Identify and Heal

So many adult daughters of narcissists meet who they believe is the Love of their life at a young age, marry them, and then too many years later make the painful discovery that they were involved with a complete stranger. This stranger to whom she never truly knew and who ended up being just like her Mother on so many levels. Other women on the other hand, drift from one relationship to the next, searching for love, and finding themselves in the same type of damaging relationship over and over again. So why do so many daughters of Narcissists look for love in all the wrong places, and end up in relationships with people who are just like their mother?

We are attracted to people who are not able to meet our needs, and who are emotionally unavailable to us. Initially we may not recognise this, because we react unconsciously to the emotional wounding from our childhood, and the imprinting and programming we received from narcissistic mother. As little girls, we were victims of abuse, and as women we continue to repeat the behaviours that we learned as a child. When we are attracted to someone, we are attracted to the things about that person that are familiar to us. We may not be consciously aware of it at the time, however we become involved with people who we can recreate the emotional dynamics from our childhoods. As crazy as this sounds, and as unwanted as it may be, in effect we are setting ourselves up to be rejected and abandoned once again.

If we met someone who could be emotionally available to us, and who could meet all of our needs, we most likely would not be interested in the person, because there wouldn’t be that pull of ‘familiarity’ in the first instance. On the flip side, if we meet someone who could be available to grow close to us, and they then saw the real us, would we really be ready to embrace this? The answer is most probably not, because in our minds, they then would see the real us and abandon us, because that is what we are programmed to believe. How many times growing up, do you recall being told that you were unlovable and that no-one would ever be able to put up with you? On the other hand, how many times did your narcissistic mother tell you that no one would ever love you as much as she would? Think about this carefully for a moment, and consider the energy that each example carries? If we grow up being told we are unlovable, we are going to have an incredible amount of Fear regarding intimacy stored deep inside of us, because we are programmed to believe that we are unworthy. Also, if we were told that no one would ever love us like our mother does, again we are going to have an incredible amount of fear regarding intimacy held deep inside of us, because we only have one mother, so who else will love us? As we can see from these two types of imprinting, each toxic example told us something different, however each example carried the same message to us regardless, which is we are unworthy. Therefore, every daughter of a narcissistic mother carries the same deep-rooted fear of rejection and abandonment, which directly reinforces our fear of intimacy.

Why do we have this deep-rooted fear of intimacy? The answer is co-dependency, and this is what leads daughters of narcissistic mothers to connect with their unconscious motivation to find a partner who is familiar and reminiscent of our past traumas. Co-dependents are the product of a narcissistic upbringing, and as daughters in adulthood we fear being alone and will endure damaging toxic behaviours in our relationships due to our core issues of abandonment, and deep fear of being rejected. These unhealthy patterns are a deep yearning from within the daughter that stem from her childhood, where she so desperately wanted to be loved and cared for. Until we begin healing our psychological wounds, we will submit to the dysfunctional destiny which our mothers set up for us, by choosing partners with whom we can recreate our childhoods with.

Co-dependency is a behavioural and emotional defence system that our ego created as a child so that we could survive. As children we did not possess the tools to reprogram our egos, and we did not have healthy nurturing role models to support, guide and help us heal our emotional wounding. Unfortunately in adulthood, we continue to react to our imprinting and programming, and again still end up not getting our needs met by those who we so badly want to love and cherish us. The co-dependency defence system, that our egos created to keep us safe, is the same defence system that will continue to wound us in adulthood, until we break these dysfunctional patterns for ourselves, and begin by being truly honest with ourselves as women.

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