5 Ways a Narcissistic Mother Impacts Your Love Life
Your narcissistic mother has a deep impact on your love life. The way she treated you becomes the blueprint for how you navigate your adult relationships.
In this article, you’ll learn five reasons this happens so you can start to make sense of confusing and ongoing patterns that can feel out of your control to change.
familiarity
The first one is familiarity. If you find yourself in adult relationships that are one-sided, where you’re not respected or you're over-functioning, that is because this is what feels familiar to you.
It might be the reason why you feel as though you're attracting toxic people or you always end up in relationships like this.
And when I say familiar, it doesn't mean it's comfortable or feels good. (Because remember, this is a survival pattern.)
The reason you put up with people who don't treat you well is because in childhood you learned that's what you had to do to survive. Your mother treated you abominably, but there was nothing you could do about that.
If you tried to stand up for yourself or set boundaries, you would get in trouble. You would risk punishment or you would be rejected or abandoned.
That’s why you might let people get away with things in relationships that other people wouldn't. This is the familiar pattern. This is what feels normal to you.
When you're in survival, feeling good is very low on the list of priorities. Staying alive is what we're trying to do.
2. Low self-worth
Number two has to do with your sense of worthiness. You might feel, whether it's conscious or unconscious, that you don't deserve any better.
There's a sense that you don't get what you want and an underlying belief that you don't deserve it. So, if you have this feeling that stems from your narcissistic mother, then you're not going to have the love life of your dreams.
And getting what you deserve can be scary. If you have a healthy partner, they're going to see you. They're going to want to get to know you on a deeper level.
And there is a part of us as daughters of narcissistic mothers who are afraid of that. Because remember, the real you was never acceptable in the home.
You might be repelling healthy partners or friends because you don't want to be truly seen because that feels too threatening.
3. You don’t choose
You may have a sense that you don't get to choose.
I remember when my daughter, who's now 26, was in grade nine. She came home and said, "There's a girl in my class that I want to be friends with."
That was her desire. That was her intention. And she set out to become friends with that girl.
She decided who was going to be her friend. And I was so proud of that because it showed me the self-esteem she had that made her believe she got to choose who to spend time with.
Because my mother was narcissistic, she had a lot of control over me. I didn't feel like I had a choice in anything.
So, I didn't choose people. I just let whoever wanted me have me. They did the choosing and I went along with it.
I never thought to myself, do I actually like these people? Do I actually want to be with these people? It was more like, they'll have me and that's good enough.
For that reason, I had a lot of frenemies and abusive boyfriends. Because if you're not actively choosing who you spend time with, you're not going to end up with the best.
4. love is hard
When you grow up with a narcissistic mother, the impact on your love life is that chaos and trying to win someone over feels like love.
Whereas peace and someone accepting you as you are, doesn't feel right. In relationships, you're constantly having to explain yourself or reassure the person or fight to be seen and heard.
You are trying to be good enough to win this person's love. And that of course is the pattern from childhood with your mother.
No matter what you did, it was never good enough, but you had to keep trying because not having her love wasn't an option.
To survive, we have to win her love. That's necessary.
And as an adult you no longer need that. You don’t need this boyfriend or friend to survive, but on a deeper level it feels like you do.
Not having their approval or their love and acceptance starts to feel life-threatening, just like it did when you were a child.
So, that's why it's so hard for you to walk away from someone like an emotionally unavailable partner. Instead, you keep trying to win their love.
If I can win their love, you think, they’ll see that I'm lovable and it will heal that trauma from the past. But of course, all you're doing is recreating the same painful dynamic in a new relationship.
And there's nothing you can do to change the other person. For whatever reason (their own trauma, maybe) they are not able to give you what you need.
My husband was like that. Wouldn't matter what I did or said, I was never going to get the attention and love and support I wanted from him. He just wasn't capable of that.
And this is also why you might be attracted to people chemically who are really bad for you. For example, I can remember meeting someone and having a very strong attraction to them, feeling very drawn to them.
But I had already started doing my healing, so I had to ask myself why, because he was not giving me attention and didn't seem that interested.
He was there physically, but not emotionally, and barely able to make eye contact. But I was so attracted to him and that was based on a trauma bond.
Something lit up in me because here was an opportunity to fix the past. If I can make this person love me, I can prove to my parents vicariously that I am in fact lovable.
Thank goodness that didn’t turn into a relationship. I had healed enough where I could extract myself and we didn't even have a second date.
I realized that this chemical, whatever was firing, gave me bad information. It was based on some unhealed part of me that still believed I could fix the past by trying to make things work with this person. But with whom it would only create the same cycle of pain that I had been through in the past.
So, be careful of strong chemistry and don't be afraid to allow attraction to grow rather than expecting it right off the bat. Because sometimes the men who are best for you are not the ones who are going to light you up on the first date — maybe the opposite.
5. Poor boundaries
Finally , how your narcissistic mother impacts your love life is due to the fact that you have poor boundaries. In fact, she taught you to have poor boundaries.
And she did that by withdrawing love anytime you wanted to set them. So, in order to keep her love, you had to have no boundaries.
It was intelligent of you as a child to have no boundaries because that was a good survival skill. It would have been dangerous to try to have boundaries with your mother.
As an adult, of course, not having boundaries becomes maladaptive, which means it's holding you back from the best in your life. It's keeping your life very small.
And it often gives narcissists a green light. These types of people will gauge if you are a good target by testing your boundaries early.
They will do things at the beginning of the relationship to see what they can get away with. I had a relationship with a narcissist in the past and he tested my boundaries by gaining access to my home earlier than I normally would have allowed that.
And then when they see they've gotten past one boundary, they'll push it to another. So, the next boundary they cross might be sex.
If you had said you don't want to have sex until a certain point in the relationship, they will push that by using their charm and flattery and love bombing so it doesn’t feel coercive.
You go along with it because you want to. But in fact, it is more proof that you have poor boundaries. Because boundaries are not only for the other person, they're also for yourself.
So, if you have a boundary that you don't have sex until a certain point in the relationship, you are going to deny yourself that pleasure to stay true to your boundary.
And if they see that, "Oh, I can blow through her boundaries, no problem, ” that means you’re a great target.
That's how they gain entry into your life and get their hooks in and create that trauma bond. So, it's going to be very hard for you to leave.
Sometimes people who don't understand this dynamic will ask, "Why doesn't she just leave?" But there is a calculated campaign to make it very difficult for you to leave.
They use tactics like breadcrumbing, which is intermittent reinforcement, to get you to stay. This is what makes the relationship addictive even though it's painful.
A lot of people think it's only material, and they explain it to themselves by saying, "Well, financially she can't take care of herself." But it's often much deeper than that.
There is brainwashing and mental manipulation going on at a high level that the narcissist uses to keep you where you are and make it incredibly difficult on a psychological level, not just a material level, to leave.
next steps
Those were five examples of how your narcissistic mother can impact your love life. I hope this has given you something to look out for when navigating relationships, be they romantic, friendship, or otherwise.
And it’s given you an explanation as to why things in your relationships have not gone the way you wanted them to; how you keep ending up in the same relationships over and over again; and a little insight into what you can do about that.
Over the past decade, I’ve developed a 4-step method for healing from a narcissistic mother. To learn more about my proven process, click here to get a brief video walkthrough of my 4R Roadmap.
