If your childhood was consistent with being raised by a narcissistic mother, this one is for you.
Naturally as a grown adult now, you will have memories you wish you didn’t have.
Your experiences will be riddled with pain, and you wish your narc mom would admit to her huge part in that.
Only, she chooses instead to rewrite your memories, leaving you hurt and confused.
Here are 9 ways she will do that.
#1 Denying the abuse ever happened
Imagine going through everything you went through only to find your narcissistic mother, in later life, denies it all.
You mention the fact that she used to control who you spoke to, and she stares at you blankly.
You speak up about never being able to make your own choices, and she accuses you of making things up.
This is painful, guys. It’s hard to sit there and watch somebody you know abused you be so confident that they didn’t.
Denying your abuse means denying all your feelings, fears and triggers related to the abuse, and that is a lot needing to be unpacked, that can’t be.
What I don’t want you to do is believe her. Don’t diminish your own pain with her lack of accountability.
#2 Minimizing your pain
Come on, you act like you were raised by the devil!
It wasn’t that bad!
You need to stop exaggerating because I know it didn’t happen like that.
You just needed to toughen up.
None of these comments matter, because ultimately they all have one thing in common:
They are made to minimize whatever you went through.
And let’s be clear, what you went through wasn’t just one thing one time. It was years of abuse that got worse the older you got.
When you start to see through the cracks of happy families, you cannot unsee what’s happened to you.
Your pain exists, and the fact that she minimizes it means she sees it as yet another thing she can control.
Just by saying it wasn’t a big deal, she tries to pull down how much her treatment of you affected you.
And nobody can be in charge of that except you.
#3 “It was for your own good”
I did it to make you resilient.
I was raised like it and I turned out fine.
Phrases like this make my heart ache, they really do. Why should you be punished for something that you weren’t there to experience?
You didn’t get a say, and you certainly didn’t ask to be born.
And what is really for your own good? Did her abuse make you a better person? Did you learn to conform and learn that conforming is how you get by in life?
I’d hope not.
#4 Fabricating the happy family image
We were a happy family!
You had everything you ever wanted!
You had all those dance lessons!
You had a beautiful room and your friends were always welcome.
You had nothing but homemade meals at the table every day.
So what? What does any of that matter when you were stonewalled behind closed doors?
What does any of it matter when you’d look around at your various school events and never see her there because she either didn’t want to come, or was too busy to be there?
The happy family image is untrue, and you know it.
#5 Claiming that your memories are lies
You will say anything for a bit of attention!
You really know how to try and turn a very normal childhood into a big drama, don’t you?
Being told that you’re a liar when all you had to put up with in childhood was lie after lie after lie by your own narcissistic mother is nothing short of insulting.
Your memories serve you well, but if there’s a way she can wriggle out of being blamed, she will do that, even by calling her own children liars.
I know this kind of approach to your childhood memories can hurt, just like the rest.
You’re told to carry the tag of being dishonest, just so she doesn’t get the criticism she deserves from everybody else.
#6 Reframing neglect as attempts to get you to be independent
I was trying to do it for your own sake.
You never wanted to be left alone, but you were growing up.
You needed to start fending for yourself.
You always wanted me, but I couldn’t always be there. I had responsibilities.
So all those times you were left, all those times she wasn’t there for you when you were upset, all those big occasions she avoided like the plague – they were supposedly to help you.
This is one occasion where the art of reframing really can cut like a knife, and can really invalidate what you went through.
#7 Blaming you for their behavior
As common as this approach is, I always try to give the victims I speak to this snippet of advice:
Think about the kind of person you were growing up.
That person cannot possibly be to blame for all the ways you were mistreated and abused.
When you are ‘too happy’ for somebody enough for it to be a problem, that problem has nothing to do with your happiness and everything to do with their inability to feel their own happiness.
Making it about you just means they refuse to take accountability for all the ways they failed you.
You didn’t fail them as a child, you did everything and more to try to get them to love you consistently and properly, but they failed.
They can’t bear to admit it, so they blame you instead.
#8 “I gave up so much for you!”
Gave up what?
This bugs me a lot, because when you choose to have kids, you know you’re going to have to make some changes in your life.
Raising children starts from the moment they’re born, and yeah, it can be tough to remember to do things for yourself (although you should always try).
But giving things up? Holding that against the kids you decided you wanted? Using you as an excuse for them to have not fulfilled their dreams?
Unfair, and untrue.
They act like they sacrificed everything in order to give you a childhood, when in fact you know the truth.
They didn’t even show up when it mattered because they were too busy in their own world.
#9 Cherry-picking the good bits
Oh, but you went on some fabulous vacations.
You had everything you ever wanted.
I made sure you had the best education.
We went on that theatre trip that weekend that you loved!
Sure, cherry pick the few times you showed up and acted like a mom. All those moments did, was offer you a glimpse of what life is like for normal families with moms who were absent from narcissism.
The good bits were so fragmented that you can’t even remember them now, but they did not constitute anywhere near your entire childhood.
With this one, I think Mom has a serious case of denial, don’t you?
