The Narcissistic Family: Diagnosis and Treatment

My LS1 recommended this book to me a while ago and I've finally gotten around to reading it - it's powerful! The authors recommend that you put up a picture of yourself as a young child - between 5 and 8 - in order to realize that you were, indeed, just a child and could not have fixed your FOO. When my Nmother died, there was much power-struggling about family pictures - the WWW "owns" anything "family", so things got ugly pretty quickly. I don't have many pictures of me as a child, and when I had the opportunity to have some, I wasn't interested. Looking at pictures of me as a child makes me so sad. From the age of about two on, I look desperately, miserably sad. Knowing what I know now, I understand why. My Nmother liked babies, but when children developed into beings who recognized themselves as separate people, she lost interest and moved on to the next baby. Once the WWW was born (and she is a year and nine months younger than I), there was no need to be bothered with any of the previous children. When we lived in the States, we had a baby picture of me on the "wall of shame" in our hallway, but the picture was taken when I was a year and a half, so I looked happy. After that, everything changed... I look way too much like my Nfather to have been chosen as the golden child - not that I think that position is great, although it sure looked that way when I was growing up! It was tough being the girl born before the princess, the sister who looked like Nmother, the heir to the Nthrone.