Because we internalize these kinds of messages throughout our childhood and adolescence, we ourselves become image-focused. We feel like we never measure up. And the narcissistic culture in which we live powerfully reinforces these childhood messages.
Projecting the “Right” Image: Cultural Reflections
American culture today in general maintains an image founded on “what” instead of on “who.” Messages to perform, excel, and be beautiful bombard every aspect of daily life, and the general incidence of narcissism appears to be rising. As Alexander Lowen cites in his book Narcissism: Denial of the True Self:
When wealth occupies a higher position than wisdom, when notoriety is admired more than dignity, when success is more important than self-respect, the culture itself overvalues “image” and must be regarded as narcissistic.2
The strivings of today’s youth say it all too clearly. A USA Today article on Generation Y (ages 18–25) states their greatest life goals are to become rich and famous:
When you open a celebrity magazine, it’s all about the money and being rich and famous . . .anything from The Apprentice, where the intro to the show is the “money song” to US Weekly magazine, where you see all the celebrities and their six-million-dollar homes. We see reality TV shows with Jessica and Nick living the life. We see Britney and Paris. The people we relate to outside our friends are those people.3
An exposé or a documentary could be made about the media influence on narcissism, especially that of reality television—Dr. 90210, Drastic Plastic Surgery, It’s Good to Be, MTV Cribs, and Extreme Makeover—to name a few. A particularly sad example jumped out at me on a show called Body Work that I recently viewed on TLC.
A young girl, maybe sixteen years old, was going to a plastic surgeon for a nose job. Her mother had undergone some previous surgeries and Botox treatments from the same doctor. The doctor tells the young girl that she is pretty. She tells him that she may be pretty, but not compared to the other girls at her school. She attends a private school and goes on to say that at her school, nothing but perfection is acceptable.
Do we want our children to think like this? Do we want our children to be a reflection of this kind of “glitter mentality”? According to a nationwide study conducted for Girls Inc. called The Supergirl Dilemma, girls as young as ten feel “a lot of pressure to be athletic, pretty, and skinny plus smart.”4 Almost every women’s magazine on the newsstand is packed with articles on how to look better, how to attract and keep an eligible man, how to be a career success, even how to raise successful children. But beauty continues to serve as the bedrock. According to The Supergirl Dilemma, “The findings point to the expectations . . .that a girl’s appearance is still her most important asset.”5
As Audrey Brashich writes in All Made Up:
Fifty-nine percent of teen girls are reportedly dissatisfied with their body shape, 66 percent desire to lose weight, and over half report that the appearance of models in the magazines influences their image of a perfect female body. And some girls are more afraid of becoming fat than they are of nuclear war, cancer, or losing their parents.6
The images seen in entertainment, on fashion runways, on television, in magazines, and in the media in general undeniably affect how women feel about themselves. The daughter of a narcissistic mother has to deal with this rampant media obsession with image as well as the warped maternal counsel that appearance is everything.
Female respondents in a survey done recently by Dove Corporation said that they felt pressure to try to be the “perfect” picture of beauty as depicted by advertisers in our culture:
[Sixty-three percent] strongly agree that women today are expected to be more attractive than their mother’s generation. [Sixty percent] strongly agree that society expects women to enhance their physical attractiveness. [Forty-five percent] of women feel women who are more beautiful have greater opportunities in life. And more than half strongly agree that physically attractive women are more valued by men. More than two-thirds (68%) of women strongly agree that the media and advertising set an unrealistic standard of beauty that most women can’t ever achieve. Well over half of all women (57%) strongly agree that the attributes of female beauty have become very narrowly defined in today’s world.7
According to the Dove study, only 2 percent of women describe themselves as beautiful and only 13 percent are satisfied with their body weight and shape. I have been quite impressed with the Dove gals who allowed themselves to be photographed in their underwear and even in some nude shots, and who seem to be breaking free from the cultural yoke of perfectionism. Yet thousands of other women will spend $5,000 to $6,000 to have the flab on their arms removed.8 Less invasive methods of retouching can be used with a camera made by Hewlett-Packard called Photosmart R-927, which has a slimming feature that digitally removes those ten pounds a camera supposedly tacks on.9
In some middle- and upper-middle-class families, it was customary for a girl to receive a car for her sixteenth birthday. Now, in many circles, the coming-of-age gift is a breast implant.
Since some people are willing to pay the big bucks for “the look,” plastic surgery is exploding. Between 1997 and 2003, the number of cosmetic procedures in America increased by over 220 percent, and teens are increasingly being given breast augmentation as graduation gifts. In one year, the number of girls eighteen and younger getting breast implants jumped nearly threefold, from 3,872 in 2002 to 11,326 in 2003.10
I started trying to offset the media assault for my own daughter when she was only five years old by telling her, “It’s what’s on the inside that counts.” One day, she and her five-year-old playmate were standing in front of a mirror primping and looking at their hair. Her little friend said, “Aren’t we pretty, Meggan?” My well-informed but too-young-to-understand daughter told her playmate, “My mommy says that it is nice that we are pretty, but it’s our guts and our veins that are really important!” Okay, perhaps I started a little early, but I was trying to give her an important message for the future.
Authentic Reflections
A young girl absorbs how to be a woman, wife, lover, friend, and mother from both her mother and her culture. When a healthy, secure mother assists her daughter in managing the cultural onslaught of image messages about celebrity, wealth, and perfect beauty, the daughter gets the correct message that healthy womanhood is about who she is—her value system, standards, courage, integrity, inner fortitude, capacity for love and empathy and her personal mode of conduct. But women who were taught that how they appear is more important than personal feelings, identity, values, and authenticity feel empty. Whenever I heard Tina Turner sing “What’s Love Got to Do with It?” I really wished that the message were “What’s Beauty Got to Do with It?” Love actually has everything to do with our healthy development.
In order to recover from this emptiness and image-oriented life view, the daughter of a narcissistic mother first has to learn how to tune in to who she is as a person. She begins sorting out the things that make her beautiful and unique and separating herself from the inauthentic, automatic reactions to people and her environment to which she has become accustomed. Before we begin these important steps of recovery, however, I want you to see how your childhood with a narcissistic mother has affected your decisions about career, relationships, parenting, and your place in the world. Join me, and together we will see some distinct patterns.
PART TWO
* * *
HOW NARCISSISTIC MOTHERING AFFECTS YOUR ENTIRE LIFE
In the previous section we laid out the characteristics and dynamics of maternal narcissism. Now we will look at how these dynamics directly affect your life.
Daughters of narcissistic mothers absorb the message “I am valued for what I do, rather than for who I am.” As we mature, this potent credo can make us act in two wildly different ways: as high achievers and as self-saboteurs.
Being raised by a narcissistic mother has far-reaching effects that brand your soul. To exc
ise this brand and become your own person, you will need to work through the recovery program in part 3. But first you need to identify which behavior pattern is yours.
CHAPTER SIX
* * *
I TRY SO HARD!
THE HIGH-ACHIEVING DAUGHTER
I decided early on, like at age ten, that working hard was the only way to feel good about myself, and to compensate for all the “not good enough” messages. I wish someone had told me it wouldn’t fill the bill as I imagined it would. The hard-work escape sounded good at the time.
—Kerry, 35
The high-achieving daughter, whom I call Mary Marvel,1 embarks on a whirlwind of achievement, out to prove to her mother and to the world just how good she can be. “I am worthy,” she is trying to tell herself and her mother, “because of the extraordinarily impressive things I can accomplish.” She finds it difficult to love herself just for who she is. She bases her worth on her accomplishment and her busyness. When not accomplishing something she (or others) thinks is great, she feels worthless. The high achiever becomes a “human doing” rather than a “human being” who is accepted for and comfortable just being herself.
Such women appear to be superheroes, but their productivity and achievement don’t make them feel accomplished or comfortable on the inside. They never give themselves the credit they deserve and continually struggle with feelings of inadequacy. Constantly looking for more things they can do to prove themselves, they are often chronically exhausted, unaware of how this drive to achieve inhibits their ability to take care of themselves. Mary Marvels can be highly educated and professional or stay-at-home, perfectionist homemakers, but they feel nothing they do is ever good enough.
Are you a Mary Marvel? One way to identify whether you are is to look at how you define yourself. Do you typically describe yourself as who you are: “I am a loving, kind person who strives to be honest and to live a life that contributes to society in some significant way”? Or is your identity more closely tied to what you do: “I am a CEO for a large manufacturing firm, I am a business owner, I am an attorney, or I am a mother of four and a Girl Scout leader who also teaches Sunday school”?
You might have learned that you had to be a doer for your mother in order to be accepted or approved. If your mother was an “accomplishment-oriented” narcissist, as discussed in chapter 3, you grew up emulating this role model and following the rule that you had to “achieve to be worthy.” Even though this was expected of you, however, your accomplishments don’t really make you feel good about yourself. For no matter how much you try to accomplish and perform, you still hear the internal message: It’s not enough.
This attitude is frustrating, sad, and difficult. There is always a push to do more, but doing more makes you feel better about yourself only temporarily. So you up the ante, hoping somehow that it will work in the end. Most daughters of narcissistic mothers don’t understand the origins of this impulse, but feel they need to keep it up. As Pressman and Pressman say in their book, The Narcissistic Family, “The roots of workaholism are truly sown in narcissistic homes; ‘I do, therefore I am’ could be the motto of many adult children from these homes.”2
• Rosa is a pretty but harried-looking woman who is constantly doing more than her fair share of work within any group. She explains, “I have to work so hard to justify just being here—have to do and do and do.”
• Mother of three and a college professor, Jerilyn started on her path during the early years. She relates, “I’ve been doing this race for the good since I was a kid. Straight A’s, AP classes in high school, every sport offered, in all the music programs, honors programs, straight to college and then on to grad school. It all looks great, but somehow it feels like I am trying to prove something to justify my existence.”
I have to admit this category fits me. Sometimes I have been able to give myself credit for what I have accomplished, but even when I’ve done so, I still feel something might be missing. Throughout my life, it would actually make me angry when others asked why I was doing something more—another degree, another business idea, another major project. You yourself probably won’t really be able to explain it to yourself until you complete recovery and uncover all the dynamics behind it. We daughters may try to explain ourselves as being type A personalities, or just overly ambitious. But inside, we know that our personal rat race has another cause. A recurring dream I had in my early years before graduate school illustrates this unconscious compulsion always to work harder and get it right:
I am standing in front of a mirror in the bedroom trying to get dressed. As I am trying on several different outfits in arduous, frustrating slow motion, nothing looks right or is working correctly. I keep changing clothes, regardless. A voice in the hall outside the bedroom is calling me: “Come on, you’re okay just the way you are.”
I misinterpreted this dream for years, thinking it had something to do with my husband’s impatience with me when we were getting ready to go somewhere. I ultimately realized, however, that the voice in the hall was my intuition calling to me, voicing the validation that I am okay as I am.
So, What Does This Mean?
If you fit the description of a Mary Marvel, you may be asking the question “But what if my choices are mine and I am doing what I want, although it just happens to be a higher level of achievement than many people care to pursue? Is this wrong?” Of course, a significant number of high achievers are doing things they really want to do. Many daughters of narcissistic mothers who took the Mary Marvel route are truly accomplished, amazing women, and I honor their multitude of talents. In fact, sometimes the narcissistic mother’s legacy ends up being a gift that provides you with an inner drive that others may not have. One woman, an exceptionally talented artist, explained it this way:
I’ve always felt that my art was something “untouchable”; my narcissistic mother could not affect it because it was an inner event and therefore not subject to her influence. It was a private joy that flourished and thrived as I grew. I had to spend so much time on the inside of myself, not disturbing her, being quiet and unseen, that my drawing abilities sort of became a natural outgrowth of that. If I had to come up with a positive result of growing up in a narcissistic home, that would top my list.
If you are a high achiever pursuing your chosen life dreams, and you are giving yourself credit and taking good care of yourself in the process, you are doing it so right. High achievement becomes a problem only when you:
• Have medical or mental health problems associated with not taking care of yourself.
• Seek only external validation to define your self-worth.
• Find that you cannot give yourself credit for what you accomplish in all aspects of your life.
Let’s look at each of these Mary Marvel pitfalls so that you can make sure they have not entrapped you or, if they have, so that you can take steps to climb out of them.
Lack of Self-Care
Busyness or workaholism can be a form of self-destructive behavior similar to alcoholism and drug or food addiction. It works the same to numb the pain. If you become chronically exhausted, and find that you can’t slow down, and are beginning to have health problems, it is time to take an inventory of whether or not your activities fit your own value system (rather than your mother’s or your internalized critic) and whether they are healthy for you. Looking strong and invulnerable on the outside may be an attempt to escape the emptiness and pain of feelings of unworthiness on the inside. Here are some women who have begun to come to terms with this behavior:
• Summer feels valued for what she does rather than who she is. “I’m a workhorse. I’m like this because my mother trained me to be. I don’t know how to stop. It’s affecting my health. I have MS, nine breast biopsies in the past few months, irritable bowel syndrome, can’t keep weight on, and arthritis. I work full time, have a side business of four accounting clients, am a Girl Scout troop leader for my daughters, youth athletic coach, make jewelry,
and can vegetables. Everybody looks at me for what I do, not realizing there is a me inside of there too. I can’t sit down. It feels like I am leaping small buildings in a single bound and if I sit down, I will crash.”
• Bernie looks at her overachieving with some regret. “I never called in sick at work even when I felt awful. Every job I had, I gave 100 percent. In fact, anything I do gets 100 percent. This is all that makes me good enough. Raising my daughters, sometimes I gave too much to my job when I should have been home with them. I have some regrets about this now, as well as a new diagnosis of fibromyalgia.”
• Marlo, 45, tells me, “I am an overachiever, a perfectionist type A with my job, with keeping a meticulous house, with constantly having new goals that I want to obtain. I never feel it is good enough and always that I have to do more. I have constant feelings of anxiety, worry, and excessive stress.”
Once you recognize that you are trying to patch up your vulnerability with various modes of achievement, you will see that you have been shortchanging yourself and those you love. Then you’ll be able to take steps to change.
Internal Versus External Validation
The need for validation can be a catch-22. If a child did not receive validation in her early developmental years, and as a young woman is not able to validate herself, she often succumbs to the lure of doing more and trying harder in ways that bring validation from others. This is an unconscious seduction because Mary Marvels are almost always highly skilled and competent. It is therefore not difficult to obtain external validation from friends, family, work, or society in general. The praise appears to fill the emptiness, but relying on external praise can create anxiety. Because it is external validation, the daughter does not own it or control it and it can be taken away from her at any time. If she does not continue to accomplish, it will also disappear.
Will I Ever Be Good Enough? Page 9
