recalling past abuse from a narcissistic family

I was on the brink of turning 21 when I headed into one of the worst summers of my life. I had just finished my first year of university in a small city far enough away from my NPD family to escape casual family visits, and for the first and last time in my life, I returned to my hometown and my chief abuser’s house for the summer.

I hadn’t realized how much just 9 months away from a toxic environment would change me. I had hated high school, I had hated working full time as a secretary in order to earn money to go to school, but at university, my world had opened up. And more important, I finally noticed the extent of my mother’s abuse. Within 2 weeks of being back, everything fell apart. My parents had divorced when I was 17 and in the fall out, I threw myself into school, my younger sister quit high school, moved in with a drug dealer, and got knocked up, and my younger brother became invisible, although as a boy, he was the favorite child and was mostly left alone. But three years later, after I, the truth-teller and major threat to my NPD mother, re-entered the diminished family home, the shit hit the fan.

My brother and I had gone out with my father and his girlfriend and we got back to my mother’s house rather late at night. On the kitchen table was a picture my brother had drawn. My mother, who was nowhere to be found upon our return, had clearly found the picture and had left it out as a sort of warning. What she had discovered was a family portrait that included a woman that was clearly not my mother – wrong hair color. Dismissing it, as it didn’t seem like a big deal to me, I went downstairs to my room to get ready for bed, but was interrupted by some shouting and door-slamming. I crept silently upstairs. The bathroom door was closed and I could hear my almost 16-year-old brother crying. Very unusual. And my protective rage flared up in me as I realized what had happened. And for the first time in my young life, I went on the attack. After checking on my brother, I walked calmly to my mother’s bedroom door and in a low and even voice, let her know what I felt. I used a few choice expletives – something she had never heard me do before. Then I walked downstairs. I didn’t get far as the dragon jumped out of bed, chased me to the kitchen and punched me in the stomach, screaming at me the entire time. I indicated that I was going to call the police since she had hit me, and mother countered with oh no, she was going to call the police because actually I was the one who had hit her. I didn’t have the insight or the language at this point in my life, but this was classic gaslighting.

Somehow, I ended up back in my room and I called my father, who immediately came to pick me up. I was emotionally frozen, not just because of my mother’s behavior, but also because it was the first time in my life that I had stood up to her. I’ll leave out a lot of the detail here, but I’ll just mention that less than a week and a half later, I found out that my mother was going out of town, and I went to her house to pick up all my things and to drop off her key. But when I got there, I couldn’t find any of my things and my bedroom was filled with another woman’s belongings – in my drawers, on the unmade bed, and on the floor. In less than two weeks, my mother had replaced me completely, and not only continued to take the exorbitant child support that my father was paying her to NOT care for me – I didn’t live with her and I paid for most of my own education and living expenses even before this – but she was now taking rent from a complete stranger. It was at that point in my life that I cut off my mother completely, and over the next year, found a way to support myself financially 100% working several part-time jobs and going to university full time. My father wasn’t interested in helping me with money even though he made six figures a year, but he seemed to take immense satisfaction in now being in sole control of emotionally manipulating me. He was a narcissist himself, but had taken a back seat in the abuse while he was still married to my mother. My brother, whom I had defended, completely blamed me and sided with my mother – typical golden child. My sister, who hated my mother more than anybody actually, ended up siding with her in order to benefit financially after having her teenaged pregnancy. In the years following my break with the family, my mother went on a rampage contacting everyone I knew to tell them I was insane and every so often, she would recruit family members and whatever man she was fucking at the time to try to manipulate me by proxy in order to get me back under her toxic narcissistic control.

This is an example of the most extreme and difficult, but effective, way of dealing with narcissistic abuse. It is usually called ‘going no-contact’. It is the route most often taken by truth-tellers and scapegoats – those of us who are least likely to become enablers, even if we are highly empathic people. All ways to deal with NPDs are difficult, but I believe this one is most difficult because you will lose more than just the NPD relationship, if it is a family situation. Likely, you will lose most to all of the other family relationships because they are, for the most part, enablers and some receive financial and other perks in exchange for tolerating abuse. And I lost most of the people in my family in the aftermath, and deliberately went no-contact with my increasingly abusive narcissistic father when I was 27. Losing an entire network is hard. As a woman, especially if you aren’t straight, it will be even harder because the only way for women to gain any kind of pretend power or the pseudo freedom that money can bring in this world is to suck dick. Now, I didn’t get much financial support from my family, even as a child, so I was used to having to pay for what I needed. I started working and saving regularly when I was 12 years old. I’ve always been poor, but I learned frugality and financial creativity and resourcefulness out of necessity, especially because I knew from a young age that I never wanted to suck dick in exchange for food or a home. I was very clear that I didn’t want to end up like my completely useless patriarchal mother.

The other issue you experience with going no-contact is that you can’t talk about what has happened to you. Most people don’t understand what NPD is, and no one believes that mothers are abusive – despite what mothers claim. I learned very quickly to tell people the bare minimum – and a semi-lie at that – when they asked about family. My parents were dead and I was an only child. And honestly, these felt true in my heart. The bonus is that people feel awkward when they hear this and don’t ask any follow-up questions. This may sound harsh and this is really hard to rationalize as a truth-teller who values clear discussions of reality, but after a lifetime of gaslighting and shaming despite being the victim, you really aren’t interested in more of the same.

Now, I haven’t done what I probably needed to do to become a healthier person partly because I’m a loner and partly because, thanks to my father, I don’t really trust people in the helping professions, even if I see that they may have value for others. I didn’t learn about personality disorders in depth until I got to grad school in psychology and worked on a few projects with some clinical students. But I didn’t put it all together in my own life until my late 30’s. And actually, a lot of victims of narcissists don’t realize what’s going on until they are older and have lived through a few bad and repetitive abusive patterns and start looking for answers.

Myself, I spent a lot of time self-examining to figure out what was wrong with ME, thanks to how my psychologist father had pathologized me and my reactions to abuse. It wasn’t until I was in my late 30’s and met a woman like me at a youth hostel where I was work-staying. We had been talking about a scary domineering woman who had passed through the hostel and how we both had tried to avoid her and had felt some rather serious emotional reactions to being around her. This other woman gave me insight and recommended the web site Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers – it had helped her figure out why her life felt like a disaster and why she was so affected by certain kinds of women. I devoured the site wondering if it had been written about me. I had already read so much and even had a couple of degrees in psychology, although not clinical psychology, but I could never identify what I had experienced. But so much more work has been done on personality disorders since my youth, not all of it necessarily beneficial, I’ll add. But I now had a context for my experience. While it might have been nice to have had a support group at the time, just being able to identify the problem did so much for my healing process. I think I’ll always be vulnerable to narcissists, as a truth-teller and a woman – they are very good at targeting threats to their control and power. But I am now very good at identifying them and I avoid them when I can. I’m just not the kind of person who is able to employ some of the strategies I’ll talk about below as I’m a sensitive person and have a hard time compartmentalizing. I’m a resilient person, but I have my weaknesses and vulnerabilities. This is normal and it is perfectly okay to have weaknesses, but it is important to know yourself and what you are capable of dealing with. Personally, I don’t think we can overcome anything and everything. We can just manage problems. So don’t let anyone tell you how you should be reacting just because it works for them.

In my opinion, there are only a few paths you can take when dealing with NPDs. If you choose to go into therapy or if you live in a culture where family is sacrosanct, going no-contact won’t even be entertained as a possibility. For those in abusive romantic relationships, the vast majority of therapists will still promote heterosexual partnerships and the idea that there is a magical unicorn male out there who won’t abuse you. So, if you decide to leave a narcissistic male, don’t worry, there are still good men out there… But keep in mind my theory that NPD is just mentally ill male behavior on steroids. If you partner with any kind of mentally ill man, you will experience a lot of the shit that narcissists inflict upon their victims, but to a lesser extent and in a way that is socially acceptable in heterosexual relationships. It is in the that kind of manly nature to manipulate, parasitize, and gaslight women, even if they are not clinically NPD. In a workplace with an NPD boss or colleague, going ‘no-contact’ or in other words, leaving without looking back, is ideal, but for women, it is really difficult. But in all types of relationships, there are strategies recommended if you want to or have to maintain that relationship.