How do you know if you grew up with toxic family and or/parents? What are the symptoms of narcissistic parents?
You may have known that something was “not right” in your childhood but were not able to put a definition or a name to what happened. All you knew is that you felt like you “walked on eggshells” growing up and there was chaos and perhaps emotional outbursts at home. Today, you may suffer from low self-esteem, not feeling “good enough”, or wanting to people please. You may have a tendency to doubt your decisions, feelings, or intuition or feel anxious or depressed in your adult life. You may have numbed your own pain with alcohol/drugs, gambling, food, or other addictive behaviors. Although children of alcoholics have similar childhoods, your parents may not have used drugs or alcohol at all but had another unrecognized problem.
The root of high-conflict personalities is often undiagnosed personality disorders. Our society tends to use the word “narcissist” as a catch-all phrase to describe several types personality disorders (also known as emotionally immature or high-conflict). However, any person with a personality disorder on the spectrum such as borderline, schizoid, obsessive- compulsive, and antisocial, can cause both childhood and adult wounds. This is because your parent had deficits in personality. These “neurological disabilities” (Lester & Godwin, 2021) cause relational harm. Although usually it is not done on purpose, it still causes relational trauma and psychological and physical effects well into adulthood.
Since your parents probably did not validate your emotions or attend to your emotional needs it may affect your life today. Parents or caregivers may have appeared to care more about their own feelings and needs than your own so it may also affect the choices of your friends and relationship partners. For example, as a result of an emotionally neglectful or abusive childhood, the partners or friends that you choose may “take” more than they “give” and not treat you the way you would like to be treated. For example, it is common to minimize or make excuses for their belittling and highly critical behavior towards you.
Although this list is not conclusive, here are some signs that your parent(s) may have had traits of narcissistic behavior and emotional immaturity. These behaviors likely have affected you as an adult:
- Their feelings came first. They ignored your feelings and usually focused on themselves and their emotional needs versus your own. For example, “It was always about my mother or about them”.
- You felt scared often as a child: Fighting, yelling, or stone cold silence made you feel emotionally unsafe as a child. Life at home was predictably unpredictable: violent outbursts, yelling, screaming, or being in a good mood were all unpredictable, but predictable enough for you to “walk on eggshells”.
- They were overly critical: Nothing was ever enough. You may feel today “I am not good enough”.
- You feel both guilt and shame: Guilt trips may include passive-aggressive behavior such as “it must be nice you don’t have my problems and you can go away on vacation”, etc. You may vacillate between feelings of not wanting to not have a relationship with your parent, then guilt for not being more involved. These are very common questions and therapy can help process these emotions.
- Undermining: They undermine you to other family members or people through lies, rumors, or accusations. They may talk badly about you to everyone that will listen and convince others not to like you. They create stories to wedge problems between you and other family members or people.
- They did not allow you to express strong emotions, particularly negative ones: Your feelings were invalidated, dismissed, and even ridiculed.
- Boundaries: They did not recognize your boundaries or there were very few. They may think they can share your personal and private business with other people, without your permission. They may demand to talk about things that are off-limits or offensive to you. Other examples of violations include ongoing meddling or expectations to call or visit daily or more than you can provide.
- Gaslighting: You remember conversations and things that happened much differently than your parent or caretaker. You are sure these events occurred but your parent pretended they did not happen or had they re-wrote reality.
- You question your own intuition and memory, thinking you must have misinterpreted something or missed something?
- You have strong emotional and physical reactions in the presence of your parents.
- Complete avoidance of relationship repair. Bad things happened and they were “swept under the rug” and the family moved on like nothing happened.
- As an adult, you are emotionally drained when you are around them. You may feel exhausted, drained, and emotionally affected by being around them.
If any of these are true for you, you may have developed some developmental trauma by growing up in a chaotic home. My Psychology Today article “Why Your Childhood Really Matters” may be helpful. Van Der Kolk (2014) calls developmental trauma and stressful childhoods a hidden epidemic because researchers are finding this is much more common. The wounds are invisible because they aren’t readily seen, but can manifest in other ways like complex trauma. These include psychological effects such as feeling worthless, depressed, or anxious. Other behavioral symptoms may include not being able to trust others, a pattern of abusive or unhealthy relationships, or feeling responsible for other’s feelings and moods.
Like most things in life, there are also positive things that have come from the experience that has shaped who you are today. For instance, you may be able to read people or situations quickly, respond well in crisis situations, or have heightened sensitivity. You may be a better parent to your own children because of what you have been through. However, it is challenging to see the positives if your experiences are still “stuck” or unprocessed.
Help is Available
It is important to connect with a counselor who is trained in trauma, EMDR, and DBT to help you move through the traumatic events. They include grieving your lost childhood and helping you process the unhealed wounds and understand how it affects you today. Once these are identified you can start to improve your mood and self-worth. Also, you can learn coping skills to handle family members that you need to interact with and learn better patterns of relating to others.
Sources: Surviving a borderline parent (2003) by K. Roth & F. Friedman, The body keeps score (2014) by B. Van Der Kolk.
Copyright 2017: Tracy Hutchinson, Ph.D
