One of the oldest clichés about parenting is that we begin to have a new respect and compassion for our parents when we raise our children.
If you chose to read this post, your experience would likely have been very different. You probably already had a sense that your parents were weird—unusually self-absorbed and unconcerned with your needs—but it wasn’t until you had your children that you began to fully understand the significance of their indifference.
As a clinical psychologist, it is my experience that although these reactions are deeply troubling, they can pave the way to self-understanding and even healing.
The past decade has seen an influx of research on the profound negative psychological effects of child neglect, as well as abuse, leaving victims vulnerable to adult-onset depression, alcohol abuse, anxiety, suicide, and risky sexual behavior.
Children’s psychological needs can be neglected for a variety of reasons, including parental addiction, family breakdown, poverty, violence, and serious mental illness.
But in my experience, the effects of emotional neglect by narcissistic parents are particularly damaging and difficult to acknowledge, let alone overcome.
This is partly because neglect is generally justified and normalized by parents according to inherent personality characteristics that are very confusing to the developing child.
Such a child will likely grow up believing that his or her needs are not important, and that the parents’ treatment was actually appropriate and loving.
The child may also engage in self-blame for feeling a lack of love and appreciation toward the (outwardly caring) narcissistic parent.
The hallmark of the narcissist is an almost exclusive interest in and focus on self-aggrandizement or enhancement. The narcissistic personality is organized around the need to deflect, neutralize, or cancel out feelings of shameful diminishment.
Related: 9 Tips For Dealing With Your Crazy, Narcissist Ex
We are all familiar with feelings of shame, a universal experience of feeling inferior, damaged or bad. Unlike guilt, where remorse for actions that may have harmed another person can enhance efforts to make amends or apologize to the harmed person, the experience of shame tends to be private and non-social.
Characteristic defenses against shame, such as anger, envy, or blaming others, are essentially alienation and are expressed through conflict or avoidance.
For the narcissist, relationships are dominated by the theme of self-enhancement. They tend to look for others who will provide attention and admiration.
Thus, the other parent may have adapted to life with the narcissist by learning to reinforce a stream of amplified input, while protecting and making excuses for his or her vulnerability to criticism.
Young children provide little prosperity currency for the narcissistic parent. Needy and helpless, the child’s needs may be viewed as a burden. Worse still, the child’s needs may spark resentment by reminding the narcissistic parent of what he failed to have in his childhood.
In the spectacle of new parents interacting with their newborns, we witness how well evolution has shaped our inherent concern and concern for our children’s needs. Bowlby stressed the crucial importance of early experiences with caregivers in shaping the future ability to establish relationships and internalize a stable, positive sense of self – “secure attachment.”
Of course, evolution does not require the impossible. Appropriate education does not require complete compatibility with the child’s needs.
In fact, through the failure of cyclic attunement and subsequent repairs, the child develops internal emotional self-regulatory resources. But parenting requires a drive to care and the ability to empathize with the child’s needs and reactions.
The narcissistic parent presents several characteristics that are incompatible with secure attachment scenarios:
First, there is simply a lack of motivation or interest to continue attending to the child’s needs. Because personality style is mostly hostage to the need to inflate a sense of self, narcissists have little concern for the needs or feelings of others.
Furthermore, narcissistic parents lack the empathy or “other mentality” needed to understand the child’s needs. The result may be a lack of interest mixed with anxiety about feelings of inadequacy as a parent. This anxiety will be immediately projected onto the child, who is perceived as too needy, difficult, and unappreciative of the narcissistic parenting efforts.
For the child, the resulting insecure attachment experiences in the first few years of life may jeopardize the development of optimal self-regulatory abilities. As Shor summarizes, “a history of insecure attachment is effectively burned into the infant’s early right brain.”
Insecure attachment (e.g., fearful, avoidant, disorganized) may itself predispose a person to some of the negative outcomes associated with childhood neglect as described above. But in my clinical experience, we often find more subtle and lasting effects related to sustained exposure in childhood to a family environment structured around narcissistic dynamics.
The basic principle of the narcissistic mean is that any opposition to the assumption that the parent is healthy and free from fault or imperfection is unacceptable.
The developing child gradually realizes that the narcissistically structured family psyche will not recognize or recognize the apparent discrepancy between his perceptions and reactions with the permissible parental narrative.
Linehan has referred to this situation, where the child’s experiences and emotions are effectively labeled as wrong or out of bounds, as an “emotionally invalid environment.”
Related: Breaking Up With An Abusive Narcissist Isn’t Easy — Even For America
The implications of growing up in an emotionally dysfunctional narcissistic family environment are myriad, depending on biology, attachment outcome, gender, and specific developmental experiences. The narcissistic parent’s attention may range from overt neglect and disinterest to intrusive efforts to control the child in accordance with the narcissistic parent’s needs.
