A severe lack of empathy toward your pain and emotional safety.
Narcissistic parents tend to be self-absorbed and unempathic, severely neglecting the physical and emotional safety of their children. They habitually prioritize their own emotions over the needs of their children. They may do the bare minimum to take care of their children while raising them in an otherwise hostile environment. The narcissistic parent may have regularly raged at your other parent with no care for your sense of comfort and safety growing up; if both your parents were narcissistic and self-absorbed, they may have engaged in screaming matches and aggression toward each other (and their children) while their children bore witness on a daily basis, not caring how it would affect their children’s development and failing to follow up on the impact it would have. If you were ill, the narcissistic parent may have blamed you for being sick or neglected you, or worse, taunted and mocked you. If you were in emotional distress, they could have gone out of their way to center themselves rather than comforting and soothing you in healthy ways, or rubbed salt in the wound and took sadistic pleasure in your pain. Some narcissistic parents even engage in hurt-and-rescue tactics, harming you emotionally or physically only to come to the rescue to make you dependent on them.
They created chaos and crazymaking, especially during times intended for celebration or joy – such as holidays, birthdays, and graduations.
A narcissistic parent does not experience the kind of authentic joy most parents would for their children unless that joy is in some way connected to their children seeking their validation or enhancing their image. That is why you may have experienced constant chaos and crazymaking in your childhood, even during times meant to celebrate you. The narcissistic parent could have verbally or psychologically abused you before an important time in your life – like a birthday, prom, or graduation, in order to deflate your joy during those events. They may have staged chaos during the holiday season, ensuring everyone in the family was miserable during times meant to be festive and light-hearted. If children stay in contact with narcissistic parents as they become adults, this pattern only continues.
They interfered in your relationships and violated your privacy in horrifying ways.
Parents who are not narcissistic can seek to set healthy boundaries and rules with their children to keep them safe. For example, a parent who wants to ensure their underaged teenage daughter isn’t going out with older men is well within their right to put a stop to such a relationship. However, narcissistic parents take an entirely different route: they don’t seek to just stop unsafe relationships – they want to sabotage any and all budding relationships and friendships of their children. For example, a narcissistic father may excessively shame his daughter and verbally abuse her for having an age-appropriate boyfriend in high school instead of having a constructive and open discussion with her about relationships. As sickening as it may be, a narcissistic mother may try to pursue the “crushes” of her daughter to “one-up” her out of envy, to sabotage her romantic relationships. They may spread rumors about their own children or pit them against their friends to create tension in their friendships.
This is all to ensure their children do not get outside validation or support, and to maintain control over them. For narcissistic mothers, they also tend to compete with their young daughters out of jealousy. In a household with a narcissistic parent, privacy and autonomy do not exist. Narcissistic parents may read the diaries of their children (without a significant reason to do so, such as a valid concern about their safety), listen in on their phone conversations, isolate them from the outside world, physically threaten them if they try to make social connections, and even go as far as to stalk and harass them in order to control them.
They nitpicked and hypercriticized your accomplishments and felt entitled to designing your future.
The narcissistic parent feels excessively entitled to controlling and micromanaging the futures of their children. They feel entitled to control the dreams you pursue, the person you marry, how you raise your children, and your career, and punish you severely throughout adolescence and childhood if you attempt to go against their desires in any way or fail to “perform” in the way they expect. This goes beyond the usual concern of a parent who wants to positively uplift their child’s welfare and ensure they are successful in their endeavors: rather, it is a damaging pattern of attempting to uphold arbitrary high standards while constantly moving the goal posts so their children never feel enough, no matter what they accomplish in their lives. Even if their children become overachievers and achieve great financial and professional success, and go on to prosper in happy, healthy relationships, the narcissistic parent will attempt to nitpick and demean them and what they’ve accomplished.
This can escalate to a ridiculous extent and carry onto adulthood. You could be a multimillionaire with a PhD and an amazing family as an adult, and the narcissistic parent would still nitpick on why your house isn’t “big enough” and why you can’t seem to raise your children correctly. No matter how much you share with the narcissistic parent that you are happy and successful in your life, they will attempt to make you feel otherwise. This criticism has absolutely no basis in reality and is an absurd power play to keep you under their control.
They subtly degraded you by chronically gaslighting you, minimizing your positive traits so you don’t become too independent from them. At the same time, they used and exploited your achievements and resources to boost their own image.
Children of narcissistic parents may share or disclose positive events or achievements to the narcissistic parent, who will inevitably subject them to backlash or bouts of envy or underhanded sabotage in response. For example, the straight A child of a narcissistic parent may share what a great job they did on a project or tell them their teacher recommended a certain university program that would best support their talents. To prevent the child from pursuing their independence, the narcissistic parent will start chronically gaslighting the child into believing they aren’t good enough to get into such a program or dissuade them from a successful career. They may put down the child’s intelligence or natural gifts in an attempt to undermine them.
This is a habit that they will engage in even as you become an adult; they will subtly imply you’re not achieving enough even when you’ve already surpassed most people. While they may show off your achievements to others because of their own grandiosity, they will fail to show you that same support behind closed doors. This is because even though narcissistic parents want their children to be high achieving to boost their own image, they simultaneously resent the idea of their children becoming independent enough to pursue their own interests, or gaining the kind of financial stability that would make them completely independent of their parents. If you were the child of narcissistic parents, you are not alone and you deserve to heal. Shahida Arabi is the bestselling author of four books, including Healing the Adult Children of Narcissists.
