Enabling Father

In a family situation where you have a Narcissistic Mother, you also need to have an Enabling Father. That is, if you have a father at all.

An Enabling Father is one who panders to the Narcissistic Mother, who facilitates her abuse of the children, who worships completely at her altar and expects the children to do so too.

He can - as is the case with my own father - act as her hatchet man, being the one who defends her viciously, portraying his own version of Narcissistic Rage. He's her front-line defence.

He'll do anything to keep the peace, including sacrificing his own children's well-being.

I remember my brother and I going to my father to protest at some specific of our mother's treatment of us. I so clearly remember every word of his reply:

He said, "Don't make me unhappy with the wife I've chosen".

And by saying that, he dismissed our concerns totally. I cannot remember what the issue was, but it must have been serious enough for us to approach him, and we must have had right on our side or he would have argued the case on its own merits. 

But he wasn't going to help us. His need to feel that he'd chosen a good wife was more important than protecting his children.

It also shows that he needed to believe his wife was perfect, or near it, to feel he had chosen a good wife. That was more black-and-white thinking.

He was forever talking her up to us, telling us how wonderful she was, how great. This in itself was a form of gaslighting (albeit probably an unconcious form) because it didn't tally with our experiences of her.

I remember as a child feeling very lonely and left out because their love for each other was a closed circle and there was no room for me in it. I certainly didn't describe it in those words then, I didn't have the words to describe it. But I distinctly remember the feeling, and thinking they loved each other so much there was no love left for me.

Nowadays I think that their 'love' was more probably an unhealthy co-dependency. My husband and I love each other very much, but that love is not a closed circle. Indeed the more we build a healthy relationship, the more that love spreads outwards, not only to our son but to others too.

An Enabling Father will rationalise away his wife's behaviour. He'll tell the children things like, "She loves you in her own way." Or, "Don't mind her, it's just her way." Or, "Don't annoy your mother, you know what she's like."

This dynamic, of course, means that Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers are living in a no-win situation. They have no champion, nobody to protect them.

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Mothers With Narcissistic Personality Disorder

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