When Your Daughter Calls You a Narcissist

Most mothers whose daughters call them narcissists hear about it from someone else in the family, and many of them look the word up soon afterward. The descriptions online list a person who needs constant admiration and uses people for what she can get from them, and the mother reading them thinks about the car loan she cosigned when her daughter was twenty-two and the rent she paid the year her daughter lost her job, which don't match the description. She starts listing reasons the word is wrong, and she finds plenty of them.

Her daughter isn't a psychiatrist, nobody has evaluated the mother, and she has probably never been diagnosed with anything, so the mother could be right that the label is inaccurate, and some relatives will agree with her. Being right about the label doesn't change her daughter's decision or the reasons behind it, though. A daughter who stops speaking to her mother has specific reasons, and the word is a short way of referring to all of them at once, so when a mother spends her effort proving the word wrong, she hasn't responded to any of the reasons.

Some mothers blame the internet, and the word did spread through forums and videos where daughters describe their mothers to one another. A mother who believes her daughter got the idea online and was persuaded by it will treat the estrangement as a mistake her daughter made because of other people, one she expects her daughter to correct eventually. The belief lets her ignore what her daughter is saying, and it treats an adult woman's decision about her own life as something other people decided for her. In most families the complaints started before the vocabulary did, and a mother can check by thinking back to arguments from ten or fifteen years ago, before her daughter used the word, and seeing whether they were about the same subjects.

When a daughter uses the word, she means specific incidents, and those are what a mother can respond to. Her daughter could mean years of comments about her weight, the money her mother lent toward an apartment deposit and then brought up during later arguments, or her mother telling relatives about her divorce before she had told them herself. A mother will remember some of these, remember others differently, and not remember some at all, while her daughter might remember every one of them clearly.

A mother can't do much with being called a narcissist except deny it, but she can respond to a specific complaint by saying she brought up the deposit money in arguments when she shouldn't have, or that she told relatives about the divorce because she was worried and understands now why her daughter was angry about it. If she remembers an incident differently, she can say so, and then the two of them are discussing what actually happened, the conversation her daughter was trying to have with her before she ever used the word.

One reason daughters use the word is that their specific complaints were dismissed earlier. If a daughter told her mother over several years that the comments about her weight hurt her and was told she was too sensitive, or that she should be grateful for the help with the deposit, then the word gave her an explanation thousands of other women agreed with at a point when her own family didn't. A mother who wants to understand why her daughter started using the word can think about how she responded the last several times her daughter raised a specific complaint.

If your daughter has called you a narcissist, you don't have to agree with the word, and arguing about it won't change her decision. Write down the specific complaints she has made over the years, in arguments, in texts, and when she told you she wanted distance, and respond to those in whatever contact she's still willing to have. If she has asked for no contact, sending anything is a decision to make carefully, and a letter disputing the word is likely to confirm what she already believes about you. Knowing what her specific complaints are means that if she contacts you later, you can respond to what she actually said.

For mothers

Was I Really That Bad?

A Thoughtful Guide for Mothers Facing Adult Child Estrangement

For mothers whose adult children have stopped calling or asked for no contact, and who want to understand what their children are saying before deciding how to respond.

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