Is my NM really N?

[ellachimera]

I think I personally have a problem with the N word added to the name of every parent/spouse/person that was abusive and mean.

You see, on my road to knowing myself and understanding what I am going through, I realized that my M could be N, judging by the behaviour and the general descriptions online and all. And then, the thought hit me that if she was N and I unwillingly learnt some of her behaviours, I might be N as well? Went to my pdoc and asked them, they refused to acknowledge the possibility. CPTSD has been advanced as an option, but not a personality disorder. Nonetheless, I lived with that possibility in mind for a while and I realized just how stigmatising this kind of talk can be for these people who naturally find it hard to accept treatment anyway.

However, I met a guy who was actually diagnosed with NPD. He had an insufferable character and made very weird life choices, he had a very tough edge and a dark sense of humour, but to me he was very open about his diagnosis and actually one of the few men I met who showed a real spine. He was there for me while I was suicidal, with his dark humour unwavered but there nonetheless. His attempt at being a friend, while it was openly just a "project" of his, actually worked, he was more able to understand my emotions than someone with unaltered empathy. I honestly miss him, I cut contact abruptly due to his overly-opinionated political discourse (he was openly trolling both sides of the political spectrum as a hobby), but I think that , aside from being a not-so-nice human being, he was a good friend for as long as his project lasted. Also, he was fun and witty.

I don't know if my M was Narcissistic or on any side of the Antisocial spectrum. I know she had trauma growing up herself but I also know that she had turned into a mean, violent and horrible grown-up. I guess it haunts me, the thought and the reminder that if I don't pay attention I may become just like her to my own family, and live trauma behind just like she does. My husband says that what she did and does was done willingly, not unconsciously. I tried talking to her to find that out but she wraps me up in a fog of lies and manipulation, so I will have to cut contact for my mental health and for my family.

But is she disordered, or just plain evil? The implications of tis question regarding my own personality make me feel overwhelmed sometimes.

[Kizzie]

Interesting issue and one that does come up here given our background of trauma. I don't know that NPD is used to describe all people who are abusive, there are many other terms(e.g.,psychopath, sociopath), each with its own set of symptoms.

What I do think (and I'm no psychologist, just my opinion), is that trauma is the root cause but causes injury to some people while others break to greater or lesser degrees (PD to psychopathy). Those who break no longer have access to empathy/moral compass that connects them to others and inhibits abusive, even lethal behaviour in more extreme cases.

I think being here signals you will not turn into your M (i.e., b/c that connection to what keeps you human and humane was not broken).   

Just my thoughts.

[ellachimera]

Thanks, Kizzie.

Funnily enough, my husband was telling me today that the behaviour and personality traits she displays tend to point out to her having high psychopathic traits rather than narcissistic ones.

I don't believe it right now. Maybe in time I'll take some distance and realize it's true. Don't know.  Really, don't care anymore. I just want out.

I am not narcissistic or anything on the antisocial spectrum (including BPD) not because I am on a forum and can say nice things to nice people but because...

Well, I don't know. I've done my share of stupid things in my life. But I guess everyone has things they regret, including those who were affected by my decisions. I just have to stop acting out my anger and fear, and I should be okay.

I need to keep swimming against the tide, making acts of love I was never taught to make, decisions I was never guided or encouraged towards. I have to do things that are natural to me but I have been trained to deny the existence of.

Like trust, care, kindness. That kind of thing. Never happened before as I was a child and I never learnt them as an adult, owing to her influence in my life. I've got my last chance to learn those, in my own family.

I am not gonna blow this.

I checked if I was NPD or ASPD or anything. I asked professionals, I researched a lot. I am not.  The only person who wanted me to believe that was my Mother.

I am nothing of these things. I just hate her, for good reason, and she hates me and everything I achieved and she didn't, despite having tried to break my marriage and deny my motherhood rights and even my freedom - multiple times. If I am not under her legal tutelage now it's just because possibly an otherwise corrupted to the bone doctor drew the line at this and later I had my husband to fight for me and less corrupted doctors caring for me.

I guess he might be right. A narcissiac would've just hurt me. A psychopath would've done anything, including gaining my trust, to destroy any trace of humanity in me, deprive me of my freedom, de-humanize me and leave me to die.

I don't know what my offense was, why the hatred and why her hatred turned into this horrible, calculated, covert strategy to bring me down.  I guess my desire to find out was making me vulnerable, I was asking her, of all people, hoping that the mask would fall and she would just say the truth to me, all the truth, on her deathbed. Oh well.

I guess I only survived so far because, although calculated, she was not very smart.

[Three Roses]

Some opinions -

I am not narcissistic or anything on the antisocial spectrum (including BPD) not because I am on a forum and can say nice things to nice people but because...

Perhaps, because you are here looking for guidance. Narcissists and Psychopaths don't look for guidance because they already know everything. (Insert sarcastic facial expression here.)

Personally, I try not to use the narcissist label for my F, because certifiable Narcissists are, I believe, relatively rare in the population; but he certainly carried many of the traits of one.

I don't know what my offense was, why the hatred and why her hatred turned into this horrible, calculated, covert strategy to bring me down.

Unless she truly is a genuine psychopath, I think it's probably less to do with you and who you are, than what her experience of you dredged up within herself. In other words, perhaps she was playing out her hatred toward herself, not you, because of some real or imagined similarity she perceived between the two of you. Or, that somehow you were the embodiment of something, like her failures as a parent or something.

But these are just the thoughts of an uneducated lay person, that you may disregard if they don't ring true for you.

[ellachimera]

Unless she truly is a genuine psychopath, I think it's probably less to do with you and who you are, than what her experience of you dredged up within herself. In other words, perhaps she was playing out her hatred toward herself, not you, because of some real or imagined similarity she perceived between the two of you. Or, that somehow you were the embodiment of something, like her failures as a parent or something.

Yeah, that sounds legit. For the first part of my life she sometimes almost forgot I was not my father while punishing me for his wrongdoings because he was gone and punishing both of us by not giving him access to me.

For the second part, she decided I was simply one of her failures and I wasn't allowed to have kids as I was impure (she's also very familiar and inclined towards the extreme right ideas).

But I don't think that makes her any less antisocial (psychopathic if you will, even though that term has been discarded from DSM). The mere thought that she could decide that, since I was a failed experiment of hers, I shouldn't be allowed to procreate, tell me that in my youth and then act upon it, trying to convince me to abort when I was pregnant and then convince my doctors I should be under her tutelage and the child discarded in an orphanage, until they instructed everyone in the hospital to bar her calls - it shows she thought she had the right to decide upon that.  A non-antisocial person , someone with a sense of morality and empathy I mean, would not have thought anything like that, I think.

[Three Roses]

I agree. 

[Three Roses]

I ran across this after talking here with you, and thought you might find it interesting. 
https://www.medcircle.com/series/aspd-psychopaths-sociopaths-53596

[Blueberry]

The mere thought that she could decide that, since I was a failed experiment of hers, I shouldn't be allowed to procreate, tell me that in my youth and then act upon it, trying to convince me to abort when I was pregnant and then convince my doctors I should be under her tutelage and the child discarded in an orphanage, until they instructed everyone in the hospital to bar her calls - it shows she thought she had the right to decide upon that. 

Maybe she hasn't realised you're a separate person, who might decide and act differently from her? One of my M's sayings when I was growing up was "it's my child, I can do what I want with it." She'd pontificate that in general, in front of us kids or to somebody else, whatever. I haven't noticed that she's fundamentally changed her opinion on that.

Whether somebody with that kind of opinion is truly NPD or BPD or antisocial or Idk what else may not be relevant to us on here, or it may be relevant, e.g. if it helps you realise that you are not the problem. My M is traumatised herself from childhood imho, but she has not done anything like the amount of healing work on it that I have done. She has seen a therapist or maybe just a counsellor off and on, but only after I'd been NC / VVVLC for a good few years. My huge drop in contact drove her to it, she wouldn't have gone otherwise. Sometimes I think she's more BPD than NPD, although that's all undiagnosed and just my lay opinion.

Just my personal, lay opinion: the difference between somebody like me, or you, and my M is: I'm working on myself, I'm trying to heal as best I can, I don't automatically blame somebody else for my problems. I do see a lot of fault in the way my parents brought me up including various types of abuse but I don't blame irrationally, at least I don't think so. My M blamed   my birth for causing her problems with her in-laws and blamed me as well, just because I was born. That's totally irrational imho. If there's one thing I certainly can't help having done, that was being born. She dumped this blame on my head when I was still a child, around 10 years old too. I don't do those types of irrational blame.

I agree with Kizzie that the very fact that you're on this forum looking for answers speaks to you not being some type of PD, especially NPD. The general view in my FOO is: "We don't have a problem, just crazy Blueberry has a problem." My opinion is: everybody in my FOO is messed up, me included of course. The whole family system is dysfunctional.

You mention hatred. My M seemed to hate me much of the time when I was growing up too. There were a whole bunch of irrational reasons. Hatred and resentment towards her own M that her F wouldn't allow her to express. This whole warped thing about my birth causing problems between her ILs and herself. Even me trying to set boundaries towards my physically and emotionally abusive elder brother, somehow she couldn't handle him being "hurt" emotionally by my boundaries so she turned her hatred on me  Like I said earlier: dysfunctional family, full of denial, and pretty crazy.

[ellachimera]

Three Roses, like always: thanks. A very good listen, that was. I was dissapointed a bit by the clickbait title (including "how to spot them" even though there was nothing about that said in the discussion), but I loved the woman's attitude and the amount of correct information she was providing (or at least I couldn't spot anything off about it).

Blueberry: she has realised I was someone different from her alright. Otherwise the unjustified superiority wouldn't be possible. You can't think someone is beneath you if you don't separate them from yourself.

She thought she'd done a good job at the end of the day as a Mom because my older brother told her so before going into therapy and realizing that sparing her the truth was eating him inside and giving him horrible bouts of anxiety. She never registered when he started telling her how he really felt, as part of his therapy, she just thought the therapist was putting ideas in his head (because yeah, that's exactly how therapy works). But I was the lowest of the low in her view and, while forgiving herself for her innumerable crimes as a parent, she was deciding that, because I was mentally ill, I didn't deserve to be a mother. I was handicapped so I didn't have a right to be anything but an appendice to her overwhelming existence.

Just as she had decided when I was a teen that she had "invested" some of her husband's money in my tutors (while not providing for my elementary needs like clothes , a bed, shelter next to my highschool, time and room for me to study - and she simply left my baby brother in my care as soon as I came from school until I went to sleep most of the days). As a result of her investment, she was repeatedly saying to me, sometimes while hitting me with full fists, I was bound to study whatever she decided I should study (incidentally something I did like, but never studied seriously, refused it as a way to gain my freedom), so I could make money and support her in her later days. That was her design for me.

Maybe she didn't hate me. Maybe she just needed a slave. I'll never know.

[Gromit]

I don't think the labels really matter. I spent years trying to understand my M, thinking that if only I knew what was wrong with her would help me. Focusing on me, my recovery is what helps me. Following information about narcissism has led me to find support in places like this but I still don't know what my M's diagnosis was when she was receiving treatment.

Interestingly a family member wants to research something about narcissism and contacted me to see if I would participate. It has made me think. Putting a label on someone else like that in some ways shifts blame. My M would shift blame for her actions onto me, I was the Scapegoat, doing that made her feel better but it did not make her any less responsible really, it is all still there, plus she knows somewhere deep down that she blamed me.