Does your mother have narcissistic traits?

Dr Karyl McBride's book "Will I ever be good enough? Healing the daughters of narcissistic mothers" (see my review here) contains a quiz - Does your mother have narcissistic traits? 

This set of questions, in my opinion, is inadequate in terms of addressing the issues that children of extreme (malignant) and/or ignoring narcissistic mothers typically deal with. The questions are far too simplistic and seem to be based largely on the author's own relationship with her own (engulfing, non-psychopathic) narcissistic mother.

My own answers are below:

1. When you discuss your life issues with your mother, does she divert the discussion to talk about herself? 

Yes, so I stopped talking to her about life issues, and stopped confiding in her about anything, after the age of 18.


2. When you discuss your feelings with your mother, does she try to top the feeling with her own? 

Yes, she did, hence I stopped discussing my feelings with her, and haven't done so in any depth since 1995. See question 1.

3. Does your mother act jealous of you?

Yes - insanely.

4. Does your mother lack empathy for your feelings?

Yes, she has precisely NO empathy for me. She cannot even be bothered to fake sympathy or compassion for me. But she APPEARS to have empathy for people she didn't give birth to or wasn't once married to. Still can't quite work this one out.

5. Does your mother only support those things you do that reflect on her as a “good mother"?

Just as she has never shown the slightest concern for me during tumultuous periods of my life (health problems, relationship breakdowns), she has never taken any interest in anything I've done that should have elicited some sort of pride - exam success and other academic achievements, a book publishing deal, job offers, travel experiences, marriage, and the births of my babies. It all passed her by. She's just so busy, you see.

6. Have you consistently felt a lack of emotional closeness with your mother?

Yes - there's never been any. An occasional faked and fleeting gesture of affection when I was a child; that's it.

7. Have you consistently questioned whether or not your mother likes you or loves you?

Yes, I did. But now I don't question it. I KNOW she doesn't love or like me.

8. Does your mother only do things for you when others can see?  

No. She birthed me, fed me, clothed me and kept a roof over my head while I was a child/teen (all begrudgingly), and beyond that, NOTHING. I'm sure she lies to others about all these amazing sacrifices she's supposedly made, but she has done NOTHING beyond the most basic physical sustenance, and so has nothing to back up her lies. Yet people still believe her.

9. When something happens in your life (accident, illness, divorce) does your mother react with how it will affect her rather than how you feel? 

No. She has no sort of human reaction. She's never shown the slightest interest, never mind concern. (Although if something tragic WERE to happen to me, she'd use it as a means of gaining attention and sympathy for herself. She would be THRILLED if I were to die before she did - she'd get so much precious supply, and could play the martyr with total impunity.)

10. Is or was your mother overly conscious of what others think (neighbors, friends, family, co-workers)? 

Yes. She really, really cares about what other people think of her. She is entirely dependent upon their validation because she's completely repulsed and alienated everyone who knows the truth about her (her daughters and one or two other relatives - everyone else presumes she's a lovely little old lady).

11. Does your mother deny her own feelings? 

Her true feelings, yes. By necessity she denies them, and it must be exhausting for her. She is utterly consumed by self-loathing, but she can't deal with that so she projects that as rage, resentment, contempt and jealousy. Everyone else is somehow to blame for the aching, ugly void within her soul.

12. Does your mother blame things on you or others rather  than own responsibility for her feelings or actions?

See above. All. The. Time.

13. Is or was your mother hurt easily and then carried a grudge for a long time without resolving the problem? 

She was easily hurt and TOTALLY impervious to (or perhaps more accurately, unfazed by) the extreme hurt she habitually caused those closest to her. Nobody did the silent treatment like my mother.

14. Do you feel you were a slave to your mother?

Absolutely. I was her slave, her hostage and her punching bag

15. Do you feel you were responsible for your mother’s ailments or sickness (headaches, stress, illness)? 

I was the reason she was unhappy and stressed. She didn't even WANT kids, but there I was, existing just to spite her. So yeah, I felt "responsible".

16. Did you have to take care of your mother’s physical needs as a child? 

No. Thank God.

17. Do you feel unaccepted by your mother? 

Absolutely. Rejected is a better word.

18. Do you feel your mother was critical of you? 

Erm... YES! She never gave me a single compliment. Ever.

19. Do you feel helpless in the presence of your mother? 

Paralyzed with terror, more to the point. And drained of all joy and energy. Hence I never want to see her or communicate with her again.

20. Are you shamed often by your mother? 

I was. She loved to mortify me - it gave her such a thrill.

21. Do you feel your mother knows the real you? 

She does not have the first clue who I am - she is terribly well acquainted with what makes me feel scared and miserable though.

22. Does your mother act like the world should revolve around her? 

All. The. Time.

23. Do you find it difficult to be a separate person from your mother? 

I cannot believe I came from her body, and the fact I did absolutely disgusts me. We could not be less alike. She has totally detached herself from me, and I am now at a point where i welcome that detachment. 

24. Does your mother appear phony to you? 

All. The. Time. She's the phoniest person I've ever met.

25. Does your mother want to control your choices? 

She wants me to make the wrong choices, because nothing makes her happier than my misery. Apart from that, she simply does not care. At all.

26. Does your mother swing from egotistical to a depressed mood? 

Her mood tends to simply be varying degrees of "batshit crazy". Sometimes calm ('simmering'), sometimes an enraged tornado of doom and destruction. And everything in between. She could go from one extreme to the other in the blink of an eye.

27. Did you feel you had to take care of your mother’s emotional needs as a child? 

It was 'obviously' my fault she was unhappy and poor and stressed. So I felt guilty all the time. I tried to please her, but my efforts were in vain. See question 15.

28. Do you feel manipulated in the presence of your mother? 

I only exist to her as a thing to be manipulated. I literally serve no other purpose.

29. Do you feel valued by mother for what you do rather than who you are? 
She doesn't know who I am, and she doesn't care about what I do. So I don't feel valued at all, in any way. Never have done.

30. Is your mother controlling, acting like a victim or martyr? 

Constantly. This question refers to two separate and distinct aspects of her toxic personality though: her 'controlling' side, which is formidable, and her propensity to play the victim (poor long-suffering unappreciated mother), which is possibly even more formidable.

31. Does your mother make you act different from how you really feel? 

She makes me feel ashamed for having feelings at all, never mind making me feel obliged to deny and suppress them.

32. Does your mother compete with you? 

She's insanely jealous and my entire adult life has been viewed by her as a sick game of oneupmanship. One that she has lost, abysmally, hence her willingness to accept my NC decision without the slightest murmur of protest.

33. Does your mother always have to have things her way? 

Yes. Always.

My mother doesn't love me

I'm almost 40 years old and it's taken me this long to realise and accept that my mother doesn't love me. I need to keep repeating it in my head, and I need to write it down, like a mantra that I might eventually be able to say out loud with detachment and no tears, in order to somehow make peace with the cold, brutal fact that my mother doesn't love me. She has never loved me, and never will love me. She's incapable of loving me.

I need to understand that it isn't because I'm unloveable. I know that I am loveable, and worthy. I'm a decent human being with many talents and virtues, none of which she has ever cared enough to take the time to see and appreciate. Or rather: she sees them alright, and she despises and resents them rather than cherishes and encourages them. I need to understand that she doesn't love her own daughter because she never even bothered getting to know me, and because she is sick and broken and mentally maladjusted. Because she is emotionally crippled. I need to understand that there's nothing I can do to make her love me. I am as powerless now as an adult as I was a child (in fact even more so), and I have now, finally, stopped trying to make her love me. Love should never be forced or coerced, and the love a parent has for a child should always be instinctive, abundant and unconditional. But I will never get anything like that from my mother. I need to find the strength to not allow this lack of love to define me, because if I did, it would destroy me.

It's not easy, this acceptance of maternal rejection. It hurts like hell, and right now I cannot envisage a time when it will stop hurting. I still occasionally have days where I might catch myself thinking wistfully "Maybe, after all this time, she's finally realised what she's lost" (she never saw herself as 'having' anything to lose, and my absence from her life is inconsequential to her, other than how it is judged by others). Or "I still have it in my heart to forgive her; all she needs to do is say sorry and we can take it from there" (our relationship isn't just rotten or fractured any more, it's dead. In fact it never actually really existed... And as for holding out any hope of an acknowledgment or apology... I know it won't ever happen. I have at least unquestioningly accepted that much).

What makes this even harder is other peoples' reactions:

"But she's your mother."
"Surely she wants you to be happy."
"Don't let your pride get in the way."
"When she dies, it will be too late and you'll have so much regret."

I covered some of these thoughtless, prosaic remarks in my early blog post Responses and Rebuttals to the Flying Monkeys. Although I am sick and tired of trying to justify myself and my decisions to other people, I have been trained to within an inch of my life (by Mummy, of course) to invest far too much of my precious time and energy into being preoccupied with what other people think of me. Perhaps it's time I grew up and stopped giving a fuck about such humdrum, trivial, glaringly misinformed and trite opinions.

"But she's your mother."
Indeed she is. She conceived and birthed me, and therefore, as much as it pains me to acknowledge it, I am composed of half her DNA. The thought repulses and astonishes me. My birth is doubtless one of her biggest regrets. And while I'm now glad and thankful that I exist, for much of my childhood and the entirety of my teens I wished I had never been born. Now I just wish I hadn't been born to her - someone so innately ill-equipped to be a mother that I will never understand why she decided to have children at all. So yes, she's my mother and I am her daughter. And yet - and yet. Where's the connection? Where's the love, the affection? The loyalty? The warmth, the affinity? Can you show me? Because I've been searching desperately for it for virtually my entire life, and I've come up with sweet FA. Worse: I feel THE OPPOSITE. She loathes me.

"Surely she wants you to be happy."
Yeah, surely! Right? Wrong. On the rare occasions my mother has actually had an awareness of my mental and emotional state, she has only ever seemed grimly satisfied or perversely interested when I have been sad, desolate, desperate, hurt or lonely. I realise this sounds insane to anyone with a normal, decent mother. It sounds insane to anyone with any goodness and compassion in their heart. But she has always enjoyed my suffering. That's the truth, and if you cannot bear to believe it then frankly you've got no business judging me for excluding such a sadistic piece of shit from my life for good.

"Don't let your pride get in the way."
PRIDE? Are you fucking kidding me?! What pride? That woman made damn sure I HAD NO PRIDE. What I do have is some vestiges of self-preservation (although even that hung by a precarious thread for years). That self-preservation is what made me finally look into my mother's intense cold grey-green eyes one day (it was in August 2013, and the moment will be forever ingrained in my memory) and realise, with a blinding, lightning-bolt epiphany, that the only purpose I served for her was as a thing to be manipulated and used. That has literally all I have ever been to her. And so yeah, I do have just about enough pride to demand a little more than that from my so-called mother. And "... get in the way" of what, exactly? Get in the way of continuing to 'put up and shut up' with a sick joke of a relationship which leaves me feeling bruised, emotionally depleted, terrified, ashamed, confused and worthless?

"When she dies, it'll be too late and you'll have so much regret."
When my mother dies, assuming she doesn't outlive me, I will be devastated. By the time she shuffles off this mortal coil, antiquated, doubtless still seething with the same pointless, pitiless defiance and inappropriate self-righteousness that has always clouded her shackled psyche, and shrivelled with bitterness and her own formidable burden of gnawing regret, I expect to be well in my fifties and possibly a grandmother myself. By that time I will not have clapped eyes on my mother, nor heard her grating, critical voice for two decades. My only regret will be that she forced me into this decision, thereby depriving herself of what could and should have been beautiful, life-affirming relationships not just with me but with her grandsons.
I will never, ever regret going No Contact.