Someone suggested I post something about my situation. My mom is handicapped and in serious pain. She's been like this since she turned 50. At that time I moved back home to help dad take care of her. He confided in me he couldn't take it anymore. She is now 87 and dad is dead. My situation is complicated in that, I have a narcissistic parent, but she is in serious chronic pain. Her doctors have confirmed it. The situation has ruined my life in more ways than I want to expound on. Please don't suggest I find resources. I've been through all of that. I am currently reading books that discuss having a narcissistic parent, and they are helpful in reflecting back what you're feeling, but I have yet to find anything that reflects the incredible damage a narcissistic parent can do. I saw one film entitled "Jaffa" (2009) about a family that falls apart after the black sheep of the family gets killed. There was a talk after the movie and the discussion focused around the "narcissistic" mother. I was shocked and speechless because I couldn't even tell the mother was self absorbed. I don't think anyone yet knows how growing up in a home with a narcissistic parent can be so completely and horribly complicated. I have yet to see anyone really define it well, or come up with a solution that the affected child can actually come to hold onto as a way out and still be intact. What I wish for now-a-days, maybe strangely, is acknowledgement. The way bullying is in the spotlight now. I wish parental narcissism was in the spotlight. I wish people would wake up to it. Thanks for reading. Please share your experiences if they are similar.
You may have to rent a room, pack without their knowledge, call a cab and flee in the middle of the night but you MUST do it! When you're settled adopt a cat from a shelter (easier than a dog in a small space) and you'll have a friend for life who expects no more than food, love and a warm bed and will give you unconditional love forever.
I have 2 dogs and four cats and without them I think I'd have been in the looney bin long ago.
Your comment brought up some questions I have about this subject in general. On other sites, too, not just here, I read a lot about people that express hurt feelings, depression, etc, etc, at the hands of abusers and narcissistic types. What I want to know, people, is where is the ANGER? Where is the OUTRAGE?
Yeah, as a really, really young kid with my narcissistic mom I was hurt and confused by her behavior. I was scared shitless of her. But that changed soon enough. Soon, I wasn't crying, or down, I was simply royally pissed off and absolutely enraged that I was being treated so badly. It came to me very young that she had absolutely no RIGHT to treat me that way, lay hands on me and beat me, or hurl nasty names at me, hurl put downs designed to destroy my soul, no right whatsoever and in the knowing came my good friends Anger and Outrage. I started to fight fire with fire. I told my mom to drop dead the first time when I was 7 or 8.
Anger is your best weapon against abuse, I promise you that. No, it won't stop the abuse of a parent and a kid is trapped with them. But you're certainly not trapped as adults.
I knew I'd never stop my mom calling me names and crap like that, but there were other lines that she knew better than to cross with me. There are just some things that you don't put up with. I was young enough to defend myself when I told my mom that if she ever put a finger on me again she wouldn't see the sun rise the next day. This followed a beating that left welts all the way from my face to my legs. She had a field day with that one, no holds barred. She didn't try to assault me again until she was in her 70's and that was just once.
Sometimes you have to draw the line. You have to make a stand. You have to say to yourself ENOUGH. You have to know in every single cell of your body that you're not willing to ever in this life accept or tolerate certain behavior from others. My mom blamed me for everything miserable and wrong in her world and she took great pleasure in never letting me forget it. There came a day, really young, when I just realized that certain things were just wrong as hell and that I wasn't going to take it like a dog on my back in submission.
Life has become pretty simple to me. If you're someone that calls me nasty names, makes me feel like shit all the time, tries to control and manipulate me and worse, my gut tells me that you're actually enjoying wiping your feet on me....you're out of my world the instant I catch wind of that vibe. Period. No questions. I don't need to know whose 'fault' it is. I don't need to know if I'm somehow to 'blame'. And I d*** sure don't sit around thinking, "Gee, if I'd just done A, B & C right enough, good enough, better enough, perfect enough, nothing would have happened, that person would be a happy camper and I'm inferior and sh***y because I CAUSED them to beat my a** because of all the ways I failed to make them content and satisfied." Um...no. Never in this life again will I allow anyone to make me 100% responsible for their happiness or unhappiness. Sure, there's bumps in every relationship. One or the other isn't happy about something. Fine. You sit down, have a NORMAL conversation, where you let the other person say their piece and you say yours and then you compromise and negotiate a middle ground where BOTH are now happy again. Ahhh, normalcy. I love it and I crave it. If that kind of relationship isn't what you have, if you're dealing with someone who sucks your energy and leaves you feeling like less of a person rather than more of one, WALK AWAY from that. The reasons be damned. It really doesn't matter a tinker's d*** WHY things are that way with person X. What matters is that things ARE that way, does make you feel like s***, does drain you, does bring you down, and you know what...the h*** with them. If that's how someone makes you feel who cares why that is. Why question it? It just is. And you just begin to realize that the whys of it all just don't matter, you just want away from them.
Nobody like my mother will ever be allowed in my world again in this lifetime, and that includes my sons. They grew up knowing my mother and got it into their heads that they could treat me somewhat the same as she did. They found out real quick that they were sadly mistaken. I told them both that if they ever came at me like that again I wouldn't call them son another day. I'm not even kidding. I've said it before, DNA be damned. In an instant I went from normal to ice in about 2 seconds flat with my boys when I recognized my mom's kind of behavior in them. I'll see them in jail or in h*** before they ever treat me even for a single second the way my mom did. It really doesn't matter who it is. Some things are just never ok and when people start to really realize that and think about it, I hope that they start getting really pissed off instead of down and hurt. When you really start to think about what kind of injustice bad treatment really is and you begin to realize that this person has no RIGHT to cause you such turmoil and pain you're much less likely to take that shit from anyone ever again. And you shouldn't. Not another day. Not another minute.
I guess the point of all this babbling is STAND UP for yourself. Either that or these types will rule you for life. If you don't find that strength within you, you'll just attract more and more predators and you'll KEEP getting shit on. No thanks.