“I love you”
“I know you think you do”
One of the first times I ever started to realize there was a problem in the way Cindy treated me was when I saw Albert Brooks’ movie “Mother.”
There is a new documentary about Brooks out and in it, they feature a scene from “Mother” in which an awkward phone call ends with Debbie Reynolds’ character saying “I love you” and Brooks’ character responding “I know you think you do.”
This short interaction is a perfect example of the basic misunderstanding between me and Cindy.
Cindy never learned what compassionate, truly accepting love is. The middlest of children in a large Irish Catholic family, she found her power and identity in tearing down others and making them feel small to build her own self-worth. A family member once said to me “Cindy’s superpower is the ability to find the one thing you see wrong in yourself and exploit it.”
When her mother died in high school, she was left with a Mad Men era father who had no ability to show love or guide his family.
Instead he tried to pay her off. Cindy came to associate love with money, the only thing her dad could give her. Also, ironically, the one thing the men she married couldn’t.
So flash forward to her child rearing years raising her pride and joy, she showed up in the way that she thought was love. By showering me with praise and taking me on trips to places she wanted to go. Because you know as a narcissist she didn’t take me places I wanted to go or do things I wanted to do. Everything was her activity, but with the framing it is all for me and I should appreciate it more.
Like when we went to Boston to visit colleges my junior year. I desperately didn’t want to go to college right after high school. I knew in my bones it wouldn’t go well, and it didn’t. But Cindy couldn’t suffer the shame of her only son not going to college! What would people say??
So off we went to Boston. We visited the Freedom Trail, saw some shows, and went shopping at their giant mall. Yet never set foot on a single campus. But she made sure everyone knew we visited the most prestigious schools… BC, BU, Harvard even! Because, you know, “Kyle is going to be applying to all of them.”
I didn’t apply to any of them, nor was she actually going to let me move that far away anyway.
While that story is about high school, it started much earlier. Think about what that does to a child to be constantly told that things are done for you that you really don’t want. And that you don’t appreciate enough the things you didn’t want in the first place.
Add to that the constant reminder that the narcissist loves you despite all the ways you’ve failed them. Not a single visit can go by without Cindy singing one of the tracks of her best selling album “Despite all that, I still love you.”
It was literally the next thing out of her mouth after saying therapy wasn’t working last week. My reply to her statement was “I don’t think you think it’s working because you don’t always get your way anymore” to which she replied “you say the most disrespectful things to me. Despite all I have done for you. I don’t have a son.”
Yes, the woman who had just told me she thought therapy wasn’t working felt I am disrespectful.
This is where the children of narcissists get trapped. She believes she loves me. No one could convince her otherwise. But as a narcissist, she doesn’t know what love is or what real, productive parental love would look like. No one ever mirrored that for her, or for me until I met my mother-in-law.
At times I am very grateful that my wife and I were unable to have kids. I would have repeated all of these cycles until a few years ago. I’ve come to accept that at least I won’t continue the cycle of generational abuse.
So now what do you do with that? How does someone reconcile the push-pull of a fundamentally broken relationship dynamic that can never be reconciled, along with all of the guilt and inner turmoil surrounding it.
After 47 years of every “I love you” being followed by a stinging rebuke, it’s near impossible for it not to trigger a reaction in me. If it’s just “I love you,” I can return that. The moment we venture into “but”, well that’s where “I know you think you do” sometimes helps.
She thinks she loves me. She wants to love me, and she did in the way she could when she had resources.
So she wants to love me, she’s just incapable of it. How can you be mad at that person? How can you possibly abandon the person who raised you and gave you life you ungrateful prick?!?
Why don’t you do more for her and just let her say her shitty things and grow a thicker skin?
That’s the inner turmoil. That’s what it looks like when you know you’re not the problem and still can’t convince your body otherwise. The self-loathing, the sadness. All of it floods back, not because of anything I did, not because I deserve it. Just because the person who is supposed to love me the most hates me and neither of us can’t fix it.
P.S. You my have heard that my podcast “In The Bubble with Andy Slavitt” published it’s final episode last week.
I have no intention over ever putting content behind a paywall here because that would limit my ability to help people. But I also don’t have any income starting tomorrow. So while you’ll get the same stuff either way, paid subscriptions are enabled to the newsletter if that interests you.
P.P.S. If you’d like a representation of what a conversation with Cindy can be like, I highly suggest the trailer to Mother.