When Your Mother is Envious of You…Ouch!

Warning: If you are a mean mother or have a mean mother, this piece may be disturbing to you. You read it at your peril. Consider, please, that no one, I repeat no one, has to read my posts.

Overview on Meanness

As my regular readers know, I have been writing for years about meanness and mean people (I now accept that they exist and cannot be helped, which evidences growth for sure). I have wrestled for decades with the whys of meanness: why are folks mean? Why do people treat others poorly? Why don’t they see their own behavior, exhibiting meanness while professing religiosity? Good questions all.

A Mother

I have long believed that one’s early years make a huge difference in one’s adolescent and adult life. Children who grow up without quality maternal nurturing struggle mightily as adults. Children who grow up with unmediated maternal narcissism struggle mightily as adults. Children who grow up with maternal envy struggle mightily as adults. Children who grow up with mean mothers struggle mightily as adults.

Don’t I know!

There are lots of ways children learn to compensate for the above maternal failings. These children, not all of them to be sure, seek out substitute maternal figures. These children, not all of them to be sure, develop coping mechanisms that allow them to shut out and block out bad maternal abuse, including verbal tirades that are venom filled. These children, not all to be sure, cut off these bad acting mothers when these children mature into adulthood and can leave without danger to themselves. These children, not all to be sure, understand the power of moral injury.

Lots of behaviors allow children with damaging and damaged mothers to not just survive but thrive.

But they pay a steep price.

Belief in Self

Imagine the envious mother, envy behavior that can persist for decades. The envious mother wants a daughter’s looks or career or lovers or money or lifestyle for her own. The envious mother, deeply unhappy in her own life and relationships, satisfies her own needs by demeaning her daughter, thrashing at her successes, questioning her choices, challenging her decisions, all the while demanding obedience. If you don’t do X or Y, she threatens that she will do W or T to you: bad bad bad.

Yup, these bad mothers exist. I know. My biological mother fit that bill.

But, the deepest cut is the reality that young children absorb the negative feelings their mothers have about them. These young people sadly but understandably believe that they (the children) are lesser because their mothers have treated them as lesser.

If your mother never could look into your eyes with warmth, if your mother could not control her outbursts, if your mother had an absence of filters (justifying their omission as honesty in verbal tsunamis), then you struggle to believe in yourself.

Think about this framing: If your mother doesn’t care about you genuinely and deeply and in a healthy way, how can one possibly reject the sick mother’s model and develop profound, lasting and enduring belief in oneself? Kids believe the gaslighting. They believe their mean and sick mother.

Answers

My mean narcissistic neighbor reminds me of my mean narcissistic mother. The parallels are obvious. Sure, ages are off! And as I watch her adult children relate to (or distance themselves from) her, I see my mother loudly and clearly.

I want to shout out: don’t let her destroy you. Don’t listen to her complaints that she wants to define you. Don’t let her pathetic neediness force you into compliance and meeting her every whim. Don’t let her haranguing force you to do things that aren’t you. Don’t expose your children (her grandchildren) to her. Don’t invite her to weddings or engagement parties or family gatherings. Don’t take her on trips.

And while it increases the burden of others and leaves her alone (awful situation as you age), I get why they rarely visit. (The grown step children don’t visit either of late best as I can tell.) I get why their spouses hardly ever appear. I get why the grandchildren never show up. I get why no visitors ever show up. She has effectively been ostracized. They’d rather send $$$ than themselves.

And I want to (but actually do not) shout out at this neighbor: behave, respect the other, be decent, be kind, be respectful ….even though I know this is wasted breath. My voice raising won’t change her even an inch.

There is no shortcut to developing belief in self. Even after a mean mother dies, she has already cast her dye. True. Another truth I know. But….

Steps … Real Steps

So, the child of the narcissistic mean mother initially needs to be reminded by others that she is kind and good and smart and attractive and successful. She needs to find reinforcement. Repeated reinforcement. And at first, she won’t be able to absorb it fully. She needs help believing she’s actually ok. Teachers can help. Fathers can help. Surrogates can help. Colleagues can help. Lovers can help.

There is another pathway initially. It comes from mothering one’s own children differently from how one was raised. Indeed, being a good mother allows one to see what power good mothering has and the joy that can come from seeing one’s child grew and flourish.

The idea that one is proud, not envious, of one’s child can be powerful and serve as a reminder of what can be. Even if one experiences it as a parent rather than as a child, our brains can flex and let us see the positive effects of good mothering. Mirror neurons at work.

This good mothering step might well account for my effort to raise not just my biological son and adopted son but children everywhere. It explains why I want still to help all our children.

But, the even deeper step is to own one’s success, one’s goodness, one’s capacities without needing outside reinforcement. This comes with truly looking in the mirror and owning the remarkable being one has become not in spite of, but because of, one’s bad mother.

Think about that. Yes, it has taken hard work and plentiful self-reflection and pain.

But:

I am who I am because I had an awful, mean, narcissistic and mentally ill mother. She is why I can’t be mean. She is why I give to others. She is why I am an educator. She is why I can mother others. She is why I get trauma and its symptomology. She is why I can write about truth.

Because of her lacks, I gained.

Shifting from Despite to Because

Now. Consider this framework shift.

My mean neighbor makes me mad every time I see her (rare occurrence these days). That feeling is no longer uncomfortable. It is more and more powerful. Her behavior, her narcissism, her absence of empathy, her absence of self-reflection are reminders of what I lived with with my mother.

And her presence (yesterday she was standing in such a way that she was blocking efforts to clear snow and move cars during a storm) has become the key to transforming me into having a deeper belief in who I am…. Because….

Yes. I now thrive because of my mother. I now thrive in the presence of my mean neighbor.

We all deal with mean people differently. I used to want my mean neighbor to move. I now find power in realizing what exactly she and her kind have done to hurt others. She’s become symbolic of the bad. She reminds me to be me … day in and day out … because of her. The contrast between her behavior and mine, in the neighborhood and in the community and in the world could not be more different.

My horrible neighbor is, symbolically, the emblem of and the reason I can and should believe in myself. Her badness is a constant reminder of how I became the person I am, a person who believes in herself and who sees all she learned from lengthy exposure to bad.

Wow! Belief in self, even if precariously balanced as it is in us all, is found by absorbing the lessons one learned from bad people. Another wow! Because of, not despite.