I was raised by a narcissist. Her toxic hooks were in real deep, and the marks of her harm are still revealing themselves even several years after I finally was able to break free of her (though frankly I don’t really feel like I’ll ever be free). Sometimes they show up in unexpected ways – like feeling really awkward about accepting support for my story, my feelings and perspective, because I’ve never had it before, to the point where it feels like I’m not supposed to accept it. Validation is crucial in theory, and I insist on it in practice for others, but for myself, well, the execution remains a little elusive. For narcissists, the only feelings that matter are theirs, and they will validate others only insomuch as it serves to promote their own wants and needs. They need the psychological subservience of others. The narrative they are pushing is heavy, and they need help to keep it aloft, at any cost.

Let’s break down some hallmarks of how narcissistic abuse works – and I do mean “works” quite literally. It serves a clear function, which is to hold up the narcissist’s reality at the expense of their victims’. There are some key cogs in this wheel:

1 – Dependence. The victim has to be dependent on the narcissist in some way to start out with, there needs to be an imbalance of power for the narcissist to exploit. This can take many forms, including financial dependence, physical dependence, and others, but it always includes emotional dependence. In my case, that was an easy setup – as a child, I was literally a dependent of my mother. She groomed me to cater to other people’s needs from the get-go, and I wasn’t in a position to consider any alternatives. I didn’t know any alternatives existed, though on some level I think I always craved them. Later, as a young adult, it still didn’t occur to me that I didn’t have to continue engaging in emotional servitude. I was nearly 30 by the time I figured it out. Financial servitude also was an issue; I’m still paying off the credit card debt that she racked up in my name, which she excused by saying she had covered my expenses long enough too. My mother pushed the narrative of “mom and daughter are supposed to be best friends” that society likes to uphold, and I bought into it because she did, even when it often felt uncomfortable because she treated me more like a therapist and confidante than a daughter who should not ever have been privy to the kinds of things she shared. That discomfort continued to grow, and when I gave voice to it…well, that leads us to…

2- Gaslighting. We often hear this term being thrown around these days; in a nutshell, gaslighting is when someone is presented with a false narrative and made to question their own perspective and feelings, sowing seeds of self-doubt and leading them to question their abilities, judgment, and reality as a whole. A narcissist is a master at gaslighting. An example of gaslighting is when an abuser will do something to cause harm and then deny their actions or that the action took place at all. They also will insist that their victim misunderstood or is overreacting, that they’re “too sensitive” or “too emotional” or “too weak”, and noting that “other people think so too”; it’s harder to question what a narcissist is telling you if they are (supposedly) not the only ones saying so. They undermine and invalidate as much as they can, in ways that will over-validate their own behavior. I’ll never forget the acrid feeling that crept up on me during my mother’s toast at my wedding, in which she repeatedly said, “I did a good job”, and stated that my beloved grandmother, who’d passed away years before, would have said the same thing. My smile, and the smiles of those around me, became decidedly fixed then, but, a wedding is hardly the time to call someone out on their bullshit. Oh well.

Another classic gaslighting technique is the fake apology: “I’m sorry you think I hurt you” or “I’m sorry for whatever you think happened”, and other such statements. Narcissists are always reluctant to even consider apologizing, for after all, they are never the ones who did anything wrong, so it takes a lot sometimes for them to even offer up these pseudo-concessions. My mother only made a couple of these fake apologies, full of conditional excuses of course, when we were at least a year into my maternal embargo. It sounds like something sincere, but the phrasing of these statements actually force the victim to hold responsibility for the damage that occurred, questioning their level of fault in what happened. Again, this is in an effort to retain dependency.

Narcissists don’t care about what happens to your reality; they care about maintaining their own version of reality.

When a victim reaches a point where they can stand their ground and gaslighting no longer works – when they can no longer affect your perception – they turn to painting other people’s perceptions of you.

3- Allies. Narcissists need allies. They cannot hold up the facade of their perfection on their own. If a victim breaks away, they enter damage control mode, and will work hard to destroy other people’s perception of the victim, so that the victim is cut off from much-needed support. This form of manipulation is multi-purpose. At best, it will cause the victim to waver in their decision to leave, and allow the narcissist to swoop back in and “rescue them from themselves” which also reinforces the narcissist’s faux-heroic self-image. At worst, while the original victim will be lost, the narcissist can farm a new crop of supporters who’ve been hoodwinked into believing it’s the victim who has been hurting the narcissist – that the narcissist is in fact the victim. When I formally blocked my mother from every source of communication possible, she attempted to reach me any other way she could, through a bunch of other people we had in common. It’s taken me years to prune every possible tentacle away, even ones she hadn’t gotten to yet that I felt I had to get ahead of. I had to sacrifice connections with some important people, which still greatly saddens me, even though I know I did the right thing for myself and my family.

What narcissists can never understand – because they don’t see past their own needs – is that the taste of true peace is stronger and authentically sweeter than the cloyingly saccharine falsehoods of narcissistic attention. True love is like pure, golden honey; narcissistic love is Sweet-And-Low, it seems sweet but leaves an undeniable and untenable aftertaste.

It is going on four years since I’ve spoken to my mother, about four years since I closed and locked and blockaded that door and boarded up the windows. I still find it hard to trust myself sometimes, to trust that my perspective is legitimate. But what has helped is finding allies of my own, people who have had similar experiences in breaking away from narcissistic abuse. I have people in my corner who help me combat the damage that a lifetime of gaslighting and invalidation has wrought, and it seems that the more I talk about my experience, the more it helps both myself and other people who are working through their own situations. Maybe the best way to heal is to help others heal; maybe that’s still playing into the tendency that’s been ingrained in me, to focus on other people’s needs instead of mine. Either way, if the end result is to spread peace, that seems like a worthy endeavor to me.