For children of narcissistic parents - have you had/do you have physical symptoms of distress?

@looloo - where you do from there - as you say and others have had to do, in the case of a stubborn senior (not to mention the other traits) that you simply have to wait it out until something happens e.g. a fall and a further deterioration in their health, that convinces them and/or their doctor that they cannot live alone any more. Do not make up the difference yourself, as she will rely more and more on you. It just postpones the inevitable. I like your statement "the better I'm getting at establishing and maintaining boundaries, and in being compassionate towards myself as well as her, the LESS able I am to fake it with her." I think that is good. Being honest and true to self is the best way for both of you - not always comfortable but the healthiest way. I am moving towards less and less contact. I am looking after mother's business affairs, and working with the professionals to see that she is placed properly. The social worker, as I am sure she is trained to do, is asking if there is any family who will visit. The answer is that mother has burned relationships with family so they are very reluctant. My daughter has said that taking mother out for a meal twice a year with the grandkids is all she can handle. The boys don't try and the local cousin was burned a few years ago. My narc sister comes once a year or so and stirs mother up and leaves a mess for me to deal with. I am stressed by visits or any contact and am at an age when I have to put my health first. My BP has gone up with the stress of the last months, as mother has gotten more and more paranoid. I have PTSD, and startle easily these days. The thought of having to move her once again creates anxiety. No, you are not crazy, but your upbringing was, for sure. Do you really have to make that trip?

@lynne - yes, lifelong PTSD, lifelong higher stress levels, need for recovery and to protect oneself. I have to steel myself for the upcoming move and tell the social worker and psychiatrist that I cannot do this again. We moved mother from her apartment to an ALF, she lasted there 6 months, moved her to an excellent ALF, she started complaining about this and that but has been there 3 years now. The last 9 months she has been impossible, and has been in a geriatric psychiatric hospital since February, with us waiting to find out what to do with her ALF apartment. They have now decided that she needs to be in a mental heath facility I agree and that could have come sooner, frankly, so I will be meeting with the staff next week to discuss the options for her and once again we will have to dispose of some furniture etc. and move the rest to her new unit. Truly, I have other things I would like to do with my time and energy and other priorities in my life that have been put aside, and I can't do that any longer. I will be 77 this summer and time is flying by. I hear you about your mother talking about you going back to those hellish years. Mother had the temerity to suggest that I leave my home, my sig other, my kids and grandkids here and rent a unit in the same AL she is in so I could look after her. She has had these kind of ideas for years. You know what my answer was!

What was it Erma Bombeck said about cherries and pits? Look after you, do what is good for you, be as humane as possible to your narc parent, without harming yourself. ((((((((hugs))))))))

I hear you, looloo. Pretending to enjoy their company, sacrificing self so that people who've lived their loves can control yours, as if one live wasn't enough for them. I'm so sick of it.
Every week I sit in the waiting room and see sad old faces. Worn out people dragged from doctor to doctor prolonging life that they are already tired of living. And the zombie-like faces of the young who accompany them out having given up their own lives, burdened down, enslaved in servitude to old people that medicine keeps alive prolonging anguish for old and young alike.
I found a great quote on the increasing toll eldery are having pn society on NPR. Sandra Tsing Loh said of her elderly father, “He is taking everything! He is taking all the money. He’s taken years of my life (sitting in doctors’ offices, in pharmacies, in waiting rooms). With his horrid, selfish, grotesque behavior, he’s chewed through every shred of my sentimental affection for him…He’s destroyed my belief in “family” as a thing that buoys one up. Quite the opposite: family is like the piano around Holly Hunter’s ankle, dragging me implacably down.”
Perfecty said!

My mother used to yell a lot very close to my ear. I told her when I was twelve that she was hurting my ears and she just yelled all the more. After that, my hearing started cutting out in the most puzzling way and not only with my mother but in many other situations that made me nervous like oral French tests. Later I had enormous problems with telephones in offices: I was not allowed to touch a phone when I was young and never got comfortable with them. This caused havoc in my life in a subtle, baffling way and made me appear stupid when I was anything but.

Much, much later I realized what was going on. I found out that there are tiny muscles in the middle ear that tense in order to muffle loud sounds and when the person has learned to anticipate a loud sound, the little muscles will start tensing before the sound starts. This is a totally unconscious process designed to protect the ears. It is particularly effective in the young.

By my forties I outgrew this baffling hearing quirk or so I thought. At least, it stopped in any noticeable way. But maybe my hearing function dulled down a bit just because I was older and the little muscles became less effective.

Yes indeed, too many to go into after a lifetime with a narcissistic mother and it's like having PTSD for life. Having changed my phone number and gone low contact I'm a couple of months into recovery but still always so tired and sleep a lot.

My mother's in a nursing home and tomorrow is her birthday/ I've been filled with dread at having to visit so today I got it over with. A card, big bunch of flowers, loads of chocolates and specialty cookies, she was pleasant ("when you come next time I want this and this") and, after a suitable amount of time I fled. I'm so tired again and I'd like to nap, or at least get to bed really early, but then I'll be awake in the middle of the night unable to sleep. Baby steps, one day at a time.

My mother wouldn't let anyone in the house and wouldn't budge either so she manipulated me into selling my home, quitting my career and moving 200km to care for her for four h**lish years. Thankfully I have both medical and financial POA and no siblings to fight with as some do.

Each time I visit she asks if I REALLY like living where I do and wouldn't I like to move?. I think in her N demented mind she thinks I might just love to move back to where we were, live in her gloomy, freezing cold basement, go nowhere, see no-one and wait on her hand and foot 24/7. You're kidding me right?, 2 country acres surrounded by fields and forest, peace and quiet - I love it. The mere thought of going back to that living h**l makes me shudder and feel ill as well as d**ned angry!

Seems to me that your only choice may be to go no contact and even change your phone number if you have to. Sounds harsh but you will never make an N happy and they will keep sucking the life out of you until they die.

Guilt, obligation, high blood pressure, heart palpitations, cringing anytime the phone rings, easily startled, moody, gritting teeth and subsequent headaches. Always tired, neck and back pain, no energy. But that's the way it's always been when I'm dealing with my parents.
I have been hair twirling and rocking to self soothe since I was a toddler. Some of my fondest childhood memories involve rocking, and hair twirling gives me a cascade of great curls, so I consider those features instead of bugs : )
More recently, the last six months or so, everytime I have to physically attend to him (weekly), I have a searing pain in my right side which lasts 4-5 hours after I've returned home. The next day after said visit, my concentration is cloudy, I feel like I've been physically beaten, and I experience a general malaise.
@looloo I completely agree with what you said about boundaries and compassion for yourself and being less able to fake it. I was way late in figuring out these were not normal responses to having to deal with one's parents and the whole narcissistic/boundary thing, and find myself waiting/longing for the day when "something happens" and he can be placed.

The dictionary definition of narcissism is "self-love". I personally believe that the term "narcissism" has been used to define persons who have such controlled and regulated behavior due to their own neurosis, that they have no ability to respond to the needs of others.
Selflessness is a good antonym, as well as empathy and most OCD patients are guilt prone and overly conscientious from having Narcissistic parents. The list of health complaints of children with Narcissistic parents are hair loss, psoriasis, biting nails, bad nerves, speech impediments, heart palpitation, heart, under and over weight.... and worse yet "self-hate"

@overwhelm you need a religion (bored) board. Everytime your parents go on a religion taunt, you win $100. I have a similar Apocolypse bored and have already netted $1 million in 7 months. Of course, I'm using Monopoly money : )

This is a great topic. My MIL (now with dementia, for extra fun!) Is a big-time narcissist. Everything is about her, to the extent that, when I told her I'd had a roor canal, she replied that she'd never had one because her teeth are "perfect." When my husband and I let her keep her car in our garage while she was in Europe for a year, instead of thanking us, she said the garage smelled "musty" (It's a garage, not a perfume shop.) She'd have to pay elsewhere, and we stored the car for free, but she didn't thank us, just complained that the garage didn't smell like a sunlit mountaintop in Switzerland, or however she thought a garage that had the honor of housing Her Specialness' royal conveyance should smell.

She also has no sense of humor. Absolutely none.

I don't like her, and she doesn't like me. We're polar opposites. Instead of confronting me and clearing the air, she tells lies about me to everyone she knows, her favorite being that I'm a drug addict. I take Sumatriptan for migraines, but it's non-narcotic. I take nothing else. But she's told everybody that I eat Vicodin like candy. What the heck? Every time I'm around her, I get a migraine that makes me feel like my head is full of shards of glass and razor blades. She, in the meantime, is healthy as a very robust horse, except for the dementia.

Just being around MIL (sometimes even ANTICIPATING being around her) makes my psoriasis act up, and gives me a horrible migraine. It's her smugness that gets to me, that and her lies, plus her insistence on always being right, even when she isn't.

My husband says she was always that way, but it's gotten worse in the past five years or so. My suspicion is that in addition to being an mega narcissist, she's also bipolar, either that, or she suffered permanent frontal lobe damage from being thrown through car windshields not once, not twice, but three times. In her way of thinking, seatbelts trap you inside the car, which may catch on fire if there's an accident. Not wearing a seatbelt allows you to be "thrown free," as she puts it. Being thrown free sounds lovely, and sort of exhilarating, except for the part about crashing through the windshield.

But anyway, that's MIL: stubborn, illogical, grandiose and triangulating like it's her full-time job. A full-time job that she loves.

As an example of her refusal to recognize when she's wrong, about ten years ago, she told me that one of her friends had stage two cancer of some kind. "Stage three is death," she intoned melodramatically.
When I politely pointed out that she was incorrect, and that there are people living with stage four cancer (not feeling super-great, but living) she ignored me. Later, I heard her repeating the "stage three is death" thing to someone else.

Fortunately, her friend's condition improved, and she's still around today, but you'd think MIL would be interested in learning that something she believed to be true was, in fact, incorrect, and then changing her narrative to suit the facts. But no, because that would mean she was wrong about something and she can never be wrong.

For someone who proudly describes herself as "an academic and an intellectual," she is very close-minded. Even before dementia started making inroads on her brain, she was very resistant to learning new things. Conversely, she has a horror of seeming "stupid," so she either ignores her mistakes or stubbornly insists that she's right.

For instance, the device that her boyfriend uses to improve his respiration while recovering from pneumonia is called a nebulizer. She calls it a breathalyzer, which is unintentionally funny because her boyfriend is n alcoholic of the falling-down-drunk variety. When I tried to explain the difference between the two, and what the nebulizer is supposed to be doing for drunken boyfriend's lungs, she cut me off with, "I don't care about all those tubes and things in the human body."

And then she pouted. For someone who's walked around in a body for coming up on eighty-one years, her ignorance of what goes on inside it is astonishing. She insists that eating Mexican food causes miscarriages, because she once had a miscarriage after having eaten some tacos or arroz con pollo or something. When I suggested that maybe her miscarriage was caused by something else, because if eating Mexican food makes women miscarry, eventually there would be no more Mexicans, she just gave me a snotty look.

My refusal to pretend that she's not always right about everything (I always tell her gently when she's wrong about something I think might be important, but most of the time I just let it slide) is part of the reason she calls me "The B*tch." She always insists that she didn't really say that, and I must have imagined it. I kind of like the title.