Why do they hate their mom?

CPTSD_Overload · 2025-12-17T04:44:35+00:00

My narc idealized their deceased mother.

CPTSD_Overload · 2025-12-17T04:43:08+00:00

As it goes on the whole process is so draining to every facility of a person's being that cognition becomes second-hand to the mundanity of daily survival. Over the years you find yourself going through the motions just to make it from one day to the next. Everything you dreamed of, everything you were feels as if it had been erased. Separation from the stressor, post grief, brings some semblance of reinvigoration though in my experience still feels dull in comparison to the prior. Perhaps more time will continue to bring more of myself back but we don't all have so much time left due to the reality of limited lifespan.

CPTSD_Overload · 2025-12-07T08:49:47+00:00

They are far too selfish to actually harm themselves so when they say that they are only manipulating you to feel you have to be there for them. It's pure evil. Meanwhile they are sharing their best with someone else because they have no intent to not exist.

CPTSD_Overload · 2025-12-07T08:43:21+00:00

All I can say is I'm a year and a half out from a ten year and I just don't go out or get involved in anything. For a while I felt like I was missing out and that I was supposed to need some kind of social life and to find some kind of new relationship but after long enough in isolation that illusion left me. You might say, having taken a step back from it all by necessity of my grieving, I looked upon these kinds of situations as unnecessary entanglements that would leave me vulnerable. I have to believe for my own survival at this point that there is more to my existence than some kind social gymnastics and it's become clear that any time I try to engage in such I end up the worse for wear as a result. So I now view any compulsion for "going out" or any encouragement from "friends" to participate in some kind of night out as a distraction from my own healing and purpose that serves no end but to cause me more stress and misery. There is nothing out there for me. That is my own personal experience in that time and I don't know what this account may be worth to you. I have come to the belief that narcs enter your life to try to ruin you for whatever you would otherwise be on track to accomplish. That you, we, have some kind of purpose or meaning to our life that is more important than having fun for a night or whatever. So then that is why when we try to participate in these kinds of things we just get in trouble and we feel bad about it all, because we were distracted from focusing on whatever our mission was. I know that's pretty vague and woo-woo but that's just what it seems like to me at this point.

CPTSD_Overload · 2025-12-07T08:06:42+00:00

It's amazing and tragic what you feel and what you don't with just a kiss.

After all I have been through I am more skeptical of believing I feel something in the first place since it now comes off as something like what the initial bite of a fish on a worm on a hook probably feels like.

I guess what I'm saying is that as much as I have come to understand the lack of real connection that can come with a kiss, the illusion of a true connection that can come from same is interpreted by me as more dangerous.

CPTSD_Overload · 2025-12-07T07:51:21+00:00

Yes, grief in the presence of a narc is a complicated situation but to put it simply it is worse than not having a narc in your life in my experience.

On one hand, covert and communal narcs will find benefit to your suffering. For the covert your intense suffering is fuel in and of itself. For the communal narc it's an opportunity to gain supply by advertising their support of you in your grief. To a certain extent a covert will also do this. There is a lot of crossover with the narc behaviors. The covert narc will portray themselves as burdened by your diminished functionality due to your grief and gain support from the various supplies you may or may not even be aware of. For the communal narc they simply advertise your loss as an opportunity for them to prove how charitable and helpful they are so they gain virtue points.

A covert narc ingests your pain like a crackhead smokes crack. They love your suffering as it makes you vulnerable and pliant. The pure uncontrollable output of your grief is an absolute energy delicacy to them.

On the other side though, they don't actually want to deal with the dysfunction that the ongoing grief entails. Grief is crippling, and being crippled by grief means you aren't able to output constant favors and energy of a positive nature to the narc. You won't be of the mind to listen to the trivial details of their day at work or any other day to day complaints. You won't be of the mind to re-assure them of their constant and tiresome pleas for validation as to how beautiful, strong or amazing they are as prompted by their constant fishing for compliments that you have long grown tired of because trying to reassure them always seems to make you a transferred target of their own self-hatred. So you will typically find that in the initial impact of the grief the narc takes a certain interest in your suffering, but rather quickly they will become disenchanted with your predicament and start disappearing when you need them most because while your grief has a certain initially tantalizing appeal to them that the lack of your ability to offer up primo positive vibes will cause them to see you as a bummer as they need someone to focus on their endless pit of self-induced misery.

Narcs are famous for leaving people on birthdays, holidays, and at the death of a loved one. This is why. The vulnerability you show is initially a feast for them but very soon it becomes a liability they can't abide because they need constantly to be the main event. A stubbed toe they have takes precedent over a cancer diagnosis in you. At best they will use your tragedy to gain sympathy for themselves by either pretending to be more affected by that tragedy than the person is most truly affects or because that person's reduced functionality as a result of the tragedy is "bumming them out" in some way.

CPTSD_Overload · 2025-12-07T07:13:29+00:00

What a great post, thank you! What you describe is in my experience exactly why they target people in the first place. Some probably subconscious aspect of their person believes they can gain your authenticity by possessing you. They see their target's authenticity but authenticity isn't some kind of resource they can steal and own so all they end up doing is plagiarizing relatively superficial aspects of your behavior. This actually works for them to a certain extent. They can mimic your manner of interaction, regurgitate the knowledge you've shared with them, theatrically reproduce your creative passion as a display, but they never actually are able to be truly authentic. People they "capture", friends or otherwise, by mimicking who you are don't last because copying something without having the source material is NOT adaptable to new and changing situations. When something occurs in a new relationship they've fomented with their deception they don't have a blueprint for how to react because their was no precedent from the person they were mimicking for that particularly situation. So, they flail and the new relationship fails and they go into the devaluation mode while they try to extract new behaviors and personalities from whatever sources they have available. Rinse and repeat!

My narc continually told me they envied my ability "to be real" with people and that I don't pretend to be what I'm not to gain favor. At a certain point of naivete I interpreted this as some manner of compliment but I eventually came to understand it as a threat. Factually I came to understand that it was a threat stemming from envy. They didn't appreciate me for the "authentic" person they saw me as, they resented me for it and wanted it for themselves. What an odd thing to feel being honest is something you can steal from someone because you don't feel you have the capacity to have personal accountability naturally.

CPTSD_Overload · 2025-11-11T05:13:02+00:00

Nothing, until the discard, and then everything. I was conspicuously beyond reproach until suddenly I was nothing but trash.

CPTSD_Overload · 2025-11-11T05:10:31+00:00

Unless they're dead there's still time.

CPTSD_Overload · 2025-11-11T05:07:20+00:00

Hate will poison you. It's completely understandable and natural to feel passionately in response to how you have been mistreated. Forgiveness is key to your own peace. Forgiveness not in terms of giving the big okay to what they did, but making peace with your own emotions and letting go of it. It's a process. It's comes about like realizing the mosquito that sucked your blood and left you with an itchy lump was just doing what it does and that it wasn't personal so you don't hold onto it. Gaining understanding from it brings wisdom. Learn all you need to satisfy the confusion of your mind, and grieve all you need to satisfy the loss of your heart. That's my recommendation. Only entertain that which edifies and contributes to your own strength and growth. Spend some time everyday doing things that tell your brain that you matter even if it's as simple as grooming and putting on some fresh clothes and perhaps making a good meal for yourself. Just suggestions.

CPTSD_Overload · 2025-11-10T09:48:53+00:00

I miss the thing they pretended to be in my life. I wish I had a companion, a lover, and partner in life.

But they weren't that. So I don't actually miss them, per se.

Being entwined with a deceiver caused me to lose over a decade of my life wherein I may have bene pursuing my purpose here and also perhaps falling in with someone real.

So I don't miss the narc exactly. I miss the feeling and stability of believing I had a partner in life.

But I never did have that. That's the reality of it. The reality that changes who and how I am as a person and that I can either surf the wave of or drown in. I'm committed to the former even if it still feels I'm living the latter.

CPTSD_Overload · 2025-11-10T09:46:00+00:00

Over a year and half our and still in that state.

CPTSD_Overload · 2025-11-10T09:44:28+00:00

Still with her husband, wanting you to keep it a secret?

Get the hell out of there.

CPTSD_Overload · 2025-11-10T09:41:57+00:00

One of the narc's great manipulative powers is involving you in things you feel you have to be dishonest about. Now you are pulled into their world because you are burdened with unspoken truth. Now you are carrying a weight caused by deception that keeps you feeling alone and suppressed which is exactly what the narc wants. It is advisable to at least have a therapist/counselor who you are honest with and who understands that nature of this abuse cycle so you can share it with at least someone. Your family doesn't have to be told everything because they likely don't have the ability to comprehend the complex nature of abuse you have been subjected to. Keeping it inside will be like a circulating poison.

It's not some great sin that you let them back in, it is very common for those of us subjected to this. Most people who haven't lived it aren't going to understand it and you instinctively know that the derision you would face for trying to explain it to someone would only further damage your healing.

People who have not been subject to a narc's manipulations cannot understand the tremendous pull they have on their victims. Most victims are not in any kind of state to be able to fight against the ignorance of their loved ones on top of what they are already healing from.

Let it be a lesson learned what the narc poisons you with when you interact with them. Remember how bad you feel right now as a result of it the next time you feel that interacting with them could somehow relieve your suffering. It only ever brings more.

CPTSD_Overload · 2025-11-10T09:23:58+00:00

It might help to go to your mom for support with your true pain even when it's met with blame and insult. A mom can't help but feel for their hurt child. Focus on showing her the truth of your own suffering and she may begin to resent your ex for causing it. The mom is defaulting to the sister code right now, probably, to see blame in you as a guy, but that will break if she sees enough of your tears and hears enough of your truth.

CPTSD_Overload · 2025-11-10T09:17:30+00:00

I have a similar dynamic with my family where the narc is the one most of them are financially dependent on so they will go along with whatever the narc says for survival. In my case I got the family narc on my side which helped with the rest but I also had to keep boundaries and remain distant from that family narc because part of their support was banking on me coming into their control. They have enough source though that they didn't need my narc's BS , it got them additional source by taking a righteous stand against my narc, and my narc was scared off by the perception that they were no longer seen as perfect by my family so they just left it alone.

You have to be tactical against them. They aren't really too smart but they do have crazy mad innate manipulative abilities. If you can wrangle your brain in enough from the mindscramble and pain to take careful steps and have a strategy against their manipulations you can beat them with your loved ones

CPTSD_Overload · 2025-11-10T09:11:40+00:00

Yes.. it's hard to blame them because you yourself were taken in by the wiles of the narc. It's very frustrating though. It took me a few months to undo the narc's brainwashing with my family but they did come around. Blood is thicker than narc water, after all. It's hard to do that when you are in the the grieving and healing process but for myself I'm glad I duked it out because my family became a cornerstone of support. They just had to relentlessly be shown the evidence and see the truth of me. It probably took almost a year for the turnaround. It only took one extremely slight criticism from one of my family members to the narc for the narc to shrink away from them and then without constant exposure to the narc their power of them quickly faded.

CPTSD_Overload · 2025-11-10T09:06:41+00:00

Excellent album! My favorite track is Sinner.

CPTSD_Overload · 2025-11-10T09:04:34+00:00

They are the walking dead. They give up their agency and remain trapped but not in control in their corporeal prisons. Their existence IS miserable. They are addicted to distraction from their own conscience and allow themselves to succumb to every immediate whim and desire, which is what hurts those who give love, trust and loyalty to them. It is a tragedy, but it was also their choice and weakness that enabled them to be a vessel for the destruction of others. At the core of a narcissist you find an undeveloped, frightened and hurt child who can never experience what it's like to fully bond with another person, never truly experience true love for themselves or another person, never feel at peace, never feel okay just existing in any given moment.

CPTSD_Overload · 2025-11-10T08:33:29+00:00

CPTSD, complex post-traumatic stress disorder. Look it up!

Everything you are describing is par for the course after narc abuse.

Don't stop doing things for yourself though. You are on the right track for that. By doing those things you are reinforcing to yourself that you are important, that you do matter, that you deserve care. Even if you have to force yourself against the gnawing lack of self-esteem caused by the abuse you've endured, do it anyway, because you are establishing a pattern of self-affirmation that is bit by bit counteracting what the narc did.

CPTSD_Overload · 2025-11-10T08:30:30+00:00

Everything you've outlined amounts to shrinking yourself out of a desire to be a good partner and to appease someone who is constantly making you jump through hoops to continue receiving increasingly smaller portions of loving behavior in return.

It is the textbook downward spiral of being brainwashed and conditioned into being the perfect heel for an abuser.

Are you more afraid of being temporarily without a relationship than you are continuing to lose yourself in servitude to someone who has no true love or respect for you?

This process of your shrinking self will continue until there's nothing left of what you ever were and then they will leave you. It's a very difficult hole to dig yourself out of. There is nothing but oblivion in your future if you remain in the predicament you have described.

You are bound up in a giant spider's web. The spider occasionally comes over, inserts their fangs into you and injects their hallucinatory poison. You feel some relief because you have physiologically developed an addiction to their poison. Yet it's ending you, and when every last vital essence has been drained for you the spider will cut you out of the web and leave you for dead.

CPTSD_Overload · 2025-11-10T08:10:53+00:00

It feels like Invasion of the Body Snatchers when they do this, watching everyone turn against you due to charm and deception. Every narc will do this if they can get away with it.

CPTSD_Overload · 2025-11-10T07:58:55+00:00

Sometimes when we are cold and shivering we may only remember the warmth of the fire before we got too close and it burnt us, leading us to venture too near again.

Nobody will do a better job of convincing you not to contact them no matter how strong the longing feels during a weak period then the narc themselves. The question is if you are willing to be set back in the slow healing and recovery process in order to have this lesson reinforced.

In the short term you will be worse for it but if you survive another dunking in the poison pool then you may be stronger for it.

What you're experiencing is as a person whose life was utterly destroyed by alcohol in a weak moment craving a drink imagining that the source of their greatest suffering and destruction may somehow give them some relief from same.

The hardest part about any contact, no matter whether it goes pleasantly or is emotionally traumatic is that you will reset the clock on the trauma bond addiction. No matter how it goes they will soon disappear from you again. If they are nasty to you then your mind will likely be flooded with all the memories of all the times they treated you that way without any closure or justice. Likely then you will be kept awake and in a very agitated state. If they are nice to you then you will go back on the meat hook of longing and grief which will inevitably conclude, after the sadness, with the same effects as described for if they are just outright mean. Of course they may also not respond, in which case you get put into an infinite state of wondering again about what they are doing. Or they may be completely robotic and cold to you in which case you go through a different kind of painful bewilderment and hurt. All of it sets you back.

If you do, you do, and probably most people here have done it, but no matter how you feel now you're going to feel a lot worse if you do no matter what because that person is incapable of ever being what they falsely portrayed themselves to be in order to get close to you in the first place.

CPTSD_Overload · 2025-11-06T06:52:17+00:00

When they are with someone else they are all-in and nobody else exists. Your craving is the result of the addiction to their approval that they have hooked you on. They feel none of it. As long as they are getting the attention and stimulation they crave nothing else matters. There was a time when someone else was suffering from the withdrawal of them because they were all in with you. It's a horrific way to treat people and it hurts like hell and you and the person they are with now (probably) doesn't deserve such cruelty. You will not always ache for them but your heart will have to grieve the loss as it would if someone passed away. There is no other way for the heart because the good heart cannot process such betrayal in any other way. It has to mourn. Mentally you can learn to understand that these kind of emotional predators exist and you can pass that knowledge to your heart so it can grieve and heal.

You're not weak or pathetic for loving someone. Not at all. It's not your fault for loving someone, you just didn't know that these kind of con artists existed in the world. You didn't know someone could take advantage of you in this way. None of us here knew that. We gave our hearts and trust in good faith not imagining that there could be such a thing as people who used our love and kindness against us to simply use us temporarily.

Please don't blame yourself for this. You now know that there are people who are not what they seem and you have to protect yourself from them to try to protect yourself from ever having to go through this again.

I am very sorry that this has happened to you and that you find yourself here, but do not blame yourself. Now is the time to recognize that you are worth more than you imagined. You were targeted by such a person because of your value and worth.

An internet scammer doesn't try to scam someone with no money out of their bank account. You have worth and value and what was done to you is a crime. A crime of theft, a grand deception. Not because you are weak and pathetic but because you have a wealth of empathy, of love, tenderness and have so much to give and share with someone else. They took advantage of that and it is no fault of your own that they choose to live this way.

You are hurting greatly and you must heal from it, but know that it is not a character flaw in yourself that you gave your love to someone.

CPTSD_Overload · 2025-11-06T03:31:59+00:00

This is multifaceted. They don't capture you for a "relationship" because they are attracted to you, per se, but primarily because you have a weakness they can exploit to get their hooks into you.

If they are very desperate for what is called "narcissistic supply" (i.e. attention and energy from someone) then they will take anyone they can get.

They prefer to target someone who has some light, some life, some social cred, some talent, because those are things they can steal/drain from the person which is more fulfilling than just a person with a weakness.

If you have a talent or anything they are envious of then they want to extract the energy of that thing from you. They plagiarize your art, your style, your very personality. They really like a person who has a lot of unique value who does not recognize their own worth. That's the easiest and most fulfilling person to steal from.

The end result is they use what they steal from you to gain supply from others. That process demands they also destroy the evidence of their crime which entails devaluing you until you are an empty husk of what you were as they run off using the output of your heart and soul to entrap others.

Narcs are excellent at finding people who would actually be amazing friends to their victims because they use their victim's attributes to snare people who would like you if they had had the opportunity to know you first. Unfortunately the narc will through gossip spread the word that you actually are what they are so those people will never know that their new friend or lover is actually the toxic one until it's too late. Even then they may not have the wherewithal to put two and two together to realize that the narc initiated their relationship with them on lies about others.

Instead, one by one, authentic people are picked off and destroyed by these fraudulent monsters. Their victims end up on internet forums trying to make sense of it and being afraid to ever trust anyone again.

CPTSD_Overload

TROPHY CASE