NPD Moms – The Psychosomatic Type with Dr Liz

Transcript

Hi, Dr. Liz here, and I’m doing a series on narcissistic mothers to help adult children of narcissistic mothers understand them. That is a specialty area of mine. So I just want people to get the information. This does come from the book: Will I Ever Be Good Enough, Healing the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers by Carol McBright. Excellent book, I highly recommend. It has all kinds of exercises in there for you to do if you are a daughter of a narcissistic mother. I recommend this book to men frequently as well, even though it’s written for daughters because it’s so good in identifying the types of mothers. So that’s what the series is about, the types of mothers and the, when I’m talking about today is a psychosomatic mother. This is the mother who’s always sick. Something’s always wrong with her and it’s her way to get the attention onto her.

So at some point in her history, she learned that if I’m sick or if there’s something wrong with me, then I’ll get attention and I can be needy. I can be dependent. This is often the mom who is too sick to work, too sick to work, you know, never held a job because she’s so sick. Um, this is not real illnesses. They sometimes mothers go through real illnesses, people do. This is generally someone who has a very chronic problem. Like let’s say migraines, but then they never do anything to really reduce the triggers or to get help for it. Okay. So that’s defining feature here. There’s a difference when someone develops, let’s say a chronic problem, I’m also a specialist in chronic physical illness and hypnosis to help that. There’s a difference between someone trying to get help for that condition. Okay. And sometimes it does take a couple of specialists to figure that out or to see what’s going to be helpful for me. Sometimes it does take healing modalities to be able to do that.

Narcissistic mothers usually are not getting help for this. They’ll say, oh, I’ve tried everything, when they really haven’t. Okay. Or nothing helps so, I’m going to bed with a migraine or you’ll see them use illnesses. So let’s say they don’t want to go to a dinner with somebody well, a migraine will magically develop just at that time and, um, they’ll take to bed. Okay. They’ll often do competitive sickness as well, that’s what I call it. So if somebody else legitimately gets sick, they’ll have to one-up them somehow. Well, they don’t know what sick is or this or that, or, you know, I’m really sick. In that example, Carol Mcbride gives in the book is a dad who had to have hip surgery and the mom then kept complaining about her own hips. Or I think I’m going to have to have hip surgery, my hips are killing me and nobody’s paying me attention because he just had surgery like that kind of things. Competitive illness.

If your mother falls into this category, this often falls into the broader category of the ignoring mother because she’s in bed, sick, wanting you to take care of her. And the children are often left on their own to cook and clean and do all kinds of stuff just on their own because their mother’s too ill to help them. Sometimes the partner buys into this, to the partner will say, oh my God, don’t tell your mother that it’ll make her ill. You know, she can’t handle stress. Your mother can’t handle stress or is too sensitive, is sort of a keyword here for a narcissistic mother who’s falling into the psychosomatic type. So hope that helps you understand narcissistic mothers.

Okay. You can always go see more about me at my website, drlizhypnosis.com. I also run the anxiety clinic Hollywood, as well as the insomnia center. So I love all of those areas and helping people through this area. Often grown-up children of narcissistic parents have significant anxiety until they really begin to heal this area of their life and get a handle of how they want to live their life and how they want to handle their narcissistic parent. So that’s important too. Okay. Navigating that. And that once they figure that out it often brings the anxiety down. That’s why therapy is useful. All right. Talk to you soon. Peace.

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Peace and Health,
Dr. Liz