- Thread starter
- #181
Still hanging in there with no meds. Just using daily grapefruit juice, and green tea during work shifts.
From hearing the name "Grace" being said from having 3 students named this and a character in a drama I'm watching on TV, a memory was triggered.
My mother told me, more than once, that she named her grand piano "Grace." She said it with such sentimentality in her voice. I was annoyed by it.
By now, I suspect that with her NPD (I have to assume both parents have high levels of Narcissism, but naturally neither will go to Therapy or get Dx'd) causes her emotions to appear superficial to me, and most other people. I have since noticed that other Narcs' "Feelings" seem like "Masks" to me (also just people "like that" with very strikingly similar makeup) and yet they appear to have feelings or they are charades that resemble having feelings. Since they act on very self-centered, ego impulses and have no real relationships, having real feelings is not possible, yet there is something that they have, which are these "semi-feelings" that have their own purpose and logic, which is to appear to be "Good/normal" and to fool and manipulate others.
Last night, I had the flashback of my mother speaking the words "I named my piano 'Grace'".
I could see the black, shiny piano in the gloom of our split-level 70's basement on the rust-colored shag carpet. I felt a familiar dislike for this sentence spoken, for my mother, for her piano. She exhibited more love for her piano than for her children. She named it something beautiful with a kind of love she never felt for us, and said "we were all accidents."
I then realized that we were not well off. My parents had student loans and debts to their eyeballs. They had small kids. They had a crappy house in a small, crappy town. They were trying to get on their feet when I was in kindergarten. I was being sexually and in many ways abused by my father and his friend, and my mother had caught my father in bed with me. I was dissociated in the dark, when the light came on and I 'came to' consciousness to seeing him pulling up his pajama pants and then sliding down the wall into a heap sobbing on the floor at the foot of my bed. My mother stood over him in her white satin robe and nightgown. It was the middle of the night. I thought she'd hug me and save me. She never looked at me. She was angry at him. It was all about them.
Then, she took my sister and I to the river at night, to get back at him? To drown us, because that is what she did. I stopped her from killing my little sister. And I fought her as hard as I could until she drove us home.
It was sometime around the abuse that "Grace" appeared suddenly in our basement. A gift from my father. A very inaffordable gift.
Now that I study Narcissism and mental illness, and I see how Narcs manipulate others, even each other (fellow Narcs, whom they attract) I see that Grace was a bribe and that my mother named her "Forgiveness" because my Father succeeded in manipulating her into seeing him as some kind of victim and shifted the blame onto us kids or his abusers from his childhood.
I feel anger because his crime and abuse was toward my sister and I, not only her, and she should not have forgiven him for a crime against us. It was not her place to choose, but as a Narc, she felt that she had the power, always, to decide our fate and determine everything about us. She treated us children as actors in her play, of which she was the sole Director. We all had to play our parts or we were "evil."
I also see now that only a mentally ill person sees the world in this way. Only a sick person would feel such love for a bribe under such circumstances. I feel EVEN MORE since this new realization that we truly were Pawns in their f*cked up Mind Game.
With every memory I process, another piece of the puzzle and it becomes clearer and clearer that I needed to get myself and my family away from the sick family and its distorted view of reality.
From hearing the name "Grace" being said from having 3 students named this and a character in a drama I'm watching on TV, a memory was triggered.
My mother told me, more than once, that she named her grand piano "Grace." She said it with such sentimentality in her voice. I was annoyed by it.
By now, I suspect that with her NPD (I have to assume both parents have high levels of Narcissism, but naturally neither will go to Therapy or get Dx'd) causes her emotions to appear superficial to me, and most other people. I have since noticed that other Narcs' "Feelings" seem like "Masks" to me (also just people "like that" with very strikingly similar makeup) and yet they appear to have feelings or they are charades that resemble having feelings. Since they act on very self-centered, ego impulses and have no real relationships, having real feelings is not possible, yet there is something that they have, which are these "semi-feelings" that have their own purpose and logic, which is to appear to be "Good/normal" and to fool and manipulate others.
Last night, I had the flashback of my mother speaking the words "I named my piano 'Grace'".
I could see the black, shiny piano in the gloom of our split-level 70's basement on the rust-colored shag carpet. I felt a familiar dislike for this sentence spoken, for my mother, for her piano. She exhibited more love for her piano than for her children. She named it something beautiful with a kind of love she never felt for us, and said "we were all accidents."
I then realized that we were not well off. My parents had student loans and debts to their eyeballs. They had small kids. They had a crappy house in a small, crappy town. They were trying to get on their feet when I was in kindergarten. I was being sexually and in many ways abused by my father and his friend, and my mother had caught my father in bed with me. I was dissociated in the dark, when the light came on and I 'came to' consciousness to seeing him pulling up his pajama pants and then sliding down the wall into a heap sobbing on the floor at the foot of my bed. My mother stood over him in her white satin robe and nightgown. It was the middle of the night. I thought she'd hug me and save me. She never looked at me. She was angry at him. It was all about them.
Then, she took my sister and I to the river at night, to get back at him? To drown us, because that is what she did. I stopped her from killing my little sister. And I fought her as hard as I could until she drove us home.
It was sometime around the abuse that "Grace" appeared suddenly in our basement. A gift from my father. A very inaffordable gift.
Now that I study Narcissism and mental illness, and I see how Narcs manipulate others, even each other (fellow Narcs, whom they attract) I see that Grace was a bribe and that my mother named her "Forgiveness" because my Father succeeded in manipulating her into seeing him as some kind of victim and shifted the blame onto us kids or his abusers from his childhood.
I feel anger because his crime and abuse was toward my sister and I, not only her, and she should not have forgiven him for a crime against us. It was not her place to choose, but as a Narc, she felt that she had the power, always, to decide our fate and determine everything about us. She treated us children as actors in her play, of which she was the sole Director. We all had to play our parts or we were "evil."
I also see now that only a mentally ill person sees the world in this way. Only a sick person would feel such love for a bribe under such circumstances. I feel EVEN MORE since this new realization that we truly were Pawns in their f*cked up Mind Game.
With every memory I process, another piece of the puzzle and it becomes clearer and clearer that I needed to get myself and my family away from the sick family and its distorted view of reality.