My mother is a voracious propagandist, a gossip. She thrusts her body into it. She points her long-knuckled finger, half crooked, with her back hunched witch-like, and creeps towards you. Her eyes, squinting, her face twisted in rage. Her voice has a deep, echo-y throttle, coupled with her French-accented English, spitting out her lies and spins. She puts all she has into the performance. She wants to terrorize you into silence and submission.
She has called relatives that I barely knew. She has called on my ex-boyfriend’s mother, written letters to her ex-sister-in-law, and tried to wrangle my friends in on the drama. She is a relentless and prolific character assassinator. She mines your life for any details to construct her narrative, sometimes built on a kernel of truth, sometimes not, to savage you for her gain and to ease the ache of her fragile, decimated ego. My existence, humanity, the things that made me who I am, threatened her. She has no concept of self and is threatened by those who do, including her children. Humiliation is her favorite weapon.
Is it Narcissistic Personality Disorder? Is she a sociopath? Histrionic? Who knows. There are distinct, repetitive patterns of her abuse, and patterns do not lie. She spends all her days and life force decimating people, extracting supply by humiliating, gaslighting, manipulating, and propagating smear campaigns. She has nothing else in her life. There is no room for creativity, love, or authentic connections.
She must cover her tracts every day. All her machination and manipulations, gaslighting and need for supply, the puppeteering, and the sabotaging, must be protected from detection. She vibrates with negativity, a vortex of destruction, ever fearful of being exposed. It is her life. And if you have a life, she wants to destroy it, little by little, death by one thousand cuts. She is a soul annihilator.
I had a “best friend”/roommate once. She was my “mother”, disguised as an obsessive pot-smoking opportunist that used the same tactics to get what she wanted out of me. I repeated the same relationship I had with my mother with my “best friend,” or more appropriately, frenemy. I believe it is what psychologists call repetition compulsion — repeating traumatic events in your life that have happened in the past.
Frenemy.
I met frenemy in high school; we moved from other schools our senior year. I had no concept of boundaries and accepted behavior a healthy, loved, and secure human would not. I did not know the red flags were red flags. Looking back, I cringe at the memory. In fairness to me, I felt it, my body lurched with discomfort, but I was not in a head place to listen. I accepted it because I had very low self-worth, a debilitating by-product of my family of origins’ profoundly dysfunctional and abusive patterns.
It took me until my early thirties to completely cut her out. I went through periods where I did not speak to her, much like my relationship with my mother. I would retreat from their orbit, tired of the gaslighting and constant hyper-vigilance in their presence. My pulling away was used against me, and I would get caught up defending myself. Guilt, shame, and fear were the weapons of choice within these dynamics. They do all the emotional damage, and I would feel all the guilt.
This is what continues to disturb me all these years later. How easy it was for them to guilt me and to shame me for cutting them out, in other words, for having boundaries. When I asserted my boundaries, by not engaging, it was weaponized against me. I can trace this back to my parents and step-parents, who would heap guilt and shame on my siblings and me. A tactic used to release themselves from their neglect, abuse, and lack of interest in our lives.
My mother abandoned me and my siblings in several episodes of our lives, and she worked over our young minds to transfer her guilt and shame onto us. She would often complain about how we never wrote her and how often she wrote to us. We did not need letters. We needed a mother. But instead, she began her propaganda campaign with her letters, which she threw back in our faces as we got older. It was her “proof”, it “vindicated” her. Her letters were a master class in manipulation and gaslighting, twisting narratives and guilting us to feel pity for her. We absorbed the guilt and shame. I took it into my adult life and stumbled for years, allowing myself to be easily manipulated by nefarious people who could sense my low self-worth.
Repetition compulsion.
Looking back at my frenemy-ship, it is a perfect example of repetition compulsion. Similar to the dynamic with my mother, I was compliant and overlooked all the red flags. Similar to my mother, she was an opportunist that knew how to spin lies to accomplish an end goal, to throw you under the bus, and to get what she wants. I was able to connect the dots and see how my early priming within my family of origin, particularly by my mother, contributed to these patterns.
The end of our “friendship” started with one of her many smear campaigns. It is because of this experience within this toxic friendship that I was able to trace it to the pathological dysfunction in my family and begin a long, long journey to healing. I was coming out of the “FOG” (fear, obligation, guilt).
My frenemy was also my roommate for two years. Towards the end, I was done with her and when she mentioned she wanted to move to another apartment and assumed I was coming with her, I told her no. She was not happy with that, she tried all sorts of mind games to convince me to remain roommates. We had a serious conversation when I let her know I was not happy with her. She was defensive, then switched tactics and said she needed me to help her be a “better” person. Nope, I was not having it. I was done with her. I was merely a source of income for her, as I had no boundaries and forked over money when I was making it, without question. More on that later. The end was near.
One day, there was a note from our landlord asking for payment of late fees (late fees they had no right to charge, but that came later). Frenemy jumped on this opportunity to spin the letter into an eviction notice (it was not) and proceeded to move in with a guy she had been or was to trying to hook up with. It turned out she was, behind his girl-friends back. She had been scheming to move out and being the opportunist that she was, jumped on the chance to spin this into her exit strategy and in the process, throw me under the bus. I was devastated by the callous, manipulating way she schemed and lied to accomplish her end game.
I came home and the only thing left was a big bin of trash and empty boxes she left for me, in case I needed them. Looking back now, it was exactly what I needed. I was not making any moves to break away, so the universe kicked me out of this horrible situation. I remember feeling I needed to get away from her, to live on my own. But I was stuck, almost frozen, unable to react to the internal messages. I have now learned that when I stay in a toxic situation and do not listen to my instinct, life will create a massive drama to make me listen. This was one of those times life was kicking me out of that apartment and that friendship.
Had I listened earlier, maybe I would have avoided the smear campaign she created, which, at the time, was devastating because there was no truth to it and it deeply hurt me to be thrown under the bus. It triggered memories of my childhood, the scapegoating and lies constantly churned to disguise the neglect and abuse by my parents and their spouses. I was gutted by this event. All my hard work and the hustling to find jobs were twisted around and worse, my mother got involved and piggybacked off her lie to serve her agenda. It was coming at me from all angles.
I spiraled, trying to survive in a world where you’re buried under lies, your voice silenced. Your sense of self is decimated. Those days alone in that apartment were some of the darkest days of my life. In reality, it was only the beginning of a slow unraveling of patterns in my life I could no longer ignore. I slowly packed my bags and arranged to move back in with my mother.
As I sat there alone in the apartment, I went over all the red flags this frenemy displayed, red flags I ignored. I began to see the patterns within myself and how I allowed this. I sat for hours in the dark going over the details of our lives, everything became clear, it was painful.
As I was cleaning and thinking, I found all the electric bills that were under her name. I would give her my portion and I never missed a payment. I found out that she often if not always paid it late. On the bill, in her handwriting was the math for splitting it. On my portion was the full amount of the late fee worked into my part. This is the person I was living with. When I was making loads of cash, because I knew how to hustle and I was a hard worker, something she was not, she would find ways to get me to pay half of the things I never saw the other half of.
She was supplemented by her father, so she had very little impetus to work, other than to appease him when he would threaten to try to cut her off. But I complied because I was good at making money, and I hated fussing over money. She read me like an open book and took advantage of this. She would go to Target and call me up asking if I wanted anything. Sometimes I would say no, or I would say, yes, a bottle of shampoo, or some cotton balls. She would come back, with bags full of Target stuff and a receipt with a line drawn down the middle, assuming I would pay half.
“Duuude, it’s for the apartment.”
I did not bother to stop and question her Machiavellian ways at extracting money, all the while sitting on her pathologically lazy ass, chain-smoking Marlboro reads, sucking down regular Cokes, in between bong hits.
She had a pot dealer, a guy named Big Bear. She placed the order and I would pay half. Only later, when I began to get tired and wise to her scavenging ways, I found out that she would skim off the top of our stash, and smoke most of it.
She always had an excuse to want more, to take more, and expect more. I stopped helping her get gigs and jobs (something I was very good at doing) because she was unreliable and I began to notice the same sabotaging, divide-and-conquer tactics she would do with co-workers. I began to pull away, I began to shut her out.
Once I got wise and began to resent her ways, I was of no use to her. When I no longer forked over my hard-earned cash unquestioningly (my fault for sure) she began her campaign to find another sucker to supplement her laziness, get up a 1 pm, drink coke, and smoke pot all day life. She lied prolifically to her family about the jobs “we” would get, and how hard she “worked” for her cut of the gigs.
I was breaking down, I needed a rest, and I was working very hard. Scoring temporary gigs bartending, making a load of cash, then taking a break. I would go to the beach and do nothing, trying to figure out my life, feeling a massive swell of something trying to break through. I was tired of striving and doing, and just wanted to, be. I began to unravel the unhealthy patterns and recognize the toxic people I had in my life.
I needed to figure out what was breaking through. The people that manipulated me could feel this and the campaigns got stronger, meaner, and more vicious. The more I fell, the more they kicked me down. My breakdown of sorts gave their smears grit. I was no longer compliant and sympathetic to their constant “struggles” and self-induced crisis. I needed to figure my life out. And when this happens, when a sociopath or narcissist gets wind that you are getting wise, they amp up their game. My mother’s agenda and my frenemy’s agenda fed off each-others.
One time, a friend of mine who met her briefly, looked at me with what I felt was disgust, I am not sure if it was me, or the situation. But he said these words,
“You know she is not your friend, right?”
Red flags. I knew, but I was just too broken, tired, and used up to fight. I had enough of her manipulating, sabotaging ways. She not only took advantage of me financially, but she also sabotaged possible relationships, gossiped ferociously behind my back and projected things she had done to me, and reversed the narrative, saying I did them to her. Just like my mother.
Repetition compulsion.
Another time, I found a gig with a portrait artist as his model. I got her a gig as his camera girl. He pulled me aside one day and said,
“Get rid of her, she is a vampire.”
More red flags. Total strangers could see it, with absolute clarity. You don’t want to believe someone who invests so much time pretending to love you, claiming they are your best friend, is a parasitic, emotional vampire. I was not the only victim. She treated everyone in her life this way. Living with her exposed her patterns.
Breakdown. Breakthrough.
I was breaking away and breaking apart. I was alone in an empty apartment I loved, collapsed under the weight of lies and smears, constantly churned out by those pretending to love me. I felt alone and tired. Something cracked in my soul, and the only good I could salvage from those days was that I saw my mother and my frenemy for what they were. I knew, and no matter how desperate times got for me in the aftermath, I saw them.
It was a long road to extricating myself completely from these parasitic relationships. And I will tell my story to help others trapped in toxic relationships, sucking them dry of money, self-respect, and their portion of the weed.
The thing is, now, years later, I am angry at myself. I am baffled at how I allowed myself to ignore the many, many, red flags. Blaring, waving, massive banners slapping me in the face. Looking back, it was like I was paralyzed. I had recreated the same dysfunctional dynamic within my family of origin, with her. She not only used me for money, but she also used me to project the worst of herself, to unload her shame, guilt, and self-loathing, just like my mother, her mother, her stepmother, and my stepmother.
Repetition compulsion.
Quick story. Even after the apartment gate, I would occasionally see her. She called me one day to tell me she was pregnant. By a married man. Anyway, pregnant frenemy continued to smoke reds and pot and cut back her Coke drinking to only one, in the morning.
So, long story short, she now “works” for her dad, having been fired from her other job for failing her drug test. Here’s my favorite part. She convinces her dad to retrofit the whole office with a special air filter of sorts, because almost everyone that worked there smoked, and she was pretending she stopped smoking. She staged a non-smoking ruse, complete with fake annoyance when someone smoked around her.
One day, I go to meet her at her office, we make small talk with her family and off we go. No less than ¼ mile down the road she whips out a cigarette and inhales for her life. At this point I am sure most people are wondering, but why are you still friends with her?!
Frenemy has no, and I mean no integrity. None. And I know this.
Wait, it gets better.
So, the frenemy has a massive baby shower arranged by her stepmother. Later, at her house, as she is unpacking all the crap she received, her stepmom finds her pack of cigarettes laying around. She goes ballistic, and not for health reasons. Because she knows it is all shit; her bitching and moaning about everyone smoking around her, the multiple baby showers she insisted on having to get more swag (did I mention she was a hoarder/shopaholic?). Stepmom knows.
Stepmom looks at me, she is red, raging, stomping mad. She says,
Is she smoking???
I look at frenemy. Mind you, we are thirty now, grown. She looks at me with bugs eyes and I said,
No.
Why?!! Why would I show any loyalty to this weasel when she had thrown me under the bus multiple times when she aligned herself with my sociopath of a mother, who sabotaged and gas-lit our whole “friendship?! It was a strange, co-dependent sort of relationship and I was still easily guilted into seeing her.
Repetition compulsion.
I began to see her less and less. Besides, she had another minion she had recruited, trying to play us off each other. She would do what my mother did between us siblings, triangulate, manufacture jealousy, divide and conquer. But, I still hung around. Even if it was brief and sporadic. I still had not cut complete contact.
I was exhausted. Of her, of my family, of myself, by the hypervigilance and sense of dread, I carried. All. The. Time. There is a line in Tom Petty’s song, Last dance with Maryjane, that resonated with where I was, emotionally, at that time in my life.
“Tired of screwing up, tired of going down, tired of myself, tired of this town..”
I can see now that the exhaustion was not just trying to come to terms with the past thirty-plus years of familial chaos, trauma, and emotional and psychological abuse. I was also dealing with it in my present, everyday life, in my adorable apartment, three miles from the beach. The apartment was thick with a congealed layer of pot smoke and gaslighting. I was living with a vampire that was sucking my blood, my money, and my self-worth.
And I allowed it.
Once I stopped forking over cash for her stupid knick-knacks and junk food groceries I never ate, I became useless and therefore, the smears were fair game. I fell under the weight of the toxic fog of a faux friendship. She would call my mother, they would swap stories, and share gossip and when I got home, she would throw it back in my face. She had an ally in my mother that co-signed her smear campaigns. It was a punch in the gut. Over and over.
Repetition compulsion.
I struggle now, with that memory of myself. How I allowed myself to be treated in such a way. But this was how it was in my family. This was how I was raised, with no reliable, safe adult to protect me or my siblings, who genuinely loved us. On the contrary, I was treated like I did not deserve anything. I was told straight out, you deserve nothing! Out of my mother’s mouth, in her French-accented English, it sounded more like, “Nuh-SING! You DEE-ZEH-ERV NUH-SING!”
The words were spewed out at me with such voracity and rage, seared through me like when you open a hot oven and stick your face too close. It singes your eyes and physically pushes you back. I was raised to believe I deserved to be treated so maliciously, I deserved to be manipulated out of money, and I deserved to have a fresh, new relationship sabotaged by gossip. I deserved to be denied resources and support, kindness, and compassion.
“NUH-SING!”
I have researched emotional abuse, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, family systems, Cluster B disorders, and C-PTSD. I know the abuse in my family is generational. I recognized the patterns and the systems that created and supported them. I lived in a family where it was rampant, it was a system that married into other similar systems.
I chose friends with the same pathologies. I was the other part of the symbiotic, parasitic dance. I struggle years after legitimately cutting contact and estranging myself, with how I was frozen in place. All the times I could have freed myself. The immobility, the fear, the lack of self-worth.
The crazy thing is, I naturally feel like a person with healthy self-esteem. I don’t feel I deserve “Nuh-SING!!” On the contrary, I feel I deserve love and respect. I was born smiling apparently and woke up smiling.
The saddest part for me to swallow, all these years later and in deep recovery mode, is that my natural self-worth and joy were covered up with the sticky residue of self-loathing and pathological dysfunction that was and remains embedded in my family of origin. I found more of this in my early “friend-ships”. I was a threat because I knew my worth. I feel like my default nature is one of self-worth and optimism and this was systematically dismantled by those threatened by it, like my mother, my frenemy, step-parents, co-workers, and teachers. Until I figured out these patterns, until I looked at my life and my family for what it was, I would keep interacting with toxic, dysfunctional people. It was a pattern. I was surrounded.
Another phrase I heard very often growing up, by both my parents and my stepparents was,
who do you think you are?!
Well, I was someone that was going to break free, someone that was not a bottomless well of self-loathing. This threatened their psyche’s survival. Why did I deserve to make it if they did not? I needed to suffer as they did. To them, there is no way I was going feel life, live life, to be happy. It took me years to unravel the patterns within myself that attracted such parasitic relationships.
Healing is not easy, it takes time. It happens in fits and starts. It is not linear, it is more like a spiral, passing by familiar territory on the way up. I eventually estranged myself from my mother and lots of other people. I shed layers and layers of toxic relationships, coping mechanisms, and the deceiving voice of the inner critic. My mother, like my frenemy, is incapable of healthy relationships. They must abuse, it is a compulsion, and their brain is wired to extract emotional supply for their ego’s survival. It makes them feel good to destroy. Annihilate. This is the word that comes to mind when I think of my mother.
The last conversation I had with my frenemy was 8 years ago. She contacted me to let me know she had spoken with my mother, who had let her know I was moving overseas. When you understand how these people work, the fact that she let slip that she contacted my mother was intentional, she knew this would rattle me, or, rather, it would have rattled me in the past.
I know these ambiently manipulating revelations are tactical. She made small talk, trying to get me to engage. She said my mom asked why we were not in contact and she told my mom that we decided to take a “break” from our friendship. More lies. I corrected her and told her in fact that I had cut her out, and that she knows full well we never had a conversation where we decided to take a break. I did not let her sneaky lies go by, she was gaslighting me and I was having none of it.
In the past, when I was gaslighted, I would not react because I was trying to figure out what was happening, but now, nothing gets past me. It is a superpower developed from years of emotional abuse. It is the silver lining on the other side of healing.
Anyway, frenemy dared to mention she wanted to visit, to reconnect because she “loved” me and “missed” me. She even had the nerve to show me (we were on skype) the travel books she bought for the country I was moving to. In translation, she wanted a free place to stay when I moved overseas. Ever the opportunist, I knew her sneaky ways. I was over it and her. I told her that I did not think it was a good idea. I remained controlled and matter of fact, as my healing journey had calmed the latent rage I felt for years after coming out of the fog.
If I would have responded with anger, she would have fed off it, knowing she still “had” me. But it was not the case. Something clicked, and I felt empowered. I just wanted her gone, but I did want to say my peace, even knowing it did not matter when you deal with narcissists. I wanted to let her know that I knew. It was pointless to call me up with all her bullshit, and her calling my mom, and how she loved me and blah, blah, blah. It has been widely touted that one does not confront a narcissist, but she called me and I did not care how she reacted. She said that she always considered me her best friend. I stopped her and replied,
“Duuude, you were never, ever my friend.”
I hung up the phone. I felt relief. Years of me sucking up my voice, the confusion of the mixed messages, the manipulation, it had created a terrible rumination loop where I would “say” all the things that were caught in my throat. I had no relief from years and years of this. One small conversation provided a strange sort of relief. It was not a big, dramatic confrontation. It was what I wished I would have said years ago, locked in a dysfunctional dance, trapped in fear and confusion.
That was that. No more frenemy. I am sure she still contacts my mother, they are very similar. Plus, it provides them with the mutual co-signing of their bullshit, as I know they need constant reassurance of their alternate realities. I am the one who abandoned them, what a good friend/mother they were, yadda, yadda…
Going my own way…
I am estranged from my mother and most of my family. It is a system of dysfunction and abuse that goes back generations. Years of trauma and abuse, unaddressed and passed on to the next generation. Call me the black sheep or the whistleblower, either way, I broke away. It is not easy, as there is an enormous stigma associated with estranging yourself from family, particularly cutting contact with your mother.
What woke me up? I can’t pinpoint where or what, but I know I have always felt different from my family, that I was sensitive to the pain and patterns of abuse normalized by others. When I was told “you don’t deserve this” and “who do you think you are”, I knew this was mean and horrible and not true.
I was a small kid surrounded by scary, angry, hurtful adults who needed to make me feel awful and undeserving to survive their day. I internalized these messages and attracted people that would abuse me and then create a narrative that I deserved to be treated this way. And it was compounded by their tactic of mining my life for details that they would spin, using my humanity and sensitivities against me. I also think there was loneliness there too. In my family, surrounded by people, I was achingly lonely.
Shame, fear, and guilt were the smokescreen to make sure I did not remember my worth, and that I did not question their need to extract supply from me, every day. It was only when I distanced myself and cut out completely these very abusive dynamics that I was able to sift through the years and mourn, rage and thrash, grieve and accept. I took my healing seriously because the damage was serious, not just to me, but to our whole family system. I needed space and time to see this, to get a perspective. I shed layers and layers. I awoke to myself, to the peace and contentment I was denied because I was told I did not deserve it. Under layers of projections, I was able to reclaim myself.
Because I do deserve it. And I do know who I am.
