A Theory of Everything # 10 'A Covert, Vulnerable Narcissist'

The abandonment of ‘Cecilia’ wasn’t just my failure. It was also an opportunity missed by my mother. It was my mother who I enlisted to open the door to a rape victim and it was my mother who dismissed a rape victim, ostensibly to save me from feeling uncomfortable and from doing a difficult thing. My mother, who had been the victim of an almost identical violation. When my mother closed the door on Cecilia, the victim of repeated, familial sexual abuse, she also closed the door on the opportunity to provide guidance to me, her emotionally ill-equipped son, and to take the first steps towards recovery from her own trauma.

The awful predation on Cecilia should have provoked sympathy, compassion and, most importantly, empathy.

‘Empathy is the ability to understand and share others' emotions, allowing us to see things from their perspective and connect with their feelings.’ -  https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-empathy-2795562

So, why did my mother squander such a rich opportunity? Why didn’t she set aside time and space to talk to me about such a serious issue?

Competent parenting helps teach honesty, self-reliance, self-control, skills like conflict resolution, fostering resilience, cooperation, autonomy, independence and developing compassion and empathy.

Why such an appalling lack of empathy?

Evidence would suggest that my mother suffered from two trauma-informed maladies, the first being arrested development.

‘In its most common everyday use, arrested development describes adults whose emotional maturity doesn’t match their chronological age… People experiencing arrested development often get described as flighty, scatterbrained, irresponsible, or impatient. They may struggle with impulse control, have difficulty managing strong emotions, or default to avoidance when confronted with adult responsibilities… The most widely discussed cause of arrested development is childhood trauma. This includes exposure to physical, sexual, or emotional abuse, neglect, domestic violence, bullying, and other experiences that overwhelm a child’s ability to cope.’ - https://scienceinsights.org/what-is-arrested-development-in-psychology/

My mother was stuck at the same age that she was violated, I’m guessing somewhere between 8 and 12 years old.

The second trauma-induced malady that I believe my mother suffered from was narcissism or, more specifically, covert or vulnerable narcissism.

Over the last few years of my own therapy I have developed a sharp-edged understanding of my mother’s narcissism. She absolutely embodied some of the more obvious narcissistic traits typically arising from the need for attention, ie an inflated sense of entitlement and the exaggerated need to manipulate and control.

But my mother’s narcissism was more specific, running far deeper.

While traditional narcissists often present as grandiose and entitled, vulnerable narcissists tend to exhibit feelings of insecurity, inadequacy, and victimhood alongside their narcissistic tendencies.

My mother was particularly threatened by my ambitions and achievements, displaying a kind of ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’. None of us were expected to get ahead of ourselves and that philosophy rubbed off onto my father. I asked him fairly recently what his ambitions were for me as I was growing up and he replied, in shocking honesty, that I might never end up in prison. That’s as far as his imagination stretched. I borrow the phrase ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’ from speechwriter Michael Gerson who described a patronizing and dangerous attitude that assumes certain people are capable of less because of their race or background. I believe my mother adopted this same philosophy because she didn’t want to be abandoned. If her family expected little or nothing then maybe they would never become curious and remain blind to an otherwise interesting world, a world threateningly more interesting than her. My ambitions and achievements triggered her insecurity, inadequacy and real sense of victimhood.

It’s easy to see how my mother played a significant part in strangling my father’s own ambitions, insidiously stifling his creative impulses and implying that his bridges were burning so that he wouldn’t be tempted to wander too far. There is more to my father’s failure to achieve his potential but my mother’s dysfunction was a huge influence and the consequences were catastrophic. He always found himself in poor paying employment and never seemed to be interested in a career or improving his lot. We were condemned to live in abject poverty, financially as well as emotionally.

I first understood this deprivation after I was handed over to my aunt for a short while at about the age of 10. The contrast between living with my immediate family and living with my aunt was jarring. When I was finally returned to my parents I had a completely altered perspective and a freshly acquired version of ‘normal’ familial relationships alongside a disturbingly profound insight into my mother’s dysfunction. I was still loitering at the threshold of adolescence, uneducated and inexperienced, with absolutely no understanding of the terminology or even basic concepts of psychology. What I did have, however, was an unsophisticated, low resolution understanding that my mother was mentally ill.

Living with my aunt made me realise that I had spent my childhood without a mother. I had grown up impoverished, in an environment characterised by a profound dearth of nurturing, comfort, caring, emotional support and love. I now believed  my mother’s place had been usurped by an imposter, a changeling oaf ( there are some modern day academics who argue that old stories of humans replaced by supernatural beings originated as folklore explanations for autism or other developmental conditions ). Even though I began to reject her, my mother still held court over my father and my siblings, emotionally manipulating them so that they became her enablers. I refused to play that part. While the rest of the family indulged my false mother’s maladaptive behaviour, I turned my back. I desperately needed a genuine mother but mine was stuck in her own pre-traumatic past. For a brief moment in time my false mother and I were both the same age. Thereafter she became obsolete and I went stumbling over that threshold of adolescence, eager to outdistance her while searching for an idealised substitute.

But I had no idea of my inheritance, my Demonic Neurological Attachment handed down just as Karswell handed Dunning his doom by way of a strip of paper with indecipherable runic writing in M. R. James short horror story.