If you decide to tell her, you should also decide how much you want to share with her. You may choose to inform her that you are attending, but tell her that you do not plan to share this private experience with her. If she pushes for information, gently set up your boundaries. If these do not work, set even firmer boundaries. An example of each is below.
A gentle boundary: “Mother, I appreciate your interest in my therapy, and when I am ready to discuss it with you, I will likely do that. I am still in the midst of some confusion and trying to understand myself better and want to get further along before I can discuss it clearly and appropriately with you. Thank you for understanding that.”
A firm boundary: “Mother, I need to be very clear with you that my therapy is confidential and I do not discuss it with anyone. It is designed to help me with some issues I am experiencing in my life right now. Do not ask me about it, as I do not plan to share that information with you.”
You can preface these boundaries with “I care about you and your feelings,” or “I love you, Mom, but . . .” If Mother acts hurt or gets angry, it is her job to take care of her own feelings, not your job to fix them. Detach from the scene and let it be her problem—which it is. Remember, setting boundaries is not a mean thing to do; it is a healthy exercise in taking good care of yourself. Typically, we daughters know this, but because Mother is good at making us feel guilty, it is sometimes difficult to do. Remind yourself that you do not create feelings in other people. Each person is responsible for his or her own feelings and reactions and therefore must also be accountable for them.
The Real Work Is Within
As I am sure you are finding out, dealing with your mother is much easier after working on your own recovery. The reasons for this change are many: You are less reactive to her projections; you can set clear boundaries; because of your grief work, she is less able to trigger your pain; and because you have accepted that she has limitations, you no longer have great expectations of her. Regardless of whether or not you are practicing a complete separation, a temporary separation, or the civil connection, your success is determined by your own internal healing.
What If Mother Is Deceased?
If your mother has passed away, you will not be engaging in some of the exercises above. Nonetheless, your internal healing is still a must. I have treated many daughters who continue to have legacy issues throughout their lives even after their mother has died. The nasty messages stay stuck until you consciously loosen and release them from within you. Working on your recovery is necessary for you to be healthy.
Let’s explore a deeper understanding of your mother and her background.
Understanding Mother’s Makeup
Because most daughters are codependent, it is a bit tricky to ask daughters of narcissistic mothers to take some time to understand their mother’s background, origins, and how she became who she is. By doing this, you won’t let her off the hook, minimize your own pain, or make your wounds suddenly invisible again. You will not be making it “all about Mom” again. But this exercise can help settle your insides and give you a grasp of the larger picture. To use an analogy, let’s imagine that I am going to hike or climb to the summit of a very high mountain with complex topography. I know that I will have to start at the bottom and work my way up and I imagine that I will have many obstacles to overcome as I go. If I could fly over this mountain in a helicopter first or look at a good map to see what I am up against in the big picture, it would prepare me better for the climb. The map or overview would not diminish the difficulty of my journey or my efforts; it would simply assist in my overall planning and ultimate success. The same is true if you better understand where your mother comes from. This work is to help you.
So to start with, try to find out if your mother had a narcissistic parent—mother or father. It is very likely that she did. You can take some of the characteristics we have defined in this book and ask her those very questions about her parents. Many narcissistic mothers are quite willing to talk about their backgrounds if it does not involve something that they did. My parents, for example, were able to give several vivid examples of their parents’ behaviors. We had a very animated, pleasant, but admittedly short discussion; nonetheless, it was better than none. I was able to trace some of the family legacy from this and use it to explain some of my own experience with my grandparents.
Next, you can ask relatives. Aunts, uncles, and cousins are great resources. Living grandparents who are not narcissistic are another great resource. Sometimes, after a narcissistic spouse passes, a relative is more willing to share thoughts and memories.
Of course, these discussions cannot take place in many families. If your family would not countenance it, you know it. Just let it go. Do not cause yourself unneeded drama if you are sure it won’t be successful. Trust your own intuition. I know of some daughters who pushed the issue with relatives and, when it did not work out well, blamed themselves for it. I do not want that to happen for you.
Other resources include close friends of the family who knew your parents and grandparents well. Although rare these days, some families still live in the same towns and cities where the whole extended family grew up.
If you cannot get specifics about narcissism, you can ask your mother general questions about her upbringing. Questions such as:
• Did you have a happy childhood?
• Did you feel loved by your parents?
• Did you feel you got enough attention growing up?
• Did your parents talk to you about feelings?
• Were you listened to and did you feel heard?
• How were you disciplined when your parents were upset with you?
• Were you encouraged as an individual or did you have to fit the mold for the family image of what was expected?
• Was your mother or father particularly concerned about what others thought?
The more you can learn about your mother’s background, the better you will understand her and why she acts the way she does. She most likely was an unmothered child herself who has her own significant trauma in her background.
When attempting to retrieve further information, however, you may feel as if you’re digging in the dark. Be prepared for her to have a lot of denial about her own childhood. While your mother will likely not be the best reporter of information, see what she is willing to share. Accept whatever that is.
Also look at your mother’s parenting as influenced by her generation and time. A multitude of factors influence how every mother parents.
Historical Perspectives
We are all shaped significantly by societal values and expectations of parenting. Each generation seems to have its own set of parenting philosophies and beliefs with which to contend, so one generation may contradict the next. See the birth markers as defined by Generations: Working Together, below.3 As examples, I have listed the women in my legacy. You can do the same to gain some perspective of the big picture of your own family.
GENERATION
BIRTH YEARS
EXAMPLE
The GI Generation
1901–1923
My Grandmother
The Silent Generation
1924–1945
My Mother
The Baby Boom Generation
1946–1964
Me
Generation X
1965–1980
My Daughter
The Millennial Generation
(sometimes called Gen Y)
1981–2002
My Granddaughters
Parenting beliefs across the ages have gone from “spare the rod and spoil the child” and “children should be seen and not heard” to the attitude of baby boomers who try to build their children’s self-esteem without requiring them to become competent in academic and social skills. That’s a seismic shift right there. Many would say, “How in the world does anyone raise a child in the right way?”
Baby boomer mothers moved from the
Donna Reed model of the stay-at-home, baking cookies, be-there-at-all-times mother, to highly educated mothers who had careers outside the home. The prevailing concept of womanhood at the time I had my first child, for example, was undergoing a cultural revolution. Mothers became feminists, joined demonstrations for equal rights, and began careers. Family structure changed: Divorce, latchkey kids, single-parent homes, and day-care centers became common, where they had been unfamiliar to the previous generation. My own daughter, in a fit of anger one day, called me a “house-divorcée,” somehow getting the unspoken message that it was no longer appropriate to call her mother a “housewife.”
Baby boomer mothers paved the way for their daughters to have better education and health care, and equal access to schools and careers. They created choices that women did not previously have. Yet some of their Gen X daughters believe that, while their mothers were doing this, the family suffered and the daughters felt secondary to their mothers’ career aspirations. This controversy requires sensitive communication between mothers and daughters, but the mothers’ commitment to self-development and career success is not the same as narcissism, unless the mothers display narcissistic traits. At the same time, baby boomer mothers need to acknowledge their Gen X daughters’ feelings and understand that they can relate to some of the daughters in this book. Understanding, empathy, and communication are the keys for resolution.
In any case, given the effects of their culture, society, and history on our mothers and grandmothers, it is not surprising that they didn’t know how best to be parents much of the time. It is safe to say that many parented in the way that they were parented. Having some understanding of the historical perspective makes it a bit easier to understand how maternal attitudes and behavior can change from one generation to the next and vulnerable girls grow up to become narcissistic mothers.
That said, however, I am not offering an excuse, but only fodder for further understanding. I do believe that for any generation the trademark of good mothering is the ability to give authentic love and empathy, and physical and emotional care, no matter the historical moment.
With this understanding of our mothers’ histories, let’s look now at the complicated concept of forgiveness.
Forgiveness
The word “forgiveness” is laden with meaning and misunderstanding. Many daughters were taught at a very early age that nice girls forgive and forget. The clear message is that we are expected to forgive anyone who has hurt us because it is the right thing to do.
While I do believe in the rightness and importance of forgiveness and in the emotional benefits it can give you, I do see it in a different light. Forgiveness is positive and healing when we can see that the person’s intentions were not to hurt us. But we do ourselves no good when we try to deny the pain we felt. And we can actually set ourselves up for further harm when we don’t deal with the reality that we were hurt and that the person is likely to hurt us again—whether inadvertently or on purpose.
Many people misconstrue forgiveness as somehow condoning the original offending behavior, as if saying that it is all right. But I believe that accountability is crucial for mental health. So I counsel you to pardon only someone who is accountable for her behavior, when she has owned up to it, has become conscious of it, and is truly sorry for having done it. While this may sound harsh, not many narcissistic mothers do this, so I do not advocate pardons for most of them.
I do advise that you practice a kind of inner letting go, however—for your own good. Daughters of narcissistic mothers have been unloved, and many have been abused physically, sexually, and emotionally. We do not condone bad mothering. We do not condone ignoring the basic needs and rights of children. But you do have to let go of this past internally, so that you, the daughter, can also let go of your anger, rage, and sadness. You forgive by forgoing these negative emotions so that you can go on for the rest of your life.
Step One of the grief process allows you to accomplish the internal letting go. Afterward, you will have an internal feeling that is more neutral; you will no longer have the intense emotions you once associated with your mother. This neutrality allows you to keep that feeling of letting go. It feels like internal forgiveness. It is your gift to yourself. As my client Kenna shares:
• “Although I could never talk about emotions with my mother—she has the emotions of a doorknob—I am now able to say I love her. The funny thing is she didn’t even notice that I didn’t say this before. I now get that this recovery and forgiveness deal is for me. It feels so good.”
This kind of forgiveness is an understanding of your mother that allows you to grow past your old feelings of being a saddened, hurt child. This kind of forgiveness feels adult-like. Lewis Smedes, in Shame and Grace: Healing the Shame We Don’t Deserve, puts it like this:
The first and often the only person to be healed by forgiveness is the person who does the forgiveness. . . . When we genuinely forgive, we set a prisoner free and then discover that the prisoner we set free was us.4
My theory and practice of forgiveness is not the only way. Many daughters find it helpful to draw on their religious or spiritual backgrounds to help them forgive. Twelve-step addiction programs advocate that true forgiveness is when you can wish the person well who has hurt you and pray for her to have all that she wishes for. They also take it a step further and suggest that you pray for the hurtful person to have all the things that you want for yourself—health, wealth, and happiness. Henry Nouwen writes in The Only Necessary Thing:
Forgiveness is the name of love practiced among people who love poorly. The hard truth is that all of us love poorly. We need to forgive and be forgiven every day, every hour, unceasingly. That is the great work of love among the fellowship of the weak that is the human family.5
My main concern for your recovery is that the form of forgiveness that you choose to implement eradicates blame so thoroughly that you have no traces of feeling like a victim. For if you continue to live in a victim mentality, you are at risk of defining your life based on your wounds. That would mean that you were allowing yourself to be controlled by your mother’s failures. Being free from the feeling of victimization is a true sign of recovery.
Mother’s Gifts
It is important to remember that no person is all good or all bad. Whether your mother has narcissistic traits or has a full-blown NPD, she has some goodness in her. She likely passed along talents, passions, interests, and knowledge to you. Remind yourself of the gifts she has given you. They might be artistic, musical, mechanical, body shape or size, texture of hair, beautiful eyes, smooth skin, or something like the ability to paper a wall without a single wrinkle.
Write in your journal about the gifts your mother has bestowed upon you and allow yourself to feel gratitude. When I was a small child, my grandmother used a significant, repetitive phrase with me. If I ever attempted to say anything bad about anyone, she would sit me on her lap and gently tell me, “If you look hard enough, you can always find the gold in people.” I have certainly found this to be true. Look for the gold and those gifts in your mother. It will help you more than you may realize right now. Suzie read this to me from her journal:
From our home I left with a feisty spirit. Perhaps not equipped for most practical things in life, I did learn that honesty and integrity were my greatest assets. I learned a work ethic that is highly valued. I learned that high standards yield high results in most things. I learned humor and laughter would bridge most differences for short-term gains. I learned table manners, how to set a table and entertain. I learned social skills. I learned to shop! Somehow I emerged tenacious; I look for the best in others, forgive easily, and learn quickly. I painfully learned I wanted to be a different kind of mother, so I was motivated to teach myself about nurturing parenting. As a result, the greatest joy in my life has been being a mom. The cycle is broken.
Love, Not Blame: The Look of Recovery
My hope for you includes all of the following: You now view
yourself with an inner knowing and a sense of love. You replaced the anxiety and unease of your childhood with a flood of gratitude for having been given life and this important journey to undertake. You now understand that the path you were given to travel was and is full of life lessons worth treasuring. You have recognized that you have an inner wisdom that you can now share with your children, others whom you love, and the world. You now see that your mother gave you special gifts, although they were disguised and hidden in trauma, that you can now appreciate.
You are accountable for your own life. You depend on yourself to manage your emotions. You are an adult with a solid sense of self. You take yourself seriously and are no longer filled with self-doubt. You have stepped out of the shadows of a childhood filled with anxiety into the sunshine of confidence and competence.
Now you are ready to complete the healing journey by undertaking the final step to ending the legacy of your narcissistic mother.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
* * *
FILLING THE EMPTY MIRROR
ENDING THE NARCISSISTIC LEGACY
Traumata stored in the brain but denied by our conscious minds will always be visited on the next generation.
—Alice Miller, online interview1
In this chapter, you’ll learn how to use your awareness of the narcissistic legacy and your desire to change it, to stop it from being passed along to your own children. Daughters of narcissistic mothers commonly express fears that they may have learned or acquired narcissistic traits that then adversely affect their most intimate relationships in the roles of mothers, lovers, and friends. Elan Golomb, in Trapped in the Mirror, expresses this worrisome thought: “If the parent has a narcissistic bent, the pressure to copy is strong.”2
Will I Ever Be Good Enough? Page 19
