Rooted in Narcissism: The Origins Of My Anxiety
Image source: Plate 28: Narcissus at the Well, Antonio TempestaGrowing up, I never knew any different. My mummy was just like all the other mummies, only she loved me ‘more than most’, as she always used to tell me. I felt sorry for other kids. My mummy loved me more than their mummies loved them.
Of course, this illusion would be shattered by the time I was 12.
For the first half of my childhood, my mother was everything I needed her to be; loving, fun, affectionate, safe. I still recall the terror I felt, aged 5, when I accidentally broke my friend’s beautiful rainbow skipping rope. I didn’t know much about money back then, but I knew it was expensive. Much more than my 50p a week pocket money could afford! I ran to mummy, sobbing in panic. “I’ve broken it! I’ve broken it!” I wailed, convinced my punishment by Lydia’s mummy and daddy would be certain death. “It’s alright, love,” mum reassured me with an amused chuckle, “we’ll buy her a new one, they don’t cost much.”
And just like that, my problems vanished. Mummy had a way of making everything better.
Until she stopped.
By the time I was hitting double digits, our relationship had soured. I didn’t understand why back then, but I realise now it was rooted in jealousy. You see, I was becoming a woman. I was developing breasts, my body taking shape. My personality was blooming. I was everything she used to be, the shadow of her fading youth. A reminder of the potential she’d lost to time. And apathy.
I was no longer this little girl my mother could mould, hoping to vicariously fulfil her ambitions through me. I was independent. My own person. A threat. Almost overnight, unbeknownst to me, I had become competition.
Puberty seemed to be the pinnacle shifting point in our relationship, when her narcissism became apparent. Our bond deteriorated fast and my mother seemed to do everything she could to deepen it. “Bitch!” she’d scream at me whenever I disappointed her. “Slut!” would often follow - a projection of her own promiscuous youth. Once I hit my early teens, she started burdening me with the realities of life; bills, debt disputes, social pressures far beyond my understanding as a 14 year old girl. Suddenly, I was playing the role of parent; supporting her emotionally, offering her advice on topics well above my age, being her advocate.
I didn’t mind. Rather, I didn’t realise. I just thought I was growing up and I felt proud, albeit burdened, by the additional responsibilities I was being given. Proof, almost, of her love, that she trusted me enough to handle these things for her. So I clung to it, desperately.
“Do you want the good news, or the bad news?” became my mother’s favourite phrase, as she slowly built a wall between us, gradually handing off more and more of her adult responsibilities to me. “The bad news,” I’d anxiously reply. ‘What bad news? Am I in trouble? Did I do something wrong?’ A million questions running through my mind. “There is none,” she’d respond gleefully, almost delighted at making me worry. The aforementioned good news never came. An empty promise. A vacuous trick, just to set me on edge. And it did.
As I grew, my anxiety only became more rooted with each year that passed, and by the time I was 14, my anxiety was so severe I couldn’t face going to school.
“Get up! Mother would scream at the depressed lump under the duvet. “You’re going to be late for school! Don’t blame me when the police come and take you into care! They abuse teenage girls like you!’
She, of course, wouldn’t see the budding mental illness in me. I was just tantruming, according to her.
Fast-forward to last year, age 35, and following a period of stalking and harassment by an ex co-worker I’d rejected 8 years ago, I experienced my first (and hopefully last) episode of psychosis which culminated in a suicide attempt on 10th June 2025.
While the harassment was the clear instigator of my mental health crisis, it was years of unprocessed trauma from childhood which was the ultimate cause. For decades, what I’ve termed ‘anxiety’, has actually been C-PTSD (Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), a condition handcrafted just for me by my very own mother after decades of abuse and neglect. A condition so personal, so precise, it feels built on pure evil.
It begs the question; how much of mental illness has its foundations in trauma? Trauma most of us don’t remember because we were too young, or it was too subtle?
I don’t think I’ll ever truly know the answer to this. Mental illness runs in my family, but so too, does abuse. My own mother was abused by multiple members of her family, and she, like I, had her own psychotic break in her late teens, resulting in lifelong schizophrenia.
Mental health is so poorly understood, not just by society, but by the very professions supposed to be experts in the matter. Psychiatry, despite its established place in medicine, is still very much in its infancy. The root of psychiatric illnesses is still being discovered, and much like a woodland ecosystem whereby the trees are all interconnected beneath the surface despite appearing as individual, so too are mental illnesses. The distinction between one psychiatric disorder and another is not clear, nor are their causes, and as medicine broadens its knowledge, it becomes ever more obvious that mental illness is a complex canopy of signs, symptoms, and origins, all of which overlap and interconnect.
“Mental health is so poorly understood, not just by society, but by the very professions supposed to be experts in the matter. Psychiatry, despite its established place in medicine, is still very much in its infancy. ”
However, one thing is clear to me; childhood trauma plays a significant role, and is the root cause, of most mental illnesses, something which I think is very overlooked by both psychiatry and society.