How Do You Know If Your Mom Is a Narcissist?
Have you ever wondered if your mom might be a narcissist? It's a tough question, and one that can be difficult to answer. Narcissism isn't always as obvious as we might think, and it can be even harder to spot when we are looking at someone we love.
This topic is especially important to me because I’ve spent the majority of my professional life developing tools to build self-worth. What I’ve found is that there is a strong correlation between struggling with low self-esteem and having been raised by a narcissistic parent. Especially a narcissistic mother.
Low self-worth isn’t something that just happens to you. Often, it’s something that you were trained into, something you were taught, or a coping skill that worked for you. However, what may have helped you cope within a dysfunctional narcissistic household, ends up creating an enormous sense of pain as an adult. The impact of your upbringing doesn't just go away. No matter how old you are, it leaves its imprint on you.
If you were raised by a narcissistic mother, there will be undeniable signs in your life—and in this blog, we’re going to explore 5 red flags that might indicate your mom is a narcissist and particular struggles that you might be experiencing now. Today we're diving into a topic that's both sensitive and incredibly important for your own personal growth and for understanding the components of self-worth. While there are plenty of overt symptoms that you might experience from being raised by a narcissist, low self-esteem is kind of like second hand smoke, a silent and life-long poison that undermines your ability to heal.
What Does Narcissism Mean?
To start with, it’s important to understand what narcissism is and isn’t. The term “narcissist” is sometimes used to label someone who’s vain, arrogant, or grandiose. And if that was the extent of it, I don’t think that they’d cause that much harm.
The Myth of Narcissus
But narcissism is far more dangerous. The term narcissism comes from the greek myth of Narcissus and Echo. Narcissus falls in love, not with himself, but with his reflection. Echo—the mountain nymph—fell in love with Narcissus but could only “echo” back exactly what he said. No matter how much she loved Narcissus, he only cared about his reflection. And she could only mirror back what he said.
And this is exactly how narcissism works—they don’t love themselves, they are enamored with an image that doesn’t exist. They are unable to love those around them but need an “echo” to mirror themselves back.
And this is what it feels like to be raised by a narcissist. Your job is to be the echo that is never loved, while they spend their lives worshiping an image they’ll never actually become.
Signs of Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD)–Grandiose and Vulnerable
Narcissism, or Narcissistic Personality Disorder, or NPD for short, is described as:
Exaggerated feelings of self-importance
An excessive need for admiration
A delusional sense of status
A lack of empathy
Willingness to exploit others for their own gain
This typically shows up in two different ways: the grandiose pattern and the vulnerable pattern.
The grandiose narcissist is larger than life, brash, and always needs to be the center of attention. They expect their children to be part of the audience that adores them, helps fuel their status, and serves their unending need for attention and admiration. Think about the Evil Queen in Snow White, or Emma Thompson’s character, The Baroness in Cruella. Going back to the myth, this narcissist is in love with a grandiose image of themselves and expects the child to echo that back.
The vulnerable narcissist or covert narcissist is harder to spot and yet just as toxic. This is the parent that is fragile, depressed, anxious and needy. They are unstable, unable to care for their children, they feign weakness to garner pity, and use faux humility to elicit attention. Think Mother Gothel in Tangled. Going back to the myth, this narcissist is in love with a vulnerable image of themselves and expects the child to echo that back.
For both types of narcissists, the roles of parent and child are flipped. As the child, you are required to meet the needs of your parent, rather than the other way around. But if you have your own needs—which means you stop playing the role of echo—you are punished, ignored, or dismissed.
Narcissist Mothers v. Narcissist Fathers
Narcissistic fathers have more of a hot and cold approach to their kids. Rather than seeing them as an extension of themselves, they see their kids as useful when needed and irrelevant when not useful.
Narcissistic mothers, on the other hand, tend to see their kids as an extension of their own reflection. They see their children as part of their adoring audience and demand that admiration from them. They put pressure on their children to be special and perfect.
The Difference Between Daughters and Sons of a Narcissist Mother
If you are a daughter of a narcissistic mother—your job is to elevate her status without becoming too much of a threat. Be beautiful and thin… but not too beautiful. Be elegant and charming… but don’t step on her toes. She often wants you to feel inadequate and uses that to inflate her own ego. Your job is simply to make her feel good about herself—that might mean that you are supposed to be a glorious extension of herself, or that you are supposed to play the ugly duckling role to help her feel better about herself. It’s to echo whatever reflection she’s fallen in love with.
If you’re a son of a narcissistic mother—your job is similar but rather than seeing you a direct threat, your job is to be her substitute husband. You are to love and adore her and make her look good but to remain in an Oedipal relationship with her. Your job is to see her as the fairest of them all, to never fall in love with a stronger, better woman. She wants you to sacrifice your own life in order to serve her.
5 Signs That You Were Raised by a Narcissistic Mother
Here are some of the signs that you might find in your own life if you were raised by a narcissistic mother.
Sign #1: You believe you are responsible for the happiness of others. You often default to apologizer, caretaker, or people pleaser mode.
When your mother is a narcissist, you are trained from a young age to see love as transactional and to perpetually apologize for anything that inconvenienced her. You were taught that love was earned by either doing something for her or by achieving something for her. Because of this you internalize the idea that love is conditional and therefore believe you need to please others, serve others, or earn your place in a relationship or community. Even today, you may find yourself saying “I’m sorry,” for things that are clearly not your fault or responsibility. Because we’ve been trained into this, we are susceptible to recreating the dynamic, and might find ourselves surrounded by people who are willing to use us. We befriend narcissists, date narcissists, and even marry narcissists because we have been taught to be the perfect counterpart. We are the echo and we apologize when their reflection isn’t perfect, and then people please and care-take to reflect back the image they adore.
Sign #2: You feel like you can’t trust yourself and regularly doubt yourself and your reality.
When you’ve been raised by a narcissist mother, you’ve been raised to believe that the mythological reflection in the water is more important, more real, and more desirable than anything else. Her inflated image, her need for attention, her need to win, her need to use you is more important than anything that you experience. Basically you’ve been trained to stop believing reality and instead to believe whatever fictional narrative she needs you to believe. She taught you that reality, truth, and evidence weren’t nearly as important as the vengeance, punishment, or suffering you’d endure if you contradicted her. Overtime, you lose touch with reality, you’ve been conditioned to see the truth as subjective, and you no longer have a sense of the ground. One of my mom’s favorite lines was, “Are you going to call me a liar?” And I quickly learned that it was better to swallow the lie myself than to expose my mother’s deceit. When you’re raised like this, you’re brainwashed into believing her and not yourself. As an adult, this leaves you riddled with self-doubt, and also makes you an easy target for narcissists and predators.
Sign #3: You believe you are not enough. You struggle with self-worth. You think you should always hide your inadequacies.
Think about what happens when you’re raised by someone who has no capacity to love you and instead is completely absorbed in their own reflection. Think about what happens when your entire job in the world is to be an extension of someone else’s fantasy, rather than a real human. What happens when your only purpose is to echo admiration back to someone who can never and will never be satisfied. You literally learn that you are not enough and that you will never measure up. You are only worth the constant stream of attention and adoration that you can supply to her. And that will never be enough for the bottomless pit of a narcissist. To have self-worth you must have a self. And a narcissistic mother lacks the ability to see you as a separate self, nor the generosity to allow you to have a separate self. As her child, you experience intermittent rewards that make no sense. On one hand she’s critical and abusive—when you’re not doing your job of making her look good, or when you do something that threatens her fragile ego. On the other hand, she’s adoring and lavishes attention when you become a source of validation for her.
This means that anything “good” about you, is co-opted, co-owned, or “because of” her. And anything “bad” about you, is a failure on your part because you’re not living up to who she wanted you to be, are a liability to her ego, and seen as a disgrace.
She valued the reflection rather than the real—and taught you to do the same. As an adult, you’ll find yourself always comparing yourself to an ideal image—a better, faster, smarter, prettier version of yourself. This tendency can be found in almost all humans, but what you see in children of narcissists is that the image, the reflection, the ideal, the fantasy is more real, more vivid, and more painful. We believe our inadequacies make us incapable of being loved, and that failure to live up to the ideal fantasy means that we can not and will not be loved. Therefore, we do everything we can to keep our flaws hidden.
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Sign #4: You believe you are a burden to others. You feel guilty for having needs. You believe your feelings aren’t important.
Because narcissism revolves around a self-entitled need for constant admiration, a narcissistic mother has a hard time seeing her child as having needs or emotions that deserve attention, or as having worth beyond serving as a tool for her own validation. When you’re raised by a narcissist, you’ve been groomed to believe that your needs or emotions caused your narcissist parent pain, inconvenience, and emotional distress. A narcissistic mother can not be bothered by something that takes her attention away from the object of her own infatuation—herself. If you were upset, hurt, sick, cold, or hungry—she did whatever she had to do to get you to shut up and behave so that she could get back to pursuing her own needs. She taught you that you are a liability, a burden, and difficult to endure. You learned that your needs and feelings were unimportant and as an adult, you feel that anyone else’s feelings and needs supersede your own. You might just feel like other people are more important, or their feelings are more important than yours. You might also struggle with putting your feelings into words, or even knowing how you feel, or what you actually need or desire.
Sign #5: You have a difficult time with boundaries and feel guilty or rude when you don’t have the capacity to perform for others.
A narcissistic mother believes she deserves special treatment and privileges, considering herself above you and anyone else. She expects you to bend to her will and becomes frustrated or even angry when her desires aren't immediately fulfilled. Her sense of entitlement knows no bounds… which is why she ignores, crosses, and destroys any boundaries that you might try to put into place. If you think about the myth, Narcissus couldn’t see anything beyond his own reflection. And no matter how much Echo loved Narcissus, to him, she was never her own entity. Imagine what would happen if Echo said something else, or if Echo kicked the water and refused to admire the reflection. That’s basically how it goes when you try to set boundaries with a narcissist. They can not and will not allow you to have boundaries.
To the narcissistic mother, you are simply an extension of her existence—you are a tool to be used. If you set limits, or make yourself unavailable for use, she will resent you, punish you, and do whatever it takes to devastate you into complying. She’ll use your own compassion and empathy against you, making you feel guilty or rude when you don’t do what she wants.
so to recap…
Here are the 5 signs you were raised by a narcissistic mother:
You believe you are responsible for the happiness of others. You often default to apologizer, caretaker, or people pleaser mode.
You feel like you can’t trust yourself and regularly doubt yourself and your reality.
You believe you are not enough. You struggle with self-worth. You think you should always hide your inadequacies.
You believe you are a burden to others. You feel guilty for having needs. You believe your feelings aren’t important.
You have a difficult time with boundaries and feel guilty or rude when you don’t have the capacity to perform for others.
If your mother is a narcissist, it’s highly likely that you have attracted more female narcissists into your life. To learn more about how to spot a female narcissist––read this next: Covert Signs of a Female Narcissist.