Growing up with such people leaves indelible scars on your psyche for the rest of your life.
Parents with narcissistic personality traits inevitably cause their children severe psychological trauma, which they have to deal with throughout their lives. Callousness, coldness, focusing solely on themselves, their interests and pleasures – all this does little to make a person an attentive, caring, supportive parent.
Here are the most common signs that you grew up in a family where one or both parents are narcissists.
1. YOU HAVE EXTREMELY LOW SELF-ESTEEM
You are very insecure, do not value or respect yourself. This is because narcissistic parents often try to assert themselves at the expense of their children by setting inflated, unrealistic expectations for them. No matter how hard you try, you never live up to these parental expectations, you always fall short of the bar. As a ‘reward’ you were constantly criticised, scolded, devalued. This has led to a constant feeling inside you, regardless of your actual achievements, that you are a failure, a worthless, incapable creature who is about to be exposed.
2. IT IS VERY DIFFICULT FOR YOU TO STAND UP FOR YOURSELF
Your parents always prioritised your interests and needs, so you had to suppress your desires throughout your childhood. Now that you are an adult, it is difficult for you to assert your boundaries, not to let yourself be offended, to voice your interests, needs, and wants, and to get them met. This problem haunts you in relationships and in everyday life situations.
3. YOU ARE CONSTANTLY CRITICISING YOURSELF
The tight control, the unrealistically high standards your parents thought you had to live up to, have all led to the fact that you are now fulfilling the parental role towards yourself and demanding the impossible of yourself. You are your own strictest, most relentless critic, you judge yourself as harshly as no one else, you always blame yourself for everything, and you do not expect from yourself pity, sympathy, acceptance, words of support.
Another consequence of this attitude is that you doubt yourself all the time, always double-checking your own actions and feeling responsible for everything that went wrong.
4. YOU FEEL THAT YOU DON’T DESERVE LOVE
In childhood, your parents never sincerely praised and thanked you, did not express and show their love, so now it is difficult for you to accept compliments, praise for your achievements. And if someone shows you love and affection, deep down you are sure that all this is falsity and manipulation. Inner confidence that you do not deserve love can make you tolerate rudeness and violence in relationships.
5. YOU FEEL THE NEED TO FLATTER AND PLEASE OTHER PEOPLE
This is the behavioural strategy that allowed you to survive as a child, so this script is entrenched deep inside. Pleasing and flattering allowed you to anticipate and mitigate impending conflict or emotional outbursts in your parents, reducing the risk of mental or physical harm. Now, as an adult, you catch yourself being willing to do literally anything, any humiliation, just to avoid confrontation with others.
6. YOU OFTEN FEEL SHAME AND GUILT
The favourite tactics of narcissistic parents are blame shifting and emotional blackmail. Therefore, children have a constant feeling that they are to blame for the bad things that happen to their parents, that they are responsible for their parents’ emotions and actions. These soul-eating feelings of guilt and shame do not disappear with age, negatively affecting all spheres of life.
7. YOU ARE CONSTANTLY CAUGHT UP IN TOXIC ROMANTIC RELATIONSHIPS
The manipulation, emotional abuse and other such things that prevailed in your dysfunctional parental family make you subconsciously look for something familiar in your partners. As a result, you are unable to escape the endless cycle of toxicity and co-dependency.
8. YOU ARE ALWAYS AFRAID OF BEING ABANDONED
Narcissistic parents, in order to control their children, often threaten to leave, abandon, unlove them. This leads to a deep-seated fear of being abandoned and rejected that has a powerful impact on your ability to trust others and form healthy relationships with them. This fear negatively affects both love and friendship.
9. YOU ARE PRONE TO EMOTIONAL OVEREATING OR ADDICTIONS
You need food, alcohol or drugs to cope with heartache, the psychological trauma of narcissistic parents, to escape from reality, to stop feeling anything at all.
10. YOU STARTED YOUR SEX LIFE EARLY
Children deprived of attention, emotional warmth and mental intimacy in a narcissistic family often start looking for them on the side through sex. They mistakenly think that physical attraction and love are the same thing.
If you notice some or even all of the signs above in yourself, then you have already taken the first step towards healing and ending the toxic cycle of family trauma. Only by recognising what has happened to you in the past and is happening to you now will you be able to move forward.