The cultural script of “Mother knows best” is powerful—so powerful that it can override a person’s own instincts, experiences, and even evidence of harm. However, that phrase was never meant to be a universal truth. It was meant for mothers who were actually acting in good faith, with wisdom, humility, and love. When a mother is not acting in your best interest, the old saying becomes a trap rather than a comfort. The myth says that mothers are always selfless, that mothers always want what is best for their children, and that mothers are incapable of envy, resentment, or sabotage. However, real human beings—mothers included—carry unresolved trauma, insecurity, jealousy, fear of losing control, resentment toward their children’s opportunities or independence. When those wounds go unexamined, they can distort maternal behavior in ways that are deeply damaging. Narcissistic parents envy and compete with their children’s attractiveness, athletic or intellectual abilities, and other sorts of favorable attention that their children attract. Narcissistic parents make negative comparisons to put their children down. They might compare a child to a sibling, friend, cousin, or even themselves—going on about how spoiled, inferior, or lucky their child is compared to them when they were young. Such behavior stems from the same jealousy and envy that motivates competition. Sadly, many children of narcissists struggle for years or for a lifetime with shame and low self-worth. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

It is important to pay attention to signs that mother is not acting in your best interest. These patterns often show up when a mother feels threatened by her child’s growth, success, or autonomy. One sign is subtle sabotage. When your mother is always undermining your confidence, planting seeds of doubt about your decisions, and discouraging opportunities that would help you grow, your mother may be manipulating you so she can control her child with guilt, threats, and belittling. Some mothers shame their children with name-calling, criticism, undermining, blame, and withholding love. Frequently, they project onto their children their feelings of unworthiness and negative traits, such as attention-seeking or selfishness; characteristics which they disown. At the same time, they ignore, deny, and criticize their children’s feelings and needs, sometimes punishing them for expressing normal emotions, claiming they are too sensitive or weak. Parents often punish by withholding love, creating constant insecurity of self and self-esteem, which can be traumatizing and physical. One of the most painful—and least acknowledged—forms of family betrayal is when a parent aligns with their children’s enemies. This form of betrayal cuts deeper than ordinary conflict because it violates the basic expectation that a parent should protect their child, not align with people who wish them harm. This is not “normal conflict.” It is a sign of a profound role reversal in which the parent’s emotional needs override their protective instincts. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

Several psychological dynamics can push a parent into this kind of betrayal, such as envy and competition. If a parent feels threatened by their child’s independence, success, confidence, relationships, or reputation, they may gravitate toward people who confirm their negative narrative about the child. If a parent feels insecure or criticized, they may seek validation from anyone—even the child’s adversaries—because it temporarily soothes their ego. Some parents offload their own guilt, shame, or failures by projecting them onto the child. Aligning with the child’s enemies becomes a way to reinforce the projection. Like all narcissists, narcissistic parents are prone to brag about themselves, their achievements, their family, and their children. Do not expect narcissistic parents to be involved with their children’s hobbies, goals, or interests unless it is also their goal or interest. They will not take pleasure in their children’s accomplishments or attractiveness except to the extent that it reflects well upon them. If the child is becoming independent, the parent may: join forces with people who undermine the child, spread misinformation, create alliances that keep the child “in their place.” This is about control, not care. Parents who engage in this pattern often share private information with people who dislike their children. Gossip or exaggerate the child’s mistakes, encourage others to “teach the child a lesson,” validate outsiders’ hostility, participate in smear campaigns, use third parties to pressure, shame, or isolate the child. This is not concern. It is collusion. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

This kind of betrayal can create deep mistrust, hypervigilance, confusion about loyalty and safety, difficulty forming secure relationships, a sense of being unprotected in the world, and emotional shock (“How could my own parent do this?”) It is not just hurtful—it is destabilizing. Why does it feel so unthinkable? Because it violates the core expectation of parenthood. A parent should never join forces with someone who wants to harm their child. The lack of unconditional love, acceptance, and emotional connection in childhood leaves a void. Until the children of narcissists accept their narcissistic parents’ limitations and begin to love themselves, they are never free of suffering. They relive the emotional abandonment of their childhood and seek self-worth, validation, and lovability in relationships with abusive and/or emotionally unavailable partners, including drug addicts and narcissists. They may contribute to the problem by reacting as they did as a child to their parents. They continually find fault with themselves because conditional love is all they have ever known. This can lead to lifelong misery because external validation never heals internal shame and emptiness. Healing requires recovery from the codependence and shame acquired in childhood to feel entitled to love and appreciation. Narcissists deny reality and live inside a fantasy world that protects their fragile ego. They distort, renationalize, twist facts, and delude themselves to avoid anything that may chip their armor, which can be so thick that no amount of evidence or argument can get through. Their memories are often faulty, and self-deception can convince them that their altered reality is true. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

Abusers, addicts, and narcissists typically use these defense mechanisms to disown their unacceptable feelings, thoughts, or qualities and assign them to others, either mentally or verbally. The projector says, “It is not me, it is just you!” In doing so, you become the target of a narcissist’s projection: you are the one who is “selfish,” “weak,” and “worthless.” Coping strategies reflect emotional maturity, and projection is considered a primitive defense because it distorts or ignores reality in any attempt to preserve a weak ego. It is reactive without forethought and used by children. When employed by adults, it indicates arrested emotional development. Low self-esteem and shame impair narcissists’ ability to accept responsibility for mistakes and negative feelings. Projecting allows narcissists to accuse others of being the source of the pain and shame they bear make someone else feel the way they do inside. Rather than suffer self-judgment, projection provides a temporary respite from their negative impulses and traits, which they find too uncomfortable to acknowledge. It preserves feelings of innocence and esteem rather than guilt and shame, or at the very least, it preserves a narcissist’s sense of security in maintaining their façade of infallibility. Externalization is like projection in that it is blaming others for your problems rather than taking appropriate responsibility for them, like addicts who blame their drinking or drug use on their partners or job supervisor. Thus, externalizing also makes you feel like a victim.  #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

However, narcissists are not the only people who project and blame. You might think to yourself, “He hates me,” when you hate him or think he is being controlling or judgmental; in other words, you remain blind to your own similar shortcomings or uncomfortable feelings because you are projecting them onto someone else. When it comes to understanding projecting, it is essential to understand that shame has two faces: one with an inflated ego and one that is depressed. When the devalued self is feeling inferior, shame manifests by idealizing others. This is what partners do when they are attracted to and idealize a narcissist. When a person is feeling superior and defending against shame, the grandiose self devalues others by projecting its disowned flaws and negative self-concept. Both devaluation and idealization are commensurate with the severity of shame and associated depression. Shame can make people fluctuate between the superior and inferior positions, but grandiose and vulnerable narcissists are more-or-less static in their respective positions, regardless of reality. Projection can be crazy-making, especially if you experience it for a long time. When you are vulnerable or have impaired self-esteem and weak boundaries or are sensitive about a specific issue, such as your looks, parenting, or intelligence, there is no filter. You introject the projection. Because internally you agree, it sticks like a magnet. Then you react to the shaming and compound your relationship problems. Doing so validates and augments the abuser’s authority, control, and ideas about you. You are sending the message that your partner has power over your self-esteem and the right to approve you. When there is a prohibition against doing something, a dialogue will result whenever the person starts to do it. The inner parent becomes active and says, “No!” in a hard script, “Watch out!” in a threatening one, or “Why do you want that?” in a soft one—usually whatever an actual parent would say in real life. The energy that the inner child had mobilized to do it is then taken over by the inner parent and is used by him to restrain the immaturity. The more the inner child had mobilized to put into it, the more energetic the mature self can become by appropriating this energy. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

Envy is an unpleasant social emotion that arises when we compare ourselves with others in terms of their characteristic and belonging, and we perceive that they surpass us. This emotion of discomfort arises because the result of this upward comparison reveals our shortcomings. Envy is, therefore, a self-conscious emotion indicating a negative self-evaluation, or an inferior self-image with respect to others. The expansive type needs people for the confirmation of his power and of his spurious values. He also needs them as a safety valve for his own self-hate. However, since he has easier recourse to his own resources and greater support for his pride, his needs for others are neither as impelling nor as comprehensive as they are for the self-effacing type. The nature and magnitude of these needs account for basic characteristics in the latter’s expectations of others. While the arrogant-vindictive type primarily expects evil unless he has proof to the contrary, while the truly detached type expects neither good nor bad, the self-effacing type keeps expecting good. On the surface, it looks as though he had an unshakable faith in the essential goodness of humanity. And it is true that he is more open, more sensitive to likable qualities in others. However, the compulsiveness of his expectations makes it impossible for him to be discriminating. He cannot, as a rule, distinguish between genuine friendliness and its many counterfeits. He is too easily bribed by any show of warmth or interest. In addition, his inner dictates tell him that he should like everybody, that he should not be suspicious. Finally, his fear of antagonism and possible fights makes him overlook, discard, minimize, or explain away such traits as lying, crookedness, exploiting, cruelty, and treachery. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

When confronted with the unmistakable evidence of such trends, he is taken by surprise each time; but even so, he refuses to believe in any intent to deceive, humiliate, or exploit. Although he often is, and still more often feels, abused, this does not change his basic expectations. Even though by bitter personal experience he may know that nothing good could possibly come to him from a particular group or person, he still persists in expecting it—consciously or unconsciously. Particularly when such blindness occurs in someone who is otherwise psychologically astute, his friends or colleagues may be flabbergasted by it. However, it simply indicates that the emotional needs are so great that they override evidence. The more he expects of people, the more he tends to idealize them. He has not, therefore, a real faith in mankind but a Pollyanna attitude which inevitably brings with it many disappointments and makes him more insecure with people. What does he expect of others? In the first place, he must feel accepted by others. He needs such acceptance in whatever form it is available: attention, approval, gratitude, affection, sympathy, love, and pleasures of the flesh. To make it clear, just as in our civilization, many people feel worth as much as the money they are “making,” so the self-effacing type measures his values in the currency of love, using the word here as a comprehensive term for the various forms of acceptance. He is worth as much as he is liked, needed, wanted, or loved. Furthermore, he needs human contact and company because he cannot stand being alone for any length of time. As if he were cut off from life, he feels easily lost. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

Painful as this feeling is, it can still be tolerable as long as his self-abuse keeps within limits. As soon, however, as self-accusations or self-contempt becomes acute, his feeling lost may grow into a nameless terror, and it is exactly at this point that the need for others becomes frantic. This need for company is all the greater since being alone means to him proof of being unwanted and unliked and is therefore a disgrace, to be kept secret. It is a disgrace to go alone to the movies or on vacation, and a disgrace to be alone over the weekend, even when others are sociable. This is an illustration of the extent to which his self-confidence is dependent upon somebody caring for him in some way. He also needs others to give meaning and zest to whatever he is doing. The self-effacing type needs someone for whom to sew, cook, or garden, a teacher for whom he can play the piano, patients or clients who rely on him. Besides all this emotional support, however, he needs help and plenty of it. In his own mind, the help he needs stays within most reasonable limits, partly because most of his needs for help are unconscious and partly because he focuses on certain requests for help as though they were isolated and unique: help in getting him a job, in speaking to his landlord, going shopping with or for him, lending him money. Moreover, any wish for help of which he is aware appears to him eminently reasonable because the need behind it is so great. However, when in analysis, we see the total picture, his need for help actually amounts to the expectation that everything will be done for him. Others should supply the initiative, do his work, take the responsibility, give meaning to his life, or take over his life so that he can live through them. When recognizing the whole scope of these needs and expectations, the power which the appeal of love has for the self-effacing type becomes perfectly clear. It is not only a means to allay anxiety; without love, he and his life are without value and without meaning. Love, therefore, is an intrinsic part of the self-effacing solution. In terms of the type’s personal feelings, love becomes as indispensable for him as oxygen is for breathing. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

Naturally, he carries these expectations also into the analytic relationship. In contrast to most expansive types, he is not at all ashamed to ask for help. On the contrary, he may dramatize the needs and his helplessness and plead for help. However, of course, he wants it his own way. He expects, at bottom, a cure through “love.” He may be quite willing to put effort into the analytic work, but, as it turns out later, he is prompted by his hungry expectation that salvation and redemption must and can come only from without (here from the analyst)—through being accepted. He expects the analyst to remove his feelings of guilt by love, which may mean by sexual love in the case of an analyst of the opposite gender. More often, it means in more general ways, signs of friendship, special attention, or interest. As always happens in neurosis, needs turn into claims, which means that he feels entitled to having all these goods come to him. The need for love, affection, understanding, sympathy, or help turns into: “I am entitled to love, affection, understanding, sympathy. I am entitled to have things done for me. I am entitled not to the pursuit of happiness but to have happiness fall into my lap.” It does almost without saying that these claims—as claims—remain more unconscious than in the expansive type. For the growth of autonomy, a firmly developed early trust is necessary. An individual must be sure that his faith in himself and in the world will not be jeopardized by the violent wish to have his choice, to appropriate demandingly, and to eliminate stubbornly. Only parental firmness can protect him against the consequences of his as yet untrained discrimination and circumspection. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

However, his environment must also back him up in his wish to “stand on his own feet,” while protecting him against the now newly emerging pair of estrangements, namely, that sense of having exposed himself prematurely and foolishly which we call shame or that secondary mistrust, that “double take,” which we call doubt—doubt in himself and doubt in the firmness and perspicacity of his trainers. Shame is an infantile emotion insufficiently studied because in our civilization, it is so early and easily absorbed by guilt. Shame supposes that one is completely exposed and conscious of being looked at—in a word, self-conscious. One is visible and not ready to be visible; that is why in dreams of shame, we are stared at in a condition of incomplete dress, in night attire, “with one’s pants down.” Shame is early expressed in an impulse to bury one’s face or to sink, right then and there, into the ground. This potentiality is abundantly utilized in the educational method of “shaming” used so exclusively by some primitive peoples, where it supplants the often more destructive sense of guilt. The destructiveness of shaming is balanced in some civilizations by devices for “saving face.” Shaming exploits the increased sense of being small, which paradoxically develops as the individual comes to understand his size and power. Too much shaming does not result in a sense of propriety but in a secret determination to try to get away with things when unseen, if, indeed, it does not result in deliberate shamelessness. There is an impressive American ballad in which a murderer, to be hanged on the gallows before the eyes of the community, instead of feeling mortally afraid or totally shamed, begins to berate the onlookers, ending every salvo of defiance with the words, “God damn your eyes.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

Many people, when shamed beyond endurance, may be in a mood (although not in possession of either the courage or the words) to express defiance in similar terms. There is a limit to an individual’s endurance in the face of demands which force him to consider himself, his body, his needs, and his wishes as evil and dirty, and to believe in the infallibility of those who pass such judgment. Occasionally, he may turn things around, because secretly oblivious to the opinions of others, and consider as evil only the fact that they exist: this chance will come when they are gone or when he can leave them. The psychiatric danger of this stage is, as it is at all other stages, the potential aggravation of the normative estrangement to the point where it will cause neurotic or psychotic tendencies. The sensitive individual may turn all his urges to discriminate against himself and thus develop a precocious conscience. Instead of willfully appropriating things in order to test them by repetitive investigation, he will become obsessed by his own repetitiveness and will want to have everything “just so,” and only in a given sequence and tempo. By such an obsessiveness and procrastination, or by becoming a stickler for ritualistic repetitions, the individual then learns to gain power over his superiors in areas where he could not find large-scale mutual regulation with them. Such a hollow victory is how compulsion neurosis develops. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

The most common sign of excessive defensiveness is frequent experiences of threat. If other people must be careful about what they say or do in your presence, it can signify that they sense the grasp of your identity is frail indeed. If you are easily upset by criticism or frightened by your anger or sensuality, it may signify that you are trying to live up to some glorified image. The time to grow—to begin to let go of one’s present self-concept—is evidenced by boredom, failure, and anxiety. These experiences signify that you and your real self have changed, but that your self-structure has not. You are impersonating an identity that, up to yesterday, may have been authentic and life-giving. Now, however, it is not. To start a growth episode is frightening, but it need not be terrifying. All it means is that you may have to suspend your usual activities and relationships in order to get a fresh perspective on your own possibilities and the possibilities of changing some aspects of your life. If you meditate or retreat to a quiet place from time to time, the chances are that you change aspects of your activity and your self-structure more or less frequently. If, however, you are “locked into” various roles, and a fixed way of being yourself, the experience of threat may be more acute when it happens, and the prospect of change more frightening. If your present identity is not sustaining a rewarding and health-engendering life, and you do not see ways to grow and change, then it might be valuable to find a personal counselor or psychotherapist. Conversations with a professional person can frequently lead to growth-producing changes that are neither drastic nor destructive. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

God’s revelation in Jesus Christ, God’s revelation of His love, precedes all our love towards Him. Love has its origin not in us but in God. Love is not an attitude of men but an attitude of God. “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (I John 4.10). Only in Jesus Christ do we know what love is, namely, in His deed for us. “Hereby perceive we the love of God, because he laid down his life for us” (I John 3.16). And even here there is given no general definition of love, in the sense, for example, of its being the laying down of one’s life for the lives of others. What is here called love is not this general principle but the utterly unique event of the laying down of the life of Jesus Christ for us. Love is inseparably bound up with the name of Jesus Christ as the revelation of God. The New Testament answers the question, “What is love?” quite unambiguously by pointing solely and entirely to Jesus Christ. He is the only definition of love. However, again, if we were to derive a general definition of love from our view of Jesus Christ and of His deed and His suffering, it would be a complete misunderstanding. Love is not what He suffers. Love is always He Himself. Love is always God Himself. Love is always the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. When all our ideas and principles relating to love are concentrated in the strictest possible manner upon the name of Jesus Christ, this must, above all, not be allowed to reduce this name to a mere abstract concept. This name must always be understood in the full concrete significance of the historical reality of a living man. And so, without in any way contradicting what has been said so far, it is only the concrete action and suffering of this man Jesus Christ which will make it possible to understand what love is. The name Jesus Christ, in which God reveals Himself, gives the explanation of itself in the life and words of Jesus Christ. For, after all, the New Testament does not consist in an endless repetition of the name of Jesus Christ, but that which this name comprises is displayed in events, concepts, and principles which are intelligible to use. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

And so, too, the choice of the concept of “love,” is not simply arbitrary; this concept acquires an entirely new connotation in the New Testament message, yet it is not entirely without connection with what we understand by “love” in our own language. Certainly, it is not true to say that the biblical concept of love is a particular form of what we have already, in general, understood by this word. Precisely the opposite turns out to be the case, namely, that the biblical concept of love, and it alone is, the foundation, truth and the reality of love, in the sense that any natural thought about love contains truth and reality only in so far as it participates in this its origin, that is to say, in the love which is God Himself in Jesus Christ. Therefore, love is the reconciliation of man with God in Jesus Christ. The disunion of men with God, with other men, with the world and with themselves, is at an end. Man’s origin is given back to him. Love is the name for what God does to man in overcoming the disunion in which man lives. This deed of God is Jesus Christ, is reconciliation. And so love is something which happens to man, something passive, something over which he does not himself dispose, simply because it lies beyond his existence in disunion. Love means the undergoing of the transformation of one’s entire existence by God; it means being drawn in into the world as it lives and must live before God and in God. Love, therefore, is not man’s choice, but it is the election of man by God. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

Only too soon personal experience and the experience of others teaches how far most men’s lives are from being what a man’s life ought to be. All have great moments. They see themselves in the magic mirror of possibility which hope holds before them while the wish flatters them. However, they swiftly forget this sight in the daily round of things. Or perhaps, they talk enthusiastic words, “for the tongue is a little member and boasteth great things.” However, talk takes the name of enthusiasm in vain by proclaiming loudly from the housetop what it should work out in silence. And in the midst of the trivial details of life, these enthusiastic words are quickly forgotten. It is forgotten that such a thing was said of this man. It is forgotten that it was he himself who said it. Now and then, perhaps, memory wakens with horror, and remorse seems to promise new strength. However, alas, this, too, lasts only for a good-sized moment. All of them have intentions, plans, resolutions for life, yes, for eternity. However, the intention soon loses its youthful strength and fades away. The resolution is not firmly grounded and is unable to withstand opposition. It totters before circumstances and is altered by them. Memory, too, has a way of failing, until by common practice and habit, they learn to draw sympathy from one another. If someone proclaims the slender comfort that excuses yield, instead of realizing how treacherous is such sympathy, they finally come to regard it as edifying, because it encourages and strengthens indolence. Now, there are men who find it edifying that the demand to will one thing be asserted in all its sublimity, in all its severity, so that it may press its claim into the innermost fastness of the soul. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

Others find it edifying that a wretched compromise should be made between God, the claim, and the language used. There are men who find it edifying ig only someone will challenge them. However, there are also the sleepy souls who regard it as not only pleasing, but even edifying, to be lulled to sleep. This is indeed a lamentable fact; but there is a wisdom which is not from above, but is earthly and fleshly and devilish. It has discovered this common human weakness and indolence; it wants to be helpful. It perceives that all depends upon the will, and so it proclaims loudly, “Unless it wills one thing, a man’s life is sure to become one of wretched mediocrity, of pitiful misery. He must will one thing regardless of whether it be good or bad. He must will one thing for therein lies a man’s greatness.” Yet it is not difficult to see through this powerful error. As to the working out of salvation, the holy Scripture teaches that sin is the corruption of man. Salvation, therefore, lies only in the purity with which a man wills the Good. That very earthly and devilish cleverness distorts this into a temptation to perdition; weakness is a man’s misfortune; strength the sole salvation: “When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry and empty places but finds no rest. Then he turns back again and now he brings with him” that unclean cleverness, the wisdom of the desert and the empty places, that unclean cleverness—that now drives out the spirit of indolence and of mediocrity “so that the last stage become worse than the first.” #RandolphHarris 17 of 17