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.

Having been controlled, objectified and used, the child falls into despair. To offset their soul-crushing pain, the child dissociates from reality and denies it completely, reframing it as ideal instead. This comes from the infantile psychological defence called splitting, where someone can only see the world as all-good and perfect, or all-bad and intolerable. The child of narcissism chooses the former, carefully painting over their family of origin with the paintbrush of perfection.

A Suffocating Reality

The narcissist’s need for grandiosity and narcissistic supply is insatiable, uncompromising and absolute, hanging over their family like a constant dark cloud.

The narcissistic parent organises the entire family around their grandiosity and need to avoid shame. This results in a variety of roles which are doled out based on birth order, personality, physical traits and other random factors.

For example, a child of narcissism can be designated as a caretaker for their siblings to establish an emotional buffer between the narcissist and their child. A child of narcissism might be designated as the ‘divine’ or ‘helpless’ one, whose only job is to sit there and be a good boy/girl. Such children are infantilised into adulthood and treated like incompetent toddlers.

A child of narcissism might be selected to be the narcissist’s ‘golden child’ or protégé, tasked with taking after the narcissist. The golden child is moulded after the narcissist in every way. And, of course, you have the scapegoat, who becomes the dumping ground for the narcissist’s disowned pain, shame and negative emotions. The scapegoat is always wrong. They are an object of disgust, unworthy of any love or positive regard.

Regardless of which role a child of narcissism is given, their life is a suffocating existence. They are treated, spoken to and seen in a particular way that gives no consideration to their authentic Self. The children in a narcissistic family are moulded for one purpose and one purpose alone: To serve and uphold the narcissistic parent’s false self. These children live a claustrophobic existence, unable to individuate and thrive as unique, agentic human beings.

Abundant Maladies

A narcissistic parent shows zero tolerance for reality. If the children attempt to assert their needs, set boundaries or call out the narcissistic parent, the parent will gaslight and attack the child until they back away.

Being treated like an object while forced to deny the truth puts enormous stress on the child’s body and spirit. Over time, the pressure builds from the inside and erupts in the form of psychosomatic and physical illnesses. Constant sickness, stomach issues, digestive and thyroid issues, cysts and other niggling problems begin to arise. Mental illness is also rife in a narcissistic family. Many people with anxiety, borderline personality disorder, bipolar and more come from narcissistic families. In extreme cases, the illness can be life-threatening.

Being in a narcissistic family is like living in a pressure cooker, which over time fundamentally dehumanises you and dissolves your True Self, until you are putty in the narcissistic parent’s hands, ready to be moulded as the narcissistic parent pleases.

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Browse more of my articles:

Narcissistic Relationships | Knowing The Narcissist | Abuse Recovery | The Narcissistic Family| Exploring Narcissism | Borderline & Histrionic

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