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

helpier-than, anyone else. Sometimes people who are very active in prominent roles – church, community associations, charities etc, are getting Narcissistic Supply from this. Of course, not all such people are. There are many, many genuine people there too. But the ones who are prominent, who get seen, they might well be narcissistic.
    And it might include your mother. Which helps with the crazy-makingness of it all. Here is everyone else telling you how wonderful she is, how helpful, and yet you are the one emotionally bruised and upset every time you deal with her. Trying to reconcile those twin realities can be truly head-wrecking. One clue is to look out for Narcissistic Glow. The genuine helpers will get pleasure from it, sure, and it’s human to like being appreciated. But they won’t have that Narcissistic Glow going on.
She may blame you for getting in the way of some huge success.
    One trick that some narcissistic mothers do is to claim some lost, would-be huge success which was in her grasp but she had to give it up raise her children, i.e. you. So she was accepted to RADA but turned it down when she got pregnant. Or won a regional singing competition, but couldn’t take it further for the same reason.
    This is actually a pretty superb trick. She gets the kudos of being a wonderful actor or singer without ever having to prove herself at it or risk failure and rejection, and she gets to use it as a stick to beat her children with. ‘After all I sacrificed for you!’ would be the refrain there.
She has no introspection.
    Narcissists are never introspective.
    They never analyse their actions or motivations. Things just are, and by definition, since it’s the Narcissist doing it, are appropriate. They don’t need to think any further about it.
    And so you’ll never get a narcissist pondering ruefully about some past mistake, or sharing a lesson she learned, or laughing at something embarrassing they did.
    And so it’s like they are petrified in amber, emotionally speaking. They never learn. They never grow. They never mature.
    Most of us like to think of life as a journey of growth and increasing awareness and increasing maturity. We like to learn from our mistakes so we don’t make them again. We like to improve our life skills all the time, including our relationship skills.
    Not narcissists. How can you improve on perfection? And so narcissists are the same at 50 as they were at 20. They do not gather wisdom or maturity.
She takes everything personally.
    Very personally. Everything is about how it impacts on her, or reflects on her. And so, if you hold a different opinion to her, it can literally offend her. Again, given what we know about how narcissists think they’re perfect in every way, that makes sense. If they think blue is the nicest colour, then it is. And therefore if you think red is a nicer colour, a) you’re wrong, and b) you’re subliminally suggesting that she is wrong to prefer blue and this is back to being an attack on her.
    The concept that colour preferences are simply that – a preference, and that no one is right or wrong, does not occur to them.
    And I picked such a trivial example as colour on purpose, because even such a trivial example will offend a narcissist. And so, whatever you do, don’t express a different opinion on something major like religion or politics.
She lies against all the evidence.
    Have you ever had the experience of a four- or five-year-old child looking you straight in the eye, and swearing with total sincerity that they were nowhere near the biscuit jar, despite the chocolate smeared all over their faces? You might even point out the fact of the chocolate stains and they’ll insist that, even so, they didn’t eat the biscuits. They make no attempt, even, to explain the chocolate. Without shame they’ll acknowledge that there’s chocolate on their face, but still insist that that they didn’t eat the biscuits.
    That’s the sort of thing narcissists