“I was 16, and my boyfriend was 17. One day after cheerleading, I came home and found my mom sitting on the couch kissing my boyfriend.”
“I remember being frozen and numb. It was like I couldn’t move. I always felt like my mom was jealous of me in some weird way, but this confirmed it,” said Amanda, a client who sought my services. She wanted to stop attracting selfish men like her mother. Amanda was a tormented soul who desperately needed help.
Today’s guest post by Lisa Romano tackles the difficult issue of overcoming a narcissistic mother. (And to be fair, we hope to have a follow-up on narcissistic fathers, too.) “Amanda” is an amalgam of several clients Lisa has guided through the process.
Does “Amanda’s” story resonate with you in some way?
Rejection is Everywhere
Amanda is a successful executive who has never been married. Although she’s had a string of relationships, they’ve all ended horribly. Inevitably, she would discover that her partners were either addicted to porn, cheating, or simply failing to meet her basic needs.
“My relationships seemed to last only when I was willing to ignore my feelings about something that made me feel uncomfortable in our relationship. As soon as I opened my mouth, these men would either shut their mouths and try to punish me with silence, or they would berate me for daring to express a personal need I had regarding their treatment of me.”
When I asked Amanda who these men reminded her of, she sat quietly for a moment and said, “These men treat me the way my mother treated me. As long as I meet their needs and satisfy my own, they are happy. But the moment I show any emotion, they shut their mouths. It’s like I’m expected to simply be an extension of them. My goal is to sit there and listen to them, and to let them control me in every way possible. When I dare to complain, I find that some kind of punishment will follow.”
Amanda was aware enough to see the similarities between her relationship with her mother and her relationships with men, but she was at a loss about what to do about it.
VisibleMother – InvisibleChild
Children of narcissists are abused in insidious ways. Narcissistic parents don’t have to work to manipulate their children into loving them the way they do with strangers or people they want to impress.
In Amanda’s case, feeling any emotion threatened her survival. The moment her mother realized she was unhappy about something that happened at home, Amanda would be berated until she emotionally submitted to apologize for her sadness or anger about something her mother had done.
This dynamic is characteristic of a narcissistic parent-child relationship. Most people agree that narcissism exists on a spectrum, but in Amanda’s case, the level of manipulation and exploitation she experienced throughout her life was toxic. It nearly killed her. During her teenage years, Amanda attempted suicide in an attempt, as she puts it, “to end the never-ending sense of invisibility and torture that she could not escape as the daughter of a woman who fascinated every man, and every boy, who ever looked at her, who could charm the skin of a snake but who seemed unable to see her as a valid individual entity, her child nonetheless.”
Amanda grew up feeling invisible and often wondered if she was real at all. Not being able to feel connected to her mother hurt her in a way that made her question her right to feel worthy.
Approval_Need
Amanda did what many of my clients do to somehow get the validation their parents so desperately needed. She excelled in school and outperformed many of her peers academically.
She even won state fairs in cooking competitions. Her drive to succeed was fueled by a need to have her mother focus entirely on her accomplishments, not for selfish reasons but simply to feel seen. When I asked Amanda to assign a feeling word to this need to feel seen, she chose “craved.” “I can’t remember a time when I didn’t ‘crave’ my mother’s validation or attention.”
Resetting_Life
Amanda eventually began to put the pieces of her life puzzle together and realized that in all of her relationships with men, she was also “craving” my mother’s validation. Just like her relationship with her mother, no matter how hard she tried to be “good enough” to gain external approval, she never quite could. As powerful as these revelations were for Amanda, our work together had only just begun. “Intellectually, I always knew that my mother did not love me or could not love me,” Amanda said, “but I never allowed myself to feel that.”
A mother’s connection to her child is innate, and most people would recognize it as magical. When the two seeds become one, a divine connection begins to form between mother and child. Beyond the mother’s conscious understanding, her body undergoes profound adaptations that allow her developing fetus to feel nurtured, protected and loved. The female body is genetically designed to fully and comprehensively support all the needs of her developing fetus.
Even after birth, a mother’s body is equipped to support her newborn. The connection is so divine that a mother’s body can regulate her newborn’s body temperature. Oxytocin secretion acts as a bonding agent to help cement the connection between mother and baby after birth.
Once the mother’s umbilical cord is cut, the newborn is completely dependent on the mother’s desire to maintain this miraculous bond. While the desire to lovingly support the baby comes naturally to most mothers, for some it is not.
Helping clients become more aware of the dynamic between themselves and their narcissistic parents proves to be extremely helpful. As the client becomes more able to understand that the dysfunctional dynamic between parent and child was beyond their control, less anxiety is felt, and a sense of freedom is felt to express more trauma.
Constantly reminding the client that what happened is “not your fault” can be a comforting thought. Cognitive revelations that are received with a sense of comfort and validation can ease the mind’s ability to access trapped emotions more willingly. With the pain-for-pleasure principle lubricated through forgiveness and validation, adult children of narcissistic abuse find a way to access feelings that were once too terrifying to integrate.
WhenMother’sMilkIsPoison
Amanda’s biggest obstacle wasn’t her mother.
Her biggest challenge was finding a way to unlearn her childhood programming that seemed to be trapped inside a Pandora’s Box. Unable to access the painful feelings in the box, due to her brain and perhaps the ego’s desire to prevent Amanda from “experiencing the abandonment, rejection, loneliness, and shame that was locked inside,” we needed to create an environment that was warm, fulfilling, and validating. The more Amanda felt seen, the less afraid she was to see or feel the feelings that were locked away.
UnleashingShame
Week after week, I would sit with my client and talk about her experiences. I would encourage her to tell me how each incident she remembered “made” her feel. Validating each emotion with the full compassion and empathy of an inner child who had a right to feel what she felt allowed Amanda her natural right to feel seen.
Amanda and I became a team dedicated to unleashing the negative power of shame by constantly reminding ourselves that Amanda was not at fault for her mother’s inability to love her healthily. Additionally, accepting that feeling unloved was real, and even normal under the circumstances, helped Amanda feel less conflicted.
For years, her mother and her boyfriend had told her that she was “crazy and too sensitive.” After realizing that she felt unloved and that such a feeling was indeed true, she allowed herself to accept her reality, rather than fight her sad truth.
Deep down, it wasn’t feeling unloved that kept Amanda stuck in dysfunctional patterns. It was the fear of believing that she felt unloved that kept her in emotional bondage. When Amanda learned to recognize that her experience of feeling unloved by her mother was appropriate because her narcissistic mother was incapable of loving naturally, it brought peace and emotional integrity to her anxiety-ridden body. Once this hurdle was crossed, Amanda was able to acknowledge and validate her own experiences with a more secure sense of knowing, and the grief work began.
ThePastIsNotTheFuture
Today, Amanda is no longer trapped in endless cycles of codependency, where her behaviors are unconsciously controlled by a deep sense of unworthiness and a neurotic desire to feel validated by others. We have since worked to reframe her ideas about what a healthy mother-child relationship looks like. She has learned to replace the shame that once kept her stuck with compassion for the wounded child who was powerless to change the environment into which she was innocently born.
Amanda, like many of my other wounded adult clients from unhealthy homes, is learning how to heal from narcissistic abuse through cognitive work based on empathy and validation. Shame is a paralyzing emotion, and it seems that the human mind will do almost anything not to “feel or face it.” In my practice, it seems that once an environment is created where the client understands that what is lurking in the subconscious is not their fault, shame slowly begins to lose its power over the client’s mind. With the feelings constantly validated, the mind seems less afraid to confront the fearful feelings that make clients believe they are unworthy.
Narcissism, Parenting and Liberation – Important Lessons
Ultimately, my clients and I strive to believe and understand that all children are born worthy, innocent, divine, and perfect. It is never any child’s fault if that child ever feels unloved or unworthy. A child has the right from birth to feel seen, protected, cared for, wanted, desired, accepted, worthy, fulfilled, and loved.
No child should ever have to wonder if they are worthy of their mother or father’s attention or validation. No child should ever feel separated from his mother but should be allowed and encouraged to bond with his parents until the child is psychologically ready to begin separating from them in his own time.
When relationships between children and their parents are healthy, separation occurs naturally with the changing of the seasons. However, in the case of children born to narcissistic parents, these children are denied their civil rights to be individuals and are instead handed over to parasites, who feed on them emotionally and psychologically, sometimes for the entire life of both mother and child.
Adult children who have been abused by narcissistic parents need to know that it is not their fault that they cannot please their parents or receive their approval.
They need to know that it was their parents who failed them. They did not fail their parents.
They need to know what narcissism is and how it impairs a parent’s ability to express love.
They need to know that they feel unworthy because their parents made them feel that way.
They need to know that feeling unworthy is valid. They truly felt that way because their parents abandoned them in various ways.
They need to know that they are not crazy for doubting their parents’ love for them.
They need to know that anger, sadness, grief, disappointment, and even depression are normal emotional responses to being raised by a narcissistic parent.
But perhaps most importantly, abused children of narcissistic parents need to know that they are capable of healing. If they can feel their feelings, they can heal them.
As life coaches, psychologists, and licensed therapists, we can create environments that are designed to reduce the shame associated with the deep sense of unworthiness that exists in the adult child of a narcissistic parent. We can help others not only heal but learn to believe in their absolute worthiness.
I am happy to report that Amanda learned that just because her mother couldn’t make her feel loved, it doesn’t mean she’s unlovable.
