Why the Real Issue Isn’t Narcissism — It’s Their Craving for Unconditional Love at Any Cost
Photo by Kaboompics.com Courtesy of Pexels
Narcissistic mothers don’t hunger for control because they’re powerful — they cling to it because they’re starving.
At the core of their disorder isn’t pride, but panic: a deep, insatiable craving to be unconditionally loved, no matter the cost or the damage.
And when they don’t feel that love? They punish. They fragment. They sabotage.
They’ll break their children emotionally just to rebuild them in a shape that feels safe: obedient, admiring, addicted to their approval.
All the while telling themselves, “This is what love looks like.”
But it isn’t love. It’s an addiction.
In this article, I am going to simplify the seemingly insurmountable problem of the narcissistic mother, and highlight an issue that has never been examined before, which is the source of the destruction, and is disturbingly prevalent today and even online.
A narcissistic mother’s biggest problem is not narcissism; it is addiction, since narcissistic moms mistake the caretaking of them for unconditional love.
This causes them to create situations which are extremely damaging to the child and harm their long-term development:
- Parentification to groom the child for a caretaking role for the rest of their lives
- Emotional incest by making the child responsible for the mother’s emotions as a spouse is expected to be
I will fundamentally be speaking about emotional abuse, but this can, of course, spill over into the area of physical and even sexual abuse.
But from what I’ve seen, abuse is a sliding scale of how sick the person is that you are dealing with.
When it spills over from emotional to physical, it’s a good sign you are dealing with another level of not just mental illness, but unawareness of the harm they are inflicting on themselves and others.
There are three ways that she will manufacture “need” from her children and from the family members she has contact with:
- She will imply or tell you that you can’t make it on your own
- Under the guise of caring about you, she might prevent you from doing adult things for yourself
- She may sabotage your life or relationships so that you still need her
All of these come from a need to be needed forever, not because she cares about you or believes that she deserves your love, but because she is addicted to how you make her feel when you care for her.
When you are warm, loving, do things for her, or treat her as though she is the child, she mistakes your kindness for validation and approval, and now she is addicted to it, so she will do anything to pry it from you.
How She Got This Way
Seeking approval and validation is a trauma response linked to her turbulent childhood.
Children need validation because they find out who they are through it.
A severe lack of it, either from neglect or abuse, leads to the child feeling uncertain of their identity, and there is an unfillable void where their sense of self should be.
If their parents are narcissistic, this child will also be told who they are within the perfect parameters of their parents’ ideal show child.
They will learn that they shouldn’t stray outside of the idea of who they are, as doing so will be met with extreme shaming tactics.
What they went through may or may not lead to them developing a cluster B personality disorder, but as you’ll soon see, their disorder isn’t what is ruining their life; it’s the disorder’s lack of empathy, exacerbated by the addiction.
Deep down, they long for the attention and validation they never got as a child, and so they begin to find ways to get attention from others.
Over time, she may have found that saying things that were made up or slightly disagreeable got her lots of attention; in fact, they found the things that she said so despicable that they found her unforgettable…
In the short term, there’s nothing terrible about this behaviour, but long-term exposure to the massive spikes of dopamine that rapid exposure to lots of validation causes will drastically alter the brain.
Their Brain Was Altered By The Addiction, Not Their Disorder
When she receives validation, her brain’s reward system receives a massive amount of dopamine, which is the neurotransmitter responsible for feelings of pleasure and motivation.
This hike of dopamine creates a reinforcement cycle much more intense than normal rewards such as food or social connection. After a while, the brain adapts to these increased dopamine surges in a few ways:
- It starts to slow down its dopamine production
- The brain reduces its dopamine receptors
- The neural pathways associated with receiving validation become strengthened because of repeated activation
The part of the brain responsible for impulse control, decision-making, and moral reasoning, called the prefrontal cortex, becomes impaired as addiction progresses.
There is no difference in what is happening to her brain with long-term approval and validation addiction, and substance abuse, and I will soon demonstrate that their behaviours are also identical.
The Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences carried out a study on substance abuse and discovered that chronic use significantly reduced activity in the parts of the brain responsible for empathy, self-awareness, and ethical decision-making.
The Narcissistic Fantasy Finally Explained
We’ve been told time and again that a narcissist’s fantasy is just part of it; they live in psychosis, so deal with it.
However, that’s not exactly true. I’ve studied dozens of these people for thirty years, and not all of them are lost in psychosis, so what’s going on here?
What’s happening is that the all-important fantasy that they escape to is also a well-concealed addiction coping mechanism.
The addiction distorts the addict’s perception, which convinces them that they won’t be able to cope with the challenges and pressures of everyday life without their validation high.
They are then convinced that they need to create an alternate reality where using people for validation and punishing them for not giving them any is acceptable, while distancing themselves from its negative consequences.
Studies have shown that this is why addicts have trouble with their memory, more specifically, how things have happened previously, and how they relate to you.
Over time, they can start to lose touch with reality, but by this time, confronting the truth about themselves would be unbearable; they just can’t deal with the shame and pity that would come from that.
When searching for clarification, they tend to feel guilty for having lied to themselves and others.
This is when a vicious cycle can ensue, which is difficult to get out of, because to escape from those difficult feelings, the narcissist will turn to the only thing that makes them feel better: Validation, which will reinforce unhealthy behaviour patterns, making it even more desirable to hide the truth about what is really going on.
When the Addicted Narcissist Believes Their Own Lies
We’ve all experienced narcissists believing their own lies, no matter how much evidence you present or how many people will attest to the contrary.
But The National Institute on Drug Abuse explains this puzzling behaviour, as they state that: Self-deception is a psychological defence mechanism among addicts.
This progresses the longer the emotional addiction goes on, and the brain becomes better at rationalising behaviours that conflict with a person’s core values.
“Instead of changing their behaviour, the cognitive dissonance is resolved by changing their perception of reality.”
In advanced stages of emotional addiction, the line between knowingly telling falsehoods and genuine beliefs blurs.
This is why they seem to get worse over time; we’re not looking at the progression of a cluster B personality, we’re seeing the deterioration of the mind, and the progression of an addiction that used to be a coping mechanism.
Addicted individuals then go to great lengths to construct a squeaky-clean public self-image, which allows them to be seen as an upright pillar of the community while continuing their destructive behaviours.
Again, this was never strictly a narcissistic or even a sociopathic trait, but those who are capable of emotional or physical abuse always seem to demonstrate it.
Therefore, we can deduce that deceiving everyone else, while being a totally different person behind closed doors, is a dangerous attribute of the addiction and is not the fault or trait of the personality disorder specifically.
Mirroring Behaviours On The Dating Scene
Lots of men, and women in same sex relationships, are complaining that modern women are behaving like what I have just described on dates and in relationships.
They don’t behave like grown women; they act like toddlers who expect you to react like their parent, not their partner.
You’re not going crazy or asking too much, because this is the same behaviour that narcissistic moms expose their children to behind closed doors.
She expects you to do everything and pay for everything, to the extent that you can easily find yourself shouldering all of her adult responsibilities while she goes off to Pilates.
This isn’t just arrested development; she gets a “high” from the caretaking that you give her, and when she doesn’t receive it, she gets withdrawal symptoms.
Identifying Withdrawal
As a child, you learnt how to identify your mother’s withdrawal symptoms by the sudden changes in her mood, especially towards you.
This is what was happening when she attacked, belittled, and made you feel like you were never enough.
She wanted you to feel this way, so that she can extract the “care” drug from you that she is not just addicted to, but obsessed with.
By making you feel this way, you would react by giving her more care, so she will love you again.
As a child, you are wired to know that your survival depends on this, so of course, you would try to please her so as not to limit your chances of making it out of this alive.
But unbeknownst to you, every time this happens, she is receiving a “fix.”
Why Healthy Relationships Don’t Solve Her Problem
Relationships are boring, and she only cares about the eventual perks that you get from a long-term relationship; e.g., if you look after a child well and support their independence, they come back, and you’ll enjoy a long and mutually beneficial relationship with them.
It’s the same thing with a romantic relationship; after building up trust, vulnerability and special times together, you take care of one another, and it becomes second nature.
She wants those long-term benefits, but she isn’t willing to build a real relationship to get them.
The problem is, she must feed her addiction constantly, so she must extract love, care, respect and attention from you, whether you want to give them to her or not.
She has no interest in building or maintaining a healthy relationship, because it’s boring, it takes too long, and she is addicted to acting out chaos and drama because she has mistaken the intensity of it for love.
In short, she wants immediate gratification from everyone around her, every day, for the rest of her life.
To pull this off and to keep it going, she must manufacture “need” so that you need her forever, and she can gain access to her drug of choice for the rest of her life.
Once you familiarise yourself with the addiction aspect of this, the concept of “supply” becomes very different.
Her children, partner, or spouse are all like walking injections of emotional heroin; they don’t just feed her addiction, they are the addiction.
Reality Snaps
This brings me to the primary way that narcissistic moms extract care from people, which is by coercing, gaslighting, verbally abusing, acting out or causing drama.
A simpler way of putting it is that they believe they are obtaining the drug that they need by destroying the relationship and their children’s childhood along with it.
What they are doing is that they create instability so that everyone in the family unit will cling to them tightly, which enables them to feed their addiction more efficiently.
Emotional addiction has the same detrimental effect on the brain as substance abuse, and those who engage in it not only behave identically, but their addiction has the same awful impact on their children.
I will elaborate on the harmful impact that this has on the children in a future article, but this extreme psychological and social damage is why the children are removed from these homes.
Not because of mental illness, but addiction.
The same steps need to be taken with children from families of emotional addiction, because the impact on their brains is the same, and so is the abuse they dish out.
It’s worth mentioning at this point that she is completely unaware of her addiction, and as such, addicts are unaware of how their actions harm others while they do what they need to do to get their fix.
That’s why no matter how many times you confront her, and no matter how much hard evidence you present, she won’t acknowledge that she hurt you, because the intention was always only ever to satisfy her addiction.
She can only see that; she can’t see the devastation that she caused on the way to obtaining it.
This is why I advocate a new approach towards treating the women who display this behaviour; further tests need to be conducted to ascertain whether this female is also displaying behaviours which could indicate that she also has an emotional addiction.
The reason is that unless you replace the unhealthy way that she is currently getting her fix (which could be her children, other people, or AI chatbots), she will always have withdrawals where she will relapse soon after, and the vicious cycle begins again.
© Honor Payne