Narcissistic family

Fragile People — Psychology, Personal strategy

15 min readSep 27, 2024

Narcissistic trauma can also be experienced in relationships with parents. The experience of rejection of children and children’s needs in parental families is varied and can be dictated by very different contexts.

A mother or father may make unfulfilling demands on children because they make unfulfilling demands on themselves. These are so-called “facade” families. For them, the impression they make from the outside, the social evaluation of family life, is very important. Children in such families are a threat: a living and real child inevitably communicates to the world information that adults would like to hide. This happens both in words and in behavior: the child can simply tell that the parents quarrel, and can often get sick or study badly, which also exposes the real state of affairs in such a family. Therefore, demands are made on the child to maintain the facade — the illusion created by adults, at the cost of denying real feelings and needs. Often children in such families are not allowed to be tired, not allowed to have social or developmental difficulties, not allowed to be dirty, have affects, or be sick. Little perfect touches to the portrait of the ideal family are their function.

It happens that such a message does not come from both parents, but only from one. Then the child is in the same boat with the second parent and theoretically can turn to him for support, but in fact it happens that by the time of the appearance of children, the second spouse is suppressed by the desire of the partner to maintain the apparent ideality. Often after some time he begins to consciously or unconsciously rebel, demonstrating socially unacceptable behavior (late nights, drinking), loses a stable income or becomes seriously ill. This does not improve the child’s life, but on the contrary. The shaken ideal picture increases the demands on the remaining controlled family member (the child), and the pressure on him or her only increases.

It turns out that such a child can feel needed and loved only by demonstrating the behavior required by the mother or father. From the rest he must refuse. Right behavior is met with jubilation, praise, pride, when the child is told “you are the best”, or a decrease in tension within the family. Wrong behavior is met with disappointment, coldness, aggression, and “I’m ashamed of you” comments. A breakdown occurs: the child may feel either wonderful or terrible.

Lisa’s father drank more and more as she grew older and became increasingly estranged from the family, becoming inadequate both intoxicated and sober. The mother reconciled, fought, pitied, heroically rescued, gave birth to new children. As the father grew heavier over time, the mother grew weaker and weaker, and naturally part of the care and rescue functions fell to the eldest daughter. Lisa remembers how her mother tearfully thanked her for her help in bringing her inebriated father home, how she told her daughter “how would I be without you”. Lisa was proud of that. At the same time, she was forbidden to have any hardship in her life, as her mother had enough problems as it was. Lisa has a medal, red diplomas, sports trophies. Ignoring her real feelings, in her adult relationships she is masochistically silent about her needs and narcissistically believes that she always does more than her partner for the relationship. Mentally stable men don’t get along with her. This kind of bothers Lisa, but not really: her main function is still “mom’s pride” and “rebuke her father because her daughter turned out so wonderful without his help.”

With Vova, everything is simpler — he simply can’t do anything. He can’t get sick, he can’t get angry, he can’t get carried away, he can’t quarrel with anyone, and he can’t get attached to anyone either. He’s the heir to the family business, he has to do well in school and meet expectations. But it’s not clear exactly what expectations he has to meet. If he studies with only A’s — he is a nerd, if he has difficulties with his studies — a moron. If he works hard — he ruins himself, if he relaxes over a soap opera — a mediocrity. Vova is used to the fact that any contact with his own family brings pain, and has “grown” an armor that makes him immune not only to the words of his parents, but to everything. He looks unlivable and feels the same way. He can’t be happy, sad, empathize with anyone. Only affects remain: envy, rage, jealousy. He is not interested in other people because he has no inner life to fill the relationship. He is a selfish and manipulative leader, an indifferent and demanding partner. The main content of his life is the tension of trying to do something to silence the inner criticizing voice. Sometimes, if by chance he reproduces the desired behavior, he is praised, and for a few hours he can relax. Then it starts all over again (usually with the adage “all I should have done was praise you”).

In these stories, there is at least a reward for the right behavior when the child can actually feel loved, albeit not for very long. There are times when the significant adult is basically incapable of loving or has difficulty loving that particular child.

This is what happens when pregnancy and birth happen by accident, or with the wrong partner, or when having a child makes a major life change for the worse.

The maternal instinct that makes a woman love her child, whatever the circumstances, is a myth.

A woman may not want children at all because it interferes with her freedom and career, but agree to her husband’s entreaties and public pressure. Or she may love another man and get pregnant by accident. Hormonal failure after pregnancy can be superimposed on the stress associated with serious and irreversible changes in life, and then depression and apathy of the mother will not let her feel joy and love in contact with the child. No matter what he does or how he is, the child may not be able to change the mother and teach her to feel differently.

Good feelings for the child may also be unavailable if traumatic experiences are associated with the child: violence, for example, or a husband’s infidelity during pregnancy. Feelings that are not safe to have toward the source of the trauma are transferred to the child: fear, anger, contempt, hatred. These feelings can be so strong that the mother cannot cope with them and transfers them into the relationship with the children.
Also love has no place when the appearance of a child actualizes the mother’s or father’s fear of death. This is the case when pregnancy is associated with a difficult physical condition and life threatening, when the arrival of a new family member complicates the situation to the level of survival, when there is someone around from whom there is a direct threat. Past experience can also be frightening: children and grandchildren of Leningrad blockade survivors or war veterans often talk about the fear of death that was passed on to them by their ancestors — in unbearable conditions, the appearance of children did reduce the chances of adult survival.

Ira’s grandmother is a witness of the Battle of Kursk. It is a terrible experience, the experience of mass deaths, the experience of surviving on the edge. She can no longer be normal: her broken psyche prevents her from experiencing feelings that require security — affection, tenderness, love. The world for her is a war effort. This is how she brings up her daughter, Ira’s mother. This is how she brings up her granddaughter Ira when she is born. The little girl every day observes the war between her mother and grandmother, a war not for life, but for death, in which she has no place. Ira vacillates between the desire to attract the attention she so desperately needs and the need to freeze to avoid being killed by a stray bullet. As she grows older, the patterns do not change: Ira still either freezes in fear or attracts attention with her brilliance, eccentricity, and talent. She has many fears masquerading behind outward confidence. She is a control freak, a tyrant and despot in her own family. If something does not go the way Ira wanted and planned, then from inside she has a wave of anger rising, in the depths of which is always the fear of death. Ira has no children.

And Sonya is the daughter of a rapist. Her mother’s Tatar family threw the young girl out for shame, causing a double trauma: a victim of rape, she met with no support or help, she was punished and expelled. Several times she tried to get rid of the pregnancy, then the baby. It didn’t work. Her mother came to terms with Sonia, but she never learned to feel anything but anger toward her. To the relief of both of them, mother and daughter no longer communicate. But Sonia still can’t stand the slightest resentment: she still feels as if she could be killed at any moment. Sonia’s main goal is to defend herself and keep herself alive.

The father can also cause narcissistic trauma. He may be aloof, immersed in affairs, work, hobbies, alcohol, or illness. The rejection of the child may not be direct: the father may demonstrate to the daughter or son a joy in their existence, a willingness to play or help, but he may simply be very little. The child, with his magical thinking, interprets the father’s constant physical or emotional absence from his side as rejection, the cause of which is within himself. An estranged mother also gives the child a narcissistic experience.

For the child of 90s Oli, all childhood memories are anxiety attacks for the absent mother and father. To earn money, dad sold meat, mom was a taxi driver, and both came home late. On TV and in the newspapers they talked about lawlessness. Olya spent every evening at the door to her apartment waiting for the sound of the elevator and did not understand why she was left alone and why taking care of her endangered the lives of her parents (as her mother said: “you need books for school and new clothes, so Dad and I have to work”). Growing up Olya does not allow herself to be taken care of, does not recognize her weakness and can do everything in the world by herself. She cannot tolerate closeness and dependence on another person. She hates women for weakness, men for taking risks, the world for injustice.

Our own feelings can also traumatize us. On the path of development, each of us meets a new world, for the knowledge of which we need an adult: to inform the names of objects and their functions, to teach behavior that will ensure our safety, to orient us in society. Everything is new to a newborn, and for the rest of our lives we will encounter something that is not in our experience. If there is someone around to orient us, this newness can be made part of a safe world and we can learn to use it.

The child’s own inner world, the world of feelings and emotions, is also something completely new. When confronted with their own emotional reactions, children do not know whether this is normal or abnormal and what to do about it. If an adult nearby is not ready to explain, comfort, regulate — then emotions become frightening and the psyche tends to suppress them. For example, this is very often the case with shame: instead of supporting and comforting, the adult reinforces the shame. This is also a narcissistic trauma: the shame that tells us that there is something wrong with us cannot be experienced and so is displaced, and we begin to put effort into creating an identity that is shame-free.

Kolya’s father left the family when the son was still young and did not communicate with Kolya anymore. The mother remained strongly resentful of her ex-husband, but he was unreachable, and Kolya was unreachable. The mother’s need to be repented and apologized to led to the cultivation of shame in this family: the slightest blunder of her son was perceived by his mother as an opportunity to implement educational measures, to make Kolya ashamed and thereby raise him to be a better man than his father was. The measures, of course, had the opposite effect, and now Kolya runs away from shame (and responsibility). His mother is disappointed, his father never showed up, and Kolya has no opportunity to become happier — too much energy is spent on maintaining the illusion that everything is fine and he has nothing to be ashamed of.

Not only the lack of love, but also too much love can traumatize. In families of single mothers, for example, a woman may feel that the relationship with a man she no longer wants: they are not safe, cause pain. In this case, all unrealized excitement is placed in the child-parent relationship. The same happens when the marriage is not very successful and the mother or father chooses to build relationships with the children rather than with each other.

Then the child becomes the focus of adult hopes for the ideal partner. He should please the parent, not cross him, not make him angry or upset, always be available for the adult’s needs, should admire him, should primarily want to spend time with him. Such love is violent. It denies the child’s right to feelings and needs that are intolerable to the parent.

Masha, for example, should be in love with her father. Mom left the family when the daughter was already thirteen. Or rather, the parents divorced, and the teenager was offered to choose with whom to live. Masha chose her father — either out of pity, or because between them at that time there was already a special relationship, in which the mother was no place. For many years they lived together, and even now, when Masha has her own family and two daughters, she buys him an apartment nearby, so that Dad could help her with the children. Dad has no life of his own. Masha doesn’t have a life of her own. She has no right to even think about it, to even allow the thought that she wants to spend time alone with her family. For this reason, Masha is estranged from her husband and children, but to realize this is to jeopardize her relationship with her father, so Masha blames her husband for her coldness and other family problems. This confused woman is tormented by the need to choose a father, wants intimacy with her husband and children, but the choice has already been made. She has no choice but to devalue her real partner and consider daddy the main source of happiness, so that at least in this way this choice can be justified.

Children with prolonged difficult life situations in childhood may also develop narcissistic traits as a defense that helps them survive in bad circumstances. For example, if parents are constantly fighting and the situation is close to divorce, the child may take full responsibility for what is happening. This is also narcissism.

Every child has magical thinking based on their sense of themselves as the center of the world. When the relationship between the parents is bad or complicated by a situation that the adults can’t handle (moneylessness, illness, failure, depression), it is the child who may feel obligated to solve it. He cannot do anything real, but he can use magical thinking, inventing peculiar “deals” with reality. If I study hard, my mom will get better. If my father comes home today, I will be well behaved and never say another bad word to him again. If I wear only this dress, everything will be fine.

Sometimes these ideas include God as a second party, but not necessarily. The causal relationships invented by the child, in which the behavior of adults depends on his behavior, help him to feel the illusion of control, perform the function of self-soothing when adults are unable to take care of him. Normally, the ability to take care of oneself is a good quality, but here it is tied to the idea of grandiosity, hyper-responsibility. When the child grows up and the situation in which this perception developed disappears, the patterns remain. Often adult manipulative strategies are added to them, and the very cause — the feeling that the world is fragile and completely dependent on behavior — goes deep into the unconscious.

Yulia, who survived her parents’ divorce, cannot tolerate most of the feelings of the close people around her. She feels bad if someone around her is upset, angry, sad, offended, disappointed, and in despair. It seems to Julia that these feelings are bound to lead to disaster, to the collapse of relationships. Therefore, she does her best to make those close to her happy — or rather, demonstrate happiness to her, because in fact it is impossible to be happy all the time. She can be persistent in this to the point of violence, forbidding her family any negative experiences. She has a wide assortment of tricks, from introjections about positive thinking to manipulation of her health to outright aggression. For example, for the sake of her husband, who was depressed by a failure at work, Yulia launched a whole campaign. First, she organized him a joint vacation in a sanatorium, where she constantly attracted him to entertainment events. Then she dragged him to a lecture by a famous lecturer, where they talked about how bad thoughts attract bad events. All day long Julia chirped, laughed, invited her husband to dance or paint, and when he finally snapped — sick with frustration. The husband, not cheered up by her activity, still portrayed for her a fit of guilt. Yulia, meanwhile, considers him ungrateful, incapable of emotion and empathy, possibly a psychopath.

Narcissism, which is based on distortion of reality, also develops in children of rapists, people with mental disorders, addicts, terminally ill. It is also characteristic of those who have fallen into a difficult life situation: found themselves in an orphanage, in the epicenter of hostilities. Reality in this case is too complicated and painful. For children in principle is characterized by withdrawal into fantasies that help to survive difficult moments almost without harm to the psyche. But if there is shame in this reality, then fantasies can acquire a hypercompensating character, helping the child to suppress this experience.

These may be fantasies of revenge, of their innocence, of superpowers. Children fantasize that they can fly, that they can shoot laser beams out of their eyes or run faster than anyone else. Modern superhero culture gives a lot of food for such fantasies, the most important thing in which — the invulnerability of the hero for their offenders and the ability to retaliate with impunity to those who hurt the small and weak. True, it happens that already in childhood in the invented image does not have features of generosity and care for the weak, and there is only the function of aggression and destruction.

As they grow up, these fantasies become less and less harmless and can turn, for example, into a fantasy of oneself as a superhuman, a genius, someone who is destined to play a major role in world history. Often it serves as a justification for aggressiveness and inadequate behavior. Often the grandiose idea contains an element of mediation: then man is not God, but the voice of God, the one who hears his voice and is called to communicate it to others. Prophets, assistant sect leaders, religious fanatics are often people who have been raped or traumatized in childhood and who thus release themselves from the aggression accumulated in a painful childhood. Material gain is not so important in this case (unlike the same psychopaths, for whom this issue is paramount).

Such ideas always contain aggression. Even if it is an idea about the Savior — he is with a flaming sword.

Sasha is a man of the world, he has lived in India, Nepal, Vietnam, Laos. A strict vegan, yoga practitioner, he has maintained celibacy for the past twenty years. For his students and followers, it is part of a purification practice. In fact, Sasha has the intention of conceiving a divine being, which requires him to live another ten years of austerity. He is selecting a mother for his divine son already now, creating around him an entourage of young and beautiful women who provide and serve him. He does not have sex with them, but exploits them to the fullest. They all live together and practice together, it is forbidden for these women to be with other partners. If one of the women leaves this tabor — it is about her: of course, she could not withstand the temptation of the worldly and now she is not worthy even to call aloud the name of the Teacher (he, by the way, promises them all that even for bad thoughts about him they will be karmically punished). Sasha lives according to the one-sided principle of “an eye for an eye”: that is, he owes no one anything, because he is holy, but for the evil in his direction the offender must pay. For example, the man who accidentally knocked out Sasha’s tooth, Sasha knocks out a tooth (actually teeth, because Sasha has some kind of justice) intentionally.

Sasha is from a small working-class town, the son of an early-deceased mother and an alcoholic father. He has a steel structure in his spine and several pins in his bones from constant beatings. He thinks it’s karma, of course, that such a childhood purified him, that it’s analogous to Christ’s suffering. In reality, he is a maimed, embittered and vengeful sociopath.

Narcissistic family

Written by Fragile People — Psychology, Personal strategy