In relationships with a mother who has narcissistic traits, that moment often doesn’t come. A daughter may speak carefully, choose her words, be specific, avoid accusations—and the conversation still slides away. It can feel like there’s an invisible system that won’t allow an apology to happen in the way most people expect. That’s one reason many adult daughters end up feeling like there’s “never any closure.” Topics don’t get resolved. They get moved.
This is where the category of the “non-apology” shows up. These are phrases that sound like an apology but don’t actually acknowledge anything. They create an impression of politeness without taking responsibility. They have a correct form and an empty core. A daughter senses that something like reconciliation is happening, but there’s no real contact with what occurred. That’s what creates confusion: from the outside it looks like the issue is over, but inside it stays open.
In systems with narcissistic traits, real apologies are difficult because an apology means more than good manners. It means admitting a mistake, and that carries risk for the mother’s image. If the image is central, acknowledgment can feel like a loss of position. The conversation turns into a battle over who is right, not an attempt to understand what happened.
A mother may choose another path that appears softer but leads to the same result: she may present herself as the one who is hurt. The conversation shifts from “what you did” to “how I feel.” The daughter ends up regulating the situation again. She starts soothing, explaining, reducing tension. The topic that started the conversation moves into the background.
Sometimes deflection is paired with moralizing. The daughter says, “That wasn’t okay for me,” and hears, “You’re ungrateful,” “You’re disrespectful,” “You don’t appreciate anything.” This is powerful because it turns a specific situation into a judgment of character. At that point there’s nothing left to apologize for, because the discussion is no longer about behavior. It becomes about who is good and who is bad. And once a conversation becomes that, closure is hard to reach. Moral judgments don’t end.
There is another version that can look like peace, but isn’t. It’s the sudden “skipping over” of the topic. The mother may act as if nothing happened, start talking about everyday things, offer food, send a photo, make plans. To an outside observer, that looks like normalcy. To the daughter, it often reads as a message: “We’re not discussing that. We’re moving on.” That can be especially disorienting when the daughter needs clarity. Closeness returns only if the topic is buried.
This is where many adult daughters get caught. They want the relationship to exist. They want contact. And when the mother offers “normal,” the daughter accepts. She accepts because it’s better than silence, distance, or constant tension. But accepting normalcy without clarity often comes with a cost. Over time, it trains the daughter to let go of her perspective in order to keep the peace.
In this dynamic, “closure” becomes an impossible standard. A daughter can chase it for years, looking for the right words, the right moment, the right tone—and still end up in the same place: deflection, moral judgment, counterattack, withdrawal, or a theatrical “everything’s fine” that really means “we’re not talking.”
Once you start seeing the mechanism, a different anchor appears. The goal stops being to win the perfect apology. The goal becomes understanding how the system works and recognizing the typical moves that rearrange the conversation. That reduces confusion and helps you make clearer decisions about when a conversation has a chance and when it turns into a stage for management.
One of the hardest parts of this topic is that the absence of an apology often feels like personal devaluation. A daughter may think, “If she can’t acknowledge it, I must not matter enough.” In these systems, the issue usually isn’t the daughter’s worth. The issue is that a real apology requires vulnerability and equality, and the system is built to avoid both.
When that logic becomes visible, conversations start to look clearer—not as a “failure,” but as a repetition of a familiar pattern. And inside that clarity, a small space for choice often appears: not entering endless explanations, not chasing closure at any cost, not treating a non-apology as proof that everything is fine. Sometimes the most realistic form of closure is internal—naming the truth about the dynamic and stepping out of the attempt to fix it with one more conversation.
Author: Nick Voss
