5 Startling Lies Your Narcissistic Mother taught You

If you grew up with a narcissistic mother, you may have a very skewed view of yourself and the world. These limiting beliefs make life difficult to navigate and prevent you from enjoying life and relationships.

To begin to rewrite these beliefs, it’s important to understand where they started and how deep they go. Here are five lies your narcissistic mother taught you…

Not always with words, but with a cult-like conditioning that may have started as early as birth.

1. Your needs don’t matter

In a healthy home, caregivers prioritize the needs of the child. When the baby cries out for help, the mother responds to those needs, makes eye contact, and provides safety and security.

With a narcissistic mother, everything is about her. She will resent the baby’s needs, even believing the infant is behaving “badly” on purpose to spite her.

You learned early that doing what you wanted instead of what she wanted got you in trouble. That trouble looked like rejection, abandonment and a loss of love.

And since the connection with the caregiver is so vitally important to a child, she will do anything to preserve it…Including abandoning herself.

So, to keep yourself safe and alive, you kowtowed to her needs (for power, control, and attention) and became disconnected from your own.

2. You’re never enough

You may feel as though no matter what you do, it’s never enough. But you keep trying.

For decades, you’ve tied yourself in knots to win her approval, get her to notice you, or simply have a decent relationship with her.

But none of that is possible with a narcissistic mother.

She’s not capable of seeing you the way you want and deserve to be seen.

That motherly love you’re seeking is not there and never will be.

But you had to tell yourself that one day you would measure up and she would love you. Or that you could explain yourself well enough to be understood.

Because the alternative, which is the truth that she’s not capable of love or understanding, is too devastating for a child (or an adult child) to accept.

It was never about how good you were but how limited she was.

You’re better off taking all that energy you waste trying to forge a connection with her… and putting it on yourself by discovering your wants and needs outside your mother’s conditioning.

At The Rising Daughter summit, 15 speakers will teach you how to prioritize yourself. Get the details and register here.

3. Love is conditional

The next lie your narcissistic mother taught you is that her love was dependent on you doing what she wanted.

If you disobeyed, questioned, or tried to speak up for yourself, she withdrew her love. This looked like silent treatment or statements of disapproval. She may even have disowned you (my story).

If you were pretty enough, thin enough, or got the right job she might be happy with you. She’s not happy for you, but enjoys basking in your light.

However, if that light shines too brightly and takes the spotlight off her, you’re in the bad books again.

And since rejection by the primary caregiver feels like death to your nervous system, you’ll make yourself small to avoid that fate.

She doesn’t see you as an individual with her own thoughts, opinions, and desires.

To her, you are a mechanism through which she gets her needs met. And, as mentioned above, those needs are very different than a normal mother.

4. Mistakes are fatal

The fourth lie your narcissistic mother taught you is that you’re no good if you’re not perfect.

Unlike healthy households where mistakes are expected as part of the learning process… Mistakes are treated like crimes in the dysfunctional household.

You’re given no guidance, yet they expect you to know how to do everything right the first time.

Due to the conditioning, you believe mistakes are fatal and do everything you can to avoid them. This prevents you from exploring yourself and the world and keeps you hypervigilant and terrified of messing up.

It prevents you from pursuing your desires because you’re too busy overthinking and second-guessing yourself.

It creates imposter syndrome because you erroneously believe that everyone else has things figured out when you don’t. It prevents learning and growing because you don’t ask for help for fear of looking stupid.

It creates disease and addiction because you are so wound up from the pain of trying to hold it all together.

5. Your emotions are not welcome

Your narcissistic mother is incapable of supporting your emotions, so they were not allowed. Only her emotions were permitted and they were out of control, whether displayed in rages or the silent treatment.

As a survival skill, you focused on managing her emotional needs (which were dysfunctional) and suppressed your own.

This led to emotional dysregulation, a prime symptom of complex PTSD, which is why you feel triggered or have outbursts at the wrong people about the wrong things.

If left too long without processing, these unexpressed emotions will cause disease in your body.

The coping mechanisms you developed in childhood to survive your mother…become the very thing that will shorten your life as an adult.

next steps

But there is hope to reverse the damaging effects of these lies your narcissistic mother taught you.

Come to our free speaker series where 15 experts (most of whom have personal experience with a narcissist), will give you the education and practices you need to understand and escape from the lasting impact.

Learn more about The Rising Daughter summit and register here.