The Day My Denial Died: The First Step in My Healing from Maternal Narcissistic Abuse
December 20, 2020
The day my life cracked open.
The day my denial—54 years strong—shattered into irreparable pieces.
The day I saw, for the first time, the woman who raised me for what she truly was.
A monster.
I didn’t wake up that morning knowing my life was about to change.
I wasn’t searching for a revelation.
But the truth found me anyway—a freight train barreling straight through my carefully constructed illusions.
And once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it.
Denial was my survival mechanism
For over five decades, I gaslit myself into believing my mother wasn’t abusive:
it’s not that bad
other people have it worse
this is just how mothers are.
I bent my reality to fit a narrative that made my existence tolerable.
Because the alternative—the truth—was too terrifying to accept.
No one wants to believe their own mother is their abuser.
No one wants to believe that the person who gave them life also made that life a living hell.
But I had to believe it.
Because if I ever dared to admit the truth to myself, even for a second, my world would have crumbled.
And if it crumbled, I had no idea if I’d survive the wreckage.
So, I did what all abused children probably do—I found ways to cope:
I “worshiped” my mother
I feared my mother
I obeyed my mother.
When I was a child, she told me she had eyes in the back of her head.
She said she could read my thoughts.
She made me believe that even if I never spoke my defiance aloud, she would know—and she would punish me for it.
So, I never thought it.
I never questioned her.
I never allowed myself to label her as abusive.
Until the moment I had no choice…keep reading.
The freight train of awareness and anger and acceptance
During the Covid pandemic, my husband and put all of our belongings in a storage unit in Ohio, stuffed our SUV with necessities and our two small dogs, and moved in with my parents in Florida to be caregivers for my terminally ill, 80-year-old father and to relieve my mother from what I assumed were her caretaking responsibilities (I later learned that she was neglecting him on purpose; that’s a story for another day).
And that’s when I saw it—raw, undeniable, monstrous.
I witnessed my mother torment a frail, defenseless man in his final season of life.
While caring for my dad, she tormented me with evil looks, screamed at me, and even pitted our small dogs against her dogs to encourage a fight.
I heard her scream at him, belittle him, mock him, punish him for needing help.
I saw her hurt him
Day after day I listened to him as he told me what she’d done to him in the wee hours of the morning while she was drunk from copious amounts of Southern Comfort mixed with vodka and prescription pain killers, including squeezing the parts of his body swollen with painful gout and telling him to kill himself.
But, I was absolutely powerless to stop her even though every cell in my body ached with anguish and sadness and fear.
And then it happened.
On December 20, 2020, the walls of my denial caved in.
Every buried memory, every swallowed scream, every moment of torment I had hidden from myself for 54 years surfaced all at once.
The force of it knocked the wind out of me.
I couldn’t breathe.
I couldn’t move.
I couldn’t escape it.
The reality I had spent my entire life avoiding was now suffocating me:
my mother was an abuser
my father was her victim
and so was I.
The pain of this realization was unlike anything I had ever experienced.
It crippled me.
It paralyzed me.
It shattered me.
And yet, this painful awareness and my even more painful acceptance of it was the first step in my healing.
The pain of awareness and its acceptance is the price of freedom
If I had to describe awareness and my acceptance of it, it would be a razor-sharp blade cutting through flesh I didn’t even know was wounded.
It doesn’t come gently. It doesn’t come with a warning.
It erupts, engulfs, consumes.
And once you have it—once you see—you can never go back.
But here’s the truth no one tells you: You cannot heal from something unless you first acknowledge it exists.
You cannot reclaim your power unless you first see yourself as you are now.
And when, on December 20, 2020, I allowed myself to softly say the words, “My mom is abusive,” and, “I am being abused,” as I looked in the mirror, something inside me shifted.
It was like unlocking a door that had been bolted shut for a lifetime.
I stepped into the truth.
I stepped into my power, which had been callously stripped from me by my mother and my sibling who didn’t experience the same abuse.
Final thoughts
If you are reading this, if you feel something rising in your chest—listen.
This awareness is your catalyst and the anger it brings is your fire.
Giving myself permission to explore this awareness was terrifying and it hurt so bad.
Accepting it was even worse.
Because for decades I survived.
I endured, tolerated, withstood, but I never accepted.
And yet, it is in this acceptance that the truth finally lands.
And from this truth, I began to rebuild.
And, so can you.
[side note] This was my entrance into The Hollow Passage
I thought that awareness would set me free.
Instead, it swallowed me whole and dragged me into what I call The Hollow.
I wasn’t prepared for the darkness, the grief, or the war within that followed.
But this was the first step—the moment denial died and truth took its place.
The Hollow is where I would have to fight for my freedom.
What helped me in the early stages of my awareness, my anger, and my acceptance
Cry. There’s no sugarcoating this. Awareness and acceptance hurt like hell. The grief will drown you. Let it. I screamed into my pillow, sobbed, ugly cried—whatever needed to come out during this initial stage, I let it out. The weight of awareness is too heavy to keep buried inside. Crying is NOT weakness my mother told me it was. It is release.
Write. I’m not talking about a cute, color-coded bullet journal with stickers and motivational quotes. I’m talking raw, messy, gut-wrenching scribbles on whatever paper you can grab.
I kept a 3” x 5” spiral-bound notebook on my nightstand, pen always at the ready. Because awareness doesn’t care about convenience—it hits when it wants to.
3 AM. Eyes wide open. Another memory surfacing.
I would grab my notebook and write. My handwriting was sloppy. My sentences were broken. None of that mattered.
What mattered was getting it out of my head before it swallowed me whole.
Watch the movie of your memories. The mind doesn’t heal in order. It doesn’t neatly present your past in chronological sequence. It throws memories at you out of nowhere—some you remember vividly, some you forgot existed.
And you will want to deny them.
You will want to minimize them.
You will want to rewrite them.
Don’t.
Let them play.
The good ones. The bad ones. The ones that make you question everything. They all matter.
You don’t have to make sense of them right away.
You don’t have to assign them meaning immediately.
But you do have to let them exist.
This is only the beginning
If you’re standing at the edge of awareness and acceptance, staring into the mirror, I see you.
If you’ve already taken this first brutal step, I am proud of you.
Awareness and acceptance are painful, but they are also powerful.
And when you own your truth, you begin the process of taking back what was stolen from you:
your mind
your freedom
your power
your worth
your life.
I say it’s a process because it took me several years to get my mind, power, worth, freedom, and life back through my healing process.
But, I hope my story and this blog help you quicken the pace.
With belief in your power,
Carole