The Severely Narcissistic Mother
“But what about me?”
According to ancient Greek legend, there once lived a handsome young man named Narcissus who was so beautiful that both men and women fell hopelessly in love with him at first sight.
One day, as Narcissus sat at the edge of a lake, he happened to glance into the water and saw the reflection of an exquisite young man. Having no idea he was looking at himself, he became so entranced with his own image that he refused to eat, sleep, or move from the spot. He died fixated on the shimmering boy in the limpid water. The white flower we call narcissus was said to have bloomed below where his body lay.
It’s a well-known myth—and the source of many misconceptions. People use the term narcissistic to describe someone with self-adoration, like Narcissus. But having known and treated many adults who had a narcissistic partner or parent, I don’t believe that narcissists love themselves at all, although they may appear vain, confident, and extremely arrogant.
In reality they are deeply insecure and self-doubting. If they weren’t, why would they have such an insatiable need for approval and adoration? Why would they constantly need to be the center of attention? And why would a narcissistic mother need to block her daughter’s developing confidence and self-worth in order to build up her own?
Narcissistic mothers don’t make us feel unloved because they love themselves too much. They make us feel unloved because they are so absorbed with making themselves seem important, blameless, and exceptional that there is little room for anyone else.
Young daughters of narcissists quickly learn that anytime the spotlight falls on them, their mothers will step in to fill it. These daughters become accustomed to being pushed aside, treated as an accessory or fading into their mother’s long shadow. Their confidence and natural enthusiasm evaporate as the narcissist takes credit for their accomplishments, and blames them for her unhappiness. Her needs, ego, and comfort—not theirs, they learn—almost always come first.
The Narcissism Spectrum
The narcissism that’s so destructive to daughters falls on the extreme end of the broad spectrum of behavior we label as narcissistic. To look in the mirror and say, “I look great today!” or openly appreciate and admire one of your own talents is self-protective, amplifying as it does your sense of self-worth and helping you to act in your own interests or stand up for yourself.
But a little farther up the scale, self-love edges into self-centeredness. Narcissists in this category amplify their self-appreciation with a demand that steady attention be paid to their wonderful characteristics. This behavior may be irritating, but it’s not toxic. A person with moderate narcissism might be vain and noticeably self-centered, dominating conversations and not paying attention to cues that her companion or “audience” is getting restless. Yet if she’s confronted or called on her actions she may apologize.
There are seldom apologies, though, when a person is severely narcissistic—a condition that mental health professionals call Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD).
Two of the defining characteristics of the disorder are the narcissist’s grandiosity and her insatiable hunger for attention. It’s normal for children to have grandiose fantasies of being powerful and adored, especially if their reality falls far short of what they yearn for, but as they gain a sense of self-sufficiency, most adults put such fantasies aside. A mother with NPD, however, has never evolved beyond these early yearnings—she clings to them because they’re defenses that mask her deep feelings of inadequacy. She’s excessively dependent on other people’s opinions for her sense of identity and self-esteem—they’re her mirror—and she’s driven by the need to get others’ approval. So she moves through her life preoccupied with proving (or at least arguing) that she’s more beautiful, more brilliant, more talented, more desirable than other women. That, in her mind, entitles her to special treatment, and she doesn’t take it well, to put it mildly, when people don’t agree. She’s jealous, envious—and highly defensive when challenged. As you might guess, her sense of empathy is highly impaired; she has very little interest in other people and their feelings, except as they can help her inflate her sense of well-being.
Narcissism wasn’t recognized as a personality disorder until 1980. Before that, it was common to play down even extreme narcissism, waving off the behavior with labels like self-centered, conceited, or egomaniacal. Now we realize that, while severe narcissists are not crazy—that is, disconnected from reality and unable to function—they have a different circuitry board than others. No one knows exactly why that is, and mental health professionals have been struggling for years to figure out what creates this personality disorder. For a time it was believed that early trauma or overindulgence led those with the disorders to create a false self, but new evidence supports the idea that the cause is primarily genetic or physiological.
What we know concretely is that people with NPD behave in ways that are highly dramatic, emotional, and sometimes bizarre. And we know that severely narcissistic mothers are dysfunctional and destructive to their daughters.
If you recognized your own mother in the descriptions above, it was probably a relief to see the truth, difficult though it is, in full sunlight. But while a description of traits is extremely useful in identifying what you’re dealing with, on paper it seems almost disembodied. It doesn’t come anywhere near touching your emotional turmoil and the hurt your mother has caused you. Terms like “lack of empathy” can’t begin to capture the sense of emptiness you feel when you try to get some kind of consistent understanding from a severely narcissistic mother.
A Mistress of the Three D’s:
Drama, Deflection, and Denial
Dana: Upstaged and Ignored by the Drama Queen
Dana, a bright and charming thirty-eight-year-old, told me she was exhausted from trying to balance the needs of a husband, a job in public relations, two young sons, and a severely narcissistic mother. She said that she had a good life—except for the times when she was expected to be around her mother. This caused her a great deal of anxiety, which was spilling over into her marriage and her relationship with her sons. She told me about an infuriating recent event.
DANA: “At a family dinner I announced to everyone that I was expecting my third child. My relatives—aunts and uncles and cousins and my brother—were thrilled, and they all crowded around me, laughing and hugging. Suddenly my mother got up from the table and did a pretend faint on the floor. It was pretty shocking, and of course almost everyone left my side to tend to her. I couldn’t imagine what had happened to her, and my father ran to get her some water. When she got to her feet she looked at me and said, ‘How can you do this to me? How can you worry me like this? You know you aren’t that strong. Now I’m going to have to be taking you to the doctor all the time!’ I didn’t know what she was talking about! I’m very healthy! She never took me to the doctor with my other children. Why did she have to turn a happy evening into such a Greek tragedy?”
Dana was outraged, but not really surprised. The fainting incident was typical of what she had experienced most of her life with her mother, Evelyn.
DANA: “I guess she’s always been a diva. I have this clear memory from when I was little. I was maybe five years old and some of my parents’ friends had come over. I’d been taking tap dance lessons and I was walking around in my tap shoes because I loved the way they clicked on the wood floor. Somebody put on some music and asked me to dance. I was a little shy, but I got up and started to do this simple routine I’d been practicing. Mom practically bolted out of her chair and started doing a very elaborate dance herself. Everybody whistled and applauded and forgot about me. I was really confused—what harm could it do to let a little kid have her moment? Anyhow, that’s what it was like growing up. It was always like that whenever I started to get some attention. I might as well have been invisible when she was around.”
Dana told me that growing up, she felt as though anything she did, and anything that happened to her, was just an opening for her mother to snatch some attention. When Dana sprained her arm in fourth grade, her mother scarcely comforted her before launching into stories of her own skiing injuries—which were “far worse than this.” To Dana’s deep chagrin, her mother showed up at her high school graduation wearing a revealing, over-the-top dress that “made everyone stare.” And even though Dana was an adult now, the drama queen behavior hadn’t abated. Evelyn made almost everything involving her daughter about herself. That’s what narcissists do.
ADDICTED TO ADORATION
It’s not uncommon for the narcissistic mother to deflate almost physically when she’s not the center of attention. Adoration is her drug, allowing her to maintain her sense of self-importance, and she’s lost without it. There is an old Lon Chaney movie called The Mummy’s Tomb. The creature at the center of the story needs the leaves of a special plant called tana to stay alive, and the monster wreaks havoc in his quest to get it. The narcissist demands her tana leaves, adoration, to survive emotionally, and she’ll go to great lengths to ensure that she has a steady supply.
Because she has such a flimsy sense of self, and seems to lack a core sense of worth that would allow her to feel good about herself even if no one noticed or praised her, all is not right in her world unless she is being fussed over. There’s a certain pathos in this. It’s almost as though she fears she’ll disappear if the people in her life look away—so she demands that they don’t. Attention must be paid—and whether she reaches for subtle one-upmanship or grand performances, she is practiced at using drama to get it.
But only positive attention soothes her. Criticism, or even disagreement of any sort, triggers inner turmoil, which is so uncomfortable for her that a pair of disorienting defenses kick in immediately to make you regret ever confronting her about her behavior. First, she’ll deflect any discomfort from herself onto you, so the focus always stays on what she describes as your deficiencies as opposed to her own shortcomings. That generally works well enough to ward off complaints and direct discussions. But if pressed, she may simply deny your version of what happened. Those are the narcissist’s Three D’s: Drama, Deflection, and Denial, a crazy-making, guilt-inducing combination that guarantees that it will be extremely difficult to express your differences—or stand up for yourself.
Dana had lived with her mother’s drama for so long that as an adult, she had largely come to the conclusion that complaining was futile. “I was floored by that fainting episode,” Dana told me, “but I was going to let it go. It was just so typical it wasn’t worth getting upset about.”
Her husband, Chad, though, pushed her to make a rare attempt to protest. And what happened next is a textbook case of deflection.
DANA: “Chad saw how I was avoiding talking to Mom about what happened, and he said, ‘Look, I think it’s time you talked to your mother. She’s been pulling this stuff a long time.’ I couldn’t argue with that. So I made myself go over and see her. I was pretty anxious because I’ve tried bringing up what she does, and I always end up feeling frustrated, even worse than before.
“I said, ‘Mom, I really need to talk to you about something,’ and right away I could see her tense up, but I kept going. I was proud of myself for that. I said, ‘It’s really hurtful and embarrassing for me that you get so dramatic when I’m saying something important about my life. That fainting thing you pulled at the dinner last week was pretty shocking. I’m not having another baby to punish you or hurt you in any way, so why did you have to act like I was doing something awful to you?’
“ ‘I don’t know why you had to get pregnant again,’ she told me. ‘You know how I worry about you.’
“I said, ‘Mom, my getting pregnant had nothing to do with you, and that scene at our dinner was a fiasco. You always have to have the spotlight, and it seems like you can’t stand it when I get any attention.’
“The next thing I knew, she did what she always does when I try to point out anything to her about herself. She took her thumb and index finger and started to rub the bridge of her nose, like she had a headache. Then she puts her head down and goes, ‘Honey, this is so difficult for me. You make it sound as though I’m the worst mother in the world. I really can’t handle your anger right now.’ ”
Dana’s mother expertly shifted any discomfort she felt to her daughter, never responding at all except to say, in words and gestures well chosen for their dramatic, guilt-inducing effect, “Look how much you’ve hurt me.”
THE DEFLECTOR SHIELD DEFENSE
Deflection is a powerful defense for a mother with severe narcissism. She uses it to keep you at a distance so she doesn’t have to consider, or even acknowledge, your feelings and the possibility that she may be in the wrong.
She can’t afford to let anyone challenge her image of herself as perfect. Invincible. Above reproach. Just as the Great and Powerful Oz is a front for the flawed and all-too-human figure behind the curtain, the image the severely narcissistic mother projects hides her deeply insecure core. She protects that shaky inner architecture by fending off anything that would force her to examine or question herself. It’s unthinkable for her to admit there are any cracks in her facade, perhaps because on some level she knows that if she did, the whole house of cards would collapse. A healthier person, confronted with a disagreement or an unflattering image of her own behavior, might react with curiosity or doubt or sadness. She’d most likely allow the possibility of another point of view. But any time you disagree with the severe narcissist, or criticize her, her raw nerve endings tell her only one thing: She’s been attacked.
Evelyn was certainly no screamer as she rubbed her nose and put her head down on the table in response to her daughter’s complaints. But behind the passive front, there was plenty of heat and aggression. With body language that suggested “You’ve hurt me so much I can’t hold my head up” and exaggerations like “You make it sound like I’m the worst mother in the world,” she took the offensive and shifted the blame to Dana.
DANA: “I didn’t see what she was doing. She never screamed at me or even seemed to be mad. But I can definitely see how critical and angry she was. I felt it in my body. My neck and face got hot, and my stomach clenched. All I did was try to stand up for myself. She’s so good at making me feel like I’m the one who’s out of line.”
LYING, GASLIGHTING, AND DENIAL
A severely narcissistic mother’s anger, criticism, and thoughtless dismissal of her daughter’s feelings are painful and destructive. And every daughter clings to the belief that if only her mother could see that behavior and its effects, she’d stop. Daughters try again and again to hold up a mirror, hoping that this time, things will be different. But severe narcissists stay true to form, responding to any confrontation with drama followed by deflection and a focus on your shortcomings. When that doesn’t produce the desired results, they turn to what may be their most frustrating and infuriating tool: denial. Confrontation makes them feel cornered, and when that happens, they can’t and won’t validate your experience or acknowledge their part in it. Rather, they rewrite reality and tell you that what you saw you didn’t see, what you experienced didn’t happen, and what you call real is actually a figment of your imagination.
It’s extremely disorienting, as Dana saw. Her mother didn’t stop with conveniently developing a headache to silence her daughter’s complaint about her drama queen behavior. She threw denial into the mix:
DANA: “It got worse, though. She got up from her chair and was heading for her bedroom when she looked at me and said in this really calm voice, ‘You know, dear, I just don’t understand how you can say I fainted. I got excited and sat down. Don’t I have a right to do that? Your hormones must be making your memory fuzzy. You’d better go now. I need to lie down.’
“At that point I felt so confused and guilty that I just slunk out.”
A severe narcissist is highly unlikely to admit being wrong, no matter how egregious her behavior, and she’ll say whatever she feels she must to portray herself as being in the right. She’ll lie about what she has promised, lie about behavior that you’ve witnessed, and lie about what other people have said and done. Often, as Dana saw, that involves not just lying, but also turning the tables and calling you a liar. She may throw you totally off balance by denying your very reality with lines like:
• That never happened.
• I never said that.
• Are you sure you didn’t dream this?
• You have a vivid imagination.
Then she’ll step up the attack with criticism like:
• You’re so unforgiving.
• You’re so overly sensitive.
• I was only kidding. What happened to your sense of humor?
• You always take me the wrong way.
As she challenges your memory and your ability to think rationally, she undermines your perceptions of reality, leaving you confused and wondering if she could be right. You may even begin to believe her lies about you.
In the classic movie Gaslight, a husband tries to convince his wife she’s crazy by, among other things, hiding her possessions and telling her she lost them, or making small changes around the house and denying it when she points them out. When she says, “It’s getting darker in here. You’ve turned down the gaslights,” he says, “Nobody’s touched the lights. They’re bright as ever. You’re probably not feeling well.” Gaslighting is a common tool of severe narcissists. When it serves them, they’ll insist that night is day and black is white. And the anger, pain, or upsetting behavior you complained to your mother about? You must have dreamed it.
Sharon: Stung by Narcissistic Rage
Severe narcissists can take on much bolder hues than Evelyn’s passive-aggressive expression of displeasure. When life has disappointed them or jangled their sense of entitlement, some mothers not only make their daughters scapegoats but also lash out at them with rage.
Sharon, a single, forty-year-old doctor’s receptionist, came to see me for help dealing with anxiety. She had a master’s degree in business, but she didn’t seem able to get a job commensurate with her education. She told me, “My panic attacks have flared up again.”
I asked her if she had any clue about what might have triggered them.
SHARON: “Well, for one thing, I just had a terrible experience with my mother. It’s an old story. . . . About two weeks ago, I had lunch with her. She and my father have been separated for about six months, and she was planning to write him a letter because she wanted to get back with him, and I told her I didn’t think it was a good idea—they always seemed so miserable together.
“She absolutely screamed at me. She said: ‘How dare you try and keep your father and me apart? You’re cruel and immature—I couldn’t be more ashamed of you. No daughter has ever been so cruel to her own mother.’ By the time she was done I felt like the lowest person on earth.”
Sharon had been bombarded with the full force of narcissistic rage. By not supporting her mother’s reconciliation attempt, she had unknowingly tapped into the bottomless pit of her mother’s inability to tolerate criticism, opposition, or defeat. Like so many daughters of severely narcissistic mothers, Sharon was made to take the blame for her mother’s unhappiness. The message was clear: “Of course I’m unhappy—who wouldn’t be with such a cruel and heartless daughter.”
Yelling, screaming, and insults to your worth are common responses to even neutral comments that disagree with the enraged narcissist’s point of view. You’re judged as good or bad depending on whether you totally support her. And she may attack with all the fury of a wounded animal, with no thought to the effect her words have on you.
“YOU’RE NO GOOD”
Criticism flows from seriously narcissistic mothers anytime they feel insecure, disappointed, or deflated. Like all insecure people, they build themselves up by tearing you down. If you’re enjoying yourself, you must be neglecting something important, or getting in trouble. Your eyes are too small. Your nose is too big. You’re too fat, too thin. Your legs are too heavy, or they look like toothpicks. They may flatter you by spinning grandiose fantasies around you, but when you fall short of their ideals—that is, when the fantasies are revealed to be just that—they criticize even more.
SHARON: “Mom got this idea when I was around eight years old that I should be a model. I was a pretty ordinary-looking kid and I knew it, but she had this idea that her daughter should be enough for any modeling agency. I was just along for the ride—I’d never wanted to do anything like that. Through a friend, she got me an appointment with an agency, and one of the associates spent a little time with me and then said, ‘Thanks for coming in. We’ll let you know.’
“A couple of weeks went by and we didn’t hear anything. Of course, that didn’t sit well with Mom. She called and called, and they finally told her, ‘Sorry, we don’t need anyone right now.’ She went ballistic—and all of a sudden, it was my fault that I wasn’t pretty enough! She started saying things like, ‘Maybe it’s that moon face of yours. Maybe it’s those squinty little eyes.’ I can still hear her saying that, and it’s been so many years. . . . I remember how I practiced in front of the mirror to keep my eyes open wide when I smiled.”
Sharon, like every daughter of a severely narcissistic mother, couldn’t possibly meet her mother’s expectations, something her mother never let her forget.
SHARON: “I know that her mother was horrible to her and that was the excuse for years of humiliating me. She obviously was so disappointed in me in almost all ways. She used every opportunity to pick on me when I got older. I just couldn’t make her happy. I got an award in math one year, and all she could tell people was that she’d done all my homework and I never would’ve made it without her help. She would say ‘Good job’ to me once in a while, but I could tell she didn’t believe it. She thought she was better than I’d ever be. I could see that, and I couldn’t figure out how to make her proud of me.”
As she repeatedly makes herself feel powerful with criticism that makes you feel bad, damaged, and small, the severely narcissistic mother is teaching you to aim low and keep your head down. You become afraid to try, and expect to be shot down if you do.
Sharon was very bright, and she’d worked hard to get an MBA, but her mother, who was a bookkeeper, did everything she could to discourage her, saying, “I don’t think you’re cut out to be a businesswoman.” Sharon held her self-doubts at bay all the way through her degree program, but she couldn’t bring herself to take the next step and go for a job in the field that interested her the most: banking.
SHARON: “It was a big deal for me to go for an advanced degree, and I was proud of myself for doing it. But I was so panicky about screwing up interviews at large firms that I only applied to a couple of small places. I got two rejections, and that was it. I really don’t need that kind of stress and scrutiny. I couldn’t handle anxiety, so I wound up getting a job at a bookstore for a while. I’d rather be doing what I’m doing now than deal with that kind of rejection. I proved to myself what I could do by getting the degree.”
Sharon’s mother had done such a thorough job of destroying her confidence that Sharon’s natural interview nerves quickly spiraled into panic, and she persuaded herself that it was a sign she wasn’t meant to advance. Her mother’s constant theme—you’re not good enough—replayed and escalated in her head until the only way to escape it was to shut down. So that’s what she did.
Not for the first time, Sharon surrendered to the overriding sense of worthlessness that her mother had instilled in her, and let it shape her life.
When the “Bad Mother”
Was Once a Good One
The less secure a severely narcissistic mother feels, the more extreme her drama, anger, and attempts to feel superior are likely to be. But there are times—often when she’s gotten what she wants, when she’s feeling confident, or when she doesn’t sense an imminent challenge from you—that her behavior calms. She doesn’t need the Three D’s, and she doesn’t need to criticize.
During those stretches, she seems like a much different person—kinder, more supportive. Some daughters rarely see their narcissistic mother’s good side. But some are haunted by the contrast between their “good mother” and their “bad mother” because they may have had long stretches of positive mothering, most likely when they were young. It’s a common pattern: A narcissistic mother with relatively few stresses in her life and loads of adulation from her young daughter envelops the girl in her world, embracing the role of teacher and idol. But as her daughter gets older, the mother begins to see her as a rival, setting off a pattern of criticism, competition, and jealousy that continues through adulthood. When triggered by her daughter’s emerging womanhood, the mother’s insecurities about being overtaken only occasionally recede, and the habitual behaviors we’ve seen from the narcissists in this chapter become commonplace.
Daughters are tormented by memories of the “good mother” because once she’s no longer a regular presence, it’s hard to turn their mother’s intermittent affection into something lasting, or recapture the closeness that once flowed so freely between them. But they twist their lives into pretzels trying.
Jan: Once Her Daughter, Now Her Rival
Jan, a thirty-three-year-old actress, supports herself with commercials and sporadic acting jobs, along with a small inheritance from her father. She is a very pretty young woman with ash blond hair, but I couldn’t help noticing the dark circles under her large green eyes. She fidgeted with her bracelet as she sat across from me. After getting some background information, I asked Jan how I could help her.
JAN: “I’m a mess. I just got my first big break, a second lead on a series, but since I found out I’ve been so anxious, I’ve been eating to calm down, and I’ve gained seven pounds. My fingernails are gone. I can’t sleep. The director said to me, ‘What the hell is going on?’ He told me I’ve got to knock off some weight. My friend Anna says I’m sabotaging myself. I have to get it together.”
Clearly there was some self-sabotage going on, and to get a fix on it, I asked Jan if she could give voice to the anxiety she was feeling by focusing on the fears and thoughts that were keeping her on edge. What did they sound like?
She thought for a moment.
JAN: “It’s like: ‘Who do you think you are? You’re not that pretty, you can’t get into any of your clothes and you’re a screwup. You’re going to blow this job.’ ”
That kind of critical inner commentary doesn’t spring full blown as the voice of truth in a woman’s head, and when I asked Jan if someone close to her regularly doled out criticism, it didn’t take long for her to come up with an answer.
JAN: “Well. . . . My mom’s not the most supportive person in the world. I invited her to watch one of our rehearsals—I thought she’d get a kick out of that. When it was over, I asked her how she thought it went, and she said it looked like a good show. But then she looks at me and goes, ‘Look, honey, I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but you’re no Meryl Streep.’ It’s the weirdest thing, because she says stuff like that a lot now, but she was so great when I was a kid. In fact, she’s the one who encouraged me to become an actress. When I was young, like seven or eight, she used to take me to see plays, and not just little-kid stuff, and that’s when I fell in love with acting. Those were my special days. I was so happy that my mom wanted to share what she loved with me—she’d done a little acting when she was young, and I wanted to be just like her. I idolized her. But then she changed. When I got a little older . . . it’s like I lost her.”
Many clients have told me of having wonderful times with their mothers when they were little, days full of hugs and laughter. And they’ve puzzled over how dramatically that ended when they reached adolescence. It’s a crushing turnabout: You had a mother for a while, but suddenly you don’t—and you wonder what the heck you did to lose her. Actually, it’s simple: You stopped being an awkward, flat-chested girl and became a threat to her as a woman.
As we talked, Jan found that she could trace the change in her relationship with her mother back to high school.
JAN: “Mom started trying to be friends with my friends and my first boyfriends, and not in a mom kind of way. I noticed how she would put on lipstick before they came over, and hang out in the kitchen with us. She would act as if they were her friends and try to buddy up with them. And she would make snide little jokes about me, as if they were her pals and she felt sorry for them for having to be with me. When I got older, I really thought about not having my dates pick me up at home because my mother was so overtly seductive with them. She would wear revealing blouses and stand way too close to them, reeking of perfume. Once, when we were in the kitchen fixing coffee for one of my dates, she whispered, ‘I could tell he would really rather be going out with me.’ ”
Suddenly the roles and boundaries between mother and daughter were blurred and bewildering. The competitive mother had gotten into the arena and put on the boxing gloves. Jan told me that the rivalry only got more pointed as she got older.
JAN: “I remember once when I was about seventeen—I know now that I was pretty and smart, but I was also very insecure. A boy I was crazy about had just broken up with me, and I was devastated. We were on one of those awful family vacations at some dude ranch—and I couldn’t ride worth a damn. My parents and sister wanted to go out on a trail, and I went along, too. I didn’t want to look like a killjoy. I was miserable and bouncing all over the place. When we got back, I sat on the porch of our bungalow feeling really rotten. My mother came over and sat by me on the steps. She got an almost kindly look on her face and I thought, ‘She knows how much I’m hurting—maybe she’s actually going to say something comforting to me.’ But after a minute she sighed and said, ‘You know, dear, let’s face it. You’ll never be the athlete I am. You’ll never be the rider I am, and you’ll never be the woman I am.’ ”
Where could a remark like that come from? Jan’s mother, Pam, as I learned, was dissatisfied with her marriage, and her early ambition to be an actress had ended in frustration. So she seized the opportunity to zero in on Jan’s vulnerability. That way she could momentarily feel superior and assuage her own insecurities.
For Jan, as for all daughters who find they’ve activated their mother’s competitive side when they need to be soothed and loved, the experience was shattering.
JAN: “I was so hurt and bewildered. I kept asking myself, ‘What did I say? What did I do? What’s wrong with me? Why doesn’t she love me anymore?’ And those words of hers. I can still hear them. . . . I just wanted to curl up in a little ball and disappear.”
Jan kept pursuing her acting, first in school plays, then in community theater and small professional jobs in television, sure her mother would be elated and that she’d win her back. But the response was almost always the same: criticisms and slights instead of encouragement. The woman who had once been her biggest fan now said things like, “I’d love to help you with your lines, honey, but I get so impatient with your stumbling. I always thought you had my good memory, but I guess not. . . .” The message was loud and clear: Anything you can do, I can do better.
JAN: “The implication was that I could never measure up, and it really hurt, because I thought this was something we could share. I was so confused. She created this huge desire in me to be an actress, and then when I actually went for it, it was like she didn’t like it because I was challenging her or something. It’s pretty much been like that ever since.”
WHAT’S BENEATH HER NEED TO COMPETE: EMPTINESS
Reasonably healthy, fulfilled women don’t have the need to compete for their adolescent daughters’ boyfriends or squash their fledgling attempts to try out their passions and take risky first steps toward becoming the kinds of women they want to be. They see their girls in the most vulnerable and self-conscious time of their lives, remember their own stumbles, and try to ease the way.
Narcissistic mothers like Jan’s can’t connect with that sense of compassion, not only because of their insecurities but also because at their core they have a terrible sense of deprivation, an insatiable hunger that makes them believe there will never be enough for them, and that anyone else’s gain—even their own young daughters’—will keep them from adequately filling the hole inside. In some ways, they’re like the “hungry ghosts” described in Asian culture: creatures with enormous stomachs that ache to be filled, but minuscule mouths and narrow throats that leave them feeling perpetually empty. That’s a good picture of the insatiable hunger of these mothers, who greedily grab all they can, from anyone they sense is cutting into their supply of men, money, respect, affection. Whenever they sense you as a competitor, you become a constant spur to their longing.
Where does this distorted sense of “not enough” come from? The likeliest answer is competition and a sense of scarcity in the mother’s own background. She may have had a competitive mother herself, and grown up with the disorienting sense that she couldn’t get or be what she wanted without somehow depriving her mother, or fighting her off. Or she may have come from a family in which there was intense sibling rivalry, a setting in which she had to compete with her brothers and sisters, cousins, or extended family members for love and goodies.
This emptiness and fear of deprivation are often well hidden under a seemingly confident exterior as she explains her sometimes desperate grabs for what she wants with the narcissist’s typical rationale that “I deserve it because I’m superior.” It’s a claim that can’t stand scrutiny—and it would be more accurately stated as “I deserve it because I need to feel superior”—but this mother isn’t likely to spend much time scrutinizing her own motives or questioning her assumptions.
YOU ABSORB HER AMBIVALENCE ABOUT YOUR SUCCESS
A daughter like Jan reaches adulthood having been steeped in the ambivalence and envy that her mother offers her in place of encouragement and support. She was lucky enough to receive praise when she was young, but she becomes mistrustful of it when she’s older, because she’s seen how often it’s followed by put-downs. And she internalizes her mother’s puzzling “go for it—but don’t get your hopes up; you’re not good enough” attitude.
JAN: “I’ll never forget getting my first commercial. I was so excited I was telling everyone about it. I made the mistake of inviting my mom to dinner to tell her the good news, and as soon as I did she says, ‘That sounds wonderful, dear, but don’t expect too much to come of this—you’re just not that photogenic.’ I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about Mom, though—she’s got her good side, too. As soon as she tells me how bad I look on camera and lets that sink in, she does a complete one-eighty and says, ‘But come on, we’ll fix you up.’ She pulls out her car keys and goes, ‘I saw a sweater at Nordstrom that will bring out the green in your eyes. That’ll get their attention.’ And she buys me these amazing clothes. I don’t know what it is with her.”
Despite her cuts and snipes, the narcissistic mother sometimes does seem to want you to get what you’re after. Her gifts may come with barbs (“Let’s fix you up”), but she occasionally offers them, perhaps because she wants to return to the teacher/idol role she enjoyed when you were little. And at least momentarily, she enjoys the reflected glory of your success. After all, she’s your mother, and she can take some credit—even most!—for your accomplishments. Your success is also often a screen onto which she can project her fantasies about being young, desirable, capable, and talented.
“It sounds like you’re getting a lot of conflicting messages from your mother,” I told her. “It’s like: ‘I’ll help you go for it so I can live vicariously through what you’re doing, but please fail or let me overshadow you so I can feel better about myself.’ ”
JAN: “Oh my God, that’s exactly like my mom. I can see she’s yearning to be doing what I’m doing, and she wants to help me make it. She thinks it’s glamorous and exciting. But at the same time, she doesn’t want me to do well or ever have a special moment of my own. I think it makes her feel like a loser. It’s bizarre. She puts me down, but she envies me.”
For Jan, the intermittent generosity from her mother helped drive the self-defeating hesitation she brought to her work. If she did well at an audition, she’d please the mother who bought her expensive clothes—the one who seemed so much like the good mother who’d encouraged her when she was young. But any real success would trigger her mother’s jealousy, and all its repercussions. An adult daughter who longs for renewed closeness with her narcissistic mother frequently considers such alternatives and stalls at the threshold, clueless as to why she’s procrastinating on a high-profile project or putting on weight on the eve of an important appearance. The process isn’t rational, and for the most part, it’s not conscious. What you experience is the push-pull sense of wanting to succeed but being held back by some mysterious force, which is often a deep sense of guilt. Your mother has taught you that you can’t, and shouldn’t, go for what you want. You’ve learned her most important lesson: Don’t outshine your mother.
SHE FANS THE ENVY IN YOUR FAMILY, AND IN YOU
Another all too common effect of growing up surrounded by so much jealousy is feeling jealous yourself. Often daughters absorb their mothers’ bottomless hunger for what other people have, and take up the envy baton that’s been quietly passed to them:
JAN: “I was boy crazy from the time I was about fourteen. I turned to boys to get out of the house—I kind of found myself through my relationships. But if there was a time when I didn’t have a boyfriend and some of my girlfriends did, I would feel angry and depressed. It was like how dare they have what I need so much. It can still happen if I don’t have a guy and one of my friends does.”
Jan told me that her mother actively fans those sparks of jealousy even now by comparing her with other people.
JAN: “Mom likes to send me clippings from the newspaper or magazines about other women’s marriages and successes. Or she calls me up and says things like, ‘Did you hear about your cousin Amy? I heard her new boyfriend is taking her to the south of France for three weeks. . . .’ I sure didn’t want to have that conversation, so I said, ‘That’s nice for her,’ hoping that would end it. And my mother’s reply was, ‘It sure is. . . . Why can’t you find someone like that?’ She made me feel terrible, and it was impossible for me to feel anything but resentful of my cousin’s good fortune. I hated feeling that way.”
There’s no need for her to say it directly. The message you take in is all too clear—you’ve lost a race you didn’t even know you were in. You’re not as pretty or as sexy as your cousin. What’s wrong with you?
If you have brothers and sisters, your competitive mother may encourage lifelong rivalries among you that give her the superior sense of being in control of the outcome, and therefore the winner, of what may be a charged contest for her approval.
On her whim, one child may be deemed the golden one who can do no wrong, while another becomes the family’s scapegoat. If you’ve frequently been cast in the scapegoat role, you may suddenly find yourself in favor, close to her for a time—just as you were when you were young. But if something—your spark, your smile, your solo in the choir—threatens her, you’ll quickly find another sibling in your place.
As you and your siblings grow up, she often keeps you engaged in the family loyalty battle by dispensing and withholding favors in the highly charged arena of money, gifts, and inheritances. These battles may well be a window into the roots of your mother’s sense of deprivation; it’s quite possible that she’s reenacting old patterns between her own sisters and brothers when she manipulates you and your siblings. But this time, while her own kids start to be jealous of one another, she can remain above the fray. This time, she wins.
You’ll Never Be Able to Please Her
Despite all this, many adult daughters of severely narcissistic women hold fast to the hope that they can repair their relationships with their mothers and that their mothers will somehow become more loving.
What you want to believe is that she’s got your well-being at heart. And the intensity of that desire can take you by surprise.
JAN: “I was over at my mom’s the other day, and after lunch, she told me she’d found an old album in the back of the linen closet. She had put it on the coffee table and we started to go through it. It was full of old photos of me as a little girl, and some shots from a trip we took to New York when I was little. I hadn’t seen those photos in years. We sat there looking at them for the longest time, and they brought so many memories back. I can’t believe it, but I miss that mom so much. I just wish I could make her happy.”
I’m sad to say that that’s highly unlikely. Narcissistic mothers are close to impossible to please.
Daughters resist accepting this. They keep hoping for the perfect words, the perfect gesture, that will let them hear the words “Thank you” and “I love you” from mothers who so rarely express real affection and gratitude. Dana, the daughter of the drama queen mother, whom you met at the beginning of this chapter, told me this poignant story:
DANA: “I decided to throw a birthday party for Mom’s sixty-fifth.. I was going to make it very special—have it catered and decorate the house with balloons—I thought she would love that, she would be the center of attention, and that would really please her. I invited several family members and some of her friends.
“I had spent several days looking for just the right present. I knew she liked Asian antiques, and I finally found an exquisite old piece of Chinese sculpture. I had to dig into savings for it, but I figured, ‘What the hell.’ As soon as she opened it, it was obvious from the look on her face she didn’t like it and she made no attempt to hide her reaction. After everyone left, I felt pretty let down. The next morning she calls up, and of course I thought she was going to thank me—it really was a lovely party—but instead the first thing she says is—not even ‘Hello, how are you?’—it’s, ‘Why did you have to let everyone know how old I am? Some of the people there didn’t know. Did you deliberately set me up to be humiliated?’
“I just wanted to cry. Nothing I do is ever enough.”
Even the most well-intentioned act or statement can be distorted through the narcissist’s self-referential lens and her insatiable need to look good. If she perceives that something was meant to embarrass or diminish her in any way, you’re likely to find yourself facing her suspicious accusations. The relationship between narcissism and paranoia hasn’t been fully explored. But when the narcissist takes one of your benevolent gestures as a deliberate attempt to embarrass her, you can feel the connection.
What You See Is What You Get
Mothers with NPD sometimes raise your hopes by agreeing to go with you into therapy, but they do not respond well to the process. They lack two crucial elements for change—self-awareness and the ability to be introspective—which makes counseling all but a charade. As long as they can blame everyone else for not filling their insatiable demand for attention and adulation, they can successfully avoid responsibility for their own damaging behavior. They’re good at that, and because they rely on it to feel better, they have no reason to change.
These mothers are in the grip of a deeply ingrained personality disorder. And that behavior is not just situational—it is at their core.
Please don’t forget, as we explore this difficult territory, that your own core is very different from your mother’s. The harmful behaviors you’ve learned from her and the pain you’ve carried with you for so long are not a permanent legacy. As I will remind you throughout this book, despite what she’s told you, you are the healthy one. You can change.