Mom stayed at my (27F) place for a week. One evening we were talking and she said I was a brilliant person and it made her sad that I'm not more outgoing so more people could see it. I said there were reasons for that, but I didn't want to talk about it. She latched on and nagged me for 15 minutes to open up, saying she wanted to help. I repeated that I didn't want to talk about it with her, but she didn't relent.

(I should explain my reluctance. My mother believes that she's always right and knows what's best. She doles out advice even on matters she has no clue about, and gets upset if people don't follow it. She's also dismissive of others' experiences and opinions if they don't match her own.)

Anyway, I reluctantly start talking about a very hurtful experience that happened a few years ago. I tear up a little as I get closer to the crux of the story. She interrupts me mid-sentence with a smirk and a "Ha! You're making this up." As I stand there shock-still, she launches into one of her hours-long lectures about how she overcame adversities in her life. I ended up just nodding along numbly.

I couldn't stop thinking about it after she left. I'm ashamed to say I screamed some very unsavory things into my pillow. We used to communicate regularly on the phone. I stopped calling her, and whenever she did I only gave monosyllabic answers. After a couple weeks she asked what was wrong and why I wasn't sharing anything. I told her it was because the last time she urged me to open up only to spit in my face.

She denied it ever happened. I felt like an idiot. Here I was fuming about it, and she went on to live her life like nothing! What stuck with me the most was that she said the following: "Not only I didn't say that, I couldn't have! Don't you know me at all? I'm not that kind of person!"

This isn't the first time she rewrote the past to make herself right, but it's the most hurtful. Usually she only did this to win arguments against my dad. Yeah, my parents used to argue constantly while I lived with them. Mom always won. Even when proven wrong, she would recover by saying something like "I didn't say X, I said Y!" and my dad would cave in and say "maybe you're right" just to restore peace in the house. Because if he didn't, mom would argue until she was blue in the face.

Thing is, I hesitate to call her abusive. During my childhood, she was rarely insulting or belittling - she just always had to be right. In regards to this incident, I think she isn't lying, but genuinely doesn't remember it. In her mind, she couldn't have said that because that would make her a bad person.

Do you think she's a narcissist? If yes what do I do? Every time I try to build some distance, she starts asking why I'm closing off. I bring up her domineering attitude and lack of boundaries, but she vehemently denies ever doing anything wrong. She claims she just wants the best for me as my mother, and I invariably end up feeling guilty.