How I Went No Contact with My Narcissistic Mother

A personal account of long-term narcissistic abuse, boundaries, guilt, and the decision to protect my own family.

Content warning: This article describes a personal experience with a toxic family relationship, psychological pressure, humiliation, and a disordered relationship with food. If you recognize yourself in the text, please read it at a pace that feels safe for you.

Why It Is So Hard to Write About This

This article will probably be one of the hardest ones I will ever write. Anyone who has experienced narcissistic abuse knows how difficult it is to describe. Complex trauma often happens so subtly, and individual incidents can seem so trivial from the outside, that when the victim begins to talk about them, they may feel ridiculous themselves. It is not one big dramatic scene with a storm, lightning, and horror-movie music. It is more of an overall feeling.

That feeling of my stomach tightening when I see on my phone screen that she is calling or messaging. That fear when I have a great idea and want to share it, but I already know she will put it down and spoil my joy. That sudden anger at the people closest to me after a conversation with her. Narcissists cannot stand anyone with whom you have a good relationship. They need their victims as isolated as possible, so they subtly inject comments about those people into conversations, comments that pretend to be justified. That is why it is so easy to latch on to them — because they are usually based on a small piece of truth. After all she only wants what’s best for me and who else will tell me the truth if not my own mother? More than once, I left her place suddenly angry at my beloved husband, my wonderful mother-in-law, and even my own sister.

Another reason it is hard to write about this is that even after everything I went through with her, I still feel a kind of obligation to defend her good name. I do not want to attack or smear her. On the other hand, I know I have the right to describe the events I experienced. It is therapeutic for me, and I also think it may help other daughters of narcissistic mothers know they are not alone. These topics are discussed more openly today, even in the Slovak space, but many years ago I would have been immensely grateful for a blog like this.

I have already written in this article that my relationship with her had always been complicated. So how and why did it come to the point that I cut ties with her completely?

A Decision That Did Not Happen Overnight

I assure you, this decision did not happen overnight. In fact, at that moment nothing “big” even happened — which, by the way, is one of the many reasons she still does not understand what actually happened. Nor was it the first attempt. We had cut contact several times before, but then time passed, things no longer seemed so terrible, I began longing for “some kind of” mother, guilt arrived, pity arrived, pressure from others arrived — and in the end I always gave in. Unfortunately, very shortly after each “reconciliation,” I regretted my decision every time. Reconciliation never happened in a way, where she realized that she, too, had something to do with the state of our relationship. She took it more as an invitation to continue the abuse, without any apology. After all, she is my mother; she has a right to everything. That is just how she is, and I must accept her as such. She sacrificed so much for me. Classic. The golden collection of family manipulation.

When a Child Becomes Responsible for a Parent’s Mood

In the article mentioned above, I wrote that things at home got worse after my father left us and I became her new victim in his place. Suddenly I was responsible for her happiness, her mood, and the peace of the household. I learned to read her mind and predict what needed to be done so there would be calm at home, at least for a while. During puberty, a person naturally begins to rebel and see the world differently than they were taught to see it. In our home, however, personal opinions had no place. So, I learned not to have one, ever. To this day, when someone asks me what I think about something, I panic. I do not think I am stupid. It is just that asserting myself, expressing an opinion, and then defending it is in strong conflict with what my nervous system learned.

Before I “learned” it, I suffered my share. Almost every Saturday I was thrown out of the house. I do not know why it was always Saturday, but perhaps because on Fridays I went out with friends and on Saturdays I did not perform as required when cleaning, or I was not willing to reveal every single detail of my evening. It is hard to say what the real reason was — when rereading family logic in hindsight, a crystal ball would have come in handy.

The Body, Shame, and the Beginning of an Unhealthy Relationship with Food

Like any loving parent, she threw me out of the house; she was not going to feed such a wh*re. I went to live with my grandmother for about two months. In the modeling competition, I eventually made it into the top twenty, but not the top ten. That was when I decided I would rather study at university — at least there I could eat. And I did start eating. During those two months of exile at my grandmother’s, I gained more weight than I ever had before. When my mother saw me on the street after some time, the only thing she said to me was: “Ugh, you’re fat!” That was the beginning of my unhealthy relationship with food and weight, something I still struggle with today. She was very angry at me for giving up modeling. For a while, she could have been a local celebrity, bragging about her beautiful daughter with a chance of success. And I ruined it all for her.

Adulthood, Successes, and Comments That Always Hurt

During university, there were also several times when she was dissatisfied with me, cut me off, and somehow, we still patched things up. I had already been working for about three years when I first decided that, for my own peace and calm, it would be best not to be in contact with her. No matter how hard I tried, whether with her or at work, I was never good enough for her. Either I did not call her often enough, or I did not show her sincere love and gratitude, or I was not living in the right city or in the right relationship. For example: I lived in Brno (the second largest city in the Czech Republic) and was single. She lied to her colleagues that I was living with my rich boyfriend in Prague…

As I was approaching thirty, she shouted at me that soon I would only be good enough to be a married man’s mistress. I had simply had enough of comments like that. I was satisfied with my life, but she spoiled every joy of mine that was not suitable for shouting about around Rožňava (my hometown in Slovakia). I had not spoken to her for about a year when I was promoted at work and traveled on my first business trip to Japan as an interpreter. I was proud of myself, happy about it, and in a weak moment at the airport I called her. The conversation went as if nothing had ever happened. No mention of the past, nothing. As if we had spoken the day before…

A Wedding That Was Supposed to Be About Me Too

After some time, I got together with my now-husband, and after a very short time — after ten days of dating — he proposed to me. I called her first with the happy news. I got scolded because SHE was not ready for my wedding, how dare I tell her over the phone — I lived about 400 km away — and I was not normal for moving back home, where I would be good for nothing more than working as a sales assistant (nothing against sales assistants). When she saw my wedding dress, she merely remarked contemptuously that she could see this wedding would be all about simplicity. Suddenly, after the wedding, when everyone praised my dress to her, she was proud and thrilled. I probably do not even need to mention that my entire wedding was about her: twenty minutes before the ceremony, I was still in my underwear with wet hair because I was doing her hair. During the reception, she constantly reminded me that her glass was empty, her plate was empty. I tried to dance with my father only ONCE, and even then she interrupted because the DJ was playing her song and I had to go dance with her. My only concern was that she felt good, that she had someone to talk to, that everything with her was all right.

Despite all of that, my husband and I still enjoyed the wedding, and if I erase her from the picture, it was a wonderful celebration 😀

When I Finally Named What Had Been Happening

Believe it or not, even after moving back to my hometown, I found a well-paid job at the time in Košice (the second largest city in Slovakia, about 75km from my hometown) — not in a supermarket — and commuted there every day. I got up at five every morning — I also went to the gym before work — and often came home exhausted as late as eight in the evening. Out of nowhere, she showed up at our place saying she wanted to discuss something important to her. When I told her to come back another time because I had just come home from work and was very tired, she was offended that she could no longer rely even on family, even though she was asking for so little. It sounds ridiculous, but when drops keep falling into a glass for a long time, it eventually overflows. This was when it overflowed, and I cut contact with her again. I was desperate. That was when I first dared to type into Google — in English, because there was no mention of it in Slovak at the time — “I don’t like my mother.” I came across articles about narcissistic mothers, and finally everything began to fall into place. Almost all the signs fit her, and I felt a little relieved that I could finally name what had been happening, not just feel it.

In the meantime, I became pregnant — this time without shame, and for real 😊 — and the flying monkeys began pressuring me into having a relationship with her. I resisted for a long time because I kept telling myself it would be better to give birth to my child in an already “cleared” environment. In the end, I gave in. And then again, and then again… and I kept regretting that I had not resisted more during my pregnancy. It was no longer only about me, but also about my children.

When the Children Became Another Tool of Pressure

As a grandmother, she saw herself as Mrs. Perfect. She wanted to present herself as the best of the best, but she did not have the patience for it. When she found out that my son had slept over at my mother-in-law’s, she immediately wanted him to sleep over at her place too. When my son cried for nearly an hour while falling asleep, she called desperately for us to come pick him up — we lived 40 km away from her. When my second son developed a fever at her place — the previous day he had been bitten by a neighbor’s cat — she was irritated that, in the hot summer, she had to go around pharmacies with him looking for medicine. Later she even said that we should bring her only healthy children. For one thing, she could not get sick because she could not miss work — although, miraculously, when she wanted to, she could easily take several weeks of sick leave — and she definitely was not going to sit at home with a sick child. It would interrupt her plans.

Once, my WhatsApp account was set to one number, and I did not receive a notification from the other number she used to write and ask whether the children could come to her place. Instead of calling me, she wrote me an outraged novel about how I was raising the children against her, forbidding her from seeing them, what an ungrateful pig I was — at this point I take it as my nickname — and so on, and so on. Even though she really raised my blood pressure, I told myself I would not handle it in any radical way. I only wrote back that she could have called me before launching into such a message. Instead of apologizing — which a normal person would have done — she wrote that I communicated with her too little and therefore she never knew where she stood. It is true that at the time I was trying to limit communication with her to matters concerning the children only. I told myself that even if I, as her daughter, no longer wanted a relationship with her, perhaps she could be a good grandmother. I was in no way raising them against her, nor was I limiting contact between her and her grandchildren. But the children became a means of further abuse against me.

Another time, when I pointed something out to her, she told me I was ill for reacting so sensitively to her and that I should go see a psychologist. I had expected something along the lines of: yes, you’re right. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it that way… but oh well.

The Last Straw

A few weeks after the incident with the undelivered message, my children got sick. She was supposed to come home — she works abroad — the following weekend. I caught myself spending the whole week with my stomach clenched because the children were sick, they could not go to her place, and I had to figure out how to tell her. Of course, she did not take it well. She seemed to see it as though the children had gotten sick on purpose right then… and that was when I told myself that enough was truly enough. That was more than two years ago, and I am very firmly decided that we do not need her in our lives.

Life After Cutting Contact

The children do not ask about her at all, and I do not think about her very often either. My life is a million times calmer without her, and no matter what anyone thinks, the happiness of the family I created for myself is worth it.