How a Parent's Narcissistic Personality Disorder Affects Their Child
Narcissistic Parent Checklist: Signs of Being Raised by a NPD
1.
Children of NPD parents blame themselves. Instead of blaming the parent, a loving child
might take on the responsibility for the negativity and sacrifice their self
esteem. They begin to believe it's their own fault their parent does not love
them, or they hold out hope that by changing themselves, they might earn their
parent's love.
2.
They feel invisible. These children may have no sense of themselves or what they want
or need. The parent's grandiosity eclipsed the child so completely that it
resulted in a person who has no idea who they really are as an individual.
3.
They become so acclimated to narcissism they may
either choose narcissistic relationships or avoid relationships
entirely. The neglect, abuse,
rage, lack of empathy, and emotional games can be so overwhelming they can make
a child grow to expect that kind of treatment in all their relationships, develop
insecure attachments, or to distrust people and abandon emotional intimacy
altogether.
4.
Narcissism breeds codependency, care-taking, low self esteem,
guilt, or more narcissism. These children often adapt by either erasing themselves,
sacrificing their own needs, developing PTSD, or joining the 'winning' side and
becoming narcissists themselves.
The NPD Parent
Young children of a mother or father who has
Narcissistic Personality Disorder are genuine victims of their parent and the
disorder—as much as any child who lives through life with an addicted parent,
or one guilty of physical or sexual abuse. The narcissistic parent abuses in an
intensely subtle and devious fashion: they are guilty of severe emotional and
mental abuse, and no one outside of the family would ever suspect anything
wrong. These child victims quite often go unnoticed, untreated, and unassisted
by other adults outside of the immediate family. This is due to the nature of
Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD).
The overriding behavioral sign of a NPD parent
is their almost total lack of concern for their child. On the surface, and in
public, the NPD parent is often unnoticeable as an abusive person. Inside the
family, there is no doubt for the child that there is something very, very wrong.
In some cases, this parent will begin to ‘heat up’ and make mistakes that bring
negative attention to them and shine a light on their NPD, but in most cases,
the abuse continues for years unabated.
One might consider NPD a kind of ‘spectrum’
with varying degrees of disorder and behavioral inconsistency. While some NPD
adults express their disorder in a fairly mild fashion (think the beauty
pageant mom or the dad who pushes his child to do a sport they do not want to
do), others are experts at hiding their abuse and are able to manipulate others
at will (including teachers, ministers, police, lawyers, and even judges).
Due to the disorder, NPD parents have little
to no regard for their child’s individuality, ambitions, or emotions. This
parent is quite simply all about themselves, all the time. This is a very
difficult concept for most normal people to grasp; it is hard to relate to a
parent who has no genuine concern for their child other than how that child can
enhance the parent’s image, or how the child can be drawn from as a source of
‘narcissistic supply’. People with NPD consistently look for and groom people
by using charm, false interest, and lavish gifts to get them to commit to a
relationship. If they have a child, they have a built-in ego-supplier. An
individual with NPD absolutely needs to see reactions in the people around them in
order to reassure themselves of an identity. And they do not really care what kind of reaction it is, as long as they get a reaction. So the NPD parent will rapidly
transform from the most charming, loving, and giving parent on the planet to
the most enraged, unfeeling, cruel parent imaginable (think of the film Mommy Dearest).
Young children of a
parent who has Narcissistic Personality Disorder are genuine victims of their
parent and the disorder—as much as any child who lives through life with an
addicted parent, or a parent guilty of physical or sexual abuse.
The Child's Experience of NPD Abuse
People complain about spoiled children, but
children really have very little power over their parents. This is even more
true in the case of a child with an NPD parent, since that child intimately
knows the unpredictability, implied threats, and intense rages that the parent
demonstrates. The child learns early in life to ‘duck and cover’ by constantly
appeasing the childish whims (that change with the breeze) of the NPD parent.
The child becomes terrified that if they speak to anyone outside of the family
about their very ill parent, no one will listen or believe them, since the NPD
parent is a master of the ‘false face’ in public. Secondarily, the child is
terrified that their complaint will get back to the NPD parent, and they will
pay a high penalty.
Narcissistic mothers and fathers elicit
intense fear in the child in several ways.
·
First, they may tell
the child that they have ‘eyes and ears everywhere’ and the child can hide
nothing from them. One father of three little girls gave them necklaces that he
told them they had to wear at all times, because he had special powers and
could see everything the children did through the necklaces. They were
terrified to keep them on, and terrified to take them off.
·
Another way that NPD
parents incite fear is to make either vague or direct threats to the child that
the parent will abandon them, or that the parent will not be able to live if
the child is not compliant to the parent’s will. A child naturally loves and
wants to please their parent; NPD parents can never be pleased and the child is
never good enough.
·
Yet other NPD parents
make it clear ‘between the lines’ that if the child should ever be disloyal to
the parent, grave and dangerous things will happen, up to an including harm to
their non-NPD parent or the child themselves.
The child victims of NPD parents are simply
there to supply the parent with admiration and ego-boosting reassurance; the
parent needs the child to adore and agree with them always, something that the
child gets very skilled at doing when in the presence of the parent. Away from
the parent, these children are often depressed, anxious, and morose, as if they
have simply given up on being a normal child. While some school counselors or
coaches may notice that the child is having difficulty, they may never suspect
it is due to NPD abuse, especially if they know the child’s NPD parent. Should
the child tell the adult about the parent, the child will instantly be
suspected as having some innate emotional or mental health problem; this plays
right into the hands of the NPD parent when the school counselor calls for a meeting.
The child is then caught in an
impossible trap: the child gets diagnosed with the mental health problem.
The personality disordered parent can slip up
sometimes, letting their real character show. This might happen when the
parent, intent on what they want, creates an embarrassing public scene with the
child present. In fact, they will at times use their children as levers in
public situations to get others to back down or give them what they want. The
witnesses to such public rages will give in just to save the child the intense
embarrassment that their parent is willing to put them through.
The child learns that they must set aside the
things that are important to them or the things that they would like to do,
because it is only what the NPD parent wants that counts. The parent always
places their own desires and needs before the child's, often cloaking this fact
with an altruistic statement that the parent is just doing what is best for the
child. The child has no real choice not to buy into their parent’s plan for
them, even if the child has no desire or any real talent for the activity that
the parent is forcing them to do. Emotional blackmail is a given. On the other
hand, some NPD parents will simply ignore any achievement that the child makes on
their own, and may even belittle the achievement in private while taking full
credit for the child’s accomplishment in public, if the accomplishment reflects
the NPD parent as Parent of the Year.
In private, NPD parents will present to the
child as either over-controlling, totally neglectful and angry, or overly kind,
giving, and generous. These presentations can alternate in rapid fashion,
leaving the child constantly emotionally off balance. This is, in essence, a
form of mind control and torture well known to survivors of POW camps. So the
child is faced with a very narrow choice of how to respond: they can choose to
submit in total compliance (and so lose their identity), wait patiently until
they turn eighteen and then get as far from the parent as possible and try to
find healing, or through constant exposure and training, become narcissistic
adults themselves. The latter child may be treated like a little prince or
princess by the parent, at the expense of any other siblings who have chosen a
different path of coping.
Narcissistic Injury
refers to any threat (whether real or imagined) that the narcissist perceives
is being done to their grandiose false-self in any given moment. With every
narcissistic injury experienced by the narcissist’s fragile ego, they will
exhibit a reflexive urge towards a violent rage.
— Christine Louis de
Canonville
Maturing and Adult Children of Narcissistic Parents
The normal development of children dictates
that they begin to individuate and differentiate as they grow, meaning that
they blossom into their unique selves. This normal progress gains momentum as
they get older. The NPD parent begins to
be very uncomfortable when the child begins to assert their individuality or
independence; the parent perceives this as betrayal, disloyalty, or
disobedience. Children often realize their parent’s illness fairly early in
grade school when they have the chance to compare other children’s parents to
their own. As the child gets older, the stress in the family system may grow to
intolerable levels.
Some NPD parents can develop a reputation in
the community as difficult, at least, and at worst be considered unpredictable
and dangerous. NPDs may ‘heat up’ and pose real danger because they view their children (and spouse) as
possessions that they are privileged to dispose of should they wish to do so.
Many cases of domestic violence and murder can be pinned to an NPD individual.
The truth is,
narcissistic parents don’t have children because they want to nurture and guide
their offspring through life; they have
children so that they have an automatic, built-in relationship in which they
have power, one in which the narcissist can write the rules without any checks
and balances.
— Seth Meyers, Psy.D.
Separating From an NPD Parent
Even if the non-NPD parent is able gain the
upper hand and find assistance to extract themselves from the relationship, the
courts often support standard custody agreements. The child, fearing the
narcissistic parent, might not speak to counselors, lawyers, or judges about
the situation. The disordered parent has
proven over and over again that they will not be discovered for what they are,
nor will they be prevailed upon or held
accountable. The child has no faith that these adults can help. In fact,
the narcissistic parent often ‘plays’ the legal system so well that lawyers and
judges are taken in and believe the non-NPD parent is exaggerating due to the
emotions of the divorce situation. Indeed, the accounts that the non-NPD parent
gives of the NPD parent often sound so ‘off the wall’ that a judge has a hard
time believing them. The child believes that there is no one in the world that
can help them from the narcissistic parent, so will support them publicly.
Clinical counselors are always very
hesitant—if not completely avoiding of—treating children involved in custody
cases when a parent is perceived to have NPD. Most clinicians will only very
rarely publicly identify a person as having a personality disorder, lest the narcissist turns their full
wrath on the counselor (meaning hauling them into court to testify or, more
often, harass them about their work, competency, etc.). Once again, the
narcissistic parent does not really care about the child or what the child
needs in terms of therapeutic support, only that the narcissistic parent might
be able to use the counselor against the non-NPD parent and make themselves
look better in court.
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