sign of anything intrinsically wrong with you. The truth is that:
You are not broken in need of fixing.
You are perfectly and wonderfully made.
You are, rather, wounded in need of healing.
But yet, there are many issues we do have to deal with. Here’s a selection.
We often have problems with perception, and think we’re crazy.
Here’s the thing: children are programmed at an extremely deep level to believe their parents. This is wired into us by biology, by evolution. Reason being, the child who believed her parents’ comments about danger, without needing to prove it for herself, survived to pass on her genes more than the child who didn’t. This system works really well when the parent is well-meaning and telling the truth to protect the child. The system fails when the parents are lying to the child to protect their own self-image or ego.
The result is that you are getting two contradictory pieces of information. The first is what your own perception tells you: what you saw, what you heard, what you experienced. The second is what your mother insists that you saw, heard and experienced.
And given how insistent narcissists can be, combined with our natural propensity to believe our mothers, we come to believe their version of events over our own. This truly is head-wrecking.
There is no security in a world where we cannot (as we think) trust even our own perceptions. How do we know what reality is, if we cannot (again, as we think) judge it correctly?
We come to think we’re crazy. Which is a totally logical thing to think – all the evidence is there, right?
And this, therefore, is the biggest gift, of the many many gifts of realising your mother is narcissistic and has been lying all this time, a gift so pivotal that it forms the title of this book:
You are not crazy.
You are perfectly sane.
Your perceptions are valid and right
You can trust your own reality.
Now, knowing this rationally is one thing. Believing it at a core level is quite another. We talk more about beliefs later in this book, and will deal with that issue then. For now, just park the doubts along with the guilt.
It feels like we were born broken.
Many DONMs have a deeply buried sense that we are inherently flawed. That there is something twisted and evil and nasty and noxious and poisonous about us, and that we were born that way. It’s part of who we are rather than just something we do. This brings with it a huge all-encompassing sense of shame.
This belief is partly us trying to make sense of the fact that even our own mother did not love us, because in a child’s logic the mother is perfect, and so if she doesn’t love us, it must be a flaw in us rather than in her.
But often it’s also a direct, if veiled, statement from our mother or parents too. They more or less tell us this! They tell us that only they know the real us, and it’s not a pretty sight, and only they could possibly put up with us, knowing the truth about us. All our friends, they suggest, would abandon us in a heartbeat if they knew what we were really like.
This is confusing, because at some level we know we’re not that bad. But yet, we are accustomed to believing their ‘knowledge’ over our own perception, so we come to think we are that bad, in some vague unspecified way. And this badness is even scarier for being unspecified. How can we fix it or cure it if we don’t even know what it is?
I lived in terror of finding out just how broken I was – this awfulness was too big and too dreadful to be even faced up to or acknowledged full-on. And so they were able to keep me docile and quiescent for years with the veiled threat to show me exactly how awful I was. I called it, in my own mind, The Horrible Danu Mirror . Once I looked in it, there would be no more hiding. I would know exactly how deformed and grotesque I was. And so I dared not look into the mirror; I dared not let them tell me details of how bad I was. And the threat to show me
You are not broken in need of fixing.
You are perfectly and wonderfully made.
You are, rather, wounded in need of healing.
But yet, there are many issues we do have to deal with. Here’s a selection.
We often have problems with perception, and think we’re crazy.
Here’s the thing: children are programmed at an extremely deep level to believe their parents. This is wired into us by biology, by evolution. Reason being, the child who believed her parents’ comments about danger, without needing to prove it for herself, survived to pass on her genes more than the child who didn’t. This system works really well when the parent is well-meaning and telling the truth to protect the child. The system fails when the parents are lying to the child to protect their own self-image or ego.
The result is that you are getting two contradictory pieces of information. The first is what your own perception tells you: what you saw, what you heard, what you experienced. The second is what your mother insists that you saw, heard and experienced.
And given how insistent narcissists can be, combined with our natural propensity to believe our mothers, we come to believe their version of events over our own. This truly is head-wrecking.
There is no security in a world where we cannot (as we think) trust even our own perceptions. How do we know what reality is, if we cannot (again, as we think) judge it correctly?
We come to think we’re crazy. Which is a totally logical thing to think – all the evidence is there, right?
And this, therefore, is the biggest gift, of the many many gifts of realising your mother is narcissistic and has been lying all this time, a gift so pivotal that it forms the title of this book:
You are not crazy.
You are perfectly sane.
Your perceptions are valid and right
You can trust your own reality.
Now, knowing this rationally is one thing. Believing it at a core level is quite another. We talk more about beliefs later in this book, and will deal with that issue then. For now, just park the doubts along with the guilt.
It feels like we were born broken.
Many DONMs have a deeply buried sense that we are inherently flawed. That there is something twisted and evil and nasty and noxious and poisonous about us, and that we were born that way. It’s part of who we are rather than just something we do. This brings with it a huge all-encompassing sense of shame.
This belief is partly us trying to make sense of the fact that even our own mother did not love us, because in a child’s logic the mother is perfect, and so if she doesn’t love us, it must be a flaw in us rather than in her.
But often it’s also a direct, if veiled, statement from our mother or parents too. They more or less tell us this! They tell us that only they know the real us, and it’s not a pretty sight, and only they could possibly put up with us, knowing the truth about us. All our friends, they suggest, would abandon us in a heartbeat if they knew what we were really like.
This is confusing, because at some level we know we’re not that bad. But yet, we are accustomed to believing their ‘knowledge’ over our own perception, so we come to think we are that bad, in some vague unspecified way. And this badness is even scarier for being unspecified. How can we fix it or cure it if we don’t even know what it is?
I lived in terror of finding out just how broken I was – this awfulness was too big and too dreadful to be even faced up to or acknowledged full-on. And so they were able to keep me docile and quiescent for years with the veiled threat to show me exactly how awful I was. I called it, in my own mind, The Horrible Danu Mirror . Once I looked in it, there would be no more hiding. I would know exactly how deformed and grotesque I was. And so I dared not look into the mirror; I dared not let them tell me details of how bad I was. And the threat to show me
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