If You Had A Narcissistic Parent, You’re Wired Differently

You’re not broken, but you don’t operate like other people.

It’s impossible to avoid the fact that our upbringing affects our long-term physical and mental health.

Children of narcissistic adults face multiple whammies: Not only may they suffer from not having an emotionally safe environment, but their physiological needs — food, money, possessions — may also be threadbare or under constant threat of removal; their personhood and psychological needs were deliberately and consistently ignored or undermined.

They’ll find themselves in constant competition with their parents: No comfort ever offered for small or large setbacks because their parents “had it worse”. Children of narcissistic and dysfunctional adults “grow up quickly” because their survival requires them to distort themselves for their caregivers.

People who haven’t experienced this cannot understand: Those born to a narcissistic parent do not receive care for their developmental or emotional needs. What they get is a wrecked nervous system and deep scars on their psyche.

The Common Giveaways of Children of Narcissistic Parents

Dysfunctional and narcissistic parents consistently fail to acknowledge their children’s needs. Instead they project their own inadequacies and insecurities onto their children — and their children are not supposed to want any differently for themselves outside of what their parents want for them.

As such, children of narcissistic parents:

• Experience crippling fear, shame, and paralysis in doing anything they feel may displease their parents
• Experience either an overinflated or nonexistent sense of self and self-worth based solely on external or parental validation
• Mistrust signs of affection while still craving them because “affection” always came with strings attached
• Experience hypervigilance and extreme reactions to criticism because their mistakes were cause for punishment or humiliation
• Have an extreme fear of vulnerability and making (or admitting) mistakes
• Have impossible or unrealistic expectations of themselves based directly or indirectly on their parent’s expectations
• Worry constantly about “how things look” to friends, family, and strangers because this was the overarching worry for their narcissistic parent(s)
• Experience the world as scary with unpredictable people that they have to either dominate, please, or wear a mask in front of
• Feel they’re being judged or watched all the time
• Struggle with boundaries because they don’t feel worthy of self-care
• Second-guess themselves constantly and experience Imposter Syndrome
• Can be gaslit and immobilized by disagreement and conflict
• Find all or some emotions threatening because they were not allowed to have them
• Expect rejection, abandonment, or ostracization for being themselves
• Have an inner narrative about their exceptionalism because they were not allowed to be ordinary, or, they were not allowed to surpass their narcissistic parent(s)
• Can feel entitled to have all their wants met or, conversely, not even worthy to have their basic needs met.

Arguing based on logic alone cannot “fix” the beliefs or mindsets of children of narcissistic parents. Everything they internalized came from lived experience. Not just rare instances, but an environment that they had to survive as developing humans.

This is the making of Complex PTSD. The irony is: children of abuse often learned to minimize and normalize their own abuse to survive.

The Physical and Psychological Toll

Because infants and children are completely dependent on their parents for survival, those born to narcissistic parents only learned to approach the world from their parents’ attitudes and behaviors.

And because their parents usually insist on their version of reality as being more correct and “enlightened”, these children learn to shut down emotionally and physically and discount their experiences of abuse.

In my own life, for example, I also learned to ignore my body’s needs and pains because they were often treated as an inconvenience to my parents, or a punishment I deserved for not having healthier habits —even though I was not modeled or taught those habits.

So I learned that any shortcomings or experiences of discomfort in my body were sources of shame. When I was found with more than one autoimmune system disorder, I just felt more shame for being a burden. I needed to read that illnesses like mine were common to survivors of narcissistic and emotional abuse.

The body is not built to keep suffering from survival stress and double binds. Constantly high levels of cortisol wear down the body and the autoimmune system. Our sympathetic nervous system (which responds to threats) misses cues to disengage —because we rarely experienced soothing, safety, or acceptance.

Headaches, digestive issues, pain, panic, and exhaustion are common in abuse survivors and eventually chronic, until and unless there’s meaningful intervention.

These physical challenges can further be used by narcissistic parents to shame, control, or manipulate their children. It’s another demonstration of how the needs — physical, emotional, and mental — of the child of a narcissist do not matter.

Healing Takes a Lot of Work

It’s not only unfortunate that the children of narcissists were deprived of emotional support in their childhood, but that their adulthood will also be challenged by the work of healing from narcissistic abuse.

The wounds are deep: Children of narcissistic parents may not even see themselves as worthy of healing. Again, logical arguments alone may not penetrate the reality of what they’ve lived through.

The child of a narcissistic parent views the world and themselves through a glass darkly — because they were only allowed to see themselves the way their narcissistic parents do.

Meaningful healing from narcissistic abuse may take no less than a change in environment because the survivor came from one that would be unimaginably painful to healthy people.

It takes education and understanding of the entirety of the damage that narcissistic parenting can wreak on a child.

If you’re the child of a narcissistic parent, know that you’ve survived too much and deserved better. And it’s possible to find help, support, and understanding, if only from others who’ve lived through the same.