I didn’t say that
I don’t remember that
That’s not how I remember it
I don’t think I said that
I wouldn’t say something like that
That didn’t happen
It wasn’t like that.
Mmm-hmm. Anyone would be forgiven for thinking narcissism came with a side helping of amnesia.
There are two separate things going on when a narcissistic individual say they can’t remember clearly what they (or you) said or did. One is their internal attempts at ordering their world so they are always the hero and everything is always golden. The other is gaslighting, a form of psychological, manipulative abuse where the abusive person imposes their reality on others.
Everything is Rosy
The problem with maintaining a narcissistic facade is its dual nature. You have to present your ideal image to the outside world and simultaneously maintain your own belief in that image on the inside. I think narcissists do this in part by filtering out information that they receive from the outside which contradicts the persona of perfection they have created. Sometimes this means they can let contradictory information slide out of their minds.
I do believe they actually forget things.
Psychologists have a name for the discomfort felt when we are confronted with evidence which contradicts our preferred view of things – cognitive dissonance. We also have a word for the tendency that people have to dismiss or ignore information that contradicts deeply held world views – confirmation bias. Unsurprisingly people with personality disorders have very low tolerance for dissonance and a strong tendency towards confirmation bias.
Cognitive dissonance is the troublesome state of flux where nothing you previously thought seems to be as firm and clear as it once was and you entertain the unsettling possibility that you were actually mistaken. It is astonishing how strongly people will fight dissonance, most people really struggle to sit with it and wait for the parts that are in flux to settle into a new configuration. The natural outcome of dissonance is a change in attitude, belief or behaviour. Highly creative people who are apt to reinvent themselves are good at this, most of us are not. People with rigidly structured and defended personalities are worst at managing dissonance. They generally reject anything that provokes the sensation. Narcissists have highly defended personalities.
In order to maintain the belief of their superiority they must reject any outside information that challenges this belief. This could be by attacking the source of the challenging information by discrediting it or the person who delivered it. Sometimes it could be by simply pretending the information was never received in the first place, until they actually forget it. After all we remember things we pay attention to, because they made a big enough impact or because they are repeated. If you cannot psychologically cope with hearing you have behaved in a hurtful, mean way you may well push it out of your mind rather than mull over it. Then you just don’t remember it occurred at all.
Thus the narcissist preserves their internal mental model of themselves as a great person. They literally cannot recall any incidents when they were not great.
This explains the weird and unsettling circular conversations that happen if you try to confront a narcissist about their behaviour. They can outright deny that they ever did or said anything upsetting with such conviction. Some are very good liars. Some have blanked the incident from their mind because it clashes head on with their self-belief. They have to maintain their rosy world view of themselves on the inside as well as the outside.
Gaslighting
This is a big topic and worthy of an entire post in itself so I will briefly explain what gaslighting is and how it links with narcissistic amnesia.
From the 1944 film Gaslight, the term gaslighting means using psychological manipulation to undermine a person’s sense of what is happening around them, physically or emotionally, is actually real. Gaslighting is all about planting a seed of doubt within a person’s mind. Did I remember that correctly? Am I oversensitive? Was that an accident? In the film an abusive husband turns down the gas lights in the family home, hides personal items and denies he is doing it to destabilise his wife and have her money signed over to himself.
Gaslighting is psychological guerrilla warfare as it occurs within your own mind. It is an abuse which occurs in close relationships built over time and couldn’t be perpetrated by a stranger. This is because for the seed of doubt to take root you have to value the abuser’s opinion. You have to take them seriously and believe they are trying to accurately report their experiences in order for you to then question your contrasting recollection. This is also what makes this form of abuse so devastating.
A narcissist will employ gaslighting, they will attempt to override your reality (how you recall, react, think and feel about an event) with their preferred reality. This may not be out of a deliberate desire to drive you insane. Gaslighting can be unconscious. If a narcissist is used to shoring up their self-belief by rejecting contradictory information as mentioned earlier, they will rebuff any external evidence that undermines their glorious image of themselves. If your memories and feelings about an incident open up the possibility that their image is wrong they will feel attacked. Then they reflexively start to undermine your version of events.
This can lead to absurd and disturbing extremes where the narcissistic person outright denies something that happened even when confronted with evidence. It is hard to underestimate how confusing and distressing this is if it happens repeatedly. If it happens regularly and repeatedly in your close relationships (spouse, parents etc) it can lead to a state of psychological collapse and depression as a person looses all faith in their own perception.
My MIL has many times said she doesn’t recall doing or saying hurtful and mean things. What is additionally upsetting is how my husband in an attempt to preserve a collective family narcissism (we are a good and successful family) will forget about my MIL’s nasty behaviour too. Nasty behaviour which he had even written about in his journal, and then forgotten because it clashed with his family-image.
This has left me as one voice against two, one much closer than the original offender. Both trying to pretend that the narcissistic abuse isn’t happening. Both not remembering things I know full well happened.
There comes a point where you have to leave this madness. I have learned to hold firmly and securely onto my own memories and perceptions. There is no point trying to argue with narcissists who forget things. They will never believe you, they will never remember correctly or admit they were wrong. If their defences are so strong they can erase entire chunks of their lived experience do you really think you have some magic power that will persuade them to reinstate that soul-crushing, self-love shattering bit of information? Come off it. You’re on your own. And that is OK. By fully accepting your aloneness in the face of their selective memory lapses, you cannot be manipulated by them. This takes strength, I’m not denying that, but it can be done.
Narcissistic MIL 
Thank you for this article! I am estranged from my mother who conveniently “forgot” the most recent verbal & emotional attacks she launched 6 months ago. The only thing keeping my confidence in reality is that I have gotten in the habit of keeping texts, emails & phone messages that prove I’m not making these things up. Now by holding firm to the request that there must be boundaries in our relationship of how we speak & treat one another I have been called, “mean”, “nasty”, “condescending” and also unable to see my mom’s “good heart”. Articles like this really help me stay grounded. Otherwise I often feel like I’m going crazy & I get really depressed. Now that I have a child of my own I feel the stakes are too high to let such unhealthy habits continue to hurt me & my family.
-M.
I just had a conversation with my NMIL where she told me to my face that she did not take $40 back from her disabled grandson’s (my son’s) birthday card, and then skip the cake and candles so she could go to Bingo with her friend. I said, “You took it from my hands and I watched you.” Then, it was my fault because I didn’t stop her. Also, because I didn’t stop her, my “story” is very doubtful.
Know how they say that women tend to marry men like their fathers and men tend to marry women like their mothers? It turns out, I nearly married several extended family members, not just my mother (I’m cis-het, but my dad died when I was 6, so that was unlikely to happen).
When I was a pre-teen, my mom and my maternal grandmother got into a fight. I didn’t find out why until later, but it turned out that my grandmother’s (married) boyfriend had made a pass at my mom, and when my mom told my grandmother this, grandma accused my mom of being the one who instigated it. So, for a few years after that incident, my grandmother didn’t come to my birthday parties. One day, in my teen years, I was having a lot of conflict with my mom and my paternal grandmother suggested I come stay with them for a few days, and offered to pay back anyone who would loan me gas money to get there (she lived about 1.5 hours away and this was way before Paypal).
I asked my maternal grandmother for the money, and she agreed, but when I got to her house she was giving me all this crap about how I should be handling things, and that my mom should’ve done this or that when she raised me and my sister (mostly centered on “discipline”) and when I defended my mother, mentioning that she was no great mother or grandmother she got really pissy. And when I pointed out that she had missed more than one of my birthdays because she was fighting with my mom – over a cheating dirtbag – she gas-lit the crap out of me, claiming not only that it wasn’t true, but that my memory was faulty because of losing my father so young. That my father had died a good 6 years before this fight between them was apparently irrelevant to my faulty memory.
It took me a long time to realize that I did jump into a relationship with someone who treated me the same way I’d been treated growing up, by most of the people I grew up around. My mother thinks that the reason she didn’t like my ex (whom I met at the age of 17, and by the age of 20 was dumped by and raising the child of) is because her judgement was so much better than mine. In reality, I think it was because she saw the worst traits of herself and the family members she was most angry with.
Excellent post. Thank you as always. This goes to the core of living with someone who has NPD: how do you maintain a sense of self, a sense of what’s of what’s real, of what’s good… in the face of incessant attacks on both of those things. Looking forward to reading your post on gaslighting.
I have been loving your blog for 3 yrs. I check in every now and again, and I laugh, and feel fortified with awareness and words as a navigate my NMIL. To be fair, I had a Narci mom, who also had alcoholism and it wasn’t until my NMIL that I learned to separate the two, it was completely baffling to me that my NMIL behaved the way she did without drugs and alcohol. And now I am so grateful my mother drank, at least she passed out! The NMIL, carries around her cross of riteous superiority and she just does not turn off.
Your articles have helped me come a LONG way though. I completely sanctioned Her for 2 years, no unsupervised time with the grandchild, no flying to visit her on my dime, a blissful almost zero contact for me. Her emotional abuse, smear campaign against me (for marrying her golden child who now could not fulfill her dreams for her), has lighting, triangulating and general wake of drama that would pop up from all the narcissistic tentacles around her taught me to say NO, emotionally, psychically, physically. She is my teacher, and fair enough, as an echo I was easy prey. Not no more. Dealing with my husbands denial and magical thinking/forgetting has been a task. But we have made progress.
Bringing me to today, I lifted sanctions (Mercy) and invited her to her grandsons 4th Birthday. She has to stay in a hotel, which she can’t do by herself of course, so she invited her sister and her two kids (whom my son doesn’t know)….. and even that I’ve taken in stride, asking her to contribute financially to the party. As well, if she has supply around her she won’t be expecting me or my grandson to be her entertainment/energetic supply while she’s in town.
I gave her a job of decorating, and when she tried to hijack food and logistics, I kindly told her I had it taken care of (without explaining b/c she’s not in charge). To this she defensively justified her over reach, to which I (not giving an inch of my own perception away), told her not to go crazy. To which she stopped responding. Non manipulatable people are not good supply. She could of course find something terribly important she has to do, and not come at all and I will be at complete peace.
The things is, I know narci’s And I know she’ll try and throw a wrench or two at me: control this, change all your plans to suit me that, make it all about her her her, ie: does my son really need to go to bed when he’s tired? Can’t he just stay up with Grandma a little longer (she thinks grandma sounds old so she’s asked to be called Nana, but i always refer to her as grandma 😈 when she’s not around). Coupled with my husbands malleability (as she calls it). I know I may get triggered. So I am upping my Narci literacy and plans, my ammo. For I am done being nice, Narcis eat that shit for breakfast. I am simply going to take care of myself and my son, whom I will not subject to the guilt and shame she uses to control/groom her victims. Your grooming article was off the charts, and sadly all to familiar to me.
It ends with me
Thank you for sharing your story. I’ve come across this blog while digging through the internet for more information on what I’ve been going through for 15 years. I can relate to so much of what you’re talking about. I came across a post about you potentially putting this info in an ebook format and selling it on Amazon. Did you ever do that? Is be interested in purchasing it 🙂
Thank you for sharing your experiences. I do hope that you are finding a way to part. I am in a similar position. My husband is controlling, abusive and manipulative. He has a narcissistic mother and I have been bemused as to how he can replicate his own unhappy childhood in our home while also being fairly aware of his own mother’s damaging behaviour. It’s incredibly difficult getting the mental energy and finances to leave, but I must.
We relocated to help mil with her business after she was widowed. What I didn’t know was I was not to be included in anything. Before the move, she gave me a hug and whispered “I’m so happy to have him back. You know you can’t leave him unless he cheats on you.” Both came out of the blue and my hair stood on end. I started to cry uncontrollably (away from her) and when I told my husband, he didn’t believe me. No way would say those things, they make no sense, she’s so appreciative and excited. I was so cruel to say such things. Totally the beginning of the end. 6 month’s later he started an affair with mil’s favourite (married) employee. It was insanity. Husband begged me to try and reconcile (it was a stupid fling, no love, just attention via sex, the other woman was a notorious serial cheater). Mil flipped out about him not leaving me and we haven’t spoken in 4 years. Her mask slipped and she told him that “if you stay married, you give all the control back to lemondrop” and he was mortified, he saw her rage. Suddenly the attention she gave him seemed very inappropriate to him and creepy. He moved us back to our original home and she never reaches out to me or the kids. He maintains a relationship with her, but limited. Her treatment of me hurt almost as much as the affair. She denies everything. Never said those things, it never happened. Thirty years of her fawning all over me telling me she loved me. She just wanted him to leave me so he could move back in with her. Didn’t even want the kids. He’s 50. She’s a therapist. If I could go back in time I don’t think I would have married him, although he has put all possible effort into therapy and fixing what he did. The toxicity of the family, the covert incest, the amount of shame and blame and guilt I’ve carried for not trusting her all this time has been awful. She’s not happy I won’t engage with her, but only because she can’t get me close enough to hurt again. My crawling back to her only serves her image and proves she did nothing wrong. I won’t do it. She’s a weak, manipulative woman with no idea how she’s perceived. She wanted me off the pedestal and gone. It didn’t happen so she’s changed the story to me being a bitter victim. It’s crazy making.
My mother in law is the person you wrote about.
I cannot even look at my husband of 26 years because he says nothing “in the moment”.
She could be humiliating me in front of twenty people saying I do not deserve to drive a car.
I’m a stay at home mom. I literally ask for NOTHING but a roof over my head and food. She hates that he even provides that.
If I worked and blew all my money on cigarettes and $1000 hand bags; she would at least not be able to hate me for not working. She would find something else. I can’t believe it took is this long to realise what she is.
My own mother has some of these traits. She is self invloved. But, she is never mean.
Thank you for your blog.
My husband and I are dealing with his narcissistic mom and his dad, who has just been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Since their facade/cocoon of false perfection has fallen in shards, we’re seeing much more narcissistic rage and general acting out on her part. It’s heartbreaking, maddening, and frightening, since she turns her rage onto her formerly servile husband, who has a brain disease. We are trying to find care for both of them and also sustain ourselves and our boundaries. THANK GOODNESS FOR THERAPY!
I’m grateful to you for your articulate, intelligent, helpful posts, and I wish you and your family all the best. It is so truly merciful just to know that I’m not alone in this maddening situation…
I also have been loving your blog for years, interestingly my NMIL’s second husband (who brought the money to the relationship) finally had enough and ran off with a 24 yr old, and now interestingly there is a chink in her armor and some light is being shed on some of her cognitive dissonance. The religion still makes it very difficult for light to pierce her armor of righteous perfection….. but it is happening. There is some hope…. eventually people do get tired of being abused and they step out of the vaccume. My husband still won’t tell her how crazy she is, he still thinks he has to mirror back her utmost perfection. So dishonesty and pretense do prevail, but I whisper form the sidelines and stand my ground firmly in my own perception.
This was so helpful to me. I’ve been no-contact with my two NPD maternal grandparents for 9 years, but I’m marrying the son of an NPD mother at the end of this year. He is luckily wise to the narcissism, which has made navigating this complex family issue easier than it otherwise might be, but it is hard nonetheless. Articles like this help me us make well-researched plans and set clear boundaries proactively for what is sure to be a lifetime of rocky times with her.
Something odd happened, that I had to share. Yesterday, my mother – whom I haven’t had any real conversation with in about 2 years – since about the time I’d first commented on this post – did something which really upset me. The house we’d lived in for 20 years, with my son (and with my sister and nephew for his first 5 years), fell into horrible shape over the last several years. We did our best to manage it, but we never had enough money to fix the certain problems related to it being 130 years old and so a few days ago she finally sold it as a tear-down, for less than even what we paid for it originally. That wasn’t the part that upset me – it was inevitable at this point.
As far as I’m concerned, the house was co-owned by my mother and I, even though only her name was listed with the county taxes. That’s because, when we’d very first moved in (after our last house burned down), she was fully the owner. But I was added to the mortgage a couple of years later, because her credit wasn’t good enough to refinance when we’d needed it. In fact, my
name was at the top of the paperwork from then on. And for most of the time we lived in that house, I paid half the bills, I dealt with mortgage company, the insurance, repair people, utility companies, etc. At some point in our co-living situation, I took over the managing of our shared bank accounts and paying of the bills organically, and I felt like it was only fair – she’d spent enough of our young lives being the one who had to cringe when she looked at how much money was left in the bank after each insufficient paycheck. It seemed right that I take on that burden, after a certain point. Plus, a fair amount of the “room & board” portion of my financial aid/student loans the last 5 years had gone to keeping up the taxes on the house – bizarrely, the primary mortgage eventually was charged off by the bank, probably to keep us from heading another class action against them for their shady refinancing practices.
Point being, I should’ve gotten at least close to half of what mom got for the house (after the closing costs). But because we aren’t speaking anymore, I had no role in her selling it (which is notable in who she hired to sell it and how much that person charged in realtor fees). And yesterday, as sis, nephew and I were leaving the movie theater, I saw a text saying she’d sent me some money. I cringed again, checking the bank.
What she’d sent was less than 1% of what she’d gotten for the house (which was in a primo location, and on a great huge lot, if nothing else). The thing is, I’m a person in the process of applying for disability benefits, who had to leave school because of medical reasons, and who has been devastatingly broke the last few months. I should’ve been so happy to have a decent chunk of money go into my bank account. Instead I’m devastated, because I was counting on getting enough to keep me afloat for a year (I live in low-income housing and get by on very little), while I fight for the benefits I am legally entitled to. Instead, that amount is only going to last until the end of this year, unless I skip some bigger items I was planning to get with it, like a decent pair of eyeglasses and new tires.
And the reason that she gave me so little, based on conversations with my sister (who is still in full communication with her) is because she’s selectively forgotten most of my contributions. We suspect this happened in conversations with her siblings, who she’s gotten closer to since the immediate family has wanted to spend less time with her, her selective memory and the narcissistic defensiveness that comes with it. Siblings whom have some of their own selective memories – because it’s ultimately from their mother and father than most of the narcissism was passed down.
So I spent a chunk of last night, talking to my sister, about what options I have (if any) to talk to my mother about this and make her understand that I not only need more of that money, I deserve it – by virtue of all the energy and money I put into maintaining that household for more than 15 years. An option that won’t just turn into another huge fight, such that I won’t even be able to stand seeing her at holiday events.
Then, this afternoon, I realize that I have two emails from WordPress, notifying me of 2 “new” comments on this post – comments which, according to the time stamps, were posted in July of 2020. So, not new. And no clue why I’d suddenly gotten email notifications about them (though wondering if they were sitting in moderator limbo, which has happened to with older blogs I’ve not maintained myself). But man did they turn out to be timely – reminding me of when I first really started to understand that my mother’s treatment of me was just more malignant narcissism in my life. Rereading my own comments from 2020 helped me gain a little confidence for what I have to do now.
As scary as it is, I’ve settled on sending my mother a video, explaining why I’m hurt and upset about the money situation. It’s the best option I have to make sure she can’t take something in a written note out of context or in the wrong tone, and where I don’t have to engage with her in a circumstance where it’s likely to turn into another nasty fight, where my mother will say something ELSE to me that she can’t ever take back. Plus, it represents more tangle evidence of what exactly I said and did in response to this situation, to avoid false accusations later, as part of her selective memory issue – like the SMS messages I saved, of the unretractable things she said before.
Just felt the need to share this weird notification event, that helped me process what’s going on right now, even if this post has otherwise not seen traffic in years. 🙂