Surviving Narcissistic Adult Children

A Mother’s Letter

A mother’s raw letter to an estranged, narcissistic son. Explore family scapegoating, false accusations, and the painful reality of breaking the cycle.

A raw letter to an estranged, narcissistic adult son. This piece explores the devastating reality of family scapegoating, false accusations, and the painful truth that breaking the cycle of abuse doesn’t protect you from the children who weaponize it.

• CelestiaQuixs posts her blog article “Surviving Narcissistic Adult Children: A Mother’s Letter,” which details her experiences with an estranged son involving false accusations such as infant drowning attempts and public blame.
• The letter explores family scapegoating across generations, the son’s unremorseful behaviors like rage over disbelief and imposing strict no-contact rules, while acknowledging her own past parenting flaws and the ex-partner’s role.
• As a writer and trauma advocate, the author conveys raw exhaustion from narcissistic family dynamics and the limits of breaking abuse cycles, framing it as a painful reality rather than a call for reconciliation.

Letter to my son, who says I am NOT his mother and who replaced me, without cause, with a woman he lived with for one year, who never questioned him and never challenged him, as if that form of lying to an adult child is the definition of nurturing emotional support.

A couple of years ago, I sent you a letter of apology, outlining every conveciable way I could have wronged you during your life; because, you told me I had done something to you that you would never forgive, unless I figured out what I did to you and apologized. After receiving it, you told me there was something I left off the list that was worse than all of that and was unwilling to “cop to”. A year later, you proceeded to, after all of the mean-spirited things you have done to me in your adulthood, falsely accuse me of having attempted to drown you when you were an infant.

I have no idea, if that was some sort of strange need to top the false public accusation your sister made of me. The only thing I do know was that it was meant to be as hurtful as you could possibly be. I have no idea why the midlife crises of my adult children had decend into delustion-land. Midlife crises usually cause others annoyance. I’ve never heard of this phase causing existential fear in others, unless it is a psychotic episode that coincides with midlife, as in the case of my mother. I, and her doctors, had attributed that to post-partum depression; but, my children have shown me it is actually narcissistic mortification and have convinced me that my existential fear of any family member exhibiting these symptoms is warranted.

I have, also, realized there will be no remorseful apology from either of my adult children for the awful things they have done to me, just as I will never receive one from my sadistically narcissistic mother for having tormented me my entire life.

While I do recognize that narcissists are created by childhood trauma and I could have done better as a parent, had I had a formal education in narcissistic abuse, I refuse to take full blame for the abuses inflicted upon my children by their narcissistic father, simply because I was naive, gullible, conscientious to a fault, and, to my own detriment, possessed high-trait agreeableness. I did the BEST I could with the skills, experience, and knowledge I had at the time. I’ve apologized for my flaws and failures. I have spent my whole life taking criticism, contemplating and searching for the kernel of truth in it, and using any new awareness to be a better human. For this, I am rewarded with having the blame for the negative behaviors of others also placed on me, as if I should have possessed, throughout my entire life, the all-knowingness of God and protected everyone in my life from bad actors, including themselves.

I used to think you had some sort of schizonphrenia, with all of your impossible stories; because, you would get rageful when disbelieved. I thought that was an indication that you ‘knew’ your ‘truth’ to be ‘real’. You once accused me of thinking you were “just like your father”. I never did, until now.

Your father has always told impossible stories; but, I watched him build ‘props’ to try to ‘prove’ them to others. You never tried to produce evidence to prove your stories. You always said the ‘proof’ had been ‘stolen’ from you or that you never ‘saved’ proof; because, you never thought you’d have to ‘prove’ yourself. This is why I always thought your father was a conman and you were delusional. The truth is, it is not the impossible stories you get angry about others disbelieving. The rage you feel is because they do not believe YOU. I had never thought you were a liar. I thought you believed to be true everything you said. I was wrong. The truth is you need everyone to whom you tell your stories to believe they are true. The narcissistic mask you put on would have served you better had you kept it grounded in the mudane rather than the fantastical.

It confused me for a long time that you were never content to share with others your actual accomplishments and experiences; because, they were amazing enough. Just like your father was never content to succeed with his actual, exceptional talents. Both of you endeavored to be seen as larger than life and proves to me the meme, “A narcissist would rather chew wasps that tell the truth.” I used to think that meant they only lie about having done something wrong. The two of you have proven to me that includes downplaying everything actually good about you in favor of a grander lie.

I know I will never receive the remorseful apology I deserve; because, you have lied to yourself, and likely others, about me, turning me into a creature who deserved the mean-spirited things you’ve done to me. You gave me “the rules” about having a relationship with you. I received that document before I ever knew about narcissism. I still remember the words:

1. Respect me

by

• Don’t question me
• Don’t talk about me

…Straight from the Movie, Fight Club with Eric Cartman playing Tyler Durden.

Just as I gave my mother a bullet-point list of abuses she purpetrated upon me, here’s yours:

• You yelled at me in a public parking lot and blamed me for getting my thumb smashed by your wife accidentally slamming it in the car door including blaming me for “ruining the evening and our dinner out”.
• You told me you hope I get raped with a knife so I “know what it feels like”; because, I refused to believe this happened to you at the hands of “some big scary guy” while I was at work when you were 8-years old and in my custodial care, saying you “hid the bloody underwear from me so I wouldn’t worry” and calling me oblivious to your injuries after I disputed this story with the fact that you were with your 7-year old sister, supervised at childcare and, had this happened, not only would SHE have told me about it, there would have been an unmistakable loss of blood and I would have taken you to the hospital. I called her, crying hysterically, after that phone call with you. She, then, called you and yelled at you for having upset me with that horrifying lie and hateful wish of harm. Instead of apologizing, you never spoke to her again, even to this day more than a decade later.
• You accused me of intentional cruelty to my cat that had cancer; because, her face had become deformed by the tumor in her nasal cavity despite me telling you I was working with her vet, taking her to monthly appointments, giving her the medication she was prescribed by him, and following his guidance on knowing when it would be time to put her down. You went so far as to CC me on the emails you sent to him, the Humane Society, the Sheriff’s Department, and County Mental Health demanding they remove my cat from my home stating that I was too mentally incompetent to properfly care for her. And, despite an investigation into your charges being conducted and found to be false, you never apologized to me, the vet, the agencies, or my therapist. You only accused them of being derelict in their duties.
• You Ccd me on your report of me and my cousin to our internet service providers demanding they shut down our services and conduct an investigation into me sharing with her, and her disseminating, your “personally identifying information”; because, I shared the PUBLIC information of your date and place of birth with her for a family tree book she was compiling for the family. No apology from you after you were informed by the ISPs that neither of us violated any laws governing PII, only an accusation that the ISPs were derelict in their duties.
• When your wife asked me for advice on communicating with you after you said the following to her when she went to you with the distressing news from her doctor that she may never have children; because, she was pre-maturely perimenopausal in her early 30s:

“You would never be a good mother anyway; because, you can’t even meet my needs. And, my needs take priority over anything else.”

You accused me of having some unknown people in another State do some unknown thing to you and forbade me from ever speaking to your wife again.

• When I informed you I would be moving back after having moved to another State to help your sister with her family medical crisis, you told me my attempt to get back into your life was futile; because, you couldn’t trust ME. You assumed my move back home was all about you, when in fact, it was all about my need to return to mental health services with my therapist, whom I felt safe with, for counseling after a family murder/suicide that occurred a 20-minute drive away from where I lived duing my stay in the State where your sister resides.
• And, last, but not least, your ‘revelation’ to me that a TV show you watched on the subject matter of a mother, in her post-partum depression, drowning her infant ‘triggered’ a ‘memory’ of me attempting to do the same thing to you when you were an infant.

Despite ALL of this, I have tried to have compassion for my son, whom I assumed to have some sort of schizonphrenia and tried repeatedly to remain in contact with him. I now realize, what ever the cause of your cruelty to me, it is causing great harm to me and I have done NOTHING in my relationship with you at any time in your life to EVER have deserved ANY of this!

I was tormented my entire life by my mother. It is destroying me to now receive even worse torment from my adult children. This is beyond the usual family scapegoating abuse by a narcissistic family. This is part of some sort of psychopathic family mobbing I have never heard of before. And, sadly, since no one else seems to have heard of this either, no one believes me, not even therapists!