Those that tell you to just ‘get over it/move on’ clearly don’t understand that if it were that easy, you would have done that already. Who wants to live with this kind of pain? Especially when it comes from someone who raised you and was an integral and fundamental part of who you are regardless of whether or not the experience was positive? Idk if you are still in contact with your dad; I cut off contact with my mother ~6 years ago and it was a years long process that included multiple attempts at lowering contact and would always result in me being pulled back into her abusive cycle just to repeat the whole thing over again. It was an incredibly slow burn and it took my partner telling me that I’d never be free of her abuse until I cut the cord permanently. My life has continued to improve ever since.

Your example of everything being ‘perfect’ until it isn’t…absolutely resonates. While my mother never used that word exactly, she too cycled between being excessively complimentary (esp when she was in front of someone she wanted to impress, bc a compliment to me was actually her congratulations to herself) and downright insulting and hateful of whatever I said/did to tap her ire. Anytime I did something that made her look good (in her eyes), of course it was a trait we shared. If it was something she disliked or disagreed with, she would say ‘how are you even my child’ at best and call me nasty names at worst. Because of the whiplash I felt due to this dichotomy, I too felt that her compliments and praise rang hollow and felt completely insincere. In fact, she would actually use praise and compliments against me when she was angry or disappointed in me, because obviously it was an offense to her that I fell short of her expectations of me and demonstrated potential to make her ‘look bad’.

With narcissistic personalities, it is all about perception and control. How they perceive themselves and how they want to be perceived drives most of their control tactics, and it is a game that is set up for them to win always at the expense of anyone else that doesn’t fall in line and ‘get with the program’ to borrow a phrase from my wonderful mother. It is a terminal diagnosis; a narcissist can never be wrong.