Narcissistic mothers do so much damage to their children that we question whether we should bring children into the world.
Daughters with narcissistic mothers are afraid to have children because we know things about the world and ourselves that most people will never experience.
We have a different view of what it means to bring a child into this world.
You’re faced with moral questions that shake the foundation of what kind of person you are.
How do you love and nurture a child when you don’t know what that looks like?
When your mother doesn’t have the ability to love other human beings you have limited knowledge of what it means to be a good mother.
The only thing you know for sure is that you don’t want to become like your mother.
Daughters with narcissistic mothers are isolated from the world.
Concentrating in school is a lost cause when you’re basically in a fog most of your childhood.
Making friends is impossible when you’re not allowed to have them.
There is no support system outside of your mother; outside of her, you know nothing.
You won’t be close to your siblings since everyone else is traumatized and doing their best to get through the day.
There’s no emotional support or anyone to help talk you through things in life because no one is allowed to influence you.
By the time you develop some awareness, you feel like you’ve been left in the dark.
Your feelings don’t matter, your voice doesn’t count, and the only way to get scraps of love is to always agree.
Agree or be punished…
Daughters with narcissistic mothers can never win their mother’s approval.
I wasted a lifetime trying to please my mother so that I too, would be considered loved and loveable.
Meanwhile, she’s doing everything in her power to make sure I can never measure up.
Imagine being put down every single day of your childhood.
Imagine everything you do, everything you say is criticized and invalidated on a daily basis.
Now tell me, how do you recover from that and act like a normal adult?
You don’t.
Narcissistic mothers make sure everyone in the family blames you.
Many of us never know the truth and never recover.
The family is 100% unanimous and agreed on one thing, that you’re the problem.
You have no rights, no way to defend yourself, and judgment has been passed.
By the time you realize what’s happening, it’s already too late.
Your only choice is to accept that you must be the problem because you’re the only one who doesn’t think so.
Eventually, you are convinced that you’re a terrible person, you must be if you’re own mother doesn’t love you.
Deep down, you carry these lies with you, you believe them, and this is what convinces us that we can’t be good mothers.
The reality is your whole life is, in fact, a lie.
Everything you know and everything you’ve been told is 100% false.
This journal is the story of my life, and only a child with a narcissistic parent would understand what it feels like to sabotaged since birth.
With this kind of mother, you don’t need enemies.
They need to see their children fail and feel like failures so that they can feel better about themselves.
Narcissistic mothers can become extremely jealous of their daughter’s youth.
She will do anything to destroy her daughter’s self-esteem, self-worth, and self-love.
And yes, all of this is to serve one ultimate purpose, to make them feel better about themselves.
It’ so simple and yet almost impossible to understand.
There’s really no more to it.
That’s it.
You find out that the only reason you were abused your whole childhood was so your mother or father would feel superior.
Except that a good mother or father would do exactly the opposite of that and would do everything they could to help their child succeed.
It’s sick, pathetic, and above all else, it’s sad.
The deepest kind of sadness.
This is something I’ve been aware of my whole life.
I’ve carried this sadness with me and never understood it.
When you’re raised by a narcissistic mother who doesn’t have the ability to love you, it leaves a permanent sense of sadness.
It lives there inside me, with my soul.
After all the healing I’ve done, and believe me, I’ve come a long way, that sadness remains.
It stays there to remind me that in this life, I will never experience what’s it’s like to be loved by a mother.
You can’t win the love of a narcissistic mother because they very simply don’t have the capacity or the ability to give love back.
If you can’t trust you’re own mother, what do you do?
You question every decision you’ve ever made because you were taught to believe you could trust your mother.
You were taught to believe that everything she said and did was in your best interest.
But it’s a lie.
Children with narcissistic parents are traumatized.
Traumatized children grow up to be traumatized adults.
You, of course, are entirely unaware of this and have been lied to your whole life about what a loving mother feels like.
You don’t have an idea what it feels like to be loved by a mother, and you have no idea how to be a mother.
Half the time, you wonder if you are your mother.
I would never want to treat a child the way my mother treated me, and I wasn’t prepared when my two babies came into the world.
I was beaten down with absolutely zero emotional support or any support of any kind from my family.
It was easy to convince me I was a bad person and could never be a good mother.
I was manipulated and forced to give up my children, but most of me believes I did the right thing.
My children didn’t bond with their adoptive family, and it didn’t go well, but I have to believe it was the lesser of two evils.
I would choose men that treated me the same way mother did, to fill that void.
Being treated that way was familiar to me because that abuse is what home feels like.
By signing those papers to give up my children, it gave them one thing I never had.
A choice.
Today as adults, they struggle through this, and I remind them both that they don’t owe anyone anything.
A piece of paper may change your name and make you live with some people until you’re 18, but after that, you’re free.
I patiently waited fifteen years to see and speak to my children.
A known pattern of narcissistic mothers.
When you’re raised to believe you’re bad and you’re attacked daily by a narcissistic mother, you were never given a fair fight.
You never had a chance.
In some ways, our lives seem to happen to us instead of us making our lives happen.
We end up being forced into adoptions, and many times, the narcissistic grandmother legally adopts the children after she single-handedly destroyed her own daughter in unexplainable and insidious ways.
A narcissistic grandmother will do anything to be in control, to keep control, and they will go to any length to destroy her own children.
They will lie, cheat, steal, call the cops, and turn you into child protection services if you refuse her access to her grandchildren.
It’s insanity.
She will do everything in her power to turn your children against you.
If she can’t do that, she’ll systematically chip away at their self-esteem, choosing a favorite and a bad one for narcissistic supply.
My purpose is to break this cycle and stop this from happening to the next generation.
My grandchildren will be free from all of this.
What daughters with narcissistic mothers are up against.
One of the worst things that can happen to the daughter of a narcissist is to have her children ripped away by her narcissistic grandmother.
Would you be able to recover if your children were turned against you by your own mother?
These are not the kind of wounds that heal.
I suppose you learn to carry the weight, but that wound is deep.
If you do get the opportunity to talk to your children, it’s an uphill climb, slowly convincing them of the truth.
The best thing about kids though is that they believe the truth when they hear it in their mother’s voice.
Children with loving mothers sense these things.
Just like children with narcissistic mothers sense that something is wrong, but they don’t know what it is.
How do I save myself from drowning in years of narcissistic abuse?
When connecting with others and reading survivor stories isn’t enough to help you heal, and seeing a therapist can cost a ton of money that most people don’t have, there are other options.
Option #1:
It’s called Online Therapy.
- You don’t have to meet them in an office.
- You don’t have to be face-to-face.
- They’re available and on-call for you Monday-Friday, so you don’t have to wait for an appointment.
- All your information is highly confidential and secure.
- It’s affordable, and you pay much less than seeing a therapist in person.
Option #2:
If you’re not looking for therapy right now, I continually use self-hypnosis apps to snap me out of it and give myself a much-needed mindset adjustment.
I’m partial to Glen Harrold with his Australian accent so that’s who I recommend, he won’t let you down, and there’s something for every aspect of your life.
Option #3.
I’m a reader, I read daily and one of the best books I’ve found on self-help is The Power Of Now and Practicing The Power Of Now.
Books like this can help you sort things out for yourself, take it to the next level (especially if you’re feeling stuck) and these two books I read over and over again as needed.
Final thoughts…
My children are adults now but I didn’t raise them, and for that I am grateful.
My only mission is to help them heal so that before I die they can be whole and live their best life.
The truth is that the daughter of a narcissistic mother can be an excellent mother.
A better mother than the one she was given because of the pain she suffered as a child.
If you make a mistake (as all mothers do) the guilt is brutal, but it makes you better.
Many of us still chose not to for fear of continuing the cycle of abuse.
We understand that damaged people raise damaged children, and if I did to my children what my mother did to me, I would never forgive myself.
For those of you who choose not to have children, I want you to know that I understand and you have my respect.
For those of you still struggling to get your babies back, please know that I can hear you.
We can hear you, because we are just like you, and you are not alone.