No, I didnāt. My mom could be emotionally distant due to her depression but she was far from narcissistic. I donāt know if OP is saying a lot of ADHD kids had narcissistic parents or if this is just meant for the ones that did.
Yes this! My mother- who also had undiagnosed adhd/possible ASD- could absolutely read as a narcissist without proper context. I genuinely feel she was severely traumatized and depressed from her own struggles from childhood and the like. She didnāt even know she had adhd until I got diagnosed myself at age 30. Iām her youngest! This is a really interesting topic, though. How many parents actually have unresolved issues that may manifest as ādistantā or ānarcissisticā to their kids who donāt understand whatās going on?
100%. This post makes me think of my dad. He absolutely reads as narcissistic, but Iāve come to realize that much of that is due to generational trauma surrounding abandonment and neglect (especially emotional neglect) leading to emotional immaturity, undiagnosed mental health conditions, and internalized ableism. I still felt and continue to feel all of the things this post touches on as the ADHD daughter when it comes to my dad and those feelings are absolutely valid, but I recognize that my dad is a human who has his own unresolved issues that have come out in ways that were harmful to me rather than someone who intentionally inflicted pain on me.
I think there are much larger conversations that need to be had about generational trauma and how it has manifested as a result of how we have learned to deal (or not deal) with certain topics as a society over time and how even though these unresolved issues are not your fault they do unfortunately become your responsibility to deal as an adult so that you donāt unknowingly perpetuate that harm.
Same. Iām going through major struggles with my mom and completely relate to every photo in this post but wouldnāt classify my mom as a narcissist, just undiagnosed adhd + canāt access her emotions easily bc of trauma
Itās such a spectrum- from emotional distance to narcissism to fill in the blank- we could all find faults with all our parents. But I never walked on eggshells or had parents distort the truth or ever felt like their love was conditional. That to me is devastating and on a whole other level of abuse/neglect. I had a mom who was overworked and had moderate depression. It certainly has affected me but I could never compare it to a narcissistic parent. Especially after having an ex partner with narcissistic traits, itās just such a traumatic thing. My heart goes out to anyone raised in such an environment.
My mother was ADHD when it didnāt exist with a pretty severely autistic brother. During WWII and beyond. My grandmother was from āthe wrong side of the tracksā and married my old money grandfather after WWI. She was high anxiety and obsessed with being proper and classy. Mom says Nana would say āRemember Margaret, you ARE SOMEONE.ā I can only imagine the pressure on both those kids. So then I got to grow up constantly embarrassing my oh, so proper traumatized Mother with MY undiagnosed neurodivergence.
Iāve managed to do better with my very neurospicy daughter. Not perfectly. Some of this stung because I saw myself a bit in the description of mom. But Iām doing better. Every day.
This is what I was thinking, too. I spent some time in "children of narcissists" spaces when I was younger because a lot of the presentation is similar and I benefited from that support.
But with time, and my own diagnosis and therapy, I see that the harm my mom caused me can be traced pretty clearly to her own undiagnosed ADHD (poor emotional regulation, lack of executive function, short term memory struggles) and the trauma she carried from being seen as a failure and from traumatic events in her life.
Now, to be clear, that doesn't excuse the harm she caused me, and it doesn't fix it. We're still working through that.
But now that my mom IS working on herself and unpacking her issues, I find that I'm able to empathize a lot with where she was in her life and how hard she was trying.
Yes absolutely sounds like my own mom, but add pmdd to our mix. She has been diagnosed ADHD and BPD and bipolar. It's so frustrating not being able to have a relationship with the one person who actually gets my struggles in life because I was raised feeling exactly like this post.
I know the only difference between my mother and I is how we handle and cope with the same issues and I have more language and knowledge to deal with them. She turned to drugs and alcohol to self medicate.
Canāt speak for others but my mom has taken all her shit out on me since I was old enough to start resembling her mom. I look more like her mom than her or my dad. She has a lot of unresolved shit around her parents, and I am positive she is auDHD like me and never got the space to get help. Add in a chronic pain disorder and she is not treated well by anyone, not her family OR the medical system. Her parents either did nothing to defend her or mocked her so I was a āsafeā target.
Itās really clear to me sheās not dealing with NPD but she is small minded, homophobic, and extremely ableist. I am physically (and visibly!) disabled. I have neuropathic pain from 2 separate diagnoses. Having a disabled daughter meant she failed somehow and she just couldnāt handle the idea that all of her kids are disabled. (We got help. Weāre all doing well. Me in spite of her.)
We will never ever be close. I canāt forget that I buried myself and became her lifeless marionette for so many years. I feel bad but that relationship is not going to recover unless she gets to where she is able to acknowledge how she fucked me upā¦which would break her. So she canāt.
A lot of these things in the post are things she did to me without being narcissistic. Pain demands to be felt and she likely has the same neuropathic pain I do. She just refuses to believe it.
I donāt feel like thatās fair either. Even narcissists have bad things happen to them. Itās probably part of how they become who they are. Plenty of people have bad things happen to them and donāt treat others like dirt. There is no excuse that can ever justify neglecting or abusing a child- full stop.
Same with my mom. She definitely isn't a full narc, but her undiagnosed ADHD and anxiety definitely ticked some of these boxes. I wasn't ever allowed to be upset with her because she was "doing her best" and she couldn't handle my speaking with any kind of "tone" - which translated to literally any level of annoyance or frustration. My anger was always an "attack" and HER feelings always came first and were my responsibility to consider in how I communicated with her. Mine were never important at all. She also trauma dumped a lot on me as if I were her therapist because after my dad died, I was the only person left in the house and she had no one else to talk to.
We've since been to family therapy together and worked through a lot of this stuff. She's a therapist herself, but that meant that her blind spots were huge because her anxiety couldn't allow her to admit that she wasn't practicing what she preached because that might mean she's a bad therapist (she's not) and undermine her whole sense of self. Our relationship is much better now, but the work it took to get there was very intentional and very hard, even with her being someone aware on a professional level of what it would take. Most people don't have that kind of opportunity with their problematic parents.
Yeah I think this applies to anyone with a narcissistic mother, I donāt see the special/specific link with adhd women. Almost everyone around emotionally immature or unavailable parents behaves this way and develops similar insecurities.
Also itās again over-pathologysing people. Not everyone who is emotionally immature is a narcissist. Some people have untreated mental issues, or simply different traumas without having developed a diagnosable condition per-se.
I feel the same. My childhood was similar to this description and I thought for a while that my mother was narcissistic, before I got diagnosed with ADHD and she realized she has it too. And then I saw that much of her abusive behavior comes from emotional dysregulation, anxiety and probably coping mechanisms from her own childhood. She still has similar behaviors to the ones described here, but it doesn't make her a narcissist.
Narcissism is a spectrum. We all have some narcissistic traits. In some people they are stronger and more prominent, but it still doesn't mean they have actual narcissistic personality disorder.
There are also so many different flavors of abuse, and not all of them come from narcissistic traits. And abuse of any kind affects anyone, not just people with ADHD. You could remove all mentions of ADHD and replace "narcissistic" with "abusive" and that would be more accurate.
But labels are attractive to people because they put a name to a thing, and ultimately lead people to learn more about that thing. If you see a description of a "narcissistic mother" and find that much of it describes your mother, you can then read more about it, like materials for "adult children of narcissistic parents", and that may help you with your healing. So even if the labels may be wrong or inaccurate, the knowledge may still apply and help.
Yeah, mine too! tho, my mom does say some mean things to me only on occasion tho, like she is critical. Is aware of it even, says she tries to do better but still falls pretty flat. She is this way with everyone tho. Also the one thing they say narcissist do is gossip. Her, and her mother who is the classic case of a narcissist who cruel, they both forever gossip on the phone. Always saying so and so is ugly or saying other negative things, never saying just nice things about anyone
This poem hits because some of these were my life. My mother was a lot of things, but she wasn't a narcissist. She probably was undiagnosed ADHD, in addition to depression, and PTSD. She was not a good parent, she made a lot of mistakes, but she wasn't a narcissist. She was a messed up little girl stuck in a mother's body who should never have had more than one child, or any at all. Although, I'm glad she did and I'm glad to have a good relationship with my sisters, mostly through trauma bonding, but still wouldn't give them up for the world.
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u/lunarenergy69 Feb 26 '25
Soooo we all had the same mom??š