The Narcissism Spectrum
The narcissism that’s so destructive to daughters falls on the extreme end of the broad spectrum of behavior we label as narcissistic. To look in the mirror and say, “I look great today!” or openly appreciate and admire one of your own talents is self-protective, amplifying as it does your sense of self-worth and helping you to act in your own interests or stand up for yourself.
But a little farther up the scale, self-love edges into self-centeredness. Narcissists in this category amplify their self-appreciation with a demand that steady attention be paid to their wonderful characteristics. This behavior may be irritating, but it’s not toxic. A person with moderate narcissism might be vain and noticeably self-centered, dominating conversations and not paying attention to cues that her companion or “audience” is getting restless. Yet if she’s confronted or called on her actions she may apologize.
There are seldom apologies, though, when a person is severely narcissistic—a condition that mental health professionals call Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD).
Two of the defining characteristics of the disorder are the narcissist’s grandiosity and her insatiable hunger for attention. It’s normal for children to have grandiose fantasies of being powerful and adored, especially if their reality falls far short of what they yearn for, but as they gain a sense of self-sufficiency, most adults put such fantasies aside. A mother with NPD, however, has never evolved beyond these early yearnings—she clings to them because they’re defenses that mask her deep feelings of inadequacy. She’s excessively dependent on other people’s opinions for her sense of identity and self-esteem—they’re her mirror—and she’s driven by the need to get others’ approval. So she moves through her life preoccupied with proving (or at least arguing) that she’s more beautiful, more brilliant, more talented, more desirable than other women. That, in her mind, entitles her to special treatment, and she doesn’t take it well, to put it mildly, when people don’t agree. She’s jealous, envious—and highly defensive when challenged. As you might guess, her sense of empathy is highly impaired; she has very little interest in other people and their feelings, except as they can help her inflate her sense of well-being.
Narcissism wasn’t recognized as a personality disorder until 1980. Before that, it was common to play down even extreme narcissism, waving off the behavior with labels like self-centered, conceited, or egomaniacal. Now we realize that, while severe narcissists are not crazy—that is, disconnected from reality and unable to function—they have a different circuitry board than others. No one knows exactly why that is, and mental health professionals have been struggling for years to figure out what creates this personality disorder. For a time it was believed that early trauma or overindulgence led those with the disorders to create a false self, but new evidence supports the idea that the cause is primarily genetic or physiological.
What we know concretely is that people with NPD behave in ways that are highly dramatic, emotional, and sometimes bizarre. And we know that severely narcissistic mothers are dysfunctional and destructive to their daughters.
If you recognized your own mother in the descriptions above, it was probably a relief to see the truth, difficult though it is, in full sunlight. But while a description of traits is extremely useful in identifying what you’re dealing with, on paper it seems almost disembodied. It doesn’t come anywhere near touching your emotional turmoil and the hurt your mother has caused you. Terms like “lack of empathy” can’t begin to capture the sense of emptiness you feel when you try to get some kind of consistent understanding from a severely narcissistic mother.
A Mistress of the Three D’s:
Drama, Deflection, and Denial
Dana: Upstaged and Ignored by the Drama Queen
Dana, a bright and charming thirty-eight-year-old, told me she was exhausted from trying to balance the needs of a husband, a job in public relations, two young sons, and a severely narcissistic mother. She said that she had a good life—except for the times when she was expected to be around her mother. This caused her a great deal of anxiety, which was spilling over into her marriage and her relationship with her sons. She told me about an infuriating recent event.
DANA: “At a family dinner I announced to everyone that I was expecting my third child. My relatives—aunts and uncles and cousins and my brother—were thrilled, and they all crowded around me, laughing and hugging. Suddenly my mother got up from the table and did a pretend faint on the floor. It was pretty shocking, and of course almost everyone left my side to tend to her. I couldn’t imagine what had happened to her, and my father ran to get her some water. When she got to her feet she looked at me and said, ‘How can you do this to me? How can you worry me like this? You know you aren’t that strong. Now I’m going to have to be taking you to the doctor all the time!’ I didn’t know what she was talking about! I’m very healthy! She never took me to the doctor with my other children. Why did she have to turn a happy evening into such a Greek tragedy?”
Dana was outraged, but not really surprised. The fainting incident was typical of what she had experienced most of her life with her mother, Evelyn.
DANA: “I guess she’s always been a diva. I have this clear memory from when I was little. I was maybe five years old and some of my parents’ friends had come over. I’d been taking tap dance lessons and I was walking around in my tap shoes because I loved the way they clicked on the wood floor. Somebody put on some music and asked me to dance. I was a little shy, but I got up and started to do this simple routine I’d been practicing. Mom practically bolted out of her chair and started doing a very elaborate dance herself. Everybody whistled and applauded and forgot about me. I was really confused—what harm could it do to let a little kid have her moment? Anyhow, that’s what it was like growing up. It was always like that whenever I started to get some attention. I might as well have been invisible when she was around.”
Dana told me that growing up, she felt as though anything she did, and anything that happened to her, was just an opening for her mother to snatch some attention. When Dana sprained her arm in fourth grade, her mother scarcely comforted her before launching into stories of her own skiing injuries—which were “far worse than this.” To Dana’s deep chagrin, her mother showed up at her high school graduation wearing a revealing, over-the-top dress that “made everyone stare.” And even though Dana was an adult now, the drama queen behavior hadn’t abated. Evelyn made almost everything involving her daughter about herself. That’s what narcissists do.
ADDICTED TO ADORATION
It’s not uncommon for the narcissistic mother to deflate almost physically when she’s not the center of attention. Adoration is her drug, allowing her to maintain her sense of self-importance, and she’s lost without it. There is an old Lon Chaney movie called The Mummy’s Tomb. The creature at the center of the story needs the leaves of a special plant called tana to stay alive, and the monster wreaks havoc in his quest to get it. The narcissist demands her tana leaves, adoration, to survive emotionally, and she’ll go to great lengths to ensure that she has a steady supply.
Because she has such a flimsy sense of self, and seems to lack a core sense of worth that would allow her to feel good about herself even if no one noticed or praised her, all is not right in her world unless she is being fussed over. There’s a certain pathos in this. It’s almost as though she fears she’ll disappear if the people in her life look away—so she demands that they don’t. Attention must be paid—and whether she reaches for subtle one-upmanship or grand performances, she is practiced at using drama to get it.
But only positive attention soothes her. Criticism, or even disagreement of any sort, triggers inner turmoil, which is so uncomfortable for her that a pair of disorienting defenses kick in immediately to make you regret ever confronting her about her behavior. First, she’ll deflect any discomfort from herself onto you, so the focus always stays on what she describes as your deficiencies as opposed to her own shortcoming
s. That generally works well enough to ward off complaints and direct discussions. But if pressed, she may simply deny your version of what happened. Those are the narcissist’s Three D’s: Drama, Deflection, and Denial, a crazy-making, guilt-inducing combination that guarantees that it will be extremely difficult to express your differences—or stand up for yourself.
Dana had lived with her mother’s drama for so long that as an adult, she had largely come to the conclusion that complaining was futile. “I was floored by that fainting episode,” Dana told me, “but I was going to let it go. It was just so typical it wasn’t worth getting upset about.”
Her husband, Chad, though, pushed her to make a rare attempt to protest. And what happened next is a textbook case of deflection.
DANA: “Chad saw how I was avoiding talking to Mom about what happened, and he said, ‘Look, I think it’s time you talked to your mother. She’s been pulling this stuff a long time.’ I couldn’t argue with that. So I made myself go over and see her. I was pretty anxious because I’ve tried bringing up what she does, and I always end up feeling frustrated, even worse than before.
“I said, ‘Mom, I really need to talk to you about something,’ and right away I could see her tense up, but I kept going. I was proud of myself for that. I said, ‘It’s really hurtful and embarrassing for me that you get so dramatic when I’m saying something important about my life. That fainting thing you pulled at the dinner last week was pretty shocking. I’m not having another baby to punish you or hurt you in any way, so why did you have to act like I was doing something awful to you?’
“ ‘I don’t know why you had to get pregnant again,’ she told me. ‘You know how I worry about you.’
“I said, ‘Mom, my getting pregnant had nothing to do with you, and that scene at our dinner was a fiasco. You always have to have the spotlight, and it seems like you can’t stand it when I get any attention.’
“The next thing I knew, she did what she always does when I try to point out anything to her about herself. She took her thumb and index finger and started to rub the bridge of her nose, like she had a headache. Then she puts her head down and goes, ‘Honey, this is so difficult for me. You make it sound as though I’m the worst mother in the world. I really can’t handle your anger right now.’ ”
Dana’s mother expertly shifted any discomfort she felt to her daughter, never responding at all except to say, in words and gestures well chosen for their dramatic, guilt-inducing effect, “Look how much you’ve hurt me.”
THE DEFLECTOR SHIELD DEFENSE
Deflection is a powerful defense for a mother with severe narcissism. She uses it to keep you at a distance so she doesn’t have to consider, or even acknowledge, your feelings and the possibility that she may be in the wrong.
She can’t afford to let anyone challenge her image of herself as perfect. Invincible. Above reproach. Just as the Great and Powerful Oz is a front for the flawed and all-too-human figure behind the curtain, the image the severely narcissistic mother projects hides her deeply insecure core. She protects that shaky inner architecture by fending off anything that would force her to examine or question herself. It’s unthinkable for her to admit there are any cracks in her facade, perhaps because on some level she knows that if she did, the whole house of cards would collapse. A healthier person, confronted with a disagreement or an unflattering image of her own behavior, might react with curiosity or doubt or sadness. She’d most likely allow the possibility of another point of view. But any time you disagree with the severe narcissist, or criticize her, her raw nerve endings tell her only one thing: She’s been attacked.
Evelyn was certainly no screamer as she rubbed her nose and put her head down on the table in response to her daughter’s complaints. But behind the passive front, there was plenty of heat and aggression. With body language that suggested “You’ve hurt me so much I can’t hold my head up” and exaggerations like “You make it sound like I’m the worst mother in the world,” she took the offensive and shifted the blame to Dana.
DANA: “I didn’t see what she was doing. She never screamed at me or even seemed to be mad. But I can definitely see how critical and angry she was. I felt it in my body. My neck and face got hot, and my stomach clenched. All I did was try to stand up for myself. She’s so good at making me feel like I’m the one who’s out of line.”
LYING, GASLIGHTING, AND DENIAL
A severely narcissistic mother’s anger, criticism, and thoughtless dismissal of her daughter’s feelings are painful and destructive. And every daughter clings to the belief that if only her mother could see that behavior and its effects, she’d stop. Daughters try again and again to hold up a mirror, hoping that this time, things will be different. But severe narcissists stay true to form, responding to any confrontation with drama followed by deflection and a focus on your shortcomings. When that doesn’t produce the desired results, they turn to what may be their most frustrating and infuriating tool: denial. Confrontation makes them feel cornered, and when that happens, they can’t and won’t validate your experience or acknowledge their part in it. Rather, they rewrite reality and tell you that what you saw you didn’t see, what you experienced didn’t happen, and what you call real is actually a figment of your imagination.
It’s extremely disorienting, as Dana saw. Her mother didn’t stop with conveniently developing a headache to silence her daughter’s complaint about her drama queen behavior. She threw denial into the mix:
DANA: “It got worse, though. She got up from her chair and was heading for her bedroom when she looked at me and said in this really calm voice, ‘You know, dear, I just don’t understand how you can say I fainted. I got excited and sat down. Don’t I have a right to do that? Your hormones must be making your memory fuzzy. You’d better go now. I need to lie down.’
“At that point I felt so confused and guilty that I just slunk out.”
A severe narcissist is highly unlikely to admit being wrong, no matter how egregious her behavior, and she’ll say whatever she feels she must to portray herself as being in the right. She’ll lie about what she has promised, lie about behavior that you’ve witnessed, and lie about what other people have said and done. Often, as Dana saw, that involves not just lying, but also turning the tables and calling you a liar. She may throw you totally off balance by denying your very reality with lines like:
• That never happened.
• I never said that.
• Are you sure you didn’t dream this?
• You have a vivid imagination.
Then she’ll step up the attack with criticism like:
• You’re so unforgiving.
• You’re so overly sensitive.
• I was only kidding. What happened to your sense of humor?
• You always take me the wrong way.
As she challenges your memory and your ability to think rationally, she undermines your perceptions of reality, leaving you confused and wondering if she could be right. You may even begin to believe her lies about you.
In the classic movie Gaslight, a husband tries to convince his wife she’s crazy by, among other things, hiding her possessions and telling her she lost them, or making small changes around the house and denying it when she points them out. When she says, “It’s getting darker in here. You’ve turned down the gaslights,” he says, “Nobody’s touched the lights. They’re bright as ever. You’re probably not feeling well.” Gaslighting is a common tool of severe narcissists. When it serves them, they’ll insist that night is day and black is white. And the anger, pain, or upsetting behavior you complained to your mother about? You must have dreamed it.
Sharon: Stung by Narcissistic Rage
Severe narcissists can take on much bolder hues than Evelyn’s passive-aggressive expression of displeasure. When life has disappointed them or jangled their sense of entitlement, some mothers not only make their daughters scapegoats but also lash out at them with rage.
Sharon, a single, forty-year-old do
ctor’s receptionist, came to see me for help dealing with anxiety. She had a master’s degree in business, but she didn’t seem able to get a job commensurate with her education. She told me, “My panic attacks have flared up again.”
I asked her if she had any clue about what might have triggered them.
SHARON: “Well, for one thing, I just had a terrible experience with my mother. It’s an old story… . About two weeks ago, I had lunch with her. She and my father have been separated for about six months, and she was planning to write him a letter because she wanted to get back with him, and I told her I didn’t think it was a good idea—they always seemed so miserable together.
“She absolutely screamed at me. She said: ‘How dare you try and keep your father and me apart? You’re cruel and immature—I couldn’t be more ashamed of you. No daughter has ever been so cruel to her own mother.’ By the time she was done I felt like the lowest person on earth.”
Sharon had been bombarded with the full force of narcissistic rage. By not supporting her mother’s reconciliation attempt, she had unknowingly tapped into the bottomless pit of her mother’s inability to tolerate criticism, opposition, or defeat. Like so many daughters of severely narcissistic mothers, Sharon was made to take the blame for her mother’s unhappiness. The message was clear: “Of course I’m unhappy—who wouldn’t be with such a cruel and heartless daughter.”
Yelling, screaming, and insults to your worth are common responses to even neutral comments that disagree with the enraged narcissist’s point of view. You’re judged as good or bad depending on whether you totally support her. And she may attack with all the fury of a wounded animal, with no thought to the effect her words have on you.
“YOU’RE NO GOOD”
Criticism flows from seriously narcissistic mothers anytime they feel insecure, disappointed, or deflated. Like all insecure people, they build themselves up by tearing you down. If you’re enjoying yourself, you must be neglecting something important, or getting in trouble. Your eyes are too small. Your nose is too big. You’re too fat, too thin. Your legs are too heavy, or they look like toothpicks. They may flatter you by spinning grandiose fantasies around you, but when you fall short of their ideals—that is, when the fantasies are revealed to be just that—they criticize even more.
Mothers Who Can't Love: A Healing Guide for Daughters Page 3