Yesterday I took part in a discussion that ensued from the following quote: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." (I personally prefer the word ignorance over stupidity.) The person opening the discussion asked if we could think of situations with our narcissistic parents where this may have applied to more than the narcissism itself and I found the discussion very thought-provoking. It was pointed out that often people act out, ignorant to the way their actions are affecting other people. Also that early in parenthood, mistakes are made in ignorance because the person thinks that that is just the way things are done because that's the way their parents did it. An example that was used was the overuse of spanking and how for a lot of people that was just the go-to response when a child misbehaved.
When narcissism is part of the mix, you do experience many instances of things being done maliciously and so it's easy to lump all the bad experiences into the same category of "malicious." As I thought about this it brought to mind a few bizarre experiences I had with my mother that didn't make sense to me at the time, and I've been reminded of the phenomenon of the narcissistic wound, well explained at this link:
With someone like my mother, any perceived threat elicits a rage response. It doesn't matter whether that perceived threat is real or not and it can come from something that has absolutely nothing to do with them. My mother is like a wounded animal who has so much personal unresolved pain but if you try and get too close to her, she'll strike out at you over what she PERCEIVES to be an attack. Sometimes she is malicious but I think a lot of her acting out is rooted in always being on alert for attack.
Looking at the overuse of spanking as an example--in my mom's case, she took personal offense to my husband and I choosing other methods first when discipline was called for with our children. I never said, "You were a bad mom for spanking me," but she took it as a personal attack that I was choosing to simply do something differently than how she did it. The same thing applied when I chose to nurse when I had my first baby. She had no desire to nurse, and often made derogatory remarks about women who did when I was growing up. Nursing is something I wanted to experience, and so that is the choice I made and she had the same internal response to that as the one I described about her having at us attempting to discipline our children differently. When my husband called her to tell her the baby was here, one of the first things she asked was if I was nursing. He replied that I was and she asked how it was going, with this tone that made it really obvious that it was a given that it was a horrible experience. He said, "It's going really well and she absolutely loves it!" She said nothing. It seemed to bother her that not only was I trying it but that it was going well. When we came to visit (we lived out of state) she treated me like I was dirty for nursing my baby.
I had a really bizarre experience when we first moved back here to where I grew up and lived with her while we got settled (biggest mistake ever). One day my daughter, who had just turned four, was acting up. I looked at my mom and said something along the lines of, "I promise we don't encourage this." I addressed the issue with my daughter by telling her she needed to stop (we had chosen as parents to do that first as kind of a warning, and then if the behavior persisted we would do a timeout or whatever). I had to go downstairs for something, I think I was making the beds, and all of a sudden my mom was down there in my face, very angry. She had a lot of malice in her voice when she said, "With that situation upstairs were you insinuating that I was a terrible mother because I spanked you?" and proceeded to scream at me for about 10 minutes. When I tried to clarify and defend myself she just got angrier. I was completely bewildered at how she came up with that because I wasn't insinuating anything personal to her.
Here is another example: My daughter, now a young adult, suffers from severe multiple food allergies and it wasn't discovered that this is what was causing her some serious, pervasive health problems until she was about 18, with the worst allergy not being completely understood or identified until she was 19. Almost two years ago I went to lunch with my mom, and as we were eating I was telling her about what we were finding out. I was really distressed because the extent of what was wrong was so overwhelming. I had to relearn how to cook and was on a really steep learning curve for identifying safe food sources because of all the hidden sources one of the allergies presents. My daughter was dangerously sick and I needed someone to talk to. You are supposed to be able to turn to your mother during times of distress for support and comfort. Instead she monopolized the conversation and started rambling about other people she knew who had had to have carpets, etc. removed from their home and I could hardly get a word in edgewise. A little later in the conversation I mentioned that as I had studied and learned about her allergies I had started to make connections between some physical symptoms I had had for years that didn't make sense and possible undetected food allergies in myself. I had testing done and I was correct. As I was sharing this with my mother, all of a sudden there was this cold silence and she stopped talking. I was pretty bewildered. She was cold for the rest of the time, including in the car as I drove to take her back home. Then it occurred to me that she was taking me sharing what I had figured out about myself as a personal assault on her parenting. I was labeled a "picky eater" and was forced to eat food that I found repulsive, to the point that I sat at the table for hours sometimes trying to make myself eat the food on my plate. I was then told I was a bad girl because I was being stubborn and was whipped and had things taken away from me. As I made the connection on my food sensitivities and had my own testing done, I realized that I was intuitively turning away from food that hurt me. This was an amazing discovery to me. In sharing this with her I didn't accuse her of being a bad parent and I didn't get into all the whipping, etc. but I did mention that I felt that I was instinctively not wanting to eat food that hurt me. From all of that, instead of having an "aha" moment herself (which could be beneficial to her because based on what I've experienced I think it is very possible she has food allergies herself) she became defensive and enraged that I would dare blame my problems on her. This was the beginning of what has become a horrible two years of coldness and unkindness during a time when our daughter, as well as my husband and I, were in need of kindness, love and support. I will write about this in more detail in a future post.
My mother used to tell me all the time as I was growing up that someday when I was a mother myself, I would understand how hard it was and I would be just like her. Well, I'm not. And I guess it has bothered her that her prophecy didn't come true.
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