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The lifetime effects on Adult Children of a Narcissistic Parent



So how does the  Narcissistic Parent affect their children?
  • The child won’t feel heard or seen. They feel invisible to their parent. In adult life, they will go on to feel invisible and dismissed  from everyone around them
  • The child’s basic feelings and reality will not be acknowledged, basis feelings such as anger. These basic feelings will be invalided, the child will be shamed by the parent in having them at all. The child in turn will dedicate themselves to regaining the lost parents love by going silent, becoming the obedient child,  becoming the role of the 'good little boy'. Eventually their entire emotionally system  withers and dies, as it has been shamed, leaving the child feeling defective and joyless, loveless.   
  • The child will be treated as an accessory to the parent, rather than a person. They become only an extension, a ‘self-object’ to the parent.
  • The child will be more valued for what they do (usually for the parent) than for whom they are as a person.
  • The child will not learn to identify or trust their own feelings and will grow up with crippling self-doubt. They are never able to trust anyone including themselves.
  • The child will be taught that how they look is more important than how they feel. Appearances become everything. Grow up to be very shallow, vain individuals.
  • The child will be fearful of being real, and will instead be taught that image is more important than authenticity. Devote themselves to their ‘phony social mask’.
  • The child will be taught to keep secrets to protect the parent and the family.  The family always hides and denies family secrets. Buys into the history of any family shame  
  • The child will not be encouraged to develop their own sense of self. Denial of the self is the parental expectation as a result of no boundaries and enmeshment issues.  
  • The child will feel emotionally empty and not nurtured. Will experience a lifetime of feeling empty. Will fill the void with addictions such as sex, gambling, money.  
  • The child will learn not to trust others. The underlying paranoia of the world.
  • The child will feel used and manipulated. Well have a simmering repressed hatred of others.
  • The child will be there for the parent rather than the other way around, as it should be. The parent’s selfish needs always come first.
  • The child’s emotional development will be stunted. A developmental arrest is a given. They will become ‘stuck’ in their lives, followed by the usual depression. Obvious immaturity/regression in times of heightened stress
  • The child will feel criticized and judged, rather than accepted and loved. The parental response to any of the child's behavior is always conditional on the parent’s needs, wants and desires.
  • The child will grow frustrated trying to seek love, approval, and attention to no avail. Underlying irritability that has to go somewhere. Believes others don’t care, that it is impossible to have your needs met by others.
  • The child will grow up feeling “not good enough.” Never able to finally ‘please’ the parents. Never feels the approval they so desperately seek.
  • The child will not have a role model for healthy emotional connections. Shows up in their failures in all of their close adult relationships.
  • The child will not learn appropriate boundaries for relationships. All or nothing boundaries. A tremendous fear of engulfment if the parent emotionally engulfed them
  • The child will not learn healthy self-care but instead will be at risk of becoming co-dependent (taking care of others to the exclusion of taking care of self). This goes back to denial of the self in servitude of others, starting with the parent.
  • The child will have difficulty with the necessary individuation from the parent as he or she grows older. They remain enmeshed or fused completely in the parent/child relationship their whole lives. Will only seek validation from siblings in later life after parents die.
  • The child will be taught to seek external validation versus internal validation. They end up constant craving attention as they can only know themselves through the daily attention from, the mirror of themselves through others.
  • The child will get a mixed and crazy-making message of “do well to make me proud as an extension of the parent, but don’t do too well and outshine me.” This is a result of the parents need for superiority over the child. Refuses to have equal relationships. Becomes unstable and possibly psychotic if envy is triggered in the parent by the child. The child will be attacked to eliminate this threat.
  • The child, if outshining the parent, may experience jealousy from the parent.
  • The child is not taught to give credit to self when deserved. Parent is extremely greedy for recognition and will ‘steal’ it from the child.
  • The child will ultimately suffer from some level of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and anxiety in adulthood. 
  • The child will grow up believing he or she is unworthy and unlovable, because if my parent can’t love me, who will? Their main question is “why do you not love me”? “Why am I not loveable.”
  • The child is often shamed and humiliated by a narcissistic parent and will grow up with poor self-esteem. This is a given as the N parents need helpless, hopeless children around her to maintain her own self-esteem through their vanity needs of the superiority of others.  
  • The child often will become either a high achiever to please the N parent or a self-saboteur, to be passive-aggressive towards the parent or both.
  • The child will need trauma recovery and will have to re-parent themselves in adulthood through a lifetime of hards but rewarding work.


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