hot take: moms need to learn how to listen to and comfort their daughters without making everything about their own traumas
a classic example
daughter: hey this thing you do bothers me very much and i wish you wouldn’t do it
mom: well my parents abused me and im not even as bad as they were and i had to sit through it so you gotta sit through whatever i do to you too
a common variant
mom: well i’m having a really hard time right now and you know that i’m doing my best and that i didn’t mean to hurt you ergo you are in fact the asshole for asking me to consider your feelings and change my behavior during this hard hard time i’m having
This is a very important post about how to recognize problematic behavior in narcissistic mothers. It is also something we all need to watch out for in ourselves, especially if we were raised by a narcissistic parent.
Because if that’s what you’re used to, you can grow up wrongly believing that this is what sympathy is supposed to sound like.
I have, numerous times, talked about having a bad day, and had a well-meaning acquaintance tell me how much worse their day was, honestly believing that they were being sympathetic – that telling me how much worse their day was would somehow make me feel relieved, or grateful, that my day wasn’t as bad as theirs.
Of course, it did not make me feel better. It made me feel like my experiences were being trivialized, and like my feelings were being invalidated.
I know these people weren’t trying to be cruel. They truly just didn’t know better. They thought they were empathizing.
If you didn’t grow up learning what genuine sympathy looks/sounds/feels like, it’s hard to know how to show genuine sympathy for other people, even when you really do care about them.
