I had this memory surface today of being at dinner with my mom and my siblings. That night, we were having dinner and I invited my friend to join. She was flakey by nature and not the most accountable when it came to time, so of course halfway through the meal she told us she wasn’t coming. It felt normal then, but I remember how we just waited on her and that’s it. The focus of our dinner was waiting on her. And then when she cancelled, the whole focus was still on her and her absence. That’s how my mother taught me to be- always focus on other people. We didn’t talk except for my mother asking “when is she coming?” we didn’t order. And when we finally did, it was, “why isn’t she coming?”
Getting to this point in my life and through my own healing process, it’s remarkable to look at it from a distant lens where I realize we had no genuine Homelife. It would seem normal for me now, for a friend who was maybe joining for dinner to fade into the background and for the family to be talking and engaged with one another. And for the absence to just be an annoyance, if that. I would imagine that it wouldn’t even matter as a detail. But back then, we had together a very real emptiness.
The reason for this comes down to not just because of narcissism, but because of martyrdom. In my mother’s mind, a good virtuous woman (and these ideas were from her very traditional Chinese upbringing) was one who sacrificed her own needs for those of others especially her husband. That was her duty. As a young child I believe she wasn’t properly cared for at a young age, and to gain any sort of identity or value in the home she took on the burden of the family always caretaking and controlling her younger siblings. This created a very fragile ego in her that was fear based. She needed to always be in control or else the fear would take over.
With this lack of interior sense of self and no healing work, she of course attracted my father who was an overt narcissist with a strong match to hers. Where she was covert, he was overt, so they could create a codependent dynamic unconsciously where both of them reaffirmed certain insecurities, shame, and also reinforced a sense of ego-ic value. When these counterparts meet, there’s usually a huge emptiness in both of them that need to be filled in various ways. The failure to look at and address this emptiness then becomes projected out onto each other and onto other family members, namely the person who then becomes designated as the family scapegoat. I was that person who received the backlash of their unconscious desire to not actually be parents (but their fragile egos needed to abide by cultural and familial norms to be accepted) because they weren’t ready and were too immature. Also, the whole family structure revolves around this emptiness and creating an external image that functions as smoke and mirrors to gain other people’s envy, so they can somehow fill this emptiness with that.
As a child who was born into this and abused narcissistically, I also learned to adopt that emptiness. In fact, my whole identity since I was a child was based around that. Because no one could mirror my needs, my emotions, at a young age, or validate my existence in necessary formative stages, I learned to overcompensate by directing all my focus onto them just like they wanted. With narcissistic and self absorbed people, they want the focus to be on them- I’ll post a video discussing this soon. If these are your parents, they form your basis of value and also your orientation. Because my sense of self was not formed, it was formed in relationship to other people’s needs and to this curation of approved of characteristics. My parents were achievement based, so that achievement became the foundation of worth in my household especially since my real human sense of worth and value were diminished and taken from me when I was little through words and abuse.
As I grew older, I noticed that for certain friendships where I had to be performative, there was a cut off point. One day I couldn’t keep up with the friendship anymore as it entered into more intimacy because that intimacy was not one I had with myself. The whole crux of that emptiness is based on avoiding oneself and so situations that required more openness, vulnerability and intimacy touched on that feeling of emptiness within that was so painful for me to feel. But looking back, my life did revolve around other people. It was always waiting for other people. Anticipating other people’s needs. Giving, doing. It was like I did not exist when other people were not in my proximity, nor needed me. Alone, I still defaulted to my trauma behaviors of dissociating, so I wasn’t home even when I was home alone. I noticed that I always liked to put the attention on the other person so I didn’t have to share much about myself, but this also led to conflicting feelings where I felt like I wasn’t heard, I wasn’t seen, yet it felt more comfortable for others to dominate the conversation because then I didn’t have to be vulnerable and I didn’t have to disclose that underneath it all, there was nothingness.
The long healing journey has been one of reclaiming my authenticity. Underneath all the things I learned I needed to do for love (which was fundamentally empty because it was conditional) and approval and attention was the core part of me that learned it was not okay. I stuffed into my shadow normal things that humans have: their own wants, needs, desires and a healthy level of selfishness. Part of the narcissistic tactic is to gaslight their victim into thinking that any needs they have are selfish. Any time that is “available” that isn’t given is selfish. Anything that can be given and done when someone has the capacity to even sans desire should be done. This is also where the martyrdom comes in, because I watched my mother martyr herself over and over for everyone, to feed her codependency and her need to be validated in being a “good woman”, and also to be a functioning co-creator in a marriage with an overt narcissist.
At the beginning stages of healing I didn’t know tangibly what “putting myself first” even meant. I spent a lot of time alone, self-isolating, so I thought that was enough. But it wasn’t, because I was still actively dissociating and playing into the image of what I thought I should be. I thought that was my authentic self, but my authentic self was hiding without any permission to express herself truthfully. For those of us who are more attuned to our higher chakras and have abuses like the ones I’ve just written about, the focus is on the lower chakras and healing those aspects of us that didn’t form in early development, the healthy ego-self, boundaries and the like. I was punished for having boundaries because those didn’t serve my caretakers. I thought I was putting myself first when I was putting myself last because I still did receive a certain level of validation that my ego needed to know that I existed. My ego had prioritized validation because at the root of it all I just needed to know that I was alive, that I had a purpose because it wasn’t reflected to me at all as a child.
I still have programmed responses and I feel them very strongly. These override my own instincts, but it’s been a long long time that I was conditioned to people please, to put my needs last, to self-abandon at every turn. Now, I take a pause and I really check in with myself. Do I want to do this? Do I even want this person in my life? I used to be afraid of people entering my life because in my mind it felt like they wanted something from me and I would then need to take care of them, did I want an added responsibility? My idea of friendships and relationships was so skewed to me needing to give, and not receiving anything in return which mirrored, emotionally, how I was received at home. This created the unfortunate trauma pattern of attracting those very people I was afraid of, because not only was this energetic, an imprint, but also because they fulfilled an expectation cognitively and therefore my nervous system was habituated to that feeling of familiarity.
I remember when I was maybe 7 or 8, I had a friend Lisa who would come over sometimes. We were out playing in the backyard, and we were muddy. Her dad came to pick her up and Lisa ran across the new Persian rugs that my parents just bought. My dad told me that friends are my responsibility and then punished me for the rest of the afternoon when I didn’t do anything. I remember crying, because at that moment he broke my spirit and programmed me to think that all things that my friends do becomes my responsibility and that I don’t have a separate identity outside of that. I noticed that that made my mental boundaries very penetrable, like I had no ability to fully think for myself- I adopted the thinking patterns of those around me, as well as their attitudes and beliefs, which happens so unconsciously for empaths who haven’t yet healed.
I also noticed that I had a tendency to take things to heart when someone didn’t respond to me, or didn’t consider me, because it put me in touch with the feeling of emptiness internally, of “I do not exist”. There was this big part in my identity that was like a black hole because I literally did not have the permission to explore it like a child normally does. And so, this healing journey is one of coming back home and figuring out what really does fulfill me in a way that is true, and not one that is performative. It’s one that I really allow myself to savor and to have, and doesn’t require me to change my plans or alter my space to make someone else feel comfortable when I don’t even want to share the experience. And that, when I’m home, and I feel fulfilled on my own, means that I look at others as additives to my life, not because they help me reaffirm my identity in the roles I was assigned, as caretaker or healer or giver, but because we can lift each other higher.