Reply to Anyone else have a toxic mother that everyone else thinks is so sweet?

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[quote=Anonymous]I had a really hard conversation once, just after the death of a dear friend from graduate school who was older than me and kind of a substitute mom, with a young woman who had worked with my mother and raved about how kind, encouraging and supportive my mother was and how lucky I was to have such a mother.

My mother was NEVER kind, encouraging or supportive of me - not in my entire life.  She actually seemed to 'get off' on being cruel to me, while she adored my brother who never ever did a single wrong thing in his life - even when he was screaming at her and calling her the C word, behaviors he learned from our abusive 'dad'.

I will never fully understand the psychology of it, but I think in short that my mother encouraged everyone in the family to scapegoat me because it reduced the amount of misogynistic abuse directed at her.

The closest I can come to labeling from the reading I've done is something along the lines of covert narcissism/fragile narcissism to describe my mother's behavior. Always sweet to people's faces, behaved like she wouldn't say poop if she had a mouthful - but behind people's backs she tore them down endlessly. Her behavior in that regard made me deeply untrustworthy of anybody's friendshop or love, because I grew up seeing my mother behave that way and knowing that behind the backs of her family members and friends she was always talking smack about them and believing herself beyond reproach and superior to everyone else - despite her truly heinous flaws, like enabling her husband to physically beat her children beginning in the womb and to viciously bully them psychologically their entire lives. All very weird, and very upsetting to witness and endure.

I'm grateful she chain smoked herself into an early grave and thus removed from me the burden of explaining to people why I estranged myself from her and her husband after 30 years of the toxic insanity.

And yes, my 'dad' was also a 'really great guy' who always made people laugh and who friends would tell me I was lucky to have as a 'dad.' It's chilling how effectively some people wear masks in public while behaving entirely differently behind closed doors with the people that are hostage to their 'affections.'

What I will say is that growing up with these personality disordered parents was a great foundation for being a criminal attorney as I was for several years - I learned not to trust people and that's basically essential if you're going to survive practicing criminal law.[/quote]

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