Grief, Interrupted. Part Two
* Same trigger warning from part one applies. However, the following may be disturbing for mothers of sons traumantically [sic] bonded to a female narcissist, or the female narcissists out there raiding nests in need of some monster love. (If you don’t know what I mean by “monster love”, please see the trigger warning for part one.)
“But life isn’t hard to manage when you’ve nothing to lose.”
~ Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
(Gray) Rock, Paper, Scissors
If you had told me the abyss of peace I was staring into was really a barefooted gift horse, I would never have looked in its mouth.
But I did.
Barefoot and trauma-rock-free for the first time in decades, I stepped off the side of my bed and descended the stairs. I was on my way outside to stand barefoot on the grass. Also, for the first time in decades of being unable to mentally and physically tolerate being barefoot, was the last rock I put down. The peace that met me where I was, in a state between waking consciousness and expanded consciousness, compelled me to ground myself to that moment to mark the beginning of a new journey. One that was free of shame, anger, despair, and resentment going forward.
Free of captivity to experience a lifejoy I’d been observing from the outside. With all of it’s imperfect perfections. Free of having never again to feel as though I have to heavily guard it, protect it from harm or an imaginary destructive force. Free, at last, to let people get a little closer and get a little closer to them. I could forgive the minor faux pas and atone for my survival mode rigidity. I could finally dismantle my DMZ because the war was over, and it was peacetime.
And I would begin with my son’s girlfriend. Why? Because she was the outsider, I hadn’t let in. There were very good reasons, but I’d made a pact with myself and this newfound peace that I would start fresh with everyone. Including, if especially, her. My short list of why I’d returned to therapy and the hours of listening to healing meditation and self-hypnosis was just cut in half.
Or so I thought. And it wasn’t because I was too late nor without deep self-reflection about my own shortcomings, of which I have as many as anyone else—even accounting for how inexperienced we both were in our respective roles and how stressful it must be for a young couple living with an old couple. Special considerations were made for her apparent mental health issues, while none were made for my own. A great deal of effort to embrace her as part of our family had been extended to her, especially by me, for her behavior and offenses I would’ve never tolerated if not for the love of my son.
So light was I on my bare feet that I didn’t feel the steps until I reached the landing. It was every bit the doozy warned about! I thought it might’ve been a phantom rock. The one that had conditioned me to fear the next step. It wasn’t. It was my instinct. I disregarded the warning and announced to my son that my father, his grandfather, was dead. He offered his sincere condolences. By contrast, she didn’t even look up from her phone or say anything. This same ignorance when our family dog, Lucky, passed away a few months earlier. The same ignorance when my husband’s mother passed away. The same ignorance when my cat would cry to come downstairs after being stuck upstairs all day because of her dogs. The same ignorance, whether a celebration or tragedy. Unless, of course, it was to celebrate or console…her.
I quietly drew a breath and willed myself to let it go. Let it slide. Defaulting back to being the gray rock I’d been conditioned — classically and operantly — to be for at least the last year or so. This was how I endured being in my own home with her all day, every day until my husband and son returned from work. In their presence, she was pleasant and kind toward me. So, it seemed out of character with my son sitting there.
It wasn’t a phantom rock. It was something else. I didn’t know what exactly it was because I was on a mission to get a cup of coffee, go out on the front porch, and ground myself.
At this point, I didn’t know if she knew we’d discovered the listening devices. Part of me was hoping they weren’t on or working, anyway, because when I found them I verbally threatened into them that I would charge her with felony eavesdropping if she didn’t get out and end her relationship with our son. I just assumed, wrongly, since she didn’t leave, etc., etc., maybe that was a sign guiding me to forgive that. Especially that. It wouldn’t be easy and would have to be addressed, but I reasoned with myself, that if I could forgive such an egregious violation of privacy, I could let it all go.
“Letting go” is the recurring mantra in all the hypnotherapy sessions that I’d been listening to, becoming a softer, gentler version of my former survival-mode mantra of “Let go or be dragged.”
Unfortunately, I did let go and still got dragged through the glass of my broken heart.
Raiders of Nests
Beware, the Raiders of Nests.
In the world of narcissism, this is a lesser-known and hybrid form of triangulation because of stereotypes and tropes exclusively narrated by predators. It’s lesser known, not because it doesn’t happen. Instead, it leaves the loving, healthy mother-son relationship absolutely devastated. Many mothers become too devastated to describe it, shamed into silence by the false narrative from only one birds eye view — the predators. Not me. It took a fallout year while grieving multiple losses, compounded by a brutal nest raiding, but I owe it to those who can’t write about it. About this tactical maneuver of capturing the son to feed upon while the mother is helpless to stop it is an endless narcissistic supply.
Let me explain.
Had my father not died the week after discovering my therapy sessions were being eavesdropped, I might’ve continued to tolerate her bullshit until it killed me. Every day since her mask slipped was endured because I would remind myself, whether in my head or under my breath, “He’s mine to lose.” She knew this because it was a regular topic during therapy sessions. Those coping strategies I mentioned as to why I returned to therapy after enjoying over two decades, well, weren’t only for me to cope with her abusing me in my son’s absence. They were to cope, strategically, with her abuse of him!
It was like threading a needle in the dark, beaten and bloodied, trembling for survival.
Great concern for him led to having to seek professional advice on how to either turn her around, help him reach his own conclusions, or cope with witnessing — in real time — the eventual loss of a fine young man. One so loving and loved by many, kind and generous, but wholly unaware and unprepared for a life of narcissistic abuse and neglect. He was a grown man, and he was in love with a crafty, pretty monster. His closest childhood friends saw it and eventually thinned out until they stopped coming by or inviting them. He slowly became less and less of whom we and his friends knew. The good-natured son we’d lovingly nurtured was slowly, insidiously disappearing before our eyes being denatured from within. So heartbreaking to witness, helplessly, we eventually limited our exposure to them in our own home, relishing alarmingly rare moments when he could join us on the porch for a cup of coffee without her. We knew this clingy isolation tactic was unhealthy, but we didn’t realize how high-tech it was with the addition of listening devices. Nor how the next level would become a weapon to dysregulate his instincts by deception.
He was out of his league. Not in that dating-up way, either.
In his defense, my son had never experienced this dark “next level.” We were a low-drama family, save for the occasional nonsense of outside forces, which we’d weather as a family toward a restored harmony. This was also his first committed relationship. So, he didn’t know what she was capable of and had no reference to go by. And this type is so insidious, even I missed it at first blush until it was too late. It was too late, being that he was already in love. In very short order, she’d already enmeshed him in her tales of woe, bonded him in her trauma cords, and unloved him just enough to question our love and our warnings to let this one go. We offered a gentle exit strategy, taking into consideration her mental issues and the impact a first breakup would have on him.
We were too late. He was in deep, dark, murky, uncharted waters.
Drowning.
Seeing how hooked he was, we settled on the hope he might need time to see it for himself. We tried to love her by being for her what we are for him: loving parents, offering her sanctuary from a harsh world to turn her around to the way we as a family were as opposed to the one she claimed she needed to escape. Looking back, we now question if she was escaping her abusive family or if they, like us, also devalued and discarded in favor of a fresh supply. Despite our invitations during the love-bombing, breadcrumbing, and future faking stages of her conditioning, we’ve never met her family. She made sure there was no opportunity to compare notes against her narrative.
(That invitation is still open, by the way. Anytime. I’ll put the kettle on.)
In conclusion of this section, we agreed to be a refuge with rules we thought were very simple. But I would quickly learn that, like pain, simplicity is also relative. Consequently, to the narcissist, rules, and boundaries are an existential threat to their disorder. We asked only that they work and put their money away for a home of their own and help us with household chores or projects in lieu of rent, utilities, food, etc. Our son had always helped us willingly, and we were financially comfortable enough to carry them through. Despite our misgivings about her and this relationship, we hoped and prayed for the best possible outcome. Either she would heal, and they would flourish, or the relationship would end. I mistakenly thought the issue that had been violated once before that caused the tension prior was understood: respect for one another and, especially, privacy. Six months into their relationship, while he was sleeping, she read text messages on his phone from a childhood female friend wishing him luck the night before he was to begin police academy.
That’s when I knew. She was told to leave. He remained here while in the academy. He moved out after graduation and six months later, returned looking wholly drained and exhausted of his lifejoy with a back injury, dangerously thin and gaunt, penniless and credit maxed out, his belongings in trash bags with hers in designer luggage. Trauma bonded to her; he asked us to take them in because her family put her out. Again. She led him to believe if they became homeless, his beloved dog would have to be put down. We agreed to start fresh, but a fresh start to ordinary people is different from a narcissist starting a fresh supply.
Forked Tongues & God’s Better Angels
We allowed her to stay only for our son's sake, whom we would occasionally take aside to gently reason with and encourage him to reconsider his commitment to this girl. We admired his willingness to love someone with mental health issues, but he was becoming increasingly less objective as we were becoming increasingly alarmed. His reassurances he could handle this or address our concerns eventually gave way to his endorsement of her excuses until full-blown defense of her. She couldn’t keep a job for more than a few weeks and had nowhere else to go, having alienated her family and no friends. There was talk of her applying for disability, which we suggested to him would provide for her, but it was denied because parasitic narcissism isn’t a disability. It’s a lifestyle that disables everyone they depend upon to exist.
Skeleton Keys
I was more keen on the tell-tale danger signs of narcissistic abuse than my husband. Even appealing to our son through his willingness to take such advice from his father was failing. And, because we allowed it to continue despite our better judgment, we felt responsible for our supportive role. I’d made the mistake of not realizing that each time I would talk with my son about her, I was building both a wall between us and a triangulation trap for her.
However, I stopped doing this once an epiphany came to me in a dream about an actual triangle and a small celestial figure handing me a skeleton key while listening to “Astral Travel Meditation.” I realize that not everyone is into hypnosis or meditation. I get it. I’ll write more under a separate cover about how the Universe stepped in. How God’s better angels come to us in forms He knows we will recognize, and how He met me where I was—praying harder than I’ve ever prayed in my life for how to save my son from a monster while grieving the death of my own monster, being subjugated by his monster. I was absolutely down on my knees, as any other mother would be. Where I was was better than the bottom of a bottle — green or amber — hospitalized for a nervous breakdown or dead. Scaling that last option was a genuine possibility, and these sessions helped me. Saved me. So I mention them here to galvanize the desperation of what I’m sharing but because the distance of a year I enjoy might be another mother’s present moment. These Nest Raiders see the mother of the object of their desire, our sons, as a threat not much different from a rival ex-girlfriend/wife. They want us out of their way.
Even if that means us dying. And if you think the Nest Raider type will comfort and soothe the grieving son, you don’t know both what these monsters are truly capable of and the haunting fear of a mother who does know. When that day comes, it will crush a man from the inside out, and the first woman to love them won’t be around to fix them because the “other” woman who unloved him will bask in his sorrow.
(I hope that clarifies what these crafty, pretty monsters are capable of and puts a spotlight on their endgame.)
Only four months before my father died, I was listening where God met me, as if He knew (wink) where I was with “741Hz” and lifted the lifelong struggle with suicidal ideation that I spoke of in part one and wrote about that she also read, so she knew I had a fragile spot. (I will republish.) To further prove this point, to cope with all that was collapsing around us, I’d been listening to a steady playlist shuffle of “Unconditional Love”, “528Hz”, and “Mindfulness for Gratitude” since this family crisis hit. Trying to find something I might’ve missed, to stay true to my mission of “letting go” just as I’d done before my own monster died. I listened to Astral Travel Meditation entirely by fluke! But it changed the trajectory by altering my role as a participant to an observer with the key.
As if on cue, immediately following this dream, weeks into my struggle to let go of the anger/despair stage that was oddly in neutral, she whined to my son that I looked at her the wrong way and reinforced that ol’reliable staple narrative, “You’re Mom doesn’t like me!” He asked me about this, and I didn’t know what look he was referring to because I didn’t wear a mask, unlike her, and things were pretty intense. I told him I was struggling but working through it and not to take any of it personally. That I loved him — and her. To just let this pass and we would figure out the rest once it did because this was not the stage to start any drama. In this state, I told him, I simply couldn’t juggle another ball of fire while standing in a puddle of gasoline.
I didn’t like her. But not for lack of trying. I did love her, though. In spite of herself, I loved her and prayed for her to turn herself around or leave. I’ll go one further: she was harder to love as she was and not who I needed her to be for my son than my father ever was for me to love.
Quite frankly, by this point, I didn’t have the energy to like her or not. The undertow of grief and trying to put off confronting her about the surveillance issue until after I could get beyond the anger/despair stage was a lot to tread with any grace. I’m sure she “overheard” some pretty harsh things said about her behavior during my teletherapy sessions or private conversations. She’d also heard how I struggled to love her or, at the very least, find a way to appreciate her place in my son’s life beyond my fears for his well-being. But those conversations weren’t what she was listening for. Many things drive eavesdropping, but for the narcissist, it’s a scavenger hunt for their confirmation bias. She was doing and saying things to intentionally set me off based on privately expressed stressors, to keep me exhausted and irritable, and to cause me to complain to my son so as to play the victim by denying my accusations, creating drama, and fortifying her stock-narrative. The same polarizing stock narrative she’s used before to pit mother and son in her previous relationships or to latch onto a new host by claiming the same “mistreatment” by her own mother.
Grieving or otherwise, these things will get you not liked by most people and are not exclusive to the mothers of sons in love with a crafty pretty monster.
Make a Wish, But Don’t Tell Anyone
When my son reached out to me, I didn’t deny it or offer any interest in continuing to tolerate her nonsense. This wasn’t my first rodeo with a narcissist. It was his. But it was the first time on a bull of this breed for us both. Their standard for imposing themselves into other’s life events such as celebrations is not limited to birthdays, weddings, promotions, and they’ll always be sicker than you, etc., etc., but also interrupt another’s grieving. I appealed to him, but she’d managed to wear him down, deprived him of sleep, Oscar-level acting the victim. His eyes would glaze over, and he would simply shut down. I was desperately trying to keep from a total mental collapse by now, knowing that if I went down, he would be lost to her, and she wasn’t going to comfort him. It was really quite remarkable to endure witnessing this never-before-experienced situation as the mother of a son in the grips of a narcissistic coup.
After two and a half years of dealing with her nonsense and having my own nonsense to deal with, I’d had enough. And no one seemed to be calling for someone to stop the fight. (An occupational hazard of being a warhorse.) Sadly, I thought that putting my foot down on her behavior during a time when most normal people back off out of respect the way even a stranger would douse the fire. Nope. I miscalculated that my son would see what she really was, and he would find the courage to end his relationship, seeing how willfully destructive she was. But by then, she’d bore into him more profoundly than I or his father could reach.
We called a “family meeting”. My husband wanted to put them out, but I appealed to him that it would only hurt our son, which is what she wanted us to do. We seriously considered filing a police report and charging her for bugging the house, especially recording my teletherapy sessions., but also for domestic abuse as I’m physically disabled and diagnosed as vulnerable. Both my husband and therapist were on board, but I said that would only humiliate our son since he was in the hiring process at our local police department. So, we settled on calling a “family meeting” to confront the issue and offer them a chance to recognize the seriousness of the violation, get her professional help with her mental issues, and stop abusing him directly or by proxy through me via her triangulation tactics.
We pounded out on paper an extended “soft eviction” from the nest, now in tatters, and would ask them to sign. We love them and their dogs. And I didn’t want to let a teaching moment go the way of “family is family for God’s sake” the way it went for me. We thought they were both so young and still immature. This economy favors no one less than a young, immature couple. We settled on a year to help them save their money and find a place of their own. Since the original agreement of help with household chores and projects wasn’t getting done, anyway, we were going to ask for “rent” that we would secretly match in a savings account to give back at the end of the year. She would have to seek mental health services, which we would offer to pay for since she was unemployed and in dire need. New boundaries would be set and abided. If we could fix where she was broken and they had another year to mature, we could part on much better terms, none the richer but no worse for the wear.
Well, that’s not how it worked out. Not even close! I’ve since come to the conclusion that there’s a difference between the immediate family narcissist and the interlopers. The former will cut you deeper, but the latter will watch and let you bleed out quicker.
*I’m going to divide this into three parts because if I need a break from writing it, I’m sure you need a break from reading it. Thank you for your patience and benevolence. The next part gets worse (I know!) before it gets better. I promise to continue my hallmark of concluding journeys with a victory and links to resources that proved invaluable to healing from all you’ve read about so far to put into practice or share with a loved one. Below my signature is a “good faith” excerpt of part three. As I said in part two, it’s been quite a year, and I just need a minute. And, Grammarly said in a post-editing pop-up, I deserved a break. See that? Even AI needs a minute from this hot mess! ;) ~MJL
Excerpt from Grief, Interrupted. Part Three
Trinity Test
We’d made it very clear that the family meeting was mandatory, and despite resistance, we left it at, “We’ll see you both at 5 pm. Bring yourselves and a plan to reconcile.” We sat on the porch and waited. We gathered our notes, the reconciliation contract, and pens, made a charcuterie board, chilled the wine, and waited.
By 8 pm, we’d sat on our thumbs longer than we would have for anyone else in the world. Then, they pulled up. We took a deep breath to reset to 5 pm. Only our son exited the car while she remained. We asked him to join us for the meeting and to remind her it was mandatory or it ended here.
Part III: https://medium.com/@mjaneletty/grief-interrupted-part-iii-78bd3e73dc2c
