Replies to 'Defining Your Authentic Self'

My mother has turned out to be not REALLY all that different from her own mother and my mother’s mother was the Queen of Narcissist’s! That woman just LOVED watching the feathers fly when she set people up. She was power hungry and would try and damage relationships for her own personal amusement. My Maternal Grandmother would LIE even when there just didn’t seem to be a really big gain in doing that. The most notable difference between my mother and her mother was that my grandmother was more overt, non-passive in her approach to acting out her pathology, she would never have feigned illness or made up excuses for her behavior-which my mother does.

Also, for a very long time the folks around my mother thought that helping her meant accommodating ANYTHING she insisted that they do for her and/or that she said she just HAD to do, that disrupted their lives. So for a VERY long time her behavior WORKED for her. (Of course, resentments grew among those who were enabling her.) No one ever asked, ‘Why?’ They just met her often passive-unreasonable-demands without question, feeling that to question anything would ‘upset’ her and that if they ‘upset’ her in ANY way that they were personally responsible for the next group of her bad behaviors. My mother is a classic example of the way that Variable Reinforcement works. For example: When your computer doesn’t do what it should do, you try things that have worked in the past even though it doesn’t always work, you at least try it because it has worked before.

My mother encountered problems with her strategies when both my twin sister and I became involved in behavioral health! We had become regarded as “troublemakers” when, as adolescents, we began challenging her disruptive dramas. Things ONLY got worse when we actively began asking about the long held tradition of doing whatever placated my mother! Despite all of that we continued to challenge unreasonable, extreme and ridiculous demands. We even went on to identify specific behaviors and pointed out the payoffs to those who had never questioned her odd intrusive, inappropriate and disruptive actions.

Now, those surviving family members see with crystal clarity what they were missing before and no longer feel a need to blindly accept unacceptable behaviors from my mother.

To answer your question, I do not believe that showing her via video how she appears would be helpful, at all. My mother's concerns have never been about ACTUAL CHANGE but in changing the way she APPEARS. Thus, she would want the video edited to make her look better rather than making change to behave better. As Dr. Phil often asks folks on the show, "So are you sorry you did that or are you sorry you got caught?" Regardless of what she might say, she is just sorry she got caught! And, if allowed time she will find someone to blame for that! 

Brenda