r/raisedbynarcissists

Ah, the holidays, a wonderful opportunity to spend quality time with your relatives. That is, unless you're a follower of the subreddit r/raisedbynarcissists who has instituted strict "No Contact" policies against your immediate family members due to petty, perceived slights!

r/raisedbynarcissists, or RBN for short, aims to be a support group for people who grew up with narcissistic parents and suffered emotional abuse. It all sounds fine and beneficial until you remember that this is Reddit, so naturally a good number of submissions are from the most feeble dweebs imaginable venting about micro-aggressions supposedly caused by their parents.

For example, this guy started playing passive-agressive wargames with his dad over the TV volume, because while he's tech-savvy enough to download an app that let him tinker with the TV's sound settings from his phone, he's apparently never heard of headphones. Or take this person, who can't seem to decide if they hate their rich parents for giving them money or not giving them enough money.

RBN helpfully includes an acronym guide so you can understand what the hell people are saying when they talk about their NMiL sending FMs to circumvent NC. Speaking of which, NC (No Contact) is like a miracle tonic that will solve any problem. Whenever a newcomer asks for advice about their parents, the answer is pretty much always the same: Sever all ties with them. Don't try to work things out, just completely cut out them out of your life as your first resort. By the way, please remember that making a secondary account to stalk your parents on Facebook technically counts as a violation of NC protocol.

Identifying narcissism can be pretty tricky. You might think a parent who sends you an email to congratulate you on making the Dean's List or a text message that says "Happy Birthday" sounds nice enough, but make no mistake: This is the M.O. of a narcissist.

Dealing with Nparents can be a fierce battle, and sadly it's not without collateral damage. A British woman posted about her son getting diarrhea because his narcissistic "feeder" grandmother gave him lots of junk food against her wishes, which sucks, but then the mother refused to give him medicine out of weird, misplaced spite. It's going to be awkward when the kid joins RBN and they run into each other.

Then there's this guy who knocked out his dad with a baseball bat, or at the very least wants strangers on the Internet to believe he did. He was fully justified, though, because the dad was narcissistic.

Somehow that guy's still not the weirdest person in RBN. That honor belongs to this 41-year-old woman who lives with her "mommy dearest" and secretly records her phone calls. Mommy dearest's crimes include getting sad at movies and expecting her middle-aged daughter to help clean the house, a clear-cut case of narcissism if I've ever seen one.

– Adam "rubber cat" Jameson (@robbercat)