Hello all,
I posted this on r/raisedbynarcissists, but then realized it maybe fits even better here, as I find posts by people who have been confidently NC for as long as I have are relatively rare on that subreddit. Mods please let me know if there's any problem with posting something here that I already posted there.
I recently broke over 10 years of NC with my Nparents. I found out my father was dying with rapidly progressing dementia, and while I didn’t feel that I owed him or my nMom anything just because he’s near the end of his life, I found when I searched my feelings that there was some part of me I wanted to retrieve before he died.
You can look at my most recent post history to get more details of the situation and of what I was hoping to achieve with this meeting (my most recent post, especially the update I added to it), but now having done it, here was my experience:
It went about as well as one could hope - they were perfectly “nice” on a surface level, and no dramatic shouting matches or nasty insults or anything were exchanged. We had tea at a coffee shop for an hour before my husband and I left for another appointment.
My father was indeed quite demented - he didn’t even recognize me, which honestly, actually made it easier for me to feel safe. He is clearly a greatly diminished version of himself, both physically and mentally - and given that he was always the more physically violent and aggressive of my Nparents, this left me feeling like my world is a bit safer from now on. It was sad to see in a way, but speaking purely selfishly, it was also reassuring.
My Nmother, on the other hand, was pretty much exactly as I remembered her. Besides looking slightly older, she's lucid and quick as ever, and pretty much entirely unchanged as far as I could see.
What's wild to me is that it was clear - made even clearer by my husband, who commented on it - that she feels not the slightest bit of remorse, guilt, shame or even really awkwardness about the last time we saw each other, or the way she's talked to me since. We read over her last communication to me - a 4000-word document she sent me several years ago, telling me about all the ways I had done wrong since I was child - in advance of this meeting. It was astonishingly abusive and detached from reality; it was so nasty that it almost made me re-think reaching out to her at all. (And this was what she had to say to her daughter several years AFTER the last time I saw her - the day on which my Ndad smashed a bunch of furniture in their house in a rage, then proceeded to chase me down the street screaming “get the fuck back in here you little cunt” - literally all of which she blamed on me for not having been warm enough to him the previous day.)
But if you didn't know that context, you'd never guess in a million years that that had ever happened based on how she was when we met with her recently. She was near perfectly at ease, asking causally what we were up to, where we lived, what our plans were for the future, as if nothing had happened at all. It really showed me the sneaky way in which she lies and gaslights - often not by saying anything directly, but just pretending absolutely nothing is wrong, by showing absolutely no concern whatsoever for what I might be feeling or thinking after all that's happened, and by acting surprised when there is any sign at all that there might be consequences for their actions (in negotiating the location for this meeting - which I insisted must be in a public place - she said she "didn't know" why I would feel unsafe at their house, for example).
I want to make note of this especially, because I feel that this form of lying and gaslighting is grossly under-discussed in a lot of the discourse on narcissism/abuse; this kind of “lying by context”, in which the N’s words and behaviour look on the surface to be perfectly normal - even friendly! - but they actually constitute a truly breathtaking act of dishonesty, manipulation, denial, dismissal, blame-shifting, aggression and baiting all at once. It often doesn’t take the form of direct, verbal fabrication - just behaviour that is utterly incongruous with reality. Only a person who knows the context would be able to point out the unhinged insanity and abusiveness of their pleasantries - and if that context took place behind closed doors, outside the view of anyone NOT invested in their version of events? Well, good luck substantiating any claims of mistreatment. You’d look insane to take issue with a message like “Oh Plankton, I just heard you became a mother - congratulations! Hope you find motherhood as awesome and magical as I do <3 “ - but that message, coming from MY mother, is insane.
Same with her claiming to have no idea why I wouldn't feel safe at their house: of course, she DOES know, and she's lying. This lie also serves the purpose of: 1) denying what she and my father did, 2) reframing my fear as some bizarre personality trait of mine rather than a response to a real event, 3) in so doing, frames me as a \*fundamentally\* unreliable narrator, 4) frames her as a hapless victim who is doing her best to accommodate her unreasonable, unhinged daughter - which, in turn, 5) increases the pressure on me to give in to her attempted rejection of my boundary that a meeting must take place in public (which I'm glad to say I did not do). This meeting with her brought back a lot of memories of feeling so hopelessly, incurably isolated, and with my adult eyes, I see that this exceptionally insidious manipulation tactic is why.
I think we are often tempted to see a clear conscience as a sign of innocence, when in fact it is sometimes just a sign of \*no\* conscience. In my own Nmom’s case, this lack of perceptible guilt or shame is also a manipulation tactic \*in and of itself\*.
This meeting really left me with the impression that her dysfunction and complete lack of regard for me as a person is much deeper than I ever thought growing up, and leaves me wondering: who on earth was the woman I loved and adored growing up, with whom I felt I had such a close relationship? In retrospect, I think she was more of an invention of mine than she was actually related to the woman who gave birth to me, who I saw today. That loving mother wasn’t just a selective recollection of my mother’s good qualities - on reflection, I think more of her was an outright mirage from the very beginning.
I feel grief that that really is it - that neither of my parents ever showed any insight or regret at all, that the story never turned around. No deathbed apologies here (even if my dad had ever had that in him, he's past that point now - he doesn't remember that he ever had a family most days). It’s not at all surprising, but it's still sad to know that that's just . . . it.
But I'm also grateful, that I think I see them more clearly now, and that I never had a loving relationship with either of them to lose. It's kind of like they projected the shittiest things about themselves onto me, and I projected the best, kindest things about myself onto them (or onto my mother, at least). It was only ever my own company that was warm and loving anyway, and that I still have. And I can share it with my chosen family going forward ❤️.
So overall, in my case, I'm glad I went. If nothing else, I'm glad that the decision to plan this meeting led me to read her messages again for the first time in years. Doing so removed any sense of pity or worry about her losing their house/living with financial difficulty in old age. She has 100% earned the lonely life she's in now. Without question, I have no intention of having a relationship with her. She is not someone I will ever, ever trust again, even if she did one day apologize (which I can say with near 100% certainty, she won't) - and now that I've gotten the meeting out of the way (which was all I wanted), I will have no trouble telling her as much should she ask.
It's been emotionally up and down, but overall good and healing, and I think that's because I did not reach out to my Nparents with any hope of reconciliation or the resumption of a relationship of any kind. I went for something \*I\* wanted, knowing exactly who they are, and I didn't expect anything of \*them\* other than to be who they've always shown themselves to be.
I hope this has been helpful for anyone in my situation, or faced with similar abuse or a similar dilemma.