Before you begin: what you need to know
Introduction
Born in Atlanta, Georgia in the mid-1940s, my mother entered a world already shaped by lack, turbulence, and abuse—a family legacy she would later confirm herself, not in life, but through her spirit.
In her human form, she never shared anything positive about her childhood. I don’t know what she loved as a little girl or what dreams she held as a teenager. Those doors stayed permanently locked and closed.
The questions her silence left behind never stopped echoing. For decades, I carried the ache of wondering WHY. Why the cruelty? Why the targeted attacks on my spirit? Why the unpredictable swings between sweetness and viciousness? Why did my father stand by and watch it happen? Why the different treatment for my sibling?
In search of answers that no earthly conversation could offer, I spent six months working closely with a gifted, kind, patient, internationally recognized psychic medium. Together, we embarked on a series of channeling sessions that connected me with my late parents, Jeshua ben Joseph (the original Aramaic name for Jesus, pronounced Yeshua), the Divine Feminine, my spirit guides, and my own soul.
These conversations became the missing link I couldn’t find in therapy rooms or psychology websites. They unearthed the truth of why I was her chosen target and revealed the roots of how she became the monstrous person she was.
I’m not here to diagnose. I’m here to share what emerged when the hard questions I could never safely ask in life were finally answered from the other side. Questions whose answers made me cry—disbelieving, furious, aching, and braver than I knew. I know it sounds confusing, but all will make sense when you read the channeling sessions (no skipping around, otherwise it’ll feel disjointed and confusing).
Your experience of maternal narcissism may look different than mine or it may feel eerily familiar. But, if you’ve ever longed to know why she hurt you, if you’ve ever felt trapped in the confusion between her moments of kindness and cruelty, if you’ve ever needed to understand the WHY beneath the abuse, then this space was created with you in mind.
The Conversations We Never Had is not a step-by-step guide or a blueprint for healing from maternal narcissistic abuse. It’s a raw, intimate body of work shared in the hope that my incessant search for truth might illuminate your own.
I am not a therapist. I am not a clinician. I’m a woman who endured over 50 years of maternal narcissistic abuse within a dysfunctional, toxic family whose healing began only after the abuser was gone.
I gaslit myself about the abuse for more than half a century because admitting the truth felt unbearable. That silence shattered on December 20, 2020. I was 53 when I allowed the awareness to finally land in. I went no-contact on February 15, 2021. My mother died on August 29, 2021.
These conversations from the other side became the beginning of my self-reconstruction. I share them because I know how isolating this kind of confusing grief and overwhelming pain is. I know how the confusion endlessly loops. I know how the longing for answers consumes you because the longing for answers consumed me. And I also know this: If I can come through the wreckage of more than half a century of maternal narcissistic abuse, so can you.
Take what resonates. Leave what doesn’t. Come back as often as you need. You have unlimited access for a reason.
With deepest respect for your story and your strength,
Carole
Founder & Creator, The Weight of Belief and The Conversations We Never Had
Maternal Narcissistic Abuse Survivor, Rape Survivor
Connecting with the other side for answers
I know I’m not the only one who’s asked these questions on repeat:
Why was I her target?
How could she be so cruel to a defenseless child?
Why did she enjoy my tears, my terror?
Why was she the way she was?
Why did she treat my sibling so differently?
Why did her kindness sometimes slip through, only to explode into volcanic rage without warning?
Did she ever love me at all?
Why didn’t my father stop her?
Why did he enable her?
These are the questions so many of us carry. The ones that haunt, loop, and remain unanswered when our abuser refuses to tell the truth.
Asking my mother’s human self was always dangerous because to challenge her meant poking the sleeping bear. Or, as she later revealed from spirit, the beast within her.
But, I wasn’t willing to live the rest of my life in the dark. I knew that if any hope for peace or clarity existed, it would come from somewhere beyond the earthly plane.
So I bravely went where the truth could finally be told. What unfolded was more than I could have ever, ever imagined!
From the very first session, my mother’s spirit stepped forward. Not defensive, not withholding, but ready to speak even before I asked my hard questions.
For the first time, I wasn’t met with denial. I wasn’t gaslit. I wasn’t blamed.
I was given the hard truths.
What to expect
These aren’t assumptions or theories. What you’ll read are the direct transcripts of my channeled conversations. They’re raw, revealing, and sometimes difficult to absorb.
Woven throughout are my real-time reflections, knee-jerk reactions, emotional outbursts, and unrehearsed thoughts. They’re raw, rough, and real because that’s how truth lands when it hasn’t been filtered or rehearsed.
Most daughters of narcissistic mothers are left with silence, speculation, or clinical guesswork. But through these dialogues, you’ll gain something far more rare: an unguarded, soul-level glimpse into the mind of one mean narcissistic mother after death stripped away her defenses.
This is unprecedented access for daughters, therapists, and anyone trying to understand how a mother becomes this way, including:
her ego, her wounds, and the driving force behind her abuse
the childhood traumas and early life experiences that hardened her and her heart
the toxic cycles that greatly worsened as she aged
the masks she wore to survive, manipulate, and maintain control
the deep shame and self-loathing buried beneath her cruelty
the twisted justifications she clung to in order to excuse her behavior
the ways she envied, resented, and depended on her daughter’s light
the spiritual perspective she gained after death—and what she finally saw from the other side.
You’ll also read reflections from my father’s spirit, Jeshua ben Joseph, The Divine Feminine, my spirit guides, and my own soul. Each conversation revealed another piece of the larger story—a story I was finally able to piece together after a lifetime of confusion.
This is not passive reading. I invite you to approach these conversations at your own pace. Let them meet you gently or strike hard, depending on what you’re ready to hear and feel.
You will find that the insights land differently each time you revisit them. That’s okay. Healing rarely happens all at once.
The Conversations We Never Had is best viewed on a device larger than a cell phone.
A note on abuse, diagnosis, and lived experience
Before you go any further, I want to speak directly to the part of you that may already feel anxious reading these words. The part that might wonder if your experience counts or that questions whether what happened to you was bad enough.
Hear this: there is no abuse Olympics here. There is no scale to measure whose wounds are more valid.
If you were harmed, if you were hurt, if you were diminished or controlled or bullied or made to doubt your own reality, you belong here.
Again, our experiences with maternal narcissistic abuse may not look the same. Your mother may have been harsher than mine or not as cruel. You may have lived through daily assaults on your spirit or experienced quieter forms of manipulation and erasure. Maybe your mother wasn’t abusive 24/7, just like mine.
Abuse comes in many costumes, but the impact on the heart, the wholeness of your being, and the sense of self runs deep no matter how it’s dressed.
For the record: my mother was never officially diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder or any other clinical label. Like many who abuse behind closed doors, she avoided anything that could expose her (I know because her spirit said so). Therapy would have shined a light where she wanted darkness. Plus, there’s no way in hell she’d ever go to therapy. A diagnosis would have put a name to what she worked so hard to cover up.
I didn’t need paperwork to tell me what I lived through. What I needed was truth and to understand WHY.
It wasn’t until one of the most intense channeling sessions that I fully understood how much she feared exposure. Her spirit described, in vivid detail, the fury of her “beast within” the day I unexpectedly called out her behavior during the most terrifying incident I ever endured with her. I was 53 years old at the time. That story is shared in the pages ahead.
And somewhere in the midst of these conversations we never had—long after I stopped hoping for any kind of accountability—my mother’s spirit quietly admitted: “I was a narcissist. It’s OK if you call me a narcissist.”
That was all the confirmation I needed.
What I share here is not clinical theory. It’s not textbook knowledge or secondhand stories. It’s my lived experience of over half a century. The inside story and the unvarnished truth of what it feels like to survive a covert narcissistic mother from birth until her death and then begin the long, complicated work of putting yourself back together. Of discovering who you really are.
I did not heal while my abuser was alive. I could not because I did not even allow myself to name what was happening to me until I was 53 years old.
December 20, 2020 — the day I finally let the truth land.
February 15, 2021 — the day I went no contact.
August 29, 2021 — the day she died.
Those dates matter because they mark the beginning of my self-reconstruction. Not healing in the polished, glossy sense. But the raw, honest collapse and rebuilding that happens when your lifelong foundation evaporates.
I also want to be transparent about something that adds to the complexity of this kind of abuse: it wasn’t bad 24/7/365.
There were good times, too. Moments when my mother seemed warm, fun, amicable. Sometimes we vacationed together. We watched college football. We celebrated holidays and birthdays. But even in those moments, I never rested from my hypervigilance. I never stopped scanning the room, reading her tone, tracking the slightest shifts in her expression while bracing for the next eruption I knew would come out of nowhere (boy, does it feel good to not have to do that anymore!).
This inconsistency and the total whiplash between affection and annihilation are some of the most devastating tools of maternal narcissistic abuse. It kept me trapped between hope and fear. It confused my instincts and it stole my sense of safety. It stayed with me long into adulthood and midlife.
These channeled conversations helped me untangle that confusion. They helped me see clearly for the first time.
“I’m not here to tell you what healing should look like for you. And MAKE NO MISTAKE ABOUT THIS: I will never push forgiveness on you. Forgiveness, if it comes for you, is deeply personal.
Your feelings are valid. Your pain is valid. Your grief is valid. And your timeline is the right timeline.
Take what resonates from The Conversations We Never Had. Leave what doesn’t. Pause when you need to. Come back when you’re ready.
This work is meant to offer truth, reflection, and the possibility of peace and hope.”
What this is and what it isn’t
Chances are, if you’ve found your way here you already know this, but I believe in being clear.
As a reminder, here’s what you can expect from this work, and just as importantly, what you won’t find here.
This is not:
A clinical guide. You won’t find medical definitions, DSM checklists, scientific data, or professional citations here. There are no academic footnotes and no diagnostic tools. This work intentionally lives outside the clinical lane.
A how-to manual for recovery. I do not offer strategies for staying in abusive relationships or managing them. I do not guide you on how to cope with your narcissistic mother, how to heal the relationship, how to reconcile, or how to overcome in the traditional self-help sense. If that’s what you’re looking for, there are many qualified professionals who specialize in that type of work.
A case-study collection or research-based text. This isn’t a collection of client stories, case studies, or third-party anecdotes about Marcia, Jan, or Cindy. This is my story, my lived experience, shared from my own lens of observation. There are no generic examples. No AI-generated filler. Just the hard truths of what happened to me and the unexpected hard answers I found on the other side.
A step-by-step plan to forgiveness. I will never tell you to accept, excuse, or love your abusive mother for who she is and then effortlessly forgive her. If forgiveness ever comes, it is your choice and your timeline. Period.
A balanced look at sibling dynamics. You will not find sibling-relationship analysis here. I am estranged from my sibling, who filled the golden-child role in my dysfunctional toxic family. The Conversations We Never Had is about me and my healing, not my sibling’s experience, not their narrative, not their role.
A guide for overachievers and underachievers. I speak from where I stand. And, for a long time, I would have told you I was an underachiever. But what I’ve come to realize is that living in survival mode isn’t the same thing as lacking ambition or drive. Rather, it’s about being trapped in a system where agency was forbidden. When your life is rooted in walking on eggshells, dodging emotional landmines, and bracing for the next unpredictable explosion, dreaming big and following through aren’t even on the table. Because why bother? When nothing you do will ever be good enough, the safest option becomes doing as little as possible or doing only what won’t provoke attack and harm. I share from my own lane of experience, not from a researcher’s checklist of personality types.
Credentialed professional advice. I am not a therapist. I am not a clinician. I hold no degrees in psychology or trauma therapy. What I hold is the authority of lived experience: over 50 years as the daughter of a covert narcissistic mother. The kind of expertise that comes from living it and surviving it, not from studying it.
A neatly packaged strategy for thinking your way out of trauma. Trauma is not something I could think my way out of. I will not minimize the complexity of my healing. Therapy with a qualified professional can be life changing (it helped me in important ways until I could no longer afford it). This library is not a replacement for therapy. What I offer is a different kind of insight—the spiritual, soul-level answers I received when I asked the hard questions I couldn’t ask while my mother was alive.
A promise of confessions, apologies, or closure. Nothing in this content suggests that your own mother will ever acknowledge the abuse, apologize, or offer you closure while she is alive. My mother didn’t admit a single thing while she was here on Earth (she took those denials straight to her grave). The confessions and accountability shared in these conversations were only possible because she was no longer in human form, no longer trapped in ego, shame, and defensiveness.
It’s very likely your mother, too, will offer truth and apologies if you channel her from the other side. Because in that state she will return to her highest self, existing in pure love, stripped of the ego and armor that blocked her connection to love on earth.
But here, in this life, with her human defenses intact? Please don’t wait for that apology. You deserve your healing regardless of whether it ever comes.
What this is:
A raw, unfiltered look into my six-month journey working with a professional psychic medium to channel my late parents, Jeshua ben Joseph, The Divine Feminine, my spirit guides, and my soul.
A space where my anger is allowed to sit at the table without being shamed or rushed away.
A reflection of what it really looks like to question your own reality for over half a century and to finally start listening to yourself.
A session-based library of truth and wisdom, not tactics; reflections, not prescriptions; insights, not instructions.
A living library of spirit-led sessions, each one a standalone conversation forming a powerful collection you can return to as your healing deepens or you need reassurance that you are not alone on this path.
This is not up for debate:
This is not an attempt to sound polished, detached, or above the anger.
I will not sanitize my story to sound more palatable or to protect the image of a woman who hurt me.
I use strong language that describes what I experienced in the moment. There is anger here. There is grief here. There are heartbreak and pain here. If that feels uncomfortable to read, I invite you to sit with why.
Anger. Repetition. Bitterness. These are often used as proof that a survivor hasn’t really healed or that they’re stuck in the past or living in victim mode or haven’t done the work. But I don’t buy that narrative. Anger has a place at the healing table. Repetition has a place, too, because when the pain was never acknowledged the first time, sometimes you need to say it more than once.
And bitterness? It belongs, too. These parts of me existed because my wound was real.
The examples I share from my life may not all sound big enough to some. Narcissistic abuse is often so covert, so insidious, so gaslight-ridden that even survivors find themselves questioning whether what they endured was real. I’m the poster child because I gaslit everything for 53 years.
So, no polished answers; rather, the unfiltered truth of my lived, messy experience.
A note on language. Yes, I use profanity and I use the words trauma and nervous system. That doesn’t mean I’m pretending to be a therapist, doctor, or mental health professional and I will not tolerate accusations saying so. I use the language that fits because some words, even when they sound clinical, are the most accurate and honest reflection of what I lived through.
I won’t dumb down my word choices or my experience to appease people who prefer softer packaging or who love to nitpick semantics.
I trust my voice. I trust my readers. And I trust that if you’re here, you know exactly what I mean.
This content is for informational purposes only.
For interviews, media inquiries, or collaboration requests
Contact Carole directly at: hello@weightofbelief.com
