If you believe in being a victim of narcissistic abuse, please seek help from a professional counselor, especially an expert in this field. Also, be aware that conventional therapy has yet to recognize the damage of what it’s like dealing with a parent or anyone with a narcissistic personality disorder. Many people struggle to release the pain caused by narcissistic abuse because for healing to take place, we have to be able to tap into our subconscious and get out of our heads and into our bodies. After all, our nervous system does not function through thoughts but through feelings, emotions, and sensations. Although therapists treat individuals who have suffered from narcissistic abuse, the amount of damage a narcissist causes to others, whether a child, spouse, friend, sibling, business partner, etc., is beyond anyone’s expectation. Many households with narcissistic caregivers suffer from domestic violence, and anyone with a narcissistic personality disorder makes them blind to their actions and believes they are immune to criticism. Narcissists believe their actions are pure and holy while destroying everyone around them. They are ungrateful and incapable of being appreciative of other people.
In many cases, people have unfortunately taken their own life because of narcissistic abuse from both men and women. If there’s one thing that narcissists hate is truth-tellers, and if you or anyone tries to expose their behavior, they will induce fear and even go to the extent of hurting someone physically. From someone who has experienced a malignant narcissist in the family, my life since has been mainly a long journey of healing and recovery more than anything else because of the narcissist’s selfish and destructive behavior. Narcissists live in a false reality that they themselves have created where they are the star, and the foundation is built on denial. They are not interested in any other version of reality other than the false one they have created. Narcissists are the biggest cowards, and here’s why. A narcissistic man will have no problems abusing, insulting, confronting, demoralizing, or humiliating women and children. It’s easy because they know that no matter what they do, they won’t be challenged, and they will be “the winner.”
You will never see a narcissist confronting or abusing someone of their own stature or success, and you will certainly never see them have the courage to confront someone they view as better than they are. Any adult who abuses a child and gets an ego boost or feels powerful, as most narcissists do, is the definition of the word coward. In this post, I will mainly focus on parental narcissistic abuse because if you experience it through your caregivers, you will likely attract partners that mirror that same narcissistic abuse. If you were the daughter of a narcissistic father, then you have a very high probability of ending up with a narcissistic man as an adult. A father is her model of how men behave, how they treat her, and how she deserves to be treated. He is her roadmap to what lies ahead for her. And unfortunately, what that means for you is that you will associate love with control, abuse, and neglect. It is incredibly confusing for a daughter to be raised by a narcissistic father who exhibits such harmful behaviors toward her. And vice versa for sons who are raised by narcissistic mothers.
The Daughter of A Narcissist
A narcissistic father will degrade, humiliate, ignore, neglect, criticize, emotionally, and verbally assault you and all the while tell you that he loves you when occasionally kind or, for some, never at all. Because of this, you have a very distorted understanding of what love looks like with another man. You learned as a child that you have no voice, no opinion, and your wishes mean little to nothing. You were controlled, manipulated emotionally, and psychologically abused from the get-go. The daughter of a narcissist has such low standards of what love and partnerships look like, and all narcissistic men can see this insecurity and the damage caused from a million miles away. They will inherently be attracted to her. Unfortunately, unless you have some awakening to the reality of what your narcissistic father is, it is highly probable that you will walk right into a marriage with a man just like your father experiencing the familiar and more narcissistic abuse.
To a daughter of a narcissist, abuse, selfishness, gaslighting, neglect, and lies all feel normal or like an inevitable part of life. If she is unaware of what her father is as an adult and doesn’t realize that her father is highly disturbed and that his behavior is abusive. If she doesn’t come to understand that there is nothing wrong with her and that the things that her father projected onto her as a child were not true, she will easily carry the internalized beliefs about herself that are not hers to carry and not hers to live with, but her fathers. Unfortunately, narcissism can also be taught and passed down from generation to generation to both sons and daughters.
1. It’s All About Them
Many narcissists use their charm, looks, wealth, professional achievements or intellect, and overall charisma to gain narcissistic supply and control other people. They are dependent on narcissistic supply as the only form of happiness they’ve ever known. Most narcissists are bigots in some manner from a very early age. They are this way because it’s used as a means to validate their desire and the delusion they have as being superior to other people. They may be sexist, racist, homophobic, or have polarized political views. Whatever they are “anti” or whatever they use as a scapegoat for blame and degradation is to feel superior. This could be a group or a class of people, a specific person like an ex-spouse, an organization, a specific religion, or a political party.
A narcissist will always look at things through the lens of what’s in it for me. Everything is self-referential. One trait of a narcissist is name-dropping. They want you to know how they are related to people with prestige and status, and they’re always very careful in educating people about how great they are. They also like to feel entitled. They find it easy to talk down to others, such as servers or taxi drivers, etc. If there is a family argument, they are in competition about who’s the biggest victim in the situation. This causes one to always seek validation outside of oneself and never trust one’s own thoughts and ideas, even when it comes to the smallest decision-making. If you were raised by a narcissist, your choices and decisions will often depend on other people’s opinions or reactions. And this is because when you are raised by a narcissistic parent, you are not allowed to have your own thoughts and ideas. You’re basically not allowed to have originality.
A narcissistic parent will never validate you and tell you what you’re thinking or doing is a good enough idea and that it is okay. And as this kind of narcissistic abuse is drilled into you as a child, as an adult, you will struggle to trust yourself. You’ll become fearful of doing what you want to do in life and if other people will approve of it. This leads to depression because you’re not trusting yourself and not becoming what you’re supposed to be. So you find yourself being held back from life, don’t understand what’s happening, and can’t make sense of it. You feel stuck. You feel as if you have so much more potential but can’t tap into that potential inside you. That can also lead to depression.
Inconsiderate
Narcissists never consider that other people have their own birthright to think, feel, want, and act according to who they are as another individual in this world. People who have narcissistic personality disorder don’t look at other people as people, with their own set of unique personality traits and with their right to think, feel, and speak for themselves. They look at you as property. As an extension of them, of their arm, because they use people to meet their own unmet needs. So every interaction for them is transactional. They have pathological envy towards those who possess a quality or trait that they themselves don’t. Their pathological envy is dangerous because they will attack verbally or in any way they can with the sole purpose of destroying you and seeing you torn down. Because it’s the only way it can regulate their sense of inferiority.
People who have had these traumatic experiences with a narcissist’s pathological envy, even in spiritual communities or other organizations outside the home, will often want to diminish and shrink themselves and dim their light in order to feel safe. There is also a lack of acknowledgment when raised by a narcissist, so you grow up feeling not good enough. You hold yourself back as an adult and don’t take chances because you don’t feel like you have what it takes to make it on your own. Because you didn’t grow up with that confidence and acknowledgment of a parent that tells you, you’re good enough, you can make it on your own, and you have what it takes. The narcissist will go to the extent of verbal, emotional, and even physical abuse and psychological manipulation to keep you near and dear to them. They groom you to be what they envision for you so that they benefit from you and maintain control in their world based on an imaginary construct of power.
A narcissistic parent does not want you to succeed. They don’t want you to break away from home or their control and go and live the life and the career of your dreams. What they want is for you to be a constant source of narcissistic supply to them forever in whatever form that may come. They will break your self-esteem so badly, especially during your childhood, that you are unable to feel valuable enough to stand on your own two feet and feel too stupid to go out on your own. They have actually convinced you that you can’t make it in life without them, without their direction and guidance. Their need to control you, the continual verbal and emotional abuse, and the narcissistic rages they subject you to have nothing to do with you. They are pathologically envious of you. They are terrified that you will accomplish so much more than they ever did, and they know the enormous potential you possess that will humiliate them and make them suffer if you were to accomplish even half of what they know you are capable of. They are very much aware that unless they can beat and abuse those things out of you, force their projections of who and what they are onto you, and unless you accept their projections as truth, they will lose a valuable source of narcissistic supply forever. And that will trigger the true underlying self of the narcissist that feels deeply unworthy, deeply inferior, and deeply defective.
They Will Manipulate You
They will try and do everything possible to make sure you never realize the truth of what and who they are and what and who you are. Just the thought of you surpassing them in any way makes them feel jealous to their core. Your narcissistic caregiver will do everything possible to see to it that you actually never know your worth, know your talents, know that your dreams and aspirations in life are valid and worthy and that you should go out and seek your dreams and find your place in life that does not involve or revolve around the narcissistic parent. They will manipulate you into thinking that their needs are your needs and that their wishes and goals are also your wishes and goals. They don’t want you ever to become a fully functioning adult with your own life. They don’t want you ever to contemplate having a life that does not solely and completely revolve around them. It’s all about them. It’s never about you. Their sense of self derives from maintaining control over other individuals and stripping away their self-worth and dignity.
They will never validate their children, and the children will never be rewarded. Often these children feel they are living a life of imprisonment. What happens within the homes of these families of narcissistic abuse is a golden and scapegoat-child dynamic. The narcissist believes the golden child can do no wrong and the scapegoat can do no right. The golden child is always praised no matter what, and there is consistent favoritism and flattering between them. But the scapegoated child, on the other hand, is continuously made to feel bad about themselves. They are the ones who take all of the blame, are punished and bullied for not doing what the narcissist and sometimes even what the golden child wants. What happens to the scapegoat within this family dynamic is that they often need intervention at school; they become suicidal, depressed, and develop low self-esteem. The scapegoat will eventually leave as soon as they are able to or be pushed out of the family and even be driven to madness because they realize they will self-destruct if they stay. There is no other choice for the scapegoat. The narcissist essentially believes that they own you and that you are here to serve them.
2. You Are Not A Person But An Extension of Them
If you dealt with a narcissistic parent, you could not develop a healthy sense of self throughout your childhood or teenage years. You were never able to truly get to know yourself and build a healthy personality for yourself. You were probably walking on eggshells, worrying about what you could do to prevent upsetting anyone. So as an adult, you place your self-worth in the hands of other people. You view your own worth through the eyes of others. Self-validation and self-worth are always placed in someone else’s hands because you never learn how to love yourself. That was taken from you in a narcissistic household leading you to experience chronic depression. The narcissist doesn’t look at their children as people or individuals separate from them. You are not a person to them; you are them. They view you as an extension of their ego. A person who’s a narcissist is deficient in empathy. Some even call it empathy deficient disorder because they need to be taught empathy.
The narcissistic parent will violate all of your boundaries, even regarding your sexuality. Fear, shame, and guilt are their weapons but remember, it’s their own projection. They will never give you their love because narcissists do not view other people, even their own spouse, and children, as living, breathing people with feelings and needs of their own. They view other people and relationships as assets. There is only one question in their mind. And it is; how can these people, or how can this relationship serve me? This is how they truly view their “loved ones” in their life. And when and if that person in the relationship is no longer benefiting the narcissist in a way they feel it should benefit them, they can throw people and relationships away just like a used tissue or a broken kitchen appliance. Some of you may understand now, if you were romantically involved with a narcissist, how they were capable of discarding you so easily. So please understand and make peace with the fact that a narcissist will never love you. They are incapable of genuinely loving anyone.
People raised with narcissistic abuse experience an extreme lack of love, which is why they become the biggest people pleasers or highly codependent. You have such a severe lack of love for yourself that you develop low self-esteem, and you abandon yourself to appease someone else. You will most likely suffer from anxiety, depression, and confusion because you weren’t allowed to move forward with your own thoughts and fully express yourself and truly become who you are meant to be. Especially if you were the scapegoat and programmed to be other than what and who you are. It becomes extremely difficult as an adult to be what comes naturally to you and move forward with your own thoughts and ideas by seeking validation within yourself instead of outside yourself.
When you’re a child of a narcissist, you are programmed and calibrated to be attuned to them. So you are always worrying about everyone else’s needs but your own. Narcissistic parents raise their children to become insecure with no boundaries by allowing others to walk all over them. Just the fact that you may have a separate thought, want, or need outside of them is inconceivable to them. They can’t wrap their mind around it. How dare you have a thought outside of what I already thought for you? That is literally their mindset, even when you are an adult, possibly past your 40s. When you start setting boundaries by saying you’re not going to manipulate me anymore or you’re not going to be in control of me, they will not honor you, and it’ll trigger them to their core and drive them insane.
3. You Feel Guilty For No Reason | Narcissistic Abuse
Living with narcissistic abuse, you’ll notice your narcissistic caretaker will put their own needs and wants before yours. They love to psychologically manipulate you into thinking that they truly have your best interest at heart and are only trying to protect you. When in reality, none of those things are true. They are threatened and panicked that you will become more successful than they have ever dreamed of achieving. Your narcissistic parent doesn’t care at all about your values, about your morals, and ethics. They can care less if you turn out to be a genuinely good person or a person like them. The only thing they care about is that you never let anyone see or know that you have no values or that you don’t care about other people or what happens to them. The only thing they care about is how you present yourself to the outside world. They could care less if you are a domestic abuser, a thief, or an alcoholic. What they care greatly about is that no one sees you doing it. The most important thing to them is the image and the lie they present to the outside world.
Even as an adult, when you have your own life, married or not, they guilt trip you for not doing enough for them. Maybe you’re not calling enough, or perhaps you’re not spending enough time with them, or you’re not giving them enough money, or whatever the case may be. Your world could literally be falling apart and what matters to the narcissist is what they can get from you or how they can control and manipulate you so that you can only serve them. You could have school, children, work, and relationship problems, and they do not comprehend that you have your own life no matter how grown you are. They do not see you as a fully grown functional adult who is on your own with your individual rights, wants, needs, and desires. They will guilt trip you if you confront them, so you won’t even be able to bring your point across. They are incapable of respecting or comprehending you for having needs and desires that are different from theirs. They really think you are here for their pleasure and that you were created solely for that.
Narcissistic parents who abuse are unable to truly love you. This is true for anyone who may be a narcissist in your life, such as a parent, grandparent, friend, sibling, etc. They are only capable of giving you conditional love. In other words, earned love. What they love to do is this thing called love bombing because it is a way for them to maintain control over any situation. This love is completely disintegrated once you do something that may upset them because you’re not living by their guidelines. You can be the daughter or son they are so proud of to a complete disgrace and disappointment in a blink of an eye. The highs and lows of this kind of love are extreme. This love only comes on a conditional basis. And they set the conditions and the tone of the relationship. The moment you deviate from their plan or their view of what you should be or what you should do, you will get criticized and emotionally abused. As long as you uphold their image of who you should be or what you should do to serve their narcissistic supply, they will give you all the love in the world. The moment you deviate from it, they will completely turn their back on you, give the silent treatment, and you’ll feel really low or depressed.
They know all your weak spots and pressure points because what narcissists do is study you and feed off of what is weak in you. They will completely ignore you, won’t show you affection or care, will stop supporting you if you are financially dependent on them, and will not call you but give you the complete cold shoulder. And you find yourself doing everything in your power to regain that love, not realizing it is conditional love. If someone truly loves you, the most important thing you have to remember is that love is given freely, and when someone truly loves you, they want to see you happy. If you have a child and you want them to grow up and be a doctor, but their dream is to be a musician because it’s what makes them happy, it is not love to force that child to leave their dream to fulfill yours. It is not love to stop communicating or supporting them if they don’t oblige. Real love is recognizing what makes them truly happy and doing everything you can to support them. The only type of love the narcissist is capable of giving is conditional love because it’s always about them and never about you. Service to self.
4. Gaslighting | You Question Your Own Sanity
A narcissistic parent will always make you believe that if there are any problems in the family, it is because of the children. It is never them. The children aren’t doing enough, they’re not disciplined enough, and the wife or husband isn’t doing enough, but when, in actuality, they are the victims. And that’s how far gaslighting can go. They are not an honest person, and they are not honest with themselves. They are not honest about who they are and make sure that they appear perpetually right in the eyes of others. The narcissistic parent will never admit to their flaws, but they will exaggerate how great and brilliant they are. When a narcissist is gaslighting other people, they will constantly look for ways to discredit you by direct criticism and by making you feel defective as if you don’t know how to do life very well. And to strengthen their argument, they will discuss how others interpret you by lying. They will bring a false portrayal of others’ feelings to back up what they are lying about.
They are pathological liars and bring insults disguised as guidance. A narcissist thinks they have a right to interpret you, and when they do, and you disagree, they will make you think that you don’t see yourself or life very well, but they do. They can completely control your reality by gaslighting and projecting this perfect image of themselves but make you feel unworthy. As if you don’t meet their standards of perfection. But they, on the other hand, are perfect. The narcissist will smear your character and make you believe that no one can see it but them and that you need them to appraise all of that. They truly believe they are the enlightened one. If you confront them about their deficiencies and how critical they may have been towards you, they will deny it and say that you are incapable of understanding and don’t know how to do life very well.
The narcissist will talk about you behind your back. Whether you are dealing with one in your workplace or your family, they will speak poorly about you behind your back to other people and make them see you as they see you. They will discount everything you say, and everyone will have an inaccurate interpretation of you. They will always challenge what you saw with your own two eyes, what you heard with your own two ears, and how you felt about it repeatedly until they break their victim down. And because children love anyone who is an authority figure, which can be the mom, the dad, or whoever the narcissistic caretaker is, they will start protecting their image and believing in them even through psychological manipulation, emotional, verbal, or physical abuse. The child who’s mostly affected by gaslighting will, in all likelihood, lead a life where others will have the same kind of control over him or her, especially when they are married.
Narcissistic Abuse Must Stay Within The Household
A narcissistic parent will always tell you to keep the family business within the home even when things are off. They teach you never to express anything to anyone outside the housewalls and never go to anyone for help. So they can keep doing what they’re doing for as long as they can. Suppose you are the scapegoated child because you see the family is dysfunctional and decide to fight back. In that case, the narcissistic parent will pull the wool over everyone else’s eyes, and they can do it so well that they will turn everyone else against you. They will gaslight everyone else in the family to make them think that you are the problem, even if they’ve known you your entire life.
Through gaslighting, they challenge people’s own accounts of their experiences and what happened, therefore literally controlling other people’s reality. The narcissists’ victims are taught, groomed, and programmed to make excuses for them. Let’s say the narcissist abuses a child verbally. They will never admit to being wrong, and they will change the facts because they have painted a picture of themselves as “the good guy.” And they believe this so deeply that when you confront them, they will take the focus away from them and attack you by knowing your soft spots and making you feel guilty about something you’ve never done.
5. They Need You | Narcissistic Abuse
First, I’d like to address the fact that I’m very aware this photo contains disturbing content. But it’s the reality for many households of domestic violence. Their pride, self-absorption, and egotism always crave them to be in control. A narcissistic parent full of pride and egotism can be highly critical, easily impatient, and constantly interrupt because they take input from no one and truly believe they are the smartest person in the room. They have a high level of defensiveness because they don’t like it if you challenge them. If you call a narcissist out, they go into their defensiveness and say your accusations scare them. Their egotism can’t accept someone else, not thinking highly of them, and they will go into blame-shifting. They go from pride to fear. They are incapable of making heart-based connections with anyone.
As a scapegoat, to protect my own sanity, as soon as I could, at 18, I left home and moved abroad to study music. I experienced post-traumatic stress disorder for years and needed therapy to function as a normal human being again. I carried the pain and weight of this dysfunctional family in my heart for years. Narcissistic caretakers who make use of narcissistic abuse within the home will always blame someone else for their failures. In their world, there is always someone guilty, or it’s always someone else’s fault. They never take into account what they did to contribute to breaking a relationship or marriage, or friendship. Remember, they are unable to take any accountability for their actions. Narcissists are known to attract empaths and codependent people. Growing up with a narcissistic parent, you are never allowed to have your own mind. No one is. You are raised in a system that is under complete control, and everyone in the household contributes to the narcissist’s narcissistic supply. Narcissists don’t know how to love you, but when in the company of others, they will make sure everyone else believes that they are the best mother or the kind father by putting up an act.
If you cut off their narcissistic supply, they will begin to make you feel invisible by giving you the silent treatment and getting their supply from someone else. They have no problem discarding you if you are their son or daughter and will stop communicating with you. That is how much they care. To say they are highly disturbed psychologically is an understatement. It’s all about service to self. Narcissists believe it is okay to verbally and physically abuse women or other individuals they feel entitled to degrade. My narcissistic parent expressed that openly once over dinner with a hint of humor as if it is wildly accepted in today’s world. He looked me straight in the eyes and said a woman needs to be beaten now and then, and smiled with great pride because I was the only person who stood up to him when he was violent, even in front of my brothers, who were much older.
Remember, it is your birthright to pursue happiness by breaking free and realizing that creating your own happiness and bliss and making choices that benefit you rather than someone who’s selfishly trying to benefit from others through continuous narcissistic abuse and manipulation is far more important than anything else. As you increase your awareness, you can cut these emotional ties and chords that tie you to individuals that keep sucking you dry of your energy.
