19-05-2025
My mum's dead to me: why women are cutting ties with their toxic parent
'A mother is a daughter's best friend'. It's a saccharine statement that wouldn't look out of place on a schmaltzy card or on a fridge magnet, but for women who have grown up with a toxic parent, it's far from the truth.
As our familiarity with modern therapy and its buzzwords has grown, so has the amount of people taking a critical view of the key relationships in their life and how they have shaped them – for better and for worse.
The national lexicon now includes terms once only found in psychology textbooks, with everyone from politicians to partners to parents being labelled 'narcissists'. But what does the term actually mean?
Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) is a serious antisocial personality condition which manifests as extreme levels of self-involvement, causing people with the condition to ignore the needs and feelings of others, including their family members, and children. Narcissists often hold grandiose opinions of themselves. It's a chronic condition, and there is no cure.
But if you are unlucky enough to end up with a narcissist in your life – and still worse, if you've been raised by one – what do you do? Many make the decision to go 'no contact', but is that the best approach?
Here two women who have discovered emotional contentment after deciding their narcissistic mothers had no place in their lives explain why they had to cut them off – while a therapist explains the pros and cons of stopping contact.
Mariette Jansen, 66, is a life coach and expert in narcissism. She grew up with a narcissistic mother and eventually broke contact with her in her 50s.
Going no contact with my mother gave me a sense of freedom which I had never experienced before. Suddenly, aged 55, I could just be me. I was no longer on the lookout for danger, I didn't have to cope with her negative comments, and I didn't need to deal with the disappointment of how she showed up, or more accurately didn't show up, in my life.
One of my earliest memories is of being a baby. I am wearing a nappy and a beautiful dress. I am sitting in the middle of a big cold, dark room, on dark parquet flooring – which we had in my childhood home in the Netherlands – and feeling so unsafe.
The second most vivid memory is from when I was about six or seven, and telling my parents that I didn't think I belonged in the family. My mother had a twin brother, and although I didn't know him very well, I had convinced myself I was actually his daughter.
My parents laughed at me and dismissed it, and it was never mentioned again, but that feeling that things weren't right in our family, and it was all my fault, and my duty to repair it stayed with me.
I am the second of three children, but as my older brother was born with learning and physical disabilities I was treated like the eldest child and expected to shoulder all the responsibilities.
My younger sister and I weren't as close as we could have been, mostly due to my mother sabotaging our relationship – a common tactic used by narcissistic parents. Family life was all about being diminished and being talked down to. It was all negative. It was nasty, but to outsiders, we looked like the perfect, lovely family.
My mother was passionate about tennis, and made the whole family compete. This was the only time she ever paid attention to me, but my true passion was hockey. She never once came to support me.
When I was at university, I wrote her a letter telling her how I felt about our relationship, and although I know she received it, I do not know if she read it.
I moved to the UK 27 years ago after falling in love with my husband, Iain. I didn't start a family until I was 40, and happily I fell pregnant easily. Shortly afterwards, I quit my job in the City and retrained as a psychotherapist. I now specialise in helping other survivors of narcissistic abuse.
I travelled back to the Netherlands to share the news. My mother simply said, 'Do you really want to be pregnant?' The prospect of a grandchild didn't change our relationship. As my due date approached, she and my father booked a holiday to Canada. It was the furthest they had ever travelled in their lives. Thankfully my mother-in-law was there to give me the support I needed. I decided I wanted to do everything the opposite way my mother had, and prayed I'd have a boy; if it had been a girl, I feared I would have become my mother.
When my sister died, aged just 50, my mother hated that she had made me one of the executors of her estate. She was livid she didn't have control and demanded I give her my late sister's treadmill and coffee machine. Nothing sentimental, just her most expensive possessions.
The final straw for me was when she refused to let me speak to my brother on his deathbed. I called the hospital, and heard her telling the nurse not to take my call. I was robbed of a goodbye.
By this time, I had a deeper understanding of narcissism and I knew that there was no hope that our relationship would ever change. Eleven years ago, I called her and said, ' I don't want any contact with you. Every time I speak to you I'm upset and it's upsetting the boys. There's nothing to be gained.' I stopped speaking to my father, too.
I didn't feel sadness: I had been grieving her my entire life. But I wondered how I'd feel when she died. Both my parents passed away during our estrangement, my father first, then my mother, five years ago. I found out randomly, after someone messaged me on Facebook offering their condolences.
The funeral had already taken place, but I wouldn't have gone anyway. On her death certificate, which used information she had given to her care home, it said she had never been married nor had children. She had erased our family from her existence.
Now, I feel blessed. I have a brilliant family. We chat away, muck about, and laugh endlessly. Until I had my own kids, I never believed it could be possible to have a family where fun and trust and respect is high on the list. It's been healing.
Dr. Mariette Jansen is the author of From Victim to Victor: Narcissism Survival Guide. Find out more here.
Matilde Crocini, 40, grew up in Italy before moving to the UK. She decided to cut her demanding mother out of her life.
The last time I spoke to my mother was three and a half years ago. She'd spent 15 minutes yelling at me down the phone. It was so loud and vicious that my two daughters, who are now aged 11 and 14, could hear her every word. It was at that point I told her 'I don't need this', and I haven't heard from her since.
For the first 10 years of my life I was raised by my maternal grandmother in Italy, with mum rarely around. She worked away, and when she did come home she tried to force me to behave as she wanted, even though I felt little connection to her. I found her overbearing and her demands were often overwhelming and confusing.
Then when I was 12, mum moved from our hometown in Italy to Ireland, and I joined her after I finished college.
The disruption meant my childhood was chaotic and messy, and while I didn't look for support then, I think I would have been diagnosed with depression from my early teens if I had. As an adult, to get myself in a better place emotionally, I studied herbal medicine, started practising yoga, and became a reiki master.
I met my husband 17 years ago, during a chaotic period in my life which heavily involved my mother, and we went on to have two children. But around six years ago I felt everything in my life was going belly up. Work was stalling, our marriage was going badly, and my relationship with my eldest daughter had become increasingly difficult.
Up until that point, my mother had been the world to me. Even though I'd always felt like there was some sort of crazy competition between us, I thought she was my best friend. Despite my fractured childhood relationship with her, we had grown to be super close, although she did interfere in my relationship with my grandmother. Still, I was the only member of my family who didn't fight with her, and believed I was breaking my family's generational curse of mothers and daughters with disastrous relationships.
Then, I started to delve deeper into into my emotions and was confronted with some hard truths about my mother, although I still had no idea what maternal narcissism was, and I had no idea what 'no contact' was, either.
In early 2022 we were talking on the phone – she had since moved back to Italy – and things got heated. She began yelling at me and calling me names, and something in me clicked. I thought: 'That's it! She does this all the time, and I'm always putting up with it. But I'm not going to do it any more.' I calmly told her I had something else to do and I wouldn't accept her behaviour any more. That was the last time we spoke.
The fall-out from my decision made me realise something was seriously 'off' in our relationship. She turned it into a big story about me having hung up on her, being the bad daughter. I was the problem for being too sensitive.
Family members tried to get involved and fight my mother's corner, a classic 'flying monkeys' scenario, where a narcissistic person will despatch others to do their dirty work. My grandparents would ask me, 'How can one phone call be the issue?'
Every now and again someone will raise the prospect of me talking to my mother again, but I am happy with my decision and I am entirely unmovable. I was never able to say no to her, or to anyone else, and not everyone is comfortable with me now being able to confidently use that word.
I have had support from my dad, who has been divorced from my mum for decades. He has been understanding. He could see how enmeshed I was with her, and how that relationship controlled my life emotionally.
I do think that the physical distance between us – she lives near Florence – has made going no contact easier in a sense. But it hasn't just been a case of removing myself from my mother's orbit. I've had to do a lot of work on myself, too.
Do I have regrets that she's not in my daughters' lives? The short answer is no. I talk about her with them and they know the whole story. Thankfully, their great-grandmother is very present, and that's who they call granny. And, until she passed away two years ago, they also had an amazing grandmother on their dad's side.
I used to catch myself repeating the patterns from my own childhood. My behaviour was similar to my mum's and it was impacting my girls' confidence, their capacity to relate to others and their capacity to relate to me.
Going no contact has changed that. It has given me the space to look deep into myself and see how I was behaving with my daughters. Now I am much closer to them, and we have a beautiful, open relationship. I can take responsibility and apologise if I say something that's off, and they feel comfortable telling me anything – even if it's to tell me I've said something which has upset them.
What I have learnt from my own experience has empowered me to help other women heal their mother wounds. It powers my podcast, Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers, and the group- and one-on-one healing I do with other women who are struggling with the legacy of how they were parented.
Find out more about Matilde's work here and listen to Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers on Spotify.
Sally Baker
I've had clients who've had incredibly toxic and damaging relationships with their mothers, but unless they have been truly abusive – sexually, or physically – and it has carried on into adulthood, I don't generally advise cutting off contact.
In some extreme cases, where the now-adult child feels like they've been groomed or are so disempowered in the relationship with their mother that they simply can't put boundaries in place, or come up with any rationale where they can protect themselves, I believe that no contact can be used as a last resort.
Instead, what is really useful to explore when trapped in a difficult maternal dynamic is to work on building your resilience. Many women struggle to put boundaries in place, but I believe that learning the skills and building the confidence to do that should be the first step.
Putting in boundaries is about placing brackets and scaffolding to structure that relationship in a way that suits you. It can be as simple as reducing a weekly call to a monthly one, or placing a time limit for how long your conversations or meet ups are.
People go to great lengths to escape negative parenting, or a really toxic relationship with their parents, but it's possible to get the same sense of relief by doing their own psychological work in therapy.
I often do 'two chair' work with clients whose mother has died, or they're not in contact with, where you talk to the absent parent. The pain they feel is as real and as raw as if the mother was still alive or in the room, so just going no contact isn't going to work – you need to focus on emotional healing, too.
Until people address their hurting inner child, they may continue to run a pattern in their lives where they choose sexual and romantic partners who play out the same scenario they experienced in childhood.
Whether it's spending years in a one-sided relationship with someone who truly won't commit to them, or it can be a scenario where it's someone who puts them down and mistreats them, they'll be caught in a loop of negative scenarios that are playing out and replicate that earlier relationship.
There's no way I am advocating for women to be open to continued verbal or emotional abuse from their mother, but I just don't feel in most cases that going no contact is the answer.
I'm more for doing the work, getting it resolved and released and then, when you have clarity, decide what you want to do.
Protecting yourself and holding someone at distance comes with pain, and it comes with emotional fallout, so it's not a decision to be taken lightly.
Sally Baker's book The Getting of Resilience From the Inside Out is available now. Find out more about her work here.
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