. None of us wanted to go back to that. The injustice and the fear of it all. Why focus on the bad when we didn’t have to? Why not live in the fantasy that my mother was always good and kind. That our life was all easy mornings and pancake breakfasts.
The reality was that I could set a watch by our beatings. I almost always knew when they were coming. Like a storm in the air. Our punishments had little to do with the constant disarray of a house governed by children, whose only parent was often working and rarely consistent about chores and expectations. While I’m sure that didn’t help, neither did the beatings, which were less about discipline and more about stress relief for a mother who was often kind, often cruel, and remains to this day a narcissist.
We all have some awareness of what narcissism means. The term is popular, thrown around off the cuff — by people who don’t really mean it, towards people who don’t really deserve it. Our colloquial understanding of narcissism is that it’s a specific character trait, one a person either has or doesn’t have, when it’s really a spectrum of behavior on which we all fall, somewhere between martyr and self-perceived god. We need a little narcissism to survive. Some awareness of ourselves and a stake in our own wellbeing. That’s healthy. It’s another thing to be so dominated by one’s own perspective that you’re rendered incapable of seeing and validating the experiences of others.
The line between an occasionally thoughtless friend and true narcissist is a commitment to the delusion of self which can only be sustained through pathological lies and constant manipulation. Self-awareness is superseded by a fragile self-ideation that requires constant validation to uphold.
Narcissists generally come from other narcissists. They grow up having their needs and feelings invalidated by their caregivers. As a result, they develop a warped sense of self and a deep distrust of others. They toggle between the extremes of ecstasy and self-loathing. They’re emotionally immature, compulsive, and effusive. They’re so attached to their own perspective that the assertion of another constitutes a threat; to be combated, eliminated, or subsumed.
To love a narcissist is to be constantly devoured. To struggle for self-actualization in such a relationship is to live a life embroiled in conflict. Hoping that one day your narcissist will see you and give back to you a smidge of the love they demand. I’m sorry to say, your narcissist will never see you or give you the love you deserve. They can’t.
In the moments before mom hit us I would often confess, regardless of whether I’d actually done whatever we’d been called to account for. I knew what all kids in turbulent and physically unsafe environments know, that my body and my needs were less important than others. I loved my mom. I hated to see her sad and her rage terrified me. I also hated the idea that at least one of my siblings was also innocent and about to be punished none-the-less. I was the baby and the favorite, so I knew that I’d probably get off easier than my sisters — sometimes even just a talking-to. It made perfect sense to young me that I should confess quickly, apologize, and take the punishment. Especially since not confessing meant I was going to get hit anyway. Taking responsibility was the only way for me to gain control of a situation that no child should have been in in the first place.
I don’t blame my sisters for letting me get hit. We were scared kids and I was favored. I rarely had to face my mother’s wrath alone, as they did. When we grew older the punishments grew more severe and I began to resent my self-assigned status as sacrificial lamb. When no one stepped forward, we all got beat. After that, it didn’t matter who’d done it. Sometimes, in the aftermath, we’d find each other. Quietly moving through the dark house after mom had gone to sleep. We’d whisper questions while searching hands checked hips, thighs, and forearms for bruises we couldn’t yet see. In those moments, when we weren’t in competition for the scraps of my mother’s affection, we were sisters.
The best-case scenario for the child of a narcissist is that they manage to develop, or at least witness, other relationships that function through mutual respect and care. The opportunity to observe healthy(er) relationships is crucial because those interactions show the kid that their caregiver’s behavior is not normal. It shows the child that there is another path to take, another type of person to emulate. Those interactions present them with a choice; to slip into their parents’ delusions or to break free of them. To start the long journey of unpacking their past and learning how to cultivate self-compassion rooted in reality, while challenging the delusional thinking they’ve grown up normalizing. To begin learning to trust ourselves and start holding ourselves accountable for our own healing.
The most difficult part of that healing process is shockingly not the therapy — which is hard — or the struggle to find a balance between self-compassion and self aggrandizing — which is harder. The hardest part is that your healing often requires that you separate yourself from the narcissist(s) who raised you.
My mom doesn’t remember the violence in our house. It sits too far at odds with the woman she sees herself as. Both damsel and hero in the story of her life which requires constant revising. A constant editing out of all the parts that don’t serve her narrative. Heroes don’t hit their kids, certainly not in order to make themselves feel better. So that never happened, delete delete delete.
She still remembers, as I do, sweet sun-drenched mornings in our Honda Passport. When we’d drive around, drinking gas station mochas and singing along to the radio, looking for yard sales to pillage. She remembers Shania Twain and TLC. Our bronzed hands sticking out car windows, dancing on the wind.
She doesn’t remember hitting us with the dog’s chain leash after finding a half-eaten pb&j in the laundry room. She doesn’t remember pushing my sister down the stairs. She doesn’t remember when I was sixteen and so sad that I couldn’t stop crying. For months I cried constantly, unable to access that happy girl we’d both thought I was. She doesn’t remember the crying. She doesn’t remember screaming at me to stop or how she pummeled my head with her fists when I proved unable to manage that.
She doesn’t remember. Or she does and she can’t confess. Maybe it’s too painful for her to see that she’s become so much like the mother she despised. Her mother, who would throw glass bottles at her daughter’s head when she made a child’s error. The mother she’d run away from when she was 13. The mother, who often wasn’t there and was terrifying when she was.
I wonder if my mother managed to love her own despite it all, as I did and still do. I wonder if they had sun-drenched mornings. I wonder if those moments are locked away, sitting tidily among the many others that my mother cannot remember.
My mother survives by not remembering, or pretending to. She demands the same from her children. Helping to sustain her fantasy is the price we are asked to pay in exchange for our mother’s love. Over the course of the last decade I’ve discovered that that price is just too high. To sustain her fantasy is to forget myself, to make myself smaller so that I can fit more neatly into her narrative. To lie for her, to others and to myself.
Loving a narcissist is an exercise in the type of self-betrayal I’d perfected at 5, the first time I ever admitted to doing something I hadn’t done in an attempt to pacify my mother’s rage. I grew up struggling to survive in my mothers delusion. Hell, I believed it. I believed that I was bad, rotten, and cruel. I felt responsible for everything. What I didn’t do, I punished myself for not stopping.
As a kid growing up with a narcissist, you have to be the adult. You get all of the responsibility and none of the control. Now that I am an actual adult, I have real control. I can choose to stay trapped in this cycle with my mother, who has no desire to change, or I can make the impossible decision to save myself. To heal, before I have a child of my own and start wounding them in the same ways I was wounded.
I’m struggling now, with the reality that my mother is not a damsel and that I am not her hero. This life is not a fantasy. I was a child and she was my mother. It should have always been the other way around. She was supposed to protect me. I know that in my bones. But still, I miss mom.
I miss the woman she was at her best. When she was gentle and kind, because she was often gentle and kind. Because I know that she tried to love me in the best way that she knew how and that she wasn’t given the tools to love me right. I know that.
I’m still so full of compassion for her. It’s coming out of my freaking pores. I’m overflowing with it and if she could just admit to a single moment of the pain she caused, I could forgive her everything. A single true apology and we could work from there, grow together.
That’s my fantasy, but I know what my mother is capable of and that she cannot give me this. She lacks the courage to face herself, in all her fullness and mistakes. I understand, it’s scary and ultimately it’s her choice.
I chose to heal. I choose to show up fully in my life and love as a person who owns their mistakes. Who tries to be better. Who craves honesty above all else. When I act outside of myself I will be accountable. I will be brave. Not a damsel, hero, or villain. No true story has such one dimensional characters. I will just be Leigh. Learning.
I will choose to look at the past and see not what I wish were there, but what was. To see the dog chains, the violence, and the sunlight bouncing off the rearview mirror in a car that for a moment was filled to the brim with joy.
