But when it comes to his mother, it is a different story—an entirely different one. He will take her to parties and introduce her proudly, sometimes even more proudly than he would introduce his own wife. He will buy her expensive gifts on occasions where he forgets or refuses to do the same for his partner. He will cater to her dietary preferences, her health anxieties. Heck, he will defend her to the nth degree. The crazy part is he will show zero empathy for his partner while doing all of this. He will laugh at his mother’s jokes that aren’t even funny, sit through her criticisms without blinking, and allow her to micromanage parts of his life as if he is still a boy in need of guidance.
All of this makes you wonder: What’s going on? When he is with me, he has to control everything; he has to hate me for loving her. But when he is with her, he doesn’t show any agency; he does exactly what he is told and says no to nothing. What is going on? Well, this is enmeshment. This is what fawning of a golden child looks like. But the kicker is he secretly hates her for all of this. He feels trapped; he resents the hold she has over him because she treats him more like a partner than a child. Deep down, he wants to rebel against her control, but he never truly does because the bond they share isn’t based on love; it is based on enmeshment, guilt, fear, and a sick kind of loyalty that was forced onto him since childhood.
He is the golden child in the narcissistic family system. He was chosen to serve—groomed. That’s the key word: trained to be the mirror that reflects his mother’s grandiosity. She projected onto him every feeling she could not express with his father. In exchange for her conditional approval, he learned early on to abandon his own identity. That is how he became a narcissist.
So now he doesn’t see her as a separate person; she is an extension of him, and he is, in a very twisted way, an extension of her ego. We call this narcissistic symbiosis, where two narcissists feed off each other’s egos. Yet, at the same time, there is always a tug of war. There is no true relationship—just two parasites suffocating each other. She never cuts off the emotional suffocation because he brings her supply. He treats her how her husband was supposed to treat her.
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