My mom was a narcissist. Here’s why I forgave her.
A story of emotional abuse and forgiveness.
my brother, myself and my mom
I loved my mom dearly as a child. It was the type of obsessive love that consumed my entire being and everything I did was a love letter to my mom. From the artworks I painted to the essays I wrote, I courted her beauty and wisdom relentlessly for the three words that fueled my existence: my good son. Our love story delighted my mom’s social circuit and the aunties who were deprived of their sons’ love, expressed their envy freely: they wanted an exact version of me, sometimes even wishing I was their son. The endless praise never felt meaningful, but when the longing words broke a smile on my mom’s face, I was ecstatic. In my eyes, my mom was God and I was a Sufi, dancing for the union of Love. Our love was undeniable and I was confident that she also loved me so much that it hurt. At least that’s what I thought.
Hint: she didn’t.
Through self-therapy, I learned that my mom was a narcissist and I was set up to feed her insatiable need for adoration. Everything was about her and none of my accomplishments were possible without her. As I slowly regained access to childhood memories, I remembered “My good son,” was always followed by a backhanded compliment for herself like, “so talented, just like me” and her iconic line, “I’m the only person who will ever love you this much,” kept me plugged into her love matrix. When I failed to be the perfect son, it was always my fault: either I was too selfish, too much like my dad, too ungrateful for her noble sacrifice or I didn’t listen to her holy scriptures. She was no different than God and demanded my blind faith religiously.
As I came to these realizations, the illusions of love shattered and what felt like unconditional love revealed itself to be bread crumbs that I hastily chased after. The crumbs were far and few in between, yet in being perfect, I was guaranteed more of it. So in the name of love, I progressed from being the sweet boy who earned straight A’s, to becoming the top business school graduate who hustled for a successful career, hoping to finally be told, “My good son, I love you for who you are.” Yet there I was, sitting on top of trophies, designer clothes and titles, and beneath it all, the emptiness built upon the hollow love my mom showed me, tore my heart into a void. I felt like a motherless child who was tricked into endless love schemes; I was simply the accessory of her self importance, a tier of her love MLM. My efforts never enough, and her greed to feel good, never ending.
Yet I forgave her. Why? It’s a complicated story.
my kindergarten teacher and I. The red badge on me says role-model student
The more I understood psychodynamics and my mom’s life, the clearer it was to me that it wasn’t a question of why my mom became a narcissist, but a matter of when she became one. Turns out, our ancestral stories matter a lot. As I grieved my past while resenting her, a tiny spark of curiosity prompted me to ask my dad about my mom’s upbringing. Let’s just say, I had it better than her. I was told many tales I’ve heard before, yet one scathed my memory in particular. My grandparents were sexist (when it was still custom in Taiwan), and heavily favored my uncle and left my mom crying alone whenever she became needy. Allegedly, her cries were notorious and penetrated the whole neighborhood like haunting PSA’s. It was one neighbor who occasionally dropped by and tended to her cries that translated into my mom’s fond memories of her. In her eyes, the aunt was a maternal figure she wished she had. As I gathered, my mom, subject to emotional neglect and abuse, wasn’t allowed to have needs and her healthy narcissism was never mirrored. Her story was starting to resemble mine too closely, yet it didn’t explain her character development entirely. As my dad continued to recall the optimistic smile my mom always carried while they were dating, I wasn’t convinced the disassociated cheerfulness gave birth to her narcissism.
As I put the puzzle pieces together, it occurred to me that the marriage accelerated her path to narcissistic awakening. In many East Asian traditions, when a woman gets married to a man, the wife is indoctrinated into the husband’s family and subject to strict expectations on how to be the perfect housewife. For many, the principle of sacrifice and giving away one’s self to family duties was commonplace. Though my mom tried, somehow her housewife skills never met my grandma’s standards and I recalled the many times my mom cried angrily whenever she recounted those days. Like her own mom, she gave away her needs for my dad’s family, yet she was never good enough. So with nuclear families becoming the norm at that time, she withheld my brother and I from my grandparents and relied on us for validation.
Then, breast cancer came. I was five years old when she was diagnosed for the first time, and it’s easy to imagine how chronic illness damages the sense of self. To the external eye, my mom was always “the strong one” throughout her 16 year battle with stage four cancer that came later. Yet deep down, I knew she was depressed. As memories thawed from deep within my unconscious, I remembered the numerous times I felt a heavy cloud around her presence, like a whirlpool of emptiness sucking away her soul. Though she never admitted to this depression, my HSP radar knew exactly what she felt: the emotional void I felt piercing through my heart, was exactly the one she felt herself too. It was through this depression that the narcissism came into full bloom. Psychoanalyst Alice Miller of The Drama of the Gifted Child said, “Behind manifest grandiosity there constantly lurks depression, and behind a depressive mood there often hides an unconscious sense of a tragic history. In fact, grandiosity is the defense against depression, and depression is the defense against the deep pain over the loss of the self that results from denial.” As I came to realize, my mom’s narcissism was a coping mechanism against her nonexistent self and me being the perfect child, was the ripe vehicle to fuel her love tank. Whenever she was low on self esteem, there I was, ready to give love out of survival. And as social roles dictated, she used my love to give me the little crumbs of her self to fulfill the narrative of mothers “naturally” loving their offsprings unconditionally. In short, the crumbs I got were really all that there was, and like me who was trying to be the perfect child, she was also trying to be the perfect mom. We were both empty inside, but we were empty together.
my mom and grandma (her mom)
the summer my mom was diagnosed with stage four cancer
As I traced from her archeology to mine, my anger morphed into one of deep grief: grief over the childhood I could and should have had, and grief over my mom’s childhood. Abuse is abuse, yet narcissists are victims too. Like my mom, people are not born narcissists; they are born into environments that nurture their narcissism. As our culture continues to normalize pathology however, somehow every parent is now toxic or a narcissist; we have scapegoated the label to avoid understanding their traumatic pasts and the ways emotional violence runs in our cultures and ancestries. We have mistaken symptoms as the root causes and psychological frameworks as the absolute truth for the people we vilify. When all that I saw in my mom was a mean narcissist, I reduced her humanity to the ways she hurt me and not for the ways she was hurt too. As I’ve learned, blaming is easy and claiming responsibility isn’t.
Despite the sympathy, forgiveness did not come easily. My mom was still the villain in my inner children’s eyes and they quivered at the thought of my mom’s love-thirsty hunts. The wounds were too deep to intellectualize a forgiveness. As I always say, forgiveness is a byproduct of our healing, not something we can bully ourselves into. For me, that came a year later.
At that time, I was visiting LA and staying with my best friend who recently relocated there. Like her, I’ve always been fond of LA and was also considering moving out west to answer the calling. Growing up, I spent a few summers in LA for camp, but my experiences were neutral at best, so my kinship to the city felt quite unexplainable. Perhaps it was just my intuition or perhaps it was all the Hollywood junk doing its job right. It was during a drive back to my friend’s place one evening that I realized why.
I sat on the back seat gazing out the window and reflecting on my visit, and it struck me that I loved LA not for the city, but for the time I got to spend with my mom. Back in Taipei, life logistics were easier and I was often left to take the school bus alone, to play alone and to do all the other acts that didn’t require parent supervision, alone. It was during those childhood summers in LA that I could finally have my mom all to myself and felt like she actually wanted me; she drove me to camp, she played with me and we shopped for groceries and clothes together. For the perfect child entitled to bare minimum needs, that was my slice of heaven and the first time I consciously felt like I wasn’t rejected with absence. My mom also didn’t have the social circus to flaunt our enmeshed love poetry and her ancestors there to judge her “unworthiness”. She was able to drop her facade of needing to be perfect, and the attention she showed me was heartwarming rather than transactional. For both of us, LA was our refuge where we were allowed to finally be ourselves. And not just to be empty together, but to be full together.
one of those summers in LA
The LA night lights continued to tinker on Sunset Boulevard and my reflections deepened and the fleeting scenery flashed my body with a bodily memory that wasn’t mine, but my mom’s. My body sank heavily into the car seat and a thousand needles darted my back and shoulders - these acute pains were what my mom complained about for years before she was diagnosed with stage four cancer. She recovered from breast cancer smoothly the first time, but I realized the metastasis plagued her body way before the second diagnosis. She was already cancer ridden before the official life sentence. Despite the raging pain, she still pulled herself together to spend summers in LA with me, cheery and smiley like the Californian sun when she could’ve easily cancelled on me. I imagined all the physical pain piercing through each crevice of her soul as she drove me to camp, as she played with me and as she grocery shopped with me. Sitting with the immense pain, I understood that even though my mom rarely showed me the emotional love I needed, she showed me the love that she knew and was capable of. Like how she gave away her needs for her mom and my dad’s family, she also gave away her needs for me, to the extreme extent that her excruciating pain became secondary. Though mothers are often burdened with the impossible tasks of unconditional love out of justified biology and patriarchy, I knew what my mom showed me amidst her deep pains and coverup smiles was in fact, unconditional love: unconditioned by her needs, unconditioned by her narcissism and unconditioned by her cancer body. Though she had her faults and was in many ways far from being the good enough mother, my heart felt the love obscured in her “narcissism” and beneath the adult face, I saw the longing inner child crying for love. She was like me, the child who felt motherless and her narcissism, simply a survival strategy. My overflowed floodgates opened and my heart murmured, “I forgive you mom, and I love you for who you are.” Turns out, we were two Sufi’s dancing around each other, for each other’s love and my forgiveness, a catharsis for my wounds.
As we pulled into the garage, I felt a deep compassion for the mislabeled narcissists out there. In an era of increasingly polarization, we have fallen prey to psychological frameworks that provide fast and reductionist ways to stereotype others, so we can relieve our fears of human ambiguity and paradox. We have fueled the fires of making mental health issues phenomenons and minimized the importance of self examination beyond cheap labeling. After all, the narcissistic archetype is simply an exaggerated version of most individualists. For many, what they reject in narcissists is the denial of their own narcissism. I was in fact one of them, a covert-narcissist in the making. Like my mom, my fate would have been sealed into becoming a self-gratifying parent had I not plunged into the depths of my shadows to surface my quenchless love seeking. Sure “narcissists” are not pleasant to deal with and sure, not everyone will be able to psychoanalyze their parents, but allowing ourselves to see the full array of humanity in others, gives us the space and grace to also be gentle and loving with ourselves. You could say I forgave my mom because of her love, but you could also say I forgave her to forgive myself. Either way a win-win and the illusion of love-crumbs restored to its full bread-th.
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Beautifully written. I'm wishing everyone who has been hurt by a narcissist a healing journey as deep and loving as yours despite the challenges ❤️