Article about Effects on Children of Narcissistic Parenting

[Kizzie]

Tks for the resources DDC! 

Still amazes me how many of us there are and that we seem to have escaped the attention of MH professionals for this long.     

[dollyvee]

Just wanted to say welcome to OOTS Dollyvee and that you're in good company with those of us who developed CPTSD/RTR as a result of parents with NPD.      

It used to be a tough sell (that the emotional abuse of being captive to someone with NPD was indeed big T trauma), but I sense that's beginning to change, perhaps because there are so many of us sadly and that we're finding one another and talking about the deep and debilitating wounds disordered parenting can cause.  Whatever the case, glad too you found your way here.   

Thank you Hope and Kizzie for your welcome messages in January. I didn't receive notification. I agree it was a tough sell to myself especially, that this was abuse and trauma. Glad that other people understand it now though.

Dollyvee

[Kizzie]

 

(Note: Our notification feature has a glitch but at the moment I am caught up in terms of time and energy in a family health issue.  Hope to get to the glitches once things settle.)

[Violet Magenta]

The whole list rings true, and this REALLY hit home: "The narcissist is not accountable for their own mistakes or behavior, so the child believes they are to blame..." It still happens in nearly all interactions with my parents to this day. One of my biggest battles is with a miasma of toxic shame that clouds my whole life. It is hard work. Hang in there everyone. Thanks, Hope, for sharing this.

[Asche]

Thanks for the pointer to the article.   I think I tick off most of the bullet points, and the others are still "maybe"s.

I've been reading (and re-reading)  Trauma and Recovery  and The Body Keeps the Score, but neither one explicitly discusses Narcissistic parenting.   My therapist thinks my mother had NPD (based on my descriptions -- my mother died about 11 years ago.)  I've never felt like either emotional abuse or emotional neglect really described what I suffered, but this seems to be it.

Decades ago, I summed my mother up as "she sees everything that happens to her as a morality play put on for her benefit/edification."  I think she saw every interaction with anyone as a judgement of her goodness/badness as a person.  Other people weren't real to her, they were only extensions of herself and her needs.  So when things happened that she saw as indicating that she was a bad person, she would get angry (I remember her losing her temper all the time when I was young, and she would regularly hit us with a fly swatter or forsythia branch) or come up with some reason as to why it wasn't her responsibility, or simply pretend it wasn't happening.  Yeah, there was -- and still is -- a lot of gaslighting in my family.

I had a number of problems with school and with my brothers when I was younger, and she basically would tell me that it was my fault and I should just handle it myself.  My life was * until I eventually trained myself not to care and not to feel and to tell my parents as little as possible about my life.  My teen years were spent just trying to stay sane until I could move out.

When I was young, I had piano lessons, but I hated to practice mostly because my mother would come in and comment on it whenever I did.  I got the feeling that she wanted to somehow appropriate my music for herself.  And one time I played a Beethoven sonata (because the music was right there on the piano), and afterwards she told me, "your father used to play that piece, but he won't ever again now that he's heard you play it."

And there was one really weird experience I had with her, years later, when I was in grad school.  I was talking to her, saying how what I believed was ultimately my responsibility; even if I decided to uncritically accept someone else's judgements and beliefs, it was still something I had chosen.  She told me I was "so arrogant" and then acted like I had really wounded her.  At the time, her reaction confused me -- to me, it felt like what I said was obvious, like saying "water is wet."  But now I think it was because I was asserting that I was a separate person from her, rather than an extension of herself.

[Kizzie]

Hey Asche, I grew up in a family with NPD so can relate to much of what you're saying. It's difficult whenever I re-read the list in the article, but confirms why I have CPTSD.

Anyway, just wanted to let you know about our sister site Out of the Fog which has lots of great info about personality disorders and a support forum like ours here - https://outofthefog.website/

[Asche]

.... just wanted to let you know about our sister site Out of the Fog which has lots of great info about personality disorders and a support forum like ours here - https://outofthefog.website/

I know about that website.  My impression was that Out Of The Storm was particularly for people with Complex PTSD, which I pretty clearly have, and Out Of The Fog was for anyone dealing with people with personality disorders.  But I've looked at both, trying to glean whatever might help me get clearer about who and what I am.

A lot of what I am struggling with is actually believing that my problems arise from how I was treated, and that that treatment really was that bad -- that I'm not just being a crybaby or just "trying to get attention" or making a mountain out of a molehill.   Everything seemed so superficially okay, and people outside the family always said how wonderful my parents were and if they ever mentioned my obvious problems, it was to imply that they were because I was doing it wrong.  I've been mostly holding onto the fact that I can clearly remember (and always have remembered) that I was thinking of suicide and how I might go about it on a daily basis and wishing I had the nerve to go through with it, because even I can see that children don't do that unless it's pretty bad.  (I still struggle with suicidal ideation, half a century later.)

My therapist and I don't spend a lot of time talking about C-PTSD as such, because our time is focussed on dealing with the issues, not trying to come up with DSM-V categories.  But I've looked at a number of web pages that list the symptoms of C-PTSD, and I clearly have most of them, and I can't say I don't have the others, because of the distortions in my thinking that still remain.

Therapy has been pretty slow and discouraging because I developed a lot of work-arounds to cover up the problems.  Also, I don't recall ever having had a person or place where I felt really safe.  (Van der Kolk mentions that people who as children never had anyone they felt safe with have a particularly hard time undoing the damage.)

Fortunately, I interact very little with my FOO, partly because I have organized my life far away from them and partly because my siblings don't seem to have much interest in interacting anyway.   My parents are dead, but even before they died, they avoided dealing with me to the  extent they could while maintaining the pretense of being a happy loving family.  I suspect that they would have been more willing to interact with me (e.g., let me know when they were passing through, or when relatives died, etc.) if I had made more of an effort to keep up the pretense that they were loving parents.   Since they died, I have the impression that things have eased a smidgen with my siblings, but it's hard to know because everything with my FOO has always been so murky and ambiguous and just plain strange.

[Kizzie]

You're correct about Out of the Storm and Out of the FOG, I just thought it might be helpful even if you aren't dealing with your parents in life any more because for many of us the ghosts of our parents continue to haunt us until we can figure out what happened to us. 

Reading posts at OOTF about what people are dealing with someone with NPD may help you to see the behaviours/abuse more clearly and also to learn the language surrounding NPD.  That really helped me to articulate all the confusion and chaos I felt around my family.  Most of all being at OOTF helped me to see and accept that it wasn't me, it was what happened to me at the hands of my NPD family and that meant I could get on with dealing with my symptoms here. 

I hear you about never feeling safe.   Safe connections with others is especially important in our case but there's just not much available at the moment that focuses on this, partly due to COVID of course but more because we are not recognized as a trauma population the same way others survivors like refugees or soldiers/first responders with PTSD are.  I'd so like to see more groups/safe spaces for us like this one in the UK - http://bodyandsoulcharity.org/. 

Anyway Asche, I hope being here helps you with your symptoms and that you feel safe enough to keep posting   

[dollyvee]

A lot of what I am struggling with is actually believing that my problems arise from how I was treated, and that that treatment really was that bad -- that I'm not just being a crybaby or just "trying to get attention" or making a mountain out of a molehill.   

Welcome to the forum Asche and I hope you find what you need here. Growing up with narc parents can be extremely insidious and a real mind bender. I found some of  the posts on OOTF dealing with gaslighting very helpful.  Reading about other peoples' experiences with it helped me to get a little distance from my own experiences and begin to frame them in a way that I could see it as abuse. It's so much easier to get angry over how other people have been treated than my own treatment and I think that's a good step towards healing.

[int101]

I am not sure if this has been posted already, but I read this very useful article today - on "How Narcissistic Parenting Affects Children" and I relate to all the things listed there.  The article is in Psychology Today and was originally posted in February 2018, it is by Karyl McBride, and a link is here:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-legacy-distorted-love/201802/how-narcissistic-parenting-affects-children
Hope 

yes, i remember reading that article, that woman knows her stuff. It is very rare for a therapist to understand what you went through.