5 Red Flags of Sexual Abuse in Narcissistic Fathers

My father made me sleep in bed with him — until I was 15 years old

**Trigger Warning: Child abuse and Sexual abuse**

My father was a malignant narcissist and he was also a predator. He was well into his 30s, with a wife, when he pursued my mother when she was only 19 years old.

I was born to make sure he could “keep” my mom as supply. When this did not work, I went from being her anchor to becoming her replacement — in ways, he only acted on after she left him.

Here are five of them.

1. He would watch me take baths.

Whenever my father ran me a bath, he had a weird habit of trying to make conversation with me while I was sitting in the tub, naked.

Sometimes, he would stand in the doorway with one arm propped up on the side of the doorframe and stare at me with this razor-sharp look in his eyes.

(I never could forget it. It always stuck out to me because although I was a very young child, at the time, I could feel something was not right about what was happening.)

There were never any bubbles in the baths he ran me. I point this out because, as a kid, that was something both of my parents knew I loved.

My father never bought me any. I realize now that that was intentional. My father was over 6 feet tall; he could see all of me from his vantage point.

Sometimes, he would stand there awhile, staring at me and saying nothing. Usually, he would walk away and keep coming back to talk. When I finished, he would help me dry off when I got out.

(This seemed to be the only normal part of my baths until I viewed it through hindsight.)

This habit continued for a few years until I stopped bathing at his house entirely. I did not want him to come in and stand there. I did not want to deal with where it could lead. There was always an element of pedophilia in the air over there. So I never bathed at his house again.

As a result, my hygiene was very poor as a kid, which led to him berating me for being dirty. At least, for the most part, I wasn’t being violated.

I was 7–9 years old when this was happening.

And yes, it escalated.

2. He forced me to show him my body as punishment.

My father rarely cooked for me or fed me in the morning. On this morning, however, he uncharacteristically made me breakfast.

A bowl of Raisin Bran.

(My parents knew I hated Raisin Bran and only ate Frosted Flakes, Rice Krispies, and Honey Nut Cheerios if nothing else was available.)

I physically could not choke the cereal down and didn’t know what to do because he had already warned me that I could not get up from the table until I finished it. I was terrified, but I had to do something, so I told him I had to pee.

I ran to the bathroom and spit the food out into the toilet. My father, who had followed behind me, stood in the doorway the same way he would when I would bathe to block me from being able to get out. And then he instructed me to use the bathroom in front of him.

I was standing in front of the toilet bowl, but he knew I had to have spit the food out because my mouth was full when I got up from the table, and now it wasn’t. He also heard the food hit the toilet when it landed in the water.

But that wasn’t the problem.

The problem was that I had started developing pubic hair. I froze when my father ordered me to pull my pants down because I didn’t want him to see it. But this was the angriest I had seen him in a long time, and I was terrified of what might happen.

So I pulled my underwear down and sat on the toilet seat. I didn’t have to pee (and we both knew that), so we both stayed there silently. I remember sitting there, crying and feeling extremely uncomfortable because my father kept staring at my vagina.

His eyes kept going from that to my face. He eventually cursed me out while telling me to leave the bathroom. Anything that happened after that went black.

I wanted to write this off as a one-off, but two years later, he did something much worse, in my opinion, because of how overt it was. The following incident was the moment it started sinking in.

My father might be a pedophile.

3. He made me change my clothes in front of him.

I started developing breasts at 11. I had a big growth spurt and went from a triple-A cup to a B in five to six months. I was becoming more aware of my body and required more privacy.

(I had privacy at my mom’s house because I had my own room. I didn’t have my own room at my father’s house; I’ll explain that later.)

During this time, I had an incident at my father’s house directly before we were about to leave the house to go to dinner with his girlfriend.

When I started getting ready, I grabbed my clothes and left the room to change in the bathroom. Puberty had hit. I naturally did not want my father to see my breasts or my pubic hair (again).

As I walked toward the bathroom, he started following me, cursing and yelling about how I had no reason to be ashamed of him seeing me and that I should not have to cover myself up from him because he was my father.

I do not remember how that situation ended, but from then on, I continued to change my clothes in front of my father like he wanted me to.

Things only got worse.

4. He stared at my ass and told my mom about it.

A year later, when I was 12, my father, his girlfriend, and I were in Target, and for whatever reason, he was yelling at me in public (again). I was his scapegoat child (I have an older brother), so I was getting used to him always having a problem with everything I did.

The difference was that, at this point, I was getting tired of his verbal and emotional abuse. I was losing respect for him and genuinely wanted nothing to do with him, so when he started to yell at me, I walked away.

I just checked out in the middle of his bullshit, and I had never done that before. I even remember rolling my eyes and storming off in another direction. The following day, while my mom was at work, he called to complain about how I walked.

Yes, my father called my mother to complain about his twelve-year-old daughter having a sexy walk. I got my walk from my mom, so his rage was escalating because my development was becoming even more of a personal struggle for him.

He tells her that I walk with a switch that I’m too young to have and that it is too sexy. He was enraged by how seductive it was; my mom was in shock. He told her, “Don’t worry, I’ll do something about it. I’ll fix her.”

She then threatened him with legal action if he touched me in any way. Nothing ever came of that situation, but it never sat right with me that my own father was looking at my ass when I walked away from him that day.

Never mind the fact that he did it in front of his girlfriend (who was young enough to be his granddaughter) and became so out of control that he called my mom about it. It was the fact that he was sexualizing me at all.

I was 12 years old.

Still, it gets much worse than this.

(If you, the reader, need to take a break from this article, it is okay. I strongly suggest you take one now because what comes next is hard to stomach.)

5. He made me sleep in bed with him — until I was 15.

When my parents broke up, he rented our house (a house he inherited) to another family shortly after my mom left him and took me with her.

I remember visiting him and watching a group of strangers take over the place I called home for the first five years of my life. Me and my father slept on a bed in the basement together whenever I came over. I thought this was normal, given the circumstances.

When I was six, my father got an apartment in Far Rockaway across the street from the beach. He took me to see it before he fully furnished it. One specific room was declared mine; I had my toys and a television there. The bed was coming soon, so he said.

Fast forward, he was all moved in. When he brought me over, my bedroom was gone. The toys were gone, and so was the television. He had turned my room into his “lab”.

My father worked with herbs; he was an herbal doctor. The lab was where he put tonics together for sick patients. All I had left to sleep on was his bed with him.

Even though he had a couch next to the bed that turned into a pullout, he never used it. I never used it because my father didn’t clean up, so the place was full of roaches I would see crawling on the couch. I had to sleep in bed with him.

Many mornings, when I got up early (as children do) and wanted to start my day, he would scream at me to lay back down with him, and sometimes he would hold me. Close.

When I was 13, he got evicted from that apartment and got a new one. I had to sleep in bed with him for another year and a half. This finally came to an end when he ended up in hospice care for blood cancer when I was 15. It never happened again because he died.

This particular trauma left me anxious when sleeping over at other people’s houses — specifically romantic partners. I tend to struggle the most when it’s time to go to sleep and feel anxiously aimless if I wake up before them, especially if they aren’t ready to start their day yet.

It has not helped that I was raped by a few of my exes on many of these same occasions on their beds, as well as my own, first thing in the morning or right before going to bed.

Dear reader:

I don’t have a proper way to end this article because I didn’t realize the weight of my experience until I was writing about it. I didn’t realize the extent of the danger I was in. I didn’t know how disturbed my father was until I wrote this article.

I didn’t understand how sexual the undertones, or the nature, of my abuse were until I read this back to myself while editing. As a child, I didn’t know how to understand it. As a teenager, I didn’t want to believe it. As a grown woman, I can’t deny the truth. My father was attracted to me.

The hardest pill to swallow here is that his attraction started when I was still a child. He had his eyes on me when I was young because even though I looked like him, I still looked like my mom (and I share her name). As I got older and developed, I resembled her more.

He always expressed this rage and disapproval towards me. I didn’t understand that his rage came from his attraction, and him not knowing how to live with that. He had to disapprove of me to find a way to dislike me to combat those other feelings. I wasn’t a daughter to him; I was my mom’s replacement.

The only reason he didn’t pursue his attraction for me further was because he knew my mom would put him in jail. So, he did what he could to come as close to it as possible.

It’s hard to look at some of the traumatic moments I lived through and accept where his disturbing actions were really coming from. I’m still coming to terms with this. And that is the point of this article.

Coming to terms.

Many of us, as survivors of narcissistic parents, don’t recognize the true nature of our abuse until somebody else details what they went through and calls those same infractions abuse.

If there is anything you take from this article, I hope you will understand that whatever it was you went through was, in fact, abuse. You can validly call it that. Yes, your parent(s) really did that to you. No, you did not deserve it. No, it wasn’t just you. And no, you definitely are not alone.

Thank you so much for reading. ❤

© Linda Sharp 2024. All Rights Reserved.