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!

this place, this time, this spring

An updatey post that ended up longer than I had originally intended.

In the past week, I had a visit from my sister and also spent a morning with my sister-in-law (wife to brother #1) and her children. The filling in this relative sandwich was the Easter holiday, which I know my extended family (siblings/nieces/nephews/parents) spent together at my parents' house, celebrating with the annual egg hunt and dinner. The difference between my sister and my SIL has never been more dramatic. My sister and I were always close, but she's much younger than I am, so it wasn't really a relationship of equals beforel it was a little-sister-looking-up-to-big-sister thing. During the last few years I've been getting to know her as an adult, and she is seriously a rock, a compassionate witness. She's insightful and articulate in general and about our family in particular. One of these days I must blog about her perspective on the fam. She is the one and only sibling who is able to be accepting and validating to me while simultaneously keeping an open, relatively-drama-free relationship with all of the other members of our family. I have made a point of not discussing my parents with my siblings in recent years, or at least not being the one to bring it up and controlling what I do say even then, but during her overnight visit last week, we just talked and talked and talked, and it was SO cathartic. I think I have needed that for a long time, and it's good to have a fellow daughter of my mother to talk to.

On the other hand, there's my SIL#1. Our relationship is a strange and awkward dance. During some phases of life we seem to have a lot of in common, and be able to talk about lots of important things together, especially parenting-related things (we parent similarly, and our parenting beliefs don't get a lot of support from my parents). During other phases, she's stand-offish or even disapproving of me. She's consistently reserved in how much of herself she lets out, and that's ok, but it makes it hard to really connect. We do. not. talk. about my family, or about my currently-nonexistent relationship with my brother (she only plans things with me at times when he's not around). She has been pretty maddeningly, purposefully neutral ("I can see both sides...both of you are hurting...your mother really loves you...") about my parents, despite their shabby treatment of her in the past. It was very, very strange to know that she and my brother and their kids had just spent the previous day at my parents' house, but for it not to come up in conversation at all. I mean, regardless of my estrangement from my parents, that visit and the holiday in general are what's going on. It's weird to get together with somebody and have them not mention at all what's going on in their life - heck, not to mention the holiday that happened YESTERDAY. It felt like the elephant in the room - or the elephant in the playground, rather. 

I don't know what to make of these relationships. I'm so happy to have some closeness with my sister, and yet ever so slightly mistrusting of her. I don't want to get burned, but I'm happy like a puppy about her support of me, and I really crave the sisterly adult relationship that we're forming. I don't know what to do with the relationship with SIL#1, who isn't open with me, whose children are related to my own and are beloved by my own, who can't tell me the day-to-day details of her life because she doesn't want to talk about anything related to my family, and whose husband has avoided me for nearly a year because he thinks I'm a narcissistic bitch. 

The bookend to this week of tricky relationships is that I had a first-time appointment with a therapist this morning. My reasons for seeing her are threefold. The first, most important reason is that I live with mild depression and moderate anxiety, for which have been taking medication for almost three years, and I want to continue to develop the ways in which I work with those parts of who I am. The second reason is that my oldest son seems to have inherited his father's and my anxious/depressive tendencies, and as he cruises into pre-adolescence, it's getting harder for him to deal with negative feelings and harder for us to support him. I'm working on finding a therapist for him, and I also want support for myself as a parent who also experiences these tricky personality traits. And thirdly, I'm going into therapy because while I've certainly worked through a TON of my family stuff on my own, it's obvious to me that it's never really going to go away. The sibling relationships are hard. The way my mom pops up from time to time in my life is hard. Trying to figure out what to DO with my childhood memories and feelings is hard. So I need support. For all of this stuff. 

I've never had a long-term relationship with a therapist, despite many years of thinking through my family dysfunction. I visited an LCSW three times over my Christmas break when I was in college and engaged, but that was because my mom thought I was crazy. (It did help, but only because it gave me some perspective on who SHE is and how to avoid being drawn into fights with her. In the meantime, she crowed about how the therapist "fixed' me, which, of course, should be credited to her, the genius mother.)  My husband had a few visits with a therapist about a year ago, and I went with him to one session. I also have friends who are therapists, and have talked in general about some concepts as they apply to dysfunctional families. But I have not had an actual, ongoing, self-imposed course of therapy. And it's time. I don't have any particular goals, except to have a person who can help me to sort out hard things as they arise. I don't have a particular time frame in mind - this could last months or it could last years. 

The woman I met this morning, who was highly recommended to me by my family physician, felt warm and easy to talk to. I liked how she drew all kinds of history out of me, especially since that morning I had been wondering where the hell to start. I'll admit that at times I thought maybe she was a little chatty, and maybe she's sharing too much about herself (should I know anything at all about her family, or that she's related to somebody I know?)...but the thing is, those things don't feel like red flags. They just felt like getting-to-know-you first-session stuff. They feel like the way I *want* to relate to my therapist. I actually don't like it when people are uber-"professional" and never reveal a single iota of personal information about themselves. It feels cold and I can't relate to somebody like that. I absolutely LOVED that her first selection for a homework assignment for me was reading a book that is actually one o my favorites. I told her it's the book that saved my sanity. Good sign that we're on the same page! I also discovered that she's not super-religious, which was a concern for me, because my beliefs fall closer to secular humanism than to the staunch Catholicism with which I was raised or the Baptist school of thought that's very pervasive in my Southern town.  I had been worried about the ability of a conservative fundamentalist Christian therapist to put their own beliefs aside in working with me. I'm interested in her other homework - to check out The Book of Awakening and see what I think about it, and to read about dysthymia and see if it clicks with me and my family history more than cyclothymia or depression, which were my previous assumptions about myself. I'm not sure it fits, but I'm willing to explore. So I'm going back in a couple of weeks.

I stopped on the way home and bought The Book of Awakening and also If You Had Controlling Parents, which I stumbled upon. It has good reviews. Has anybody read it?

And that's what's going on in this place, at this time, in this spring. The trees outside are bright green with tiny leaves, the sky has been a beautiful clear blue for several days, and the air is breezy and cool. It feels like good changes are happening. 

labels

I'm reading David Burns' book Feeling Good, and while I'm actually becoming less of a fan of cognitive-behavioral therapy while reading it, I did like this passage:

"Labeling yourself is not only self-defeating, it is irrational. Your self cannot be equated with any one thing you do. Your life is a complex and ever-changing flow of thoughts, emotions, and actions. To put it another way, you are more like a river than a statue. Stop trying to define yourself with negative labels - they are overly simplistic and wrong. Would you think of yourself exclusively as an "eater" just because you eat, or a "breather" just because you breathe? This is nonsense, but such nonsense becomes painful when you label yourself out of a sense of your own inadequacies."

He goes on to talk about labeling others: "When you label other people, you will invariably generate hostility."

These aspects of self- and other-labeling brought to mind both how narcissistic parents tend to label their children (cold-hearted, the artistic one, dependable, moody, forgetful, bitchy, good, bad, etc) and also how we internalize those labels and apply them and others to ourselves. It also reminded me of the special ed mantra "put the child before the disability," because saying "an autistic child" focuses on what you think is wrong with the child, while saying "a child with autism" allows you to think of the child as a whole person, and their diagnosis as just one aspect of who he or she is. It helps you to think of the child in terms of what he or she can do, rather than what they can't.  This is true of any child, not just those with a medical or psychological diagnosis. The difference between a "difficult child" and a "child who is sometimes difficult to parent" can be vast. The same goes for labeling ourselves. Am I lazy, or am I a person who sometimes feels sluggish? Am I forgetful, or do I sometimes forget to do something? 

I'm going to think about what labels I put on myself today. Where did they come from? When do I use them? Can I change the way I apply them?

parenting the troubled teen

A friend posted this on Facebook because she thought it was funny. Before you click on it, I want you to know that it may be incredibly triggering to survivors of emotional abuse, as well as to those with anxiety.  The first time I tried to watch it, I had to turn it off after less than a minute. I watched it the next morning when fullly-rested and feeling peaceful. By the time it was over, my heart was pounding in my chest in a way that I recognized from my adolescence and young adulthood. It was the adrenaline-filled, trapped feeling that I would have when my mother was devaluing and punishing me.

In the video, Tommy Jordan, father to a 15-year-old daughter, reads his daughter's Facebook diatribe against her parents, then tackles her complaints point-by-point. Throughout the video, he shows disgust with her point of view, mocks her, talks about how infinite her grounding will be, and belittles her. The video concludes with his idea of justice: he unloads a handgun clip into her laptop computer and informs her that she is responsible for replacing her own laptop as well as reimbursing him not only for the software he installed on it, but also for the nine bullets he put into it.  Transcript here.

Many people are congratulating Jordan on his parenting choice. Many more, myself included, are appalled. Some people saw a take-charge, tough-love dad asserting his authority and giving his daughter a taste of her own medicine. Justice! Discipline! Here's what I saw:

• a daughter venting her frustration about balancing her workload and personal life at a time when her school assignments have become harder and take more time, her family responsibilities have increased, and her social needs have also become more complex.
• a daughter who feels like the assignment of family chores is unjust.
• a daughter who is behaving in a manner emotionally consistent with adolescence.
• a father who takes her rant personally.
• a father who decides to respond in an "an eye for an eye" vindictive method of justice.
• a father who mocks his daughter's statements.
• a father who seems unaware of how normal his daughter's behavior is.
• a father whose reaction is out of proportion to his daughter's action.
• a father who states his intent to humiliate his daughter.
• a father who uses shame as a parenting tool.
• a father who threatens to restrict his daughter's physical liberty.
• a father who destroys his daughter's property.
• a father who does not use one single compassionate word in his own diatribe.

This dad has some baggage, to put it mildly.  His reaction shows his own emotional development to be somewhere in the adolescent range. An emotionally secure and healthy adult (heck, even many of us who are flawed!) would certainly be angered and probably embarrassed by a child's angry rant - even more so if our child posted the rant in a place where it could be easily read by over 400 people - but would, hopefully, take some time to get perspective, then think of a compassionate way to listen to her feelings, communicate our own, and find a solution to the situation. 

In fact, that's pretty much exactly what the book How To Talk So Teens Will Listen & Listen So Teens Will Talk (Faber & Mazlish, 2005), which I have been reading lately, recommends. The authors outline a five-step process to conflict resolution:

1. Invite your teen to give his point of view
2. State your point of view
3. Invite your teenager to brainstorm with you
4. Write down all ideas - silly or sensible - without evaluating
5. Review your list, decide which ideas you can both agree to and how you can put them into action.

Notice that the first step is to listen to the kid. Nowhere in Jordan's rant does he ever give any indication that he understands that his daughter is a thinking, feeling human being who has her own perspective on their family situation. I know he's hurt, but it's a parent's job to get over your own shit and focus on the child. I don't know of a single parenting resource that recommends shaming and lecturing children, public humiliation, and destruction of property. In fact, those are all elements of an abusive relationship based on control and domination. 

As a parent, I get that Jordan wants to teach his daughter a lesson. Is public shaming a good way to do it? Do lectures work? No, and no. You know what works? Teaching by example. Jordan wants his daughter to show respect, but he doesn't show any to her, so where will she learn how to show respect? Jordan wants his daughter not to air her grievances in public, but he airs his publicly (his YouTube video will surpass 12 million views today), so how will she learn other ways of resolving conflict? Even the average person on the street these days knows that "do as I say, not as I do" is a piss-poor way to parent. The argument that a child has had values "instilled" in them and "knows that there will be consequences" (frequent retorts from emotionally abusive parents) are bogus. One does not "instill" values into a child by simply telling them those values at top volume. Values are taught by example. The example this girl is seeing is one of a controlling, manipulative, vengeful parent. Will she go on to be yet another mother who makes abusive parenting choices because her father, God bless him, taught her the value of an ass-whoopin'? 

Jordan argues that his daughter (who is named in the video) has not been damaged by her facebook notoriety.  He mentions their "amicable" chats about previous punishment and says that she sees the humor in this particular event and will grow up "happy and healthy." I call bullshit. This girl has probably learned that there's no way out of this controlling relationship.If you can't get away from your abuser, you lay down and take it. You even thank him for it. You convince yourself that these are, in fact, the actions of a loving parent. You smile and say "I love you, daddy," and perhaps earn a hug from the abuser, who is pleased to have bullied you back into your proper submissive place.

Another friend of mine commented that we really can't judge this guy's parenting from one video. I would contend that we can. A healthy parent would not do this. Period. If this were a parent beating a child in the middle of a public place, we would not hesitate in the slightest to label it as abuse, intervene to protect the child, and call the police. Emotional abuse is abuse. It might not be inflicted with punches and kicks, but it is no less harmful, and we have the same obligation to say "this is NOT OK," to explain what isn't ok about it, and to point the way to more compassionate, loving parenting choices.

This girl needed an adult to say "you were feeling really angry, can we talk about it?" and to hear her - really, fully hear her. She didn't need somebody to tell her why her thoughts and feelings are wrong. She didn't need somebody to quibble over the facts. She didn't need to be shamed and threatened. She did need to hear the feelings her parents had about her actions, but probably only after she had been given a chance to vent. She needed somebody to feel sympathetic to her difficulty in figuring out the work-life balance that even most adults complain about. I'm willing to bet that if they had had a truly open-minded, open-hearted chat, they would have been able to find a resolution to this particular situation, and more importantly, she would have been nurtured and learned another way of handling conflict.

Instead of doing this, her father acted like an overgrown, gun-toting adolescent himself: impulsive, rash, without a thought for the potential consequences (like hell he didn't know it could go viral).

I hurt for her. I know what it is to grow up with an emotionally-stunted parent who overreacts, takes things personally, and lashes out in retribution. It's my hope for this young girl that there's a kind adult in her life, if not now, then in the future. I'm sure that she thinks her life is normal and that her father is loving. Most of us abused kids do. I hope that via life experience, a loving friend, counseling, or some other avenue(s), she is eventually able to understand what really happened during her childhood, heal, and change her own path. 

the elegance of the hedgehog

Yesterday I stumbled upon several quotes that I had copied from The Elegance of the Hedgehog when I read it about a year ago. The book explores narcissism at times, and while narcissism is by no means the emphasis of the book and, in fact, did not detract from my enjoyment of the book (as it did for Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections), I still found that these passages leapt off the page when I read them.

The first reminds me of myself in my twenties, when, despite having some issues with my mother, I still believed that her general controlling approach to parenting was the right way and that touchy-feely "gentle" parenting methods were "lax" and "permissive" (you must say these words with a sour sneer, as if picking up soiled underpants from the floor). At that time, I thought of discipline as synonymous with punishment. I thought of children as unformed creatures who had to be trained and broken.

"The problem is that children believe what adults say and, once they're adults themselves, they exact their revenge by deceiving their own children. 'Life has meaning and we grown-ups know what it is' is the universal lie that everyone is supposed to believe. Once you become an adult and you realize that it's not true, it's too late.  The mystery remains intact, but all your available energy has long ago been wasted on stupid things.  All that's left is to anesthetize yourself by trying to hide the fact that you can't find any meaning in your life, and then, the better to convince yourself, you deceive your own children." (page 22)

When my first son was an infant, I still clung to the belief that my mother's childrearing practices were mostly good. I was not yet ready to put myself in my son's place and consider the possibility that I was raised in a way that was often unkind and injurious, and denied my autonomy from birth onward.

This next passage immediately called my mother to mind:

"She cannot feel safe if she hasn't crushed her adversaries and reduced their territory to the meanest share. A world where there's room for other people is a dangerous world...at the same time she still needs them just a bit, for a small but essential chore: someone, after all, has to recognize her power...she would like me to tell her, while her sword is under my chin, that she is the greatest and that I love her." p 84

For some reason this reminds me of my mother speaking scornfully of anyone who didn't do things the way she liked, like a woman down the street, who worked with my mother, and who had a pair of sons with whom we liked to play. These children sometimes forgot to be perfect please-and-thank-you automatons, and were accustomed to calling adults by their first names. The woman, who was also a single mother, was held up by my mother as an example of all that was wrong with permissive parenting. She was a failure, a bad person. Her children were beneath us. We were discouraged from playing with them and I believe my mother stopped having a friendly relationship with the mother. My mother seemed really hung up on the fact that the boys had a hard time remembering to call her "Mrs. Clairesmom" instead of by her first name. 

Everything was a fight to determine who was right. Her parenting was the right way. Her religion was "The One True Church." Her ambitions at her job reflected the only correct way to run the place, and heaven help those who stood in her way.
One more quote gets to the heart of the matter:

"If there is one thing I detest, it's when people transform their powerlessness or alienation into a creed." (page 85)

Yes, that explains so much. It's very true of my mother, that she took all the faults she found in herself or with the world and turned them into a moral code, a set of absolutes. Nothing was ever a grey area. Nothing. I can sometimes feel the same tendency in myself, stemming from my own alienation from her, from the world, from myself. Again and again I fight that tendency, and struggle not to pass on the universal lie to my own children.