Anonymous wrote:I often wonder the kind of person I could have been if I had the gift of healthy non-narcissitic parents.

Same here, although I admit that's probably not the most productive use of time.

I often wonder the kind of person I could have been if I had the gift of healthy non-narcissitic parents.

Anonymous wrote:I'm not jealous. I'm just incredibly sad. In my case, it's my father. I hate the fact that every interaction with him is so exhausting and hurtful. I feel so much grief that he will mess with me for the rest of my life and we will never have a close, loving relationship. I feel red hot fury that he cannot see the part he plays in our terrible relationship, but I'm working on accepting it.

So I'm not jealous of other people. I'm just sad for myself.

I'm one of the PPs, and while I get an occasional pang of envy when I see the relationship that one of my closest friends has with her folks (who are what parents should be), it's mostly just sadness for me too. The therapist I saw at the time I was working through these issues just told me that I had to mourn the parental relationship I won't have like it's the death of a person. It's dead and gone and never actually existed in the first place. That has made it easier to cope when I feel sadness, anger, or guilt or when people don't understand why I don't have anything to do with my father. It also makes it easier to ignore his attempts to reach out. I know nothing will change, nothing about him has changed, and the end result will be same if I give him yet another chance. But it's also a wound that will never fully heal.

Anonymous wrote:DH dad is NPD. BIL is BPD and MIL is DPD. The household is so utterly dysfunctional that I was traumatized when I went to help them 2 years ago for 2 weeks. I felt I was dying.

DH is a lovely husband and fantastic human being. He is loved and adored and has high moral standards. He has created a life away from them but still treats them with compassion. We have been together for 33 years since we were 21.

Sooner or later we will have to take care of MIL.

Child of a narc mom. No, you don’t have to take care of MIL. Let BIL do it or she can hire help or go to a home. You don’t owe crazy people anything if they have been that awful to you.

I'm not jealous. I'm just incredibly sad. In my case, it's my father. I hate the fact that every interaction with him is so exhausting and hurtful. I feel so much grief that he will mess with me for the rest of my life and we will never have a close, loving relationship. I feel red hot fury that he cannot see the part he plays in our terrible relationship, but I'm working on accepting it.

So I'm not jealous of other people. I'm just sad for myself.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm jealous of people who had normal childhoods with healthy parents.

I'm jealous of people who can have functional relationships with their parents as adults.

I'm jealous of people whose mother doesn't lie and gaslight to their faces and then posts about God and Jesus all over Facebook to all her friends crowing about what a wonderful Christian she is.


Why wasn't I deserving of good parents?

I often think this, too. I wonder what I did in a past life to deserve this. Was I a Nazi? I must have done something horrible.

Like others, I do not trust people and have difficulty asking for help. It's probably hurt me professionally. I'm used to being in "go it alone" mode, bc that's what I did to survive.

In middle age I've tired of people who are tiring like my mother and mil. I only want to deal with people who are straightforward, no drama. I have to find that outside our families though. SIL's new boyfriend is a jerk. I don't want to be around anyone who is exhausting.

Me too OP, me too. Once my mom passed away I was sad for the relationship we never had, but it was ultimately a relief. So there is that to look forward to.

I'm completely over exhausting drama filled relatives too. It's not like they actually help me when I have actually problems (not drama.)

Anonymous wrote:I'm jealous of people who had normal childhoods with healthy parents.

I'm jealous of people who can have functional relationships with their parents as adults.

I'm jealous of people whose mother doesn't lie and gaslight to their faces and then posts about God and Jesus all over Facebook to all her friends crowing about what a wonderful Christian she is.


Why wasn't I deserving of good parents?

I often think this, too. I wonder what I did in a past life to deserve this. Was I a Nazi? I must have done something horrible.

Like others, I do not trust people and have difficulty asking for help. It's probably hurt me professionally. I'm used to being in "go it alone" mode, bc that's what I did to survive.

In middle age I've tired of people who are tiring like my mother and mil. I only want to deal with people who are straightforward, no drama. I have to find that outside our families though. SIL's new boyfriend is a jerk. I don't want to be around anyone who is exhausting.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Therapy. Supposedly you can "reparent" yourself to provide yourself with the love and support you needed but did not get. Also, there is a process to mourn what you did not have. I am not there yet myself, but somewhere along the road. I used to cry over other people's facebook posts about how awesome their moms are. I even cried over the ones who were missing their dead moms, because I knew I would not miss mine.

A woman I knew once told me that I could never understand the pain of losing her mother young. And she was right -- I can't imagine that loss. I'm sure it's the kind of thing you struggle with for a long time, maybe forever.

But she could never understand the pain of growing up with a mom with a serious personality disorder and having to care for that person well into adulthood. I didn't envy that woman losing her mother, but I did envy the simplicity of being able to say "My mom died when I was young. It was hard," and have people recognize that this was a difficult thing to go through. There is no simple way to explain my grief over my childhood or my relationship with my mother. I'm sure that woman thought I was lucky because I still had my mom in my life.

+1

Anonymous wrote:DH dad is NPD. BIL is BPD and MIL is DPD. The household is so utterly dysfunctional that I was traumatized when I went to help them 2 years ago for 2 weeks. I felt I was dying.

DH is a lovely husband and fantastic human being. He is loved and adored and has high moral standards. He has created a life away from them but still treats them with compassion. We have been together for 33 years since we were 21.

Sooner or later we will have to take care of MIL.

We have this dynamic too. DH is a great guy but visits with his family always consist of his parents shouting or crying or some sort of adult meltdown taking place. Then it blows over and we are expected to act like the whole thing never happened. Rinse and repeat, visit after visit. When they stay with us, they lack any sort of basic respect (FIL watches tv on full blast until 2:00am and asking him to turn it off turns into an awkward battle). I often regret ignoring these red flags while dating DH, but not sure I could have predicted the mess of living in it. Pre-Covid, they rarely left their home and any attempt to gently coax them to a restaurant or park or outing was met with a fight. It's exhausting.

The whole situation used to stress me, but as I've talked to them less and less over time, I feel a bit free.

I used to get very frustrated with people who couldn’t understand a mother treating us as our mother treats us. I felt misunderstood and judged by others. Now, I just have this sense that they’re lucky. It must be awesome to have grown up with a loving parent, to the point that you can’t conceive of a mom being hateful and vicious to her own kids. I had a period of being jealous, in between these things. Just try to be happy for people.

Very few people IRL understand what it’s like, and that is a wonderful thing. What a cynical bunch the world would be if they all had the same experience as us!!

I relate to this so much. I envy my friends who can have a normal conversation with their parents or ask for advice or just a listening ear. I never had that. I can barely even fathom what that would be like. My parents will never be my friends as we age. Thank God for therapy and chosen family. I still struggle with self-esteem, being able to ask for help, and truly trusting people. Narcissistic abuse is the gift that keeps on giving -- I have to always stay on top of my self-talk and patterns of thinking, otherwise, I devolve into the kid I was at home, being told I was useless, stupid, worthless, unlovable. The last thing I want is to perpetuate that abuse.

Sending love to anyone with parents like this. It's so hard, and people with functional families really struggle to truly understand what it's like.

Oh I get this! I do have to keep friends who are close with their own moms at arms' length.

Anonymous wrote:Same here. Super jealous. I have talked to my therapist about this many times. I have decided I just can’t be friends with people who are super close to their mentally healthy parents and have a lot of emotional and physical support. I just can’t get past that. Isn’t that sad?

I 100% get this. For me it's a combination of the jealousy I feel about their families and their inability to understand basic things about my life. Like I struggle with self esteem and even though I am doing amazingly via therapy and lots of self work, I've had friends who were like "I don't get it, why don't you just assume that you are as good as anyone you might meet. That's what I do." When you try to explain that you've spent most of your life being told you are not a worthwhile person, you can't just snap into a healthy self image like that. It's a daily battle.

So now I limit my interaction with folks like this. I'm happy for them, but it is too painful to try and interact with them.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm jealous of people who had normal childhoods with healthy parents.

I'm jealous of people who can have functional relationships with their parents as adults.

I'm jealous of people whose mother doesn't lie and gaslight to their faces and then posts about God and Jesus all over Facebook to all her friends crowing about what a wonderful Christian she is.


Why wasn't I deserving of good parents?

I could have written this myself. Does your mom call your children and badmouth you? Mine does even though she has not been in my life for over a decade.

No, she just likes to paint me and my siblings as terrible and horrible children, she's always, always the victim never responsible for anything.

Well, at least she is consistent.
My mom never wanted me to exist ... in fact she told me she wanted to abort me but my dad (yes, she was married) convinced her not do it.
She adores one of my brothers and thinks he can do no wrong no matter how many ridiculous things he's done in his life.
She's treated the youngest one just like a normal mother should. I suppose that's why he is very successful, both in his job and personal life.

When I lived in the same city as she did, she would call my co-workers and badmouth me. She did the same thing with my guys I dated ... I have no idea who she got their phone numbers. I had to move thousands of miles away from her. She was so furious about not knowing where I was that she called a friend and made up a story that the police was after me. To the outside world she was a very well educated woman living an upper middle class lifestyle with her husband and children and many believed her words about me being mentally disturbed.

Honestly op. Cut her off not will be the beta thing you’ve ever done. You owe her nothing.