My mom was very strict with me as a child, but I don’t think it was narcissistic. She was very focused on my education. I had to do well and get a good job. But it was because she wanted me to have good health insurance as I have had chronic health issues from birth. I have a good job now, my student loans are paid off, and she was right about me needing good health insurance. Our relationship is lovely now. But I’ll probably always remember the time that I skipped a homework assignment and she spit in my face.

My father was a good man, through and through, but he didn’t always think about the consequences of his actions. He ran his own business quite well for many years, and my mother and I were well taken care of right up to when he died and beyond.

However, for a few years before he retired, the business wasn’t doing well. He kept it afloat with his retirement fund, and drained it pretty quickly. He never touched mom’s half nor what he’d set aside for me. Mom found out and forced him to shut the place down and retire early.

However, because he spent all that money keeping the business afloat, he had to keep working to make any kind of income. He went and got his CDL and drove busses for the city and the school in the small town he and my mom lived in for a bit before taking a job as an instructor at the small local college.

It was during one of these days out teaching his students that he got bit by a mosquito and contracted West Nile Virus. It affected his health like less than 1% of people that contract it. It attacked his nervous system, and he was unable to breathe unassisted. Mom, having medical power of attorney, told the doctors to pull the plug after a month with no improvement.

Because he elected to keep all his employees employed, he had no retirement fund, forcing him to continue working and thus putting himself into a position to be bit by that mosquito. His kindness killed him, if indirectly, and about a decade late.

I asked my mom if she ever made mistakes and without skipping a beat she just says no. Looked at me like I was asking something very strange. I was maybe 13 or so when I asked.

All my life I thought that she would love me, if I achieved certain test scores or finished a certain degree.

Then there was high school graduation night. I had worked really hard to get there and I will never forget how she made that annoyed face to let me know that she wanted to leave early. It was like a punch in the gut because it became clear to me at that point that there was nothing I could do to make her love me.

She wasn’t capable of giving love. That’s really fucking sad and I am still grappling with it, but it gets easier.

Our neighborhood had large community mailboxes and my dad would always make me walk down the street to get the mail. One day there were some older kids outside and they started squirting me with water-guns. I got home and told my dad and he asked me to show him where the kids were. When I did he yelled at them saying, “don’t squirt my mail!”

The sad thing is I though he was talking about me, as in male. It wasn’t until years later I realized he didn’t give a crap about me, he was mad his mail got wet.

It’s by far not be the most narcissistic thing my dad did, (that would be beating the shit out of me for not wanting to go to church because it made him look bad). But I think about it often because I want my kids to know they are the most important thing to me, and I never want to say something that would make them think otherwise.

A few years back my family and I went to my cousins wedding a few states away, we decided on driving rather than flying due to covid airfare prices. So it was my mom, dad, brother, niece, and myself. My brother and I were both in our late twenties at this point in time so it was kinda weirdly nostalgic.

Anyway, on our way back from the wedding, we were driving through the cornfields of Pennsylvania when we noticed a few oddly parked cars on the side of the road. It was near a stop sign so we had plenty of time to figure out what was going on. A guy on a bicycle was hit by a car and laying on his back surrounded by people on the side of the road.

My mom is a nurse so I immediately asked her if we should pull over, she thought about it for a few seconds and said no we are meeting your sister in Cleveland for dinner and we can’t be late. So we kept on driving. A few minutes later, she looks back and realizes how selfish of a decision she just made right in front of my 8 year old niece, so she says we should all pray for the man. Me and my brother just looked at eachother in awe as she proceeds to recite the Hail Mary.

My mother says it’s my fault my brother is gay, because I showed him how to use the Internet. The Internet then didn’t even have websites, and we used telnet talkers, which was literally just people chatting in text format, it even predated ICQ or AOL or anything. It certainly wasn’t a place you’d turn someone gay, not that that’s a thing you can really do. She just hates that he’s gay even though we were brought up to embrace LGBT people long before people were really out.

Emotionally manipulated me back into multiple abusive situations to act as her shield, and has refused to so much as acknowledge what was going on. Can’t even have a talk about it, it’s just shut down immediately.

Now she doesn’t even know that she has a daughter instead of a son, and never will.

My wife’s parents are pretty bad. The worst thing that comes to mind immediately (sure there are worse) was a time we recommended and watched Baby Driver. We had good reasons to believe she’d enjoy it (not relevant why and not going to get bogged in unnecessary details). Literally as soon as the movie ends she says to my wife “Well, it just shows how much we’ve drifted apart because I did not like that movie.”

So, things sort of escalate and we’re packing to leave because why the hell would we stay after a comment like that. She’s already got crocodile tears and has twisted the situation around to make her seem like the victim. Stuff like “but you never do talk to me” blah blah blah.

She’s always so paranoid about being viewed as a bad mother by her children, but rather than ever apologize for anything or try to improve its always just the passive aggressive “you must think I’m terrible” at the smallest things. It’s so manipulative. It’s like she knows saying it over tiny things will get her family to be comforting and insist it isn’t true. Meanwhile when she does actually out of line things she never says that sort of thing and instead tries to be the victim. It’s disgusting.

I really really dislike my wife’s parents. I’ve found peace and am able to be cordial but holy fuck.

That’s an interesting hypothesis you’ve cultivated. It needs additional testing, however, I’d like to add on the impact of intergenerational trauma and genetic drift, there’s systemic runoff of abuse which impacts future generations within a specific animal group, resulting in evolutionary and social adaptations.

Enough of these adaptations kill a planet or a species, I’m afraid.

Lately I’ve been reading a lot of books on narcissism and have been picking up on the idea/notion/possibility/viewpoint that narcissism is a spectrum like autism is. In autism, which itself is incredibly common due to the fact that it’s multiple genes/processes/whatever performing multiple parts of a spectrum (think a carpet representing humanity and a shattered cup on the carpet, I use the shards in this visual to represent pieces of the spectrum scattered across humanity, apologies if anyone thinks a shattered cup seems like a negative comparison, I don’t), you have the majority of humanity having some variance in it, which goes to demonstrate there’s no such thing as a neurotypical. As in, if a scouter was invented that instead of scanning your power level scanned your autism level, everyone would have their very own signature number. I would be over 9000. Same with narcissism, if this view is correct, as it would be another shattered glass on the carpet that is humanity, with the shards from both glasses overlapping in their territories (which when you think about it makes the family dynamics in The Good Doctor all the more awkward, it’s one spectrum at odds with another in a show where the main character is a medical savant with autism). And again, not trying to make an awkward comparison, I have friends who openly confess to me they’re deep on the narcissism spectrum, and these people at least are trying their best in life, as well as showing narcissism is a neutral condition that just happens to seem more negative in modern urban situations

This is a pseudopsychological word salad, but please accept my apology if you’re 14 or chatgpt prompted for redditisms, if that’s the case good job.

Not my parents, but I’ve had a narcissist work colleague pester me about my partner and I not wanting to have kids, trying to convince us I guess, using her ultimate argument…

Her: But… you need to have kids so they take care of you when you’re old!

Me: So… wait. Is that the reason you had kids?

Her: Well yea! (like that’s the only logical answer, duh)

Me: … wow …

Fast forward. Her kids are all grown up now, they’ve since cut all contact and she hasn’t seen them nor her grandkids in years. I run into them once in a while and I’ve helped them out with a handful of times with things like moving or maintenance or tax reports or whatever. There’s a few things they never really got to learn growing up and anything they could ever do was never good enough for her, even though she’s terrible at most things.

Now and then, she’d still complain about them being ungrateful and I’d just ignore her… she’s never once come even close to the self-awareness that she drove them away by being a narcissist asshole.
She’s retired now, so neither of us have to deal with her now.

Great fucking plan, having kids to guilt trip them into caring for you…
They had the guts to move on and I’m proud of them.
I was probably the first to tell them so, some random passerby.
Fuck narcissists.

My parents wanted to be so hands-off they would let me and my sisters have collective authority over each other. This led to utter disaster.

I can’t remember what I suggested to my father but a little bit of time went by and he introduced the same thing as his own idea. It wasn’t anything terribly important. And I think the reality was just that I planted the seed and he forgot by the time he came around to it. But I still found it distressing because of years of family shit.

My mom was so dead set about molding me into her idealized version of a hippie kid that she wouldn’t let me cut my hair as a young child despite the trauma of all the homophobic shit and actual fights I endured in kindergarten.

She to this day refuses to accept her part of responsibility for my complicated relationship with gender and social norms while also robbing me of a somewhat normal childhood even if it was reactionary social pressure that motivated me to want to conform to gender norms.