Asklemmy

My mom was very strict with me as a child, but I don't think it was narcissistic. She was very focused on my education. I had to do well and get a good job. But it was because she wanted me to have good health insurance as I have had chronic health issues from birth. I have a good job now, my student loans are paid off, and she was right about me needing good health insurance. Our relationship is lovely now. But I'll probably always remember the time that I skipped a homework assignment and she spit in my face.

All my life I thought that she would love me, if I achieved certain test scores or finished a certain degree.

Then there was high school graduation night. I had worked really hard to get there and I will never forget how she made that annoyed face to let me know that she wanted to leave early. It was like a punch in the gut because it became clear to me at that point that there was nothing I could do to make her love me.

She wasn't capable of giving love. That's really fucking sad and I am still grappling with it, but it gets easier.

I asked my mom if she ever made mistakes and without skipping a beat she just says no. Looked at me like I was asking something very strange. I was maybe 13 or so when I asked.

Our neighborhood had large community mailboxes and my dad would always make me walk down the street to get the mail. One day there were some older kids outside and they started squirting me with water-guns. I got home and told my dad and he asked me to show him where the kids were. When I did he yelled at them saying, "don't squirt my mail!"

The sad thing is I though he was talking about me, as in male. It wasn't until years later I realized he didn't give a crap about me, he was mad his mail got wet.

It's by far not be the most narcissistic thing my dad did, (that would be beating the shit out of me for not wanting to go to church because it made him look bad). But I think about it often because I want my kids to know they are the most important thing to me, and I never want to say something that would make them think otherwise.

My mother says it's my fault my brother is gay, because I showed him how to use the Internet. The Internet then didn't even have websites, and we used telnet talkers, which was literally just people chatting in text format, it even predated ICQ or AOL or anything. It certainly wasn't a place you'd turn someone gay, not that that's a thing you can really do. She just hates that he's gay even though we were brought up to embrace LGBT people long before people were really out.

My father was a good man, through and through, but he didn’t always think about the consequences of his actions. He ran his own business quite well for many years, and my mother and I were well taken care of right up to when he died and beyond.

However, for a few years before he retired, the business wasn’t doing well. He kept it afloat with his retirement fund, and drained it pretty quickly. He never touched mom’s half nor what he’d set aside for me. Mom found out and forced him to shut the place down and retire early.

However, because he spent all that money keeping the business afloat, he had to keep working to make any kind of income. He went and got his CDL and drove busses for the city and the school in the small town he and my mom lived in for a bit before taking a job as an instructor at the small local college.

It was during one of these days out teaching his students that he got bit by a mosquito and contracted West Nile Virus. It affected his health like less than 1% of people that contract it. It attacked his nervous system, and he was unable to breathe unassisted. Mom, having medical power of attorney, told the doctors to pull the plug after a month with no improvement.

Because he elected to keep all his employees employed, he had no retirement fund, forcing him to continue working and thus putting himself into a position to be bit by that mosquito. His kindness killed him, if indirectly, and about a decade late.

A few years back my family and I went to my cousins wedding a few states away, we decided on driving rather than flying due to covid airfare prices. So it was my mom, dad, brother, niece, and myself. My brother and I were both in our late twenties at this point in time so it was kinda weirdly nostalgic.

Anyway, on our way back from the wedding, we were driving through the cornfields of Pennsylvania when we noticed a few oddly parked cars on the side of the road. It was near a stop sign so we had plenty of time to figure out what was going on. A guy on a bicycle was hit by a car and laying on his back surrounded by people on the side of the road.

My mom is a nurse so I immediately asked her if we should pull over, she thought about it for a few seconds and said no we are meeting your sister in Cleveland for dinner and we can't be late. So we kept on driving. A few minutes later, she looks back and realizes how selfish of a decision she just made right in front of my 8 year old niece, so she says we should all pray for the man. Me and my brother just looked at eachother in awe as she proceeds to recite the Hail Mary.

Emotionally manipulated me back into multiple abusive situations to act as her shield, and has refused to so much as acknowledge what was going on. Can't even have a talk about it, it's just shut down immediately.

Now she doesn't even know that she has a daughter instead of a son, and never will.

My wife's parents are pretty bad. The worst thing that comes to mind immediately (sure there are worse) was a time we recommended and watched Baby Driver. We had good reasons to believe she'd enjoy it (not relevant why and not going to get bogged in unnecessary details). Literally as soon as the movie ends she says to my wife "Well, it just shows how much we've drifted apart because I did not like that movie."

So, things sort of escalate and we're packing to leave because why the hell would we stay after a comment like that. She's already got crocodile tears and has twisted the situation around to make her seem like the victim. Stuff like "but you never do talk to me" blah blah blah.

She's always so paranoid about being viewed as a bad mother by her children, but rather than ever apologize for anything or try to improve its always just the passive aggressive "you must think I'm terrible" at the smallest things. It's so manipulative. It's like she knows saying it over tiny things will get her family to be comforting and insist it isn't true. Meanwhile when she does actually out of line things she never says that sort of thing and instead tries to be the victim. It's disgusting.

I really really dislike my wife's parents. I've found peace and am able to be cordial but holy fuck.

That's an interesting hypothesis you've cultivated. It needs additional testing, however, I'd like to add on the impact of intergenerational trauma and genetic drift, there's systemic runoff of abuse which impacts future generations within a specific animal group, resulting in evolutionary and social adaptations.

Enough of these adaptations kill a planet or a species, I'm afraid.

Lately I've been reading a lot of books on narcissism and have been picking up on the idea/notion/possibility/viewpoint that narcissism is a spectrum like autism is. In autism, which itself is incredibly common due to the fact that it's multiple genes/processes/whatever performing multiple parts of a spectrum (think a carpet representing humanity and a shattered cup on the carpet, I use the shards in this visual to represent pieces of the spectrum scattered across humanity, apologies if anyone thinks a shattered cup seems like a negative comparison, I don't), you have the majority of humanity having some variance in it, which goes to demonstrate there's no such thing as a neurotypical. As in, if a scouter was invented that instead of scanning your power level scanned your autism level, everyone would have their very own signature number. ~~I would be over 9000.~~ Same with narcissism, if this view is correct, as it would be another shattered glass on the carpet that is humanity, with the shards from both glasses overlapping in their territories (which when you think about it makes the family dynamics in The Good Doctor all the more awkward, it's one spectrum at odds with another in a show where the main character is a medical savant with autism). And again, not trying to make an awkward comparison, I have friends who openly confess to me they're deep on the narcissism spectrum, and these people at least are trying their best in life, as well as showing narcissism is a neutral condition that just happens to seem more negative in modern urban situations

This is a pseudopsychological word salad, but please accept my apology if you're 14 or chatgpt prompted for redditisms, if that's the case good job.

Not my parents, but I've had a narcissist work colleague pester me about my partner and I not wanting to have kids, trying to convince us I guess, using her ultimate argument...

Her: But... you need to have kids so they take care of you when you're old!

Me: So... wait. Is that the reason you had kids?

Her: Well yea! (like that's the only logical answer, duh)

Me: ... wow ...

Fast forward. Her kids are all grown up now, they've since cut all contact and she hasn't seen them nor her grandkids in years. I run into them once in a while and I've helped them out with a handful of times with things like moving or maintenance or tax reports or whatever. There's a few things they never really got to learn growing up and anything they could ever do was never good enough for her, even though she's terrible at most things.

Now and then, she'd still complain about them being ungrateful and I'd just ignore her... she's never once come even close to the self-awareness that she drove them away by being a narcissist asshole.
She's retired now, so neither of us have to deal with her now.

Great fucking plan, having kids to guilt trip them into caring for you...
They had the guts to move on and I'm proud of them.
I was probably the first to tell them so, some random passerby.
Fuck narcissists.

My parents wanted to be so hands-off they would let me and my sisters have collective authority over each other. This led to utter disaster.

I can't remember what I suggested to my father but a little bit of time went by and he introduced the same thing as his own idea. It wasn't anything terribly important. And I think the reality was just that I planted the seed and he forgot by the time he came around to it. But I still found it distressing because of years of family shit.

My parents were wonderful, so I have no real complaints, but my father had a weird quirk. Tools, equipment, whatever that he had interest and purchased himself were "his." I mean, obviously, but he would use the possessive when referring to those things.

"You have to prime my lawnmower first before you try to start it." "Go and get my ladder." Never the ladder, always my ladder. I never questioned it (because I didn't care), but when I was a teenager I started noticing it and it was odd. Like he was establishing that the lawn mower or the ladder or whatever didn't belong to the household, they were his. And nothing seemed to get him worked up more than a neighbor borrowing something and taking more than a day or so to return it.

Someone I know was hospitalized and their parent seemed more concerned about how it inconvenienced them than the person in the hospital.

My mom is truly terrible, but one of the pettiest things she did was after I opted to not tell her about an important milestone in my life as a young adult. (I had already decided to slowly cut ties with her and was pushing a limit I hadn't explored yet.) She didn't take kindly to learning about it through Facebook, and acted as if I owed her the privilege of hearing something before anyone else. She made the situation all about her, detracting from the good thing I had accomplished, painted herself as the victim as she often did, and then started to retaliate.

The first thing she did was delete my Netflix profile on her account. Specifically so I would log in and see that it was gone. Specifically to be cruel to me. She did other things to cut me out of her life, and I just rolled with it since I had become fairly independent by that point and she was doing the heavy lifting for me.

Anyway, now she reaches out occasionally to say she doesn't understand why I won't talk to her. Typical narcissist.

I recommend reading this blog about estranged parents forums. The writer analyzes the logical fallacies of narcissistic parents, and it's very enlightening to get a peek of that world without having to interact with it directly.

Not the most but probably one of the last ones. When I decided to move to another country my mother refused to help in any way, even though the money necessary would make no difference in my parents life. Not only that, but she actively sabotaged every effort I made and in my last day she asked me to talk to her. She cried and cried and said: “I fought so hard for you to stay here. Who is gonna take care of me now?”

And that’s how I moved to Canada in February without a winter jacket and had only 20 dollars in my bank account after paying the initial expenses.

My parents once invited a friend to sit down and watch a movie with them. They offered him popcorn, and they talked a little during the movie.

After the friend was gone, I was told how rude it was for them to accept tge popcorn and movie watching. And the height of the rudeness was that when given his own bowl of popcorn, he ate it all!

Pfft. Clowns.

My parents were separated since before I started forming long-term memories and I was raised by my single mother. We used to visit my dad's side of the family for a week or so every other Christmas, I lived with him for a couple months as a teenager when my home life got particularly rough due to a profoundly toxic non-parent influence, and during stay that we ignored each other apart from the cliche "divorced parent and kid who don't actually know each other at all trying to act their respective parts but neither knows how or really wants to or frankly likes the other one but they both know it's polite to pretend" sorts of interactions (which were quite sparing even as those go). Neither of us has ever attempted to keep in touch with the other over the phone or in writing.

To be clear, I don't hold any of that against him even a little bit; that's all perfectly normal on his end as far as I'm concerned. That's all just there for context when I tell you that, now that I'm well into my 30s, I recently heard from my older sister who actually tries to stay connected to him that he's begun boasting about how proud he is for having shaped me into the man I am today. And, like, I'm not even on social media so I'm not a person he's even capable of keeping tabs on from a distance if he tried. He fully has no idea who I am. He not only doesn't deserve to take credit, he doesn't even know what he's taking credit for. I'm just so automatically an extension of himself by virtue of my DNA that he goes around telling other people that he's proud of me.

(A more technically accurate but less entertaining answer to the question is that he's politically a Libertarian.)

May be not the worst, but as I grew up I start to see my mother as a prima donna with anger issues. Though we have a good relationship now, my childhood had always been at the mercy of her anger and ego. All my failings were about humiliation for her as a mother and all my success (what little there was), was her doing. She showed very little affection. I remember one time being sick as a kid and hyperventilating on our way to a clinic. I was scared and try to cling to her as we wait for the doctor. She seemed more annoyed than worried at the time.

She's also a typical asian parent, driving academic success at all cost. I think her being a somewhat busy single mother is what kept me kind of sane throughout my life. If she's a typical middle-class asian housewife with all her time being dedicated to me, I think I'd be a lot more messed up. I know that single mothers tend to have to struggle a lot, we do have a lot of support from my aunt and we didn't have to worry about food and a place to stay. We lived comfortably.

Some of her physical disciplinimg includes typical cane lashes, face slaps, hair pulls, making me kneel on prune seeds, twist pulling my skin and ear, etc. But I think it's her verbal abuse that really gets to me to this day. It was always about how other mothers with high achieving kids have good karma (lucky) and she doesn't because of my mediocrity. I get compared to other kids a lot and sometimes she said I only deserve to eat other successful kids' shit so that their success might somewhat rub off on me.

As I grew older and became, well.. not rebellious, but indifferent to her outbursts, she started to play the victim. A mother at the mercy of her kids' "deliquency". The last time we fought was while naming my new-born son. In my country, it is somewhat of a tradition to approach fortune tellers to give names according to the weekday the child was born on. I didn't care for that and gave him the name my wife and I agreed upon before he was born. Us having a child, a wonderous occasion, became about her and she started playing the victim with all our relatives.

Well, she had mellowed out a lot since then. I think it's because she started reading a lot of educational posts from facebook and the country's general shift toward more progressive child nurturing attitudes. I had gotten over a lot of what happened, but sometimes I still struggle with showing affection towards her.