I think this will be my last post in this journal. I did a lot of reading the past several days on narcissistic mothers and gained more understanding of how my parents functioned. My mom is incapable of empathy, but demands it from others. She hated most of my friends and significant others because she perceived they had influence over me. Kicking me out was a way to take away support so that I would remain reliant on her, though that backfired. Me moving away kept me out of her control and influence. She needed an enabler, and my dad needed a controller; she verbally abused him, too, and emasculated him. Because of his own issues, it was easier for him to separate himself from me because he needed her, and he needed her to be right since he didn't know how to connect in himself with what was right and stand up for it, whether for himself or for me. The pity I felt was the focus that was always demanded to be on her as the center and focus of the family. She was jealous of me and needed to knock me down, she needed to be bigger and better than me.
I also read about the different types of roles the children of narcissists are put into: the scapegoat, the golden child, and the ignored child. If she did me any favors, it was by making me the scapegoat, because children in those roles tend to be the ones who see what is going on, call out abuse, and have a sense of justice. They tend to react to the abuse with strength, so because of how she set it up, she made me stronger, and to her own detriment also made me her foe rather than her toady.
I feel much more free of my parents now. More free to do what I want, and no guilt if I choose to ctb. I knew these things rationally, but my feelings are much more aligned with my thoughts now, and I feel calmer and more centered.
I don't feel the need now to post any more stories I mentioned in other posts that I would, except for the final one, as well as one that I didn't mention. I'll tell that one first.
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Several years ago, my mom and I were having a conversation about the abuse in her home when she was growing up. Her father was an alcoholic for many years and both passionately loved and physically abused her mother. Her mother was physically abusive. My mom didn't talk much about the abuse, but she and her brother used to laugh about how one of them could pass my grandmother in the hall, and out of nowhere, she would slap one of them in the face.
During this conversation, I said to my mom how hard and scary it must have been to grow up in such an environment of physical abuse. I showed her empathy. She got kind of quiet and responded, "Yeah, I guess I brought some of that to you." It was the only time she acknowledged she abused me. She did not apologize. It was the tiniest step, and nothing further developed. It brought no significant healing to our relationship. But she has a tendency to remember her father as a kind of saint, and her childhood as a simpler and happier time, a golden era in her life. In retrospect, the conversation we had reveals to me that she cannot face what she did to me if she cannot face the reality of her past. She doesn't have the inner strength and support for a different foundation than the false one on which she relies. I can't fix that. I can't fix her. And it's not emotionally safe or sane to have her in my life as long as she functions like that. As she said when I was a teenager, "We're not going to change, you are." She and Dad did not change. I have only improved, with decades of effort and, recently, reaffirming and embracing my awareness of the fuckedupness, now with more groundedness and understanding. It's been quite healing to stop owning her shit, which is what a narcissistic mother wants those around her to do.
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The final story.
When I wrote to my parents demanding they take responsibility for the abuse, they said no. We didn't speak for about four years. I moved out of the country, and at one point I had an irrational feeling that something had happened to one of my parents and called them. I spoke to my mom, they were fine, I told her where I was living and the good things that were happening in my life (narcissistic mothers don't like this, I had done things without her consent, approval, or involvement). I wrote her an email, including saying that I forgave her, and she took several days to respond.
When she finally wrote back, she told me things that were going on in their lives. She said that they couldn't take "the blame games" anymore, and while they would always love me and wished me the best, they were ending contact with me. She signed the email from her, my dad, and the pets, two of whom I'd never met.
I wrote her back and blasted her, and said at the end that it was ridiculous the pets were telling me goodbye, first because they wouldn't, and second because two of them didn't even know I existed. She never responded.
I would occasionally check Facebook to see if she ever opened an account, and she did. I blocked her and used a fake name so that she could never find my account. A couple of years after the final shunning, I checked her account one day. Her profile photo was a picture of her and I from an event when I was 19, the one year I was compliant. The event was thrown for me by a close friend of hers.
Lots of people liked and commented on the photo. The woman who threw the event asked if it was from that day, and my mother replied, "Yes, and GoodPersonEffed and I still thank you for it!"
Clearly all this time, my upstanding parents had been lying to extended family and their friends that we still had a close and loving relationship.
I took a week or so to process my strong anger and consider rationally how to manage the situation.
I sent her an email. I told her that she had one week to delete the photo from Facebook, or I would write to every person who liked or commented the photo and tell them the actual status of our relationship.
Within hours, she put up a new profile photo, but did not delete the one I told her to. She also blocked the list of her friends.
I waited five days and wrote to her again. I reminded her that she had two more days to delete the photo completely, and I sent her screenshots of the list of people who had reacted, and all of the comments. Within an hour, the photo was deleted.
Several months later, I was suicidal and went to an ER. From there I was transferred to a "Behavioral Health Center," that is, a stand-alone psych ward that exists to suck up Medicare funds. It was a horrific place, full of gaslighting and abuses by staff. One tiny example was that I was crying in my bed one night, and a nurse told me if I kept crying that I would be sent over to the unit where the seriously out of control folks were. There were patient-on-patient sexual assaults at the center. At one point, I was under threat of assault. I knew it likely wouldn't work in my favor, but because of the fear, I called my parents' house. My dad answered. I told him I had been suicidal, had checked myself in to a psych facility to get help, that assaults were happening, and I was in danger. (Reminder: my dad is a retired cop.) He said, "What do you want us to do about it? There's nothing more we can do." I asked if Mom was there, and he said, "Why?" Then he said something that at the time I didn't understand: "What did you do to get put in jail?" I said, "I just told you I'm in the hospital because I'm suicidal! Fuck you!" and hung up. I had never told either of my parents to fuck off. Only later did I make the connection that the name of the hospital was the name of the jail in another state where he had been a cop, so that's what he saw on the caller ID.
So that conversation was the last I ever had with my father, and the email about the photo was the last conversation I ever had with my mother.
Up until just the past month, I felt very conflicted about how I managed the situation with the Facebook photo. On the one hand, I felt very empowered. I set a boundary, and I gave it the teeth of consequences. It was effective and got results. On the other hand, it troubled me that I didn't exercise more patience and reason with her. It bothered me that she had coerced me throughout my life, and in order to get my need met, I resorted to coercion, rather than patiently taking it in stages to reach my goal: reason and explain, suggest, then escalate to demands and consequences. I jumped straight to a demand and a threat that I wouldn't have even followed through on, although I respect that I gave her a reasonable amount of time to comply, and even a reminder when she clearly wasn't interested in meeting the deadline. In the grand scheme of things, it's not that huge of a deal that I didn't manage it at some level of ethical purity. I needed the empowerment and victory, I needed to fill up what she had drained for so long, and I still feel that wonderful power. However, I accept I am not perfect, I am not a saint, and there are stages to reaching that level of inner strength, groundedness, and self-assurance that would have assisted me in managing the conflict resolution steps that would have been more balanced and more powerful, if not as immediately and gratifyingly empowering. I needed that step of growth in fighting back against the bully. I didn't cause her harm, and I didn't get addicted to the feeling of power. I still enjoy that feeling, but it does not direct me, and now, neither does the guilt. I earned that moment of victory, I'm allowed to enjoy the power of it. I progressed, I did no harm, and that is more than sufficient for now, and for a long time.
One of the last books I read was about emotionally immature parents, who often view things in black and white, as my parents do. The author said that part of emotional maturity and intelligence is about being able to manage that many things in life are emotionally complex and conflicting. There is more than one way of viewing and experiencing how I responded to the Facebook situation, and it's a sign of healing and grounding that I can deal with the complexity, the lack and the fulfillment, the winning and the wanting to have done better. It is a sign of emotional maturity that I can feel both anger and compassion toward my parents, without being ungrounded by it and falling back into the pity sandtrap.
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Thank you to any and all who have read this post or any of the others on this thread. It has been much more effective and empowering to write all this here on a forum than in a journal. I have felt heard and supported. It has given me more strength and clarity. I have felt not alone, as I would have with a journal. I have been experiencing for days the benefits and empowerment of having done this here, and it has been integrative. Again, thank you.
