This is a review of the book Break Free from Narcissistic Mothers.
Break Free from Narcissistic Mothers has exercises you can write to help yourself heal. In January 2023, I bought this book after searching the library catalog on the topic. We assume that if we do what a narcissist wants, they will treat us better. However, when they aren’t satisfied, nothing we do will ever be good enough for them.
We’ve been framed—we were set up to fail.
This keeps us dependent on the narcissist who cannot allow us to be a separate person. The narcissist will get desperate as we push back against their unreasonable demands. They seek attention and our total devotion to them. That’s when their cruelty knows no bounds.
At this point, we’re tempted to believe they would treat us better if we acquiesced. Only doing so will wreck our mental and physical health—keeping us exactly where the narcissist wants. Growing up, daughters and even sons of narcissists are made the scapegoat for our mother’s problems. Our mothers kept us “under their thumb.”
Break free we must—even if it’s not until we’re older (I was 57) that we find out that the woman who raised us had a mental illness listed in the DSM-5 (the manual used to diagnose mental health disorders) as Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). However, NPD cannot be diagnosed without the patient actively seeking treatment. In such cases, a person thinks there’s nothing wrong with their behavior.
All our adult lives, we children of narcissists likely felt and internalized that something was wrong with us. A narcissist makes you believe you’re no good and deserve to be treated this way because you’re a failure. They need us to need them to save us. We turn into people who care what others think of us.
Sadly, after many of us get diagnosed with a mental illness, a narcissistic mother could relish that we depend on them as our caregivers. Talking with a friend, we both were grateful for more independence. We could live in our own apartments apart from the interference of our mothers.
NAMI ( National Alliance on Mental Illness) will not acknowledge many mothers’ and fathers’ roles in inflicting trauma on their children. I give talks for NAMI. Now I’ve started telling the audiences how living in recovery allows a person to “Be who you are, not who the world wants you to be,” as the quote magnet urges. A narcissist frowns on this individuality. It threatens them when we attempt to become independent.
If karma is a thing, I’m confident that experiencing this dynamic was the catalyst for writing and speaking about how healthy relationships are the gateway to recovery. We need you and me to give credit where credit is due: to Us, the Peers who paid our dues early in life.
It’s time to put our needs first and do what gives us joy. Some of us choose to go “no contact” with our mothers. The Break Free from Narcissistic Mothers book tells readers how to do this. In my life, I’m hiring a woman to clean my apartment. We could all use extra money after losing jobs during COVID.
Paying a housecleaner is not “entitled”—it’s a way to support the livelihood
of a person who could use the money. So I am using my extra money to hire a cleaner. Knowing I don’t have to clean my rooms alone is a relief.
We can break free. It will take courage. Yet, we can break free!
Author Info:
Christina Bruni
Christina Bruni is the author of the new book Working Assets: A Career Guide for Peers. She contributed a chapter "Recovery is Within Reach" to Benessere Psicologico: Contemporary Thought on Italian American Mental Health.
