A Narcissistic Parent Amplifies Your Emotional Distress ON PURPOSE.
It’s all about control and stealing your emotional energy.
Growing up in a narcissistic home is hell. It’s particularly painful because you grow up thinking that love equals pain. Your needs don’t exist, your opinions are countered and your feelings are denied. The narcissistic parent lacks emotional empathy so there’s no soft place for you to land.
The narcissist sees you as an object to be used and abused. Your job is to provide fuel (narcissistic supply), adoration and residual benefits, like parenting your younger siblings. That’s it. That is the sole reason you exist. The narcissist’s insatiable need for control sets the tone for the entire household. Living in a narcissistic home means you are always on edge. You can never relax.
Narcissistic parents are known for their emotional reactivity. Anything can trigger a rage attack. One minute you are the darling child, the next you have a parent coming at you with slipper, a belt or a hand. Or, you’re made invisible by an icy silence that lasts for days. Harsh punishments are given for minor infractions. Hitting, shouting and screaming are the norm.
As a young child you don’t reflect and think, “Wow! My parent is cruel and emotionally unstable. They’re doing a really bad job at parenting me. They are projecting their anger and resentment onto me. I’m not the problem, they are. Their inability to love me does not mean that I am unlovable.”
Nope, that’s not what happens. Instead the child internalizes that they are bad and unlovable. It’s their fault. They must try harder and do better. The golden child becomes an extension of the narcissistic parent — a mini-me. There’s no room for them to become themselves. But, it’s a high price to pay for that cosy spot. The scapegoat becomes the fall guy. The lost child is forgotten. No matter your role, no-one is immune from the narcissist’s selfishness.
Everything that you say or do has to mirror back to them how perfect they are. If you dare to challenge them, you immediately become a threat. As a child, you don’t understand what’s going on. You have nothing to compare your experiences to. You love your parents and all you want is to be unconditionally loved in return. Unfortunately, a narcissist loves no-one but themselves. In your naivety, you adapt to the dysfunction and continue trying to get your parents to love you.
The sacred role of a parent is to be a nurturer and the greatest ally to their children. It’s contrary to any culture or society to imagine that a parent can be anything less. Most people cannot accept that some parents abuse their children. Narcissists have mastered the art of abusing their children, whilst looking like saints.
Their envy, impatience and resentment explodes behind closed doors. When no-one is looking, the narcissist devalues and denigrates the child they view as a threat. Instead of nurturing and inspiring the child, they wound them. The narcissistic parent refuses to acknowledge the child’s own thoughts, needs and desires. You’re expected to be who they want you to be — you exist to serve them.
Unlike normal parents, they feel threatened by your growing independence and uniqueness. After all, you are there to affirm them. Instead of offering you emotional support, it’s your job to do their emotional work for them. Instead of making you feel safe, it’s your responsibility to make them feel comfortable. Can you see how twisted this is?
The child never gets to experience emotional safety and support. Living in an emotional desert which randomly morphs into an emotional rollercoaster, is traumatizing. The child adopts limiting beliefs about themselves:
“It’s not safe to be me.”
“I am not lovable.”
“Relationships are not safe.”
“It’s my job to please everyone and serve their needs.”
“My feelings don’t matter.”
These beliefs carry through to adulthood. They become a wrecking ball to future relationships.
You grow up chronically stressed. Without a peaceful, loving environment, your nervous system becomes incredibly dysregulated. Trauma gets stuck in your body. It can show up as anxiety and depression. In his book, When the body says no, the cost of hidden stress, Gabor Maté explores emotional trauma and the body. Trauma causes diseases like arthritis, cancer, diabetes, heart disease, IBS, and multiple sclerosis.
Narcissistic parents stress their children out, to the point, they eventually get sick. They blame you for things you didn’t do. They make you apologize even if you did nothing wrong. They deny that they said or did things. They use anger and fear to assert their authority. Worst of all, they act loving in front of other people and become cruel and unkind when alone with you. You shut down and numb out as a way to cope. You hide from the ugly truth of who your parent truly is.
Parents are responsible for their children’s emotional development. Narcissistic parents fail miserably at this. Instead, they emotionally dysregulate their children. Children that grow up in narcissistic households often have their physical needs met. But, their emotional needs are neglected. They have to tolerate walking on egg shells. No-one sees the ‘angel’ mask fall off in private.
How do narcissistic parents get away with it?
People don’t see (or refuse to see) what they can’t conceive. If they witness blatant abuse, they convince themselves it’s something else. It’s none of their business. The hard truth that a parent is intentionally harming their child isn’t believed. Thus, the abused child isn’t protected by the other adults or caregivers.
On top on that, the enabling spouse and siblings fear the wrath of the narcissist. It’s safer for them to keep quiet. They either join in or deny any abuse exists. To protect themselves, they continue to enable the abuser. Children can grow up in the same household and experience very different childhoods. The golden child has a very different experience to the scapegoat child. Both are emotionally damaged.
To protect themselves, the siblings of the scapegoat will lie to themselves. They convince themselves that their parent is good and right — the scapegoat is bad and wrong. They buy into the narcissist’s lies and refuse to see the truth. They are invested in the narcissist’s fantasy. Their subconscious won’t allow them to face the truth. They deny that their parent is cruel, controlling, manipulative and abusive. They just can’t go there.
The mother’s role in emotional development
In her role as nurturer, your mother has two important jobs:
1. She teaches you what love feels like from yourself. The way she loves, nurtures and cares for you, models to you what self-love feels like. If you had a good enough mother, great! If you had a narcissistic mother, love felt critical, punishing, hot and cold and in effect, absent. Instead of learning to love yourself, you self-abandon. At best, you grow up doubting yourself, at worst, hating yourself.
D.W. Winnicott, a paediatrician and child psychotherapist, coined the term “good enough mother”. Good enough parenting involves responding to a child in sensitive manner. This approach enables an infant to be dependent whilst becoming more autonomous. The child learns to tolerate frustration at an age-appropriate pace.
2. She teaches you how to hold and feel your feelings. To create emotional safety, a mother must co-regulate with her child. Co-regulation is essential for healthy emotional development. Regular exposure to a calm caregiver, teaches a child how to handle big emotions. Compassion and understanding provides emotional safety. You learn that it’s OK to feel your authentic feelings. You learn how to settle down when you are emotionally charged. You learn to calm down during a tantrum.
A narcissistic mother often ignores her child’s cries. She minimizes their pain. As a child you’re told, “get over it”, “don’t bother me” or “you’re embarrassing me.” The root cause of your very real distress is never dealt with. Instead of being nurtured and soothed, you were abandoned and neglected. The message you internalized from her was, “I can’t help you, you are alone with it… And don’t you dare make me look bad.”
Your narcissistic mother does not mirror to you how to regulate big feelings. As a child, you learn that it’s safer to bottle up your emotions. Feelings become “bad” and you begin to release them in unhealthy ways. Numbing, dissociation, fawning and compulsive behaviors result. A chaotic and neglectful environment conditions you to adopt co-dependent behaviors. People-pleasing and denial become survival mechanisms. Plus, the parent child relationship becomes compromised.
Childhood trauma leads to an inability to self-soothe. You’re not taught how to deal with your emotions, especially the negative ones. As an adult, you may blow up at minor irritations. Or, have a hard time bringing yourself back down from emotional extremes. Years of continuous trauma can lead to the development of complex PTSD.
When you are out of touch with your feelings, you are out of touch with yourself.
When you struggle to self-regulate you become overly-emotional. Panic attacks, anxiety, lashing out and feeling out of control, are signs of emotional dysregulation.
You’re always switched “on” scanning the room, looking for danger. To feel safe you placate, soothe, fix and attempt to create order. To feel calm on the inside, you try and control the outside. Healing means flipping it around. You learn to self-regulate and feel calm on the inside. You stop trying to control the outside. If it’s unsafe or abusive, you leave. Other people’s discomfort is not your problem. Your discomfort is.
Growing up in an aggressive environment means chaotic, dangerous people feel familiar — and normal. Instead of avoiding them, you’ll walk on egg shells, trying to placate them. In the process, you stuff down and ignore your needs for safety, connection and love. You try and earn your abuser’s love in the same way you tried to earn your abusive parent’s love. The cycle of abuse continues.
You numb out the painful reality of your parent’s cruelty. The thing is, cutting off from your feelings, cuts you off from your intuition. You stop picking up cues alerting you to danger. When you disconnect from your body in this way, your discernment becomes compromised. You learn to tolerate danger - abuse feels normal.
To heal, you must break your narcissistic parent’s rule that you ignore your feelings. Learn to own your anger, own your rage and own your hate (hate is a blanket emotion for deep hurt). Exchange being “nice” for emotional honesty. Don’t pretend everything is OK when it is not!
You need to accept that your narcissistic parent intentionally hurt you
Narcissistic parents are often antagonistic. They make you the target of their narcissistic rage. They project their emotions onto you. Emotional regulation is non-existent. This will show up in your adult emotional life. Are you anxious and reactive? Does your anger flare easily? Or, do you fall into depressive lows? Your parent’s narcissism left little space for your emotions. You were not taught how to regulate them. Your emotions may often feel overwhelming and uncomfortable.
Not only do narcissistic parents project their negative emotions onto their children. They also deliberately evoke negative emotions. Instead of calming and soothing your distress, they poke and provoke. They purposefully ramp up your emotional state, gleefully pushing you over the edge. Once you have “lost it” they have the green light to shame and abuse you even more.
“Look at how out of control and disrespectful you are!”
Smash, hit, shout, scream.
Why on earth do they do this?
First, let’s go back to our good enough mother to understand healthy parenting. She understands that if her child is crying, they’re genuinely upset. She may not understand why, but she knows those tears are real. She validates her child’s emotional experience. She acknowledges their sadness, anger or frustration. In turn, she helps them deal with those emotions. The child gets the message,
“I see and understand you’re upset. I know it’s not easy. I feel you. You are a good kid having a tough time. I love you. I’m here.”
- The goal of a good enough parent is to minimize their child’s distress and maximize feelings of calm and safety.
- The goal of a narcissistic parent is to maintain control and garner narcissistic supply. They have zero empathy. Their distressed child is an object they can extract emotional energy from. The more emotional energy a narcissist harvests, the more powerful they feel.
A child that is freaking out and over-reacting, is A-grade narcissistic supply. So, a narcissist will intentionally press that child’s buttons. H.G. Tudor, a diagnosed psychopath and narcissist, shares how negative emotions deliver more of a “kick” than positive ones. This is what makes them emotional vampires. They feed off of your emotional energy. It’s a game to them. Your distress is their pleasure.
Narcissists use their children as batteries to power themselves up. The narcissist flourishes when everything’s dialed-up to high drama. Everybody else is left exhausted and spent. When they see you tip-toeing around them, they smirk with satisfaction. They have you right where they want you — dancing around them.
By eliciting a strong emotional response, the narcissist feels in control of you. But, like a drug addict, they need stronger and stronger doses. Small barbs and jabs stop having the desired effect. They push your buttons harder and more frequently. By pushing you to breaking point, you give them a high dose of narcissistic supply. In turn, you look like a crazy, badly-behaved child. They’re now the “victim” of your disrespect. This manipulation technique is known as baiting. It will continue into your adulthood — as long as you allow it to go on.
The narcissistic parent justifies their abuse, “look at this badly behaved child I’ve got. They deserve the punishment I’m going to meet out.”
Whatever you were asking for or needing is twisted to be all about how “bad” you are. You’re shamed for your emotional reaction to their disrespect. This is so destructive because you learn your emotional patterning from your parents. A good enough parent teaches their child that going to the point of hysteria, is not productive. Shouting, screaming and crying will not get your needs met. It’s not good for you. It’s not good for others.
A good enough parent helps bring their child back to a state of calm. From that state of calm, you can then negotiate and organize to get your needs met. That’s not what narcissistic parents do! They deliberately tip you over the edge to get a hit of your emotional energy. You are programmed to emotionally escalate.
Research suggests that when you’re emotionally dysregulated, certain neurotransmitters fail to function properly. This causes you to remain in a prolonged “fight or flight” response. The pre-frontal cortex (the part of the brain responsible for emotional regulation) remains switched off during times of extreme stress.
This plays out badly in your adult life. You may experience emotional flashbacks. Events in your present trigger intense feelings of anger, fear or shame from your past. Unchecked, you don’t recognize when you’ve become dysregulated. Emotional dysregulation becomes your normal. To add to your pain, you were never taught how to calm and soothe yourself. Without realizing it, you may often over react and inadvertently, push people away.
Small triggers take you back to past trauma. You find yourself living most of your life in the past. In this traumatized state, you become hypersensitive and reactive. Your nervous system has been trained to enter a heightened state and to stay there. Being in a state of fight, flight or freeze feels normal to you.
Added to this, a narcissistic parent never gives you a ‘yes’ or meets your needs. In your adult relationships, you anticipate your needs will not be met either. You expect people to hurt, frustrate and sabotage you. You recreate your childhood emotional experience in every interaction and adult relational experience.
In a dysregulated state, no one’s going to want to help you. And even worse, toxic people will wind you up even more — like your narcissistic parent did. And boom! You’ve recreated the pattern from childhood. You’re still stuck in the old pattern of emotional escalation instead of regulation. It’s not your fault. But, you are responsible for your own healing.
Learning to self-soothe is key to healing.
Whether consciously or not, a narcissistic parent “trains” you to become emotionally dysregulated. You may be addicted to drama without realizing it. The key to healing is to notice that your emotional dysregulation a.) exists and b.) it’s not serving you.
When triggered, learn to immediately pull your energy back. Don’t be sucked into another person’s drama. You’re under no obligation to participate in someone else’s reality. Find the tools and techniques that resonate with you and use them,
Do for yourself, what was not done for you when you were younger. Name what you are feeling in that moment. Parent and soothe yourself. Don’t respond until your rational brain has come back online. When you’ve calmed your nervous system down, you will see things more clearly. Instead of catastrophizing, you’ll focus on solutions.
Calm is a superpower.
You have no power when another person has the ability to control your emotional state. Taking back your power is an essential step towards healing from emotional abuse. When your nervous system is well regulated, you’ll respond appropriately to your circumstances. Once a threat is gone, your nervous system will return to homeostasis.
If your nervous system is dysregulated, you can get stuck in a threat response. As a result, you will experience physiological and biochemical manifestations of the threat, even though your circumstances are safe.
3 steps to help you regain control when intense emotions threaten to spiral.
1. Recognize what you are feeling and name it.
Say out loud, “I feel x.” If you are not aware of your emotions, they can hijack you. They short-circuit your thinking, especially if you have Complex-PTSD. Communicating to yourself what you are feeling puts you back in the driver’s seat.
2. Redirect your focus
Instead of focusing on the external trigger, bring your awareness inward. Pay attention to the sensations in your body. Allow them to be there. Let your body know there is no real danger. Use your breath to slow your heart rate down. Focus on relaxing. Pray, mediate, put on soothing music, go for a walk, play with your pet, calm yourself down. Let your internal parent soothe and comfort you.
By interrupting the surge of emotions, you’re no longer at the mercy of them. You’re now doing for yourself what your parent should have taught you in childhood. Instead of escalating, you mindfully de-esculate your emotions. You bring yourself back into balance.
Humans are meant to feel intense emotions. The trick is not to get stuck there. You want to feel safe, knowing you can feel a surge of anger or disappointment. But, you also have the ability to come back to neutral.
3. Reframe the situation
Ask, is this true? Are my expectations realistic? What steps can I take to change or improve this situation? This is the key to taking back your power. Emotional thinking clouds your judgment and rarely leads to positive outcomes.
Conclusion
Narcissistic parents traumatize their children. Their charming facade hides this painful truth from everyone, including their children. You are gaslit into believing that the abuse is not real. But, the emotional damage speaks for itself.
Narcissistic abuse leads Complex-PTSD, drug and alcohol addiction, eating and sleep disorders, autoimmune diseases, anxiety and many other mental health issues.
I know how difficult it can be to emotionally separate yourself from your narcissistic parent/s. You’ve been programmed to feel responsible for their emotional well-being. Remind yourself that it’s your turn now. Prioritize your emotional well-being. Your narcissistic parent/s will never change. You are not responsible for them — there’s nothing you can do to make them see the light.
Focus on your recovery.
Work through your dysfunctional parent-child relationship. Consult a trauma-informed therapist or coach. They can help you confront, accept, and process the past without retraumatizing yourself. They will help you heal the damage inflicted by your narcissistic parent.
Dealing with your childhood trauma takes time. Be patient with yourself. You may have some tough decisions to make. But, with commitment and support, you can survive your childhood, heal, and thrive. Ultimately, healing the past heals your relationship with yourself.
If you’re ready to stop living in the story of your trauma, book your Breakthrough Session today or contact me to see if we’re a fit. Together, we’ll release the patterns and beliefs that are keeping you stuck.
References and Further Reading
When the body says no, the cost of hidden stress by Gabor Maté
Fuel by H.G. Tudor
Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find And Keep Love by Dr Amir Levine and Rachel Heller.
8 Simple Tools for Raising Great Kids by Dr. Todd Cartmell
Freeing Yourself from the Narcissist in Your Life: At Home. At Work. With Friends by Linda Martinez-Lewi
Difficult Mothers: Understanding and Overcoming Their Power by Terri Apter
Conquering Shame and Codependency: 8 Steps to Freeing the True You by Darlene Lancer
The Emotionally Absent Mother: How to Recognize and Heal the Invisible Effects of Childhood Emotional Neglect by Jasmin Lee Cor
Energy Vampires by Dr. C Northrup
