First, an update from my last post: I never confronted her about anything because it's not worth it, and now she stole my hand soap from the kitchen.  She keeps stealing bottles of things: my facial wash, my expensive shampoo, a bottle of my son's something-or-other from the bathroom, and now my hand soap from the kitchen.  Oh, and apparently my sunglasses and my garage door opener.  Either I have a super weird poltergeist, or my mother is just being weird and throwing away our items.  I mean, it could go either way at this point.  

Anyways, my birthday just passed and guess what?  I got a letter in the mail.  

A year ago I told my birthmother I no longer wanted contact with her.  You can read about that here.  I felt I had a good reason for doing so, but it always was in the back of my mind to wonder if I was overreacting or not.  Whenever you go no contact with someone in your family, that's always in the back of your mind.  Well, that is, until they do something crazy.  And then you realize you made the right decision.  Well, this letter cemented the reason I went no contact.  

At first I wanted to read it, in case it was nice and apologetic.  But I also wanted to stick by my choice of going no contact.  So, I compromised and had my husband read it instead LOL  And yeah, the look on his face said it all.  

Me: "So, it's bad?"

Him: "Uhh, you could say that.  It's not good, I'll say that."  

Me: *sigh*  "Great."  

So then I compromised even more and took pictures of it, didn't read it myself, and sealed right back up and wrote "Return to Sender" on it and sent it back.  The funny thing?  She didn't put a return address on it.  So I looked up her address and wrote it on myself.  I assume she should have it by now.  If not, then soon.  

My first gut instinct was to be pissed that she wanted to run my birthday by sending me a shitty letter near my birthday.  And that's still my feeling about it.  But my second gut instinct was that she sent it in retaliation for me sending her my "no contact" email right after her friend died.  I cannot help that her friend died close to my birthday and my birthmother decided to send it on my birthday.  And my third gut instinct was to read the damn letter.  So, I did.  

Dear Shay,

This IS important. 

I had to let some time pass before rereading your email, as it kept gnawing at me.  And I need to lay this to rest.  I don't mean to make you upset (yes you do, otherwise why send it in May?), but I do feel the need to defend myself after such a vicious attack.  

Really?  Vicious you say?  I could hardly call it vicious.  I pointed out some truths, which weren't exactly nice, but they weren't vicious and they weren't an attack.  They were the truth and they were me telling her how she hurt me.  But apparently telling this woman anything she did wrong is an "attack" (she later calls my son pointing out she forgot my 40th or so birthday him "chewing her out" rather than saying she did anything wrong).  So, we're not allowed to tell Miss Barbara she does anything wrong.  Gotcha.  Okay, well, that just 100% cements my choice to go no contact with her.  

Rather than post the single-spaced two-page letter here, I will sum it up for you: 

This letter is not an apology.  It is a defensive reframing of reality where she positions herself as reasonable and misunderstood, and I am positioned as angry, attacking, and wholly inaccurate.  My pain is minimized and reinterpreted, whereas hers, due to my "vicious attack" is front and center.  And her accountability is avoided entirely.  It was, quite frankly, childish and quite ridiculous.  And completely unexpected at the time, but when I thought better of it, actually quite expected.  I just didn't want to see this side of her.  

Here are some more points I can make about her letter: 

• She reframed my honesty as a “vicious attack” instead of pain.
• She pathologized (read: picked on me for) my anger instead of asking why it exists.
• She focused on factual defense (“only twice”) when it came to forgetting my birthdays instead of how forgetting my birthdays made me feel (though this is a lie--she forgot most years, and send my cards late--she only completely forgot twice).
• She used two particular acts of help to dismiss her longstanding emotional absence (at times, it was years when hadn't heard from her).
• She treated our relationship as equal-responsibility rather than acknowledging the asymmetry of adoption/birthparent or parent/child dynamics.  Narcissists LOVE to do this.  They will say "Well, YOU could have called ME" or whatever.  But normal parents never see it that way.  They know damn well that parents are supposed to be the ones checking on and checking in with their kids, even when their kids don't call.  
• She cared more about whether she looked bad than about how I felt about her behavior.
• She centered her intention (“that was meaningful to me”) over my experience (“that hurt me”).
• She used “people love differently” to bypass accountability for how her behavior landed.  Total narc move.
• She reframed my emotional distance as something I created, rather than something that emerged from her inconsistency and lack of caring.  Just the same as my mother used to do.
• She separated herself from my actual mother while still repeating some similar emotional patterns (dismissal, minimization, framing me as “too angry”).  Which means she said "I am not like your mother!" while acting just like my mother LOL  Funny, isn't it?  
• She claims the title of "mother" publicly while not carrying the emotional role privately.
• She reduced my lived experience to “your story,” rather than recognizing that your experience is real even if it differs from hers.
• She still never truly acknowledged the profound attachment disruption of relinquishing a bonded six-month-old child.  In all actuality, I don't think she even realizes the ramifications of her actions in the least.  
• She does not seem to understand that adoption trauma is not erased by reunion.
• She appears to think biology alone grants permanent emotional entitlement/claim, while most people experience motherhood/daughterhood as relational and lived.  And when I say "most people", I mean NORMAL PEOPLE. 
• She keeps interacting with me as though my adoption was a simple event in her past, while I have lived inside the consequences of it my entire life.  And she DOES NOT acknowledge that.  
• Never ONCE did she apologize for a single thing.  Not once.  Other than saying "I am sorry you didn't get what you needed from your mom, I really am", while accusing me of needing her to fill the space of my mother.  How freaking arrogant it is that she assumes I need her to be my mother? I HAVE a mother.  She's awful, but I never once wanted Barbara to step in and take her place.  What I wanted her to be was NORMAL.  But I am sorry she didn't get what SHE needed from HER mother to teach her how to be a good and normal person.  Geezus.  

But most of all?  She shows her own stupidity about human behavior and why we do the things we do and at the same time insults me for my human behavior.  She's shaming for having anger.  Not just about my letter, but also including my letter, but about my past on Facebook.  I used to be a different person.  I used to be involved in a very immature friendships with people who were full of chaos.  I grew up with narcissism, so I made narcissistic friends as a teen and as an adult.  So, I will say my anger was real and it was 100% warranted.  BUT, it shouldn't have been posted on Facebook.  I should have just written about it in my diary.  I learned recently that's called "victim signaling", which was something I learned to do from my mother.  It was this obsessive need for others to see my pain and validate it.  I used to call it "needing an audience for my pain".  I was taught that pain HAD to be shared for it to be valid.  I was always looking for people to say to me "You're right to feel this way!  You have every right!"  Because deep down, I didn't feel I had the right to ever be mad about someone treating me like crap.  I felt I probably deserved it.  And it fed some sort of dopamine thing inside of me every single time someone validated me.  Do you know how hard it is to have someone treat you badly and to not share it when you're feeling bad and used to doing so?  It's an addiction that I literally had to get over.  And it was one of the hardest things in my life to do.  

But instead of being nice to me back then and asking if I was okay, she attacked me for it.  Like, legitimately attacked me, being accusing and rude.  Maybe I wrote about it on this blog?  I will have to see if I can find the post if I did.  

So, I had to set her straight for the first time in my life and say "Look, you are my birthmother and you have ZERO right to tell me how to live my life.  I am not trying to be rude here, but you didn't raise me.  And our relationship is far more complicated than you're making it out to be and I need you to back off."  Or something of the sort (I think I was nicer when I actually said it).  And she ended up unfollowing me on FB because of it, so she could "protect her mental health" or something.  And eventually I ended up blocking her because I was processing my adoption and didn't want to hurt her feelings.  She was protecting herself by unfollowing me and I was protecting her by blocking her.  

We are very different people.  

I am a person with emotions.  She is a person without many emotions, or rather, with few emotions.  This is not an insult, it's the truth.  We are both autistic, but we are very different kinds of autistic.  I am a person who strives to understand other humans in the world, it's one of my main special interests as an autistic person.  Which is why I am so interested in psychology and narcissism.  SHE, on the other hand, doesn't understand anyone, no wants to even try to.  She mainly wants to pretend at all times (as a coping mechanism) that everything is fine and great and wonderful.  Unless someone supposedly wrongs her.  Then she'll chat on about it.  One time she wrote to me making fun of her close friend she went on vacation with who had severe anxiety.  I also have severe anxiety, which I had told her about before.  Tone deaf, much?  Most her emails were like that.  Tone self and selfish.  I am a person who expresses myself quite often both verbally, and in the written word.  She is a person who doesn't express herself much at all.  I am too much for her.  And she is too little for me.  We are not a match.  

So, I decided to write her a letter back.  Even though I made it look like I didn't read her letter, I wanted say "Actually I DID read it, and it sucked!" So I wrote it, rewrote, and rewrote it several more times.  Then out of the blue, it hit me: no matter what I say to her, she will not hear me.  She will never be understanding of what it's like to be the daughter of a woman who gave her up at six months old.  She will never even be sorry for it, either.  So sending her my letter is not only a waste of time and stamps, it's useless and futile.  And it will break the illusion that I didn't read her letter, which is important if I want her to realize that no contact means no contact.  

So I didn't send it.  But better yet?  I don't even want to anymore.  I don't feel the need to defend myself to someone who won't listen anyways.  My son, who has BPD, is like that in arguments.  Last night he had a FIT while we were playing Gloomhaven that I didn't put my cards where they were supposed to be and when he, in a very irritated tone, told me to move them, I said "Sorry, I just didn't do it yet" rather than saying "I forgot."  I didn't forget I that's where they needed to go, I just forgot to move them yet.  He was accusing me of completely forgetting that they even went there.  So when I said "I didn't forget" I wasn't making an excuse for myself, I was defending what I thought he was accusing me of.  And the entire night was ruined because he started screaming and went totally bonkers over the entire thing.  And every time I tried to talk, he accused me of steering the conversation the way I wanted it to go and blah blah blah blah.  So I had to sit there, seething, saying nothing.  If I shake my head because I disagree, he'll start screaming again for me to "not interrupt him".  It's crazymaking.  But with him, there is no defense you can use with him when he's like that.  He will twist what I say to adhere to his narrative.  Just like Barbara did in her letter.   So, I stay quiet until I can leave the situation.  

But here's the difference between these two situations: BPD (alone, not comorbid with NPD) has instances of these situations where they act irate and don't listen to reason.  So does NPD.  But...with BPD?  It ends and they look back and say "Oh wow, I was wrong".  It took years for my son to get to that point (him growing up and also having an BPD diagnosis), but he usually comes to me later and apologizes and says "I don't know why I get like that?  What causes this?"  And we can talk about it.  Whereas with NPD?  They will never admit they are wrong.  They will never say "Oh wow, I overreacted".  They will not only never ever admit they were wrong or did something wrong, they will never even listen to your side.  And if they do?  It's a con.  It's a con to use against you later for some other reason.  BPD can do that too, but usually only to use when they're dysregulated.  NPD builds a profile on you the way advertisers do so they can use that info any time they like.  They'll catch you by surprise, letting you know that they've always been waiting for this moment, they're in it for the long game.  

So the letter sits on my computer, unsent, and probably will never be sent.  I will only take action if someone from my birthfamily reaches out to me.  They won't.  And that's okay.  Even my grandma stopped sending me birthday cards and mother's day cards and Christmas cards.  This chapter of my life seems to be over.  I am actually happy Barbara sent me that letter.  Yes, that's her real name, I don't care about protecting her identity anymore.  She doesn't protect mine.  I am happy because she proved me to me that my instinct to go no contact with her was the right thing to do.  I will never have to second guess myself.  Though the funny thing is: I actually never did.  I was glad of it.  It felt peaceful.  Any new letters will probably go right into my burn bin.  I don't live in her version of make believe.  And I needed to stop letting her make me feel bad because of her choice to live there.  

Then came my actual birthday and I woke up pissed.  I haven't been angry on my birthday in YEARS.  And this year, I was.  It was Barbara's letter that did it.  And then my husband alluded to the fact he didn't do anything for my birthday.  And I was hurt again.  But I didn't let my day get ruined.  I did some stuff to get my brain feeling better and then my family actually made it a wonderful birthday.  I thought I was beyond being disappointed on that day.  I thought I was past it.  But it crept right back, hence me needing to go no contact with her (she was a part of that disappointment...because she always forgot my birthdays).  But it ended up being so lovely, because I did my part of doing what I needed to do to change how my brain was feeling that day.  Had I let myself stew all day?  I would have ruined it.  Just like every year for YEARS.  But I didn't.  And it turned out so great instead :)  

This is my path to healing myself from narcissistic abuse.  

And I can finally see that it's working.