[DeletedAccount53]

Part Two.


Narc mums treat their children as enemies and strangers. They don't consider them part of their "family group". That is why Mother employed the silent treatment for so long, deliberately withholding love until Julie and I agreed to her terms. To resist her meant punishment, meted out with relish which was the trait of our sadistic mother. Who used a whip of which I will say no more.

In practice, our mother behaved as if we her daughters were like an enemy who had penetrated her camp. So, narcs ensure that the children have no power, no information, and are fully co-dependent on anything they do. It's a sad fact of life and many teenagers suffer, yet help is at hand if they only searched on the internet.

The reason for our mother's narcissistic behaviour was because she couldn't deal with her emotional problems which stemmed from her childhood. She felt shame towards us, tried to get rid the offending garment I enjoyed chewing, and Julie chewed her hoodie strings, too. That way, our mother took revenge to cover up her own private issues.

A narc's ultimate intention is to disturb others with their emotional problems. They try to protect against those who seem to display independent trust and love towards them. And so they can hide what they do in the background. To not be discovered having a narcissistic trait meant our mother could carry on undetected.

Narcs sound confident not because of what they say that moment, but because they are always hiding something. Any argument I had made Mother feel more confident, because being nasty she could distract me even more from what she was are hiding.

And Mother lied. She constantly pretended, by playing drama to its fullest, like something happened to her, or that she harboured a lot of worry. Anything she said was an excuse to hide something else.

Over time, Julie and I learnt to trust ourselves, our instincts, our emotions, and limit contact with our mother whenever possible, expect little to nothing from her so we could withdraw our reliance on her as often as often as we could. In order to do this successfully, we began learning how to recover.

It was no mean feat. Our mother's lack of empathy could not be understood because a normal mother would have a natural empathy towards her child, which was an essential area of development for the child which a narcissistic personality misses. Failing to demonstrate love, the mother creates an emptiness in her child. It was to Julie and mine's benefit that my sister and I could 'feed' off each other the love and understanding and empathy that twins possess.

Had it not been for Julie I would never have survived. And vice-versa. We grew close and as our mother demonstrated nothing but emotional manipulation with viciousness, so we became dependent on each other. We were always able to read each other's 'voice', but kept this ultra secret from our mother for fear of not knowing what that woman could have done to us. I was highly protective of Julie because our mother was acting the psycho, her heart devoid of feelings for us. Our mother was akin to a black hole, unable to give any care for our individual needs, sucking all our feelings into her void.

We were fourteen and it felt as if we were grieving, mourning for a loss that our mother neither cared a damn except for her selfish self. I am reminded of Jamie Anderson saying, "Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go."

I write with tears in my eyes, bringing Julie to sit beside me because she sensed my feelings. No words needing to be spoken, she picked up on me like iron filings attracted to a magnet. As I type, her hand rubs circles around my back. She knew I was writing this because writing is cathartic. Sitting with our grief, acknowledging it, and moving through its full spectrum of emotion was necessary for our healing, exchanging hugs, or a squeeze of the hand.

What we went through was profound trauma where we needed time to heal, emotionally and physically for the viciousness Mother did with her whip. Once we understood how Mother lived her narcissistic life, we began to understand its reality and with the help of books we read together, gradually we began taking down our blocks of denial piece by piece.

Generally speaking, narcissistic mothers are masters of manipulation using guilt trip. The only person you need to convince in order to heal and not be so ridden with guilt is yourself, pushing away and breaking down the mentality our narcissistic mother had trained us to only find fault with ourselves.

We drew pictures of ourselves, pictures in which we depicted comic book heroes. The stronger self-image we built up, the less the insults and put-downs our narcissistic mother affected us. If Julie and I were not be ridden by guilt, we had to really understand and get to the bottom of the truth through our eyes, not through the eyes of our mother who was so brutally emotionally abusive.

We had to train our minds to find who we were and in a positive way, so that when others doubted us, we didn’t doubt ourselves. This is really important for people with narcissistic parents. Having a strong core self-image and working on it on a daily basis helped us combat our inner feelings of guilt.

Another thing that helped us was learning how to manage a negative conversation. A narcissistic parent is always throwing jabs and darts at their child, especially when they least expected it. If we learnt how to manage negative conversations, then we could avoid getting into another drama battle.

There were some sentences that we used when our narcissistic mother began attacking our way of trying to take care of her, making us feel as if nothing we did was enough, or that we weren't good enough. When Mother ranted off, we replied something like:

"You’re entitled to have your own opinion, of course." - adding - "But it’s such a shame you view things so negatively, looks like you’re getting very angry again." - or - "If that’s the way you choose to view things, then you're entitled to have those views, Mother." - or say - "I’m sorry it’s so difficult for you to feel contentment. It must be such a terrible feeling."

Those statements are great when narcissists say something negative, because they deflect their own anger back onto them.

The reason Mother jabbed away at me or Julie was that when we felt negative, then we'd get an automatic negative emotional response back. That meant she was dipping into her 'tub' of narcissistic ammunition, but for why? Because she could see angst in our faces and read our tone.

The more we responded so angrily at her, then the higher Mother got, and by then she was well addicted to that high, her negativity built up into going ballistic, so the next day if Julie and I were careless, then our mother's anger would have got a lot worse. And we would physically suffer.

It was hell living with our narcissistic mother, but gradually, Julie and I began becoming able to detach ourselves from our mother's harsh judgemental attitudes because we actively worked by neutralizing her complaints and constant endless nagging.

Working on neutralizing the power our mother had on us was a daily task. Sometimes we'd fail, but other times we'd begun turning the tide on her narcissism.

One day when Julie and I went skiing, we dropped by at a ski lodge to take refreshments, when Julie gazed into the snowy distance and said, "You know, Wendi, but we should realize Mother may never change her narcissism. It will be present - " she gulped and turning slowly to look at me, opened her mouth to continue when tears coursed down her face.

"Our mother's just died. In the end we lost. We never won. Did we?"

At the same time Julie uttered those words I felt that same sudden helpless emptiness. Our mother, we somehow knew, had realised her end was near and dropped dead.

True to Julie's statement, our mother had indeed died. She and I had learnt a lot about our narcissistic mother, and in the battle of our dealing with her, wrote down our feelings, helping us, eventually, to put closure on her death.