Surviving Mother’s Day After A Lifetime of Narcissistic And Family Scapegoating Abuse

For scapegoats, Mother’s Day is a day of loss. 

The commercials start off with messages of honouring your mother for the incredible woman she is. She is beautiful! Perfect! Amazing! You wonder what it must be like — must have been like growing up — for those who tear up at the loving sentiments splashed across their screens. 

You’re tearing up too, grieving a life that never was and never will be. Grieving what ought to have been yours.

Then the greeting card aisle chimes in by offering full-bodied prose that lavishes mothers, reminding everyone that there are people out there who are buying these cards without irony. Without guilt. With genuine love in their hearts who want their mothers to know just how much they mean to them.

You want to pull them aside and ask, “What did that feel like? Was it as amazing as I imagine? Tell me all about it while I soak it all in.” 

It’s the friends who tell you about the upcoming spa trip they have planned for just them and their mom, as a way to bond. Because they are so close. “She’s my best friend,” they say. 

It’s the phone calls they get to make out of admiration not fear. The hugs they offer because they fully mean it, not because it is expected, or because if not offered there will be consequences. The gifts and letters given that they know will be appreciated, without guilt of never being enough. 

It’s a day of genuine celebration, not forced fakery as an emotional survival tactic. Grovelling for the woman that neglected, punished, abandoned, and destroyed you is a true self-gaslight. Do they make greeting cards offering deepest sympathies for all the mental and emotional gymnastics you have to do every year on this day? 

Imagine fawning over your mother because she is, actually, the greatest. 

Everyone Has A Mother

This is literally a universal truth. Biologically speaking, we all have a mother. And while families take on many forms after children are born (and certainly not every pregnant person who delivers a baby identifies as a mother), it still feels like the greatest ‘eff-you’ from the universe when you don’t get to have a loving mom. 

Especially today on Mother’s Day.

“Everyone has a mother”, you think. “Except me”. 

Except us. 

I need to add a disclaimer here because I want to acknowledge our fellow LGBTI2QA+ individuals and relationships. While I am speaking about motherly love — for this Mother’s Day-themed post — I am not meaning to disclude or erase the many configurations of gender, family and parenthood. If I do so, it is inadvertent and I would like to be corrected so I can acknowledge my mistake, grow and learn. Nor am I suggesting in this article that it is only the “mother wounds” that lead to attachment trauma. The pain of father wounds runs just as deep, though culturally we do place a certain significance on mothering as critical to attachment security, nurturance, and our developing sense of love. 

Mishka’s Story:

In a previous post, I shared Mishka’s story of “Coming Home” after experiencing narcissistic abuse. She and I met up before Mother’s Day this year to discuss the role and meaning of this significant day in the lives of scapegoats and survivors of narcissistic abuse. Here is what Mishka shared with me:

“This is my 6th Mother’s Day as a parent. I have three sons and in that sense it’s a day of love and joy (and chaos). But this year is different. It’s only my second Mother’s Day without my biological mom who disowned me. And now it’s my first without my “surrogate” mum, who devastatingly passed away just before Thanksgiving.”

When she was ejected from her family, Mishka was lovingly “adopted” by her surrogate mum. She says:

“Mary (*not her real name) taught me what it meant to truly be safe, supported, loved and accepted. As a child, she was like the community’s hub for children. Everyone gravitated towards her. I don’t know why she took a liking to me. She either sensed what was happening to me and took me under her wing, or was just an angel in disguise that the universe or some higher power knew I needed. She stuck with me throughout my life, even though we didn’t actually see each other that much. She returned home to care for her own ailing parents who couldn’t immigrate with her. So we had phone calls here and there, visits when possible. Still, I called her “mum” from the get-go. When her parent’s passed, she came back and we got close.

It always felt special. I would tell people I had two moms! What a lucky kid. So when I was ejected from my family of origin and Mother’s Day approached just a few short months later, I didn’t know what to do. There were two conundrums; one, do I send a bland text to my bio-mom as a protective action on my part (not sending one would mean more smear campaigns, backlash and character assassinations)? and two, who do I give my daughterly love to? Who do I honour and acknowledge? Would it be OK to message my “surrogate mum”? To send her a card instead?

I remember my last Mother’s Day card to my bio mom was probably one of the best. It was deeply adoring, grovelling even — that’s what I knew I needed to do for her — and detailed the past decade of all the big and small things she had done for me that I was grateful for. She told my husband it wasn’t good enough and she didn’t believe a word I said. Later I found out she was deeply jealous of the card I had given my father on Father’s Day (which wasn’t nearly as good — another lesson I had learned growing up was to never show as much affection or care to him or you would risk setting her off). What I didn’t account for is that she would be set off anyway. Because I acknowledged him, and because my card failed to fix her deep wounds of self-loathing.” 

An Alternative Option For Celebrating Mother’s Day

Mother’s Day shouldn’t raise so many questions. But for scapegoats, especially those estranged from family or currently navigating a tenuous no-contact relationship, it is a deeply confusing, painful, and triggering day. 

In this article, I want to share an idea for how to experience Mother’s Day as “motherless” people. How you can grieve, and give, in ways that replenish you, rather than distance you from yourself. How you can reconnect with your internal mother, how you can honour your own mothering. How you can embrace the mother figures who did step up for you along the way, and how you can validate your truth and protect yourself and your energy from the mothers that “couldn’t love you”, through no fault of your own. 

Too often when faced with triggering moments like this; holidays, special dates like birthdays, or even places you used to go together or things you used to do together— in order to not feel the tremendous weight of the grief and pain, we dissociate ourselves (dis-associate). We ignore the holiday. We bypass the birthday. We take the long way around to skip the memories that live at our old haunts. In short, we try not to feel. 

But I don’t want you to miss any more seconds of your life numbing out. You shouldn’t have to skip a day of your life every year because of what someone else did to you. 

The problem with shutting down the pain is it flips off the switch for joy too. Our emotions exist on a spectrum, and like an electrical circuit, when the breaker is turned off for one, we can’t experience the other. Dissociating from pain means dissociation from the possibility of joy. And how can we heal if we never give ourselves the possibility of experiencing joy?

In the following section, I am going to share some thoughts on how to reclaim Mother’s Day, whether you are a parent or not, whether you are in contact or not, or wavering somewhere in the middle. These are hypotheses I invite you to try out and test for yourself. 

Connecting With Our Inner Mother and Our Mothering

Let’s begin by acknowledging you. If you are a parent, this is a day for you to celebrate breaking the cycle. Of stepping up and being the parent that you never had and that every child deserves. This was no easy feat. You had to actively take every parenting template you had been exposed to, every limiting belief instilled in you and unlearn them. You had to reconstruct parenting from the ground up, loving someone else more than you were ever loved. If you are doing this, then you know the grief that comes up when you stare at your child adoringly and think “This is easy. Loving them and nurturing them is the easiest thing I have ever done. And yet my mother couldn’t do this for me.”

It is painful to realize that validating your child’s feelings and honouring their realities is much easier than harming them. That gaslighting, guilt trips, and psychological and emotional harm are harder than just showing up for your kid safely and lovingly. 

I’m not suggesting parenting is effortless. It’s exhausting — especially because you are probably doing it with little to no support. And every time someone mentions they are going to send their kid off to Grammie’s for the weekend, or that Grandma is coming over to help them tidy up, get some food and do some dishes so they can get some well-deserved rest — it stabs you a little bit. Look at you, mama, holding your sick child, making the meals, doing the housework, doing it all, and on your own. Because you knew that the sheer exhaustion of having no support was better for your child than subjecting them to the toxicity you worked so hard to escape and rebuild yourself from. 

This Mother’s Day, praise you — the weary, burnt out, but still going cycle breaker. 

Celebrating Motherhood By Re-Parenting Yourself

If you are not a parent, celebrating yourself is still a necessity today. Because you are still a cycle breaker, still out there doing life on your own without a sanctuary to run to or call up when life hits you too hard and everything becomes too much. 

But you are also a parent. Yes, you are a parent to yourself. One of the main tasks of recovering from parental toxicity and attachment wounding — especially the wounds brought on by narcissistic and family scapegoating abuse — is “re-parenting yourself”. This means teaching yourself, and your body, that you are indeed worthy of love, care, safety, acceptance and belonging. That you are, in fact, good enough — fabulous even — just as you are. 

Reparenting yourself means that when life takes you down, you provide yourself nurturance, even when you were never taught what it felt like. That you provide yourself compassion and grace, even when you were never offered it. That you allow yourself to make mistakes, even when you had to be perfect just to survive. Reparenting is a skill that you have had to boot-strap from the ground up by piecing together your own ideas of what safe, comforting parenting could feel like because you were never given these as blueprints. You are re-constructing a map out of scratch. That is not easy. 

Celebrate you for being fierce enough to love yourself despite everything you were taught to believe about yourself as unlovable. Celebrate you for being brave enough to love yourself when your toxic parent tried to ensure no one else would show you love. Celebrate you for being strong enough to fall to pieces and cry oceans of tears because you know deep down how worthy and deserving of love you inherently are. Celebrate you for choosing to honour yourself and care for yourself, while grieving all the things you lost by not having a healthy home and family. 

Honouring Other Mothers and The Concept of Motherhood

Mothering is not something that has to be done by our own biological parents. Like Mishka, many scapegoats survived because there was one person who took them under their wing, or certain moments in life when someone stepped up for them and they felt seen. Those moments were enough for your young brains to latch on to the idea that you may be worthwhile after all. That someone sees your value. This Mother’s Day, take time to acknowledge the people who enabled you to keep going, to keep surviving on crumbs. 

Who stepped up for you? Was it a teacher? A friendly shop-keeper? Did you have extended family who took you in, if not permanently, but at least in their hearts? Was there a friend’s parent who modelled for you what a loving parent is actually like, that gave you insight into the quality of care that does exist in the world? What about in-laws that have included you as one of their own? Maybe your only peek into loving family was a cherished TV family, but you were able to transport yourself on ‘imagination journies’ to be with them when you felt scared and alone. 

Whoever it was, can you send them gratitude today? If they are living and you can reach out to them, could you send them a card or letter thanking them for the role they played in your life, whether they know it or not? Can you write the letter and not send it? Can you send silent thanks straight from your heart to theirs, whether they are alive or not? 

Can you engage in loving rituals like meditation, candles, tears, walks in nature, loving kindness mantras, symbolic hugs, or just talking out loud to the energy of the world and trusting the message will reach its intended recipient? 

Can you sit in silent visualization and conjure up the memories of all those moments when you felt safe, accepted, and cared for, no matter how fleeting the moment was, so that your body can remember what it feels like? Athletes use these visualizations to achieve impossible physical feats. The body and mind are connected so intimately that visualization like this can be physically healing. 

Whatever your style of re-connection, let today be a day where you honour those who stepped up and helped you survive. And remember, you will feel joy and pain, lightness and sadness, fortitude and a faintness of heart. The joy will bring along its close companion; grief. And the greatest healer of grief is giving. Giving back to yourself what was lost or that you never had. And giving to others in a loving, meaningful way. 

If you have no one to thank, and I’m deeply sorry if this is the case because you deserved much much better, can you opt instead to send your love to other scapegoats and survivors today? Those that are mothers and those that need mothers. Some of them will not be OK today. You can physically send them messages of love, like on chat boards or in online support groups. Or you can send them love energetically as described above. Thank them for breaking the cycle too so that our future generations won’t have to go through what you did. 

Giving Love Is The Antidote To Toxicity

I firmly believe that giving more love is the antidote to toxicity. In my years working clinically, and in my own trauma healing process, what I have discovered is that people who include giving and community contribution in their recovery journies seem to fare better, and seem to find freedom, peace and wholeness sooner. 

One of the reasons people are scapegoated is because their hearts are full of truth, justice, empathy, and awareness for others. These are your gifts and the world intends you to use them. You are no longer wasting them on those who rejected your offerings. This Mother’s Day, can you honour your gifts by sharing your love with those who need to receive it most today?

Loving Kindness For The Concept of Mothering and Motherhood

I want to offer one final option for you. And it is not sending loving kindness to your family or toxic parent. If you choose to do that, I applaud you. I have witnessed clients do this when they feel capable enough, and there are benefits to offering loving-kindness to those who have harmed you. 

But for today, ask yourself first, would you be risking re-injury by forcing love and grace towards someone who still holds a metaphorical knife and has the potential to slice through you? Especially if you are at the beginning of your recovery journey or have recently gone no contact. To offer loving-kindness is to be incredibly open and vulnerable, and energetically, I wonder how being so exposed can put us in emotional and psychological danger. If you have not yet built up safeguards or protective mechanisms, Mother’s Day may not be the day for this “advanced” practice. And that’s OK. I am sharing this OPTION (not advice) with you in case there are some of you who feel pressure to offer love or forgiveness today as a healing practice. I just want you to know it’s OK to be not OK today. To be angry and bitter and hurt. Why wouldn’t you be? 

Instead, can you send energy out into the concept of motherhood itself? To help create a universal collective of healing vibes (yup, sometimes recovery is a bit woo-woo). Whether it’s mother nature, nurturance as a practice, mother energy, or any trait you associate with motherhood and mothering, can you fill up your heart with this force, and send this force forward to contribute to a greater good? Can you embody these “mother-like” (but not gender-specific) traits and integrate them into your day and into your relationships? Can you ‘mother’ a friend in need? Can you ‘mother’ a plant in your garden? Can you nurture and support the growth of a vibrant community for you and others locally or on a grander scale? 

Whatever you choose to do — whether scientifically grounded or wonderfully woo — make sure it honours you and your recovery needs. 

Mother’s Day is a reminder of all that survivors of narcissistic and scapegoating abuse have lost. And it is an opportunity to grow as a community of scapegoats taking up your rightful place in the world. Rejecting the smallness that you are expected to be. Whether you choose to use Mother’s Day as a platform to speak your truth (to yourself or others), whether you use it to raise awareness in the world about narcissistic and family scapegoating abuse, or whether you use it to silently, and simultaneously grieve and give thanks, this day is still yours to own. It is part of the 365-day package that is rightfully yours. Do not skip today. 

You are alive. That is the one gift she gave you that has made the world an immensely better place. 

I am so thankful you are here.  

Update:

Mishka did opt to send a heartfelt card to her surrogate mum. She told me in a follow-up email that she was able to give it to her in person and thus watched her read it, take it in with genuine love, and thank her profoundly. It was a moment she says stays with her every day as she strives to keep her mum’s memory alive in her heart.