to aspies: is your mother narcissistic?

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My mother has been called narcissistic, but she was nowhere near that.

She was rather autistic with a good portion of borderline: A frenetic horror by the thought of being abandoned and a tendency to say, whatever could save her bacon here&now.
At the same time, she would give her last t-shirt away, if someone needed it.

Nope, definitely not. There is something wrong with my father, though: I suspect maybe a personality disorder or PTSD.

Gosh. Why do you think your mother was not narcissistic? Whose needs did she prioritise, her own or yours? There are several indications in what you wrote that suggest she may well have had a "cluster B" personality disorder (Narcissistic Personality Disorder).
However perhaps there are other so far unstated reasons you have for supposing that she did not.

I think my mother was very self-centered - but I don't recall her being particularly egotistical - Nor do I think she was absolutely lacking in sympathy, empathy or remorse. As far as her lack of mothering skills are concerned - I really don't think she had a clue. It was as if she had no idea what a mother is supposed to do. It was like an enormous blind spot. When I would come home upset about being mistreated at school for not being properly dressed and groomed - I think she genuinely thought I was just silly. She would absolutely insist that I was dressed just as well as any other kids. I think she believed it. Of course that was absolutely preposterous. But I'm sure she believed it anyway. She would actually go to PTA meetings and listen to my teachers tell her about problems I was having - but she never connected the dots that she had some responsibility to try in help in that matter. That hint went completely over her head.

I would add that after I grew up and went away - she acted like we had always been close and loving to each other. She also spent enormous amounts of her spare time doing volunteer community work - after I grew up and moved away.

It may have been a "blind spot". Or a lack of interest (wilful blindness). Sounds like she communicated the message that your needs were just too much bother to her.

Neglect - whether benign or deliberate - is very damaging for children. It communicates messages which can have a life long impact: your needs don't matter; you don't matter; you have no right to expect consideration or respect from others; you should never expect anyone else to help you, etc. These are toxic invalidations.

All these messages are false. They are communicated wordlessly by neglector parents on a daily basis for many years; many of whom are narcissistic parents if not flagrant Cluster B examples of NPD. Because of the wordless communication it can be very hard for adult survivors of this kind of neglect to recognise and articulate the effect it had and continues to have.

I hope you are right, and that you are not one of these survivors.

Am I the only one who thinks it sounds like she's autistic?
One of my kids has trouble with spelling - has for years. It never occurred to me that the teachers were "hinting" that I was a bad mother when they told me this.

How do you know that's what they were hinting, or that they were hinting anything? Mind reading?

Weren't they simply communicating to you that he had a specific issue?

You had the adult option of making a choice in response -ie to do nothing about it, to try and give him extra practice at home, to get him extra outside help, or just hope the problem would pass, wait and see what happens.

The confusion between NPD and ASD is a very toxic and erroneous one for the ASD community, and the mislabelling of NPD parents as ASD is an absolute tragedy for their children.

Is this addressed to me? Of course I don't know that. I'm only assuming that now based on what r2d2 said. I thought they were just keeping me informed, as teachers are supposed to, about how she was doing. Are you suggesting I'm narcissistic and mislabeled as autistic? Or that what I said could encourage such mislabeling? It just sounds to me as if someone with executive function problems and trouble reading social cues could have done the things he listed (except the bit about hating her son).

Edit: And yes, I did hope it would pass. She's an avid reader, and I thought she'd eventually pick the spellings up through reading. I tried to practice with her but she wasn't very willing. She has improved, but is still not a good speller. Is this toxic? Narcissistic? I'm honestly asking.

Last edited by Nonperson on 13 Oct 2014, 9:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I feel like a lot of the replies here are going to be 2edgy 15 year olds who are still in the teenage angst period and are still pissed off at there parents for actually enforcing rules on them

People still blame the mother, I see. Well, my mother is one of the kindest, most caring and unselfish people I know.

This post rings so true for me, particularly the 2nd paragraph.

Didn't go through anything as extreme as r2d2 did, but I did have a strong sense of not mattering which persists to this day. My mum wasn't narcissistic, but she had 4 children and an almost impossibly neurotic husband. He wanted nothing to do with his children; why he had so many I'll never even know, since he apparently didn't want to see or hear us. We couldn't come downstairs in the mornings until we were given permission to; at dinner time he insisted on eating alone with my mum and the dining room was barred to us.

I was left alone a lot with my older brothers, who taunted me mercilessly and acted like they genuinely despised me. My mum didn't check up on basic things, like whether I was brushing my teeth (I wasn't, hence needing a load of fillings in my teens.) Nobody seemed particularly interested in me, apart from my brothers when they were laughing at me and taunting me. (None of it was friendly teasing.)

In my late childhood at least (don't remember my early one), my mum barely seemed to be present in my life, despite her being a full-time 'mum'. In my teens she did start trying to include me in her life at long last, but by then it was too late to undo the damage. I felt like my dad still massively resented me, which didn't help either.

Anyway, long story short, I wouldn't say my mum had a narcissistic personality. But she seemed to leave her kids to their own devices an awful lot; it was almost like we were latchkey kids, except we were too middle-class for that. My mum got plastered half the week, but remained sober for long enough to not descend into total alcoholism and take us to school. That way my parents could pretend to themselves we weren't an utterly f**ked-up family, but we were; we just managed to hide it from the world better than a working-class family, that's all.

Apologies for the bio. Thinking gloomy thoughts tonight. Well, I think gloomy thoughts pretty much every night, to be fair.

And actually, what the...? If someone is neglected, they suffer from it regardless of what the neglectful parent's diagnosis is. It sounds to me, though, like this thread is diagnosing "narcissism" as the following:
1. Is female
2. Is not nurturing/is irresponsible

Which is not the DSM definition at all.

That was actually my guess. But, I do not want anyone to think I'm suggesting that people with autism are inclined not to be good parents. But it is simply reality that if autism can interfere with someone's ability to do their job - it can do that when their main job is being a parent. It doesn't have to. But there is no reason to believe that in some cases it might.

I assume that when teachers inform a parent that their child is having difficulty at school - it is being suggested that the parent should try and help their child - not that they are a bad parent

My mother is not narcissistic.

Not really. She is weird but definitely not a narcissist. The only person in my family that fits that bill is my sister.