hot take: moms need to learn how to listen to and comfort their daughters without making everything about their own traumas
a classic example
daughter: hey this thing you do bothers me very much and i wish you wouldn’t do it
mom: well my parents abused me and im not even as bad as they were and i had to sit through it so you gotta sit through whatever i do to you too
a common variant
mom: well i’m having a really hard time right now and you know that i’m doing my best and that i didn’t mean to hurt you ergo you are in fact the asshole for asking me to consider your feelings and change my behavior during this hard hard time i’m having
This is a very important post about how to recognize problematic behavior in narcissistic mothers. It is also something we all need to watch out for in ourselves, especially if we were raised by a narcissistic parent.
Because if that’s what you’re used to, you can grow up wrongly believing that this is what sympathy is supposed to sound like.
I have, numerous times, talked about having a bad day, and had a well-meaning acquaintance tell me how much worse their day was, honestly believing that they were being sympathetic – that telling me how much worse their day was would somehow make me feel relieved, or grateful, that my day wasn’t as bad as theirs.
Of course, it did not make me feel better. It made me feel like my experiences were being trivialized, and like my feelings were being invalidated.
I know these people weren’t trying to be cruel. They truly just didn’t know better. They thought they were empathizing.
If you didn’t grow up learning what genuine sympathy looks/sounds/feels like, it’s hard to know how to show genuine sympathy for other people, even when you really do care about them.
I really cannot get over this cats fucking face it’s so round and conveying an emotion that I simply am not equipped to understand
I WAS AT THIS MEETING, I MET THIS CAT. I forget his name but he was soooo sweet, I think it was Councilman Clark who brought him in! This was at the very first meeting in Denver to decide whether to ban declawing (the ban succeeded!)
Update: I emailed this post to councilman Clark, subject line “your kitty is famous”
Update 2: Councilman Clark responded, he thinks this is awesome and his cat’s name is Kit Kat
Thank you Kit Kat for protecting the cats of Denver!
I think the emotion on Kit Kat’s face is democratic engagement.
The guardians of the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation.
Originally brought to the museum in 1795 from Kazan by order of Elizabeth of Russia, following a plague of mice that had begun eating away her art collection, where only twice has the museum been left without its guardians, the first time in WW2 during the Siege of Leningrad, which decimated the population, and the second in the 60′s, where the museum decided to evict the cat population, only to revert the decision shortly after the mice problem returned.
Pride, Prejudice and Mail Order 