Relationship Advice Regarding Love/Wisdom STS/STO

[Fuse]

The question would have been if my choice to not chase after my mom after she officially walked out of the family was a STS move because I would be free of her emotional manipulation and pull.

I absolutely DO NOT feel that the choice to allow her to go was in any way an STS choice on your part. Quite the contrary.

First, her actions in leaving were an attempt to manipulate and control you, as you rightly identified. But you didn't cut off contact with her, SHE chose that. If anything you are honoring her free will to choose that route for herself. Further, your sense of relief is only a natural response to the reduction of threat in your immediate surroundings. The sudden absence of a situation of long-term abuse is naturally quite freeing. Enjoying the freedom that she granted you is in no way an STS action, and I feel STRONGLY that you needn't feel guilty for it. Allowing yourself to feel guilty about that is exactly what she wants, and only places you back within the STS structure that she creates around her. As it stands now you are freed from that. That is cause for celebration, if understandably a somewhat melancholic one.

Even if you had chosen to protect yourselves by proactively cutting off contact with her, it would not be an STS choice on your part. Lots of people are unfamiliar with NPD (narcissistic personality disorder), but it is a heartbreaking condition, and devastating to have to witness firsthand. It sounds like you and your family are doing your research, but your brother and father are correct that there is no hope for her, and that you shouldn't strive to maintain contact. NPD is a terminal condition, in that people who develop it DO NOT get better. Tragically, it is very unlikely that someone suffering from it can ever be trusted. In fact, once she determines that this current effort to manipulate you all into placing yourselves back under her power has failed, she will very likely try to come up with some new approach. At that point, it will become even more difficult to protect yourselves, but you absolutely should.

NPD is not like other mental health conditions. In fact, my own theory on this is that only souls very dedicated to the STS path will ever choose an incarnation as someone who suffers from it. It's the only thing I've been able to come up with that explains the well-documented fact that basically 100% of NPD sufferers fail to ever change their patterns or experience healing of any kind related to it.

I speak, sadly, from painful personal experience, having also been raised by a vulnerable narcissist. In my case, it was a stepmother who my father married when I was 7. She was physically violent, mostly to me, though occasionally to my younger brother as well. She liked to hit me with kitchen implements employed as weapons, blows always carefully aimed at my head so my hair would hide any bruising. She also manipulated my poor father, and he believed her lies about us hating her so much that we made up stories about her. (My brother and I are more or less okay now. My father still carries a lot of guilt about failing to protect us, though I think he's doing okay too. All three of us now have happy lives and healthy romantic relationships, and none of us seem to have carried the cycle forward, thank goodness.)

Eventually we grew up and got out of there, but that didn't stop her efforts to control us. Once we kids were out of the house, she found my father to be an unsatisfying victim, so she left him. She moved on to other victims for a while, and we thought we were free. But since we weren't fully aware of her diagnosis yet, she was able to successfully develop new tactics to rope us back in. And this is where things get insidious, and where I share a warning for you.

Vulnerable narcissists, sadly, often keep a nuclear option in their back pocket for situations when all other methods of control fail to achieve the desired result: threats of suicide. Over the subsequent twenty years, she has used suicidal threats to get us to do what she wants, even getting me to move in with her for months-long stretches on several occasions in order to be her "caregiver." Looking back now, it's rather shocking to realize that that "caregiving" mostly involved checking things off of her to-do-lists for her, or otherwise engaging in activities that involved ceding my freedom and self-determinative power to her. In the last few years those efforts even turned to trying to get us to pay for things for her, even though she is the only one of us who isn't a renter, who actually owns her home outright, and has more money than any of us. The STS life can be profitable, after all, at least in those 3D terms.

Thankfully, though, my brother got into therapy himself, and was quickly diagnosed as the child of a vulnerable narcissist. That led us, finally, to the information we needed in order to realize that we had to protect ourselves from her. Eventually she forced a confrontation about it with me, and I ended up telling her everything we had learned about her. It did not go particularly well, as you might imagine. But after that argument, none of us are under any further illusions about the nature of our relationships, including her. This is healthy, and I think it's the greatest (if possibly the last) act of service that I can do for her, not to mention myself and the rest of my family. That said, I would be surprised if she doesn't try again someday. I guess we'll see.

Should I have let her maintain that power over me, power to manipulate and control me? Would remaining in the STS structures that she builds around her everywhere she goes have been an STO choice from my perspective? I guess it's possible. But there are plenty of other opportunities for me to serve others in this world, and I avail myself of them. And in those relationships, all of our individual cups of blessing overflow back and forth into each others' lives in ways that are beautiful and healthy...exactly the kind of heavenly structures of collective consciousness that all of us here are hoping to see form more broadly in our world.