Dealing With A
Narcissistic Mother
- Dynamics And What
You Can Do

If you have realized that you are dealing with a narcissistic mother then you need to give yourself a pat on the back for two reasons. Firstly, for realizing that something was wrong in the relationship, and secondly, for accepting that your own mother was controlling and abusive. Neither of those two things are easy, as you well know! So well done for that.

So now you are trying to figure out the best way for dealing with a narcissistic mother. Again, as you know, this is a complicated situation and there are a lot of things to consider here. You probably feel that nobody understands what it's really like for you.

You have conflicting emotions, you know you should love her because she is your mother but you often hate the way she treats you. Your thoughts often clash with your emotions, for example, in your head you want to get away from her, but in your body you feel obliged to stay around. You may feel like a disappointment to her so you try and do things to get her approval, but she never seems to appreciate you. Your self esteem is low, you feel less than others, you want to please others so that they like you but that gets exhausting sometimes. You have difficulty making decisions. You feel you need to run everything by her first so as not to get into trouble. Then there are the "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situations.

Even if you have already moved out of her house, she is still in your head. You mentally consider how she would react whenever you have to make a choice. You often think in terms of whether what you are about to do would upset her or not. She may have led you to believe that you are stupid, worthless, you will never amount to anything, you have to settle for second best, and so on. She continues to criticize you, your friends, your spouse, your work, your ideas and generally makes you feel guilty about many things. You are probably afraid of her, your own mother!

In order to help make sense of things, I am going to go back to basics. Rather than give a list of 10 things to do, I think it's much more useful to understand what goes on in a relationship with a narcissistic mother so that you understand where the problems are created. In this way, you develop different ways of responding to the manipulations of your mother and you get to take control of your own life.

So let's get started...

Dealing with a narcissistic mother - from the beginning

In a normal, healthy mother-child relationship, the mother is the safe haven for the child for many years. As the child grows it begins to move further and further away from the mother at times, first crawling, then walking, learning about how the world works, exploring, figuring out how to get what it wants. If the child gets upset for any reason, it attracts the attention of it's mother, is comforted, and when settled, begins to explore the world again. As the child grows, and it's personality begins to show through, it is encouraged in certain ways. Think of the personality as the collection of thinking, emotional and behavioral patterns that makes an individual unique. The personality includes interests, values, attitudes and a sense of self.

All these things are influenced over time by healthy parents so that the child grows up to be an independent, free-thinking, confident, happy individual who can fit into and adapt to society. Parents usually want their children to be more successful than they were themselves.

While a narcissistic mother may give the outside world the impression that this is exactly what she is doing with her children, what happens at home behind closed doors is something entirely different.

A narcissistic mother will control every aspect of the child's development. She will mold and shape the child's ideas, beliefs, thinking, behaviors and emotions. She will manipulate the child's decision making. She will not allow the child to have a good opinion of himself or herself. She will make the child doubt themselves a lot. She will set up double binds, those 'damned if you do damned if you don't' situations, interfering with the child's ability to think rationally and learn. She will create fear of the outside world in her own child.

If the child has a particular talent, or even expresses an interest in something, a narcissistic mother will often turn the child away from such an interest. In fact, anything the child gets enjoyment from is often prohibited. The complete opposite may be the case, although much rarer, where the child shows a natural proclivity for some sport and they are pushed forcefully into it because the mother wants a national champion, or even a world champion.

The effect of all these things is to prevent the development of the personality of the child. Instead, the child develops a false personality, or pseudopersonality, that the mother imposes on the child.

This pseudopersonality is programmed by the mother to be subservient and obedient. It is trained to put the mother's wants and needs before it's own. It is kept dependent on the mother, often well into adulthood. Fear and guilt are the main tools used to keep all these things in place.

The child grows up often not knowing who they really are. They are torn between feeling they should look after their mother but wanting to break away. The child only knows they are ok if the mother lets them know this. More often than not, the mother is critical and belittles the child and the child ends up believing that they are basically flawed and sosmehow they must deserve this kind of poor treatment. The child is blamed for anything that goes wrong and ends up taking responsibility for all sorts of things that it is not actually responsible for. This obviously has a huge impact on the child's sense of self and their sense of self worth.

But this is not all that is going on...

Dealing with a narcissistic mother - bonding issues

I mentioned already the safe haven idea and how fear is used to control by narcissistic mothers. When you put these two things together, the narcissistic mother is both the safe haven and a source of fear, or even terror, for the child. Normally when the child is upset, it naturally attracts the attention of it's mother because it wants to be comforted. This is called secure attachment.

In situations where the mother cannot regularly provide comfort, children often develop one of two insecure attachment responses. They can become very clingy, demanding attention all the time (preoccupied), or they can become aloof, trying not to depend on others for comfort (dismissing attachment). Both of these patterns are considered organized attachment styles because they do have their uses. The preoccupied style means that there are times when the child increases the chance of attachment with the care givers and the dismissing style means there is less chance of the child being hurt by rejecting or harmful behaviors on the part of the caregiver. Although these adaptations are not ideal, they usually work well enough for the child to have predictable and organized ways of responding to the environment.

Now consider the situation where the mother is actually causing the distress. The child is drawn to her and at the same time tries to move away from her. The normal attachment system collapses and the child is in a situation of terror without any solution. Sometimes the child may switch rapidly between the systems mentioned above, and there may also be confusion, fear, freezing and even strange movements. This is a disorganized attachment and is not a useful mechanism.

Oftentimes, the only safe place a child can retreat to is to a safe place in their head. In other words, they dissociate. The problem here is that the individual can no longer think about what they are feeling. The sensory, emotional system dissociates from the cognitive system. This is not necessarily a global phenomenon but it certainly happens with regard to the traumatic relationship.

The person can be terrified, but cannot reason their way out of the situation. Instead, they experience the terror and do what they have been programmed to do, move closer to the source of terror. The individual is unable to think independently and is emotionally dependent on the mother. The child often gives up and resigns themselves to such an existence. This situation can persist well into adulthood.

For some children, it's not until they have children of their own and they figure out that they cannot treat their own children the way their parents treated them, that they realize that there was something seriously wrong with their childhood relationships.

These are the underlying dynamics of relationships between narcissistic mothers and their children. You can read more about the specific problems that children have in some of the links at the end of this article.

Dealing with a narcissistic mother - what can you do?

Hopefully now you can begin to see where some of the symptoms you may be having have been created. The lack of self worth, identity issues, relationship difficulties, decision making issues, the constant anxiety and the people pleasing are all by products of the programming and the pseudopersonality as well as the disordered bonding system.

If you are feeling overwhelmed and terrified by all this, it's ok. There are solutions. All your behaviors have been learnt as a way to survive in the situaiton you were in. Because you have learnt these things, you can learn to replace them with behaviors that are useful, organized, stable and for your benefit. This last point is very important.

The pseudopersonality will often do things that go against it's own best interests. The person then thinks that they have done things to hurt themselves, or they are self sabotaging, or they are broken human beings. These ideas are wrong. The pseudopersonality is simply doing what it was programmed to do, and what it was programmed to do was to take care of the manipulator. The trick here is not to try and fix the pseudopersonality, but to get rid of it altogether. So how do you do that?

The pseudopersonality was put in place with very strong influence techniques over many years. What is necessary is to learn about these techniques. How do they work? How were they used against you? Why were they used? What did the technique do to you? How did it change your thinking, your emotions and your behaviors? In your particular case, how is the technique still affecting you?

On top of this, you have to learn about manipulators. What drives them? What were they getting from controlling you? What techniques were they particularly good at? What other techniques were they using that you were not actually aware of? This last point is particularly important. If you are not aware that somebody is doing a particular thing to you, you cannot mentally resist. And if something is affecting you outside of your conscious awareness it is even more powerful that something that you are actually aware of.

So, as you can see, education is fundamental here. This is another example of where knowledge is power. (This is one of the reasons that narcissistic mothers lie to their children and keep them in the dark about many things.) Right now, you need information, and lots of it.

Another important factor to keep in mind is that not only were you made to feel that anything that went wrong was your fault, but also that you should be able to fix things on your own. This idea will hold you back in your recovery. Professional help is invaluable. But to get outside help many people have to realize that they cannot fix all this on their own. Unfortunately many people spend years trying to sort things out alone before finally getting help. And then, of course, they wish that they had asked for help sooner!

Children in abusive families are often trained not to talk to others about what happens at home, even with their siblings. If that is your case, talking to others in the family often helps to clarify things and when you start to talk, it allows others to speak up, too. This can be very validating for all concerned. However, if you suspect that somebody else other than your mother is a narcissist, too, then be very careful!

Limiting contact with anarcissist is also very important but this is obviously complicated when it's your mother. As you get rid of the pseudopersonality, this aspect becomes more obvious and making decisions about how much contact you have becomes easier.

Dealing with a narcissistic mother - more reading

To get you started, you can read more about pseudopersonalities, controlling mothers, what a controlling relationship is all about, more details about the effects of narcissistic parents, specific problems of adult children of narcissists, the beliefs abusive mothers install in their children and narcissistic abuse recovery.

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