The Friendships I Kept Alive All By Myself: What Growing Up With a Narcissistic Mother Taught Me About Losing People

I was the youngest of three sisters, and I grew up with a narcissistic mother. For most of my life I didn't have a name for that. I just knew something felt off, and I couldn't quite explain what.

It wasn't until my late thirties that things started to click. I went to therapy. I journaled. I talked and shared and kept peeling back layers, thinking each one was the last one. And then life would hand me a new situation, usually something small, and I'd feel that old familiar tug of needing to be liked, needing to smooth things over, needing someone to not be upset with me. And I'd realize, "Oh." There it is again. Another piece of the upbringing I didn't even know was still running the show.

Here's what I wish I had learned sooner: a constant hum of needing approval, flinching at the thought of disappointing someone, and organizing myself around avoiding confrontation at all costs are not signs of a healthy sense of self. Those signs are what happens when your sense of self gets built by someone who saw you as an extension of her rather than as your own person.

Researchers who study daughters of narcissistic mothers describe exactly this pattern. When love is conditional and attention has to be earned, a child learns to scan for approval instead of trusting her own instincts. That scanning doesn't stop at eighteen. It follows you into your friendships, your romantic relationships, and every room you walk into as an adult. The chronic self-doubt, the people-pleasing, the fear of being disliked. These are adaptations and not character flaws. They were smart and necessary when you were small and had no other way to stay safe in that house. The problem is they're very difficult to unlearn once you're grown.

Knowing that has been clarifying for me. It has also made me sad, if I'm honest, and a little angry too. So many years spent not understanding why I felt the way I did.

Where This Shows Up Now

Lately I've noticed this playing out most clearly in my friendships. I get attached to the people I love, and it genuinely hurts when they drift. I know the sayings. Some friends are for a season, some for a reason, some for a lifetime. I love the train station metaphor too, the idea that some people are on your train the whole way, some are standing at the station with you for a while, and some are headed toward a completely different destination. All of that is true and I still feel the loss when someone I cared about goes quiet.

A few years ago I made myself a promise. I would only nurture the relationships where the other person was reaching back. I wouldn't spend my energy chasing people who weren't choosing me. Somewhere along the way I forgot that promise, and I think building Filled Cups had something to do with it. When your work is helping other people build strong friendships, it's easy to slide into over functioning in your own. I hold a lot of space for the people in my life, more than most people do, and I've had to admit that I've still been losing some of the good ones anyway, no matter how much effort I poured in.

I'm grateful for the friends who do show up, who reach out, who care in a way I can feel. And I'm learning something that took me a long time to actually believe. What my friends choose to do, whether they stay close or drift away or head off toward a different life, isn't a reflection of my worth. I know I'm a good person with a lot to offer. I have to be careful not to let the loss of one or two people turn into a story about how I'm not enough, because that story isn't true and it isn't even mine. It belongs to a much younger version of me who learned to measure her value by whether the people around her stayed.

Choosing Abundance Over Scarcity

I sometimes miss how simple friendship felt in college. You shared something real with someone; you connected, and that was enough. No overthinking, no cataloging who reached out first.

These days I'm trying to find my way back to that simplicity, just with a little more wisdom this time. I have friends scattered all over, some close, some far; my book club; and women I've known since childhood who I still catch up with over video calls and voice notes. I'm a generally happy person with plenty going on, and it's okay if friendship isn't the thing I'm actively striving for every single day right now. It's okay to just let it exist.

I talked more about all of this recently with Dr. Nzinga Cates on the podcast, a victimologist and therapist who has spent her career studying daughters of narcissistic mothers and who is a survivor of narcissistic abuse herself. One thing she said has stayed with me since we recorded. She talks about a message beneath the message that gets transmitted in these households, things like "your needs come second," "love has to be earned," and "mistakes are unacceptable." Nobody sits you down and says those words out loud. You absorb them from a thousand small moments, learning to read the room, learning to manage everyone else's mood before you even think about your own.

She also said something that reframed this whole healing process for me. She said it's not really about becoming a different person. It's about becoming who you already were before anyone taught you to shrink. That distinction matters, because for a long time I thought healing meant fixing something broken in me. It doesn't. It means unlearning what was never mine to carry in the first place.

The other piece that hit me was about trust and intuition. When you grow up being told you're too sensitive, that never happened, or you're overreacting, you lose your ability to trust your own gut. And that follows you straight into your adult friendships. You meet someone who doesn't quite feel right and you talk yourself out of that feeling because you were trained your whole childhood not to believe what your body was telling you. Learning to trust myself again, in who I let close and who I let go of, has been its own quiet kind of healing.

If any of this is resonating with you, that full conversation with Dr. Cates is worth a listen.

I'm rebuilding my sense of self, even though I was raised in a way that discouraged me from having one in the first place. I'm unlearning conditioning I didn't choose. And more than anything, I'm choosing to believe there's an abundance of good people out there for me, rather than living from a place of scarcity. Scarcity never actually served me. It just kept me holding on too tight to the wrong things.

If you grew up with a parent like mine, I hope you know this. The way you love people so hard, the way you keep showing up even when it costs you; that part of you isn't broken. It just needs to learn that it's allowed to receive as much as it gives.

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