evile

Do narcissistic mothers break their children intentionally? I don't want to be too hard on her if she didn't realize she was doing it. She's 100% a narcissist and seems to have tried on purpose to ruin her kids but I feel like I can't be mad at her

I really homed in on the last part of your question, “I feel like I can’t be mad at her,”

When a person is raised in an abusive environment, or raised by a personality disordered parent, it is hard to grow up knowing what good boundaries are, or how to express boundaries. You may even reach adulthood without any knowledge at all of how to express yourself if you grew up in an environment where self expression was punished or not allowed. So, feeling like your emotions of anger are not allowed is a normal part of being raised by a narcissist.

Establishing an independent identity and boundaries are not you ‘being hard on her’ or you being cruel to your parent. They are important things that you need to do for yourself in order to be a healthy person.

Narcissists don’t see things like normal people do, and she won’t accept responsibility for her behavior, so trying to hold her accountable for her treatment of you growing up is not going to be an effective way for you to reach closure or come to a place of peace with how you were raised and the parental affection and attachment that you did not receive, that every child wants and needs. It is very hard to reach a place in adulthood where you understand all the terrible ways you were deprived of a normal childhood.

Unfortunately, there’s a saying: “you can’t return to an empty well looking for water,” To me this means that you cannot find peace and healing by going to the person who hurt you. You can only find peace and healing by opening your own well within yourself, and you do this by healing yourself with counseling, prayer (if you find comfort in a religious practice), and educating yourself about the personality disorder and about ways to develop good boundaries and healthy relationships.

Practicing boundaries with a narcissist is going to be difficult, and enforcing boundaries with someone with whom you have not had healthy boundaries is going to be challenging, but it will increase your self confidence and peace of mind when you are able to do so. This is not punishing a person for what has happened in the past, or holding them to account (because narcissists just don’t have the mental or emotional ability to accept that consequences are related to their own behavior), it is not you being “mean”—it is you telling others what behavior will and will not be accepted and tolerated.

Finally, I want to reassure you that you are not ‘ruined’ no matter what the person raising you did to you, or what she says about you. The fact that you are here, alive, and looking for answers, examining your feelings and looking for ways to work through the harm that was done to you as a child, says to me that you are far from ruined. You are in fact a good, strong person who is working towards wholeness. I find that very admirable and I hope that you will continue on this path.

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