When Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers Receive Constant Messages

When daughters of narcissistic mothers receive constant messages throughout their childhood that their feelings, wishes, and thoughts swing between being "completely unheard" and "crudely trampled on," they grow up believing that what they feel doesn't matter, that what they want doesn't matter, and that their thoughts are irrelevant or simply wrong — that what they see, they apparently don't really see; what they hear, they didn't hear properly; and what they understood, they apparently misunderstood. Women like me learn to silence and suppress all of these wants and to please others instead — it's the only way to stay relevant, to be heard, somehow. When daughters of narcissistic mothers grow up and become partners, and later mothers themselves, they choose to give in, to "compromise," to "put others first." For them, giving becomes a chaotic free-for-all: they're used to feeling worthy of existing only when they've been useful to someone, never simply because of who they are. People-pleasing women will give up things that matter to them, as long as everyone else in the family "is happy" — and the price for that is enormous, both in self-worth and in a sense of self-fulfillment. We place ourselves at the very bottom of the "family chain."

There's a gaping chasm between loving someone simply for who they are, and "loving" someone for the benefit they bring with them. That's how the world was explained to us — we're used to pleasing people.

People who grew up in normative families find this hard to understand. When I published You Imagine, some family members told me, "But you were always such an opinionated child — how could you not have been heard? You were heard loud and clear." My answer is: yes, I was heard, because I screamed. And if I hadn't screamed, nothing would have been heard at all. And yet, for that very screaming, I paid a heavy price — slander, verbal abuse, and even a few instances (not many) of physical violence, of being turned on, of being ostracized.

Every battle has a price — the need to fight is a sad one; it doesn't come from a good place, but from real distress. Many years have passed since then. I'm a wife and a mother now, and I speak my wishes and my voice, my thoughts and my feelings. But even today, sentences like "Maybe you misunderstood?", "Are you sure you heard that right?", "Your intuition isn't always correct" can still break my heart. No matter how many years have passed, sentences like these send me straight back to that original memory — it still hurts.