reading notes: you're not crazy, it's your mother

A while back, I made a new friend, and shortly afterward, I shared a post about estrangement on Facebook. She sent me a message letting me know that she also has a narcissistic mother and recommending Danu Morrigan's book You're Not Crazy - It's Your Mother. Danu is the driving force behind the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers site and forum, which, coincidentally, was one of the first resources I found 5+ years ago when I started really trying to figure out what the hell to do about my relationship with my mother. I had known for about a decade before that point that my mother was a pathological narcissist, but had just gotten to the point of deciding that I was not going to engage with her crap any more. I think my friend, being younger than myself, had only recently realized what the deal was with her own crazy mother, and having found resources, she was eager to share them. Sweet person that she is, she sent me a copy of the book in the mail. At the time, I was really not wanting to read yet another book about dealing with an abusive parent, especially since I was in a phase of feeling at peace with my decisions and not in turmoil about my place in the world, so the book resided on my shelf for almost a year.

Recently, I've been feeling bummed about the collateral damage in my extended family relationships, and I've been supporting my Wonder Twin (WT) with her family stuff, and I'm back to writing here, and I'm trying to figure out what my dad's illness means for me, and I've read a ton of fiction lately, so I'm feeling open to some self-improvement reading. Last night some stuff about WT's mom triggered some of my own mom issues, so before bed I grabbed You're Not Crazy and started perusing. I figure I'll keep notes here on ACONography for the sake of remembering good quotes and providing a bit of a review for interested folks.

Without further ado...

You're Not Crazy - It's Your Mother
Danu Morrigan

Who would appreciate this book:

• women just starting out in exploring issues with crazy moms
• people who like a casual, conversational writing style and lay-person approach to discussing psychological / emotional illness
• people who are experienced, well-read ACONS but want a quickie refresher / pick-me-up or a new perspective

Most thought-provoking quote thus far: 

"The kind of attention she prefers is admiration, but fear works well, too, if that's all she can get. And pity, failing even that." (p. 18)

Aha! While I'm very, very familiar with the love the narcissist has of being admired and/or feared, it had never occurred to me that pity is also a form of attention. This leads me to reflect on those times during my relationship with my mother when I clearly was not behaving in an admiring or fearful fashion, and she whipped out the "you have it so much better than I had it" or "when I was your age..." stuff. Kid isn't adoring you? Attempt to strike fear into her heart has failed? Go for "poor me, I had a sucky childhood with an abusive father and dead mother."

I do, actually, pity my mother, and with good cause. But I have learned that it's not a constructive discussion topic with her, because she will use it to excuse negative behavior. Sixteen-year-old me had some killer wisdom when my mother was haranguing me about how much more responsibility she took at that age, and I came back with "my mother isn't DEAD." Your shitty childhood is no excuse for being a horrible person to me.

Issues I have with the book:

Like so many other books and websites about narcissistic mothers, You're Not Crazy appears to fall into the trap of "all narcs are EVIL and all of them are EXACTLY THE SAME." This is a big problem I have with the ACON / Nparent community in general and some resources in particular. Narcissism, like just about everything else in life, falls on a continuum, from extreme narcissism through healthy narcissism through extreme lack of narcissism. Not every Nmom will be at the far, far deep end of the pool. As such, some mothers will be more neglectful than others. Some will be more consistently abusive than others. Some may have occasional flashes of empathy while others never do. And it may be more possible to establish effective boundaries with some than with others. My own mother is closer to the deep end in terms of her inability to change, but is not quite as malevolent as some others. My childhood did have good mixed in with the bad, and as such, it's not healthy for me to perceive it as entirely based in evil.  If we don't allow some room for nuance, we've fallen into the same trap as the Nparents themselves. 

It's also important to note that not all narcissists think they are perfect. Far from it. Most narcissists suffer from extreme lack of self esteem. Their narcissism is excess bravado that they layer on top to hide their self-hatred. They know how imperfect they are, on some level. They just can't handle it, and they especially can't handle you pointing it out to them.

So far, Morrigan is not making points with me because of this lack of nuance. For a balanced perspective that helps adult children to understand their relationships and recover from the harm done to them while also acknowledging the humanity of their broken parents, I still vastly prefer Alice Miller's The Drama of the Gifted Child. 

I'm interested to read more, and will share what I think along the way!

blaming the victim

I'm an occasional reader of xoJane. It's a guilty pleasure, kindof my quasi-feminist version of a fashion magazine. The posts are mostly fluff, often from a cringingly young-and-inexperienced perspective, but sometimes there's one that strikes a chord. Yesterday's entry from Vanessa Formato, "I 'Accidentally' Read My Mom's Diary Over the Holidays and It Turned Out Terribly," was one of the latter.

Formato, a woman in her early 20s with a rocky mother-daughter relationship, describes getting an item out of her mother's bedside table drawer - with her mother's permission - and coming upon her open diary in the drawer. What she reads confirms her darkest suspicions that she is unloved and dredges up angry feelings about the way her mother treated her as a child/teen. (Side note - she mentions her mother's perfect cursive. Anybody else identify with that? Were you shamed for less-than-perfect penmanship by your mother like I was?) What follows is an examination of her feelings - her sadness, the anger that covers it - and some really insightful thoughts about who her mother is, why she parented the way she did, and how she might engage in some self-healing in order to avoid making the same mistakes.

You or I would probably wrap her up in a hug, tell her that we know exactly what that pain feels like, and tell her that it's NOT HER FAULT. I would want to tell her that I'm proud of her for figuring out some of these things in her 20s and encourage her to keep exploring those feelings.

Do you think the readers of xoJane shared this reaction? Oh, no no no. Here are some choice reactions:

"you're a bitch"
"She says YOU don't love HER. And you read that as SHE doesn't love YOU. I think that could be very telling about your relationship with her."
 "I very rarely think xojane should not publish a good story because of its content. But this, I don't know about."
"you would have been better off writing about it in your diary, and then letting it go."
"She never made you feel loved and you gave that back. What if you could just love her now?"
"you lack perspective"
"Sounds like you had a healthy dose of narcissism that manifested as defiance and victim hood."
"if you try my suggestions, and be the daughter she wants and the daughter you wish you could be, things will get better."
"Everyone lies and everyone keeps secrets, yourself included. Humans are pretty messy, accept it and enjoy the happy moments with your loved ones while you have them."
"This article was a major invasion of privacy and shame on you for asking to have it published and shame on XOJane for not having any integrity."
"It definitely sucks not to be loved by your parents, but whatevs. Shit happens."
"If you read another person's diary, you deserve to see whatever mean things are written about you in there."
"Your mother feels like you don't love her and you more or less confirmed that in this essay."
"you're jumping to conclusions about her diary entry"
"...it sounds like you and your mother have more in common than you'd like to recognize...except you might be a worse person for being completely oblivious to it"
"you're an incredibly shitty daughter. Time to own it. Especially if you want to play grown up."
"This feels kind of guilt-tripping and manipulative, though your reasons for that are damn clear. What are you going to get out of it?"

In other words: you're a childish and horrible person who doesn't consider her mother's feelings, and you deserve exactly what you're getting. You deserve to be unloved by your mother. You deserve to be criticized by us. You should shut up and sit down and try harder to be a loving, forgiving daughter. And *if* any of what you have said is actually true about your mother, you're just like her. But it's doubtful, because you clearly don't have any credibility when it comes to reporting your own experiences and feelings.
One commenter even goes so far as to insinuate that Formato is a pathological narcissist. The mother goes undiagnosed. Formato is pushed back toward the closet by people who don't seem to really grasp that emotional abuse thrives on secrecy.

Here's a quote from an essay of my own:

Now, regarding public bashing: talking about my feelings is not bashing. Nor is discussing my parenting goals. Owning and talking about my own truth is my prerogative. Part of my truth is that I have noticed that public comments such as this one generally contain more loving and accepting language than private conversations or written communication sent directly to me. In those types of conversations, I have been called delusional, hard-hearted, a poor communicator, and avoidant. I've been informed that her friends, when polled (kindof the older generation's version of blogging, no?), believe that she's entitled to disrespect her children's boundaries. I've been threatened with the "I hope your children do this to you someday" line, a classic conditional-parent move. I've been threatened with a lawsuit because physical access to my children is apparently more important to her than the effects of legal action on their family. These are all my personal experiences and mine to share.

If you don't want somebody to talk about how you abuse them, try not abusing them.

That's what I want to say to those commenters, and to Formato's mother. Fuck you and your protection of the abuser. Fuck you and your shaming of the abused.

I stuck up for her in the comments. I hope you'll join me. There is a scattering of support for her there, and I'd love for it to drown out the victim-shaming.

you and i and she and he are beautiful

Earlier this year, I joined a "boot camp"-style workout program. If you're not familiar with the boot camp fitness model, the idea is that you're more likely to push yourself physically if you're with a group of people rather than working out on your own, and you're also more likely to stick with it. Why I signed up for something I would ordinarily hate is another story. For now, suffice it to say that I'm in better physical condition than I have been for most of my adult life. I'm down 20 pounds and up a fair bit of muscle tone. This is the first time in my life that I have a) enjoyed exercise, b) exercised regularly, and c) had enough muscle to see and feel. I love it. I mean LOVE it. I might be a little obsessed with my biceps, which are far from Linda Hamilton-esque, but *I* can feel those guns, and sometimes I find myself rubbing my arm, enjoying how healthy skin over healthy muscle feels. It's lovely.

In the middle of one of these moments of (healthy) narcissism, I suddenly realized: I don't remember my mother ever enjoying her body like this. I don't remember ever hearing her say positive things about her body. Not what it looked like, not what it could do, not how it felt. Nothing. That is not to say that she said negative things about it all the time, but in general, I had the idea that she didn't think she was pretty or shapely or strong. I don't remember her ever reveling in what her body could do. I don't recall any sense of physical prowess, of excitement at a physical feat. I also don't recall her engaging in beauty routines just for the sake of enjoying them. She only did her hair and makeup for the stage (she was an amateur actress in her younger days) or for social events that also had an air of performance - an important business meeting, a church gathering in which she had a public role. I don't remember her ever dressing up for my father or even just for fun. I certainly don't remember any indication that she sometimes felt sexy or pretty or kickass. A memory came back to me of the time in my teens when she refused to buy a black bra for me because black was "sultry and seductive." Funny thing is, all of her underwear was pale beige cotton. So not only was sexiness not for teens, but maybe it wasn't for adults, either. (Not to say that you can't wear beige cotton and feel sexy - but by her own definition and actions, I didn't get the impression that she ever felt that way.)

I know that she was proud of her weight in her early 20s - below 100 pounds - even though she also indicated that she was underweight and didn't eat well and had self-esteem problems at the time. She seemed wistful about her youthful slenderness, but also a little ashamed of it. She never considered herself to be pretty, and envied her younger sister's looks.  I thought my mom was beautiful when I was a little girl, but over time, after hearing her talk about how she was NOT the beautiful sister, she was the plain one whom boys never wanted, I think I learned that my ideas of beauty were wrong. She didn't like her skin. She didn't like her breasts. She didn't like her lips. She didn't like her hair. Eventually I didn't like them, either. I started to dread ever looking like her. This causes some problems for me now, on occasion, when I look in the mirror and see her staring back at me.

I don't remember her ever being fit. She disliked exercise and never engaged regularly in it. Exercise was a chore, one to be avoided. People who enjoyed exercise were weird. Physical prowess was something a person came by naturally, in which case being proud of themselves was vanity, or through fanaticism, in which case it was shallow, obsessive, and unhealthy (and still vain). If there is a physical activity that she enjoys, over thirty years of experience with her never revealed it to me.

Now, everybody doesn't have to be an athlete. And women don't all have to enjoy doing their hair and makeup or wearing frilly dresses. But I would hope that every healthy person would have a sense of enjoying living in their body and liking the way it looks and the ways it can be used, regardless of whether or not that body is "perfect" by societal standards. I suspect that my mother was (is? I don't really know her any more.) divorced from her body, in a way. There was no sense of liking any part of herself or wanting to take good care of her body for the sake of enjoying living in it even more.

I'm not sure what any of this really means within the context of her narcissistic personality disorder, or with regard to my experiences as an adult child of a narcissist. I do know that in the past decade, I have learned much about living in my body (which is, in many ways, very similar to the zen concept of living in the moment).

Two days after making these realizations, I saw an item linked by a friend, "I've Started Telling My Daughters I'm Beautiful." It strikes near my thoughts about my mother. Namely, if we want our children to feel beautiful for who and what they are, we need to let them know what we love about who and what we are.

I want my kids to be able to listen to their bodies and learn about them, and to eat and drink and work in ways that make their bodies feel really good to be alive. I want them to know about how thigh muscles can feel like springs when you run, and how nice it is to look in the mirror and love your eye color. I want them to know about dressing in ways that feel good on your skin, or look good to you in the mirror, or look good to other people not because sometimes looking good on the outside is not necessarily conformist, but can be a way of giving a gift to them through sharing what you like about the way your body looks and feels.

If I want them to be able to enjoy their bodies and the bodies of the women and/or men that they will someday love, I must show them how I can do that for myself. So I'm going to rest my hand on the curve of my bicep and tell my boys about how awesome that morning's workout felt and how I like the shape of my body and the things it can do.

Hopefully you can do this for yourself and your children, too.

loved

Mornings are often less-than-blissful here, for reasons completely unrelated to narcissism. My kids' school starts a little on the early side, and my middle son is a person who needs to ease into his morning rather than hitting the ground running, so even though we're earlyish risers, it always seems like it's rushrushrush out the door every morning to avoid being late. Lately the preschooler doesn't want to go to school - he loves it once he's there, he just hates the going part - and getting him dressed and fed and into the car is an ordeal. 

So it was really nice last Wednesday morning, after herding reluctant children into the car and getting everybody all strapped in, to come around to the driver's door and find this little love-note waiting for me. I haven't been on the receiving end of Guerrilla Goodness before, and I was really feeling the joy and kindness. The whole drive to school was easier.

Then, because receiving love can never be that simple for an ACON, I started to doubt. Wait a minute, did a friend leave that note for me, or my mother? Because if it was my mother, I don't want to leave it there. I don't need her "love", I want any love given to me to be genuine. 

It bummed me out that I doubt something so simple as an anonymous note left for me, probably by a friend. I'm guarded, skeptical. 

My husband pointed out that "it lacks attribution. You mom would never sign her letters 'anonymous'". He has a point. She always wants people to make sure they know that she was there, that this is her work. 

So the little heart stayed. It's still there, through sun and rain and snow. I'm passing it on to you, my ACON brothers and sisters. Although sometimes you may feel skeptical, and it can be hard to accept, you are lovely, loving, lovable, loved people. 

a new beginning

It's not enough to know that the only person you can change is yourself, because even when you stop trying to change other people, you don't stop hoping for them to change on their own. An epiphany, a life crisis, a spontaneous conversion. You may not be able to force the transformation, but perhaps you can wish it into existence, or leave clues leading to it, or nudge the process along.

One day, if you're fortunate, you may have an epiphany of your own: that the change is not coming, or at least is so infinitely unlikely that you would be better off going forward with the assumption that the dreamed-of shift will never come, rather than standing still, sheltering the flickering light of your delusional hope.

This is not to say that all hope is delusional, only that the best place to invest it is in yourself, as the agent of change in your own life.

Your hope lies in understanding your past, accepting the present, and believing in your ability to build a new future.

You are the adult child of a narcissist. So am I.