I felt nothing however reduction when my narcissist mom died. It sounds heartless, however I’m nonetheless haunted by what she did to me aged three: KATRINA COLLIER

It was the middle of the night – 2.34am to be precise – when my mobile phone rang.

Seeing my sister’s name pop up, I knew instinctively what the news would be: our mother was dead. I was right.

My 87-year-old mother had died of a brain bleed during the night that had taken her instantly. I am 54, but the death of a parent is something that usually leaves children devastated, no matter how old they are, an event that can take years to come to terms with.

Not in my case. The conversation was matter of fact, lasted barely five minutes and afterwards, as I took the news in, I closed my eyes in relief and went back to sleep.

A few hours later, I felt quietly elated as I walked my dog, thinking about the time I received the call – and what it signified. 2.34am: numbers in sequence, moving forward. Now, my mother’s death would give me the chance to move forward, too.

For she was no ordinary mother. Instead of unfailing love and care, she regularly treated me with cruelty, plaguing my life with physical and verbal abuse.

One of the earliest incidents, when I was aged just three, saw her lash out at me – literally – after I cried and said I didn’t want to come home from nursery, which tells its own story. She deemed I had embarrassed her in public.

Chillingly, when she recalled the story to me in my late teens, she added ‘I understand how a parent could kill a child’ with zero remorse or regret.

For it was her constant verbal attacks, in which she told me I wasn’t good enough, that were most painful.

While the physical abuse stopped in my teens, when I got big enough to hold her off, the verbal assaults didn’t stop until I estranged myself 11 years ago, aged 43.

Until that call in December, deep down I still feared my mother – who never earned the right to be called Mum, let alone Mummy – might find a way to get to me.

I was the youngest of four siblings and all of us were abused in our own way, with our mother using manipulation and lies – divide and conquer – to stop us uniting against her. It’s inevitably had a lasting impact on our relationships.

Though she was never formally diagnosed, it’s clear that she was a narcissist, gripped by a personality disorder that made her manipulative and self-centred.

While hers wasn’t the type of narcissism that gave her delusions of grandeur, she would play the victim, gaslight those around her and had zero empathy – all while presenting a respectable middle-class face to the world.

We lived in a large house and were privately educated. I’d receive regular thrashings from my mother – either with her bare hands or the cane handle of the feather duster – for minor infractions that any other parent would have shrugged off: talking back, not listening or what she might consider to be me ‘shaming’ her.

My father, a respected university lecturer, worked long hours. While he knew what our mother was like, he disengaged himself from what was going on, often dismissing her explosive temper with casual comments like ‘you can’t change your mother’.

I realise now the fact he never intervened or defended us was just as damaging as my mother’s abuse. We had no caregivers we could trust to keep us safe.

My siblings and I would go to school with visible bruises and welts, but in the 1970s and 1980s there wasn’t much a teacher could do if they noticed them. If they’d dared to call home, that would inevitably have resulted in another beating.

Even if social services had been called, they’d have seen a big house with a swimming pool, warm beds, lots of toys and food in the fridge. They wouldn’t have seen how we lived in absolute fear, constantly walking on eggshells to avoid triggering her.

Though, of course, what triggered her was entirely unpredictable, so trying to prevent her explosions of rage was futile.

One school report when I was around 12, which was mostly positive but had one negative comment in it, saying I needed to apply myself more, led to a particularly memorable belting.

Years later, I remember watching my beautician’s son bringing in his report. Mother and son calmly discussed what was good and where there was room for improvement. I was stunned. I couldn’t imagine a world in which I could have a conversation like that with my mother.

No matter how perfect I tried to be, how much I tried to make her happy, it was never enough. She, meanwhile, never thought she was doing anything wrong.

If I ever cried as a result of one of her verbal or physical beatings, she’d tell me to stop the ‘crocodile tears’. Even years later, as an adult, when I brought up her abuse, she’d tell me I was lying.

If I sent her evidence of a nasty message she’d once sent me, she would call me vindictive for keeping it. If I reminded her of a horrible comment she’d once made, she’d brand me a liar.

The only admission of wrongdoing – ever – was that she once remarked that if she treated children like that today, social services would be called.

But it was a throwaway comment rather than evidence of any serious self-reflection.

Her abuse led me to develop a distorted understanding of what constituted a caring relationship.

I remember once, aged nine, my mother grabbing me by the ears and shaking me. The way she dug her nails into my skin caused me to start bleeding. She then had to spend time mopping up the blood and applying dressings.

In my warped version of reality, desperate for any scraps of kindness, this felt like an act of care.

And childhood trauma can show up in mysterious ways. Decades later, I was on a boat in the Galapagos and, seasick, was soon vomiting over the side.

As some of the passengers tried to look after me and offer comforting words, I sobbed uncontrollably, unable to understand why they were being so kind.

Then I remembered that, as a child, I’d once been on antibiotics that made me throw up on the bathroom floor.

My mother went ballistic and smacked me because I didn’t quite make it to the toilet, leading to trauma around vomiting that endured well into my adult life.

With examples like these, what hope was there for me to go into a healthy relationship as an adult? When I left school at 17, you might have expected me to get away from home as quickly as possible, but she’d worn down my self-esteem so much – telling me I was incapable of living independently – that I didn’t have the confidence to go.

I started university, but flunked out and then started working in a bank when I was 19.

When I finally moved in with a friend two years later – my mother immediately redecorated my bedroom and turned it into a guest room – it wasn’t the great freedom that I hoped.

Riddled with insecurities I slept around in search of love, and when I did enter my first relationship aged 21 it was horrifically abusive and I was beaten up and belittled all over again.

He was a man I met through work, and we were together for 18 months, even though his ex-girlfriend went so far as to warn me about his dark side.

In the end, after one particularly savage beating I had to call the police and then secure a restraining order against him – yet still I somehow felt it was my fault he had turned violent.

The ripples of my mother’s emotional abuse went even further.

Aged 27, I met and got engaged to a kind and lovely man. But I sabotaged what could have been a healthy relationship by cheating and called off our wedding with just six weeks to go, believing that I didn’t deserve his love, and that it was impossible for anyone so kind to truly like me.

Eventually, I moved to London aged 32 – where I live still – after meeting and marrying a man I met at a friend’s wedding.

Wanting to avoid fuss and drama, we’d eloped. Mum’s reaction when I told her we were married was simply to tell me that my husband was too good for me.

Did I ever want to start a family myself? The truth was, I was scared to, worried what kind of parent I might be. While it’s not an excuse for their failures, both my parents had dysfunctional childhoods of their own.

My father was adopted into a violent, abusive family when his own mother died, while my mother’s father went to war when she was young for four years, so she felt abandoned.

When he returned, he placed her on a pedestal but would brutally beat her brother. I didn’t want this pattern of bad parenting to continue and, terrified of passing on the trauma to another generation, I made the decision never to have children.

For different reasons, my husband didn’t want children either, so we were content in our choice – and I still don’t regret it – but over the years it’s something other people have judged me for. Even my nail technician asked me recently, with a horrified look on her face: ‘What do you mean you don’t have children?’

But if my experience with my mother has taught me anything, it’s that not everyone should be a parent, and certainly not for selfish reasons.

I’ve often wondered why my mother had four children when she was incapable of showing us any love or kindness.

I can only conclude it was due to societal pressure, or to fill some kind of void. Maybe she hoped adoration from her children would validate her, not realising love has to go both ways.

For years, I’d hear her voice on a loop in my head, saying I was worthless. I only began to heal when, at a career crossroads aged 40, I started having therapy and discovered I had complex PTSD due to childhood trauma.

The healing process helped me understand that my mother was a narcissist and that nothing I did would ever make her change. This gave me the confidence to build a wonderful life for myself.

While my marriage ended amicably after nine years, I became a published author, delivering presentations on human connection in the hiring process. I’ve travelled extensively; I’ve climbed Kilimanjaro and mountains in Peru, snorkelled in the Galapagos, scaled the Crystal Cave in Guatemala, taken a microlight over Victoria Falls, slept in the Indian desert and so much more.

Over the years, I cut my mother off many times, usually when she’d done something horrific, and only reconnected out of duty or warped hope.

Of course, when we did reconnect, nothing changed. Finally in 2015, aged 43, I severed all contact. I blocked her without informing her; there’s no point telling a narcissist the details of your boundaries, because they’ll just ignore them.

People would tell me I only had one set of parents and I should maintain a connection. But you wouldn’t say that to someone about an abusive partner, so why would you about abusive parents?

After I heard from my sister in 2022 that my Dad died, in an email sent from my father’s account my mother insisted I collect his possessions in-person, which I did in a swift visit in which I saw my mother for just 20 minutes. That was the last time I ever saw or spoke to her.

I felt lighter for cutting the ties – but hearing that she had died gave me a feeling of relief no estrangement could bring.

While I had done my best to break away from her – moving far away and cutting off communication – there was always the subconscious fear that she’d create a new email address to send me abuse, or attack me from a new phone number.

Her death meant that voice was finally fully silenced. For the first time in my life, I felt truly safe.

Like my father, she had wanted a private cremation, and I didn’t return home to mark the occasion.

Before she died I wrote my memoir, The Damage Of Words: A Memoir Of Healing Self-Hate And Gaining Self-Mastery, to show others how to overcome an abusive childhood, and how to go on a healing journey of their own.

Still, I know that saying I’m happy my mother died makes a lot of people uncomfortable. It’s breaking a taboo.

But since speaking out about it on social media, I’ve received so many comments and even lengthy emails from strangers who feel exactly the same way.

After lifetimes of torment and abuse, the deaths of their parents have left them feeling nothing but relief. I understand the immense sense of closure well, and I hope that by speaking out, I’ll be able to help others come to terms with feeling this way.

Like the numbers on the clock when I heard the good news, I’m moving forward.

The Damage of Words: A Memoir of Healing Self-Hate and Gaining Self-Mastery by Katrina Collier (Synergy Publishing, £10.99)

As told to DEBORAH CICUREL