The Mother Wound
Part 2
I denied for many years the severity of my story. If I admitted how much of a tragedy it was, I feared I wouldn’t make it out on the other side a whole person. In the midst of the battle for my mind, I would find myself repeating over and over in my head all the malicious things my mother spoke over me. Jason would ask me tough questions to help me see that those things I believed were all lies. He has had enough interaction with my mother that he knew where that battle was coming from, but unless I allowed myself to go there, healing couldn’t take place in my heart.
I was in complete denial about a lot of things and cried many many tears in the process. How counseling helps the victims walk down some of those broken relationship paths have been truly life-saving for me.
There were times I was determined to defend my mother, defend my dad, and held on tight to the bondage I so desperately wanted to let go of. Those reasons were rooted in surrendering to the fact that my mother did not want a relationship with me. I desperately needed to believe that she loved us enough that we could make this a happy family.
I needed to believe that my parents loved me and wanted the very best for me. And I held onto the narrative that my mother had created and I visualized this kind-hearted, care taker of a mother that in reality, she was not, and made it clear she had no intention of being.
I was being faced with a harsh truth that the person I had needed her to be, was only a void that would never be filled.
Not only was my mother neglectful of my needs as a child, but she consistently went of her way to make life very difficult in my married life and tried causing division between me and my children.
As a result, Jason and I had no choice but to set boundaries between her and our family. Her toxicity was pouring over into my children and could no longer allow them to experience the same patterns of abuse from her. And that, I discovered unleashed a viscous barrage of lies and character assignation that continues to this day. In fact, she will create more lies after this article is discovered. The narcissist can not and will not be seen in an unfavorable light.
The hardest struggle of my life was coming to grips with not having a mother. She is not who she says she is. The realization that she was never going to love me, never going to accept me, never wants to be with me, and that I would never be good enough for her was painfully devastating.
I got the courage to ask her to do normal mother/daughter things with me like grab some coffee together, talk, etc. Oh, the tears I shed when I heard from her lips that “I was talking to the wrong person” and that she “was not going to be that person in my life.” It was a blow to my soul and it destroyed a lot of my hope that I once held onto.
I had to surrender to the fact that she did not want a relationship with me; she would rather control my life instead. When I think back on that conversation, I still do not have words for that kind of pain. I felt such grief in my heart, but also sorrow towards my husband that he had spent a lot of his time guiding me on what she summed up in about 15 seconds.
I was tricked into a false reality that she created my entire life and it just shattered before my eyes. The loss I felt was indescribable.
After I wiped away my tears, a childhood friend brought a truth to my attention that took some time before I allowed it to sink in. “Natalie, I think you miss what you think your family should have been, not what they really are.”
As simple as that was, that clarity was helpful in my ability to move forward because my paradigm had been so distorted. I started telling myself that “I can’t miss something I never had to begin with.” I had convinced myself she loved me because I did not know any better. I had nothing to base what a mother should be.
What kind of mother is so withdrawn and callous toward their own child to the point of being smug towards their pain? What kind of mother puts her hand up and states that she will not be who she needs to be for her only daughter? Cold and callous didn’t cover it. Gut-wrenching didn’t cover it either.
For years, I justified in my heart she was just busy with work. I justified that she had to be gone all the time because my dad drank the money away. I justified her vulgarity and cruelty towards me as her being upset with my dad and that I had to take it on the chin. I covered the pain I felt, but I couldn’t brush off her cruel intentions on the inside. That kind of affliction takes years to heal from.
I knew I was wounded, but what do you do with the malice your mother dishes out regularly? You can’t pretend it isn’t crushing to your spirit. You can’t just pick up and move on like words don’t matter.
Because of this insatiable appetite for her to be in a superior position, she consistently labeled me as the inarticulate, mute. As much as I didn’t want to own so many different labels she was throwing out there, being subordinate was my only option if I was to have any kind of temporary peace in my life. I didn’t know any other route to take.
It wasn’t until much later on in my adulthood that I learned that narcissists have to feed off of someone.
We had been conditioned to glorify everything she ever said to be the gospel truth. We created this platform upon which we can place this idealized, fantasized version of mother so we wouldn’t have to recall all the things that really happened.
The reality is, my father went along with my mother’s distorted version of truth, she rose to superiority at the cost of her children… and because of mother’s grandiose sense of self-importance, we all became her idolizers and the narcissistic supply she needed to keep gaining her power. As my dad started to protect my mother’s image and did everything he could to fulfill her desires, he lost himself not only in his angry, alcoholic behavior, but she stripped him of any dignity and strength he had left as a man.
Ultimately, children are the real victims because they get lost in the shuffle of the selfishness the narcissist parent who dominates the control, and gains authority of the home. Children get lost in the neglect or abuse just observing the insanity the parents create.
Unfortunately, in our case, it was both. Children are so easily shaped by their environment and can be manipulated very quickly. I understand now that I preserved that narrative or fantasy about my mother (that she just had to have loved us and I needed to protect her at all costs) in order to keep the reality alive in my heart. If I didn’t, the alternative would be having to face that she was too selfish to truly love us and care for our needs at home.
It was very painful to face that reality. All I wished she would have done is pulled us in tightly, held us close, and reassured us it was going to be okay. For these reasons, this is why you can’t choose for someone else how they heal from abuse and neglect. It takes time and lots of encouragement along the way with safe people. Even on those hard days, you can’t just say to them that God is going to heal this situation because you don’t know what God is allowing. I know He can heal, but even if He doesn’t, empathizing and prayer is the simple answer here.
It was difficult for me not to absorb the things she would say that were directed at me. I knew she became easily frustrated and irritable, and by listening to her complaints, I was convinced that if she got the right job, or made enough money to suit her, if my dad was a better leader, if she had better friends, if my family went to the same church together, or if they could live under the same roof on a regular basis, stop filing for divorce every other year, or if they could just go to counseling longer than 3 days, maybe then, she would be happy.
The reality is, she chases a dragon. Her heart isn’t at home. I had to realize her lusts will never be satisfied. Her love of money will never be enough. She uses derogatory phrases about people she sees as beneath her, including her closest friend and my children. That self-importance complex was killing off any and all potential relationships that should be meaningful.
When all of those realities hit me and I no longer glorified who she was or what she was doing, it was like I was standing against an evil I could not ignore any longer. My eyes were opening, and God was helping me tear down those high places of what her version of what truth was.
God wanted me to be disgusted with sin, and this is what was happening to me. I hated what sin had caused my family. I saw myself as a pilgrim in a foreign land that could not stay if my children were to be preserved. I could never honor my parents and my God simultaneously because both were contradicting. The cost was very high and I knew that there wasn’t anything else I could do.
I had exhausted all of my efforts into someone who just wasn’t interested in being a mother to me. I could no longer lie for her. I could not cheat or steal for her when she asks. I had to stand against that fiery dart and say, “I know God can heal this situation with just one word, but even if he does not, I am not and will not bow to wickedness. I’m not going to cower to her darkness. I had to honor God first and if anything came against that, I had to rebuke it and walk away without regret.”
I didn’t wake up one day and everything make perfect sense. It came in tid-bits, pieces, sometimes chunks. It’s really the Lord who brought it to me one day at a time and as much as I could handle, little by little.
Some days, the prospect of losing even the little superficial moments that I had with my mother was really scary. There were times when I believed it was better for me to accept the terrible relationship over none at all at the expense of sinning and losing myself in the process.
I was still trapped in my child-like brain thinking I still needed this person in my life and I was willing to put myself at risk to be poisoned on a continued basis. It was a clear case of attachment trauma from a mother wound… and my dad’s addictions and anger only intensified my anxiety over what I was to do with the mess I was handed.
My dad has mentioned numerous times in his life, “I will take a punch anytime from anyone, but your mother’s back-biting mouth I just about can’t handle anymore. I’ll take a bust in the mouth any day over that.” There is a lot of truth in that statement for me as well.
There is something seriously sick in the heart of a human being when they use psychological abuse as a means to get what they want from their child, and in my opinion, it is much more damaging and wicked than physical abuse.
I feel I can speak to such a statement because I have experienced the traumatic, lasting effects of both. I say that with a very heavy heart. Just the implication that you are nothing more than invaluable and never good enough is devastating for a child.
It is obvious how unimportant I was to her, how she wouldn’t take the time to prepare me for the woman I needed to become, how heavily medicated we were because we were an obstacle to her lifestyle, how I internalized the cruelty that just oozed from her lips, and it is evident that she does not have even an ounce of remorse for any of those things.
For any daughter who is faced dealing with emotional and psychological abuse, I pray healing comes in a way that you can see God teaching you not to have a man-pleasing spirit. Jesus is the only one who can fill that void of not having a nurturing mother in your life.
(Galatians 1:10, 1 Thessalonians 2:4, Proverbs 29:25, Colossians 3:23, Acts 5:29, Isaiah 2:22, Romans 12:1-2, 2 Corinthians 5:9, Galatians 2:20)
Click the link here to continue to the last slice of The Mother Wound- Part 3
Natalie