You may have heard about the mother wound but today I will be covering what daughters of narcissistic mothers face when growing up with a mother like this.
Many daughters suffer complex trauma and end up with CPTSD or complex post traumatic stress disorder. How the narcissistic mother wound shows up:
You feel unloveable, distorted and defective.
You feel that if people knew the real you, they would reject you and abandon you.
Your life as a child was confusing because the person that was supposed to protect you and nurture you was the cause of your pain.
You may think in all or nothing, black and white due to being raised with somebody who was abusive. You have to separate the abuse from the nurturing aspects of your mother so that you could survive.
You focus on external validation and when you receive it, it’s not enough. You don’t feel happy or accomplished.
You may have all the things you want in your life but you still feel like a fraud.
You tend to idealize people, meaning you hold them to perfection until they fall from grace, and you are quick to cut people off due to fear of abandonment and rejection.
You have a hard time being vulnerable and opening up to others because being vulnerable with your mother meant pain and anguish and at times, it was dangerous.
You have trust issues because you couldn’t trust your mother to bond and attach with you as a child consistently. She was your first experience with trust and it was damaged.
You may lack empathy because you did not learn empathy as you were focused on yourself and surviving your childhood. (self-centered) In order to be empathetic, you need to put yourself into someone’s emotional world and that may be challenging for you.
You may use logic as a way to steer people away from getting close to you. It’s important to integrate the logical and emotional part of your brain.
Due to childhood abuse, your brain developed in a way for survival, logic may go out the window and you may react emotionally without thinking.
You may have physical symptoms of the repressed emotions that you haven’t dealt with such as migraines, fibromyalgia, heart palpitations, high blood pressure and digestive issues.
You most likely suffer from complex trauma, (CPTSD) as abuse from narcissistic parents tends to be repetitive in the child’s life. This includes emotional abuse, emotional neglect, physical abuse, no protection from sexual abuse.
Did you relate to any of this. If you want to start taking your life and power back from your narcissistic mother, subscribe to my email list.