Life with narcissistic personality disorder can take you on a roller coaster ride. Your situation is further exacerbated if you were raised by a hypothetical narcissistic mother.
Is your mother an exhibitionist narcissist?
Seven signs your mother may be an exhibitionist narcissist.
Written by Dr. Elinor Greenberg
When I listen to some of my clients talk about the way their mother treats them, I sometimes hear an almost scripted description of the classic exhibitionist narcissist.
Usually, my clients have no idea that many of their horrible childhood memories and low self-esteem might be due to their mother suffering from Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
Related:
What is a narcissistic personality disorder?
One can think of narcissistic personality disorder as an adaptation to a childhood condition that left the person with unstable self-esteem and low empathy. These children grow up to be adults who lack what psychologists call “whole object relationships.”
This means that they are unable to see themselves and others in an integrated and stable way as they simultaneously have a mixture of good and bad, likes and dislikes.
Instead, they alternate between love and hate or idealization and devaluation.
As parents, when a child makes them feel good about themselves, they will only have positive feelings for the child.
When a child upsets them in any way, they will only have negative feelings toward the child.
As their feelings change, so does their view of their children.
Narcissistic parents also see themselves in this limited, binary way: either they are special, unique, and perfect, or they are
Defective trash is worthless.
Child abuse and object immutability
Narcissistic parents also lack “object persistence.”
This means that when they feel disappointed, hurt, or angry with their child, they immediately lose touch with all of their positive feelings towards the child and now see that the child is very bad and deserves to be punished.
Much of the child abuse we read about is due to a lack of “object persistence”.
If parents have “object persistence,” it helps them manage their angry punitive impulses.
They can remember when they are angry or frustrated with their child that they still love the child and do not want to cause any harm.
The Effect of parental narcissism on the child’s Self-image
If you were raised by narcissistic parents, you are unlikely to be able to develop a stable, integrated, and realistic self-image.
This is because we are biologically programmed to develop a great deal of our self-image from the way our caregivers treat us. This is similar to the way we learn to speak whatever language the people around us speak.
A narcissistic parent can only reflect the child’s distorted and biased views of how they view the child—and these views about the child can change rapidly as the parent’s mood changes.
This effect can be mitigated if there are loving, stable adults around who see the child realistically and positively.
This could be a non-narcissistic father, loving grandparents, aunts, and uncles, or even close friends of the family.
Related:
7 signs of an exhibitionistic narcissistic mother
After listening to hundreds of my clients talk to me about their mothers, I realized that those raised by narcissistic transverse mothers were describing the same seven types of issues over and over again.
If you can relate to the following examples, and these seven issues played a huge role in your childhood, this may be a sign that you were also raised by a narcissistic hypothetical mother.
I hope you don’t get to know many of them.
- You need to be the center of attention
Like all exhibitionist narcissists, the narcissistic exhibitionist mom craves attention.
Somehow, no matter who’s talking or what’s going on, you’ll always manage to find a way to make it about her.
You might do this tactfully with humor and a funny story or by abruptly interrupting an ongoing conversation and changing the subject.
Example:
Such a mother visited her daughter in the hospital. Her daughter was recovering from major surgery.
Instead of focusing on her daughter, she began flirting with the doctors and talking to the people who were visiting the patient in the next bed.
She was shocked when her daughter later told her how hurt and abandoned she felt.
The mother was so focused on the quality time she was having that it never occurred to her that her daughter might feel differently.
- She is low on emotional empathy
One of the interesting characteristics of narcissistic personality disorder (or “adaptive” as I prefer to call it) is that the narcissistic person does not usually “feel” what other people are feeling.
A narcissistic mother may have “cognitive empathy” (that is, she may be able to mentally understand that some of her behaviors may be causing her child’s pain), but without “emotional empathy” she has little incentive to care.
Her awareness of emotional pain only goes one way. If you accidentally cause her even the slightest bit of emotional pain, she will likely react in an extremely exaggerated way, while completely ignoring the pain she is causing you.
Example:
When John’s mother Carol celebrates her birthday, she expects everyone around her to make a fuss: give her thoughtful birthday cards, buy her gifts, take her to dinner at her favorite restaurant, and generally make her whole day extra special.
When John turned ten, he woke up very excited, wondering what special surprise his mother had planned for him:
Will he get the bike he was asking for?
Will there be an ice cream cake?
Unfortunately, Carol has been so busy all week that she completely forgot about John’s upcoming birthday and didn’t even get him a gift or a card.
When John acted disappointed, his mother felt criticized and instead of apologizing, lashed out at him and said, “Stop acting like a kid! You’re too old now for special gifts anyway.”
John’s father David (who has “emotional empathy”) assumed his wife was planning Christmas.
Seeing how hurt and disappointed John was, he quickly intervened to try and save the day for John.
He takes John and his sister to a local amusement park and they go out for ice cream, while his wife stays home, grouchy. That night after the children are in bed, Carol scolds her husband for making her look bad.
Related:
- She dominates the house and uses devaluation to get her way
The entire family tends to center around the desires of the showman, a narcissistic mother. Everything has to be the way she wants it to be because she feels entitled to it.
People do what they want because when they don’t, they fly into a rage, devalue themselves, and generally make life miserable for everyone until they give up.
She will constantly belittle anyone who challenges her and when she does, she hits below the belt.
It is not uncommon for a child who disapproves of this kind of mother to be told, “No man would ever marry you because you are too fat.” Or, “You’ll never get anywhere because you’re such a worthless idiot!”
Since the showman, narcissistic mother sees her surroundings as a reflection of her situation in life, it can be extremely important to her that the home be decorated the way she wants it to be as clean and maintained as possible.
Conversely, if she is the type of woman who does not particularly care if her surroundings are clean and orderly, she will be indifferent to her family’s pleas to take more care of the house.
Usually, she was able to marry a man who would allow her to manage the home and children however she wanted.
