Family
Every story comes back to her and visits leave you exhausted and the pattern has been the same since you were a child.
Every story comes back to her. Every accomplishment of yours becomes a story about her. Your bad news is something she takes personally. Your good news is something she competes with. Visits leave you exhausted. You’ve cancelled plans because she made you the bad guy for not being available. She isn’t always cruel. That’s what makes it hard. She can be funny, generous, present. The pattern reasserts itself anyway.
You’re not imagining it. The pattern is real and it’s been the structure of your relationship since you were a child.
The pattern kept reasserting itself.
Educational, not diagnostic. Not a substitute for clinical assessment.
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You very likely came up as the kid who was an extension of her, whose job was to reflect her back to her, and who got punished in subtle or not-so-subtle ways for being a separate person. You may have grown up the child she pointed at as proof of her parenting, and the role required you to perform whatever she needed performed. You may have absorbed the lesson that being loved by her required being available to her on her terms, and you’ve been running that program in every interaction. You may have lived through one specific event where you tried to confront her and the response was so disorienting that you decided never to try that approach again.
Boundaries are advice that assumes the other person will respect them once stated clearly. Narcissistic parents typically don’t respect boundaries. They renegotiate, escalate, guilt, or punish. Each time you state a boundary and it gets walked through, the boundary gets weaker. The advice didn’t account for the actual person.
The other trap is engaging in the conversation about whether the pattern is real. She’ll defend herself or rewrite history or turn the conversation into your cruelty. The conversation is its own loop. Each round teaches you the conversation isn’t the place to address it.
If you’ve gone no-contact and feel guilty, see I went no-contact and I feel guilty . If you don’t speak to her at all, see I don’t speak to my mother .
You can’t reason with the pattern. The pattern is older than reason.
Strategic therapy names what the handles have been doing, the specific responses she’s been counting on from you to keep the pattern running. We change what you do at the exact points she casts, baits, or rewrites, the points so familiar you don’t see them as choices. The pattern loses its grip because you stop being available to play the part it requires.
She’ll still be who she is. You won’t have to be who she’s been making you.
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