The Making Of A Narcissist

Figure 6: The four trauma responses.

Fawning is no magic pill, however, and can only go so far. Because the child in an abusive home has nowhere to turn, the fear also has nowhere to go. Worse still, the child has no way of processing what is happening to them. Mammals who escape threatening situations physically ‘shake off’ the incident in order to release the excess adrenaline. Humans have no such coping strategy. If a person cannot come to terms with the shock of an overwhelming situation, they become traumatised. This generally happens after major accidents or natural disasters, and is known as post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD for short. In such cases, the sheer magnitude of the event shocks the nervous system beyond what it can handle. Consequently, the fight/flight ‘alarm bell’ remains permanently on, and the body continues to produce adrenaline for a threat which no longer exists. 

The abused child is traumatised in much the same way. Unless each frightening event is successfully processed and resolved, the energy remains trapped in the body and splits from consciousness, leading to a pressure cooker effect. The more fear there is, the bigger this ‘ball of fire’ becomes. The ‘stress’ component of PTSD is the exhausting burden of living with this excess energy. It is a constant, gnawing anxiety which never goes away. The longer the neglect and abuse continue, the more such experiences fuse, until the fight/flight state remains permanently active. This feeling of constant fear and impending doom is complex post-traumatic stress disorder,or C-PTSD for short.

What makes C-PTSD ‘complex’ is that it is not tied to a single, traumatic accident or event, but has instead developed over a long series of frightening and overwhelming experiences in a relationship. C-PTSD is also not isolated to fear and anxiety. An over-exposure to any negative emotion contributes to the trauma, including shame, guilt, grief, humiliation and helplessness. The horrifying spectre of abandonment, along with a series of painful emotional and physical experiences coalesces and becomes a permanent fixture in a child’s psyche. This leads to an internal rupture which alienates the child from their True Self, irreparably altering their core.

Symptoms of C-PTSD might include:

• Low self-esteem: Children are grandiose by nature. They believe that everything which happens to them is their doing, both good or bad. Therefore, when the child is never celebrated or accepted for who they are, and when they never truly feel in control, their natural conclusion is that they are unworthy and incompetent.

• Fear of abandonment: Being neglected, emotionally cut-off or angrily attacked leaves the child believing that their parent might leave them forever. This results in a crippling fear of being alone, along with a paralysing terror of death by abandonment. This fear emanates from the child’s core, so it is irrational while being irresistible in its immensity and strength.

• Abandonment wound: The abandonment wound is like a bottomless pit. It leaves you with a despairing sense that you will always be alone. With their low self-esteem, the traumatised child constantly believes that people will leave them, since they are, of course, utterly worthless and flawed. 

• Panic Attacks: Repressed trauma has incredible power, and when it spontaneously breaks into consciousness, can take shape as a panic attack. Panic attacks are like volcanoes of fear, erupting and overwhelming you. They feel like death, as though the terror will devour you until there is nothing left. It is a horrible, crippling experience.

• Chronic emptiness: Because the traumatised child is cut off from their True Self, its nourishment becomes inaccessible, leaving them with chronic emptiness as a permanent state. This makes the child vulnerable to neurotic behaviour, addiction, and neediness, all with the hope of filling the void.

• Emotional flashbacks: The traumatised child is submerged by a constant torrent of negative emotion. A flood of shame, guilt, fear, anger, sadness, despair, self-hatred and more always lurks beneath the surface, controlled by a hairline trigger. These emotional flashbacks are a core feature of C-PTSD. When activated, they take the traumatised person back in time. The person shrinks in stature, regressing to their childhood self. They become uncertain, highly-sensitive to stress, easily angered, or mute and unable to assert themselves. They might grow shameful and hide away from the world. They could become numb and have a hard time focussing or engaging others. Emotional flashbacks are so insidious that it can be incredibly difficult to know you are in one. You simply start to feel, think, look and react differently, and usually only become aware long after the fact.

• Dissociation: For the traumatised child, reality is often an incomprehensible nightmare. As the pressure builds, the child splits away from reality and drifts into their imagination. In this other-worldly realm, the child can escape their pain while fantasising of a ‘better’ life. Dissociation provides relief, and is a way to numb the chaos emanating from the child’s core. The price the child pays for this coping strategy, however, is high. The child develops poor memory and even amnesia, being unable to recall aspects of their day or even their entire childhood. The dissociated child often cannot identify the nuances in their surroundings. They remain naive to the happenings in the world, and as a result experience immense disruption in their development.

• Difficulty focussing: Trauma and emotional dysregulation are incredibly distracting. This naturally results in an inability to focus, since the traumatised child is constantly plagued by the chaos and discomfort within. Trauma also impacts brain development, and is a major contributor to ADHD.

• Impulsiveness: Never truly in control of their emotions, the traumatised person may engage in risk-taking behaviour such as unsafe sex, illegal drug use, gambling, over-eating, reckless driving or overspending and materialism in order to regulate how they feel. The traumatised person is also prone to addiction.

• Extreme splitting: The traumatised child sees the world in black and white. People are either a threat, or a source of fantastic pleasure. The world is wonderful and abundant, or horrible and terrifying. There is no in-between, no nuance in the child’s reality.

• Suicidal ideation: Trauma pulls you deep into the death instinct. This is a harrowing state, as you are literally swimming in death. Here dying becomes a natural, normal thing. You can feel it, even taste it. You think about it, imagine it, even welcome it. This is suicidal ideation. If trauma dampens the life instinct enough, physical death becomes a very real possibility.

• Constant anxiety: C-PTSD permanently activates the fight/flight response, and the resulting anxiety is crippling. The traumatised person has a need to always be doing something or working toward something in the future. They can engage in incessant thinking and compulsive talking to distract themselves from their feelings. They might have a hard time falling asleep, with anxiety corroding their capacity to relax. Those carrying trauma also carry a constant sense of impending doom. They catastrophise often in their minds, being bombarded by ‘what if’ thinking.

• Unprocessed grief: An abusive parent does not tolerate crying, since allowing their child to cry is to connect with their own wounded inner child. So they shame and attack the child to stop the sobbing in its tracks. A child is magical in their thinking, and lives in a beautiful Utopia of their own making. As they brush up against the limits and harshness of the world, their delusion cracks, and they lose another piece of their fantasy. A healthy response to loss is grief. That is what a child does. They are grieving the gradual death of their childhood. They cry regularly as their awareness expands and they realise the world is not as wonderful and friction-free as they imagined it to be. Children are growing into adults when they cry. The abusive parent halts this process, contributing to the child’s arrested development.

• Arrested development: The traumatised child remains psychologically and physically frozen in time. Their muscles and organs tense to resist emotion, they appear younger than they are. Because of their extreme split, they are unable to integrate nuanced views, and hence continue to see the world in an infantile way. They spend so much energy trying to avoid pain that they miss the ship toward maturity and integration into society. They have a hard time in social groups, and are often dismissed as being slow, immature or uncooperative.

• Identity diffusion: The traumatised child’s experience of who they are is so chaotic and confusing, they can never remain anchored within their True Self. They have a hard time finding mastery in life, since they have no consistent internal experience. They are chameleons, always changing to suit their environment, but never fully embracing or integrating any particular way of life. When you believe your core to be ‘rotten,’ no outer identity will ever be good enough, and therefore the traumatised child constantly switches out identities like costumes.

• Ruptured sense of ‘home’: The traumatised child’s fragile sense of Self extends into belonging and community. They can never feel at home anywhere, since home is integrated within the Self, to which they have lost access. Home is a spiritual place as much as it is physical. Each relies on the other. Therefore, the traumatised child experiences no rest. They grow frustrated and might move geographical locations often to find this elusive sense of home. This is a trauma which quickly becomes intergenerational, impacting a family tree across multiple centuries as the family lineage grows nomadic, never truly becoming rooted and integrated in any community.

• Paranoia: With their fight/flight response on a hairline trigger, the traumatised person can never rest. They are always hyper-vigilant. This becomes most evident in intimate relationships and social situations. In relationships, the traumatised person becomes clingy, jealous and terrified of abandonment, often perceiving rejection when it is not there. They also have a hard time trusting, which makes staying in relationships far more difficult. This paranoid state also makes it hard to identify when real threats arise, which can destabilise the traumatised person’s sense of reality.

• Repressed rage: Having your boundaries broken, being humiliated, constricted, terrorised or abused all take their toll on the child who cannot fight back. Yet the body never forgets. Anger is a reasonable reaction to such treatment, but the child can never vent or express it. So they push it into the body, where it remains. Some traumatised children appear perfectly calm, with the anger nowhere to be seen. But it is there. It eventually rises to the surface as passive-aggression, over-the-top rebelliousness and resistance to authority, unexpected angry outbursts, covert revenge and humiliation of others, and in the worst cases, as extreme violence that seemingly comes from nowhere. There is no limit to the traumatised person’s rage.

Shame run rampant

One of the most painful yet insidious wounds the traumatised child carries is that of not being seen. A child craves the acknowledgement and validation of their guardian’s loving gaze. The parent needs to be present, calm and accommodating of the child’s chaotic emotions. Only through being seen does the child feel legitimised. Neglectful parents are often too dissociated, distracted, depressed or emotionally unstable to see the child. As a result, the child will come into the narcissistic phase with a wounded sense of Self. When they express rage to protest this painful state of affairs, the child is counterattacked and forced to repress their anger. As a result, they project the energy of their death instinct back toward the ‘bad child’ as self-hatred. Rage accumulates, remaining dormant and unprocessed. Having no power to get their need to be seen met, the child concludes that they are simply not worth it, and moves down the continuum toward shame. They become tortured by an agonising sense of inferiority and worthlessness.

A caring, respectful guardian will do their best to shield their child from experiencing too much shame. In contrast, an abusive guardian will behave in ways which trigger it torrentially. Shame burns in every part of the child’s being, robs them of their willpower, and leaves them in a state of despair. By being able to set boundaries through hate and feel connected through love, the child can experience some sense of healthy pride. They can even experience a healthy amount of shame, especially when resistance comes with compromise. The emotional forces become balanced. If instead the child is denied their right to be seen, they reach a point where they can no longer tolerate the pain.

The loss of control

To the child who projects their split, the parent’s reasons for abuse and neglect mean nothing. A happy and loving parent is good, and an emotionally deadened or tyrannical parent is bad. The child has no hope of understanding or transcending the dysfunction of their situation. When a guardian neglects the vulnerable child, the child is exposed to a sense of impending terror from the spectre of abandonment. When a guardian attacks the child or grossly abuses their boundaries, the child experiences shock, eventually being flooded with toxic shame. Both forms of abuse threaten the child with annihilation; one is death by abandonment, the other is death by attack. In both situations, the child’s foundation violently collapses from the psychological earthquake, along with their sense of Self. Devastated and having lost all control, they clamber to regain it — whatever the cost.

Melanie Klein referred to the death instinct response as the ‘paranoid-schizoid’ position, which is another term for the fight/flight state and its subsequent coping mechanism. The ‘paranoid’ part is the fight/flight state, which manifests as panic and dread. This fear has two sides; the fear of engulfment, and the fear of abandonment. The ‘schizoid’ component is a freeze response, where the child dissociates from reality, numbing their emotions and retreating into fantasy. This coping mechanism is the first line of defence the child has to regain a feeling of control. By escaping into their mind and splitting their experiences into good or bad, the child can direct their love and hate accordingly, conjuring an imaginary sense of connection and control. In abusive families, the child’s power to hate is forbidden. Anger is met with greater anger, frustration with greater frustration. The shame and terror become too much. The child is forced to dissociate from their external experience and goes within to find reprieve.

Wrestling back control

It is the nature of trauma that even when the original situation is gone, the fear generated by the threat remains in the body. Unless this original wound is quickly depressurised and released, it remains in place, and the ego builds around it. The fight/flight alarm bell stays permanently activated, functioning outside of the child’s conscious awareness. Meanwhile, the child moves on to life’s challenges, even as paranoia and low self-esteem infect their every experience. This leaves them far less likely to trust others, since they are always looking through the lens of trauma. Add to that a string of shame experiences, which bind together with the trauma, and you have the perfect cocktail for a dissociated personality.

With trauma and shame consuming the child’s reality, it takes little for them to realise that powerlessness leads to terror, and regaining power in any form alleviates it. At first, splitting is the only tool the child has at their disposal, but as they grow, they scramble to develop ways to gain control over their environment. They get their chance during the narcissistic phase.

As the child’s ego emerges, a new ‘self’ forms over the traumatised one, bringing with it the capacity for the child to influence their environment and manipulate their mood. The child finds that imagining this emerging self as powerful offsets feelings of shame and vulnerability. They split this imagined self in two, committing entirely to their ‘good child’ and discarding the shame-based ‘bad child.’ They then reinforce the grandiose, ideal self by experimenting with controlling the people around them to prove their superiority. You can see this in the child who constantly asks for approval, who bullies other children, who compulsively creates fictional stories, deflects questions from adults to avoid accountability, or tries to gradually push the limits by misbehaving in covert ways. In each case, the child is acting out their imagined ‘all-powerful’ self.

In the face of insecure attachment and C-PTSD, there is usually a limited integration of the True Self into the ego, since experiencing it is too painful. By living through their false self instead, the child loses touch with their guilt, empathy and shame. Their world becomes an abstraction, a projection of their imagination. The worse the trauma, the more compelling and absolute this false self must be. The child might practice being aloof around family members, hoping to remain under the radar. They might also find that their innocence disarms the adults, and so might exaggerate it by being charming and obedient. They integrate these behaviours into their personality and use them as tools to distract both themselves and others from their traumatised, shame-based Self.

The price they pay for this solution, however, is immense. To find sanity, they sell their soul. They give up their need for secure attachment and actualisation, and instead, direct all of their life energy into maintaining their grandiose false self. The True Self remains buried, and is replaced with a pale imitation; a set of behaviours which make up a personality, aimed at gaining cooperation through deception, manipulation and control. Instead of genuine connection, the child enters the world of power; a realm where they pull the strings. This pseudo-reality exists in its own bubble, requiring others to engage and feed it to keep it alive.

Disposable people

To resolve the split, a person must have object constancy. This requires a secure attachment and a tolerance for imperfection. When relationships undergo rocky periods, or our loved ones show their flaws, our steady image of them remains intact. Emotional hurt is one thing, the relationship itself is something else.

A lack of object constancy is an inability to maintain a positive, realistic picture of the other person. Without it, a person has no real estate inside another’s heart, and therefore can be dismissed before they can cause any harm. A lack of object constancy is also usually to blame for people who have a high turnover of friends or relationships. They are simply unable to maintain an attachment through the uncertainty that comes with loving.

Because the wounded child lacks object constancy, they create it artificially via their split. They begin by withdrawing their vitality from their primary loved ones and creating an idealised version in their imagination. This allows the child to regulate their fear of abandonment by imagining the people in their life to be perfect, loving and, above all, loyal. By relating to an image of perfection and cooperation, the wounded child can avoid being hurt or abandoned. Their loved ones are, after all, perfect.

The traumatised child, through their split, holds a rigid, binary view of relationships. When people are cooperative and non-threatening, the child sees them as good, and treats them as such. When the child feels hurt or offended by others, they re-cast them as all-bad. From there, they can easily distance themselves from that person, allowing the child to ‘avoid’ being abandoned or humiliated. In a perpetually-vigilant state, the wounded child is relating based on how a person makes them feel in the moment. Also, by dealing with others in such a way, the child can avoid the potential hurt which comes when people become ‘real.’

The unshakable false self

Although a child is magical in their thinking to begin with, they usually get a chance to test their fantasies against reality and tone down their delusions. For the traumatised child, reality is terrifying and painful. Grandiose fantasies are all they have to offset their trauma.

Eventually, a convincing, tightly-layered false self develops as the child moves into adulthood. With a dense, rigid ego, there is no space for the True Self to express itself, robbing the child of the experiences needed for growth and actualisation. Peeling off the layers of this false self subjects the child to a torrent of painful emotional flashbacks. Consequently, the child maintains a tense and armoured body, their breathing shallow and constricted, all to stop the repressed trauma from rising into consciousness. Meanwhile, the child clings to their paranoid delusions and grandiose images. This state may often be detached from reality, but it gives the child a sense of safety and sanity.

The more compelling someone’s false self is, the harder it becomes to challenge it. People cannot see that beneath the traumatised child’s facade they are forever vigilant, always on guard, unable to establish a foundation for mutually-beneficial, authentic relationships. What perpetuates this unshakable false self and keeps it functioning well into adulthood is that a) it exists beyond the child’s realm of awareness, and b) it maintains the sanity of the child, along with their psychological health. It is an integral part of them, and no matter how intelligent and resourceful they become, the core remains untouched. To challenge this false self is to provoke the child’s identity, which to them is what allowed them to survive the terror of childhood. Not even the most loving intentions can convince the wounded child to let go of their defences. Their paranoia is deeply entrenched and out of reach. To go beyond the ego and expose their True Self, the wounded child will need to have some level of trust, which by now they have long abandoned. The purpose of childhood is to offer a child plenty of time to build a secure attachment and to learn how to manage the five emotional forces in relationships. The wounded child gets minimal opportunity to achieve this. When they do grow old enough to escape their dysfunctional environment, the time for unconditional love and total dependence is over, and the chance to establish a mature emotional foundation is long lost.

When trust dies

A key ingredient for the True Self to thrive is intimacy via a secure attachment. To be intimate with someone is to be truly seen by them. Not only are they present with you, but open hearted. You feel safe expressing your thoughts, emotions and doubts to them. The intimate other looks upon you with love, and is delighted not only by who you are, but also by the fact that you simply are. This kind of emotional resonance breeds confidence and power in a child. The more intimacy you receive, the more your True Self feels safe to expand.

In short, intimacy is the absence of ego. Where the ego is a mind construct designed to filter a person’s experience and guard their emotions, intimacy is the relinquishing of this protective layer. Such an act of faith allows humans to connect authentically, which creates a sense of well-being, safety and compassion. To allow intimacy, a person needs to feel the trust that only a secure attachment can provide. The less resistance and the more respect they receive during intimacy, the more confidence they can have in others. Their self-esteem grows, and they feel secure enough to express their emotions and desires. In a state of genuine connection, a person is also more likely to adhere to moral standards, because intimacy by design means functioning within the realm of our emotions, which includes shame and empathy. To maintain the connection, we are challenged to consider the feelings of the other person. This mutual space is beneficial for all parties, and it is in the best interest of everybody to handle each other’s feelings with care.

Furthermore, it is the promise of intimacy which endears us to each other. Once our basic needs are met and we feel secure in our environment, we begin to crave deeper human connection. If the child has a dismissive or tyrannical parent, then this natural evolution is thwarted, as the path to intimacy is either blocked or compromised. To be seen, the wounded child must jump through the hoops of their guardian’s expectations. The parent might provide some mirroring and care, although the condition of that love is the child’s obedience. By being offered some path to love, the child remains endeared to their guardian and maintains the hope for true intimacy and unconditional love. Also, many children have older siblings who provide some mirroring and care.

In the worst cases, the child is perpetually abused or neglected without any offer of intimacy. They looked to their guardian to love them and were rejected, leaving them with a burning sense of inadequacy. Other times their behaviour brought on their guardian’s wrath, and the resulting trauma became too much. It is precisely during these times of shame and terror that the child will look to their inner ‘good child’ to provide them comfort and escape. This good child is their grandiose false self, which creates the illusion that not only are they ‘good,’ but better, stronger, smarter and more capable of being seen than anyone else. They conclude that nobody can be trusted to cater to their needs, deciding never again to lower their guard. They may in some cases remain outwardly loyal to their guardian, but internally they split away from the great parent. In the meantime, the child’s paranoia never wavers, and they must control their environment at all times. They remain hyper-vigilant, their bodies tense to block emotions, terrified of the death instinct and their toxic shame.

The child leaves their emotional world behind and connects with a construct of their imagination. In doing so, they effectively cease being human. That is, they refuse to be ‘ordinary,’ and no longer feel what an average person feels, hence allowing them to break free from the ‘bondage’ of humanity. Shame, morality, empathy and love cease playing a part in tempering their grandiosity. They give up the search for intimacy and stop trusting that it will come to them.

There is a price to pay for this Faustian bargain. While the traumatised child has gained a sense of power and pain relief, they have given up the sustenance of their True Self. Without the internal nurture of love, wisdom and humanity, the child becomes plagued by an eerie emptiness. To maintain their false self, they need to feed it externally. So the child rises above the realm of shame and intimacy and into the realm of power, unhinged and unhindered by their emotions. They observe their guardians and other adults, and take note of how those people obtain compliance. Grandiosity, aggression, trickery, charm and shamelessness become the child’s ways of relating. Using these tools, they test their environment, fishing for weak spots in others and opportunities to manipulate and control. To survive and thrive, they need a constant supply of vitality for their false self. There is no resting in being for the wounded child. Attention, control and mind games are all they have.

If the wounded child manages to gain a monopoly over power, they use fear and emotional manipulation to enforce it. Where power is lacking, they turn the forces of love and hate against others to obtain it, withholding attention to gain the upper hand and feigning love to draw back those who pull away. This is the traumatised child’s way of using attachment to their advantage. They are especially quick to target those who have an anxious or fearful style. They themselves will lean in any direction they see fit, using all manner of activating and deactivating strategies to manipulate and dominate others. They find that leaning avoidant makes the other person anxious to fill the gap, and charming the other person lowers their boundaries. A power imbalance then emerges in the relationship, and they even go as far as threatening the attachment to enforce compliance, knowing how painful abandonment would be for the insecurely-attached person. In all cases, the wounded child’s aim is power and control. Above all, they want to avoid feeling helpless or vulnerable.

Beyond attachment, people also respond positively to the child’s shamelessness, impressed by their apparent confidence, ambition and self-control. Without the negative emotions of their True Self, the wounded child takes on a clean, godly appearance. They find they can make intense eye contact, their posture improves, and they intimidate more easily. They use all of their craft and cunning, seeking out ways to manipulate their environment for the purpose of obtaining power. They relish the resulting feeling of control, fantasising about how far they can take it. In time, narcissistic supply becomes their drug of choice, and the narcissist is born — along with an accompanying entourage of hidden personalities to help enforce their doctrine.