Make no mistake: narcissists have a formidable arsenal of weaponry at their disposal. They can, will and do use it, daily. Their remorseless and tried-and-tested-to-perfection techniques of mental, emotional and psychological abuse include projection, triangulation, gaslighting, scapegoating, the recruitment of Flying Monkeys (abuse enablers and apologists), plus of course outright lies, denials, distortions and delusions.
And that, in a nutshell, is what it is: the systematic, deliberate eroding of a person's sense of reality, forcing them to disbelieve or discredit their own perceptions and doubt their memories. It is, pure and simple, UTTERLY CRAZY-MAKING. And narcissists are fucking BRILLIANT at it. Until you have experienced it for yourself, you literally cannot imagine that such evil and cunning exists, and certainly not between a mother and her child.
My mother's campaign of control over me and my sister relied heavily on gaslighting, which included dismissing or trivialising our emotions, and dismantling our concept of Truth. As children, traumatised and vulnerable as we were by our parents' divorce in 1986, we were initially pretty easy to manipulate. We trusted our mother with all the wide-eyed, unquestioning naivete that young, impressionable kids tend to possess. We were putty in her furious, dexterous hands.
But when we inconsiderately changed from little girls into teenagers, the abuse was ramped up. Because, dammit, we were SO MUCH MORE DIFFICULT to control. We had opinions! Thoughts! And feelings! All of our own.
Such autonomy and individuality was simply not tolerated by mother dearest (and neither was the sexual awakening that accompanied these unwelcome new facets of our characters). Although the physical abuse my mother subjected me to was, by far, the least egregious of all her abusive tactics, she did hit me hard enough and often enough for me to live in fear of her temper - which was as capricious and volatile as it was quick and explosive. (My dad once described my mother as being "incandescent with fury" and "apoplectic with rage".)
Every so often, at least once or twice a month but rarely more than once a week, she would rain blows down on me - on my head, arms, legs, body, wherever her flailing fists landed - screaming some sort of verbal abuse, anguished criticism or generic accusation, and I would usually just cower and cry and wait for it to end. The rages would last between thirty seconds and five minutes, and would finish as suddenly as they would start. I'm embarrassed to admit this, now. Embarrassed to admit what a pushover I was; how much I tolerated from that woman, and for so long. My mother is not a tall or physically powerful woman; I could have slapped her across the room if I'd been so inclined. But I never hit back. Not once.
Afterwards, the calm. She would walk away and distract herself with something, leaving me sobbing inconsolably, and the incident would simply be forgotten about and not mentioned again. I knew there'd be a 'next time', but part of the campaign of control (permanently 'walking on eggshells') was never knowing when the 'next time' would be. I could never quite work out what might provoke such an attack from my mother (who was in a near-perpetual state of 'simmering, seething resentment'), but one thing's for sure: I did always assume that it must have been, somehow, my fault. So sometimes, after these spectacularly immoderate narcissistic rages, I would apologise to my mother, in an attempt to clear the air, which might otherwise remain unbearably frosty for many hours. My apologies didn't come easy, of course - why the fuck was I apologising to her? But she made me feel obligated to offer one. She was good at making me feel obligated.
Not once did she say: I'm sorry, I shouldn't have hit you.
Not once did she say: Are you OK? I really didn't mean to hurt you.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
How can you ever forgive me?
What she said instead, when I found the courage to confront her about these random and regular incidences of domestic violence, was: "Don't tell me how I should discipline you." And: "My mother smacked me when I was naughty, it's just discipline."
She liked that word. Discipline.
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| Source: www.daughtersofnarcissisticmothers.com |
Much later, in my early 20s, I wrote my mother a long letter explaining that I wished, with all my heart, that she and I could have a healthy mother-daughter relationship; that all I wanted was for us to be friends but all my life I had felt rejected and scorned and disrespected by her. I also dared to mention the abuse, although (obviously) not in a confrontational way, as that would have been entirely self-defeating. It was a perfect opportunity for her to admit "Yeah, I fucked up, badly, I'm sorry, let's build some bridges." It took every ounce of courage I could muster to post that letter to her. I was terrified of her reaction. But still, a big part of me hoped for that apology; hoped that maybe she loved me enough to want to at least TRY to make amends. After all, I was her DAUGHTER. Surely she loved me, right? Surely she didn't want me to feel hurt, alone, confused? Surely she would want to put things right?
This was her reaction: "What are you talking about?"
"I don't understand."
"What's all this about; abuse? What abuse?"
"Are you crazy?"
And so, I let it slide. When you are invalidated to such a mind-wrecking degree that you no longer trust yourself to feel a single authentic emotion about anything or to react in a natural, normal and reasonable way to your experiences, you just end up assuming that your mother - the woman who was supposed to love you unconditionally, after all - is merely doing her best with what amounts to damaged goods. That's what I was. Damaged goods. Of course I was almost impossible to love! Did I even know how I should feel about anything? So how is anyone supposed to know how to feel about me?
... Our relationship, such as it was, hobbled on for a few more years. She continued gaslighting, exploiting, disparaging, sidelining, resenting, ignoring, mortifying, scapegoating and undermining me (although at least the beatings stopped, once I'd moved out of her house at the age of 19), and I just accepted that this was the way it was to be between us, forever. Even though I was, by now, painfully aware that mothers, REAL MOTHERS, are supposed to engender in their children only positive feelings, I concluded that I deserved no better than being made to feel constantly inadequate, irrelevant and pathetic. Finally, I just became so worn down by it all that I lost the will to even react.
For more information about gaslighting, click here and here, or see my follow-up post, Gaslighting Revisited.
Further reading:
Flying Monkeys Denied: What is Gaslighting - Covert Narcissistic Abuse At Its Finest
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