It's interesting with my mother. Sometimes she genuinely has no idea what she is saying is highly abusive. Sometimes, she is fully aware of it, expresses feeling guilt years and years later, but then takes no responsibility for the ensuing issues. For example, my younger sister physically/emotionally abused my younger brother. While it was really going on, my mom was fully aware of it and fully aware that the reason it was going on was because she constantly compares my siblings and says my brother is smarter. She hasn't expressed guilt for that or taken actual responsibility for the problem. She will say my sister needs to get over it and continue making the same comparisons as if they have no connection to the situation.

In another situation, my mom bullied me about my weight. She would make me take my pants off and stand on a scale once a week and scream at me if I haven't lost weight. She now recognizes that it was wrong, and she expressed some form of guilt for it. However, she will not call that action abusive or say she has any role whatsoever in my current psych problems.

I really believe that people with severe NPD do not experience love or guilt or have the ability to see their actions causing others pain the way we do. They can see that maybe what they did was perhaps not the best, but whatever the good outweighs the bad and everything was done with good intentions and therefore it should have no impact on us.