Digging Up the Truth; Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Realize My Mother's a Narcissist

For years I thought that I was broken, that there were a lot of things wrong with me.  It explained why I never fit in, why I had a hard time making friends, why nobody loved me for more than a year and eight months, why my family made fun of me all the time.  I would fight back every now and then, but it would always backfire; they would push me back in my corner, and my rebelliousness only proved their point:  I was broken.

About eight years ago, I started questioning that belief.  I started seeing things differently.  The image of the perfect family started cracking in the corners.  If they were so perfect and I was so broken, why did my brother jump from relationship to relationship?  Why did my parents ignore his serious issues and blame me for being too hard on him?  Why did they get angry at me for protesting my dad's treatment of me when I was young, but matter-of-factly talk about his PTSD years later?  

I've always been a voracious reader, and the day I connected to the internet was amazing.  Years later, when I started digging into family dysfunction, it was no different than any other subject I'd researched.  I'm not sure where the threads began weaving together, but I found some references to narcissism and I began discovering some patterns.  I found a checklist for daughters of narcissistic mothers:  Have I consistently lacked emotional closeness with my mother?  Is my mother overly conscious of what others will think?  Do I feel unaccepted by my mother?  Does my mother act jealous of me?  Am I shamed often by my mother?  Check, check, check, check, check, all the way down the 30 question list.  To be fair, I didn't check a few of the questions, but you can't have everything.  

I dug further, and found more websites.  I found Karyl McBride, Issendai's work on "estranged parents", and reddit's (ironic, I know) well-moderated forum for people who were raised by narcissists.  At each stop, I learned more about the patterns of this dysfunction.  I learned that I wasn't the only one dealing with this situation.  I marveled at the similarities between my family and dozens, no, hundreds of other people around the world whose stories I was reading.  I learned about different coping mechanisms, different reactions that families had to those coping mechanisms, and a wide variety of health issues that were consequences to living in the cloud of dysfunction caused by these people.  

At the time, I was still visiting my family about once a month, and I started noticing things.  Every time we would visit, my stomach would be upset for at least a full 24 hours afterwards.  My mom would delay mealtimes, which she knows can trigger a migraine for me.  My family would say hurtful things, and then tell me that I was being too dramatic and sensitive if I protested.  These were all things listed as patterns in a household ruled by a narcissist in so many of the sources I had been reading!  I was just flabbergasted as, over and over, they walked right out of the textbooks and proved the points to a T.  

About six years ago, I hit a wall.  I spiraled into a deep, dark depression.  I did nothing but play computer games and pretty much wish that my life was over.  I had things to live for, but nothing was appealing.  I couldn't sleep, but all I wanted to do was sleep.  The irony did not escape me; I didn't want to be awake, but I couldn't get to sleep.  Looking back, I was being forced to face my reality.  My body was in cahoots with my mind, and it was not being kind to me.  I finally went to see my doctor, who gave me the standard ten point test:  "On a scale of Never to All the time, how often do you think about hurting yourself?" Et Cetera/Peter Cetera.  By the end of the test, I was bawling, and I never cry at the doctor's office; I don't want to inconvenience them (see feelings of worthlessness above).  She prescribed medication for the insomnia and prozac for the depression.  I promised her I would find a counselor.  

I dug around online for a counselor; thank goodness for the internet!  I wanted to trust myself to find the right person, and I looked at different websites and found someone with a philosophy that sounded like my style.  I made an appointment and we hit it off right away.  I started talking to her every week.  In January of 2013, she asked me to write a letter to my mom to say what I wanted to say to her.  I must have gotten a look on my face, because she said, "Why don't you pretend that she can't respond to you?  Like she's tied to a chair and she can't say anything back to you?"  I was shocked.  I had honestly never even conceived of a world where that could be possible.  My mother was ubiquitous, she was all-powerful, there was nowhere she hadn't oozed into, her judgmental voice preceding her.  My eyes went wide with possibilities.  

I went home and wrote an eight-page screed in large cursive letters that very night.  I addressed an envelope and stamped it.  I brought the letter to my next session and handed it to my counselor.  She read through it and asked, "So are you going to send it?"  (She had seen the envelope.)  "I HAVE TO," burst from my chest.  I couldn't contain the words.  I tried to calm myself.  "I have to.  If I don't, I will die."  I knew it was true.  

I mailed the letter that day, my heart bursting out of my chest.  I thought I would die.  I didn't.  I mailed the letter, and I haven't seen my mother since.

I'm still working on myself; my depression comes and goes --- there are no fairy tale endings, and you can't expect 41 years of damage to go away with a snap of your fingers.  There are studies that show that childhood adversity has serious lasting effects on us into adulthood and old age.  But it's been almost five years since I saw my mother, and they've been the best five years of my life.  I'm freer, happier, more myself than I've ever been.  I was breathing poison every day, and I didn't even know it.  Now I'm breathing fresh air, and it's the best I've ever tasted.