Getting To Know Anna Szabo
By: Anna Szabo
Tags: Self Help, Narcissistic Abuse, Abuse, Self Improvement, Healing From Trauma

To put my mom’s life in context, today, I look around at very simple conveniences and appreciate how much women don’t have to do just because they have disposable pads for their menstrual periods, diapers for their kids, dishwashers to do the dishes, washers and steam-based dryers to do the washing and ironing of clothes, and cars to take them anywhere they need to go. My mother had none of the above.

We had self-made fabric-diapers and menstrual pads. They weren’t disposable — we washed them by hand and reused them. Our own hands and a bathtub served all our laundry needs: we had to wash laundry in a bathtub by bending for hours. Outdoor laundry clothesline made of thick rope served as our dryer. We stretched the ropes and hand the clothes. Then, we had to iron every piece of laundry with an iron on an ironing board for hours. I did it. She did it, too. It was our life. We didn’t have much, so we did harsh physical labor.

We had scarce everything: soap, shampoo, toothpaste, clothes, underwear, shoes, towels, food, furniture… The same soap was used for bathing and for washing the laundry: one bar of soap for the entire ten-people family. Sometimes, that soap was also our shampoo. My hair was all tangled and very dry but we used what we had.

As I imagine having to live like that today, without a car, having to walk for miles or wait for public transportation in -30C in the snow for hours, doing all those chores by hand, having hardly anything to eat, and having to work a job while also having to farm… anyone could lose their mind and forget their kid. The life my mom had was very hard. That’s the very reason why I always had an excuse for her abuse. I chose to believe that my mom was innocent and I was very bad to cause her to treat me the way she did. I internalized everything and felt responsible, as well as guilty, for my mom’s feelings, emotions, and behavior.

In the last few years, I slowly began detangling the truth and reorganizing my mind. This work has helped me draw boundaries: I realized where I end and my mom begins. I examined my beliefs and stopped accepting responsibility for my mom’s faults. I was able to admit to my mom-protective consciousness that my mom wasn’t a saint and that I must stop making an excuse for her abuse.

That deep and healing work enabled me to investigate what happened to me — truthfully — and face my story.

To do that, I had to become my own friend.

Facing my real life as it is — no longer avoiding calling things what they actually are, not minimizing the impact of my trauma on my psyche, not excusing my mom’s hatred and violence toward me, not pretending to be maniacally happy all the time, not forcing myself into the mindset of toxic positivity only to suffocate my humanity and vulnerability — this hard work allowed me to become fully human, accept my situation and feelings, own my truth, voice my pain, and genuinely heal, one small step at a time, over a long period of time. Learning to be my own friend required me to feel sad about my own problems, which is defined by our culture as self-pity, and that is a huge taboo.

To be my own friend, I had to learn how to be genuine instead of being happy all the time and toxically-positive in my thinking. So, I had to learn how to be sad. It was very hard because intellectually I rejected the very idea of being sad, vulnerable, or sorrowed. I didn’t understand why I would do this. But that was how I used for so many years to hide from myself. Sadness is as valuable as joy.

In fact, there can’t be genuine joy without genuine sadness. Learning to feel my sadness allowed me to fully experience my true zeal for life because I unnumbed my psyche. Here’s a very good video explaining the importance of self-pity. To heal, I had to stop making the same excuses for my mom’s behavior as her friends made: “Your mom works hard, she raises you alone without a husband, she is lonely, she is doing her best with you…” I had to look at the situation, putting myself in the shoes of my mom’s child: my little defenseless self whom no one loved, no one protected, no one affirmed, no one comforted, and who was cruelly abused and tortured. I am now responsible for that child.

My hard internal work allowed me to intellectually get to know my story without hiding and actually recall the real events of my life into my memory. Then, I was able to get to know myself emotionally, not just intellectually. Here’s a great video explaining how to get to know yourself emotionally and not just intellectually. I was able to feel what that little girl in my memories felt and acknowledge how hard she had it. Even today, I can feel the terror that child experienced and even taste the salt on that little girl’s chicks from crying in a dark corner while being forced to kneel on the dry roasted triangular grain of buckwheat spread over bare hardwood floors for hours.

At first, doing this work made me feel lonely and odd. Then, I realized that everyone is struggling in life which I didn’t know, just because people don’t typically share their real selves with either themselves or their friends or the outer world. So, I compared my vulnerable and fragile inner self with other people’s carefully-staged, photoshopped, and edited outer selves, which resulted in me feeling lonely, odd, and misunderstood. Of course, now I know that no one is normal!

Today, I have real friends who share their real authentic selves with me in our real and truthful relationships. I feel as “normal” as everyone around me. That’s why in October of 2020 I permanently deleted my Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, and LinkedIn to focus on being real with myself and my real friends instead of trying to fit into a fake, staged, and photoshopped “normal” of our mentally-unstable culture’s make-believe toxically-pretentious unrealistic “reality.”

It’s been difficult but essential effort.

Believing that my mom’s hard life was a great excuse for her brutal abuse and constant neglect was the very wall I had to break to even begin examining what I had actually endured as a child and how I genuinely felt about it. Before, I was out of touch with myself, as if I were completely separate from my body and my actual real life. Now, I am in touch with my authentic self and my true feelings, so I feel integrated and attached to my body and my psyche. I am real with myself, I feel real to myself, and my life no longer feels surreal.

I have befriended myself.

Becoming real, vulnerable, and authentic allowed me to understand why I have always been so easily triggered and what those triggers have been. Instead of hating and rejecting my hypervigilance, I empathically explored its origins and was able to compassionately understand my hypervigilance. That, in turn, allowed me to cope with daily life more effectively and feeel more joy, peace, and pleasure.

Chasing culturally-accepted abnormal fake “normality” caused me to suffer from addictions in order to hide from my true self. Facing, acknowledging, investigating, and accepting my trauma enabled me to become fully human, wholly integrated, and genuinely healthy. Today, I am able to understand my mom’s hard life and still claim my truth about what she did to me during our 25 years together.

So, back to my mom’s neglect.

When I was five and asked my mother to protect me in one of the neighborhood’s conflicts, during which all kids’ parents came out, except for my mother, she said: “Protect yourself!” I remember standing there in the kitchen on that warm Summer day, little and defenseless, looking up at my big mom in hopes that she would have my back, that I mattered to her, that she cared about me…

Yet, all she showed me was neglect.

That Summer, grandma tried to chock me. She held me to the wall next to my bedroom, lifted me by my neck, and pressed continuously. I was suffocating, and she was smiling. I felt terrified and looked her straight in the eye. Even today, at 37, I remember that moment. Seeing her evil look, I realized that she actually intended to kill me. That was the last moment of my childhood innocence.

My self-preservation instinct kicked in and I was ready to fight my own grandma. I used my little legs to kick grandma in her stomach as hard as I could, so she dropped me. I ran into the bathroom, locked the door, filled a bucket with cold water, unlocked the door, saw grandma waiting to get me, and I had a surprise for her… I poured that bucket of cold water on her and ran outside to seek safety.

Of course, I had nowhere to go, so I came back home when I saw my mother coming back from work. When I told my mother about the incident, hoping she’d stand up for me, she assured me that the incident never happened and called me a liar. She said her mother was a saint and would never do such a terrible thing. Gaslighting reigned in our household. I had to pretend that the incident never happened. There was no one to talk to about it. I was completely alone in my suffering.

When I was six years old, my mother took me to a river. She had never taught me how to swim. Yet, she let me into the water while she herself was playing cards with friends on the beach, with her back turned toward the river. I drowned.

I remember the current picking me up as I was fighting back and screaming for help, but the water covered me completely. I remember giving in and surrendering in peace, floating underwater, and blacking out. A stranger man saved my life.

When that man rescued me and brought me back to conciseness via CPR on the beach, my mother immediately screamed at me, telling everyone what a terrible child I was and that I did this intentionally, to hurt her. Yes, I drowned due to my mother’s neglect and she projected her own fault on me, as always. It was her typical behavior.

Years later, I was married to the same kind of manipulative narcissist. My third husband Michel eloquently projected all his faults on me, and I even bought into his mental manipulation, believing that I was guilty for his faults.

I was perfectly conditioned for it by my mother.

Just like her, Michel loved tormenting and threatening me. He always carried a gun and told me: “Something really bad would happen to you just like to my sister.” Michel had 31 sisters, so I never found out, during our few months of marriage, what he had done to hurt his sister or which sister he actually hurt, but I did realize that he was cruel, angry, neglectful, and mentally unstable, and, just like my mother, very abusive. Living with Michel felt like living with my mother.

My mother’s neglect left me feeling worthless, lonely, and unloved. I felt like I was an object and not a human being, like I did not matter at all to anyone, like there was no reason for me to even be… Those were some of my emotional and mental injuries. My mother’s neglect caused many physical injuries to me as a little girl, as well. The impact of those injuries worsened over time, making me very sick, and even requiring surgery to allow me to breathe again.

It happened when I was seven. That Summer, I had multiple accidents, which, due to my mother’s total neglect, resulted in lasting health issues for me. When at seven, I fell into a 36 feet deep underground hole, I hit the brick wall and the iron ladder several times with my body. My grandpa was with me, and he was terrified. I still remember his huge eyes as he was staring down at me in despair.

My mother blamed me for that fall.

I was bruised and injured.

I felt scared.

She screamed at me for being bad and for scaring her. She never took me to a doctor to get checked, though my grandpa was shocked when he saw my little body so bruised. My mother asked me angrily: are you hurting? Scared that telling the truth would upset her, I said I wasn’t hurting. She told grandpa not to worry about me.

When I broke my nose while ice skating later that same year in the Winter, my mother also did absolutely nothing. In 2007, as an adult, I had to have a corrective sinus surgery done due to the fact that my nasal bones grew together after that neglected injury. The underground fall also had serious consequences for my physical wellbeing. Seven years after that fall, at 14, during an annual medical exam at school, I was diagnosed with severe S-shaped scoliosis and advised to go to an orthopedic specialist.

My narcissistic mother refused to take me. I took myself to the spine doctor who examined both me and my x-rays and said it was seven years too late because help needed to be provided to me after I fell 36 feet underground and got injured. Today, my spine looks like the letter S and my neck has been permanently altered. One side of my body is longer than the other, and one of my shoulders is lower than the other one.

The emotional neglect I endured was even more painful than the physical pain from the neglect of my bodily injuries. In any family-, school-, or neighborhood conflicts, my mother blamed me. She never stood up for me. She never wanted to protect or defend me. She neglected me.

All my family members, except for grandma, were alcoholics. Grandma didn’t drink because she wanted to outlive the entire family. She would say to us as kids: “I am going to outlive all of you!” This year, in 2020, grandma was still alive in her 90s, walking, talking, lying, and torturing my mother, as always, for 65 years now. That’s my mom’s age. I saw them both on Skype. My mom chose to stay exactly where she was born, all her life. And it was hard to watch or accept but I did accept this reality.

When I was little, my mom would drink all night with friends and have me worried. Dealing with this requiring me to go look for my mother everywhere since we had no phones and she’d never tell me in advance where she was going. Many times, I carried her home in the unconscious kind of drunk condition at night: by foot, on my own, as a child, alone, for many miles, scared and very confused as to what my role was in my mother’s life.

My mother, too, was an extremely confused being. That is why she was neglecting my basic needs as her daughter. My father wasn’t in our lives. He was an imprisoned criminal who spent most of his life behind bars.

My neglectful mother let my father into my bedroom when I was 12, at night, without any warning, in the dark. The man just got out of prison. She had him waiting for me chilling in a chair next to my bed in my bedroom, with all lights completely off, as I was coming out of a shower. I didn’t know about him being out of jail and being in my bedroom. I didn’t see him. I lay down to sleep and felt terrified as a man’s hand appeared on my naked back under covers… Even now, as I’m writing this, I cringe.

At that moment, lying in a vulnerable position on my stomach, realizing that my nacked back was being touched by my father, whom I didn’t know, who was a criminal, who didn’t know me, who had no character or good intentions, who was a stranger… I felt so scared, betrayed, endangered, and angry at my mom and at him. I couldn’t understand why they would do something like this! This was a setup… but to accomplish what? I was scared of thinking about what they were trying to do with me…

I screamed, cussed, and told him to f..k off, so he left for many more years and got arrested again. My mother told me that I was evil and persuaded everyone to believe that I kicked her loved one out of our home because I was egotistical, selfish, and controlling. After that, I realized that my mother was a total psycho and that I was completely alone in this pointless life. I tried to kill myself that year.

My mother’s neglect continued as I got older.

When I was a teen, I had an ingrown toenail. I asked my mom for help. She told me to cut it out myself and pour my urine over the wound, which I did. Red bloody flesh, aka fresh human meat, began growing out of my toe from underneath my toenail. I was in so much pain, yet, my mother refused to take me to a hospital. I had to take myself, by bus, and walk to and from the foot surgery for miles in the winter snow alone. My mother neglected me always, intentionally, driven by anger and hatred.

As far as urine… My mom believed that it had healing properties. When I got sick, as a kid, there were two options: my mother gave me either strong alcohol to drink or my own urine. This isn’t a typo. Yes, she’d make me pee into a jar and then force me to drink it. I became an alcoholic and I was physically very weak and sick.

In my late teen years, I was raped twice. I told my mother about it in our face-to-face conversation in the kitchen that summer right after it all happened. her response? She said I was lucky because now I had more sexual experience than my peers and could use it to my advantage when seducing men while looking for a husband. My mother always taught me that the purpose of my life was to be a mother and a wife, as well as that without a man, I had no inherent human value.

Deriding

Derision is an act of ridiculing or laughing at someone with a feeling of deep hatred in order to intentionally dehumanize or wound the person. I was being derided by my mother regularly. One-on-one behind closed doors and in front of others, my mother expressed deep hatred, contempt, and ridicule with indignation.

My mother’s deriding of me included mockery and taunting. Her deep desire was to provoke me in an insulting or contemptuous manner and to show me that I was worthless and helpless. What did my mother ultimately want? She just loved tormenting and torturing me because she was an evil monster. But there was something she wanted in addition to the pure pleasure of abusing me. She didn’t keep her intentions a secret. She told me that she wanted me dead. So, by deriding me with indignation on a regular basis, my mother wanted to feed off of my energy, demonstrate her power, and manipulate me into suicide.

She taunted me to reproach me in a sarcastic, insulting, and jeering manner to show her disappointment and disapproval. In fact, I can’t remember my narcissistic mother ever looking at me with approval, except when she was interrogating me about my sexual experiences and multiple orgasms. It was the only time our interaction looked like “bonding.” It became the very foundation of my sexual addiction, and detangling this later in life became the foundation of my addiction recovery and healing. I had to recognize, accept, and process the fact that I never had an actual mother, that I was raised by a monster, and that I was never loved or nurtured. Running away from facing this truth for many years did spare me from a painful heartbreak but it also prevented me from dealing with trauma and healing. Today, I own my truth, keep no dark secrets, and I am healing. By the grace of God, I am alive, alert, aware, and able.

My narcissistic mother tended to scorn me just for the sake of sucking the life out of me. I had to always be on guard, always ready to protect myself, always feeling scared and prepared to be interrogated and terrorized by my mother.

Over the years, she repeatedly, over and over, told me that she hated me and wanted me dead. Every day, my mother called me “duffer, nothing, loser, crackbrained, nature’s mistake, nonhuman, twerp, nonentity, ogre, nobody, worthless, despicable, monster, devil, brute, schizophrenic, idiot,” and many other names. My mother told me again and again that I “didn’t deserve to live.” I’m sad now when remembering her words. Yet, I see that mine is a story for God’s glory.

Scolding

My mother loved scolding me: angrily rebuking and reprimanding me. I categorized her typical brutal scolding into several categories as I was working to recall, face, and accept that these things were said to me by my very own mother. I wrote them out in Russian as these were said in Russian of course. Then, for my blog, I translated them to help other women. The term “things narcissistic mothers say” is one of the most popular searched in Google that brings readers to my website. It’s a very common issue, and often women like me can’t find any support because talking about being abused by your mother is a cultural taboo. It’s essential that we shift our thinking, accept the truth, and support the victims. That’s why I’m sharing below some examples of scolding.

Identity Attacks

I wish I got rid of you when I went to abort you

I wish you were never born

I never wanted you, you shouldn’t be here

You’re worthless and a waste of my life

You are not of this world and you don’t belong here

You are a curse to our family

You are not a part of our family, you’re a miscarriage

You are not like us, you must have been switched

You are an embarrassment, you are shame

No one loves you, there’s nothing to love about you

You’re too complicated, everyone hates you for that

No one will ever love you, you’re unlovable

Who do you think you are? You’re a daughter of a janitor

You will never amount to anything

I curse the day you were born, I want you to suffer forever

Body Shaming

You’re so ugly, look at me, I’m beautiful

I wish you were beautiful like your cousin Vika

Learn how to be beautiful by 35, otherwise, you’re stupid

You’re so ugly, have you noticed that you have no eyebrows?

You have no boobs, I wish you had boobs like your cousin Vika

Your laughter is ugly, I wish you could laugh like your cousin Yulya

You shouldn’t smile, too much gum is exposed, it’s ugly

Your teeth are so ugly, you look like a horse

Your legs are ugly, I wish you had beautiful legs like your cousin Vika

Your butt is so flat, I wish you had a nicely shaped butt like Vika

You’re sweating like your father’s sister, you’re the same kind of pig

Your arms are fat, you’re gonna have fat arms like your father’s side

Your ears are popping, you look like a monkey

You embarrass me with your ugliness, at least draw some eyebrows

You were beautiful when you slept with your teeth facing the wall

Ability Diminishing

Your hands are growing out of your ass, you can’t do anything right

You’re too deep and too intellectual, it’s annoying, be simpler

Don’t think too much of yourself, you’re not going to go far

If you want to make anything of your life, get a man

A smart woman will pick a bum and make him Prince Charming

A woman who has no Prince Charming is stupid and useless

A good woman is skilled at drinking, smoking, sex, and seduction

You have goals and ambitions? You’re delusional!

Be simple, don’t think too much, be like normal people

Have a drink, you’ll feel better about yourself!

Suicide Manipulation

The world will be a better place when you’re dead

You won’t live long, someone’s gonna kill you soon

When you’re dead, everyone will celebrate instead of mourning

You’re dead to me, you died a long time ago

Why don’t you try to kill yourself, you’ll feel better

Didn’t even succeed at suicide? Failure! Try again

You will die alone and no one will even care

I hate you and I just want you dead

Hearing those things from my mother and not having anyone there to comfort, nurture, and love me, no one at all to contradict what she was saying, I grew up heavily brainwashed, believing deeply that those things were true. I searched for love, security, acceptance, and identity for many years, especially from older men. I was looking for protection and safety. But I found even more abuse.

In the last few years, I dedicated my time, energy, and effort to healing trauma, and first I needed to acknowledge and understand what happened to me. In short, I understand and accept that I had a crazy and cruel mother-monster who hated me and did everything she could to harm me, but God had His own plan.

This is a story for God’s glory!

Tormenting

My narcissistic mother deprived me of love and affection. At the same time, she would take a kitten, bring it into my room, sit on the side of my bed in front of me, and start petting the kitten gently and affectionately for hours. She did that while refusing to even hug me. It was pure torment to watch her give affection for hours to the kittens while rejecting her own daughter. The emotional pain she intentionally inflicted on me was indescribable. She would look at me, smile sadistically, and tell me that she didn’t want to hug or hold me.

Her cruel smiles gave away the very fact that she was intentionally tormenting me, without any remorse. It happened many times. I felt rejected, unwanted, unloved, and deeply hurt. I didn’t understand why she would do that kind of thing. When I’d cry and ask, she’d tell me she gave the kittens affection and love because they were good and I was bad and didn’t deserve her affection.

Since I was a small child, my mother tormented me with threats of abandoning me, sending me to a stranger to live somewhere else forever, or giving me away, killing me, and killing herself. She also told me how she went to abort me. Several times, she told me that, actually, I wasn’t her daughter at all. She’d tell me an elaborate story of how her good daughter was switched at birth for someone else’s bad daughter — me. I never knew who I was, whose I was, or why I was here. I ended up searching for my identity for decades, lost in meaningless sexual relationships, various addictions, endless parties, and overall confusion. All I ever wanted was to have safety, stability, and security.

When I was a child, my mother’s tormenting involved creative methods aimed to cause the most intense and lasting pain to her little girl. One rainy afternoon, my bedroom window was open and my favorite toys were on the floor while I was quietly playing alone with my favorite stuffed animals. My mother walked in and began scolding and berating me for something. A few minutes later, she said she was going to hurt me, and nothing I could do to stop her. One by one, my cruel mother threw away all my favorite animal-toys into the rain and dirt out the window to torment me, and she laughed as I began to cry. I still remember the shock I experienced seeing my mother laughing and throwing my favorite stuffed friends out the window to intentionally inflict pain and suffering on me.

It seems that from the very beginning of my life, my uncertain mother was extremely confused. For years, she called my cousin Vika her daughter and she called me unspeakable names. Vika, when she was already an adult female, came to visit, while I still lived with my mother, and they both slept in one bed in my mother’s room. It was bizarre. Yet, it was a pattern: my mother loved tormenting me by spending a significant amount of time with girls my age and even sleeping in the same bed with them, as well as calling them “my favorite daughter.”

My mother only had one child: me.

When I was a teen, she brought home two girls to live with us. She told me they were complete strangers whom she found on the streets and declared that from then forward they were her daughters and that I needed to treat them as such. The three of them (my mother and the two girls) slept in one small bedroom with one bed for many months, right next to my bedroom. I felt confused, scared, betrayed, angry, and shocked.

They also carried out a smear campaign against me. The three of them would treat me as if I didn’t actually exist. They’d occupy our small kitchen for hours so that I had nowhere to eat. They would create a web of lies to gaslight me. Their compounded abuse escalated over time until one day, the girls just vanished.

It was such an incomprehensible experience to watch my mother do these tormenting things to torment me for many years… I internalized it all because I had neither the words to describe what I was going through nor anyone to talk to about my pain. I simply put on a big smile and pushed through because life went on every day, and I had to move forward with it. I detached and dissociated.

My narcissistic mother would tell me that I was forever indebted to her for having a chance at life. She demanded that I recognize my debt and acknowledge that I owed her, which I refused to do, so she’d hate me viciously. One of the worst tormenting tools used by my mother and all her family member was gaslighting. They would collectively deny reality and the things that happened. They would do it to make me doubt my sanity and force me to believe that I was crazy. It went on for decades.

I remember, as a little girl, walking into our home after playing outside and seeing my mother on the floor being held down by several ambulance workers while salivating excessively and banging her head against the floor. Her body was stretched in a hallway between the kitchen and the bathroom on the bare floor. She was screaming, but I couldn’t distinguish what exactly she was saying. It was all accompanied by tearful weeping as she was trying to get people off of her.

It was a frightening scene to witness.

I felt terrified and was devastated by what I saw and heard. I was a little but smart girl, so I had a suspicion that my mother tried to kill herself and that this was a suicide rescue. I started asking what happened. I was immediately taken away by grownups and told that what I thought I saw actually never happened.

Then, I remember everyone acted as nothing ever happened. Yet, one of my aunts, when drunk, would tell me that my mother had a breakdown episode and was crazy. Sober, the aunt would deny anything related to that situation, and all family members would tell me that I was making it all up and that “things like that never happen in our family.” Our family was regarded by our family members as a very stable, reputable, and respected family. Actually, it was regarded at school and with the local police as a “dysfunctional family.”

When I asked my mom about that episode, she got angry and defensive. She told me nothing like this ever happened to her. After that, my mother would threaten me with suicide regularly. She’d say “I’m going to hang myself on a kitchen chandelier for revenge because I hate you. Tomorrow morning when you wake up, you’ll walk into the kitchen and see me dead hanging there on the chandelier. I’ll be sure to write a suicide note, telling everyone that my death is your fault, so that everyone can hate you forever as much as I do. My death will be a burden on your soul forever, and I will always be haunting you and never let you live in peace. I want you to suffer and die from torture.”

I was very afraid of my mother.

Danger was everywhere all the time. I felt terrified, couldn’t go to sleep, and wetted my bed even at seven years old because I was so stressed and scared. I saw nightmares, gritted my teeth at night from fear, and was dissociating from reality in order to be able to cope with my horrifying life at home. I was there, but my psyche almost wasn’t. It was as if I were watching someone else’s vicious and cruel narcissist-mother do and say those mind-torturing things.

My mother told me for years only bad things about my father. Of course, that made me feel angry and resentful toward him, though I myself had never even known the guy. I was five when he showed up at our doorstep for the first time in my life. He knocked. I opened the door. He told me he was my father. I told him to f…k off.

I was groomed for that moment and taught since birth to hate my father. He left, and my narcissistic mother, for 21 years, blamed me every day with hatred and cruelty, screaming at me that I ruined her love life. She told everyone that I didn’t have a father because I kicked him out of our home. The truth was very different, of course. He was never in our lives. She never had a relationship with him.

I had never had a father and had never seen him before that summer afternoon when I was five. My father spent most of his life in prison for various crimes. He and my mother had never had a relationship even before I was born, and certainly not after my birth. She did show me their marriage certificate. I think they were married for one day. Still, my mother blamed me for ruining her personal life and being responsible for her singleness.

Ever since that Summer afternoon when I was five, my mother gaslighted me and projected her faults on me to make me feel guilty for my father’s absence in her life. She wanted me to feel worthless and suicidal, which eventually did happen: I tried to kill myself twice, at 11 and 12. After I was saved by the ambulance EMT at home, my narcissistic mother bullied me and blamed me for still being alive and encouraged me to try to kill myself for good. I never did, actually.

At 12, after my second suicide attempt, I saw a glimpse of God and hope. I decided to live, set big goals, achieve them, and leave my home forever, never speaking to my mother again. It did happen, in exactly 13 years, when I turned 25.

I moved to America…

Objectification

My mother saw me as an extension of her — an object and not a subject with my own valid and complex identity, character, feelings, needs, preferences, and boundaries. She saw me as a tradable commodity. Some days, she’d say I was her daughter, while other times, she’d denounce me and say publicly that she didn’t know me.

Many times, my narcissistic mother abandoned me on the street or public transportation saying she didn’t know who I was. I felt very scared and extremely confused. There was never any kind of stability in my life. Any day anything could happen to me, and all my relatives and neighbors would always be on my mother’s side.

My mother treated me as an object by…

Sizing me up visually and verbally every day

Comparing my appearance and abilities to that of herself, siblings, neighbors, and her friends’ kids

Calling me names: bitch, stupid, schizophrenic, duffer, nothing, loser, nonentity, nobody, twerp, worthless, traitor, the enemy of the people, miscarriage, mentally incompetent, liar, ugly, trash, etc

Fat-shaming me since I started my period and began having cellulite

Shaming me for my skin color, which was too dark for her, since my father was on a gypsies side and dark

Cutting and styling my hair unattractively and age-inappropriately; when I see my pictures from childhood, I chock from tears

Discussing my looks, boobs, butt, number of holes between my legs, my teet, ears, lazy eye, hair, and weight with others in front of me

Criticizing my eating habits when I became an adult

Blaming me for my health problems, caused by her neglect

Pushing me to dye my hair, which she began ding when I was nine years old; I actually thought all mothers did that but when I became an adult and would tell people this, their jaw would drop and eyes pop, that’s how I started having a suspicion that my mother’s behavior was odd

Neglecting to buy me clothes, shoes, and underwear; I literally had to beg for it with tears… but there was always plenty of money to buy alcohol

Neglecting my personal hygiene needs; for example, I often had such severe vaginal discharge from the only soap option she gave me that I had to be hospitalized, yet, she’d tell me to spray beer into my vagina “to kill bacteria” and not get a new soap bar… she also made me drink my urine when I was sick wit cold

Shaming me for my personal hygiene; specifically for shaving my hair off where I saw appropriate, and she actually would show me exactly where she grew her hair and how much men loved it… I’m about to vomit remembering this but I’m sharing because at this point I know this odd behavior is customary to a narcissistic mother

Teaching me that I was for me and for sex and that it was my duty to give myself to anyone who wanted me and please them; even when I was raped, she said I was lucky to have more experience

Shaming my sexuality and femininity, criticizing everything about me: how I dressed, how I laughed, how I walked, how I talked, how I smiled, how I did my makeup, how I ate, and even how I held my spoon or swallowed soup… everything was wrong with me

Sometimes, my function was to be a source of pride, especially before I turned six and people would compliment my beauty. She’d later, as I grew up, say: “You were beautiful at six when you slept with your teeth facing the wall.” Other times, my function was to be an embarrassment so that she could brag about her hard life and heroic attitude toward motherhood. I also served as a source of competition, and she demanded that I allow her to help me with my homework so she could take all the credit but I cut that short quickly and would scream and kick her out of my room to allow me to do my own studies. She always told me: “Your hands are growing out of your ass! I can do this so much better! Look at me!” In later years, she saw me as “another woman” and it was so painful to watch her try to compete with me for men’s attention when I actually needed a mother, a friend, a mentor, and a wise counsel. It’s very painful to remember how obsessed she was with multiple orgasms, always talking to me about my sex life, how many orgasms I had, and comparing herself to me, bragging how she’s better at this and that in sexual ways. It was gross. I literally cringe now while writing this, and I’m 37, I haven’t seen er for 12.5 years. Finally, on the topic of objectification, my body was not my own, from her perspective, rather it was hers to manipulate, control, violate, judge, display, reject, exploit, neglect, and abuse.

Berating

My narcissistic mother criticized every aspect of my being: privately and publicly. She told me not to smile because my teeth made me look like a horse. She mocked my laugh saying it was reminding her of “horse neigh.” She made fun of my legs (too skinny) and arms (too fat). She called me fat because at 12, with puberty, I began having cellulite on my thighs. My ears, she said, made me look like a monkey. I didn’t have enough holes between my legs, she said, so my legs were ugly. My boobs were too small, she said, and I would never find a husband. She taught me to wear a bigger bra and stuff it with cotton. I did that.

When I had various injuries throughout my childhood and would ask for help, my mother would never take me to the hospital but would berate me, telling me to stop whining because my injuries weren’t even serious. She’d blame me for all my health problems. I felt hurt, abandoned, confused, and very lonely. I didn’t understand why she’d treat me so cruelly. I just wanted to be cared for and loved unconditionally. I was a kid. I saw how other kids’ moms treat them. I felt so sad.

After one of the injuries endured, when I broke my nose at seven, ice skating with my cousin Yulya, my mother did nothing as I kept bleeding for hours. Years later, I had a nasal surgery done to separate my nasal bones, which grew together over the years, preventing me from breathing properly. I had that surgery in 2007 and was hospitalized for weeks. The doctor was drunk while operating, so he messed up my nose permanently, which I was shown by an ENT here in America through a special video camera placed in my nasals.

Back in 2007, after I was released from the hospital, I had severe yellow and green nasal congestion. I was told by the doctor to flash my sinuses regularly and push mucous out with great effort, so I did that. Every time I would go to the bathroom to flush my sinuses, my bully-mother would be waiting at the door, berating me for having the surgery, laughing, mocking me, bringing in relatives or even her friends to hear me blowing my nose and calling me names.

My monster-mother berated me for messing up my sinuses. She claimed that there was nothing wrong with my nose, to begin with, and that I never actually had any injuries and just made it all up. She blamed my health situation on me and made fun of me. She was angrily demanding that I’d stop flushing my sinuses and admit that noting was ever wrong wit my nose and that I simply made it all up.

Humiliating

My mother enjoyed humiliating me to make herself feel powerful and very important. She often demanded that I crawl on my knees following her around our home and kiss her feet. She told me I was obligated to wash her feet and drink that water. My mother explained to me that I was worthless and she was God-like for giving me life and not killing me. She believed that my life was in her hands. She regularly told me: “I gave you life and I can take it away from you!”

Dehumanizing me through the kneeling humiliation was my family’s preferred tool to boost their egos. My aunt, my mother’s youngest sister, also asked me once to kneel publicly, in the middle of my neighborhood, in front of all my friends, for an extended period of time, on hard bare asphalt, for disobeying her. She enjoyed it tremendously. The family I grew up in was sadistic and very cruel.

Many times, my mother publicly humiliated me at school, when the teacher would say that I wasn’t perfect. My mother would smack me, push me, pull me, and yell at me right in front of my teacher, who apparently also enjoyed watching the cruel humiliation of a young child. Assaulting me was my mother’s favorite thing to do.

I was humiliated many times by my mother’s drunkenness. Searching for my mother, going to her friends’ houses and having them tell me she wasn’t there while I was hearing her very voice or laughter, getting her out of parties, carrying her home, drunk, vulgar, angry, and abusive, those unfortunate experiences were extremely humiliating. Yet, I loved my mother and I wanted to be there for her. When I was young, my middle-aunt was raped and beaten. We went to the hospital when she was picked up, so I literally saw my just raped and beaten aunt, when I was a little girl. Then, we waited for her in the hospital as I was weeping. I was so scared. After that, I feared that my mother could be raped, so I was always looking for her when she wasn’t home at night, and I’d find her drunk partying carelessly, so I’d carry her home. Some of those experiences still make me cringe and cry. I feel sad that the little Russian girl had to go through all of that, endure pain, abuse, violence, humiliation, ridicule, insults, rejection, taunting, mocking, and assaults. Still, that little girl loved and adored her mother. Yes, I loved my mom.

It was humiliating to see my mother bring home a married man and sleep with him regularly right next to my bedroom, have him talk to me, flirt with me, and just be there, in our home, when everyone knew he had a wife and kids. But at least that man did have a home… One time, my mother brought home an old homeless man who didn’t even have even clothes. She told me that he was from that point on her husband and that I needed to treat him with respect accordingly.

I remember the shock I experienced hearing her say that and seeing the homeless man actually staying in our home, sleeping in her bed with her, having sex with my mother, showering in our one and only household bathroom, using our kitchen and toilet, and demanding respect from me. I felt disgusted, repulsed, scared, confused, and very angry. I was a teen. Of course, I grew up into a total rebel.

It was humiliating to be hooked up by my mother with her coworker for sex. It was humiliating when I’d share my secrets with her and hear from various strangers later on that they knew all my personal business. It was humiliating to be my mother’s daughter. But the most humiliating experience was her grooming me for sex with her. I had a hard time dealing with those memories because the very idea of mother-daughter incest is incomprehensible and humiliating to me. Yet, it’s my life. This is my truth. I own it. I accepted it. I can speak about it and don’t need to hide from it anymore. I am finally separated from my trauma. I am not my trauma. These things happened to me but they do not define me. I am no longer in bondage with my trauma.

Blaming

My mother always told me to my face that I was an unwanted accident. She blamed me for her pregnancy, for being born, for being a girl and not a boy, for her singleness, for my father having nothing to do with her, and so many other things, with which I had nothing to do. She blamed me for being a human with thoughts and feelings instead of an object for her pleasure and service. She blamed me for communicating my limits, for not submitting to her like a slave unquestionably, for setting boundaries with her, and also for having my father’s visual characteristics and his smile. My mother also blamed me for his continued absence in her life. Everything was my fault, even where she lived and worked. She blamed me for her lack of education and career as a janitor. She blamed me for the violence in our family and the conflicts between her and her narcissistic mother. She blamed me for everything under the sun. I had no perspective, mentors, church help, therapists, so my mother was the primary influence on my mind, and it was very negative.

Those beliefs were deeply embedded in my subconscious mind, and I believed all those things that she groomed me to accept as true. I was always blaming myself for my mother’s mood and that of others. I became a rescuer of people and developed the Wendy Syndrome. I later found a Peter Pan to marry. He was my mother’s age. At the time, I didn’t see as clearly as I see today, so I felt confused and trapped. But after I left Peter Pan doctor and divorced him, I began unpacking my beliefs and see the impact of my childhood on my adulthood.

My mother blamed me for wanting to pursue education and achieve big goals and for graduating from multiple universities with high honors. She was jealous of me and constantly compared herself to me. She never viewed me as her daughter but rather as a competitor, as another woman… It felt so awkward and so bizarre.

I always longed for a wise and loving mom.

My mother blamed me for having friends and social life. She wanted me to be her prisoner and serve only her needs 24/7/365. She unquestionably served grandma for decades, always there like a puppy, living with her mother for 65 years, never launching on her own, enslaved by her mother, despite grandma’s abuse and genuine hatred toward my mother. Even today, my mom calls grandma “mommy.” My mother is 65 and grandma is in her 90s. They live together.

My narcissistic mother blamed me for refusing to please her sexually and also for separating myself from her and moving to another country to be my own person, to own my own mind, to live my own life, to build my own future, and to heal from the deep wounds she inflicted on me by torturing and tormenting me for 25 years.

I wanted to find a video that would demonstrate my mother’s blaming tactic and how she also brutally abused me at the same time as she blamed me. Here’s a hard-to-watch violent phone-recorded video of a Russian mother torturing and cruelly beating her newborn baby. As she’s heating, choking, and torturing this 3-month-old baby, this mother is blaming the baby for being born and “stealing” her personal life and youth, which are my mother’s exact words. What she says is word-for-word what my mother said to me during her violent assaults.

My mother also blamed me for ruining her body.

There was a purple couch in her bedroom. The couch was in front of a three-leaved mirror. I’d be sitting on the couch. She’d get naked and get in front of the three-leaved mirror. She would get in front of me often and start examining her naked body in the mirror. She’d tell me that I was guilty of making her fat, that I was responsible for her cellulite and varicose veins, and that, had it not been for me, she would have “beautiful boobs and no belly pooch whatsoever.” She’d declare that, if it wasn’t for me, she’d have a “skinny body and beautiful legs.” Those are quotes. She demanded that I admit that I owed her. I never bought into this propaganda because I knew she had me as an accidental result of unprotected one-time sexual intercourse with a bed-ridden prison inmate. I wasn’t there to entice her to practically rape that man.

Shaming

My mother regularly compared me to others and shamed me for not being able to draw beautiful cartoons like my aunt Nadya who was nearly my age, or weave colorful funeral wreaths like my mother’s friend’s daughter Lena, or do a split like my cousin Vika, or laugh as pleasantly as my cousin Yuliya, or have anal sex like her girlfriend Tanya. Yes, my mother loved talking to me about the sex life of her girlfriends. She not only demanded that I sleep around but also that I practice the perverted sexual ideas she taught me and report to her in great detail how it all went. I did that. It was the only time she “bonded” with me.

“Shame on you!” and “You should be ashamed of yourself!” as well as “You are a shame on our family!” were all my mother’s favorite phrases. Early on, she also made sure I knew that my grandma was ashamed of me, too, because I was an “illegitimate child” since mom had me out of wedlock. She told me that grandma didn’t want me to call her “grandma” because she didn’t want to be associated with me. Indeed, many times, grandma acted like she didn’t even know me.

My narcissistic mother also shamed me for being too intelligent. This is probably the most painful part of er entire shaming habit with me. A working family, my grandparents and mother were the backbone of the communistic USSR where the intellectuals were prosecuted and executed. The Russian intellectuals were called by my family “the enemy of the people.” Physical labor was work. Intellectual labor was a myth. That was my mother’s position on things that mattered to me. Schoolwork was not work. She didn’t want me to pursue education. Sex was what she wanted me to pursue: sex and babies, not multiple university degrees and ambitious goals. And of course, I had to farm. That was unquestionable. I worked on our family’s multiple farms.

I was expected to get married to a Russian drunk and pop Russian babies left and right as a patriotic gesture and a payback to my family. However, I was instead pursuing education, writing research papers, speaking at conferences, and winning awards for my intellectual accomplishments. As I’m typing these last words I’m going to say next, tears are rolling down my cheeks because this part of my story I am still working through. They called me “the enemy of the people.” Yes… All of the members of my large family mocked, shamed, insulted, ridiculed, scorned, and reproached me just because of my educational aspirations and intellectual accomplishments. I loved school. School was my life.

In October of 2020, for the first time in my 37 years of life, I received an email from my cousin-sister Yulya. No one from that family ever emailed me, except my mother, and no family member had even stayed in touch with me (not that I’d want or allow it). To say the least, I was caught off guard when I saw my cousin’s name in Russian in my email inbox. The subject line was even more intriguing: it was a graduate-degree research paper. The email was addressed to a university professor and, I assume by accident, it was also sent to me.

Attached was Yulya’s thesis.

I started crying… My cousin, who mocked and shamed me for my intellectual pursuits and educational accomplishments, at the age of 38 now was finally pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in business herself. Just like me… And her thesis, attached to that email, was focused on marketing, which has been my career here in America.

I felt genuine grief for how many years it took her to break free from the brainwashing of my family. Also, I was rejoicing that she did actually break free, though decades later. It was a shock to me to receive that email. It was a blessing, too, because, at the same time as I was feeling sad regarding Yulya’s bullying of my intelligence, I also felt very proud of Yulya’s intelligence and her new ambition.

I decided to respond to her email with words of genuine encouragement. I congratulated my sister-cousin on her intellectual accomplishments and said I was proud of her.

Our moms didn’t go to college.

I’m glad we did.

Endangerment

My mother served me a beer when I was five. At ten, she gave me wine, vodka, and moonshine regularly, as well as allowed other adults in the household to give me cigarettes and to smoke with me, which she herself witnessed and to which she never objected. The moonshine was made at home by my mother and her relatives. There was always the smell of alcohol being made and drunks consuming it stinking up the house. I hated our ugly, stinky, dirty, mice- and bugs-infested home, with peeling ceilings and holes in the floor. My mother would see a mouse, hear me scream, and she’d laugh, bring food, and feed the mouse. She loved doing the kinds of things that terrified and upset me. She was also a hoarder and told me the mice were our family.

My mom sometimes gave me to strangers. She sent me with women-strangers to bathe for hours, naked, with dozens of naked women surrounding me as a little girl. She gave me to a stranger man who took me to his home far away for an entire day. She gave me to her girlfriend to go to the gym and be naked together with other women. I didn’t like the whole naked-women ordeal so I asserted my boundaries and said I won’t go to anything like this anymore. From that point on, I had to know where I was asked to go, with whom, who else was going to be there, what exactly we were going to be doing there and for how long, as well as what the agenda was and why.

Some people say I’m too intense and too controlling. Well… If you’ve never walked in my shoes, you don’t understand. Yes, I am intense, and there’s a reason for it. For someone to be laidback, they’d need to feel safe since childhood and have security. I didn’t. My mother endangered me many times, so, as a kid, I had to look after myself, and yes, that prevented m from becoming laidback and chill, so yes, I am very intense. Even as I’m writing about my experiences now, my heart hurts and I feel a little bit of free-floating terror present in my chest and neck. My neck is burning right now from stress. My experiences are why I’m intense. There’s been no safe place for me as I was growing up.

There was danger everywhere all the time.

Some people today call me “high-maintenance” but there’s a reason for my approach to life, and whoever never lived through dangerous situations as a kid, as I did, simply can’t ever understand my boundaries. I’ve been through a lot, and it was completely up to me always to ensure my own safety. No one ever had my best interest in mind when I was growing up. Endangering me was my mother’s intention and desire. She loved seeing me hurt, injured, and defeated.

When I was a teen and already had boobs, my mother began inviting me to sleep on her job site with dozens of grownup out-of-town men who slept inside that same building on the same floor. My mother would leave me there in the dark, in the bedroom, completely alone, without any supervision, while she herself was working around the building at night as a janitor. I felt very awkward and scared. It felt like a setup for trouble. I didn’t have a good feeling about it. I was very guarded because I knew how dangerous the environment where my mom placed me actually was. The old creeps who stayed in that building flirted with me, made inappropriate comments about my body, and suggestively harassed me. My mom would laugh. When I’d express my boundaries and tell the men that their comments were inappropriate, my mother would scold and scorn me for being “rude” and taking myself “too seriously.” I quote. Being around my mother was dangerous.

Eventually, she hooked me up with one of her coworkers, insisting that I have sex with him, which I did. I was 16. He was 24. My mom was excited about her “success” setting up our hookup. It was fun for her. Somehow, since my childhood, I involuntarily was a part of my mom’s sexual fantasies and an object of her lustful perverted obsessions. She ended up flirting with that guy while also insisting that I date him, which I did. When I was already in America, he reached out to me on social media telling me about his feeling for my mom… I can’t even imagine what happened behind my back but I thank God that I regularly checked for STDs. For the last many years, I’ve lived a single and celibate life and finally can separate myself mentally from all those bondages.

Complaining

I was always the subject of my mother’s cruelty. Never have I heard my mother say anything positive of affirming about me to either me or anybody else. In fact, whenever someone would say something encouraging to me or about me, she would immediately combat it and discredit their words by putting me down.

In 2015, after being in America for seven straight years already, I was talking to my mother on the phone, listening to her complaining to me about me. I asked her: “Mom, do you have any good memories about your daughter at all?” She replied: ‘There’s nothing good to remember about you.” It hurt so much!

I left my mother in 2008, emigrated from Russia to America, and never returned or even visited for a day or two. In the last 12.5 years of detoxing my psyche from my mother’s poison, I slowly began to heal. I still talked to her sometimes and sent her money up until mid-2020 when she cruelly scolded and scorned me over Skype, after which I permanently blocked her on Skype, phone, YouTube, and email.

My mother always told my relatives, neighbors, teachers, and even friends what a terrible person I was, how unfortunate she was for having me, and what a difficult life I created for her. I felt scared of her negativity, aggressively harassed by her, terrified of her violence, angry with her abuse, and rebellious against any and all of her rules. In my early twenties, drunk and rebellious, I ended up locked up in jail for a night. Those memories give me a great perspective on what my life could have turned out to be, so I feel deep gratitude for the beautiful, healthy, peaceful, authentic, God-led life I live here in America in my 30s, praising Jesus for my salvation and redemption.

I often think of myself as a pickle preserved by God in an invisible bullet-proof jar to carry me into my mid-30s where I could finally live peacefully and joyfully, standing on God’s promises, resting in His sacred peace, and giving Him all the glory for my story.

My narcissistic mother told me that she wanted people to hate me the way she hated me. Sometimes, when I was very little, my mother would show me affection and care for me when I was very sick. In fact, she loved it when I was sick. She’d tell everyone about her unfortunate fate of having a sick child, making sure she played a superhero to elicit praise and admiration in response to her complaining.

My mother ensured that I was sick very often so that she could have more opportunities to complain, especially when I was hospitalized. That was heaven for her because, in a hospital room, I was placed with 12–17 other women, all of whom could hear my mother’s complaining and give her the narcissistic supply of praise, admiration, and compliments, which she craved every day non-stop and demanded it from me, for years sucking the life out of me.

People in the hospitals where I stayed would admire and compliment my mother in exchange for the devastating stories of what a hard life she had as a single mom on welfare doing her best to raise an unmanageable and ungrateful daughter (me).

My narcissistic mother played a humble woman who dearly loved her sick daughter. Needless to say, I had a host of illnesses when I was little and many people hated me, indeed, thanks to my mom’s heart-wrenching stories of what a terrible child I was.

Her eloquent smear campaign against me was a huge success. But when I went to college, though I still lived at home, I had my own life, more so independent from her because I worked three jobs, making and keeping my own money.

Still, well into my twenties, thanks to my mother’s complaining, I continued being extremely sick and was hospitalized for up to three weeks at a time, several times a year, year after year. Today, I’m 37, healthy, safe, live at peace, and feel gratitude and joy.

Misleading

My mother was supposed to be my solid rock and wise counsel. But she wasn’t. Not only did she mislead people to believe lies about me, but also she taught me to lie to people, to manipulate relatives, to be rude to the neighbors, and to abandon friendships instead of trying to work through relational conflicts.

When I was in the first grade, I remember coming home from school, walking into the kitchen distressed, and asking my mom for guidance in regards to a conflict that happened between me and my classmate that day. It was a sunny afternoon. I remember waiting for my mom to lead and guide my thinking.

But my narcissistic mother’s “wise counsel” never developed or evolved. She said to me: “F..k that friend! She won’t be in your life forever. She is temporary and not that valuable anyway. Go find a new friend!” Initially, I was shocked but eventually, this became exactly what I did. Why? Because my mother’s “wise counsel” was the only one I had. There were no therapists, churches, mentors, wise older sisters or aunts or Godmothers or grandmothers in my life. My mother was the authority. Her misleading guidance was all that was available to me.

When I launched on my own and left Russia at 25, I had to figure out life, relationships, money, career, health, self-care, identity, habits, and myself on my own. I had to learn everything good I know today but, before I did, I had to identify and remove everything bad, poisoning, negative, destructive, toxic… all the things my mother planted in my headspace during our 25 years together.

Neediness to say, I grew up to get married and divorced three times. It’s taken many years to recognize, acknowledge, confront, and heal my vicious mother’s misleading and harmful unwise counsel, which has been embedded deeply in my subconscious mind, with strong roots, blossoming with poison, spoiling my life.

I am 37 years old now.

Regularly, I receive letters from women around the world sharing the horrors they’ve lived through, misguided, brainwashed, manipulated, abused, and violated by their mothers. These kinds of things are extremely hard to communicate because the shock and the terror we as daughters of narcissistic mothers experience cannot be put into mere words in any language. But even when we do find some words to describe some of our experiences, feelings, and trauma, people have a hard time believing our unbearable horror stories.

Why?

Because it’s inconvenient and bothersome to face the truth about our life stories and hear how our mothers hate us viscously and cruelly, genuinely wishing us pain, suffering, and death. Most people prefer to believe wholeheartedly in the utopian ideal that every mother is nurturing, kind, and loves her daughter, genuinely wishing her well. It’s a very naive idea and is completely disconnected from the actual reality of human existence on earth.

To raise awareness of the truth, I write on this blog about my experiences with my own birth-mother who raised me in an environment of anger, violence, hatred, adultery, disrespect, addictions, rejection, and abuse. It’s scary but we do need to face the truth. I write about my experiences so that every woman who is going through the same kind of horrors knows that she is not alone, that there is someone in the world who knows how she feels, that there’s hope in Christ, healing, and God’s amazing grace, love, and redemption.

Smothering

My narcissistic mother smothered me in every way possible. She tortured my body, she tormented my mind, she hijacked my emotions, she stripped me of my human dignity, and she violated every imaginable aspect of my boundaries, including my sexuality and femininity. After 25 years of misery, living with my mother and her mother in our real-life “house of horrors,” I left Russia forever, a severely traumatized woman who coped with everyday existence by being maniacally-happy all the time, trapped in toxic positivity, avoiding herself by the means of various addictions, especially alcohol and sex, and focusing primarily on being a high achiever. I didn’t allow myself to feel anything but intense jolliness.

I had to heal from smothering by becoming fully human, allowing myself to feel my emotions, and accepting my sorrow, grief, fears, regrets, longings, and, of course, anger.

My mother searched for, found, accessed, and read my journals, showing them to me in my face, reading to me from my journals, telling me that I can’t have privacy or safety or security and that she can violate any boundaries I try to establish.

As she would do those cruel things, she would look me in the eye with a smirk, and she would laugh. When I showed my shock and fear, she indulged with pleasure in shuttering my psyche. My mother was a conscience-lacking monster. Here’s an article that describes the exact relationship my mother had with me, only this mother was jailed, and my mother was never held accountable. Read “Mother from hell who abused daughter from day she was born jailed for three years.” There are two things my heart is longing for: a good mm for me and for my actual mother to be held accountable. Neither will ever happen, and on my healing journey, I had to accept this truth.

In 2016, I married the same kind of sadistic conscience-lacking monster who became my third and last husband. Michel knew that I had Complex PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) and needed reassurance of the safety and security of our home. Indulging in his cruel mental games, Michel would show me how he was able to open any door lock easily, demonstrating to me in practice that I couldn’t have safety and security in our marital residence, from which he tried to exile me a few months after our wedding, explaining that he changed his mind and “didn’t want to be married anymore.”

One night, I saw that Michel placed a ladder outside my bathroom window to watch me naked in the shower. I discovered the ladder after it had already been there for a while. We had split and already lived in two separate bedrooms. When I asked Michel why he put the ladder outside my bathroom window, he laughed. I insisted that he’d remove it. Michel laughed. With cruel sadistic pleasure, he loved manipulating my psyche and witnessing my terror. Realizing after I married Michel Szabo that I was practically married to the same monster as my mother, I felt completely devastated and suicidally depressed.

Michel loved smothering me to fuel his ego.

Mother enjoyed smothering me to feel powerful.

This pattern was scary to realize.

I felt confused and trapped.

That’s why I spent years unveiling my trauma.

Now, I can see clearly. I’m not confused.

No longer do I feel trapped either.

But marriage to Michel was certainly hell.

One night, during our divorce, when we already lived in separate bedrooms, without a knock, he opened the door in my bedroom, got into my bed where I was sleeping at 3 am, and took advantage of me sexually. After that, Michel proceeded to give me the silent treatment, ignore me, and discard me for the pleasure of manipulating my mind with his clear and loud message of gradual dehumanization and invalidation. Unlike my mother, Michel also had access to my paycheck, so he smothered me financially as well, just like my mother during my early years when she took and spent all my money.

Being smothered by my mother and then by Michel was unbearable. I write a lot about freedom and independence through my poetry today. It’s because I know what it’s like to not have freedom, to be robbed of human dignity, to be trapped in abuse, to be violated and feel voiceless, to also feel hopeless, and to want to die because of complete and total despair from unbearable pain. I have lived through all those experiences and I wanted to die many times. Today, I love life.

Jealousy

My mother told me openly that she did not love me, did not like me, did not want me, hated me, and wished to see me dead. I explained what it was like to grow up hearing these things and provided many helpful insights in my essay called “Being the Child of a Narcissistic Mother.” She compared herself to me, competed with me, and was openly jealous of me. It started when I was five years old and for the first time began establishing boundaries with her.

It happened after she molested me.

She couldn’t take it and resented my boundaries because she never set boundaries with her mother and expected the same kind of enmeshed relationship and total submission from me. In fact, she didn’t even see me as a human with feelings or an independent mind. Yet I was always my own person, thinking on my own two feet.

My narcissistic mother compared herself to me all the time in every imaginable (makeup and the shape of the thighs) and unimaginable way (sexuality and the shape of pubic hair). Her comparison escalated from art and sewing skills to sexual performance and the ability to have multiple orgasms. At first, she told me she was able to knit and sew better than me, then, that her pubic hairstyle was better than mine, and then that men liked her better than me. I felt very awkward.

She regularly told me that my ambition, intelligence, and confidence irritated her. She’d say “I was never like this, I’m simple, so you need to be simple, too!” She ridiculed me and mocked the way I talked about the books I read or the new things I learned. She berated me for everything and didn’t want to hear about anything I was interested in, except for my sex life. My mother was obsessed with sex.

She criticized me in every imaginable and unimaginable way. When I had boyfriends, she’d tell me they liked her more than me because she’s better than me. I could never understand why she wanted to be adored by my boyfriends since she was so old and regularly condemned men. In fact, almost on a daily basis, she told me “all men are as…oles”. I guess I still believed back then in my mother’s goodness or even innocence. I excused her behavior by her hard work and tiredness. In reality, she was a hateful cruel sick pervert. I didn’t see it though.

My mother would demand that I sleep with men and then tell her about my sexual experiences in great detail. When she saw me going on a date, she’d say: “Go have orgasms for both me and you because I never got to have one!” Her demands would make me feel obligated to sleep around for the sake of her approval and at least an illusion of bonding with my mother. I always longed for a meaningful relationship with her. Yet, it never happened for me and it never will. This year, in 2020, at 37, I was able to accept this harsh truth for the first time… and grieve. In my recent essay called “Honest Answers to 20 Frequently Asked Questions About Narcissistic Mothers” I elaborate on everything I have slowly realized about my mom and our relationship.

My mother was jealous of my friends and even try to build coalitions with them against me. She was jealous of my educational accomplishments and did everything she could to create obstacles to my success.

She tried to talk me out of going to college, telling me that I needed to be a janitor like her and find a man to make babies with and provide for me. She would tell me a man who’d become my ATM machine. While today I’m an almost 40 years old adult woman and have a comprehensive perspective on life, myself, other people, and relationships, at that time, I was very young, and my mother was the main influence in my life, showering me with mental poison daily non-stop.

She was jealous of my beauty and had a habit of criticizing me in the morning right before school to reassure me that I was ugly and nothing special. She called me names, bullied me, shamed me, and demanded that I become beautiful. She told me repeatedly “If you don’t learn how to be beautiful by 35, you’re stupid.”

She used to chase me to the front door, smash my makeup, and demand that I redo it instead of going to school. To get out in the morning and go to school often was a war-like ordeal for me. I loved school, and my narcissistic mother was jealous of that, too. In fact, she told me that smart women end up going insane. She told me how there was a girl in her class on an honor roll, like me, who after the high school lost her mind and was admitted to a crazy house. My mother dreamed that I ditch school and make babies for her to abuse them.

At 17, I was discovered by a photographer, invited to beauty pageants, and even won my first-ever international trip, which was fully paid and absolutely incredible. During my life season of beauty pageants, I learned that I was beautiful. I didn’t believe it for a long time, so it took many people to repeatedly say this to me, and then I began believing in my beauty, slowly, one step at a time.

While in another country on that fully-paid exotic trip all by myself at 18 years old, I experienced brief healing while separated enough from my narcissistic mother.

That was how I realized that I wanted to move as far away from my mother as possible as soon as possible. Seven years later, I left Russia and my mother. Glory to God!

Dehumanization

My mother’s goal was to persuade me that I wasn’t even a legitimate human being. She wanted to use me as a thing, an object, a tradable commodity. She wanted me to disregard my own feelings, goals, values, believes, and interests for the sake of hers. She always told me that I did not belong here on earth and had no right to live.

I remember being in my first year of law school in 2005 and for the first time hearing about an inherent human dignity and the inseparable human right to life and physical integrity. I still can feel my mental shock: everything slowly coming together in my mind. Enduring decades of my mother’s sexual, emotional, spiritual, mental, financial, and physical abuse, I could hardly comprehend the idea of me having a right to live or having any inherent dignity…

I still cry when I remember that moment in the classroom realizing viscerally that I was a human being and had rights, assigned to me by the constitution and not requiring my mother’s approval. It was nothing short of a revolution for my psyche.

My mother repeatedly told me since I was very little that I wasn’t a human, and she treated me accordingly. The dehumanization did not stop after I grew up. My mother’s attempts to dehumanize me continued even in 2020 during our last Skype call when she berated me for not being willing to stay in daily contact with her and refusing to be continuously reporting on everything happening in my life as soon as I wake up. This was her exact word-for-word demand. I rejected my mother’s insane manipulation, stating that I have my own life and would never do something like what she was demanding but that I was doing my best to communicate with her regularly, send her money, and share pictures with her. At that point, my mother began screaming at me that I was “not a human.” I clearly and calmly asserted my boundaries once again. She hung up on me. That night, at 11 pm, I finally realized that I have had enough of my mother. I blocked her Skype, phone number, and email permanently in a way that her messages don’t even reach my junk mail or trash box. After that, I began doing the excruciatingly-painful internal work of facing my past in such great detail that would allow me to put together the puzzle of my life and look at it with a sober mind.

The result is this article.

I was seeking to understand why, after all the abuse and all the pain I had already endured due to my mother’s hatred, cruelty, and violence against me, I still was hoping that she would change. I wanted to know why I still was longing for her acknowledgment, acceptance, affirmation, and approval.

I desired to know why she still had my heart.

My narcissistic mother dehumanized me by showing me and telling me that I was nothing. When I was a teen, my mother attacked me with a knife, she chaises me with an axe, she spilled hot boiling cooking oil right out of a frying pan onto my legs one morning, while I was making breakfast… She brought home strangers to drink alcohol for hours at a time when I was little, drinking to the point of unconsciousness. She would abuse me in front of relatives, friends, and her drinking buddies as if I were her feelingless punching bag.

She brought her random strangers, even married men, and had sex with them right next to my bedroom, being inappropriately loud, not caring about the mental health of her child, acting as if I not only didn’t matter as a human being growing up in her custody but also as if I didn’t even actually exist at all. I could never comprehend… I was a thing that provided my mother with child support from the government, and she told people she gave me birth just so when she becomes old and disabled, there would be someone to take care of her.

Well… Unfortunately, her plan failed terribly.

I moved 5,521 miles away.

She’s permanently blocked from contacting me.

Debauchery

My mother sexualized me since I was five years old. Back then, she would tell me about sex and how I would need to be sexually-prepared to hunt for a husband using my body as bait so that I could become a mother and a wife. Yes, my mother taught me that my body was bait for men. Until just a few years ago, I genuinely didn’t know that I had any inherent value as a human being.

I was always treated as a tradable commodity so I thought of myself as such. My narcissistic mother persuaded me that I was nothing without men. Men of course saw in my behavior how I felt about myself. I had to learn about my humanity and dignity, accept it, change my identity, and completely transform all my beliefs.

My transformation took six years.

The way to get a man, according to my mother’s sophisticated daily brainwashing, was through sex. I was for men and for sex. That was what she taught me. At five, she left me in a small bathtub with my two cousins Yulya and Vika who molested me and taught me cunnilingus. Today, at 37 years old, I can only imagine what my cousins endured in their childhood as a part of that evil family in order to do that to me as their little sister-cousin. All of us were pregnant as teens.

The girls had abortions.

I suffered a miscarriage at 17.

My mother watched hard-core porn films in my presence when I was not even in elementary school yet. She also encouraged me to read a pornography book called “Emmanuel” about sodomy, in which women, men, and entire groups of adults had sex with children. My narcissistic mother also took me to the movie theaters with her whenever she went to watch porn. I was very little.

I explain the details of my mother’s obsession with sex in an essay called “Raised by a Narcissistic Mother to Be a Sex Addict.” In elementary school, I was already masturbating in front of other kids and my teacher by fidgeting in a chair with my butt positioned on top of a little orange jacket during a study session.

I did what I was taught to do, what I witnessed at home, what was shown to me, and what I was told I had to learn how to do. My elementary school teacher was frightened when she witnessed my public masturbation. She called me bad… but I wasn’t bad. This kind of sexual behavior is extremely common among sexually-abused children but it was taboo to discuss. Here’s an article about childhood masturbation.

In my neighborhood, there were many kids. We would all work together to organize concerts for the elderly neighbors. Our microphones were hair spray cans. We’d dress up for performance wearing parents’ clothing and shoes. We all played together. I remember that, by my family members, we kids were encouraged to French-kiss…

My mother encouraged me to explore sexuality and indulge in bodily pleasure. She was obsessed with the idea of multiple orgasms, which eventually became the vehicle for the rapid escalation of my sex addiction. Combined with my alcoholism, which was born and developed in the four walls of my childhood home, my addictions cocktail led me to hit the rock bottom in 2014, when I already lived in America on my own. That was when I became a Christian.

I invited Jesus into my heart and asked God to change me. He did. This Christian ministry was born in 2017 as God called me to help other women who’ve experienced the same abuse and are suffering today. I wrote two insightful essays called “Living with a Narcissistic Mother Resulted in C-PTSD” and “Being the Child of a Narcissistic Mother Led to OCD” where I elaborated on just some of the damage to the mental health of daughters of narcissistic mothers.

If you’d like to support the work I’m doing in God’s kingdom, donate now. Your donations are the only way to continue raising awareness of trauma and offering God’s healing, ultimately helping alleviate suicide among women globally by sharing hope in Christ.

When I was sixteen, my narcissistic mother couldn’t wait for me to have sex. I held on to my virginity but gave it away one night in the Summer of 1999 while drinking heavily with my cousin-sister Yulya, her boyfriend Valik, and his friend Roma.

I remember bottles of vodka, heavy rain, hearing my cousin Yulya having sex with Valik, being seduced by her boyfriend’s friend, and feeling shocked. I couldn’t believe what happened. It was the first and the last time I ever saw the guy. I was 16.

After that night, my mother encouraged me to have a lot of sex with many different men to gain a “valuable experience.” She persuaded me to hook up with my former classmate Andrey, with whom I was watching my girlfriend’s dog for a few days, so I can the key to her home. Andrey and I began skipping college classes together to indulge in sex. We continued doing the same at his place later on while his parents were at work. My mom was finally happy: I prioritized sex over school, which was what she wanted all those years.

We were sixteen but Andrey already had a daughter. It was the child of his neighbor who was an older lady. She was married to a local police officer. While her husband was at work, that female-pedophile regularly molested Andrey at only 12 years old. When he was 13, she got pregnant and had a baby girl, right next door to where Andrey lived with his picture-perfect family who always bragged about their life. My mother encouraged us to have sex because she wanted to be liked by Andrey’s parents and she hoped I would make babies for her.

Yet, my mother’s obsession with Andrey only lasted until she decided to hook me up with her coworker Vova who was from a nearby town of Zheleznogorsk. She introduced us, and the brainwashing began. Her obsession with Vova escalated. She insisted that I have sex with him. The next thing I knew, I was sleeping with my mom’s coworker. I was only 16. He was 24. My mother was ecstatic.

One snowy winter night, I was out with Andrey, who lived less than a mile away. I come home with him very late, and my mother is there waiting to whisper secrets to me. When I heard what she said, cold blood started running through my veins…

I could hardly wrap my head around the situation in my home, intentionally created by my perverted mother. What happened? I will try my best to describe the horror.

Right there and then, my mother already had my other boyfriend Vova sleeping in my bedroom without my knowledge or approval. He came from out of town and she just let him into my bed. When I came home with Andrey, my mother told me to bring Andrey to her bedroom and have sex with him there while Vova was asleep in my bedroom, and then, she suggested, I would go have sex with Vova. All this took place in our home, with my grandmother and other adults present, and I did exactly what my mother suggested.

It was all normal for our family.

Those learned mindsets and behaviors impacted my personal life for many years. At 17, I got pregnant from a 28-year-old man, with whom my mother loved hanging out and whom I barely knew. That pregnancy resulted in a miscarriage. I have never been pregnant again for the last 20 years. I know I will never have children. I live a single and celibate life now, fully dedicated to Jesus Christ and His calling.

Stalking

My narcissistic mother was always a master manipulator and a stalker. She would stage any drama to get attention in order to fuel her narcissistic ego. Nothing was off-limits with my mother. Manipulating my friends, creating fake online personas, finding people in my circle overseas, emailing to those close to me and blackmailing me, asking strangers to forward her messages to me… She’s done it all, and, at one point, I felt completely overwhelmed by the unbearable stalking and its incomprehensible extent. On October 21st of 2020, I even permanently deleted my Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Yelp accounts.

After I moved to America, my narcissistic mother stalked me in more ways than I could have imagined she’d come up with. Don’t ever underestimate your narcissistic mother! She found people in Atlanta and reached out to them online directly through both American and Russian social networks. She figured out people in my circle from my social media tags on posts, and she started following them and commenting on their content. Through social media, my mother even began manipulating people, who were close to me here in America, into a friendship with her, requesting that they brainwash me into a relationship with her. Once that happened, I always disconnected from my former friends. I’ve had to block people over the years due to my mother’s relentless stalking.

I have received many messages through the Russian social media site Odnoklassniki from people asking me to call my mother, or even forwarding me her long and very hateful messages addressed to me. Years ago, I permanently deleted my profile from that platform. It was then that I began receiving multiple Facebook requests from various Facebook profiles with my mother’s name. The scenario was always the same: to lure me into a conversation through manipulation and then attack me, harass me, blame and shame me, and suck the life out of me. During our last interaction in early 2020, began seeing my own funeral and grave in my nightmares about my narcissistic mother.

I’ve blocked dozens of Facebook profiles with my mother’s name. The same was with Instagram, only there, in addition to me, my mother was stalking and befriending the people she saw in my pictures. Multiple messages were sent to me by my spooked friends. In 2020, I permanently deleted Facebook and Instagram. It was a good decision.

My narcissistic mother created a Google account with my Russian name and a picture of me. She was contacting people pretending to be me. When I personally saw this, I was speechless. I felt so violated and completely overwhelmed by the conscious realization of what a crazy psycho my mother is, which was almost incomprehensible for me personally because I did love my mother, hoping that someday she’d become peaceful, nurturing, and loving. This phenomenon is described in detail and the reasons are explained in the article “Narcissistic Abuse Victim Syndrome” where I provide insights into the psyche of a person surviving abuse for any length of time, especially decades.

My narcissistic mother’s stalking is painful to recall and hard to describe. Writing this, I feel sad, angry, overwhelmed, scared, agitated, and resentful. What helps me is recognizing and labeling my feelings so that I can remain separated from them and they don’t take my headspace over. I created a helpful resource called “a List of Feelings” to enable this emotional work and promote mental health.

I began receiving emails from my mother a few years ago: long, hate-filled word-vomits, which I was deleting without reading. In 2016, while at Piedmont Park taking my engagement pictures with my then soon-to-be and now ex-husband Michel, I began receiving text messages about my mother being in a hospital, telling me that she fell and broke her spine. This was the script she used to get attention.

How repulsive!

I knew it was a setup to disrupt my wedding as my narcissistic mother stayed in contact with my former friend from Atlanta. It was disturbing. Her stalking and harassment sent me into a panic immediately because at the time I didn’t fully understand my story or its impact on my psyche. Today, I’m more protective of myself but also I have a much greater understanding of my mother’s abuse. Also, today, I have a visceral knowledge that I am not my trauma, my trauma is not here, it’s in the past, and I’m in the present, safe and secure.

Harassment

Growing up in my childhood home in Russia, which was also my mother’s childhood home, I felt confused and terrified at all times because of my mother’s unstoppable harassment. I remember coming home from school and taking a nap. Mother opened my bedroom door, walked in, and began physically harassing my body while screaming what an irresponsible and ungrateful person I was for not doing all the household labor there was to do every day.

We had no dishwasher, no washer and dryer, everything had to be done by hand. It was my responsibility to clean, do laundry, do dishes, cook, labor on the farm, iron clothes, bedding, curtains, etc. Mother was harassing me for years, demanding heavy labor from me, even as a child, which I did provide, only it was never good enough for my narcissistic mother’s unrealistic expectations.

Yelling at and slapping a sleeping person was something that took place in my mother’s home regularly for many decades: grandma did that to grandpa. We all witnessed it.

My mother yelled at me regularly when I was asleep. She’d pull me, drag me, or scream for me to immediately wake up and serve her needs. I’d get up terrified and immediately face her drama unfolding in my bedroom. My mother was always disappointed with when and how I slept. It was always imperfect. She’d scold me for sleeping too long or not enough, demand that I stay up all night jarring pickles with her and demand that I had to be in bed by 10 pm…

Life, sleep, eating, and reading could only be on my mother’s schedule and only for short periods. Sleeping was always a huge problem. As a result of my narcissistic mother’s continuous harassment, I’d wake up in terror and often with rapid heartbeat, intense short breathing patterns, chest pain, and uncontrollable tears running down my cheeks. Even here in America, in my late 20s, I still experienced this.

Years later, I married the same kind of sadistic maniac who sleep-deprived me for months, driving me to insanity by preventing me from sleep. Michel would come home at 12 am, then leave home at 4 am, slamming doors, shaking the house by opening and closing the garage door multiple times, playing loud music and singing, spraying the entire house with men’s cologne, all to prevent me from sleeping. Sleep abuse is a common narcissistic abuse tactic ought to exhaust the victim, making her more receptive to the abuse.

My mother sleep-deprived me by forcing all-night labor on me: cooking, jarring produce for the winter, peeling huge amounts of potatoes, entertaining her, and being her punchbag. Of course, I had to go to school every morning…

I remember my friend Olya came over while I was napping in my bed one late afternoon. My mother simply let Olya into my bedroom. She didn’t see me as a human who needed privacy. She didn’t recognize that I had boundaries. She let anyone into my bedroom any time, without consulting me. Olya woke me up as she sat on the side of my bed and stared at me. I opened my eyes and began weeping intensely while hyperventilating. It was not because of Olya but because of my mother’s abuse, especially sleep abuse, and chronic harassment.

My mother always let people into my bedroom without any warning: relatives, strangers, friends… I remember waking up at night and seeing my grandmother’s evil sister standing there, looking at me, doing something with her hands, and whispering spells and curses at me. I felt terrified and had to become angry quickly to kick her out. I was just a little girl who was completely alone in life with no one standing up for her ever. To protect and defend myself, I had to always get angry, scream, and become very defensive. Calm conversations in normal human language didn’t happen in our household. It was a war-like environment where I was a soldier to defend my dignity at all costs.

Eventually, I demanded a lock on my door and spent a lot of time locked in my room alone to feel at least a brief illusion of privacy and safety while doing my school work, reading, journaling, or changing my clothes. I had to typically plug my ears with earplugs to escape the typical screaming and fighting, which happened 24/7 in our home among all relatives. It is so hard to imagine how a little girl survived there. Yet, I did, thanks to God’s good plan, protection, provision, and purpose for my life. God preserved me like a pickle in the invisible heavy-duty jar of His amazing endless grace. When I think about it, my heart melts.

In recent years, since I moved to America, to harass me, my mother created multiple online profiles on Facebook, Google, and Instagram, reaching out to both me and my friends. She also created a Google profile with my Russian name and a portrait picture of me, pretending to be me. In 2020, my mother was emailing me up to 30 times a day, and eventually, I completely blocked her.

The free-floating fear I felt every day at home was always present, and the residue of it is still here with me in America today at 37. Only I can now recognize it for what it is and acknowledge it without letting it hijack my psyche. That is the case most of the time, though just a couple of weeks ago, there was a panic attack I experienced when my neighbor Flame showed me a YouTube clip from the movie “Precious.” Seeing how the cruel mother hatefully called her innocent daughter “bitch” while explaining why and how she molested her daughter, I cried and shook uncontrollably, my body collapsed on the floor.

It took a lot of mental and physical effort to conquer my flashback that evening and to come back into my current safe and secure reality, to America, to Atlanta, to 2020, to my peaceful and beautiful home on the River where I have security and peace. This for me is an everyday work of battling C-PTSD as the result of decades of chronic abuse and trauma. Being able to do the work in order to heal allows me to gradually get better. Finding the words to describe those traumatic events and explaining how they impacted me propels me to the next level of healing because it allows me to separate me from trauma.

Brainwashing

Perhaps the hardest thing to understand, from my perspective of being a liberated 37-year-old free-thinking woman in America, is the concept of obligatory patriotic procreation. It’s the idea my mother imposed on me since I was a little girl. She told me that we, as Russian women, owed it to our country to mate with the Russian men to procreate for the sake of our country’s wellbeing and strength. Yes, I was asked to have sex in the name of “mother Russia.” I explained this cultural phenomenon in my article about sexualized Russian poetry.

My mother explained that after World War II, the ratio of men to women in our country was 1 to 5, so four women out of five simply did not have an opportunity to have their own man and needed to sleep with other women’s men. I did that.

Today, as I think back about those confusing experiences, I understand how powerful brainwashing can be, resulting in people getting trapped permanently in dangerous cults or political propagandas, which manipulate and exploit innocent minds of unsuspecting victims. It is especially powerful when the one doing the brainwashing is the victim’s primary caregiver who is supposed to offer guidance on how to live life productively and provide wise counsel. My narcissistic mother was unfit for the job and so she wasn’t able to counsel me effectively or at least sufficiently. I was very confused.

Silencing

My narcissistic mother didn’t want me to speak up. She was afraid of me revealing to people her sexual misconduct with me as my mother. Also, she hated my intellectual debates with her because she wanted me to “be simple.” So, she silenced me.

These are the ways, in which my mother silenced me.

Calling me crazy in my face. My narcissistic mother regularly told me “You’re saying too many words, be simpler, no need to talk so much, your words do not matter, keep your opinions to yourself, stop thinking you’re special! You’re delusional! You’re schizophrenic.” My mother’s words mattered a great deal to me and actually programmed me to get anxious and hyperventilate whenever I’d share my honest opinion. Still to this day, it’s very hard to share my opinion or disclose how I feel, though I’m 37 and have been on my healing journey for 6.5 years. I’m working now on identifying my authentic voice.

My narcissistic mother regularly told me “You’re saying too many words, be simpler, no need to talk so much, your words do not matter, keep your opinions to yourself, stop thinking you’re special! You’re delusional! You’re schizophrenic.” My mother’s words mattered a great deal to me and actually programmed me to get anxious and hyperventilate whenever I’d share my honest opinion. Still to this day, it’s very hard to share my opinion or disclose how I feel, though I’m 37 and have been on my healing journey for 6.5 years. I’m working now on identifying my authentic voice. Telling people I was crazy. My narcissistic mother told people that I was crazy so that they should disregard whatever I said against her. This began when I was five after she molested me but I refused to submit to her sexual demands. When I would share what I was going through, not only did people didn’t believe me but also they’d doubt my character, questioning why I’d say things that weren’t true about my mother who “worked so hard” and was “a single mom doing her best.” That was how people invalidated me due to my mother’s smear campaign against me. I got quiet and lost respect for adults around my family. I became rebellious and angry, but my authentic voice was buried.

My narcissistic mother told people that I was crazy so that they should disregard whatever I said against her. This began when I was five after she molested me but I refused to submit to her sexual demands. When I would share what I was going through, not only did people didn’t believe me but also they’d doubt my character, questioning why I’d say things that weren’t true about my mother who “worked so hard” and was “a single mom doing her best.” That was how people invalidated me due to my mother’s smear campaign against me. I got quiet and lost respect for adults around my family. I became rebellious and angry, but my authentic voice was buried. Leveraging triangulation . My narcissistic mother argued and held screaming matches with me daily for decades. She would bring another person into the mix in an attempt to “stack the deck” in her favor. To make herself seem more credible and to invalidate my opinions, experiences, and feelings, she’d say” “I’m gonna call grandma now, and she will confirm that I’m right!” or “If you don’t agree with me right now, I’m gonna go get your friend and bring her here to tell you that I’m right!” or “If you don’t do what I say, I’m going to your school principal to tell her everything you do wrong at home, and she will never respect you again.” Many times, she would use someone I personall