Emotional unavailability

[Sojourner17]

My parents fostered children through most of my childhood years up until I was 25.  I have some pretty mixed feelings regarding that but one of the realizations, which just came to me this morning, was how emotionally unavailable my mom and dad were to me as a result.  I and my adopted sister took the backseat to the children coming in and out of our home.  There was  a lot of trauma and drama as a byproduct of having so many people with varying stories of abuse and neglect joining our family and leaving our family. 
(Those of you who were in the foster care system, please hear me, I in no way want to minimize your story and trauma....I'm just trying to process my own). 

What I have realized is that as either a direct result, or perhaps because of my mom showing pd traits a lot of her emotional energy was put into her relationship with my foster siblings and their social workers and their birth parents sometimes at the expense of my sister and I. It gets so confusing and convoluted and has led to a lot of mixed feelings and emotions on my part.  A lot of times my mom had no emotional energy for me.  I was the GC (sometimes I don't think I always fit this role) growing up so a lot of times I think I was left to my own devices. As in, Sojourner is strong enough, she understands I have to put my energy towards the foster children.  My sister, however, was a bit of a handful.  She saw my moms anger a lot more than I did growing up and would get spankings based on my moms rage (which was terrifying).

[Catothecat]

This isn't quite the same as what you're writing about Sojourner, but seems to have an "emotional parallel." 

My parents, especially my mother, would emotionally "take in" my friends and would spend more time interacting with them when they came to visit than they ever spent with me.  They would then emphasize what "great kids" they were and ask me why I couldn't be more like them.  Of course, at the time I couldn't explain that they were the way they were because they came from a functional home and I didn't.  I didn't understand how my parents were incapable of seeing the failings of their limited parenting skills when compared to parents who were actually behaving as parents and involved positively in their kids' lives. 

So no, they weren't there emotionally or otherwise and even as a kid, I knew it.  And yet when one of my friends would come to visit, my parents became "visible" and I was left wondering who those people were since they weren't that way around me! 

[treesgrowslowly]

Hi Sojourner17,

Realizing how emotionally unavailable our parents were to us, is a huge piece of the recovery puzzle. Good on you for this work, it is not easy work at all!

I do think what you went through is common actually with a lot of narcissistic parents. Some of them find an opportunity to perform as the 'plugged in' or 'engaged' adult in their community, and they take it. I saw this with someone I used to know, whose parent was a teacher, and put her energy into her students while leaving her kids to raise themselves, emotionally speaking. At her job she could be found doing all sorts of things for those kids, and then at home with her own kids, it was a different story....she found it easier to be there for her students, than to be there for her kids.

What you wrote is pretty powerful for others I think to read as well. That emotional connection was something YOU needed when you were little, and it went to other kids instead - maybe not 100% of the time but yeah, as you have recognized, there were probably too many times where you were left to figure out your own emotional needs, and she was busy attending to the needs of other kids instead of tuning in to you.

What you know now is that those conflicting and confusing feelings can be looked at now and examined now and you can keep healing from those childhood experiences.

When I read your post, it reminds me of how we can sometimes wonder (as adults), how we became a GC, what the process was, what unfolded as we were growing up. When did our mothers realize they had a daughter who could be a "good little GC"? One of the emotions I feel around that stuff is sadness. It is sad. In being good at taking care of ourselves as children, we ended up with this treatment from our mothers.

Hugs to you, hugs to all of us who dealt with this.

Trees

[Cat of the Canals]

One of the reasons I struggled to categorize my mother as BPD or NPD is that she can appear empathetic... it's only occurred to me recently that this only applies to people outside of the family. When my cat was sick, her comment was, "Well, there are plenty of other cats in the world." When her sister (who has a chronic form of leukemia) was concerned that her hair was starting to falling out, her comment was, "She's just overreacting! She's not going bald!"

She's a Queen-type BPD, and I think she sees her family as her subjects/property. We are supposed to mirror her, always. That means we aren't allowed to be anything but the ideal. We can't have problems. Any hiccups in the perfect veneer must be immediately smoothed over. Her immediate instinct is to tell us how our problem is either NOT a problem or an easily solved problem. My aunt is NOT going bald! My cat can simply be replaced!

And I think the so-called empathy she shows outsiders is really just the mask she puts on to appear "nice" and "useful," because on some level, she thinks she has to prove her value to them.

[Sojourner17]

Thank you to all who added to the conversation.  It is sad to think about what has happened or is happening.  My mom would also "take in" my friends, some of them would talk to my mom about what was going on in their homes.  However,  she would devalue them and even a couple of times accosted my friends (two in the grocery store  ) because she thought they weren't treating me right and were leaving me out.  My friend told me about this years later.  I was so shocked and embarrassed but it explained a lot regarding that particular friend not l ever coming over.  She got my moms MO but was mature enough to separate me from my mom in her mind and still be my friend.
Mom also likes to do the "sojourner you don't have it that bad... so and so has it much worse" if I have brought up struggles .  The most recent being  4years ago.  It was hurtful and shut down conversation.  It was kind of like a "so and so has it so much worse and is coping so this thing you are complaining about bothering you is meaningless and trivial".  If that person had lived closer my mom would have been right in there helping out.

[olivegirl]

Wow Cat,
My Queen/Witch mother is extremely similar to your mother.

For my mother, who volunteered to feed the homeless and raised money for children with cancer, it was all about Image.

She also thinks that her "good" behaviors cancel out or undo her selfish acts!

When I'd point out a particular egregious act, she'd shrug and announce "Well I donated $100 and gave my old clothes to the poor so how can I be such a bad person as you say?" 

She's pull this stunt every time!  She says "make a column and list all the bad things I do on one side and the good things on the other side."

All of the backstabbing, petty, malicious acts were aimed at me and my sister.

Most of the positive acts were aimed at outside the family.

Clearly, she was flexing that no one would believe us because her image was tightly managed and this way a way for her to establish control via intimidation and gaslighting.

So yes, my uBpd Queen/Witch mother was emotionally unavailable to her daughters, especially me the SG, but this was definitely a deliberate act to enforce her power over us. 

My uNpd father could not handle my domineering, haughty mother and abandoned us completely to serve her. 

After all she rewarded him with keeping him fed and he felt it was in his best interest to keep his wife happy.

His daughters gave him nothing he needed and since every relationship is transactional for an Npd, our father would just rage at us "What do you want from me?!" 

We learned to stay quiet, be grateful for a place to live and dinner, and did our best to keep our parents happy by doing chores while perfect students. 

My uNpd low income-earning father could barely keep up with his Queen wife's demands and felt overwhelmed by the presence of his daughters who cost him money by eating food and needing clothes.

Consequently my sister and I grew up to be people-pleasers and magnets for narcissists bc we were taught that having boundaries makes us selfish and that we have to earn love by giving to others.

[Cat of the Canals]

Sojouorner17, my mother would also "take in" friends of mine from time to time. I would watch her be so patient and non-judgmental with them and think, "Why can't she act like that with me?" On the flipside, I have the distinct feeling she was jealous of my closest friend in middle school/high school. Maybe in part because she never really had the opportunity to fawn over/lovebomb her and get her hooks in.

olivegirl, I've had that same feeling reading your posts. Especially because it sounds like your mother, like mine, is good at "winning people over." Where my PDmil is a social disaster with no real friends, my mother has LOTS of friends and is constantly going to lunches and meetings and having houseguests. She is gifted at appearing "normal" to most outsiders.

[easterncappy]

Am I the only person whose parents were such oafs that they didn't really have anyone fooled? Not for long, at least. I mean, one of my parents was drunk so often that I can count the times I've seen him sober on one hand, and the other literally couldn't go 5 minutes without an emotional explosion or behaving in such a way that she literally looked like an alien pretending to be human. The only people who stuck around for more than a couple of weeks were people who either had no choice or had mental issues of their own.

But my mom did have a lot of "empathy". I think they believe they're genuinely "empathetic" (they also actually think their weird transactional/conditional view of us is "love"). But the "empathy" is just a way to look good, which is what they think everyone else in the world is doing too.

Once my mom kept ranting about how cruel everyone in the world is because her friend couldn't get an organ donor for her daughter's kidney transplant. "So, are you going to donate your kidney?" "WHAT? No! Why would I do that?". The "empathy" was really just an excuse to be mean and judgmental of others. She wasn't planning on being any better than the people she was condemning. And of course, emotionally healthy and mature people know that it's just not reasonable to expect strangers to give away literal body parts.

My mom once "took in" a PD friend's terrible, terrible little boy. I hate to condemn kids as "terrible", but due to his parents both being ill-equipped to raise children, he behaved very poorly. He'd throw things at people, cuss at people, insult people, steal things, and so on. My mom really prided herself in the fact that "she was the only person he respected" and "she was the only person who ever treated him with gentleness and kindness". It would have hurt my feelings if I wasn't educated enough about dysfunctional families to know that she was just putting on a show and trying to one-up someone, because she never treated me half as nicely as she treated him.

[treesgrowslowly]

So glad folks are sharing about this here. Taking care of others more than their own kids,  is / was such a deeply stealth form of gaslighting us.

I remember one time in high school my uNPD mother bought this friend of mine something pretty expensive. At a time when she was never spending that kind of money on her own kids. For no reason!

The person wasn't even a close friend of mine. She had been over to our home maybe twice. None of it added up. Like at all.

It was treated as perfectly normal. Trees was the one who was odd for questioning it. The recipient didn't think it odd either. 100% gaslit.  I had no idea what to think.

Then I would try explaining this to anyone who has a non PD mother and they gaslight you again! Saying "oh she's not like that oh you misunderstood" or "oh she's just being generous what's your problem" blah blah blah.

It. All. Sucks. PD emotional manipulation sucks. Thank heavens to each of you who has found their way here so we can share and heal.

Trees

[NarcKiddo]

I've always supposed that with normal people their love simply expands to fit the circumstances. So there isn't really a question of emotional energy running out, as such. Of course we all have bad days and stresses and whatnot. But I don't think it's supposed to be a cup with a finite amount of emotional energy to be dispensed as the person sees fit.

Therefore I think it is quite reasonable to feel hard done by if every other person is getting a share of emotional energy and you are left with none.

My mother would tend to be very caring and generous to other kids. There was always something fake about it, though. At least to me. I could tell she was putting on a "nice" act. In later life she would do things like teach languages to neighbour kids out of the kindness of her heart. She has a couple of godchildren she spends time with and has taken over various friends of mine who are now her friends. She has friends almost as old as her who she likes to "mother". I've realised it's all about narc supply in her case. She's not getting much from me due to grey rock.

[Stillirise]

I’ve been following this post with interest.  Now that I’ve put my updxh far in the rear view, and have been doing lots of self-work, I’ve spent considerable time examining childhood relationships.  I’ve often said here that my FOO was “classically dysfunctional,” meaning no glaring PD issues.  F had substance abuse issues, and M was/is co-dependent.  I see now that M was so wrapped up in trying to support and enable F, run the family business, etc., that there wasn’t much left of her to share with me emotionally.  I’ve always hesitated to talk about this, or acknowledge my pain, because she wasn’t/isn’t abusive, mean, or absent.  However, I’ve often felt alone, and that my emotional needs or feelings aren’t important, while those of her spouse are her main priority.   Even now, after my divorce from the updxh, she seems mostly concerned with my ability to survive financially.  There’s been little to no talk about how I’m feeling or coping otherwise. 

F passed away, and mom re-married a genuinely kind man.  In some ways, I feel more emotionally supported by him than I ever have by her.  He’s even mentioned to me in passing that she is Co-dependent.  She is constantly concerned with his well-being, and managing the details for his life, while remaining somewhat disinterested in my own. I honestly don’t think it’s intentional on her part. I think she just doesn’t have the tools to connect to me emotionally. It’s still hard, to realize I’m never going to have that from my mom, and helps explain why I’ve likely ended up in the bad relationships that I have. 

When it comes to financial, practical, or business advice, she’s as solid as I could hope for. Edited to add…it just occurred to me that she’s an excellent mentor, but just not so much in a typically motherly way.  I suppose I have to be content with that, and keep finding other, hopefully healthier ways to meet my emotional needs. Thanks for the opportunity to share.  Best wishes to you all!