Key Points
Children who grow up with narcissistic parents often suffer from negative consequences such as low self-esteem.
Common characteristics of adults who grow up with narcissistic parents include stress and fear of conflict.
Healing from the effects of narcissistic parenting involves self-soothing techniques.
According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5; APA, 2013), narcissists are emotionally cold, lack empathy, and insensitive to the feelings and needs of others. What can you do if you have a parent like this?
If we grow up with a narcissistic parent, we often struggle with feelings of inadequacy and anxiety (Määttäi, Määttä, Uusiautti, & Äärelä, 2020). Research has shown that children of narcissistic parents may even suffer from complex trauma (Mahoney, Roxbun, & Hall, 2016).
Venus Winslow, a survivor of narcissistic parenting, now works as a life coach to help others recover from such parenting. Narcissistic parenting “trains us to be dependent and obedient,” she told me in an interview. “We can become people pleasers with an overwhelming need to look good to maintain our image. We become acutely aware of other people’s emotional states while being detached from our own.”
“We struggle with low self-esteem, inadequacy, and anxiety,” she explains. We have a lot of fear — “fear of judgment, rejection, and conflict. We may be afraid of people in authority.” And we can neglect our physical and emotional health because our narcissistic parents neglected our needs.
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“Because we believe we are unlovable and unintelligent, we can develop a victim mentality,” she says. We get into relationships with other narcissists because the pattern feels “familiar to us.”
Our narcissistic parents did not provide us with what Abraham Maslow (1971) identified as our basic needs for food, shelter, safety, security, and love. As Winslow puts it, all children need “nurturing, caring, and understanding. We need love; we need connection; we need significance, certainty, and security. And we need a sense of belonging and purpose.”
Winslow notes that “many adult children of narcissistic parents really struggle to stay emotionally stuck in old, childish ways of feeling.” We become chronically stressed, hypervigilant, and easily influenced by anything that resembles an old pattern from the past. When overwhelmed with fear, we feel as helpless as we once were. As neuroscience research has shown, we react through the amygdala, the brain’s alarm center, which limits our options. The fight, flight, or freeze response shuts down higher brain centers and our ability to think rationally (LeDoux, 1996).
The Road to Recovery
Winslow points to five key steps in the recovery process.
- Calm ourselves. Our recovery path begins with recognizing when we’re triggered and calming ourselves down so we can respond more effectively. Winslow recommends taking a deep breath, “and as you exhale, relax your body, relax your shoulders, relax your face. Relax your hands, relax your chest. Just try to relax your major muscle groups. And keep taking deep breaths.”
This reduces stress responses, calming our minds and bodies. Her advice is consistent with Buddhist traditions, mindfulness-based stress reduction, and research at the HeartMath Institute, which shows how slow, heart-focused breathing can restore balance to our emotions and bodies (Children, Martin, & Beach, 1999; Dalai Lama, 2002; Kabat-Zinn, 1994).
- Recognize our patterns. Once we calm ourselves down, Winslow says, we can begin to recognize our patterns, “the parallels between our childhood and the choices we make in our adult lives.” To make better choices in the future, we can reflect on why we feel the way we do and why we made the decisions we made in the past. Then, we can take steps toward the direction we want to take our lives. It’s a process of “catching ourselves in our old patterns, and then transforming and changing them.”
- Deal with grief and unresolved issues. The journey of recovery will bring up unresolved issues and painful emotions. “As children of narcissistic parents,” Winslow explains, “we’ve often been taught not to feel our feelings.” When recovering from narcissistic abuse, “we will experience grief and unresolved issues, which is a natural part of the healing process. So we will experience shock, pain, anger, sadness, and fear.”
Instead of feeling ashamed of such feelings, or suppressing or denying them, we need to acknowledge our feelings, work through them, and eventually “come to a place of acceptance and peace.” We may need professional help to work through this process.
- Set healthy boundaries. When we become aware of our feelings, we can set healthy boundaries. This can be difficult because our narcissistic parents frequently violate our boundaries, and setting boundaries raises the fear of hurting someone close to us. Winslow refers to boundaries as “safety boundaries” and says that now, as adults, “we are responsible for making decisions to keep ourselves safe.” We can recognize when a boundary has been crossed “when we feel angry or resentful. Then we can communicate with others in a healthy, respectful way.”
To develop our ability to set boundaries, she says, we can start by “setting boundaries with ourselves,” for example, by eating more vegetables each day. Setting our own boundaries builds our self-confidence so that we can then set boundaries with others.
- Become our own inner parent. Winslow says the ultimate goal of recovery is to give ourselves the respect, security, stability, love, and attention we need as we grow: “We can ask ourselves, ‘What can I do to support myself emotionally, to soothe my inner child, to meet my needs?’”
This approach is similar to internal family systems therapy (Schwartz, 1995), which works with the different parts of us. We have an inner parent, our centered self, and other parts, like the scared six-year-old. Our centered self can calm this childish part, saying, “I feel what you feel. I’m an adult, and I’m going to take care of you.”
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Recovering from narcissistic parenting is an ongoing practice. Winslow sees it as training, “like martial arts or learning a new language or a musical instrument. With practice, you literally rewire your brain so that the things that were sending you into a tailspin no longer have control over you.” It’s an ongoing process of growth and development “where we can embrace our true selves and live our lives intentionally, free of codependency and narcissistic abuse.”
