“Babies are soo cute, I want one!“

The Breeder Reality Oath (via)

I understand that when I breed I accept the following conditions. I agree that these conditions are not “unfair,” that they may, in fact be the result of my own deficiencies as a parent, even if I am not aware of those deficiencies, and that I have no right to complain about them. I further agree that I will not expect the taxpayers to fund the consequences of these events:

1) In the modern developed world, breeding is a choice I make to fulfill my needs. I will not pretend that it “just happened” or that I am a victim of the consequences of my own decision to breed.

2) I understand that a child is a minimum $200,000 commitment. I have done the math and agree that I have an average of $11,000 a year after taxes for each child in excess of what I need for myself. I further understand that colleges are only getting more expensive, and that I probably need an additional $2000 a year after taxes for each child to invest towards my child’s education if I expect them to go to any college at all. Even though I have additional expenses, I will not be entitled to extra pay, or to preference for jobs, time off and promotions and I will not be exempt from rising costs of resources, no matter how much I need those resources. If the price of a barrel of oil goes up, I can expect my driving costs to go up.

3) I understand that a child is a minimum 18 year commitment. I understand that sweet little babies turn into active, independent toddlers, and mouthy, hostile teenagers. I have done the math and I know how old I will be when my last child graduates from college, and what the probabilities are that I will be disabled or unemployable by then.

4) I may have a child who is severely physically, mentally or emotionally disabled, even if I do everything “right.” I know that I will probably spend the rest of my life catering to that child’s needs at the expense of my marriage, my hopes and my expectations for my own life. I will accept that my child’s physical, mental and behavior problems are entirely my responsibility, and most likely are also my fault, even if I don’t recognize the root of that fault. Even if my child’s problems are caused by a genetic factor, I will still acknowledge that my child suffers because I put my own needs and wants ahead of theirs and so I gambled with their potential suffering and lost.

5) My child will not be special, unique or in any other way deserving of extra consideration and resources above those available to everyone else. It is extremely likely that my child will be quite average and will never do anything remarkable. I understand that in a world of six and a half billion people, another human being is not a gift to everyone else – it is just another burden.

6) I will probably have a child whose values or lifestyle diverge from what I would prefer. If my minor child decides to behave in a way that violate my values or standards I will, nonetheless, have the responsibility to deal with the consequences of that behavior. I understand that my adult children may use drugs, end up in prison, join a cult, abandon their religion, abuse their own children, cut off contact with me, or otherwise disappoint me and anger me.

7) I accept that once I breed, whether and how I have grandchildren is not under my control. If my minor child decides to have a child, I will have no say in that decision, but I will have financial responsibility for my grandchild, perhaps for the rest of its life. I know that my child may decide to abandon or abuse his or her children, and that I get no say in their parenting or in the outcome if the authorities become involved. I know that I may have to choose between raising my grandchildren and never seeing them again if my child proves to be an unfit parent. I am aware that my children have the absolute right to prevent me from seeing my grandchildren.

I further understand that my children have the right to decline to breed at all.

Whatever you say is met with smirks and amused sounding or exaggerated exclamations (“Uh hunh!” “You don’t say!” “Really!”). She’ll then make it clear that she didn’t listen to a word you said.
If she visits you or you visit her, you are required to spend all your time with her. Entertaining herself is unthinkable. She has always pouted, manipulated or raged if you tried to do anything without her, didn’t want to entertain her, refused to wait on her, stymied her plans for a drama or otherwise deprived her of attention.

It’s your [narcistic] mother.

Do you know her, too?

Before you read the following text, think of how your mother may have acted similarly. Think of friends and their mothers and how common this mother is and what effect it has on our society or, how it portrays the general mental health of our society.

Cruelties are couched in loving terms. Aggressive and hostile acts are paraded as thoughtfulness. Selfish manipulations are presented as gifts. Criticism and slander is slyly disguised as concern. She only wants what is best for you. She only wants to help you.

She’ll talk about how wonderful someone else is or what a wonderful job they did on something you’ve also done or how highly she thinks of them. The contrast is left up to you. She has let you know that you’re no good without saying a word. She’ll spoil your pleasure in something by simply congratulating you for it in an angry, envious voice that conveys how unhappy she is, again, completely deniably. It is impossible to confront someone over their tone of voice, their demeanor or they way they look at you, but once your narcissistic mother has you trained, she can promise terrible punishment without a word. As a result, you’re always afraid, always in the wrong, and can never exactly put your finger on why.

Because her abusiveness is part of a lifelong campaign of control and because she is careful to rationalize her abuse, it is extremely difficult to explain to other people what is so bad about her.

Unfortunately therapists, given the deniable actions of the narcissist and eager to defend a fellow parent, will often jump to the narcissist’s defense as well, reinforcing your sense of isolation and helplessness (“I’m sure she didn’t mean it like that!”)

You have never known what it is like to have privacy in the bathroom or in your bedroom, and she goes through your things regularly. She asks nosy questions, snoops into your email/letters/diary/conversations. She will want to dig into your feelings, particularly painful ones and is always looking for negative information on you which can be used against you. She does things against your expressed wishes frequently. All of this is done without seeming embarrassment or thought.

Any attempt at autonomy on your part is strongly resisted. Normal rites of passage (learning to shave, wearing makeup, dating) are grudgingly allowed only if you insist, and you’re punished for your insistence (“Since you’re old enough to date, I think you’re old enough to pay for your own clothes!”) If you demand age-appropriate clothing, grooming, control over your own life, or rights, you are difficult and she ridicules your “independence.”

If you complain about mistreatment by someone else, she will take that person’s side even if she doesn’t know them at all. She doesn’t care about those people or the justice of your complaints. She just wants to let you know that you’re never right.

She will deliver generalized barbs that are almost impossible to rebut (always in a loving, caring tone): “You were always difficult” “You can be very difficult to love” “You never seemed to be able to finish anything” “You were very hard to live with” “You’re always causing trouble” “No one could put up with the things you do.” She will deliver slams in a sidelong way – for example she’ll complain about how “no one” loves her,

The envy of narcissistic mothers often includes competing sexually with their daughters or daughters-in-law. They’ll attempt to forbid their daughters to wear makeup, to groom themselves in an age-appropriate way or to date. They will criticize the appearance of their daughters and daughters-in-law. This envy extends to relationships. Narcissistic mothers infamously attempt to damage their children’s marriages and interfere in the upbringing of their grandchildren.

She has to be the center of attention all the time. This need is a defining trait of narcissists and particularly of narcissistic mothers for whom their children exist to be sources of attention and adoration. Narcissistic mothers love to be waited on.

Older narcissistic mothers often use the natural limitations of aging to manipulate dramas, often by neglecting their health or by doing things they know will make them ill. This gives them the opportunity to cash in on the investment they made when they trained you to wait on them as a child. Then they call you (or better still, get the neighbor or the nursing home administrator to call you) demanding your immediate attendance. You are to rush to her side, pat her hand, weep over her pain and listen sympathetically to her unending complaints about how hard and awful it is. (“Never get old!”) It’s almost never the case that you can actually do anything useful, and the causes of her disability may have been completely avoidable, but you’ve been put in an extremely difficult position. If you don’t provide the audience and attention she’s manipulating to get, you look extremely bad to everyone else and may even have legal culpability. (Narcissistic behaviors commonly accompany Alzheimer’s disease, so this behavior may also occur in perfectly normal mothers as they age.)

A peculiar form of this emotional vampirism combines attention-seeking behavior with a demand that the audience suffer. Since narcissistic mothers often play the martyr this may take the form of wrenching, self-pitying dramas which she carefully produces, and in which she is the star performer. She sobs and wails that no one loves her and everyone is so selfish, and she doesn’t want to live, she wants to die! She wants to die! She will not seem to care how much the manipulation of their emotions and the self-pity repels other people. One weird behavior that is very common to narcissists: her dramas may also center around the tragedies of other people, often relating how much she suffered by association as she cries over the horrible murder of someone she wouldn’t recognize if they had passed her on the street.

She’s selfish and willful. If you tell her she cannot bring her friends to your party she will show up with them anyway, and she will have told them that they were invited so that you either have to give in, or be the bad guy to these poor dupes on your doorstep. If you tell her she can’t come over to your house tonight she’ll call your spouse and try get him or her to agree that she can, and to not say anything to you about it because it’s a “surprise.” She has to show you that you can’t tell her “no.”

She’ll make it clear that it pains her to give you anything. She may buy you a gift and get the identical item for herself, or take you shopping for a gift and get herself something nice at the same time to make herself feel better.

She’s infantile and petty. Narcissistic mothers are often simply childish. If you refuse to let her manipulate you into doing something, she will cry that you don’t love her because if you loved her you would do as she wanted.

he shed her responsibilities to you as soon as she was able, leaving you to take care of yourself as best you could. She denied you medical care, adequate clothing, necessary transportation or basic comforts that she would never have considered giving up herself. She wouldn’t buy your school pictures even if she could easily have afforded it. You had a niggardly clothing allowance or she bought you the cheapest clothing she could without embarrassing herself. As soon as you got a job, every request for school supplies, clothing or toiletries was met with “Now that you’re making money, why don’t you pay for that yourself?”

Above all, you were always her emotional caregiver which is one reason any defection from that role caused such enormous eruptions of rage. You were never allowed to be needy or have bad feelings or problems. Those experiences were only for her, and you were responsible for making it right for her. From the time you were very young she would randomly lash out at you any time she was stressed or angry with your father or felt that life was unfair to her, because it made her feel better to hurt you. This includes her children, of course. If she set up a bank account for you, she was trustee on the account with the right to withdraw money.

Sometimes the narcissist will exploit a child to absorb punishment that would have been hers from an abusive partner. The husband comes home in a drunken rage, and the mother immediately complains about the child’s bad behavior so the rage is vented on to the child. Sometimes the narcissistic mother simply uses the child to keep a sick marriage intact because the alternative is being divorced or having to go to work. The child is sexually molested but the mother never notices, or worse, calls the child a liar when she tells the mother about the molestation.

From the perspective of ability, narcissists are extremely empathetic; indeed they have a gift of telling what other people are feeling and thinking. Their skill at discerning and guiding the emotions of other people is the basis of many characteristically narcissistic interactions. Narcissists are very socially adept which is why no one ever believes their children when they complain of their mothers. They know just how to make everyone think that they’re delightful.

As a last resort she goes pathetic. When she’s confronted with unavoidable consequences for her own bad behavior, including your anger, she will melt into a soggy puddle of weepy helplessness. It’s all her fault. She can’t do anything right. She feels so bad. What she doesn’t do: own the responsibility for her bad conduct and make it right. Instead, as always, it’s all about her, and her helpless self-pitying weepiness dumps the responsibility for her consequences AND for her unhappiness about it on you. As so often with narcissists, it is also a manipulative behavior. If you fail to excuse her bad behavior and make her feel better, YOU are the bad person for being cold, heartless and unfeeling when your poor mother feels so awful.

Read the full text at http://www.geocities.com/zpg1957/narcissists.htm

• Feelings (transference)
• Parental relationship (go ahead, tell me everything about your childhood ;-)
• Psychology on a global scale: Psychohistory and the way psychohistory thinking could be applied today’s events, unconscious motivated global behavior, unconscious motivated political behavior, group behavior
• Defense Mechanisms: resistance, denial, projection, identification, humor
• Collusion

Right now I have a couple of drafts pending – my perfectionism inhibits me from blogging in a more fluent manner.

Please share your experiences and ideas, too!