What is a narcissist grandmother like, with her grandchild?
08.06.2025 04:01
When my narcissist grandmother died of Alzheimer’s, I had visited my parents and my mother was very gleeful at the death, of course. She was chirping on about her last days.
But really, it was over his unprocessed pain.
(Narcissists CAN definitely be thoughtful at times too: they aren’t all bad. That’s why it’s hard to break trauma bonds. I’m grateful she remembered and gave me that. Her relationship to them was as contentious as my dad’s, as was her relationship to my dad. Her relationship to me was totally nonexistent lifelong and still is. She always ignored me, so her gesture was kind. I didn’t even know she knew we played that game.)
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This is why I think having BPD and empathy is best explained as to have a life of lifelong grieving. It is very hard and isolating to try to explain the emotional experience of that kind of broken love.
It is still something I cry over. I also cry because I know my grandmother also suffered what my father did in order for her to do what she did. It is so very tragic.
I understand now, that he was shocked because the house I said I liked was a house of horrors for him.
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TEARS!
They’d play games with me for hours: Rummy, Chinese checkers, Candyland. My narcissist grandparents always were very competitive and would gloat to beat me, BUT…they also would show me exactly why I lost. But whenever I did win, they’d be mad. 😤
My parents were always angry when they left either of their parents and they usually fought with each other after.
My histrionic grandpa ALWAYS let me win and would wink at me when I accused him of letting me. I love that he did that, but back then I almost preferred my narcissist grandparents. I wanted to win FOR REAL!!
It was always eerie to me that for Christmas, my dad would just sit quietly, eat, say nothing to no one. It felt so so sad to me. He always felt miserable. No one would ask him anything. Then he’d go quietly watch football.
As for the grandparents I was raised with, I had wonderful relationships to all my grandparents and I loved them very much. Awakening to the truth of what they did to my parents was very painful because I loved them.
But WOW DID THAT TRUTH OFFEND HER.
My father cut off his parents when I was 10: it was over Bill Clinton, who he hated but they liked.
He gave his parents a card with $100 and they gave him a card with $100 every year. It made no sense to me. He had a name that rhymed with my grandmother and my grandfather’s name as a middle name—a golden child—but they were not loving or close.
I’m a borderline. I had a histrionic grandfather married to a narcissist grandmother and a borderline grandmother married to a narcissist grandfather.
Holding contradictions like that causes brain damage, so many often go into denial to cope: the first stage of grief. The cognitive dissonance is too profound to hold, especially in childhood.
When my borderline grandmother died of cancer young, my narcissist grandfather got remarried in a MONTH. My mom was so mad, she cut him off. So my relationship with him ended at 8 years old. I saw him once in adulthood, and he had Alzheimer’s. He didn’t remember me.
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My grandparents and narcissist parents also loved to use us kids to triangulate and also judge each other. But it generally worked in my benefit because, for example, my grandmother would be judgmental over how my mom treated me and would be like, “What is wrong with that woman? You’re literally an angel child.” That made me feel like someone loved me and was on my team and found the abuse wrong.
They were cantankerous. They all fought with their spouses constantly. They all hit me as a kid. They were threatening and controlling with others.
For about two years.
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It is not hard to see any of my grandparents’ NPD in hindsight now that I’m self aware.
And my parents didn’t seem to love their own parents. They never even had phone conversations or sit down conversations. It was a brief hi and update to drop us off or pick us up. That was all.
And when my histrionic grandfather died, my narcissist aunt asked me if I wanted anything, and I said just some photos, but she sent me our Chinese Checkers game which I was astounded he still had into his 90s! The same game!
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I asked, “What happened to the lake house?”
They had rooms in their home for us and toys for us. They taught me to swim in their lake and took me on walks in the woods and taught me about plants and animals. My grandmother would always have some magazine page she tore out of some craft she wanted us to make together, like little dolls made of clothespins.
I hate to even speak their shames at all: I want to protect them. I don’t like people seeing them as ALL bad. I know they did awful things, unforgivable things, and they have mental illnesses, yet my love persists very stubbornly.
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But despite the toxicity, which was just very normal to me, I felt that my grandparents all put in efforts to be good grandparents to my sister and I both. I enjoyed staying with them. It always felt like a reprieve from Hell.
Also my grandparents all stopped hitting me around the age of six. They said I was too old for that. My parents never stopped hitting me.
If you know sociopaths you know this is pretty rare. And also, for how COLD their relationship was, it was such an epiphany for me to recognize, He DID love her?!
But the truth is, like with everyone I loved who had NPD, I buried and excused all the bad to maintain that love.
His mother molested him. She made him into a rapist.
I still tried though. At 30, when my first book was published, I brought them a copy and brought it to their house. I kid you not when I say, they looked at it, and looked away and turned up the tv.
He flinched, turned his head in shock, and said, “REALLY?!”
My narcissist grandparents seemed to find children cute, entertaining, and amusing for the first couple years, and then, like they do with supply, grew bored. I saw them become great grandparents and they just doted and couldn’t stop telling stories of how cute the kids were. They seemed to really love them.
When I turned 18, I sought to reunite with my grandparents, my own parental relationship being so fraught. I went to their house and I confided how traumatized and abused I’d been by my parents and how painful it was to lose them and have no agency whatsoever, and how no one helped me with my grief over losing them.
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Still, I credit them with giving me skill and patience…and I had fun because I don’t care about losing games. I still don’t. I play for fun and for the company of others. My narcissist sister would scream and tear the house apart to lose, so they played more with me than her.
My father turned his head away and looked out the window and I saw TEARS welling in his eyes.
They also differ in types of abuses. I know narcissist parents who starve their kids, for example. I was beaten, burned, and locked in my room for months but never starved.
How do I become mentally strong?
Just like my parents and sister, nothing ever felt good enough, and it made me not feel happy for myself. Now in hindsight I see that was narcissist envy and devaluation.
Even narcissists as parents differ drastically. And they differ BETWEEN children too: the scapegoat child or the invisible child or the golden children all have very different experiences.
Golden child status restored!
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My NPD grandparents HATED who their child married, and I sensed it was JEALOUSY, which confused me very much too. My grandmother really trash talked my mom to me, and I said once, “I think you two are exactly alike,” because…they were…narcissists often marry someone who can be their surrogate parent to enact revenge on.
Regardless of the pain in my family, I love my grandparents very much and wouldn’t trade them for anything. I dream of them often and I believe they are rooting for me to heal the pains in our family that they couldn’t.
My narcissist grandmother sewed us princess dresses and we could wear them all the live long day if we wanted to.
(My mom was adopted and found her birth parents who I briefly knew for a couple years in childhood and those were two sociopaths. Though I have few memories of them, they were impoverished, criminals, and addicts. My grandfather had a huge porn collection. They seemed pretty indifferent to me. Me and my cousins had little supervision and they let us do dangerous things like drive three wheelers—no helmet).
The forcefulness of his surprise actually made me jump. And it confused me. I could see he was extremely emotional, which was rare for him. Gently, I said, “Yeah, I have great memories there. I mean, she had her issues like anyone, but she was a good grandma.”
Then cut off again. My dad even gave them the plane back.
I know many people cannot hold nuance in their mind, yet still I want to tell their stories in the nuanced truth.
I told them I wanted to spend holidays with them. But Christmas rolled around and I wasn’t invited. I saw the family celebrating without me, and it was the BIGGEST wound from my grandparents, but in hindsight you can see that this is the narcissist devaluation at play.
By about age 4 or 5, they were not much in their lives and didn’t talk about them anymore.
His parents returned a couple years later with a lovebomb hoover he couldn’t resist: THEY BOUGHT HIM AN AIRPLANE.
There’s no generalizing narcissists like that: their relationships to others will be based on a lot of factors.
My dad: “We sold it.”
My family tree is just rotting with grief.
That is a VERY hard truth to hold alongside all my memories of loving her. My dad being a rapist is also a hard truth to hold alongside my love for him.
“I loved that house,” I said.