Karyl McBride

Narcissists commonly cut people off and out of their lives due to their shallow emotional style of seeing others as either good or bad. Everything is black or white to them.

Rather than engage in an argument, simply state your boundary over and over until your mother takes your point.

Remember, you can’t heal what you cannot feel, so narcissistic mothers usually tend to stay away from their inner emotional life.

As I am sure you are finding out, dealing with your mother is much easier after working on your own recovery. The reasons for this change are many: You are less reactive to her projections; you can set clear boundaries; because of your grief work, she is less able to trigger your pain; and because you have accepted that she has limitations, you no longer have great expectations of her.

Forgiveness is positive and healing when we can see that the person’s intentions were not to hurt us. But we do ourselves no good when we try to deny the pain we felt. And we can actually set ourselves up for further harm when we don’t deal with the reality that we were hurt and that the person is likely to hurt us again—whether inadvertently or on purpose.

I counsel you to pardon only someone who is accountable for her behavior, when she has owned up to it, has become conscious of it, and is truly sorry for having done it. While this may sound harsh, not many narcissistic mothers do this, so I do not advocate pardons for most of them.

Even if you had no narcissism in your background, it would still be impossible to be a perfect parent. I have yet to meet one. In fact, if someone ever came to me in my role of mental health provider and claimed to be perfect in the parenting realm, I would likely grab the DSM and begin to assess some kind of delusional disorder.

To empathize involves identifying the feelings your child is expressing and telling him or her that you recognize the feeling in the moment: “I hear that you are angry.” “You are feeling sad.” “I see that you are very upset.” Being able to show empathy to a child at any age makes him or her feel real as well as important as a person.

No one can create my feelings, cause me to drink, force me to be aggressive toward others, make me depressed, make me hit or yell at my children, or drive too fast, or not follow the law, etc. I make my own decisions and have choices about almost everything. I am only a victim if I choose to be one.

remember that empathizing is not agreeing, it is acknowledging a real feeling.