Ladygosthunter,
I feel your pain and can relate extremely well how you feel as I was the eldest and lost child / scapegoat of a narcissistic mother. Hard to believe as it is -and after so many years of counseling- I just woke up within this week as I write this. I finally saw through all the deception, sugar-coated lies, etc... that my mother is a narcissist. All these decades and it had been hiding in plain sight. All those opportunities torn away by her that included romantic relationships that never were, and all those years living without any sense of identity, besides living with the Asperger's syndrome that also was never revealed until so late in my life.
Finally! Eureka! Behind the façade of the most beautiful, devoted, nurturing, and caring mother that there could be, I knew it all along that there was an undercurrent and some kind of secret agenda, but I was powerless at the time to do anything. I found my own way to survive it all. Like some kind of resistance faction within the freak show that I grew up in, I intentionally behaved that way to insert a justification for the unjustifiable punishments.
I now see why Dad was the way he was with Mom, driving her to the brink of insanity during all their time together: he was only developing and applying his own brand of anti-narc -which I will now take from hereon and continue to develop and apply on my still-living mother. Know thy enemy, know thyself, and you will never be defeated in a thousand battles.
It was Dad that I had shut out of my life as he was the more blatant abuser -until he had his own epiphany. We made up, I forgave, anf even his perspective of his position in the family changed: I had been his scapegoat, now I was his Golden Child. It was quite an honor.
By the time I turned 14 it became ever clearer and clearer to me something was up that my younger and less developed siblings could not see. It was around that time that I saw the movie Papillon. It was also around that time that I read the book "For Those I Loved" by Martin Grey. I read many other books written by survivors of Hitler's concentration camps. I drew my inspiration from all to develop my own unshakeable resolve and a tenacity to shame a British bull dog. I was the scapegoat but also some kind of one-boy resistance faction within the freak show war in which I lived. If I had really caught on to Mom's deeply secret and incredibly evil agenda -well that was then this is now.
Don't ever negotiate with a narc. Don't ever try to make a narc see for herself the damage she inflicts on others, including the ones she should love the most. Instead, study what makes people like that tick, and play the game. Feed them their own medicine however cruel it may seem. Countermove every time your narc attacks you and revel in the soul torture she just tried to target you with. I know it sounds incredibly cruel, but as you know, narc medicine tastes like $H!+.
That being said I have to admit I don't love my mother anymore.
