If you grew up with a narcissist mother, chances are that you fully understand how it feels to be
invalidated almost constantly and the same can be said for any
relationship with a narcissist, but when the narcissist is someone who has been in our lives since literally the day we were born;
There's a huge chance that you struggle with self-esteem and personal power and today at QueenBeeing.com
we're going to talk about exactly why
narcissistic mothers have this tendency to
invalidate their children. Why they do it, What it means and what it's all about.
So let's get started. (Closed captioning provided by Athena Moberg and
CPTSDfoundation.org). My name is Angie Atkinson and on this channel, I offer free daily video coaching to help you discover,
understand and overcome
narcissistic abuse and toxic relationships,
I like to call it toxic relationship rehab. So if that sounds good to you,
hit that subscribe button and let's get going.
If you had a narcissistic mother, chances are you're well aware that narcissistic mothers have this way of
invalidating their children, they're kind of masters at that whole
invalidation game. Gaslighting is their favorite way to make a child feel not quite good enough and they very often continue this throughout the
relationship with their child and unless the child actually figures out; Hey, my mom is a narcissist and this isn't normal,
they may go their entire lives just plain-old, feeling not good enough. Today
I want to start with a story that is modified from a story that came from one of my clients about how;
starting very early in her life this client knew that no matter what she did,
her mother just couldn't love her the way other mothers seemed to love their children. For the sake of the story,
I'm gonna call her Jenna, take a look. When Jenna was a little girl
she learned how to play the piano and since her mother never seemed to be proud of her for well
anything, Jenna
decided that she was gonna do something really special for her mother's birthday and she hoped that somehow her mother would finally be proud of
her. Since she learned how to play the piano she decided she was going to write a song for her mom's
birthday and she knew there was nothing that could stand in the way of her mom being proud of this one.
She truly believed that if she worked hard enough on the song her mom would really understand and she did everything she could do. Jenna
imagined that her mother would be so happy, that she would hug her and tell her she was good and talented.
Jenna said she worked on how she would do her hair, what she would wear,
she was so excited about this opportunity to show her mom how much she loved her.
Jenna said she worked on the song harder than she'd ever worked on anything in her life up to that point.
She wrote and rewrote the song, she wrote
lyrics and she made it as loving and kind as
possible, because she wanted her mother to feel the love that Jenna felt so deeply in her heart.
Jenna worked on the song for weeks hoping against hope that
somehow her mother would feel and hear the love in the lyrics and the music she played. Jenna thought that if she could just show
her mother how much she loved her, her mother would love her back. She had always assumed that something was wrong with her,
she couldn't understand why some kids mothers seemed to really care how they felt and what they thought and what they wanted and Jenna's mother
seemed distant and cold and
unloving. She was always angry and Jenna could never do anything right.
She would punish Jenna for everything that Jenna did or said or thought and Jenna just figured;
Hey, I'm just not quite good enough yet,
so maybe this will help. When it was time to sit down and play the song things didn't go exactly as planned.
She said I felt like my mom would finally really be proud of me. She went to play the song for her mother.
She said mom have a seat, I want you to hear this song I wrote for you,
it's for your birthday
and as she did, her mother noticed that Jenna hadn't taken out the garbage that day, which was one of her chores.
She got angry and she stood there, very annoyed while Jenna played the song and shortly after that,
she screamed at Jenna to get the trash taken out and she blew off the song. Jenna said and continued to be angry.
Jenna said I felt crushed, it was like the wind had been knocked out of me.
I was angry and confused and I just felt like I couldn't be good enough.
She said that she repeated this cycle until she was an adult. She said it was constantly never being good enough, never being validated.
She said I embodied my mother's assessment of me,
I really felt like I was not even a whole person.
The choices she made for the first 30 years of her life were completely based on her mother's manipulation.
Jenna said she was always trying to do what she knew her mother would want,
alternating with what she knew she would hate.
She was constantly
struggling with
invalidation and her mother was the cause of it. Every time Jenna looked for validation from her mother, her mother would shut it down quickly.
Why did this happen?, and what was this all about?
Whether she knew it or not,
Jenna's mother clearly
undermined her feelings,
ignored her emotions, made her feel like she just wasn't really a whole person.
What it came down to was that for Jenna, as for many children of narcissistic mothers;
she was only allowed to feel whatever her mother thought was appropriate for her to feel. That meant her mother could treat her
however she wanted to and could manipulate and maneuver each situation to her advantage,
but why would she do this?
what did this mean? Gaslighting as we all know is meant to make us doubt ourselves and the world around us and our
perceptions and pretty much everything that we are. Jenna's mother was no exception here,
it was obviously cruel beyond measure what she went through, but she couldn't quite put her finger on what happened until she was an adult
and in hindsight.
I truly believe that invalidation is absolutely the most crushing part of having a narcissistic parent, because we grow up
believing that we aren't worth
loving, that
we aren't the same as other people or as important as other people. It leaves us feeling confused and lost and
doubting everything that we believe to be true. We don't trust our own feelings,
I mean
how are we even supposed to know what we feel and whether we're accurately figuring it out if there's no one there to tell us.
What am I talking about?
Well,
if you had a
narcissistic mother, you probably weren't confused by that statement. What it comes down to is that when you are dealing with a toxic mother who
invalidates everything that you do, say think or feel,
Chances are your mother is going to make your life a little difficult. If you can't trust your own feelings,
what do you have left?
How do we know what we think we're feeling or if we're wrong or right and what we feel and
since the world tells us that our feelings are our guides and that we should listen to our intuition,
what do we do when our intuition is broken. Every feeling as it turns out carries a really important little bit of information
and when we're taught not to trust our own feelings,
we're kind of missing out on something huge that we need in our lives to function normally.
So for example;
if growing up you were afraid of the dark and your mother told you you were stupid for being afraid of the dark,
chances are that as you go forward now you doubt your fear,
instead of validating your fear of the dark and helping you overcome it, a narcissistic mother would just
criticize you for it, call you a baby, tell you to get over yourself, stuff like that
and then basically you would learn to swallow your fear
and as you grew up and became an adult each time
you felt afraid you would probably doubt yourself and then you might end up in situations that are very
unhealthy and unsafe for you as a result. When we have a narcissistic parent, we very often grow up just feeling completely abnormal,
twisted, messed up and this is a direct result of being told consistently that we are not worthy, that we're not good enough,
that our feelings aren't real, that our beliefs aren't real.
So basically we absorb the message that we are sort of wrong to have those feelings and those thoughts and those beliefs. To say it
messes with our heads would be a huge understatement,
we spend our whole lives wondering- are we imagining that, did we just overreact to that situation.
We have a high threshold for abuse as a result of it and very often end up in toxic relationships with other
narcissists and guess what, it's because of the way we were raised that we're left open for future abuse
and even though we're told growing up; "Hey childhoods over", "I did the best I could, get over yourself" by our mothers,
we also know that every single adult on the planet has a child self kind of living inside of us, today
we understand that. The way that our parents saw us as children,
reflects very heavily in the way that we see ourselves today as adults and sadly the way that they treated us as children
very, very closely matches the way we treat ourselves as adults. Research have proved this again and again. There's a condition for this
it's called Childhood Emotional Neglect.
This is when we're sort of given subliminal messages or blatant messages by our parents that say our emotions don't matter, they're irrelevant,
they're not real. What does this do to us as we go into adulthood? Well, I kind of just described it,
but basically it leaves you feeling confused and lost and not really knowing which way is up when it comes to your own intuition and your
emotions.
It's like when you were a little kid and you got in trouble for doing something that you didn't do or got in trouble for
not doing something you did do. For example, and this is kind of a silly example,
but I have an aunt who's 6 months younger than I am and at one point
I remember being a little kid maybe like four or five years old, over at one of my aunt's house who was her sister's house,
an adult and at the time we were about the same age six months apart and
we were both coloring in coloring books. The page that we chose had pictures of watermelons on it.
I remember coloring the watermelon accurately as closely as we could get with the crayons
we had. I colored it red and I colored the seeds black and I colored the Rhine green and I even lightened the green as
I got closer to the center where the red was in the watermelon.
Well
my aunt colored hers purple and green or something like that, something
off color and when all was said and done we had our little pictures hanging up on the fridge and I remember my aunt
Saying to me Oh Kelly did a really great job Kelly's not her real name, by the way
Kelly did a really great job on hers, look it looks just like a real watermelon and I said no, that's mine aunt joy and
again- not her real name and aunt joy said no, you couldn't have done this one, this one was obviously Kelly. Look at yours,
it's
scribbly and messy and I remember being so angry and shocked by this, because I thought why would you assume that mine wasn't as good
as hers, and this was just one of many events like this in my lifetime.
Usually that stuff didn't come from my aunt, but it did in this case. So let's break that down a little bit.
Yeah joy in that situation kind of made me feel helpless, because I was trying to prove to her something
that was true, and she wouldn't believe me. This told me in that moment that I wasn't valid to her or relevant to her,
she assumed I was the one who colored the messed up
watermelon and not the one that was colored accurately. That showed me that she didn't see my true nature,
she couldn't tell that I was really a more artistic kid than Kelly, it showed me that she didn't see who I really was and
then when she didn't believe the truth, it showed me that she thought I was a liar, she made me feel alone,
she made me feel like nobody was on my side, then she got mad at me for telling the truth,
I felt invisible. This turns out to be a common thing for narcissistic abuse survivors. Here's an example of that.
Let's roll back to Jenna, shall we? As an adult Jana became a pretty likeable person.
Infact, if we're being honest, she was a people pleaser. Everybody
she met seemed to like her, but she couldn't see that because she really couldn't see who she really was.
She was so confused about her own self-image because of the messages that had been given to her as a child that she literally
didn't understand why people liked her. While she was kind of successful on the outside on the inside,
she was constantly broken and feeling confused and lost. Later,
she got married and when she got married, she actually married a pretty good guy, which is unusual,
but this guy she couldn't quite figure out why he loved her. She would always question him and doubt him and herself in that process
eventually the two got divorced because even though it could have been a good relationship,
Jenna couldn't quite put her finger on why he was with her. Later
she ended up with someone who really wasn't worth the air, if he was breathing and guess what, that person was a toxic
narcissist that felt more comfortable to Jenna and she stayed married to him for six years before reaching out to me for sessions.
She felt alone in the world regardless of who she was with, where she was and what it was all about.
It didn't matter if she was walking down the hall at work or if she was standing in a crowd full of people
at a concert, she constantly pushed her feelings down and away from herself so that she didn't have to feel what she thought was
the hate and dislike of other people.
She didn't want her emotions to trouble other people or herself for that matter. So she just swallowed them all, she feels really disconnected,
she doesn't really fully understand why she never kind of feels like she belongs in any group and while she does feel like she's an
individual and she tries to really express that and state that in some ways,
she kind of leaves herself hanging in other ways by not really connecting with people on the same level that she could and should, because
she secretly believes or knows that she infact is the problem in every relationship.
None of that is true, but that's how she sees it. Once she comes to me, when she started her coaching program,
we kind of broke all that stuff down and figured out exactly
what was going on here, because of what she had gone through, she was feeling empty, lost, confused, overlooked, unseen.
She was numb,
she didn't really even know who she was because she was never given the opportunity to know that. See the thing is,
invalidation isn't just saying no, that's not true, it's not just denying what someone says, it's literally denying who they are.
Basically, it's a process where the mother or father who is toxic,
communicates to you, teaches you that your opinions, needs and emotions are irrelevant, unreal, selfish, irrational, stupid and
wrong, just plain wrong.
They make it clear to us that our opinions and our feelings and our thoughts are
invalid to everyone all the time, that they're never good and they're never real and they cannot help anyone.
This can be done very subtly or very blatantly, depending on the person and the type of narcissist you're dealing with.
Sometimes it becomes extreme even leading to physical abuse and in some cases worse.
Subtle and confusing our two words that really fit this situation.
It causes us to have low self-esteem and we lose the ability to express ourselves as I described here,
we feel unheard and discounted. Why didn't our statistic mothers do this?
I think it has to do with a number of issues beginning with the fact that narcissistic
mothers are insecure in themselves, the fact that they see us not as whole people but as extensions of themselves.
So if we say, do, think or feel anything that is different than what they say, do, think or feel we must be wrong.
They minimize us, they act like we don't have true opinions,
they act like even when we're adults like we're small children who don't really know what we're talking about.
Ultimately, they end up destroying the people we could have been in the process,
but if we're careful, we can take it back.
Narcissists don't think we have the right to feel the way that we feel or that we're real enough people to actually feel it and
that's because quite honestly we don't count for anything when it comes to narcissists. Our opinions, ourselves don't matter.
The reason they do it is because they can't really attach to another person appropriately, not like a normal person
can. They are completely incapable of really connecting with anyone emotionally, not truly,
but you need to know that it doesn't say anything about you as a person,
it says a lot about your narcissistic parent. When your emotional needs aren't being met, it leads you to feel pretty miserable.
Alright now this brings me to the question of the day,
and the question of the day is; Have you had a narcissistic parent, mother or father
and if so,
did you grow up feeling invalidated?. Share your thoughts, share your ideas,
share your experiences in the comments section below and let's talk about it.
I want to take a quick minute to shout out my amazing channel members. I really appreciate that
you took a chance on me and that you're here supporting my mission here at YouTube to help survivors of narcissistic abuse
discover, understand and overcome their situations so that they can evolve and become the people they truly want to be. Thank you,
it means so much to me. My awesome channel members and inner circle include Angela falsetta,
Susan Marion, Roxanne antle, Deborah, Black Caesar, LifesRevival, Tricia Wolf, James F,
Marlene, jen Archer and Sarah Lee. Thank you. Again, thank you so much.
Alright, that's all I've got for right now,
but as always thank you so much for being a part of my day and a part of my life and hey,
thanks for letting me be a part of yours,
it really does mean a lot to me. Now before I go make sure you take a look at the videos
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while you're here, hit that Subscribe button right down there, and remember you're never alone, you always have your SPANily. I'll see you soon.