You're Not Crazy - It's Your Mother by Danu Morrigan Read Free Book Online Page A

it’s because it’s part of the image of the Perfect Family the parents wish to project. Perfect grooming is part of this dynamic.
    Ordinary healthy cleanliness, which allows for getting dirty in play, but being cleaned after that, does not seem to apply to any of these families.
She may neglect your medical care.
    It often happens that narcissistic mothers don’t get appropriate medical care for their children. I have heard so many horror stories of bones not set in time, of scars remaining where wounds did not get stitched and so on. Dentists’ visits and other maintenance type of medical care can often be neglected too.
She might make you overly dependent too young.
    Narcissistic mothers often don’t bother to teach their daughters the skills they need to look after themselves, e.g. personal care, and they don’t necessarily look after their daughters’ care either. The other extreme is that they expect their daughters to be responsible for themselves way too early in life. Anne remembers having to use the washing machine before she was tall enough to even easily reach the buttons.
She probably has zero curiosity.
    Narcissists have zero genuine curiosity. Oh, for sure they might have nosiness. Especially if they can nose out something to your detriment or their benefit. Or if they can find out something about a celebrity which makes them feel more important for knowing it. But genuine curiosity about you, or anyone else – nope. They don’t care about your fears (except to exploit them), hopes (except to dash them), desires (except to mock them, or get the same thing for themselves).
She’s sly.
    Anything cruel she says, she says when people aren’t around. So they never hear it, and she can deny it all. Or if they are there, the cruelty is so subtle only you can see it. Maybe it’s hidden in mock-concern for you. So no one else sees the cruelty. They may well think she’s lovely with her concern and help. This adds to the isolation and feeling of being crazy.
She probably will be vain.
    You might be surprised that it has taken this long for a narcissist’s vanity to be mentioned. Vanity is, after all, the very first thing people think of when they think of narcissism.  They often equate vanity and narcissism. However, narcissism is far more than vanity, and might not even include vanity.
    But having said that, narcissists can of course be vain. Typically they tend to be vain either about their looks, and these we call somatic narcissists, or about their intelligence, and these we call cerebral narcissists.
    It is important to stress that in neither case does the narcissist have to actually be exceptionally beautiful or intelligent. She just has to believe herself to be this. As already explained, narcissists have a fairly relaxed relationship with the truth anyway, so this is just one more aspect to that.
She rarely cries genuine tears.
    Only tears of self-pity or rage, or false tears to manipulate you. Not tears like we would: tears of grief or upset or sadness for others.
She doesn’t genuinely mourn.
    Except for her own loss. So a narcissist who loses her husband will mourn what that’ll mean for her life. But she won’t mourn her husband for himself. Still less will she feel bad about him, that he has died.
She has no sense of humour.
    Narcissists have no sense of humour beyond, sometimes, a slapstick slipping-on-banana-skin humour. They can never, ever take a joke against themselves, which of course makes sense too, right? But they can often miss the subtleties of all kinds of humour, because a lot of it depends on empathy. We laugh because we feel for the butt of the joke – but narcissists never feel for anyone but themselves and so they don’t get the joke.
She probably loves prestige.
    Sometimes narcissists will just claim it, by assuming they’re more important than everyone else (and it’s surprising how much other people buy into that). Other times they’ll get it by being holier-than, or