A World Beyond Narcissism
Premium articles on narcissism and other cluster B types. Find freedom and personal power through knowledge of psychology and the practice of spirituality.
The Spouse In A Narcissistic Family
The narcissist’s spouse is their sidekick and most loyal ally, carrying out the narcissist’s menial tasks while helping put on a happy front for the family. The spouse reassures the narcissist of their grandiosity by always remaining at their side, or more accurately, orbiting them. As long as the narcissist knows that their spouse is at their whim, they feel reassured.
Yet the narcissist’s fear of losing control is never far away.
For this reason, the narcissist is careful to isolate their spouse from the outside world through psychological manipulation. Without an external support network, the spouse’s emotional needs remain unmet. This puts the spouse in a tough position; running on empty while caught between their children’s needs and the narcissist’s insatiable hunger for supply and control.
The questions which may arise to an outside observer are: How did they end up in this situation? Why do they put up with it? And above all: How do they find the strength to endure such overwhelming torture?
A Tragic Exile
The narcissist’s spouse possesses something in their core which acts as both their superpower and eternal prison: An inherent sense of badness; of being irredeemably flawed and unworthy of love and respect.
The Lost Child In A Narcissistic Family
Uniqueness, spontaneity and agency hold no value in a narcissistic family. Instead, everyone is reduced solely to a role that serves the narcissistic parent’s grandiose false self.
The spouse acts as a central pillar to legitimise the narcissist’s grandiosity. The spouse also stands in as an emotional sponge which protects the narcissist from having to be vulnerable with the children. The spouse generally puts out fires and plays the peacekeeper in the home.
The golden child becomes an expression of the ‘light’ side of the narcissist’s grandiosity. They are the narcissist’s protégé; the one who the narcissist pins their hopes and dreams on.
As for the ‘dark’ side of the narcissist’s grandiosity, frustration and negative emotions need to be syphoned off to maintain the integrity of the false self. After all, a ‘superior’ and ‘special’ person cannot have flaws. For this, the scapegoat of the family acts as an outlet. The narcissist shames the scapegoat, humiliates them, rages at them and blames them for everything that goes wrong. Where the golden child can do no wrong, the scapegoat can do no right.
Finally, the divine child is the narcissist’s mascot, playing a ceremonial role to give the family a positive brand in public.
The only person who lacks a defined role, is the lost child. Their sole task is to keep quiet, and never rock the boat.
Access Denied
The lost child is usually a middle sibling, or in some cases, can be the youngest. Once the narcissist has separated two of the children into ‘perfect’ and ‘disgusting’, i.e., into ‘good’ and ‘bad’, then they stop caring about the rest.
This is the simplest way to look at it. There are exceptions, of course.
Some families have two narcissistic parents, and the children can be split into two camps, depending on birth order and gender. The divine child can also be an exception. Much like the golden child, the divine child can do no wrong. Yet what separates them is that, unlike the golden child, nothing is expected of the divine child. The golden child is supposed to live up to the narcissistic parent’s demands — to become competent, special and powerful according to their parent’s vision. The divine child, on the other hand, is ‘the baby’, and adored simply for being the baby. You can think of the golden child as the narcissist’s ideal version of themselves, and the divine child as the child the parent could have ideally been before their narcissistic wound emerged. Both are projections.
In some narcissistic families, a child is designated as a surrogate parent and told to look after their younger siblings. In this case, the surrogate parent is given a position of importance that has nothing to do with the narcissist’s grandiosity. They simply play a functional role which frees the narcissist from the pressures of their parenting role.
Why It Took So Long To See Your Mother’s Narcissism
To see your mother as ‘narcissistic’ is a terribly difficult thing to do, for reasons that go way back and which cut deep into our social structure as well.
The idea of mother is that she is a source of security, warmth, acceptance and regeneration. We’re supposed to go to her to make things ‘ok’ again when life gets difficult or painful. She’s the first figure in our lives at a time when we were the most vulnerable and in need.
In short, our survival depended on her. And we knew it. We felt it in our bones. This need was all-consuming. She was the one figure who stood between a Utopian calm and warmth or falling into a dystopian state of pure terror. This might sound exaggerated, but for a child, fear is always at the gate, and mummy is the one who is supposed to make it go away.
The fact that your mother could be a wounded person with a destructive ego construct never entered your consciousness. All you were concerned about was having a ‘good’ mother to look after you.
Children are magical in their thinking, and this ‘good mother’ is a very real part of your psyche. In a child’s mind, this figure is absolutely real, and you seek to connect with it through your own mother. As a survival mechanism, it makes total sense.
As you grow older, this longing doesn’t just disappear. It only disappears if your mother was sufficiently able to play the part. If she was able to nurture your needs and fears and lead you to maturity, the day would come when you realised she was a human being with faults.
The Effects Of Narcissism On Children
Children who grow up in the shadow of a narcissistic parent experience a kind of role reversal which stunts their development in numerous ways.
For a child to grow up into an empowered and emotionally-mature adult, they need their parent’s support, mirroring, respect and understanding. The child must be seen by the parent for who they are, not for who the parent wishes they were. Because a narcissistic parent is mostly identified with their grandiose, ego-based false self, they have no capacity to empathise and connect authentically with their child’s emotional needs.
The child’s needs remain, however. The child can’t shut them off. In a desperate attempt to secure their parent’s goodwill, the child stops expecting love, support and attention, and instead turns their attention toward the parent. They intuit what the parent reacts to, and adapt their behaviours and beliefs to suit the whims of their parent.
Ultimately, the narcissistic parent is an addict, whose drug of choice is narcissistic supply. To maintain their sense of grandiosity, they expect adulation, submission, unwavering loyalty and services from their children. Above all, they expect never to be challenged in their grandiosity.
This is destructive because the child’s sense of worth then becomes tied to a delusional ego-construct which is not based in reality. The child’s map of the world becomes completely distorted in a narcissistic family. This results in numerous developmental traumas such as:
What It’s Like In A Narcissistic Family
The unaware child experiences their narcissistic family like any other. If you ask them about their childhood, they will tell you that it was great. Faultless. Ideal. They love their parents dearly, and they were lucky to have such a wonderful childhood.
After a brief moment, however, they stare off into the distance. A crease appears between their eyebrows. They open their mouth to speak, then hesitate.
“I mean,” they finally begin. “It wasn’t exactly amazing all the time. But it could have been worse. I’m lucky.”
And with that, the creased eyebrows fade, and the person who grew up in a narcissistic family returns from their far-off state of dissociation. Balance has been restored in their cognitively-dissonant mind.
So what just happened? Did this person have a good childhood, or not?
Herein lies the surface-level experience of what it is like to grow up in a narcissistic family: An uneasy denial of what actually happened.
The Conflict Between Denial And Truth
Humans have a wide array of tricks to shield themselves from uneasy truths and painful emotions — and living in a narcissistic family generates plenty of both. The solution for the child of narcissism is to dissociate, deny and reframe their reality to numb their pain and ensure their sanity.
Narcissistic parents can never face their shame, their negative emotions or admit to their flaws and weaknesses. They need to be seen positively by others at all times.
To maintain this grandiosity, the narcissistic parent must distort reality and bend their children into the right shape. The narcissistic parent therefore questions, judges, ridicules, undermines and controls their children at every step. Worst of all, the narcissistic parent treats their children as sources of narcissistic supply, and only provides the children with positive regard when they fulfil the narcissist’s grandiose and rigid expectations.
All of this is intolerable to the child, whose deep needs to be seen, mirrored, nurtured, loved and encouraged remain unfulfilled. Instead, the child’s True Self collides against infinite collision points, which generates oceans of shame, rage and resentment.
The Narcissistic Family: A Shattered Mythology
The narcissistic family is an isolated cult of one. It does not worship God, has no affinity to the state, and is cut off from the mythology of its people and nation. The solitary focus of worship and submission is the narcissistic parent.
All roads lead to the narcissist. The narcissistic family does not have a greater sense of tribe. It may physically dwell in a village, a city or a nation, yet it has no affinity or loyalty to any of these. The core to understanding why, unsurprisingly, also lies with the narcissist.
A narcissist carries the core trauma of being neglected, shamed, controlled, treated coldly, objectified, and above all, not seen for who they truly are. Due to their dysfunctional environment, the narcissist felt chronically unsafe and unworthy. In the face of unfathomable fear and shame, their True Self shattered into countless fragments. On the edge of death and disintegration, they made a last-ditch effort to salvage a sense of self: They split off from their True Self, and they created a grandiose, all-powerful false self.
While it may only be a construct in their mind, the false self plays a crucial role in stabilising the narcissist’s identity and psychology. It is the gargoyle at the edge of their soul keeping them safe from the destructive power of their trauma.
Yet at their core, the narcissist remains paranoid, dissociated and detached from reality. The narcissist does not see people as they are. They cannot empathise with them, or feel their plight, or relate to them. What the narcissist sees are abstractions of people. With their black-and-white infantile thinking, the narcissist attaches labels to these abstractions based on a binary system of good and evil. There are no shades of grey. The narcissist idolises people based on what they deem to be good, or they vilify people based on their own paranoia.
Ultimately, the narcissist has one criteria for judging people; do they buy into the false self, and do they provide it with narcissistic supply? This paints a picture of someone dissociated from reality and existing within a bubble of mistrust and delusion.
Inside this bubble is where the narcissist’s spouse and children find themselves. The narcissist is suspicious of outsiders, sensitive to losing control, and has expectations of nothing less than perfection. The spouse and children are therefore expected to live up to impossible standards, never disappoint the narcissist, and never stray from the narcissist’s control.
The Intergenerational Narcissistic Family Explained
Family creates the strongest of bonds. As we grow, our family shapes us physically, spiritually and psychologically. We take on its customs, rituals and beliefs about the world. It is not only a group to which we belong, but an ideology which we inherit.
When you consider a family tree, you can see how one person’s belief system can trickle down and affect dozens and eventually hundreds of people through each generation. Usually, a child internalises a great deal from their family, but as they separate and actualise, they grow in unpredictable ways, and the influence of the family is diluted by the child’s experiences outside the home.
In the narcissistic family, the development of the child is much more tightly controlled, which means the influence of the family becomes more potent and absolute. The most frightening thing about the narcissistic family is that through this tendency toward isolation and gaslighting, one person’s delusional agenda can rain down over generations like a dark shadow, without anybody realising it.
Consider the following family tree:
A three-generation narcissistic family tree.
Bold: Parents (Head narcissist and spouse)
Italic: First generation (Children of narcissist)
Normal: Second generation (Grand-children of narcissist)
Jane is a malignant narcissist with a strong, controlling personality. Francisis a mild-mannered man with a dry sense of humour. Together they have four children; Fred, Harry, Bill and Christine. Because it is headed by a narcissist, their family takes on the structure of a typical narcissistic family, which is organised as follows:
Fred (Golden Child), who is the oldest, has a superiority complex, championed by his mother as the leader of the family. Fred respects his father but believes himself to be the strongest and wisest in the family.
Harry (Scapegoat) is the ‘angry one’ who receives the bulk of his mother’s and family’s criticism and ridicule. Harry resents Fred’s overpowering personality and bossiness, and they often fight.
How Narcissism Spreads Through Families
Narcissism is a virus that runs rampant within a ‘tribe’ of people who have ‘low immunity’.
Narcissism does not emerge for no reason; it is a reaction to a core trauma of the Self. It is a compensation strategy for survival. It usually begins with a person who was severely emotionally or physically abandoned by their parents. They experience a fall from grace, a rupture in the childhood ‘Garden of Eden’.
As children, we live within a secure bubble, convinced that we are all-powerful and immortal. Slowly but surely, reality creeps into that bubble as our grandiosity is challenged and tempered. If our parents manage this carefully and lovingly, the result is an assertive and humble adult who can contribute to the world.
Not everyone has an ideal upbringing. When there is conflict or economic hardship in a society, the parental system is put under extreme stress. The parents become short-tempered, controlling and abusive to ensure some semblance of stability within the chaos of their world. The child’s bubble is not only challenged; it suddenly bursts. This leaves them exposed to the fear of abandonment and an extreme feeling of terror and insecurity.
Beyond mere survival, the child also needs a healthy sense of pride. They need to feel empowered within their world so they can be confident to act and thrive within it. When the child lives in an abusive dystopia of chaos and hardship, they have no hope of easing into the world with a healthy sense of pride. Instead, they become saturated in toxic shame, believing themselves to be unworthy and inept.
With the parents having no patience or love to give, nothing the child ever does is right. Also, because the parents have lost sight of the divinity of their offspring, they stop ‘seeing’ their child and attuning to them. Quite the opposite — they become judgemental and contemptuous. As a result, the child comes to believe themselves as unlovable and repulsive.
In reality, the parent is simply overwhelmed and struggling to survive. The parent themselves feels incapable of dealing with a chaotic world, and of course will only mirror this state to their child. What can be more frustrating than a helpless child bringing you down when even getting by is nearly impossible? Taking it out on the children becomes the path of least resistance as the craziness possesses the parent.
The child absorbs this all like a sponge, and without any way of understanding the reality, will be overwhelmed by feelings of terror and shame. This is enough to destroy the child once and for all.
The Principles Of A Happy Family
Having written a lot about narcissistic and dysfunctional families, I spent some time considering what a ‘healthy’ family might be like, and came up with the following set of values:
Secure Attachment
There is no such thing as spoiling an infant in a healthy family. The mother and father know the importance of safety and connection in helping the child establish trust in others and a strong sense of Self.
As much as humanly possible, the healthy parent will remain open and empathic to their kid, giving them ample touch, eye contact, attention and mirroring.
Temporary Worship
While the child bonds with the parent, the guardians of a healthy family are careful not to abuse their child’s vulnerable position. They allow the child to depend wholly on them as a coping mechanism but they do not encourage it.
The parent will instead work with the child to help them transition from a state of dependence and worship to a state of personal power. The guardians are leaders, not demagogues. They communicate this by exhibiting healthy shame, which includes acknowledging their limits and accepting accountability for their wrong actions.
Over time, the parents demonstrate their flaws, and support the child in coming to terms with the fact that the only person who knows best for the child is the child. It only takes a long process of learning to trust their intuition and inner wisdom, and having the courage to make hard decisions in the world.
Personal Power
Infantilisation is supposed to be for a limited time — during infancy and early childhood. The more the child grows, the more they are encouraged to attend to their own needs. The guardian teaches the child the importance of informed decision-making and life skills, and that the reins for their life belong in their own hands.