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Growing up with a narcissistic mother & subsequent abuse

Hi. I haven't really posted in forever because I have a real life and deal with real life things.

However, seeing as the holiday season has just passed, I was once again reminded I do not have a normal family. I didn't have a normal, healthy, and functioning childhood and adolescence.

Because my mother was a narcissist.

Now, when most people think of a narcissist, they think of someone who blows smoke up their own ass. They have a massive ego and think the world of themselves.

The reality is narcissists do act this way but they don't feel this way. The truth is, is narcissists likely had something happen to them in their childhood that caused them to create a "superior" persona.

This leads them to form a pathological mind and lack of empathy for others to the point that they essentially see people from lovers to family members as a way to get "supply."

Narcissistic supply comes in the form of validation, living vicariously through others, money, affection, sex, or even sabotaging others to prevent them from being superior.

In the case of narcissistic parents, there are generally two kinds with variations. One tries to control everything you do and live through you, while others don't allow you to be a whole person and they essentially don't acknowledge you exist.

My mother was the second with some controlling tendencies.

Growing up with a narcissistic mother & subsequent abuse

My mother did not care about my feelings. As a matter of fact, my mother made it her mission to disregard every concern or emotion she deemed "too stressful" for her to deal with. Even when I was being mentally and physically abused by my mentally ill siblings, primarily the eldest brother, my mother "dealt with it" by asking me:

"Why are you always stressing me out? Why can't you all just get along? Ugh, fine, I'll deal with it."

Only she never would deal with it, my mother never dealt with anything. She never dealt with the abuse she faced as a child and she never dealt with her alcoholism she used to medicate it. She also never dealt with her spending habits and ever-growing bills.

It wasn't abnormal for her to choose her spending habit over food for our lunches, forcing me and my siblings to skip school in order to hide the fact that we weren't eating.

The narcissism for me manifested for me in many ways. My mother, being a narcissist, didn't want her children to be independent, especially me. To her, her children were only extensions of herself and they served whatever needs she saw them as being fit to fulfil.

Mine was the emotional sponge, and later when I became a teenager and young adult, a financial source too. Regularly I was dumped on and tormented with everything she thought was wrong with life, people I loved, me, and everyone around her.

It progressed into medical/psychological crippling, where I was constantly told how broken I essentially was. I was born premature, I had a laundry list of diagnoses for mental illnesses, and my mother made sure I knew that and that I was incapable. This leads her to be very controlling of me, she would isolate me from the world, claiming it was to "protect me."

I wasn't allowed to go out with friends, I couldn't go to parties, I was filled with ideas that all older men are potential rapists, I wasn't allowed to stay out if the sun was setting, etc. My siblings didn't have the same treatment as I did, but they too were essentially encouraged to be codependent on her, nothing more than an extension of her.

She was never interested in any of my accomplishments until other people noticed. If anyone acknowledged my writing, she would take credit for teaching me or making sure I had the best education - both of which were blatant lies. If I received compliments about my appearance, she would interject and claim she was the reason why I was so attractive, "I got her genes, after all."

When she wasn't taking credit for what I did do, I was being reassured that I was completely incapable. My mother insisted - no, demanded - that I was essentially broken and would never be on "the same level" as other people.

This led me to doubt myself and spend a good majority of my life trying to please her and everyone else around me to change that perception.

But I never could. And that's when the real abuse started.


I'm going to end part one here. I feel this is already too long to the point no one is likely to even read it. I simply decided in the new year to write about my personal experiences as a means of getting it off my chest and maybe even "help" someone, in some way I suppose.

Post-disclaimer: I'm not looking for pity. I'm grown now, I'm past this now, and I don't need anyone to apologize for my experiences. That isn't what this is about.

Growing up with a narcissistic mother & subsequent abuse
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