Tuesday, July 30, 2024

Signs Your Mother Is A Covert Narcissist

 


Just like Alice Miller wrote: "We are all prisoners of our childhood, whether we know it, suspect it, deny it, or have never even heard about the possibility. The realization that we can free ourselves from the consequences of old wounds will gain ground as more people prove it can be done. Inevitably, resistance to following this path is great, as we all fear our repressed past and the experience of how helpless we once were. We have had good reason to be afraid; if we did not, there would have been no need for repression. Yet the more we encounter our fear and dare to see its causes, the more it decreases." Read more here

In my book A Dance to Freedom, I prove that it can be done! And once you break free from the emotional prison of your childhood, not even a mob of sociopaths, like I had at my job of nine and half years, can trap you and take you back to the emotional prison of your childhood. 

As I wrote In My book pages 84, 85, and 86 " Children are like sponges. They absorb everything their parents repress. And because children are such perfect mirrors of their parents’ repression, they’re also powerful triggers that put parents into panic mode to keep repressing. No one can trigger in us what’s not already in ourselves, but many parents don’t want to see that because it would force them to feel the painful truths of their own childhoods that they try to avoid at all costs. 

Instead, parents force their children to feel what they themselves can’t feel. They use their children as scapegoats or “poisonous containers,” and endlessly punish them for their bad behavior. 

Most parents don’t take responsibility for the fact that, on some level, they’re the cause of their children’s bad behavior, due to their own repression. This is one of the biggest injustices I’ve ever witnessed in this world. And when this happens, parents lose the opportunity to nurture their children and heal their own hearts. 

This is very sad and tragic. Parents don’t realize that, in most cases, their desire to have children comes from their compulsion to reenact their own childhood dramas — not as victims again but as the oppressors, the ones in control. 

After all, that’s what they were taught when they were children themselves. I believe that the idealization of one’s own parents and childhood is a major obstacle to the betterment of our whole society. Since so many people believe that their parents are always right, it’s much easier for them to follow other people in power positions, who cast themselves as mother or father figures disguised as educators, healers, cult leaders, therapists, gurus, and government officials. 

We become extremely vulnerable when we refuse to face the truth about the people who raised us. Someone with a false self is an easy target for exploitation, which can threaten not only individuals, but also society as a whole. 

The only thing that can save us is to make sure that more people are true to themselves. We need more people who can fight the power, starting in their own homes. Alice Miller describes these individuals as “people who had the good fortune of being sure of their parent’s love, even if they had to disappoint certain parental expectations. Or people who, although they did not have this good fortune to begin with, learned later — for example, in analysis — to risk the loss of love in order to regain their lost self.”51 

According to Alice Miller, these people so appreciate their freedom from trauma and tyranny that “they will not be willing to relinquish it again for any price in the world.”52 

When we idealize our childhoods we become just like our childhood abusers and the vicious cycle continues. And we keep holding on to the false hope of eventually gaining love and acceptance from our parents, or from those who stand in to symbolize our parents. 

Idealizing the people who raised us puts us in danger, physically and emotionally. Alice Miller believes that the body knows our traumatic history and remembers the cruelty we had to endure as children without being able to really feel it, process it, and move beyond it in a healthy way. “… As long as we are compelled to protect our parents we pay our loyalty with our depressions,” she writes. But “…by discovering and  understanding the pain of the former neglected child you start to love and cherish him, perhaps for the first time in your life.”53 

She expands on the idea in For Your Own Good: “If the tragedy of a well-meaning person’s childhood remains hidden behind idealizations, the unconscious knowledge of the actual state of affairs will have to assert itself by an indirect route. This occurs with the aid of the repetition compulsion. Over and over again, for reasons they don’t understand, people create situations and establish relationships in which they torment or are tormented by their partners, or both. Since tormenting one’s children is a legitimate part of childrearing, this provides the most obvious outlet for bottled up aggression.”54 This is how the vicious cycle of repetition compulsion has been going on since the beginning of human history."

”Poisonous Pedagogy. The pedagogical conviction that one must bring a child into line from the outset has its origin in the need to split off the disquieting parts of the inner self and project them onto an available object. The child’s great plasticity flexibility, defenselessness, and availability made it the ideal object for this projection. The enemy within can, at last, be hunted down on the outside. Peace advocates are becoming increasingly aware of the role played by these mechanisms, but until it is clearly recognized that they can be traced back to methods of child raising, little can be done to oppose them. For children who have grown up being assailed for qualities, the parents hate in themselves can hardly wait to assign these qualities to someone else so they can once again regard themselves as good, “moral,” noble, and altruistic. Such projections can easily become part of any Weltanschauung.” Alice Miller

“…unwanted children are usually mistreated. But there exist as a rule also a huge amount of people who were "wanted" indeed, but only for playing the role of the victims that their parents needed to be able to take revenge on. They were wanted to give their parents what the parents never had gotten from their own parents: love, adoration, attention and so many other things. Otherwise, why would so many people have five or more children when they have no time for them? Why do they adopt children if their body refuses to give them what they apparently "want? The never acknowledged, never felt pain of their childhood calls for being avenged. They go to church, they pray, they honor their parents, forgive them everything – and they mistreat their children at home, often in a very cruel way, AS IF THIS WERE THE MOST NATURAL THING, because they learned this so early. Their children learn this perverted behavior, also very early, and will later do the same; and so this perverse behavior continues for millennia. Unless people are willing to SEE the perversion of their parents and are ready to consciously refuse to imitate it.
You are not being "sickeningly sarcastic," you only dared to speak out the truth that most people are afraid of seeing or talking about.” Alice Miller


Just like Alice Miller wrote in the introduction of her book The Body Never Lies “ As long as the children allow themselves to be used in this way, it is entirely possible to live to be one hundred without any awareness of one’s personal truth and without any illness ensuing from this protracted form of self-deception. A mother who is forced to realize that the deprivations imposed on her in her youth make it impossible for her to love a child of her own, however hard she may try, can certainly expect to be accused of immorality if she has the courage to put that truth into words. But I believe that it is precisely this explicit acceptance of her true feelings, independent of the claims of morality, that will enable her to give both herself and her children the honest and sincere kind of support they need most, and at the same time will allow her to free herself from the shackles of self-deception.” 

Here are some signs that you may have been raised by a covert narcissistic mother:
  • Gaslighting
    Covert narcissists may use gaslighting to make their children doubt their perceptions of reality. This can include denying past events, distorting facts, or blaming their children for family problems.
  • Intermittent reinforcement
    Covert narcissists may offer validation, such as praise, gifts, or caretaking, in an inconsistent way. This can create a dynamic that keeps children coming back for more.
  • Sensitivity to criticism and rejection
    Children of narcissistic parents may be highly sensitive to criticism and rejection. This can lead to self-judgment and shame in response to feedback at work, criticism from a partner, or even innocent comments from a neighbor.
  • Preoccupation with others' emotions
    Children of covert narcissistic mothers may become good at anticipating or reading the negative emotions of others. This can lead to a preoccupation with trying to contain those emotions before they appear or turn on you. 

  • Other signs that you may have been raised by a narcissist include:
    • Conditional love
    • A focus on themselves
    • Difficulty distinguishing between reality and imagination
    • Being unable to express your feelings or needs
    • Witnessing their victims
    • Worrying about displeasing them
    • Feeling responsible for their reputation
    • Being expected to always agree with them
    • Hot and cold behavior 

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