When scapegoat daughters of narcissistic mothers begin to understand the truth about how a narcissistic mother behaves, we start to question our very identity.
Sometimes you don’t believe what happened to you.
We get stuck in this place of ‘what if it’s not true?’ or ‘what if I’m the narcissist?’
I started to question myself; every decision I’ve ever made and realized nothing she has ever done was in my best interest.
When you realize your mother is a narcissist, it turns your world upside down.
For our whole life, we’ve not only taken all the blame for her behavior, but we accepted it as the truth.
It’s ingrained into your very being.
I had to come to terms with the truth.
My whole life, since birth, has been a lie.
That’s not an easy thing to face.
That’s not an easy truth to swallow.
You don’t just ‘get over it’ and move on.
Surprisingly, I’ve found the most comfort for this in Eckhart Tolle’s book The Power Of Now.
It explains nothing is as it seems, and it shows you a better way to deal with everything going on in your mind.
Most people will not understand and will give you terrible advice.
The worst thing they can say is crap like this:
- “Oh, but your mother loves you.”
- “You only have one mother.”
- ‘She’s only doing what she thinks is best for you.”
Um, no.
These are just more lies that give us a false sense of guilt.
She has never had my best interest in mind and isn’t capable of loving other human beings, including her own children.
If you are the scapegoat daughter, then please hear this…
It is not you who’s unlovable.
It’s not you that is so awful even your own mother can’t love you.
The truth is your mother is so broken and beyond repair that she can’t love anyone.
Not just you.
It has nothing to do with you; she can’t love ANYONE.
The scapegoat daughters of narcissistic mothers have to mourn their mother’s death while she’s still alive.
Only the women who have experienced this can understand what you’re going through.
I would say over 90% of the population has no idea what life would be like to grow up without a loving mother.
We, on the other hand, have no idea what it’s like to grow up with a loving mother.
They will never understand.
Stop listening to them.
They can’t help you, and more often than not, they do more damage by quoting the rules of society.
Society’s rules don’t apply to us.
We are better off without our mothers.
We would’ve been better off with no mother at all, so we make our own rules.
The mind struggles to accept this.
The brain starts spiraling out of control as it tries to make sense of it all and find a solution.
It collects all the pieces you’ve discovered so far and puts them back together again.
You might call this thinking, but this is what my brain is like.
As I heal from the trauma and question myself, my brain has this instant response that proves the truth to me over and over again.
This did happen, it is real, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it now.
It happened to me or the little girl I used to be, and once you start to see it, you can’t unsee it.
We dissociate and disconnect with our childhood.
I blocked out most of my childhood, but it didn’t stop me from being convinced I couldn’t be a good mother.
This is a common theme among scapegoat daughter of narcissistic mothers, and it’s yet another lie I’ve dissected in this journal entry.
When I got pregnant, she said she was too young to be a grandmother, and she wasn’t going to be called grandma.
Little did she know how right she was.
I would also like to point out daughters who have good relationships with their mothers don’t give up their children.
Daughters with good mothers have emotional support.
Their mothers would never even consider giving up their firstborn grandchild.
Narcissistic mothers are the opposite of this and do everything in their power to destroy any hope you have of making it on my own.
Anytime I tried to assert my independence, I was ferociously attacked for an undetermined long period of time.
She would drag these arguments out for as long as she could remember them, sucking every last drop of supply she could get out of it.
It makes you want to claw your skin off because you have no other choice but to sit there and listen.
I would chew my fingernails until they bleed just to get some relief.
How was I going to raise a child by myself when I was dying inside?
I was looking for love in all the wrong places with men who treated me like I was used to being treated at home.
It was familiar to me.
It felt like home.
How was I supposed to know that isn’t what home is supposed to feel like?
I soon found myself in yet another impossible situation.
I was being stalked and harassed not just by my narcissistic mother but also by this crazy bastard.
Once again, I was owned, not loved.
He’d already gotten violent with our daughter, and she wasn’t even a year old.
I was presented with another option.
My mother handpicked a couple to adopt my daughter from our church, and of course, I, a twenty-year-old with nothing, couldn’t compete with that level of godly perfection.
The first reason I agreed to adoption was to release and protect my daughter from having a father like that.
The second because I truly felt I had nothing to offer her but my love, and I did it because I loved her more than anything in the world.
I wanted her to have a chance and a choice I never had.
By the time I gave her up, we were already bonded, and after fifteen years, she came back.
I was ready and waiting.
Since then, she’s become my greatest ally.
I thought my family would be thrilled to have her back in our lives.
Not for a moment was I prepared for what I saw that day.
My mother viciously attacked my daughter right in front of me.
She racked her over the coals for something that happened three years before, just like she used to do to me.
I could feel my eyes start to glaze over, and I had to catch myself from almost checking out so I could defend my daughter.
It was an automatic response I used to do as a child when my mother would go at us while we were trapped in the car.
You go into a trance, but everything that’s said and done is stored in the subconscious. This time, something in my head unlocked, like a vault, rusty, covered in dust, it started to shudder and crack itself open.
I didn’t know my mother was a narcissist at the time, but my brain knew I had to break free of this woman once and for all.
If not for me, then for my daughter.
I wasn’t about to let her do it to the next generation.
Nobody wants to face their mother is a narcissist, and their whole life has been a lie.
Many scapegoat daughters of narcissistic mothers don’t know anything about narcissism until we start looking up our own symptoms, trying to fix ourselves.
I was trying to fix whatever was wrong with me, and that’s what lead me to the symptoms of narcissistic abuse.
You don’t just find out your mother is a narcissist and then go no contact the next day, it’s a process of elimination, and no contact is the last resort.
I had no choice.
By the end of the holiday season, I couldn’t bring myself to ever speak to her again.
I stopped speaking.
I stopped fighting to be heard.
And this time, I went silent by choice.
Once you stop the abuse, the real work begins.
You don’t see what’s coming, and it’s not what you expect.
You wish she was dead, and once she’s dead, you’ll be free, but no, no, you won’t be.
She has to be purged out of your head, and believe me, your body and mind want to purge it.
Your soul doesn’t want to carry the weight of it anymore.
This purge lasted a year and a half for me.
My head spun from the minute I woke up to the minute I laid down.
Even in my sleep, I was dreaming about everything she’d ever done to me.
The mind knows, and the subconscious remembers everything.
You’re thinking of every possible way to solve the problem and every time you come up with the same answer.
All roads lead to one thing.
Your mother.
For the scapegoat daughters of narcissistic mothers, I want to bring you hope.
When you’re in the cycle of madness, there is still hope.
Even if you’ve gone no contact and your heads spinning so fast you don’t know if it’ll ever stop, there is still hope.
It will stop.
Her voice in your head will stop.
In my own experience and from working with dozens of coaching clients, I’ve noticed we all have gone through this phase. Right around the one year mark (sometimes longer), you feel yourself shift again.
It’s my humble opinion that the mind knows how to heal itself.
The body knows how to heal itself, but we fight it, overthink it, and form limiting beliefs about ourselves.
When you understand what it is to be the scapegoat daughter of a narcissistic mother, a few things will happen:
- First, the definition of a narcissistic mother is a devastating thing to face.
- You feel gullible, duped; you can’t believe you missed what was right in front of you the whole time. People don’t like you because you’re obviously too stupid to be lovable.
- The guilt sets in, brought on by the rules of society telling you you’re mistaken, and of course you have a loving mother, doesn’t everyone?
- The definition of a narcissistic mother is in your heart, and you’re whole life you’ve been trying to hold your broken heart together all by yourself.
- Then you get real mad. Not just any kind of angry you’re furious, enraged, you’re so f*****’ pissed you can’t see straight.
- You stop feeling helpless, you stop accepting the blame, and you start figuring out how to save yourself.
- Beware once you see it, you can’t unsee it, and you can’t go back to the way things were.
I was pretty horrified when I grasped the full extent of what was being done to me and how senseless it all was.
The mind dump didn’t stop for at least sixteen months.
It takes a long time to process a lifetime of abuse.
And yes, I was starting to get worried, but I’m stubborn, and I wanted to do it on my own.
We are alone in this in the end, and I have to save me.
You have to save you.
More than anything, I wanted to be left alone as I privately struggled every day to purge her negative, nasty voice out of my skull.
Once my brain was done processing and doing its thing, it stopped completely, almost overnight.
Her voice was gone.
They say the voice in your head is of the person who raised you.
Imagine how awful a voice like this can be for the daughters and sons of narcissistic parents.
One of the greatest blessings I’ve ever received was the day her voice stopped screaming at me inside my head.
Once you get past this stage, you’re primed and ready for massive growth.
I was ready to start talking again and decided to deal with it head-on.
I tried many things that didn’t work, but life coaching helped me find the resources to pick myself back up.
Final thoughts…
Recovering from this kind of abuse is exhausting, and it can be debilitating.
In some cases, it can cause brain damage, but with the right help, you can undo the damage, and you can heal.
If you’re interested in my work as a life coach, check it out here.
If you love to journal or write, I also have another option.
Starting a blog is the most fulfilling hobby I’ve ever had in my life, and I love it.
I think everyone needs a creative outlet, and creating a website is a never-ending project that can live forever.
Start your own mental health blog using your journal as inspiration (it’s cheaper than therapy).
And please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments or contact me through email below.
Need Support?
It’s tough trying to recover from this and straighten it out on your own.
To speed up my healing process, I got into life coaching, and it changed everything for me.
I took it a step further and became a life coach so I could learn how to help other people like me.
Coaching actually works, and it works quickly when you use a specially trained coach. Check out my page here to learn more about it.
When you’re dealing with narcissistic abuse, sometimes you need help. If you have more severe symptoms like debilitating depression, PTSD, or C-PTSD, you can connect with a professional therapist online.
Try Online-Therapy (20% off affiliate link). 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.
It’s affordable, and you pay much less than seeing a therapist in person.
Post like this and narcissistic support groups are no substitute for therapy.
I’m just beginning my decent into this mind fuck that has been my reality for 41 years…but I was to late. Through her lies and smear campaign she has managed to get temporary guardianship of my children. She cut off communication and I only hear from them once or twice a week. I have been everything for them until now, but I left to go no contact and this is what her retaliation was. I’m sick, heartbroken, helpless, sometimes hopeless and feel a rage inside me I’ve never experienced before. The memories are flooding in and I see now all the destruction she did, she took 41 years of possibilities from me. And blamed me for all the effects it did that were in reality her doing. I hate this woman, she took from me the only love I’ve ever known. My purpose, my pride, my entire heart. I’m so broken.
Hi Robyn,
I waited fifteen years to reunite with my children and being ripped away from them is one of the worst things in the world.
I found out at 38 about narcissism and it was all of what you said here.
It took a long time for it all to cycle through and it’s almost like reliving it through the eyes of an adult.
I hate mine too and after three years I still do.
What they took from us is unforgivable.
Thank you for sharing your pain, it is my pain as well. There is truly medicine in writing! Once you know, you can’t ignore it! Sending you lots of love and thank you again.
Writing is the best medicine, but it sure does make me work on my crap. Thank you for your kind words and for taking the time to comment.
Hi ,
I normally don’t read blogs. But I did read yours and it gives me hope.
I had no idea all these years what was going on and how to break the circle. I was fighting with her . I didn’t know why I felt fighting her but deep inside of me , I knew something was wrong.
After many years of the abuse and not knowing what was going on. She kicked me out but the worst part was.
That I worked in her store and made me work mostly13 hours a day. Not being able to have friends and was living on her and her husband number 3 vineyard.
She threw my clothes out of the window and all my furniture .
With my arms black and blue and my dog in my arms I was shaking and sleeping in strangers house.
7 months later I feel DIZZY and hard to find a job and have a positive mindset.
So your words gave me hope.
I feel understood now
Hey Liesbeth, this sounds incredibly painful and I can only imagine what else she’s put you through. This behavior isn’t normal and this isn’t how a loving mother behaves. The blame is hers and it’s not yours to carry. I had to educate myself and remove all her interference. The only way I know how to heal is to go through it, purge it all out so you can get her voice out of your head. My head spun for 16 months straight and then her voice was gone. What goes in must come out and children like us have had no choice but to bury it deep. Don’t expect too much from yourself during this time, it’s hard work and it’s exhausting, the rest will come. Thank you for taking the time to comment, you will be in my thoughts.
Holy buckets this has really hit home for me!! I graciously thank you for being so brave to share this with others. I has helped me gain so sort of footing to work on myself. Have been struggling for years blaming myself for this. Everything you have mentioned I have struggled with. I thank you from the bottom of my heart for sharing.
Hey Christa, your comment means everything to me. All that blame was placed on us and it’s not ours to carry. That’s why I’m sharing because we deserve better and we deserve more. Once I released the blame and shame the rage hit and Raging Female was born. I won’t stand down, we’ve all been silenced for far too long. Thank you for taking the time to comment.
While I was reading your blog, all I could do was cry. You and I are almost identical! My mother is still doing what she has always done. The only reason I haven’t cut her off is my religious beliefs. You know, the big 10 commandments that says, “ honor thy mother and father”.? That’s the ONLY reason I haven’t. I continue to live in pain, shame , the constant pitting me against my siblings and my own children… and lots more. I grew up in HELL with this woman, our entire family did. I have been a great mother to my children and grandchildren. It wasn’t hard either. The love I have for them just flows out of me. They are my whole life. I’ve given up on my relationship with my mom but it still hurts when I think of how much my life would have been different had I had a good mother. I feel robbed. I have 2 siblings, they have strained relationships with her too. But, my sister, who I love very much is the “Golden Child “, I am the scapegoat child and my brother doesn’t deal with her. Not sure where he fits in. I have a wonderful relationship with both my siblings. We were all we had growing up in the crap! This may sound bad but, it helps me to know that there are others going through this battle. I don’t feel alone anymore and it gives me strength and hope. To all my sisters out there… I love you. I wish you the best in life. I am praying for your success and I hope you get relief. Please pray for me that my relief will come soon.
❤️ Steph
Hey Steph,
It’s almost creepy how identical our stories are (and not just yours and mine). Don’t get me started on the religion if you want to read my rant go here. I feel everything you’re feeling and think about how different it could’ve been. It was such a waste of my energy trying to get her love. Thank you for sharing your strength and hope, you will be in my thoughts.