Because of financial constraints I haven’t been seeing much of my therapist lately. This week I got to meet with her and because we hadn’t seen each other in almost a month, there was much to talk about. So much, in fact, that the session lasted nearly four hours.
That’s one of the things I adore about my therapist — sessions go for as long as I need them to.
Usually the epic sessions are due to switching and interacting with others beside myself, which is neither common nor uncommon. Sometimes it happens, but often it doesn’t. This particular session was just me, though, because the last few weeks have been predominantly my own. I haven’t been switching much.
So I got to tell my beloved therapist about the successes and struggles of July, which was a huge damn relief because I’ve been keeping it all bottled up. There are so many blog posts I’ve started and then deleted in the past few weeks. So many things I’ve tried to share here but haven’t been able to find the words, or I’ve been overwhelmed by the belief that no one wants to hear about this, just keep it to yourself.
But it has been making me feel trapped. The less I write about here, the more I feel isolated and I question my sense of reality. If things upset me, but I don’t tell anyone, did the things actually happen or are my emotions untrustworthy? It’s a bizarre version of the philosophical question, “If a tree falls and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”
My sister has been experiencing a lot of anger and neediness surrounding her realization that our mother is a narcissist. For all the things I may have said about my sister, I hope it comes across that I love her dearly. More than that, I feel a genuine responsibility for her because I am the older sibling and we grew up in an abusive household. I admit to playing out the textbook definition of parentification.
It was through trying to help my sister understand the definition of narcissism that I found online resources linking to an easy-to-understand checklist. It merely scratches the surface of NPD, but it was through this list that my sister was able to very simply grasp the enormity of our mother’s disorder, and how harmful it was to us. Many times while reading it she was in shock, saying, “How could this total stranger have written this about our mom, did they know her personally?”
Here is the list (in-depth descriptions are found here) :
1. Everything she does is deniable. She uses “gaslighting” as a technique of control.
2. She violates your boundaries. Your space, diary, phone calls, even your thoughts aren’t your own.
3. She favoritizes. Narcissistic mothers commonly choose one child to be the golden child and one to be the scapegoat.
4. She undermines. You learn you’re supposed to feel bad about yourself constantly.
5. She demeans, criticizes and denigrates. She is a bully.
6. She makes you look crazy. She convinces you you’re imagining things and lying.
7. She’s envious. If you get recognition for something, expect her to punish you for it.
8. She’s a liar in too many ways to count.
9. She has to be the center of attention all the time.
10. She manipulates your emotions in order to feed on your pain.
11. She’s selfish and willful.
12. She’s self-absorbed. She gets the best of everything, you are left to fend for yourself.
13. She is insanely defensive and is extremely sensitive to any criticism.
14. She terrorizes. She uses fear to control you.
15. She’s infantile and petty.
16. She’s aggressive and shameless. She doesn’t ask. She demands.
17. She “parentifies.” She sheds her responsibilities to you as soon as she is able.
18. She’s exploitative. She will manipulate to get work, money, or objects she envies out of other people for nothing.
19. She projects. She puts her own bad behavior, character and traits on you so she can deny them in herself and punish you.
20. She is never wrong about anything. No matter what she’s done, she won’t ever genuinely apologize for anything.
21. She seems to have no awareness that other people even have feelings.
22. She blames. She’ll blame you for everything that isn’t right in her life or for what other people do or for whatever has happened.
23. She destroys your relationships.
24. As a last resort she goes pathetic.YOU are the bad person for being cold, heartless and unfeeling when your poor mother feels so awful.
So hearing this list had an interesting effect on my sister. She immediately agreed that every single aspect was directly applicable to our mother, and then she looked uncomfortable. While it was freeing to finally understand what we had lived through, she did not seem comforted. And I was pretty sure I knew why.
My therapist has met my sister several times and has commented to me privately that she sees my sister having a lot of narcissistic thought patterns and behaviors. Knowing this, I gently told my sister that it was common for adult children of narcissists to exhibit symptoms of NPD too, and that’s why she and I would have to be extra careful and aware so we could break the cycle. She instantly looked relieved and admitted,”Yes, that’s what I was worried about! I mean…I do a lot of those things on that list too…”
So I didn’t disagree with her, because well…it’s accurate. It’s *painfully* accurate, speaking as someone who lives with her and only two weeks ago had to pay our neighbor who she had taken drugs from (UGH SO INAPPROPRIATE) and then never paid for said drugs. So…yeah, speaking as the person who is unable to work and poor as fuck who has somehow incurred her grown-up sister’s drug-habit-financing responsibilities, cell phone bill, and fueling expenses for her trip to work every day (in *my* car) — my sister is a fucking narcissist.
I admit that living with her is a mind-trip in several ways, but I’ll be more specific about that in a different post. What’s important here is that talking to my therapist allows me to get a genuine, educated, outside perspective on all this. Her ability to listen and mirror reality back to me gives me the ability to validate my own emotions, which have been mainly guilt and feeling like I don’t have the right to question my sister’s needs…which only as I’m writing this sends off all the right alarm bells that tell me I’m being terrorized in my home by a version of my mother — one that I feel I have parental responsibilities toward.
Oh wow that is very upsetting, I am not comfortable with that.
I haven’t been writing about it because I haven’t felt a right to. Somehow, without realizing it, I’ve reacted to having a narcissist in the house by closing myself off and accepting responsibility for all her problems — just like when I was a child living with my mother.
I actually had a whole different end planned for this post, about how my sister is not really a narcissist, she’s just an adult child of one who exhibits similar traits and she *can* change. I really truly had this whole explanation planned out, and it wasn’t even self-delusory. Because from what I understand about true narcissists versus people who have grown up copying them, the difference is if you ask them to stop doing something that upsets you, a narcissist won’t, but a non-narcissist *will* stop.
But honestly, fuck all that. Fuck it. Because though it may be true, it doesn’t excuse any of the bullshit I’ve been dealing with, and beyond that and far more importantly, it doesn’t negate the fact that my reaction to her narcissistic behavior has been to feel trapped and responsible. I am clearly not in control of myself enough to talk about this situation in a philosophical way yet, it would be counterproductive and lying to do so.
This explains why I’ve been having thoughts of leaving. Just leaving my home, running away, to get away from my sister. I didn’t piece it together before, but it entirely explains it. She’s my younger sibling and I couldn’t understand why I would need to *escape* her intrusion upon my home, but a part of my brain has been screaming at me,”Get away, get out, you’re not safe, you’re going to be hurt.” And I do believe that part of my brain is right. Now I have to figure out what to do. Too bad four hours of therapy couldn’t fix everything instantly. But without it…I’d be dangerously lost.
I need reality reflected back to me, I hope some of you will help me with that.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
