Key Points

Secure attachment is the foundation of relational trust and healthy psychological and emotional development. Children of narcissists often suffer from relational trauma and insecure attachment.
Narcissism and self-abandonment are common responses to narcissistic parenting.

“In order to prevent tyranny, exploitation, and inequality in the world, we must first recognize that the primary inequality in life is between child and adult.” – Erik Erikson

For humans, a highly social species that relies on the group for survival, attachment is everything. What is attachment? It is our ability to bond with others, based on shared resources and shared vulnerability through empathy, cooperation, and integrity. In short, it is about trust—the ability to trust and be trustworthy.

Healthy Attachment

Humans develop their capacity for trust—and its deepest form, love—primarily through their relationships with their parents/caregivers in the first two to three years of life. These relationships become the imprint that shapes our expectations and behavior in relationships throughout our lives. If we receive “good enough” parenting/parenting, where our feelings are reflected with empathy and our needs are met most of the time, we form a secure attachment style. Secure attachment fosters self-confidence and self-love, enabling us to trust and love others, and is the foundation for developing these key dimensions of healthy personality:

• Emotional regulation
• Empathy
• Self-esteem
• Emotional literacy
• Self-reflection/self-awareness
• Personal responsibility
• Personal boundaries
• Relatedness to others
• Moral integrity

If we do not experience an empathetic environment that responds to our dependency needs in childhood, healthy attachment is disrupted and insecure attachment styles result.

Narcissistic_Parenting

Narcissistic personalities are unable to provide the empathic attunement that children and infants need to form secure attachment patterns. This is because they lack the self-regulation, emotional maturity, and capacity for intimate attachment necessary to form trusting bonds with anyone. Even if there is a loving parent in the family system, such as the narcissist’s partner, that parent is likely to have an insecure attachment pattern (trauma bond) that denies and enables narcissistic abuse and models a fear-based relationship with the narcissist.

Because narcissists internally oscillate between shame and compensatory superiority (repressed self-loathing versus idealized self-esteem) and continue to project their internal state onto others, they treat their children as a journey of idealization and devaluation. They may shame and deprive their children of their agency by:

Punishing them for expressing authenticity (i.e., normal feelings, needs, interests, and preferences) Rewarding conditioned behaviors Giving them undeserved praise and privilege

Related : What do Narcissists Sound Like?

Narcissistic parents often create a home environment characterized by anger, neglect, inequality, boundary violations, and outright abuse or passive aggression. Dynamics such as the following are often the norm in narcissistic families:

• Bullying
• Blame
• Competition
• Humiliation
• Excessive criticism
• Manipulation
• Implication
• Projection
• Denial
• Harsh comparison
• Scapegoating
• Triangulation
• Smear campaigns
• Parenting
• Manipulation

Also characteristic of narcissistic parents is a constant propaganda campaign that denies abuse and promotes fantasies of exceptionalism and/or victimhood, fantasies that are often supported by outsiders who are deceived by the parent’s convincing public personas.

Insecure Attachment in Children of Narcissists

Children raised in narcissistic households face a terrible reality. From infancy onward, the people they depend on to meet their needs for protection, nurturing, and modeling routinely violate their trust. Children in this predicament have no way out. Attachment is essential for survival, but they receive only untrustworthy ambivalence and fear.

One of my clients described this predicament poignantly in her account of what she thought was a recurring nightmare but realized was an early memory: “I’m in my bed. My mother is standing in the doorway, a dark silhouette. I feel her looking at me. I feel longing and fear, like I’m drowning. I feel small, it’s dark and scary, and I just want her to come and get me, but I don’t want her to come.”

Children who are dangerously attached to the adults in their lives are often in a state of fight or flight, which is exacerbated and, when chronically activated, impedes healthy development. Because their dependency prevents them from fighting or fleeing their abusers, many children in this environment will disengage from their natural feelings of anger and fear, deny the abuse, and blame themselves for problems in the family relationship.

Disengagement, denial, and self-blame, experienced as shame, are necessary defenses for children who are emotionally neglected or abused by the people they should turn to for care. As survival mechanisms, they make sense, but they come at a cost.

Narcissism vs. Self-Denial

Children who experience attachment trauma struggle with underlying shame, an overactive nervous system, boundary confusion, and inadequate support for self-esteem and identity development.

Some may identify with the narcissistic parent and become abusive in their relationships. Children who develop a narcissistic personality may close off their emotional selves early in their development and fortify themselves by avoiding vulnerability, relational hostility, externalized (expected) shame and anger, and grandiose and/or victimhood delusions. Their narcissistic mechanism is a primitive response in the sense that it relies heavily on childhood defenses of denial and projection, sacrifices profound aspects of psychological, emotional, and moral development, and has a traumatic effect on those around them, both individuals and social groups. Insecure children who develop empathy, by contrast, typically adopt patterns of self-denial—sacrificing their own interests to those of others. These children struggle with impaired self-agency, insecure boundaries, internalized (self-directed) anger, vulnerability to bullying, and traumatic bonds in their social, work, and intimate relationships. In short, they are vulnerable to narcissistic abuse and to denying and enabling the narcissistic abuse of others.

Related : How to stop being a toxic person: 13 no bullsh*t tips

Childhood trauma responses are adaptive compensations to support survival that must be overcome in order to achieve balance, health, and healing in adulthood. The former supports the self at the expense of others; the latter supports others at the expense of the self. It is important to note that these two personality types exist on a complex continuum that may combine aspects of narcissism and self-denial, as well as other coping styles.

RecoveryProspects

Because narcissistic personalities typically lack empathic connection to themselves or others and operate by suppressing self-awareness and projecting negative aspects of the self onto others, they are rarely able to undertake the emotional self-reflective work required to build trust and compassion.

Self-denying personalities, on the other hand, have greater potential for healing insecure attachment styles because they have access to a vulnerable inner self, desire intimacy with others, and are able to tolerate self-reflection and take personal responsibility. Their path to healing and safety depends on a willingness to let go of denial, detach from abuse (trauma bonds), learn the boundaries of safe relationships, and stand up for themselves.