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.
