Malignant Maternity: When Your Mother Is a Narcissist

One of the most chilling episodes of the US crime drama CSI: Crime Scene Investigation is “Turn of the Screws” (S. 4, Ep. 21) in which narcissistic mother Raina Press kills her daughter, 13-year-old Tessa Press, with a shovel for the apparent ‘crime’ of stealing too much of the attention of Raina’s boyfriend Justin. Raina then dumps Tessa’s body outside of town without a care in the world, and proceeds to act as if she hasn’t a clue what has happened to her daughter. When the shovel turns up as viable evidence of her involvement in Tessa’s killing, however, Raina shows her true colours while being interviewed by CSIs Willows and Brown:

Raina Press: I bought Tessa a bus pass, and that little slut still gets my guy to pick her up after school. We all know why.

CSI Willows: Why don’t you tell us?

Raina Press: She was trying to steal him from me. Justin was the best thing in my life.

CSI Willows: No. Your daughter was the best thing in your life. (Willows gets up, disgusted, and heads for the door.)

Raina Press: You didn’t know her!

CSI Willows: I do know that she was thirteen years old. A child. (Willows walks out of the door.)

Now, probably not many narcissistic mothers would go quite as far as to commit actual murder. But many inflict severe damage every day that leaves their children and often also other family members feeling emotionally and psychologically attacked and ‘dead’ inside time and time again.

I thought my mother loved me when I was growing up – or, more accurately, I wanted to believe she did. That was probably partly due to my innocence, and partly due to her skill in passing off everything she did as being in my best interests. You will hear a lot of narcissistic mothers utter the phrase, “I’m only saying/doing this because I love you.” Those words mask and apparently excuse a multitude of sins. I say apparently excuse because, looking back, my mother engaged in behaviours that were very hurtful, invasive, and devaluing, and these had quite serious consequences for my well-being as an adult. There is nothing remotely excusable about that.

Things a Narcissistic Mother Says and Does

– She competes with her children, and/or forces her children to compete for her ‘love’. My mother did both of these things regularly. She was forever threatening me with the words, “Wait until your dad gets home!” and ‘telling on’ me to him to provoke him into being angry with me, so that she could triumph in his eyes as the one in the right. Rather than behaving as his parental equal and disciplining me fairly herself, she preferred the childish satisfaction of winding Dad up and watching me get the brunt of it. She competed with me for my father’s attention, apparently enraged, much like Raina Press, that he gravitated towards and leaned on me emotionally in response to her undemonstrative coldness. She evidently thought that the balance needed to be redressed, and set about doing so in her own sneaky and vindictive way.

And it didn’t matter that I didn’t have actual siblings for her to compare me to; she would simply find me temporary ones wherever we happened to be at the time, in the shape of other people’s children. She would say, “That little girl always talks to the waiters!” “You don’t see that little boy making a fuss!” I ended up feeling inadequate and disliking these other kids, as any kid probably would, but it was her influence creating the inadequacy and animosity that I felt. Until she tried to cause trouble, I felt quite happy in myself and pleasantly disposed towards them. This is how the narcissistic mother creates chaos and grinds you down, making sure you keep trying in vain to reach her impossible standards. This is how she makes you dependent upon her, until you start perversely believing that you actually need her and her damaging behaviour! You get caught in the cycle of hoping that if you are just enough like others whom she compares you to, THEN you will have earned her love. The sad thing is, you shouldn’t have to earn it.

If you have siblings and a narcissistic mother, she may well try to drive a wedge between you to satisfy her own twisted need to feel more valuable because you are all competing to impress her. She may choose one or more of you to be her favourite children, and make one or more of you the ones who can’t do anything right. Be very aware that she is the one setting up this sick little scenario, and don’t let it turn you against each other – that’s just what she wants! My own father and his brother were drawn into an almost lifelong silent feud with each other, all because their mother had labelled them the ‘clever’ one and the ‘useless’ one when they were children. It was just her selfish, meaningless opinion, but it tainted the way they saw and interacted with each other into their middle age. They only started to have a better relationship after she died, when she couldn’t poison things between them any more.

– She invades her children’s privacy. Telling you how to live your life as if you had no choice or opinion in the matter, reading your diary, snooping through your private things, insisting that you undress and/or bathe in front of her and getting upset if you protest… narcissistic mothers do all of these things and more. When I still lived with her, mine would barge into my bedroom without knocking while I was getting changed. She continued to do so even after I asked her not to. Her reason? “We’re all women, we’re all the same!” No doubt true, but it was still no excuse for her to be there staring at me when I didn’t want her to be. She also found my diary and opened it, shaming me by reading aloud my private thoughts in front of me in a mocking fashion.

Why does the narcissistic mother do this stuff? Well, to her, you are not her child to be loved and nurtured into a whole and happy separate person; you are a possession. You don’t have rights, you don’t have feelings, and you sure as hell don’t belong to yourself! What she wants is to erode all the healthy boundaries that should exist between you and her as independent people. That way, you can be easily controlled, and you won’t get any silly ideas about leaving her or not doing exactly as she wishes all the time.

– She invalidates her children. This follows on from the invasion of privacy. By eroding the boundaries between you, the narcissistic mother effectively invalidates your existence as a person in your own right. She will also invalidate your feelings and needs, when you have them. When I was younger and got upset about something, my mother would say things like, “You’ve got a very vivid imagination,” and “I think you’ve been reading too many magazines.” ANYTHING except acknowledging my upset for what it really was: feelings needing to be heard and understood, and comfort needing to be felt. When I went to her and asked for physical affection, she would usually either push me away, saying, “Don’t be a baby!” or respond with a gesture so weak that it was hardly worth making at all. I got little, if any, of the emotional or physical mirroring that is meant to occur between mother and child. But that is the narcissistic mother’s whole MO. She expects her children to be her mirror alone, and to have no needs of their own.

This post basically describes the narcissistic mother and her main behaviours (though by no means all of them). In future posts, I will address what your options may be if you find yourself dealing with this kind of mother, and offer some ways in which you might deal with and protect yourself from her. Thank you for reading.

(Photo credits: ALAMY and themomcrowd.com)