The Narcissistic Family

Excerpts from The Narcissistic Family

– by Stephanie Donaldson-Pressman

        “Among adult children of dysfunctional families, there is a body of personality traits previously identified with the ACOA (adult child of alcoholism) model, which include chronic depression, indecisiveness & lack of self-confidence. The ACOA individuals appear to suffer from immutable low self-esteem, inability to sustain intimacy & blocked paths to self-understanding.

        These people have common behavioral traits: a chronic need to please, an inability to identify feelings, wants & needs, & a need for constant validation. This group felt that the bad things that happened to them were well-deserved, while the good things that happened were probably mistakes or accidents. They had a difficulty being assertive, privately feeling a pervasive sense of rage that they feared might surface. They felt like paper tigers – often very angry, but easily beaten down. Their interpersonal relationships were characterized by distrust & suspicion (bordering onto paranoia), interspersed with often disastrous episodes of total & injudicious trusting & self-disclosure. There were chronically dissatisfied, but were fearful of being perceived as whiners or complainers if they expressed their true feelings. Many could hold their anger in for extremely long periods of time, then become explosive over relatively insignificant matters. They had a sense of emptiness & dissatisfaction with their achievements; this was found even among individuals who externally may have been viewed as very successful. They become obsessively involved in their enterprises, but were unable to achieve at a level at which they found satisfaction. In relationships, these individuals frequently found themselves in repeated dead-end situations.

        A common thread among these individuals was that they suffered from dysfunctional parenting: such as incest, physical abuse, emotional neglect & physical absence by parents/guardians. There was one pervasive trait present in all of these families: the needs of the parents took precedence over the needs of the children. The fundamental needs of the children were not met: trust & safety. The family is consumed with dealing with the emotional needs of the parents & the children are recruited in the process of satisfying the parents’ needs. The spouses even put energy into sustaining the status quo & mollifying their partner which becomes detrimental to the children. The child’s behavior is then evaluated not in terms of what it says about what they might be experiencing, but in terms of its impact on the parents.

        For example, in a healthy family, an F on a report card alerts the parents to the presence of a problem. This situation is then examined in terms of the child’s needs & development: do they need help, are they working too hard, are they under stress, do they need tutoring or another support system, or the like? In a dysfunctional family, though, the same problem is examined on the basis of difficulty presented for the parent: is the child disobedient, lazy, embarrassing, or just looking for excessive attention?

        In a healthy family, they parents would react by expressing concern for the feelings of the child & presenting their “F” not as a personal failure, but as a problem to be solved. In the narcissistic family, however, the reactions of the parents indicate to the child that their personal feelings are of limited or no importance. The child is shown that they don’t have a problem, but that they are a problem. To go one step further, the child does not have a need (treatment of anxiety or depression, for example) but rather is a label (stupid, lazy, screw up, etc). The consequences of the child’s actions on the parents are seen as the primary importance.

        Over time, these children learn that their feelings are of little or negative value. They begin to detach their feelings, to lose touch with them. Often this denial of feelings is functional to the child, as to express them only adds fuel to the fire. Instead of understanding, recognizing & validating their own needs, these children develop an exaggerated sense of their impact on the needs of their parents. They even become the reflection of their parents’ emotional needs. The need of the parent becomes a moving target on which they struggle to focus. Because they feel responsible for correcting the situation without having the requisite power & control to do so, the children develop a sense of failure. Moreover, they fail to learn how to validate their own feelings & meet their own needs. As adults, these individuals may not know what they feel, except for varying degrees of despair, frustration & dissatisfaction.

        The path to healing is an art more than a science. A child from a dysfunctional family is molded by the family’s dysfunction, but as an adult, they no longer need to be defined by it.

To define:

        Narcissism is basically about self-love that precludes the ability to see, hear, or react to the needs of another, primarily involved in getting it’s own needs met. In a narcissistic family, the guardians are the narcissists & the children try to gain attention & approval by becoming a negative reflection of the parents’ needs, thus unable to develop the ability to recognize their own wants & needs, their own voice. In a healthy family system, parents attempt to provide for the emotional needs of a child; in a narcissistic family system, it becomes the responsibility of the children to meet the emotional needs of the parents.

Elements of a Narcissistic System:

– Skewed responsibility: in a healthy family situation, parents accept responsibility for meeting a variety of their children’s needs; they get their own needs met by themselves, each other &/or other suitable adults. In such a family, the intrinsic expectation is that the children are not responsible for meeting the needs of their parents. Rather, children are “responsible” for gradually learning how to meet their own needs in an independent manner. The children, with their parents support, are expected to be involved in an eighteen-year (more or less) process of learning how to care for themselves. If this process works properly, the children will also learn, through modeling, how then to be parents who can take care of their own emotional needs & meet the need of their own children. In the words of Bradshaw:

“What a child needs most is a firm but understanding caretaker, who needs to be getting their own needs met through their spouse. Such a caretaker needs to have resolved the issues in their own source relationships, & needs to have a sense of self-responsibility. When this is the case, such a caretaker can be available to the child & provide what the child needs.”

In a narcissistic family, the responsibility for meeting of emotional needs becomes skewed – instead of resting with the parents, the responsibility shifts to the child. The child becomes inappropriately responsible for meeting parental needs & in so doing is deprived of opportunities for necessary experimentation & growth.

– Reactive/Reflective: Children in a narcissistic family become reactive & reflective individuals. Because they learn early on that their primary job is to meet parental needs – whatever those need may be – they do not develop trust in their own feelings & judgments. As a matter of fact, their own feelings are a source of discomfort: it is better to not have feelings at all than to have feelings that cannot be expressed or validated. Thus, rather than act on their own feelings in a proactive way, the child awaits to see what others expect or need & then reacts to those expectations. The reaction can be either positive or negative – the child can be elect either to meet the expressed or implied needs or to rebel against the needs – either course of action is reactive. In the same way, the child becomes a reflection of parental expectations. This happens in all families to some extent, of course; the concept is mirroring in personality/ego development is a long established tenet of psychology. Frequently in narcissistic families, however, the mirror may reflect the child’s inability to meet the parental needs. This reflection almost always is interpreted by the child as inadequacy & failure on their part.

– Problems with Intimacy: for the child of the narcissistic family, intimate relationships are a problem. Children of these families have learned not to trust. Therefore in adulthood, as much as they may want to form close & loving relationships, they have difficulty letting down the barriers to trust they have erected. The need for psychological & physical safety as essential building blocks for the development of trust is an elementary stage described in most developmental psychological systems. The survivor in a narcissistic family system often learns not to trust or unlearns trust, rather than never learns to trust. As infants & children, many survivors were fed well, kept warm, cuddled & nurtured. A needy, dependant infant may pose minimal threat to the parents; the needs are simple & the parent system is often able – & perhaps even willing – to meet them. As the child grows & seeks to differentiate from the parent, however, their needs become more complex. The parents may frankly be unable to tend to these needs, or they may be threatened by them & become increasingly resentful. At this point, the responsibility for meeting needs begins to shift from parent to child, & the erosion of trust starts. While certain overt behaviors will be obvious in damaging the trust, children will notice the covert dysfunction as well, describing the parents as “just there,” seeming to care but not really, feeling like they cant get close enough to their parents, & grabbing their attention is like trying to grab smoke. This is called emotional unavailability; that the parents’ focus is not on the child but their own needs over all. This is the problem: children are expected to meet the parents’ needs.

Characteristics of a Narcissistic Family:

– Overtly Narcissistic Families: these types of families are classical examples of dysfunctional. They’re characterized by parents’ that are involved with drugs/alcohol, physically/sexually abusive, criminal, mentally ill (often with history of disabling depression), &/or profound neglect. In these families, the parents are so overwhelmingly self-involved that it may also have difficulty meeting even lower-level needs such as food, clothing, shelter, etc. The child born into such a family becomes reactive/reflective very early in life, often from infancy.

– The Family Secret: perhaps the single outstanding feature of these families is the family secret. In order to meet the parents spoken or unspoken needs, the children keep the abuse or neglect a secret from outsiders, & often, from each other. Rather than banding together for support, the children in these families are often isolated from each other. The “secret” is too scary to be discussed, even among themselves.

The typical adult from these types of families is filled with unacknowledged anger, feels like a hollow person, feels inadequate & defective, suffers from periodic anxiety & depression, & has no clue about how they got that way.

– Tension & Fear of Abandonment: Tension is the hallmark of the overtly narcissistic family. The children are all trying desperately to get attention & approval, & not to “rock the boat” & make things worse, in order to inject some control over the situation & make things better. The children’s fear of abandonment causes them to go to extreme measures to deny – to other people,  & often to themselves, the reality of their home situation. This fear of abandonment often carries over into adult life, making family-of-origin disclosures difficult & painful.

– Covertly Narcissistic Families: the covertly narcissistic family is harder to recognize, as the dysfunctional behaviors of the parents are more subtle. This family looks fine from the outside & looks pretty good from the inside, too. In fact, survivors of these families are absolutely mystified at the suggestion that any of their problems could stem from their family of origin. But the children are still expected to meet their parents’ needs who are the focus of the family. The children still learn to mask their own feelings, & how to keep from experiencing their own real feelings. In adults, this shows in workaholism, initially a defense against bad relationships, but then made developing any relationship a problem. And they always believe themselves the problem & not their seemingly normal families. An example of their feelings toward their parents would be that their guardians always had another agenda, mom & dad so taken up with each other that the children don’t seem to matter, the parents locked in an emotional tension with each other, obsessed, even jealous of each other sexually, leading them to not bear their children to be anything but cutouts of successful kids. This leads their children to feel the tension, always act happy, not making any demands of emotional needs, & “cant wait to go away.”

– Issues of Trust: survivors of narcissistic families have difficulties with trust, but necessarily because their elementary need went unmet in infancy. At a rudimentary level, trust may have been established at that time, but as the children grow older & assert themselves, the parents are unable to attend to them. This leads children unable to trust anyone, especially themselves. In girls, through their adolescent & adulthood, their difficulties would push them into many damaging relationships that are patterned. They’ll have an overwhelming need for male attention & approval, which, once achieved, would become too scary, so they’ll precipitate the end of the relationship. They’ll hate & distrust women, & have few or no female friends. They may even discover a satisfying form of self-mutilation in easy adolescence (such as plucking facial hairs with tweezers) until it becomes a deep-seated compulsion. In the end, this leads children to form the thought, “They suck me in & then drop me, so I wont let myself get sucked in.”

– The Inverted Parenting Model: as the child grows, the parents own identity may become more & more involved with the child’s development. Simultaneously, as the child’s needs become more both complicated & better articulated, they may start to infringe more obviously on the parents. As the children’s psychological need become more of a factor in the life of the family, the narcissistic family truly develops. The parents are unable to meet the children’s needs, & the children, in order to survive, must be the ones to adapt. The inversion process starts: the responsibility of meeting needs gradually shifts from the parent to the child. Whereas in infancy, the parents may have met the needs of the child, now the child is more & more attempting to meet the needs of the parent, for only in this way can the former gain attention, acceptance & approval.

        In a healthy family, in the children’s infancy, normal development is often rewarding to – & therefore rewarded by – the parents. A baby’s smile, for instance. The child’s needs & the parents needs are in sync; there is no problem. The youngster’s normal development, however, may pose a threat to the parents. The toddler’s exploration requires vigilance & patience; their shouts of “No!” or “Mine!” can be infuriating & embarrassing. The preschoolers questions & demands are intrusive & time-consuming. Further, the needs of the children – especially emotional needs – increase geometrically as their tractability decreases. As a normal child develops, their need to please themselves & their friends increase as their need to please their parents decrease.

        In a healthy family, however annoying this fact of life may be, it still does not change the basic conceptualization of parental responsibility: the parents job is to meet the child’s needs, not vice versa. In the narcissistic family, though, as the child’s needs for differentiation & fulfillment of emotional needs escalates with normal development, so does the parents belief that their child is intentionally thwarting them, becoming increasingly selfish, & so forth. The parents, feeling threatened, thus “dig in their heels” & expect the child more & more to meet the parental needs. Somewhere between infancy & adolescence, the parents lose the focus (if they ever had it) & stop seeing the child as a discrete individual with feelings & needs to be validated & met. The child becomes, instead, an extension of the parents. Normal emotional growth is seen as selfish or deficient, & this is what the parents mirror to the child. For the child to get approval, they must meet a spoken or unspoken need of the parent; approval is contingent on the child meeting the parental needs.

Rules for Maintenance in Narcissistic Families:

        There are predictable means by which the narcissistic family members relate to each other. The purpose of these unspoken rules is to insulate the parents from the emotional needs of their children – to protect & hold intact the parent system. Therefore, all of these unspoken “rules for maintenance” of the narcissistic family system discourages open communication of feelings by the children & limit their access to the parents, while giving the parents unlimited access to the children.

– Indirect communication: In the narcissistic family, direct & clear communication of feelings is discouraged. Individuals express their feelings obliquely. Requests are rarely direct. Instead of “Sam, would you please set the table?” one gets “It would be nice if someone would set the table.” When parents are upset or angry, they are usually unable to express those feelings in a timely & appropriate manner.

– Triangularization: another ineffective communication technique used in narcissistic families is parents communicating through a third party. More commonly, however, the parents will “confide” in the child, with the implicit expectation that the child will carry the message to the other parent. The parents may also use the child as a buffer so that they do not ever have to communicate directly, planning their lives around the children & thus never being alone together; in other words, using the children as a defense against intimacy. In a third scenario, triangularization is employed by one parent to form an alliance with a child against another person – this becomes confusing & damaging to the child when the “enemy” is the child’s other parent or a sibling.

        Again, such families are covertly narcissistic. It looks like the children’s needs are being met, & they indeed get a lot of time with one or both parents. The problem is that it is the parents’ preoccupation with getting their own needs met that is driving the family relationship. The children cannot predict when or why good times will either happen or be withdrawn. They feel like they may have “gotten it right” when intimacy is encouraged, & “messed up” when it is discouraged. In reality, they are not responsible for either their inclusion or exclusion from parental intimacy; it is their parents own needs, not the children’s behavior, that is the motivation.

– Lack of Parental Accessibility: lack of emotional accessibility – the ability to have conversations about feelings, is heavily lacking in these families. Many survivors will say that they never had in-depth conversations with their parents.  Their parents would “do work” for them, such as provide or buy things for them, but if they really wanted or needed to talk about their feelings, the conversation would quickly turn into an advice-giving session, a fight, or denial. The parents are always “too busy” to talk. And, of course, the children could see that the parents were busy, doing things for the children, or the family, or the job. So, if the child felt resentful, it was because they were selfish, wrong, & mean-spirited.

– Unclear Boundaries: in the narcissistic family, the children lack entitlement to their own feelings; their feelings are not considered. When we do not have feelings, then others do not have to take our feelings into consideration. This is seen by the parents as “lightening the burden” & by children as “lightening the burden on their parents.” Issues such as the right to privacy take on a different coloration in a narcissistic family. For instance, in a healthy family, privacy is respected & encourage: parents do not come into bedrooms or bathrooms without knocking, they do not listen in on others conversations, read others’ mail, or allow their own privacy to be abrogated by their children. There are clear boundaries, clear rules governing what the family members can expect from each other.

        In an overtly narcissistic family, there may be no rules at all to govern boundary issues such as privacy. Privacy may be a totally unfamiliar concept as people’s possessions, time, & very bodies may be property of a parent, caretaker or a stronger, more powerful sibling. In the house where the father is sexually abusing one or more of the children, for instance, the very idea of privacy – private ownership – is ludicrous for the incest victim. If they do not own their own bodies, they feel as if they own nothing & have no rights. There are no boundaries at all in terms of what parents may expect or demand from them. It could be anything & everything.

        In covertly narcissistic families, there may be clear rules governing all manner of boundary issues, including self privacy. The problem, however, is twofold. First, the rules may be broken by the parents as their needs dictate, & the second, there are no boundaries in terms of emotional expectations of the children. The children are always expected to meet the parents’ needs, but the needs of the children are usually met only by happy coincidence.

Boundary issues are enormously complex for the survivors. Adults raised in narcissistic families often do not know when they can say no – that they have a right to limit what they will do for others, & that they do not have to be physically & emotionally accessible to anyone at any time. In their families of origin, they may have not had the right to say no or to discriminate between reasonable & unreasonable requests. Children in narcissistic families do not know how to set boundaries, because it is not in the parents’ best interests to teach them.

– The Moving Target: this is when the childrens’ needs are met only coincidentally. Everybody is happy but only temporarily because the parents’ needs coincidentally came into the same range as the childrens. This is damaging, because the children believe they achieved some form of intimacy, but when its rejected again, they believe it’s their fault, too. They believe they haven’t got something right & that there is something wrong with them.

– Lack of Entitlement: the main center, on which boundary setting intimacy concerns, & virtually every other issue is centered, has to do with emotional entitlement. In order to set boundaries with another person,  one must know that one has the right to feel as one does: that one has the right to set the boundary, feel the feeling or make the demand. In narcissistic families, the children are not entitled to have, express or experience feelings that are unacceptable to parents. Children learn to do all manner of things with their feelings so as to not create problems for themselves vis-à-vis their parents: they stuff them, sublimate them, deny them, lie about them, fake them, & then ultimately forget how to experience them. What has been extinguished in childhood – the right to feel – is difficult to call back in adulthood. But until adults understand that they have a right to feel whatever it is that they feel, & that they always had that right, they will be unable to move forward in boundary setting. And without appropriate boundaries, all relationships are skewed & unhealthy.

– Mind Reading: parents’ who teach their children that asking for things is a sign that the giver is not truly loving or that the thing loses its value if not freely given cause children to internalize the idea that their minds must be read for others to know their needs & wants, creating a very hostile foundation for relationships.  This is shrinking the child’s naturally assertive nature. The expectation that a spouse or child should be able to read one’s mind & meet every unspoken need is one of the most damaging “rules” of the narcissistic family. It virtually assures that no one’s needs will ever be met: “I will not get what I want, & you will be a failure because you did nothing to provide it.” This is truly a lose-lose scenario. The messages are complex in the extreme: “Not only are you to read my mind & come up with the real message, but in doing so you also disregard my expressed preferences. And it is up to you to figure out when to read my mind & when to honor my explicit preferences.” This leaves a tense & sad atmosphere in relationships.

Conclusion: While the symptoms may range in these families, one thread connecting them has to do with skewed responsibility. Somehow, at some point in the families histories, the responsibility for meeting of emotional needs shifted from parents – where it belonged – to children. The children’s healthy emotional growth becomes arrested, their feelings get turned off & they start to grow in a different, unhealthy direction.

Therapy Process & Healing:

Acceptance: The Key to Recovery

        There is nothing more important in the process of recovery than acceptance. Acceptance does not imply resignation, or that things are okay as they are or were, or that one must necessarily hand things over to some higher power. It means recognition & acceptance of reality: of how things were in our family of origin, of the effects of that experience on our development, & that while as children we were not responsible for what happened to us then, as adults we are responsible for our own recovery now. We do not need to be defined by our experiences of our family system.

        Most people are very concerned about having to “blame” their parents for deficits in parenting. They are afraid because they don’t want to acknowledge their anger with their parents, & also because placing blame on their parents seems too easy – like a cop out that eventually will backfire on them, & leave them feeling even more deficient than they do at the present. Conversely, however these individuals are more than ready to blame themselves for everything – failed relationships, lack of job success, indecisiveness, their child’s lack of coordination, the cake they’re baking not rising in the over, etc. The concept that blame, in any form, may be irrelevant is often difficult for survivors to grasp. They believe that if they take the blame off of themselves, then it must go onto another.

Molten Gold

        An example of how blame does not have to be involved in the acceptance process that is helpful to understand is to use the idea of molten gold: it can be poured into a mold for a bracelet or a bedpan. The gold does not make the choice; it is not the gold’s “fault” if it is molded into a bedpan instead of a bracelet. The same concept can be applied to children of narcissistic families. Regardless of intent, right or wrong, children get molded in certain ways. In order to understand & love oneself in a healthy manner, it is important that one is able to see the reality of how one was molded. In childhood, one is molten gold. The potential for goodness & beauty is all there, in them simply being a person; it may be enhanced by one’s upbringing, or it may be diminished.

        In life, the bedpan can be melted down, & the same molten gold can then be reformed into a bracelet that is a beautiful work of art. So it is with therapy: the adult, who has the control they lacked in childhood, can choose to see the reality of the past, let go of self-blame, & take the responsibility of reforming the present. Acceptance does not place blame or require forgiveness – it merely acknowledges the reality & places the potential & responsibility for healthy reform in the survivor.

The Five Stages of Recovery

Although these occur in a logical sequence, people will swing back & forth among stages. That’s okay; the process to recognize, label & explain recovery is still in motion.

Stage One: Revisiting

        To begin, the person must remove the blinds & look at the reality of their childhood. This has to do with giving up the fantasies that the family has promoted through the years. It means accepting that things were never ideal or as good as the family pretended they were & that the child had no control over this. At this stage, the person may be reluctant to reframe their family-of-origin experience in terms of what actually happened, because it implies blame of the parents & letting themselves (the survivor) off “too easy.” It’s hard for them to look back at the past & realize that regardless of how well-meaning their parents may have been, it still affected the survivor negatively & that their parents were unable to meet their emotional needs. This concept of responsibility without blame is very difficult for many people to grasp. They need to be listened to, to have their feelings validated & then refocused on the reality of their childhood & how it affected them.

        One of their childhood coping mechanisms often was to think of themselves as somehow responsible for the problem in the family in an attempt to gain control, believing “if I broke it, I can fix it.” As adults, they still have a skewed idea of how responsible (& therefore ‘powerful enough’) they were – how much control they had & who they were as children.

        A first step to healing from this thought pattern is for the person to look at themselves as a child, perhaps obtain a picture of themselves as children, put it in a nice frame & to look at it for a time every day, to see themselves as they really were as children, how small, cute & lovable they were.

This will evoke memories in the person & mirror some aspects of the reality of their childhood. It is often very painful, as the picture can be too poignant of a reminder of the past & bring up too many feelings. But the key is to keep at it, to keep looking at the child they were & to realize they were a child, to understand the reality that they were children, not short adults; that they were small, powerless & dependant, controlling very little in their own lives, let alone in anyone else’s. They have to look at the children around them & imagine the same abuse occurring to those children as it did to them & ask themselves if the children are bad, if they deserve it, if they’re responsible for it. The answer will always be a no. When the survivor learns to accept & love the child in the picture, they inevitably come a long way toward being able to accept & love the adult version of that child. They are able to assess realistically the conditions of responsibility & control of both their past & present.

        Another concept the survivor can engage in is compartmentalization – the ability to discriminate between what they own & what someone else owns. One of the biggest problems for adults in narcissistic families is that they tend to take responsibility for things which they have no control over, yet refuse to take responsibility for what is happening to them today, as adults, & when they have a great deal of power over the decisions they make & the actions they perform. They must learn that they have control over their life now & that it’s appropriate to take responsibility for it now. At the same time, they are finally able to see that they had no control in childhood & therefore could not take the responsibility for their own victimization.

        A problem many adults from narcissistic families tend to have is that they generalize issues of responsibility & blame so that they end up with all-or-nothing stances. Depending on any random day, they decide that they are responsible for everything or nothing. This tendency to generalized is also demonstrated as a propensity to lump unrelated occurrence together, as if there were a cause-&-effect relationship. In order to asses issues of responsibilities & control realistically, survivors need to be able to put their emotions about different events into separate compartments, to differentiate kinds of feelings, severity & immediacy of situations, depth of responsibility, & degree of power/control.

        The tool of compartmentalization helps the person understand that differing realities can exist simultaneously, that two conditions, such as parents couldn’t meet the needs of the child & that the child grew up afraid & insecure. It is understanding that both conditions were real & exist on their own & that one can be put away while the other is explored. This is the essence of compartmentalization: that it’s possible to deal with realities bit by bit. It allows the person, through visualization, to see that their situational feelings are finite: that if you can place things individually, then it has a size, shape & mass – and to deal with what falls into their control.

        This first stage of acceptance can also be called “the shedding of denial.” This stage doesn’t imply either guilt or blame; it is simply acceptance of reality. It may be the first time the survivor has ever even been encouraged to look at the reality of their upbringing. It’s always painful, but they’ve already begun the road to recovery.

Stage Two: Mourning the Loss of the Fantasy

        This stage is the most painful & the most liberating for survivors. On one hand, the recognition that the “perfect family” can never be recreated, because it never existed, is an occasion for sorrow. It seems to remove for the most survivors the last vestiges of hope for a “real family.” But on the other hand, survivors begin to see that as they stop wasting their emotional energy on recreating a situation that never was & to win approval they will never get, they now have enormous energy to expend on hopeful situations – on trying to create a fulfilling life with people who genuinely care to meet their needs.

        Adults raised in narcissistic homes tend to cling to the fantasy that they can somehow control & manipulate their parent/family-of-origin system to get the recognition & approval they require, that is, to get their needs met by the family of origin. They had this fantasy as children, & they maintain it as adults. The reality, though, is that they had little control over their parents as children & have little control over it now. These individuals continuously return to the family-of-origin situations with the idea that “this time, it’ll work out.” They believe that they can re-create the perfect family they never had. But they could not make it happen then, & they cannot now. Concentrating energy on that fantasy is destructive for several reasons: it presupposes that the patient if somehow wrong or defective, that if they could just do better, be different, find the key, then they can get their needs met by the family. In short, it blames the victim. It also keeps the patient involved with the narcissistic family system & waste time, which affects making their own family & relationships of choice. It keeps the patient obsessive with a goal that they can never achieve: getting their needs met by their parents & feeling like a failure for every time they’re rejected. It sets up patterned situations where opportunities for good interactions will be missed because of constant underlying expectations & resultant anger, which will make any sort of relaxed interaction impossible. It creates a pattern of missed opportunities for healthy relationships.

        Once the survivor is able to mourn the loss of what might have been, but in reality, could never be, they can then move on. They understand that they could not & cannot change their family of origin, but they do have the power & control to reform themselves & improve the quality of their own lives. They may also open up the possibility of developing a reality-based relationship with their family of origin once they stop trying to manipulate, control & gain approval. In other words, they decide to melt down the bedpan.

Stage Three: Recognition

        The third stage of acceptance involves recognizing those effects of being raised in a narcissistic family that are evidenced in the individual’s life now. This means being able to look at specific personality traits & saying, “Ah! I see where that came from.” For instance, a survivor might say, “I can never be assertive, I can never tell people how I feel. Now I understand that I can never tell people how I feel because I don’t know how I feel. I don’t know how I feel because when I was a child, no one ever asked me how I felt. In fact, in order to survive in my family, I had to bury my feelings. Not only were they seen as unimportant, but they were seen as potentially dangerous. I was not allowed to have feelings.” This is a stage of recognition of present traits as they reflect past experience.

        The survivor needs to realize that, while those traits developed in childhood may be dysfunctional now in adulthood, they were valuable at the time. Those traits & skills allowed the child to continue to function within their narcissistic family; they need to be valued as sensible coping mechanisms in a difficult situation. Now, of course, the situation has changed: they are an adult & have power & control now, & their coping mechanisms need to change as well. It is vital in the process of self-image for the survivor to have respect for the child they were, & for that child’s ability to survive. They are, after all, essentially a bigger, older version of that child: they deserved respect then, they deserve it now.

        Most children of narcissistic families have a difficult time dealing with any kind of criticism, overt or implied. They take rejection of anything they do, think, say or fee as a rejection of themselves. Their self-image is too amorphous, & therefore too vulnerable, to deal with negative feedback. Many of these individuals become people pleasers in an attempt to head off negative feedback before it can happen. For them, everyone out there becomes a mirror of their own self-worth, thinking “if no one gets mad at me, I’m okay” & “if anyone gets mad at me, criticizes me or looks at me funny, then I’m bad/stupid/worthless,” & the like. They believe that they are as others react to them.

        Once the survivor recognizes the experiences, sometimes, they can return to the well that brought them down in the first place. They decide to apply their newly gained insights & strengths to enable their successful return to dysfunctional situations. They believe they are now ready to reenter those situations & effect a different outcome. They use their newly gained skills to enable the maladaptive behaviors of their family. It’s like going to a well they grew up around that’s been poisoned & thinking that because they have a new bucket, then they wont get sick from the well. It’s going back into dysfunctional situations with expectations that you can “make it better,” but only setting yourself up for failure & pain all over again.

        Recognizing behavioral patterns is a crucial part of healing. This is the basis for reforming the molten gold.

Stage Four: Evaluation

        Evaluation involves the survivor’s assessment of their current situation: looking at personality traits that they now “own” & deciding which ones they may wish to keep, & which ones are now no longer functional & need to be changed. In this stage, survivors often regress into a lot of self-blame; they will make comments like, “My parents weren’t really that bad,” & “I feel guilty complaining about my family, it’s not really fair.” What they must realize is that they’re not in a court to be judged, they’re simply healing from their own experiences & that if their parents/guardians want to do the same, they can work on their own reform, but it is not the responsibility of anyone else. The survivor must consistently give themselves positive reinforcement about their improvement. This is the stage where they develop a blueprint for the work of art they will make with their gold.

Stage Five: Responsibility for Change

        The last stage is to work on changing those personality traits that may have been dysfunctional in childhood & indeed facilitated survival, but are now dysfunctional in adult life & are definitely getting in the individual’s way to healing & forming healthier traits.

        The survivor must realize that the concepts of blame are not essential to healing & that defending the narcissistic family isn’t a need; they need to look at it realistically. It’s also important to realize that confronting one’s traumatic/abusive relationships for the sake of revenge, an apology, admittance, or even to gain closure or “clear the air,” the intervention will fail. If the individual wants anything at all from their abusers, the confrontation is a set-up for failure. They will walk out feeling worse than when they went in, because all they have done is reenact an old scenario, trying to change, control or manipulate to affect it – & they cannot. They do not have that power or control. The only reason to confront the perpetrator would be for the survivor’s own sake: to tell them what happened, how they feel & how much pain they’ve gone through. For once, the survivor will have an opportunity to validate their childhood experiences. The perpetrator’s reaction is irrelevant. But if they can avoid confrontation until they’ve healed, it will have a better affect on the survivor. It’s important to understand that forgiveness is not necessary either, as self-imposed pressure to forgive the abuser often gets in the way of genuine recovery, as it can shut off the survivor’s necessary expression of emotions such as anger & self-validation of feelings. Forgiveness is more of a feeling than an act, it cannot be legislated; if it happens, it happens on it’s own. Forgiveness is no more necessary than blame. This is so the survivor can reflect on reality & leave the damaging environments alone, not be busy with making judgment calls & trying, once again, to control them.

Conclusion:

        Acceptance of reality of growing up in a narcissistic family is more helpful than half the battle toward healing. It is to recognize how we learned what we learned, & how we can relearn to make life more satisfying. It leads one to understand that they are not defined by that experience.

The Narcissistic Family

– by Stephanie Donaldson-Pressman

        Among adult children of dysfunctional families, there is a body of personality traits previously identified with the ACOA (adult child of alcoholism) model, which include chronic depression, indecisiveness & lack of self-confidence. The ACOA individuals appear to suffer from immutable low self-esteem, inability to sustain intimacy & blocked paths to self-understanding.

        These people have common behavioral traits: a chronic need to please, an inability to identify feelings, wants & needs, & a need for constant validation. This group felt that the bad things that happened to them were well-deserved, while the good things that happened were probably mistakes or accidents. They had a difficulty being assertive, privately feeling a pervasive sense of rage that they feared might surface. They felt like paper tigers – often very angry, but easily beaten down. Their interpersonal relationships were characterized by distrust & suspicion (bordering onto paranoia), interspersed with often disastrous episodes of total & injudicious trusting & self-disclosure. There were chronically dissatisfied, but were fearful of being perceived as whiners or complainers if they expressed their true feelings. Many could hold their anger in for extremely long periods of time, then become explosive over relatively insignificant matters. They had a sense of emptiness & dissatisfaction with their achievements; this was found even among individuals who externally may have been viewed as very successful. They become obsessively involved in their enterprises, but were unable to achieve at a level at which they found satisfaction. In relationships, these individuals frequently found themselves in repeated dead-end situations.

        A common thread among these individuals was that they suffered from dysfunctional parenting: such as incest, physical abuse, emotional neglect & physical absence by parents/guardians. There was one pervasive trait present in all of these families: the needs of the parents took precedence over the needs of the children. The fundamental needs of the children were not met: trust & safety. The family is consumed with dealing with the emotional needs of the parents & the children are recruited in the process of satisfying the parents’ needs. The spouses even put energy into sustaining the status quo & mollifying their partner which becomes detrimental to the children. The child’s behavior is then evaluated not in terms of what it says about what they might be experiencing, but in terms of its impact on the parents.

        For example, in a healthy family, an F on a report card alerts the parents to the presence of a problem. This situation is then examined in terms of the child’s needs & development: do they need help, are they working too hard, are they under stress, do they need tutoring or another support system, or the like? In a dysfunctional family, though, the same problem is examined on the basis of difficulty presented for the parent: is the child disobedient, lazy, embarrassing, or just looking for excessive attention?

        In a healthy family, they parents would react by expressing concern for the feelings of the child & presenting their “F” not as a personal failure, but as a problem to be solved. In the narcissistic family, however, the reactions of the parents indicate to the child that their personal feelings are of limited or no importance. The child is shown that they don’t have a problem, but that they are a problem. To go one step further, the child does not have a need (treatment of anxiety or depression, for example) but rather is a label (stupid, lazy, screw up, etc). The consequences of the child’s actions on the parents are seen as the primary importance.

        Over time, these children learn that their feelings are of little or negative value. They begin to detach their feelings, to lose touch with them. Often this denial of feelings is functional to the child, as to express them only adds fuel to the fire. Instead of understanding, recognizing & validating their own needs, these children develop an exaggerated sense of their impact on the needs of their parents. They even become the reflection of their parents’ emotional needs. The need of the parent becomes a moving target on which they struggle to focus. Because they feel responsible for correcting the situation without having the requisite power & control to do so, the children develop a sense of failure. Moreover, they fail to learn how to validate their own feelings & meet their own needs. As adults, these individuals may not know what they feel, except for varying degrees of despair, frustration & dissatisfaction.

        The path to healing is an art more than a science. A child from a dysfunctional family is molded by the family’s dysfunction, but as an adult, they no longer need to be defined by it.

To define:

        Narcissism is basically about self-love that precludes the ability to see, hear, or react to the needs of another, primarily involved in getting it’s own needs met. In a narcissistic family, the guardians are the narcissists & the children try to gain attention & approval by becoming a negative reflection of the parents’ needs, thus unable to develop the ability to recognize their own wants & needs, their own voice. In a healthy family system, parents attempt to provide for the emotional needs of a child; in a narcissistic family system, it becomes the responsibility of the children to meet the emotional needs of the parents.

Elements of a Narcissistic System:

– Skewed responsibility: in a healthy family situation, parents accept responsibility for meeting a variety of their children’s needs; they get their own needs met by themselves, each other &/or other suitable adults. In such a family, the intrinsic expectation is that the children are not responsible for meeting the needs of their parents. Rather, children are “responsible” for gradually learning how to meet their own needs in an independent manner. The children, with their parents support, are expected to be involved in an eighteen-year (more or less) process of learning how to care for themselves. If this process works properly, the children will also learn, through modeling, how then to be parents who can take care of their own emotional needs & meet the need of their own children. In the words of Bradshaw:

“What a child needs most is a firm but understanding caretaker, who needs to be getting their own needs met through their spouse. Such a caretaker needs to have resolved the issues in their own source relationships, & needs to have a sense of self-responsibility. When this is the case, such a caretaker can be available to the child & provide what the child needs.”

In a narcissistic family, the responsibility for meeting of emotional needs becomes skewed – instead of resting with the parents, the responsibility shifts to the child. The child becomes inappropriately responsible for meeting parental needs & in so doing is deprived of opportunities for necessary experimentation & growth.

– Reactive/Reflective: Children in a narcissistic family become reactive & reflective individuals. Because they learn early on that their primary job is to meet parental needs – whatever those need may be – they do not develop trust in their own feelings & judgments. As a matter of fact, their own feelings are a source of discomfort: it is better to not have feelings at all than to have feelings that cannot be expressed or validated. Thus, rather than act on their own feelings in a proactive way, the child awaits to see what others expect or need & then reacts to those expectations. The reaction can be either positive or negative – the child can be elect either to meet the expressed or implied needs or to rebel against the needs – either course of action is reactive. In the same way, the child becomes a reflection of parental expectations. This happens in all families to some extent, of course; the concept is mirroring in personality/ego development is a long established tenet of psychology. Frequently in narcissistic families, however, the mirror may reflect the child’s inability to meet the parental needs. This reflection almost always is interpreted by the child as inadequacy & failure on their part.

– Problems with Intimacy: for the child of the narcissistic family, intimate relationships are a problem. Children of these families have learned not to trust. Therefore in adulthood, as much as they may want to form close & loving relationships, they have difficulty letting down the barriers to trust they have erected. The need for psychological & physical safety as essential building blocks for the development of trust is an elementary stage described in most developmental psychological systems. The survivor in a narcissistic family system often learns not to trust or unlearns trust, rather than never learns to trust. As infants & children, many survivors were fed well, kept warm, cuddled & nurtured. A needy, dependant infant may pose minimal threat to the parents; the needs are simple & the parent system is often able – & perhaps even willing – to meet them. As the child grows & seeks to differentiate from the parent, however, their needs become more complex. The parents may frankly be unable to tend to these needs, or they may be threatened by them & become increasingly resentful. At this point, the responsibility for meeting needs begins to shift from parent to child, & the erosion of trust starts. While certain overt behaviors will be obvious in damaging the trust, children will notice the covert dysfunction as well, describing the parents as “just there,” seeming to care but not really, feeling like they cant get close enough to their parents, & grabbing their attention is like trying to grab smoke. This is called emotional unavailability; that the parents’ focus is not on the child but their own needs over all. This is the problem: children are expected to meet the parents’ needs.

Characteristics of a Narcissistic Family:

– Overtly Narcissistic Families: these types of families are classical examples of dysfunctional. They’re characterized by parents’ that are involved with drugs/alcohol, physically/sexually abusive, criminal, mentally ill (often with history of disabling depression), &/or profound neglect. In these families, the parents are so overwhelmingly self-involved that it may also have difficulty meeting even lower-level needs such as food, clothing, shelter, etc. The child born into such a family becomes reactive/reflective very early in life, often from infancy.

– The Family Secret: perhaps the single outstanding feature of these families is the family secret. In order to meet the parents spoken or unspoken needs, the children keep the abuse or neglect a secret from outsiders, & often, from each other. Rather than banding together for support, the children in these families are often isolated from each other. The “secret” is too scary to be discussed, even among themselves.

The typical adult from these types of families is filled with unacknowledged anger, feels like a hollow person, feels inadequate & defective, suffers from periodic anxiety & depression, & has no clue about how they got that way.

– Tension & Fear of Abandonment: Tension is the hallmark of the overtly narcissistic family. The children are all trying desperately to get attention & approval, & not to “rock the boat” & make things worse, in order to inject some control over the situation & make things better. The children’s fear of abandonment causes them to go to extreme measures to deny – to other people,  & often to themselves, the reality of their home situation. This fear of abandonment often carries over into adult life, making family-of-origin disclosures difficult & painful.

– Covertly Narcissistic Families: the covertly narcissistic family is harder to recognize, as the dysfunctional behaviors of the parents are more subtle. This family looks fine from the outside & looks pretty good from the inside, too. In fact, survivors of these families are absolutely mystified at the suggestion that any of their problems could stem from their family of origin. But the children are still expected to meet their parents’ needs who are the focus of the family. The children still learn to mask their own feelings, & how to keep from experiencing their own real feelings. In adults, this shows in workaholism, initially a defense against bad relationships, but then made developing any relationship a problem. And they always believe themselves the problem & not their seemingly normal families. An example of their feelings toward their parents would be that their guardians always had another agenda, mom & dad so taken up with each other that the children don’t seem to matter, the parents locked in an emotional tension with each other, obsessed, even jealous of each other sexually, leading them to not bear their children to be anything but cutouts of successful kids. This leads their children to feel the tension, always act happy, not making any demands of emotional needs, & “cant wait to go away.”

– Issues of Trust: survivors of narcissistic families have difficulties with trust, but necessarily because their elementary need went unmet in infancy. At a rudimentary level, trust may have been established at that time, but as the children grow older & assert themselves, the parents are unable to attend to them. This leads children unable to trust anyone, especially themselves. In girls, through their adolescent & adulthood, their difficulties would push them into many damaging relationships that are patterned. They’ll have an overwhelming need for male attention & approval, which, once achieved, would become too scary, so they’ll precipitate the end of the relationship. They’ll hate & distrust women, & have few or no female friends. They may even discover a satisfying form of self-mutilation in easy adolescence (such as plucking facial hairs with tweezers) until it becomes a deep-seated compulsion. In the end, this leads children to form the thought, “They suck me in & then drop me, so I wont let myself get sucked in.”

– The Inverted Parenting Model: as the child grows, the parents own identity may become more & more involved with the child’s development. Simultaneously, as the child’s needs become more both complicated & better articulated, they may start to infringe more obviously on the parents. As the children’s psychological need become more of a factor in the life of the family, the narcissistic family truly develops. The parents are unable to meet the children’s needs, & the children, in order to survive, must be the ones to adapt. The inversion process starts: the responsibility of meeting needs gradually shifts from the parent to the child. Whereas in infancy, the parents may have met the needs of the child, now the child is more & more attempting to meet the needs of the parent, for only in this way can the former gain attention, acceptance & approval.

        In a healthy family, in the children’s infancy, normal development is often rewarding to – & therefore rewarded by – the parents. A baby’s smile, for instance. The child’s needs & the parents needs are in sync; there is no problem. The youngster’s normal development, however, may pose a threat to the parents. The toddler’s exploration requires vigilance & patience; their shouts of “No!” or “Mine!” can be infuriating & embarrassing. The preschoolers questions & demands are intrusive & time-consuming. Further, the needs of the children – especially emotional needs – increase geometrically as their tractability decreases. As a normal child develops, their need to please themselves & their friends increase as their need to please their parents decrease.

        In a healthy family, however annoying this fact of life may be, it still does not change the basic conceptualization of parental responsibility: the parents job is to meet the child’s needs, not vice versa. In the narcissistic family, though, as the child’s needs for differentiation & fulfillment of emotional needs escalates with normal development, so does the parents belief that their child is intentionally thwarting them, becoming increasingly selfish, & so forth. The parents, feeling threatened, thus “dig in their heels” & expect the child more & more to meet the parental needs. Somewhere between infancy & adolescence, the parents lose the focus (if they ever had it) & stop seeing the child as a discrete individual with feelings & needs to be validated & met. The child becomes, instead, an extension of the parents. Normal emotional growth is seen as selfish or deficient, & this is what the parents mirror to the child. For the child to get approval, they must meet a spoken or unspoken need of the parent; approval is contingent on the child meeting the parental needs.

Rules for Maintenance in Narcissistic Families:

        There are predictable means by which the narcissistic family members relate to each other. The purpose of these unspoken rules is to insulate the parents from the emotional needs of their children – to protect & hold intact the parent system. Therefore, all of these unspoken “rules for maintenance” of the narcissistic family system discourages open communication of feelings by the children & limit their access to the parents, while giving the parents unlimited access to the children.

– Indirect communication: In the narcissistic family, direct & clear communication of feelings is discouraged. Individuals express their feelings obliquely. Requests are rarely direct. Instead of “Sam, would you please set the table?” one gets “It would be nice if someone would set the table.” When parents are upset or angry, they are usually unable to express those feelings in a timely & appropriate manner.

– Triangularization: another ineffective communication technique used in narcissistic families is parents communicating through a third party. More commonly, however, the parents will “confide” in the child, with the implicit expectation that the child will carry the message to the other parent. The parents may also use the child as a buffer so that they do not ever have to communicate directly, planning their lives around the children & thus never being alone together; in other words, using the children as a defense against intimacy. In a third scenario, triangularization is employed by one parent to form an alliance with a child against another person – this becomes confusing & damaging to the child when the “enemy” is the child’s other parent or a sibling.

        Again, such families are covertly narcissistic. It looks like the children’s needs are being met, & they indeed get a lot of time with one or both parents. The problem is that it is the parents’ preoccupation with getting their own needs met that is driving the family relationship. The children cannot predict when or why good times will either happen or be withdrawn. They feel like they may have “gotten it right” when intimacy is encouraged, & “messed up” when it is discouraged. In reality, they are not responsible for either their inclusion or exclusion from parental intimacy; it is their parents own needs, not the children’s behavior, that is the motivation.

– Lack of Parental Accessibility: lack of emotional accessibility – the ability to have conversations about feelings, is heavily lacking in these families. Many survivors will say that they never had in-depth conversations with their parents.  Their parents would “do work” for them, such as provide or buy things for them, but if they really wanted or needed to talk about their feelings, the conversation would quickly turn into an advice-giving session, a fight, or denial. The parents are always “too busy” to talk. And, of course, the children could see that the parents were busy, doing things for the children, or the family, or the job. So, if the child felt resentful, it was because they were selfish, wrong, & mean-spirited.

– Unclear Boundaries: in the narcissistic family, the children lack entitlement to their own feelings; their feelings are not considered. When we do not have feelings, then others do not have to take our feelings into consideration. This is seen by the parents as “lightening the burden” & by children as “lightening the burden on their parents.” Issues such as the right to privacy take on a different coloration in a narcissistic family. For instance, in a healthy family, privacy is respected & encourage: parents do not come into bedrooms or bathrooms without knocking, they do not listen in on others conversations, read others’ mail, or allow their own privacy to be abrogated by their children. There are clear boundaries, clear rules governing what the family members can expect from each other.

        In an overtly narcissistic family, there may be no rules at all to govern boundary issues such as privacy. Privacy may be a totally unfamiliar concept as people’s possessions, time, & very bodies may be property of a parent, caretaker or a stronger, more powerful sibling. In the house where the father is sexually abusing one or more of the children, for instance, the very idea of privacy – private ownership – is ludicrous for the incest victim. If they do not own their own bodies, they feel as if they own nothing & have no rights. There are no boundaries at all in terms of what parents may expect or demand from them. It could be anything & everything.

        In covertly narcissistic families, there may be clear rules governing all manner of boundary issues, including self privacy. The problem, however, is twofold. First, the rules may be broken by the parents as their needs dictate, & the second, there are no boundaries in terms of emotional expectations of the children. The children are always expected to meet the parents’ needs, but the needs of the children are usually met only by happy coincidence.

Boundary issues are enormously complex for the survivors. Adults raised in narcissistic families often do not know when they can say no – that they have a right to limit what they will do for others, & that they do not have to be physically & emotionally accessible to anyone at any time. In their families of origin, they may have not had the right to say no or to discriminate between reasonable & unreasonable requests. Children in narcissistic families do not know how to set boundaries, because it is not in the parents’ best interests to teach them.

– The Moving Target: this is when the childrens’ needs are met only coincidentally. Everybody is happy but only temporarily because the parents’ needs coincidentally came into the same range as the childrens. This is damaging, because the children believe they achieved some form of intimacy, but when its rejected again, they believe it’s their fault, too. They believe they haven’t got something right & that there is something wrong with them.

– Lack of Entitlement: the main center, on which boundary setting intimacy concerns, & virtually every other issue is centered, has to do with emotional entitlement. In order to set boundaries with another person,  one must know that one has the right to feel as one does: that one has the right to set the boundary, feel the feeling or make the demand. In narcissistic families, the children are not entitled to have, express or experience feelings that are unacceptable to parents. Children learn to do all manner of things with their feelings so as to not create problems for themselves vis-à-vis their parents: they stuff them, sublimate them, deny them, lie about them, fake them, & then ultimately forget how to experience them. What has been extinguished in childhood – the right to feel – is difficult to call back in adulthood. But until adults understand that they have a right to feel whatever it is that they feel, & that they always had that right, they will be unable to move forward in boundary setting. And without appropriate boundaries, all relationships are skewed & unhealthy.

– Mind Reading: parents’ who teach their children that asking for things is a sign that the giver is not truly loving or that the thing loses its value if not freely given cause children to internalize the idea that their minds must be read for others to know their needs & wants, creating a very hostile foundation for relationships.  This is shrinking the child’s naturally assertive nature. The expectation that a spouse or child should be able to read one’s mind & meet every unspoken need is one of the most damaging “rules” of the narcissistic family. It virtually assures that no one’s needs will ever be met: “I will not get what I want, & you will be a failure because you did nothing to provide it.” This is truly a lose-lose scenario. The messages are complex in the extreme: “Not only are you to read my mind & come up with the real message, but in doing so you also disregard my expressed preferences. And it is up to you to figure out when to read my mind & when to honor my explicit preferences.” This leaves a tense & sad atmosphere in relationships.

Conclusion: While the symptoms may range in these families, one thread connecting them has to do with skewed responsibility. Somehow, at some point in the families histories, the responsibility for meeting of emotional needs shifted from parents – where it belonged – to children. The children’s healthy emotional growth becomes arrested, their feelings get turned off & they start to grow in a different, unhealthy direction.

Therapy Process & Healing:

Acceptance: The Key to Recovery

        There is nothing more important in the process of recovery than acceptance. Acceptance does not imply resignation, or that things are okay as they are or were, or that one must necessarily hand things over to some higher power. It means recognition & acceptance of reality: of how things were in our family of origin, of the effects of that experience on our development, & that while as children we were not responsible for what happened to us then, as adults we are responsible for our own recovery now. We do not need to be defined by our experiences of our family system.

        Most people are very concerned about having to “blame” their parents for deficits in parenting. They are afraid because they don’t want to acknowledge their anger with their parents, & also because placing blame on their parents seems too easy – like a cop out that eventually will backfire on them, & leave them feeling even more deficient than they do at the present. Conversely, however these individuals are more than ready to blame themselves for everything – failed relationships, lack of job success, indecisiveness, their child’s lack of coordination, the cake they’re baking not rising in the over, etc. The concept that blame, in any form, may be irrelevant is often difficult for survivors to grasp. They believe that if they take the blame off of themselves, then it must go onto another.

Molten Gold

        An example of how blame does not have to be involved in the acceptance process that is helpful to understand is to use the idea of molten gold: it can be poured into a mold for a bracelet or a bedpan. The gold does not make the choice; it is not the gold’s “fault” if it is molded into a bedpan instead of a bracelet. The same concept can be applied to children of narcissistic families. Regardless of intent, right or wrong, children get molded in certain ways. In order to understand & love oneself in a healthy manner, it is important that one is able to see the reality of how one was molded. In childhood, one is molten gold. The potential for goodness & beauty is all there, in them simply being a person; it may be enhanced by one’s upbringing, or it may be diminished.

        In life, the bedpan can be melted down, & the same molten gold can then be reformed into a bracelet that is a beautiful work of art. So it is with therapy: the adult, who has the control they lacked in childhood, can choose to see the reality of the past, let go of self-blame, & take the responsibility of reforming the present. Acceptance does not place blame or require forgiveness – it merely acknowledges the reality & places the potential & responsibility for healthy reform in the survivor.

The Five Stages of Recovery

Although these occur in a logical sequence, people will swing back & forth among stages. That’s okay; the process to recognize, label & explain recovery is still in motion.

Stage One: Revisiting

        To begin, the person must remove the blinds & look at the reality of their childhood. This has to do with giving up the fantasies that the family has promoted through the years. It means accepting that things were never ideal or as good as the family pretended they were & that the child had no control over this. At this stage, the person may be reluctant to reframe their family-of-origin experience in terms of what actually happened, because it implies blame of the parents & letting themselves (the survivor) off “too easy.” It’s hard for them to look back at the past & realize that regardless of how well-meaning their parents may have been, it still affected the survivor negatively & that their parents were unable to meet their emotional needs. This concept of responsibility without blame is very difficult for many people to grasp. They need to be listened to, to have their feelings validated & then refocused on the reality of their childhood & how it affected them.

        One of their childhood coping mechanisms often was to think of themselves as somehow responsible for the problem in the family in an attempt to gain control, believing “if I broke it, I can fix it.” As adults, they still have a skewed idea of how responsible (& therefore ‘powerful enough’) they were – how much control they had & who they were as children.

        A first step to healing from this thought pattern is for the person to look at themselves as a child, perhaps obtain a picture of themselves as children, put it in a nice frame & to look at it for a time every day, to see themselves as they really were as children, how small, cute & lovable they were.

This will evoke memories in the person & mirror some aspects of the reality of their childhood. It is often very painful, as the picture can be too poignant of a reminder of the past & bring up too many feelings. But the key is to keep at it, to keep looking at the child they were & to realize they were a child, to understand the reality that they were children, not short adults; that they were small, powerless & dependant, controlling very little in their own lives, let alone in anyone else’s. They have to look at the children around them & imagine the same abuse occurring to those children as it did to them & ask themselves if the children are bad, if they deserve it, if they’re responsible for it. The answer will always be a no. When the survivor learns to accept & love the child in the picture, they inevitably come a long way toward being able to accept & love the adult version of that child. They are able to assess realistically the conditions of responsibility & control of both their past & present.

        Another concept the survivor can engage in is compartmentalization – the ability to discriminate between what they own & what someone else owns. One of the biggest problems for adults in narcissistic families is that they tend to take responsibility for things which they have no control over, yet refuse to take responsibility for what is happening to them today, as adults, & when they have a great deal of power over the decisions they make & the actions they perform. They must learn that they have control over their life now & that it’s appropriate to take responsibility for it now. At the same time, they are finally able to see that they had no control in childhood & therefore could not take the responsibility for their own victimization.

        A problem many adults from narcissistic families tend to have is that they generalize issues of responsibility & blame so that they end up with all-or-nothing stances. Depending on any random day, they decide that they are responsible for everything or nothing. This tendency to generalized is also demonstrated as a propensity to lump unrelated occurrence together, as if there were a cause-&-effect relationship. In order to asses issues of responsibilities & control realistically, survivors need to be able to put their emotions about different events into separate compartments, to differentiate kinds of feelings, severity & immediacy of situations, depth of responsibility, & degree of power/control.

        The tool of compartmentalization helps the person understand that differing realities can exist simultaneously, that two conditions, such as parents couldn’t meet the needs of the child & that the child grew up afraid & insecure. It is understanding that both conditions were real & exist on their own & that one can be put away while the other is explored. This is the essence of compartmentalization: that it’s possible to deal with realities bit by bit. It allows the person, through visualization, to see that their situational feelings are finite: that if you can place things individually, then it has a size, shape & mass – and to deal with what falls into their control.

        This first stage of acceptance can also be called “the shedding of denial.” This stage doesn’t imply either guilt or blame; it is simply acceptance of reality. It may be the first time the survivor has ever even been encouraged to look at the reality of their upbringing. It’s always painful, but they’ve already begun the road to recovery.

Stage Two: Mourning the Loss of the Fantasy

        This stage is the most painful & the most liberating for survivors. On one hand, the recognition that the “perfect family” can never be recreated, because it never existed, is an occasion for sorrow. It seems to remove for the most survivors the last vestiges of hope for a “real family.” But on the other hand, survivors begin to see that as they stop wasting their emotional energy on recreating a situation that never was & to win approval they will never get, they now have enormous energy to expend on hopeful situations – on trying to create a fulfilling life with people who genuinely care to meet their needs.

        Adults raised in narcissistic homes tend to cling to the fantasy that they can somehow control & manipulate their parent/family-of-origin system to get the recognition & approval they require, that is, to get their needs met by the family of origin. They had this fantasy as children, & they maintain it as adults. The reality, though, is that they had little control over their parents as children & have little control over it now. These individuals continuously return to the family-of-origin situations with the idea that “this time, it’ll work out.” They believe that they can re-create the perfect family they never had. But they could not make it happen then, & they cannot now. Concentrating energy on that fantasy is destructive for several reasons: it presupposes that the patient if somehow wrong or defective, that if they could just do better, be different, find the key, then they can get their needs met by the family. In short, it blames the victim. It also keeps the patient involved with the narcissistic family system & waste time, which affects making their own family & relationships of choice. It keeps the patient obsessive with a goal that they can never achieve: getting their needs met by their parents & feeling like a failure for every time they’re rejected. It sets up patterned situations where opportunities for good interactions will be missed because of constant underlying expectations & resultant anger, which will make any sort of relaxed interaction impossible. It creates a pattern of missed opportunities for healthy relationships.

        Once the survivor is able to mourn the loss of what might have been, but in reality, could never be, they can then move on. They understand that they could not & cannot change their family of origin, but they do have the power & control to reform themselves & improve the quality of their own lives. They may also open up the possibility of developing a reality-based relationship with their family of origin once they stop trying to manipulate, control & gain approval. In other words, they decide to melt down the bedpan.

Stage Three: Recognition

        The third stage of acceptance involves recognizing those effects of being raised in a narcissistic family that are evidenced in the individual’s life now. This means being able to look at specific personality traits & saying, “Ah! I see where that came from.” For instance, a survivor might say, “I can never be assertive, I can never tell people how I feel. Now I understand that I can never tell people how I feel because I don’t know how I feel. I don’t know how I feel because when I was a child, no one ever asked me how I felt. In fact, in order to survive in my family, I had to bury my feelings. Not only were they seen as unimportant, but they were seen as potentially dangerous. I was not allowed to have feelings.” This is a stage of recognition of present traits as they reflect past experience.

        The survivor needs to realize that, while those traits developed in childhood may be dysfunctional now in adulthood, they were valuable at the time. Those traits & skills allowed the child to continue to function within their narcissistic family; they need to be valued as sensible coping mechanisms in a difficult situation. Now, of course, the situation has changed: they are an adult & have power & control now, & their coping mechanisms need to change as well. It is vital in the process of self-image for the survivor to have respect for the child they were, & for that child’s ability to survive. They are, after all, essentially a bigger, older version of that child: they deserved respect then, they deserve it now.

        Most children of narcissistic families have a difficult time dealing with any kind of criticism, overt or implied. They take rejection of anything they do, think, say or fee as a rejection of themselves. Their self-image is too amorphous, & therefore too vulnerable, to deal with negative feedback. Many of these individuals become people pleasers in an attempt to head off negative feedback before it can happen. For them, everyone out there becomes a mirror of their own self-worth, thinking “if no one gets mad at me, I’m okay” & “if anyone gets mad at me, criticizes me or looks at me funny, then I’m bad/stupid/worthless,” & the like. They believe that they are as others react to them.

        Once the survivor recognizes the experiences, sometimes, they can return to the well that brought them down in the first place. They decide to apply their newly gained insights & strengths to enable their successful return to dysfunctional situations. They believe they are now ready to reenter those situations & effect a different outcome. They use their newly gained skills to enable the maladaptive behaviors of their family. It’s like going to a well they grew up around that’s been poisoned & thinking that because they have a new bucket, then they wont get sick from the well. It’s going back into dysfunctional situations with expectations that you can “make it better,” but only setting yourself up for failure & pain all over again.

        Recognizing behavioral patterns is a crucial part of healing. This is the basis for reforming the molten gold.

Stage Four: Evaluation

        Evaluation involves the survivor’s assessment of their current situation: looking at personality traits that they now “own” & deciding which ones they may wish to keep, & which ones are now no longer functional & need to be changed. In this stage, survivors often regress into a lot of self-blame; they will make comments like, “My parents weren’t really that bad,” & “I feel guilty complaining about my family, it’s not really fair.” What they must realize is that they’re not in a court to be judged, they’re simply healing from their own experiences & that if their parents/guardians want to do the same, they can work on their own reform, but it is not the responsibility of anyone else. The survivor must consistently give themselves positive reinforcement about their improvement. This is the stage where they develop a blueprint for the work of art they will make with their gold.

Stage Five: Responsibility for Change

        The last stage is to work on changing those personality traits that may have been dysfunctional in childhood & indeed facilitated survival, but are now dysfunctional in adult life & are definitely getting in the individual’s way to healing & forming healthier traits.

        The survivor must realize that the concepts of blame are not essential to healing & that defending the narcissistic family isn’t a need; they need to look at it realistically. It’s also important to realize that confronting one’s traumatic/abusive relationships for the sake of revenge, an apology, admittance, or even to gain closure or “clear the air,” the intervention will fail. If the individual wants anything at all from their abusers, the confrontation is a set-up for failure. They will walk out feeling worse than when they went in, because all they have done is reenact an old scenario, trying to change, control or manipulate to affect it – & they cannot. They do not have that power or control. The only reason to confront the perpetrator would be for the survivor’s own sake: to tell them what happened, how they feel & how much pain they’ve gone through. For once, the survivor will have an opportunity to validate their childhood experiences. The perpetrator’s reaction is irrelevant. But if they can avoid confrontation until they’ve healed, it will have a better affect on the survivor. It’s important to understand that forgiveness is not necessary either, as self-imposed pressure to forgive the abuser often gets in the way of genuine recovery, as it can shut off the survivor’s necessary expression of emotions such as anger & self-validation of feelings. Forgiveness is more of a feeling than an act, it cannot be legislated; if it happens, it happens on it’s own. Forgiveness is no more necessary than blame. This is so the survivor can reflect on reality & leave the damaging environments alone, not be busy with making judgment calls & trying, once again, to control them.

Conclusion:

        Acceptance of reality of growing up in a narcissistic family is more helpful than half the battle toward healing. It is to recognize how we learned what we learned, & how we can relearn to make life more satisfying. It leads one to understand that they are not defined by that experience.”