When Mommy Dearest demands attention by manufacturing chaos and triangulating, expect the world around her to literally be expected to stop spinning.
Mommy Dearest wants not only her offspring but anyone who knows her to truly believe their personal needs and desires will never matter as much as the social obligation to indulge her every demand, irrational desire, or whim.
Desperate for attention and thriving on creating the illusion that their needs are the only ones that ever truly matter during any event or social experience, the Cluster B female who thinks of herself as the Matriarch of any peer group of socially enamored people or a toxic family unit tends to suck the metaphoric and energetic air out of literally any room or person she targets for a “visit”.
Women who are egocentric and self-absorbed tend to have a pervasive sense of grandiosity, as well. If they seek to attention seek by lying to and manipulating other people in order to place themselves in the middle of a manufactured triangulation they themselves created, they are likely to have power and control issues.
If they can triangulate abuse targets — making them fear and mistrust one another while hindering or outright preventing contact between the parties — they truly are able to pretend they are master puppeteers.
The strings they tug the hardest tend to be gossamer thread cords that run through the heart of their own children. The problem is, the feeling of wanting to please or care for the child himself or herself is seldom the goal of a parent consumed with egocentrism and prone to thinking of themselves as grandiose individuals.
If they, meaning toxic mother figures, gaslight and feign a need for someone like a romantic partner, child, friend, casual acquaintance, or neighbor to drop everything in their own life and neglect themselves, their career, and their own friends and family to come running to the side of the narcissistic social predator every time they claim they have an emergency or crisis that must be tended to “right away” — understand what is going on with them is a different mechanism entirely.
The more extreme the narcissistic dysfunction, the more likely the toxic person is going to be to bend or twist the facts and truth to mislead any listener intentionally into believing that the Narcissist’s need for constant control and attention is more important or pressing than whoever they have targeted for social use.
The abuse happens when the predator misleads to net gain a humanitarian response from someone they HOPE will be easy to lie to and to manipulate.
By dropping everything going on in your life and rushing to alleviate the Narcissist’s feigned distress, the game is afoot — and you, the targeted mark, took the bait.
The faster you leap to assist, they see weakness and someone so “pathetic” that the new narrative a Narc will typically spin about you for making yourself available is that somehow you are a lost soul, desperate for attention and affection yourself.
Why?
So they can con Flying Monkeys into abusing targets by proxy. Their default social behavior is to strive to manipulate other people’s behavior by doing or saying things to foster sibling rivalry, to triangulate — say — a spouse or grandchild against the toxic elders adult child, or to foster extreme alienation between a prospective whistleblower and anyone who might otherwise be willing to show the truth-teller compassion.
The net effect is that anyone who would dare to have the audacity to tell the truth about the parent having a proclivity to covertly or to situationally abuse that the innocent party telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth after taking a faith-based oath to share details with veracity is likely to be disbelieved entirely by all others.
The Verbal Abuser, gaslighting anyone who is foolish enough to stop to take the time to listen to what the word spinning pathological social competitor has to say, wants everyone to truly believe their victims are cray-cray. While adult children do their best to make sure all their toxic parent’s needs are met at the expense of themselves, the toxic parent could literally care less.
Utterly unpleasable, the more adult children tend to do for them in order to make their lives better or easier, the less likely the child’s adult human efforts are to ever be acknowledged or appreciated. The more you give, the more they take — that’s the Cluster B behavior kids groomed for a lifetime to enable toxic people during the Abuser’s senior years tend to unintentionally socially as well as to physically facilitate.
When Mommy Dearest starts manufacturing chaos because they are attention-seeking, expect them to self-create insane levels of time-wasting in the lives of whomever they recruit to take their “boy who cried wolf” claims they need time-sensitive help or attention seriously.
Triangulating and positioning themselves as the ONLY person their targeted and gaslit children and social supporters come to for help communicating with OTHER abuse targets positions them to share information to bait, provoke, mislead, and gaslight without the people they manipulate ever typically having a chance to compare notes about claims the pathological lying parent or anti-social senior citizens make when and if they make it to grandparent status or active old age.
By implying you — rather than they — are the socially deficient person… they get a tremendous sense of power. Because their core values are different, Cluster B people tend to physically derive a sense of pleasure from abusing and conning, pretending they are the victim and that the people they target for harm “deserve” whatever random “punishment” (typically for nothing) they choose to on a whim to dish out.
Again, by granting you the opportunity to cater to their needs and to wait on them hand and foot while they offer nothing positive to say to or about you before, during, or after you show up to help that somehow the targeted and wholly psychologically duped and manipulated mark should be thanking them for allowing them to abuse hospitality by free will choice.
The trouble is, once you KNOW what they are doing… there’s no escaping the reality that by enabling a dysfunctional pattern to form between people that it takes the victim’s willingness to expose themselves socially to the Cluster B person to turn the target into a WILLFUL Enabler.
Does that mean that the Narcissistic is not karmically responsible for concocting an attention-demanding, power, and control rooted scheme to force a romantic interest, “friend”, or family member to PROVE their loyalty by being willing to bend over backward to capitulate to their demands without regard to their own needs or best interest? Nope. What it does mean is this… Abusers are responsible morally, psychologically, physically, and socially for behaving like con artists and abusive provocateurs.
- Their target’s task is to realize that the predator is seeking attention due to their own socially immature needs.
- The target’s task is to listen to the request with an intent to understand (if and when it’s appropriate), but to learn how to use gray rock skills to assess the situation on a minute to minute and hourly basis.
- The target is tasked with the challenge of learning how to set and enforce their own healthy lifestyle boundaries.
Now, obviously, if a pipe burst in the wall at mom’s house and you have a vested interest in maintaining the home in a proper condition… that might be a great reason to drop everything on your personal agenda and make a trip to her place to shut off the water valve and to help clean up while you wait for someone else (like Service Master pros and a Plumber) to come and provide truly needed assistance.
But when mom is doing things like calling one person and asking them to come over to put something on the highest possible shelf in the kitchen with the express intent of the minute they walk out of the door she calls someone else to come IMMEDIATELY — this minute, this hour, this day, this second — to come to help her get the object down from the shelf because unless you cancel that crucial job interview or you skip that critical lecture at college or you have to cancel plans you already made that other people were counting on you for just so you can PROVE your loyalty to them?
All based on a manufactured attention-demanding con — wasting the time of the first person who was recruited to place the item on the shelf too high for her to reach easily or safely without assistance then completely misleading and disrespecting the second mark by forcing them to drop everything to come running… literally… for no earthly reason other than the predator is bored and a liar…
Then.
Then you know the person you are dealing with is not simply afflicted with nurtured Narcissism.
They are likely to be escalating in their dysfunction, their neuroplasticity is calcifying, and it’s time for you — their Narcissistic Supply Source — to decide if being their energetic snack is, for your own best interest or theirs, pragmatically speaking in any way advised.
Before you leap to assist when the toxic mother or “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” starts spinning a yarn about being in crisis, do consider why stress illnesses form.
If you can learn how to go gray rock psychologically and not be emotionally or psychologically manipulated… if you choose to assist them at a time you decide is convenient, they are likely to see your healthful choice to self-advocate while still being willing to provide companion care as a betrayal. Once they suspect you have given any credence to your own needs whatsoever, if they are Cluster B, they will feel as if they have lost control.
- They are likely to be verbally abusive, to provoke, and to strive to bait when and if you arrive to assist.
- They are likely to be unsatisfied with whatever you do strive to do in order to make their life better.
- They are not satisfied with any offer to spend time with them, to financially assist, or to provide physical assistance care-taking or providing companion assistance.
- They expect complete and total submission, for their needs to be met in such a way that everyone else’s are wholly invalidated as even being a human right to have, and they demand 100% of their Enablers psychological, physical, social, and emotional time to be spent thinking about the needs of the predator. Anything less, the toxic person will claim they are being victimized and neglected.
See the pattern? They demand you live inside their own psychologically created and defined box.
Even while you are alone, away from them, if you are reading here striving to cope with feeling victimized, they have you under their spell completely.
At no time in a narcissistic parent’s life is anything ever about anything except themselves. They live to divide and conquer their children, their adult family members, their so-called “friends”, neighbors, community members, and anyone willing to allow them the opportunity to gaslight, con, and woo them.
Acting like spoiled bratty irrational and completely egocentric monsters, they avoid having to take time out and self-reflect about their own free will choices regarding how they mindfully, deliberately, and purposefully choose to behave in relation to others. If they lie to convince you that they are in crisis — including gaslighting to mislead, con, or dupe — understand they are displaying anti-social, conscience-free personality traits.
If you are the offspring of a toxic parent and have not turned out to be abusive by nature, understand they are likely to see you as their failure.
Understand from a rational and logical perspective that how much time you spend thinking about the narcissistic person’s words or needs are seconds of your life you will never have the opportunity to get back again.
If you are psychologically enmeshed with your toxic mother or an abusive dad, if all you do is think of them and what they did or did not do or say over the course of your relationship with them, you are (from a neurological perspective) under their social and biological control.
Even if you physically go no contact… if you are still lending subjective credibility to anything a hospitality abusing, self-promoting, self-aggrandizing, duplicitous and overwhelmingly toxic egocentric and tunnel-visioned person who is prone to manufacturing chaos in the lives of other people in order to dominate them and force them into submission?
Might want to re-think whether or not showing up at their door when they point and snap is passively allowing them to incur more karma for themselves before their death.
If reading that statement gave you pause — it should. And here’s why.
In a healthy relationship, both parties seek to communicate. Both people also tend to have absolute social and emotional respect for the other.
Healthy people understand that when one person talks, if they themselves are healthy, they are likely proffering insight into themselves as a gift. When a healthy person speaks to another, their core nature tends to be empathetic by nature… and social skills like learning to be polite, mannerly, sensitive to other people’s needs and experiences, and having an interest in learning about others are natured habitual responses to social cues and biological prompts.
When a parent-child relationship is healthy, neither party are expected to abandon their own fundamental human rights.
Child abuse happens when a child’s needs are neglected. Child abuse happens when a child is treated like a slave to a parent — an owned piece of property without a right to life or to have and or to express feelings or emotionally intelligent insights of their own without the toxic parent withholding even more affection than they normally do or they rage.
In a relationship where the power balance is likely to favor the elder, it is not because of a moral iniquity. Parents are older. They tend to have more money and life experience than a newborn.
Kids who are emotionally immature are likely to come to expect things from a parent like money, access to home goods, and the parent’s home, car, and personal belonging use. If a child is over the age of 6 and behaving this way, a serious lifelong habit of devaluing people who are hospitable towards others with loving intent is likely already brewing.
Kids who appreciate the time and money their parent spends with and on them are likely to grow up to be kind, loving, and morally decent people themselves.
Those who are angry about not having enough or who find no value in the time and interest and affection a loving and emotionally healthy parent shows — for whatever reason caused the dysfunction — are destined to have to figure out what is and or was wrong with the 9th circle behaviors they chose to engage in alone… meaning all by themselves.
And that’s okay — because kids who act terribly toward caregivers and loving people without consequences for betraying the social compact to value and appreciate others while behaving in a way that a mutually beneficial relationship forms are likely to become abusive in later life to their own friends, family, romantic partners, children, grandchildren, neighbors, strangers, and co-workers.
By neglecting self-care, an abused parent spends a lifetime giving and giving without being recognized, validated, seen, or considered. The parent is likely to develop C-PTSD issues that cause health decline post-age 35 that truly compromise their quality of life.
Children who fail to consider their parent’s needs as humans — rather than simply thinking about their own immediate needs or whims — become Mommy Dearest and Enabling Henchmen father figures during their adulthood for this very reason.
Because their own parents failed to nurture compassionate, non-egocentric related interests or health awareness of pro-social behaviors in them when they were young, from a neurological perspective their brain and all conditioned neurologically-based social and emotional perspective ended up maturing and calcifying in a way that biologically is [meaning was] malformed.
In the mind of an abused and emotionally neglected child, the brain is broken in a different way, hindered from lack of use. People who enable because they were groomed to take, to overlook, and to tolerate abuse under-utilize logic and healthy emotional processing centers that are physically present in the brain’s anatomical structure but fail to develop from under-use.
A child of a toxic parent who is HSP rather than nurtured Sociopathic tends to develop massive C-PTSD issues over time. The physical illness takes over the body after the mind, traumatized, is punished by a parent every time the infant, toddler, or young child seeks to self-actualize as a sentient being with individual — and therefore equal — rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Such a child, once they reach the legal age of maturity, is the most likely person to be targeted for social and sexual use and abuse by Love Fraud predators seeking to feather their own nest with a harem of people who have already been groomed to submit.
Understand this…
An abused child who is groomed to enable and has not been allowed to think about anyone’s needs except their own captors tends to have a severely malnourished or totally impoverished concept of self. How a child is groomed to see the world and to interact with other people socially (from a psychological as well as purely physical perspective) truly matters.
[It does not excuse the behavior, having been abused in the past, but core values and related PTSD issues must be understood to at the very least a rudimentary degree about all people one encounters on a daily basis in order to function in harmony without inadvertently causing friction when and if it one is in a position where one must learn how to predict the everyday behavior of people.]
A narcissistic person knows they not only have a self, but that caring for it is likely to support their own physical, social, and psychological survival. But the child of a narcissistic person tends to have little to no internal awareness that anyone except for the abuser or abusers in their life has those same rights to the validation of right to life.
As a child matures, biology compels them to form an awareness of self. By nurturing the understanding that the self in each person is of equal spiritual (as well as biological weight and measure) and coupling the awareness with the idea that to have a friend one must also BE a friend, children have a chance to grow up valuing the opportunity to even have a relationship with another person.
Other people include parents. Other people include children.
Ask yourself this question…
How many hours of the day do you believe a person who is egocentric or prone to abusing the hospitality of others physically spends thinking about the health and wellness needs of other people?
How many hours of time in a day do they spend doing things for other people without seeking anything other than someone else’s gratitude? Not fake appreciation where someone passively resets the assistance…
We’re talking provable and readily observable, actual, on their own without prompting or demanding, self-initiated, emotionally understood, conscious awareness that they had a need that you showed up and met. Awareness that without other human beings to connect with on a social and physical level that our lives are likely to feel solitary, brutish, of poor emotional quality, and to be shorter due to the damage medically done to a form when the mind fails to nourish it with thoughts that are warm.
How many hours a day do you think a hospitality abuser spends doing self-help research on behalf of another person so the other person does not need to do their own manual labor?
How many hours a day? How many MINUTES do you think they spend worried about whether or not their abuse victims feel emotionally supported, whether their preferred scapegoats and Narcissistic Supply Sources have their personal needs met? How many seconds do you think they spend thinking that their targeted marks social and emotional or physical needs are equally as important to validate as their own?
About that…
Self-reflect. Flip the internal script and self-assess?
How many hours a day do you devote to striving to please unpleasable people?
What do you get back from the time invested in caring for the needs of a person or peer group that does not value their relationship with you? What do you get back — meaning EMOTIONALLY speaking — from a person or peer group that behaves as if they are entitled to behave in ways that indicate they have an awareness of human rights… but they are not willing to acknowledge or validate that you, as a targeted mark or preferred scapegoat, are entitled to have yourself?
What do you get, personally, from associating socially with other human beings — blood relatives or not — who treat you as if you are some subpar form of human?
How many hours? How many minutes? How many seconds devoted to striving to meet their needs… to meet their irrational and abusive demands for attention?
As you sit here reading this article — a completely healthy place to be — are you reading with an intent to understand the pattern and social dynamic in order to avoid in enabling the perpetuation of toxic thinking and to avoid slipping inadvertently into enabling your own dysfunction or are you here striving to understand your parent for their benefit?
Are you reading self-help literature about their personality type, astrology sign, numerology chart, MBTI related literature, developmental psychology, and the like so that you can become a more compassionate Enabler? Or so you can take personal responsibility for the conscious development of your own core nature as well as your behaviors?
Because it matters. WHY you read self-help literature that gives insight into other people’s personalities and minds matters.
The Enabler strives to understand their Abuser so they can more easily make an excuse for other people’s deplorable behavior. Making excuses employs the use of magical thinking to lay the groundwork intellectually in the mind and emotional body for the toxic formation of Cognitive Dissonance — a coping mechanism a broken brain uses to allow them to remain involved in an unhealthy, dangerous, and dysfunctional relationship.
You pour your heart out of your chest, a Cluster B person is likely to treat your sweet self like a maple tree with a tap for sap.
When it comes to being in a relationship, social predators like egocentric vertical thinkers typically offer the enabling party no true care or authentic companionship, intellectually or emotionally speaking, whatsoever. Using trauma bonding tactics to bind lessers to them by making them think there is actual mutual care or consideration present, the psychological vampires rely on their own acting skills and mirroring talents to position themselves as having a right to be cared for without feeling any social or emotional interest in the needs of others.
It’s not personal.
All emotional vampires suck.
Show up to help them with that can of soup that Mommy Dearest claims that she cannot live without you driving across town to take down from the shelf this day or minute but be prepared to have your consciousness assailed.
Mommy Dearest will call offspring A and tell them they must have the item put as high as humanly possible on the shelf. The person who they demand puts it there is likely to be lied to and about with regard to why they were asked to put it up there, blamed for making such a foolish decision — one that was never their idea or decision to do in any way whatsoever, and left clueless about the fact that their attention-seeking parent employed their help in an Abuse By Proxy / Flying Monkey situation when offspring B or some other preferred scapegoat is called 10 minutes after they leave and is told that the parent has no idea why the person they insisted put something of need in a place that is unsafe or completely inconvenient to reach would so such a thing.
The Mommy Dearest who cries wolf time and time again and has their attention-seeking pattern rewarded in the Pavlovian sense is likely to have multiple people enabling them. It’s up to you whether or not you decide to be one of them.
Baiting or provoking phone call or text arrives? Work the steps.
Gray rock. Observe. Evaluate. Self-reflect.
Is the mother’s crisis real or manufactured? If you were in her situation, would you require a person to assist you with the manual labor?
Ask yourself seriously if you would prefer to help her yourself or if someone other than you might be a better choice of the person for her to ask. If someone else can do the task — such as calling a cleaning crew to arrive to help with a busted pipe faster than you — but she insists YOU must be the person to drop everything and to come running, ask yourself why.
If the answer is she misses you and does not know how to self-advocate, consider letting her know you are sending someone to help her today but you have set aside time to spend with her on a date you confirm in advance and don’t blow off. If you tell her you will see her on Saturday and she spends time readying herself and the house, then you don’t bother to show up because your buddy calls and you want to do something else, understand YOU are abusing HER hospitality as well.
But if she lies to person X to recruit them in a scheme to deceive Y followed by them bad-mouthing one or both conned parties to party Z while the gaslighting parent net gains a ton of attention from all three people and is offered compassionate responses for having been socially or physically neglected with they weren’t?
Before all three duped parties are aware that Mommy Dearest is an attention-seeking Cluster B with a desire to alleviate her own sense of boredom and powerlessness related to loss of vitality and sex appeal and professional viability due to their age, it’s easy to fall for her attention-demanding cons.
It is easy to become an Abuser by Proxy or Flying Monkey yourself by doing nothing more than responding to her as if her claims she was neglected or somehow inconvenienced were or are in any way true. It’s easy to quip off, “Why the heck would he put it up there?” in a critical voice, making an ad hominem attack on the intelligence and character of an innocent person who was simply trying to please her.
To please HER.
Do you hear that?
To please her. Not themselves, not for their own sake other than seeking HER validation that they were successfully able to please her.
There would have been nothing wrong with them telling her that placing the item on the lower shelf would be safer, nor would there be anything wrong with them trying to arrange pantry shelves so that if she was alone she could reach everything easily without needing to rely on the assistance of another.
But understand this…
If the first person manipulated refused to place the item where she demanded — no matter how nonsensical or obviously being done in order to manufacture an excuse to abuse the time and hospitality of targeted future others — that person would be accused of being an abuser. It’s not at all TRUE — but they would be punished for thinking not only about HER needs but also the time-related needs of other caregivers.
Best to let people who feel the need to lie to their children about their every day needs in order to play mind games while they manufacture chaos for fun to head off to an assisted living facility. Otherwise, take the pressure off yourself by going low to no contact.
Bottom line, parent or not, the person manipulating incurs their own karma. If they were healthy and truly loved their children or had functional and working respect for others, no one would be lied to or have their personal needs invalidated, cheapened by verbal assault, or have their time and willingness to care abused or taken advantage of whatsoever.
If you are the mom feeling neglected by an adult child or children… consider this fact before manufacturing a crisis. Try writing them notes and journaling your experienced diary-letter style. Tell them how you are feeling. Admit to being in need of things like physical touch — not just a phone call.
A two-minute hug releases Oxytocin in the mind and bodies of BOTH individuals. Oxytocin relieves stress and physical tension that are likely to damage the heart and body if and when the body isn’t able to interact in a loving manner with at least one or more reciprocally interested and emotionally supportive humans.
To have a friend, one must be a friend, but to be a parent, one must simply play a part in procreation.
Having a baby no more gives the parent the right to treat the child like chattel than it gives a child the right to treat their parent as a sub-human every day of their life. A parent who is caught lying intentionally to deceive and mislead their own offspring does far more harm to the child than not buying them a fancy and overpriced new luxury or sports car on a whim or a pony on-demand at the ripe old age of six.
If they were a stranger or casual acquaintance caught lying one time, any healthy person would quickly realize that the offender is untrustworthy, socially dangerous to be around, and every word they say is likely to have been calculated to manipulate you by deceiving you willfully.
Would that be a person of quality to add to your life — or one likely to abuse your hospitality pervasively if and when you let them in? Would that be the kind of person you want to allow to have private time chattering in the ear of your spouse, your friends, other family members, your professional contacts… or who you think would in any way, shape, or form be a healthy or safe influence to have around your children?
By accepting Cluster B parents as they are for what they are and electing to distance ourselves at a safe distance from them, we — as adult children of toxic parents — might make them angry, but at the very least we show respect for our elders by making pro-social choices. Honor thy father and thy mother are only words as a legally binding contract when and if they reciprocally honor their responsibility to parent in a pro-social manner.
Tolerating abuse is in and of itself passively baiting the Abuser to incur increasingly damaging layers of karma. It’s not loving to allow a toddler to abuse a classmate or sibling; a responsible human being with a healthy respect for themselves and others is morally compelled to strive to shift the pattern while offering the out of control toddler an opportunity to learn from the situation in such a way that their own needs get met without traumatizing other people or invalidating the fundamental human rights of the world’s most compassionate others.
You observe, you self-reflect, and if there is something you can do or say to help everyone involved in the social situation at hand, you volunteer to assist. You are not a primate. You are an ANT.
When Mommy Dearest rages or pulls a bout of hysteria that amounts to nothing more than putting on a stage act while they pretend to be angry, in need, or as if they are sincerely misunderstanding or unaware of the needs of others… they are behaving like Love Fraud predators. If you grant credibility to the assertion of a person willing to lie or mislead someone in order to get their own needs for attention in order to alleviate nothing more than profound existential boredom met because sometimes the Abuser is fun to be with… yikes.
Consider this article as granting you permission to think critically about why you remain socially as well as psychologically enmeshed. We are not encouraging anyone to abandon their family or an elderly parent… what we are suggesting is that Cluster B parents require a different social and emotional approach to management.
