Now, let’s talk about where you fit into this—or rather, why you didn’t fit. The narcissist understands something very fundamental: adulthood brings bills to pay. And I don’t just mean money; I mean emotional bills. When he meets you, when he marries you, the dynamic changes. A spouse expects growth, responsibility, and emotional maturity. You expect him to take out the trash, to be faithful, and to communicate. To a narcissist, these requests feel like taxes—like something is being taken away from him. If he does not want to grow—and usually he does not—staying psychologically connected with the mother becomes a strategy; it’s a survival mechanism for his ego.
Even after marriage, he may maintain an alliance with her that actively undermines you. He may deliberately devalue you to keep the mother pleased. He knows that if he complains about you to her, she will agree with him: “You’re right. She’s too demanding, or she doesn’t appreciate you at all like I do.” In this triangle, you are reduced to a functional role. You become the caretaker, the domestic support—the person who keeps the actual life running. You are the backstage crew, while the mother is the director.
By keeping the mother satisfied, he ensures ongoing protection. In return, she shields him from the consequences of his marital failures. If he cheats on you, she will blame you. If he spends the family savings, she will say you drove him to it. It becomes a mutually beneficial arrangement where they protect each other from reality.
But there is often another darker layer to this: the father’s void. In many of these stories, the father is either physically absent, a narcissist himself, or emotionally unavailable—defeated by the mother. In that case, he becomes a victim. If the father was distant or turbulent, the narcissist may unconsciously believe he must fill that void for the mother. This is what we call emotional incest. He stops being her son and begins to act as her surrogate husband. He may experience loyalty to her not just as love, but as a heavy moral debt, feeling responsible for her happiness and for regulating her emotions.
In that psychological structure, disagreeing with her does not just feel like a difference of opinion; it feels like a crime he committed. There is no forgiveness for it. Even setting a simple boundary, like “Mom, don’t call during dinner,” may register internally as abandonment. The conditioning runs so deep that separating from her feels like cutting off his own arm. He does not know who he is if he isn’t mommy’s protector or her surrogate husband.
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