What you need to know about narcissistic mother recovery
If you’re looking for help with narcissistic mother recovery, there are a few things you need to know. Through my healing journey, I’ve learned that typical self-help strategies are useless in the face of this type of abuse. Here’s what to do instead.
Recognize the dynamic.
Your mother and the narcissistic family system are not interested in connection and authenticity. For this reason, trying to get them to understand and validate you is a waste of your precious energy.
Narcissistic family dynamics are born out of a desire to avoid change and growth. That means any effort on your part to get through to your family by revealing the truth is going to backfire.
They don’t want to see the light; they prefer to stay in the dark. They don’t want to see your side of things; they want to continue demonizing you so they don’t have to look at themselves.
Their inability to understand you is intentional. They don’t want to see, hear, or know you. Not the real you, anyway. They insist that you keep playing the role that allows the family system to function.
That means everything revolves around your narcissistic mother and her needs. Even though those needs are completely backward and the opposite of what any normal person desires.
For example, you want love, healthy intimacy, honesty, and mutual validation. Your mother wants power, control, undivided attention, and to always be right.
She will never let you see her true self because her whole personality has developed to hide that. She will throw you under the bus over and over to protect her thin skin. That’s what you’re signing up for when you keep trying to connect with her.
2. Regulate your emotions.
You’re constantly triggered because you were never allowed to express yourself or your emotions. You live in a constant state of fight or flight because your mother withdrew her love so often and this felt like life or death.
The child who still lives inside you was never given the comfort and support it deserved. So, now when someone treats you with disrespect, you feel like that child again, trapped without a voice and like your life is in danger.
They don’t even have to disrespect you. Sometimes an innocuous comment can set you off.
That’s the traumatized child who never got what it needed. When you feel triggered, that’s unresolved trauma in your body that makes you feel like you’re right back where the trauma first took place.
The child inside needs you to comfort and soothe her now. To let her know that she does matter, she’s not at the whims of others, and she’s allowed to express herself without ramifications.
3. Reparent yourself.
This means giving yourself the care and attention you never received. Accept the limitations of your mother and other family members.
That doesn’t mean condoning their behavior, but realizing that hoping they will change only keeps you stuck.
Stop going back to an empty well for water. Learn to pay attention to and fulfill your own needs instead of hoping somebody else will.
Tune into yourself instead of focusing on other people. Go to the bathroom when you need to. Eat when you’re hungry and drink when you’re thirsty.
Make a list of things that give you pleasure and start doing those for yourself. Take yourself on a date.
Determine your values and start to live by them. Set boundaries that tell other people what you expect from them.
Yes, this will be hard and feel extremely uncomfortable. That’s why we call it work. Be kind and patient with yourself as you learn how to love yourself in a new way.
4. reclaim your identity.
The reason self-help and therapy never worked for me is that they pasted surface strategies onto a false self. Instead of changing from the inside out, they encouraged changes from the outside in.
For example, positive thinking and behavior modification taught me to police myself instead of getting to know myself.
This only led to more perfectionism and hypervigilance. Instead, I needed to get curious about the me inside that was never allowed to show up.
Who was I when I wasn’t trying to please other people? Who would I have become if I wasn’t forced to pretend to be someone else to please my mother?
You might have to go far back in childhood to remember a time when you operated from your true self. Something happened early that told you it was not safe to be yourself.
Now that you’re an adult, you may have a personality that is a collection of coping mechanisms you’ve used to survive your mother.
It’s time to chip away at those in the same why you’d declutter a messy home. These things served you at one time, but now they’re no longer needed and they have to go.
If you want to be free and find true narcissistic mother recovery, you’ll need to leave that old adaptive personality behind.
Once the true self emerges, boundaries become easier to set and your nervous system settles down. You see an end to health symptoms if you had them, and a desire to create the life that you want…not what others want from you.
next steps
Now you know the key factors in narcissistic mother recovery. These are often missed in mainstream self-help and therapy that deal with thoughts and behaviors instead of the nervous system and inner child.
To go more in-depth with these tools, watch this training from my recent event on how to heal your mother wound. Enrollment is open for Narcissistic Mother Recovery until February 3. Learn more here.
