Unmasking Parental Narcissism: Codependent Anger's Root

In this powerful episode, Lisa A. Romano, trauma-informed life coach and codependency recovery expert, dives deep into the often-overlooked role that anger plays in the healing journey from parental narcissism and complex trauma. Growing up in a dysfunctional family can leave emotional scars that are not easily seen, but they shape how we experience relationships and view ourselves as adults.

Transcript

Welcome to Breakdown to Breakthrough,

The podcast that empowers you to transform your life by awakening to your true,

Authentic self.

I'm Lisa A.

Romano,

Your host.

As an award-winning author and certified life coach,

I've dedicated my life to helping others understand the incredible power of an organized mind.

I believe that true empowerment begins with awakening to our false self.

My mission is to support you on your journey toward mental and emotional regeneration through conscious and deliberate awakening.

In this podcast,

I'll share insights,

Tools,

And transformative stories that illuminate the path to healing and self-discovery.

If you stay on the path long enough,

You may have idealized one parent as a form of safety because it's too difficult for a child to imagine both parents are abusive.

I'm focusing on the adult child.

I'm focusing on the you that is searching the internet,

Trying to figure out what the heck is wrong with me.

What's up with my family?

Why am I this way?

Why am I codependent?

Why am I such a people pleaser?

Why am I so agreeable?

I didn't even want to say yes.

Why do I ruminate about my partners?

Why do I worry about what people think about me?

Why do I struggle with abandonment fears?

First of all,

Congratulations if you are that person because there are a whole lot of people out there in the world that aren't even questioning that,

Where they are just constantly reacting.

Amy the amygdala and Harry the hippocampus are in complete control.

When you have a codependent mom and you have a narcissistic dad,

Depending how addicted your mother is to your father's approval,

Depending how addicted she is to his feelings,

Depending on how addicted she is to being seen by him,

Depending on how addicted she is to that abuse cycle where she is trying to please him,

She's trying to gain his validation,

He doesn't give it,

He pulls it away.

There's persecution that makes her want his validation more,

And now he disappears,

He has an affair,

Or he just stonewalls her,

Gaslights her,

Stops talking to her,

Stops fooling around with her,

Whatever,

And now all of a sudden mom is really completely overwhelmed with the fear of,

What did I do?

The reason I want to bring this to light with the codependent mom and the narcissistic dad is because on the healing journey,

You might be blindsided after you do enough emotional recovery work and you have been studying dad,

Let's say in this situation,

As the overt narcissist,

The person who is overtly abusive,

The person who is overtly gaslighting you,

The person who has overtly abandoned the family,

The person who has overtly damaged the kids in the home,

That it's just so obvious this person is overtly narcissistic,

Never takes full accountability,

And if he does take accountability,

It's short-lived,

And the minute you actually try to hold this person accountable and they feel like you're trying to guilt them,

They're going to lash out at you.

We go into emotional recovery,

We go into personal development,

We go into therapy,

We're trying to figure our stuff out.

Hopefully you have a therapist who understands this stuff because this is very,

Very deep.

This is in the fabric and the fiber of your psyche,

Of everything that you think about the world.

This is where it is,

How you were raised,

How the people who raised you taught you to believe and think and feel and perceive.

So when you are the codependent mom,

You don't always realize on the journey that you might get to a place where you start to be angry at her.

If you have a parent who was not as overt,

Then you may have a sweet spot for the parent who wasn't as overt.

Now,

Some codependent moms and some codependent dads are not going to be happy with me right now,

But unless we get to the truth,

Then you can't be set free of denial and without accountability and humility,

You're never going to heal,

You're going to stay stuck,

And I want you to have the good stuff in life.

I want you to be able to say,

Yeah,

I did that and that was wrong.

I didn't know any better and I'll never do it again.

The enemy doesn't want you to tell the truth because once you tell the truth,

You're not controlled by shame anymore.

You're not controlled by dark anymore.

You are living in the light.

I've apologized ahead of time to any codependent moms and dads out there who might be like,

I don't like where Lisa's going with this,

But I have to because it's real and it's not going to help you as the codependent passive mom that ignores your children and you were absorbed in your own pain,

Rightfully so,

I get it,

It's not your fault,

It could be no other way,

And you were addicted to your husband or your boyfriends or vice versa,

Male,

Female,

Whatever.

It's not your children's fault that they grew up feeling invisible.

What'll happen is if you stay on the path long enough,

You may have idealized one parent as a form of safety because it's too difficult for a child to imagine both parents are abusive or both parents are so toxic or both parents hate them or both parents are mean to them.

So we tend to idealize the parent that is less abrasive,

Less aggressive.

The problem is we never felt safe and that poses a tremendous amount of problems for us.

Oftentimes we feel parentified.

So if we had a highly narcissistic father,

We could be parentified.

In other words,

We can start taking on our mother's pain and want to take care of her.

That becomes our burden.

And we don't recognize that taking on her pain,

We've been parentified,

There's been role reversal,

Who's taking care of me?

Who's taking care of me?

Who's teaching me how to emotionally regulate?

Who's teaching me to have a sense of self?

Who's teaching me that I'm worthy?

Nobody.

My sense of worth,

My sense of safety is tied to taking care of mom.

And that is a burden no child should have to carry because children can't fix their mothers.

They can't fix their fathers,

But damn,

Do they try.

And so you end up living your life as the daughter or the son of a codependent mother,

Narcissistic father,

And you start taking on the codependent pain.

You start taking care of the more codependent parent.

What I want to prepare you for is that on the healing journey,

If you keep going,

Lots of people don't go as far as they should and they give up because it gets hard.

It does get hard,

But that's where the good stuff is.

All your pain is going to be turned into purpose and your message is in the mess.

That's where my message is.

My message is in the mess.

I absolutely love that quote.

Rather than run and give up,

When it gets tough is when we have to stick through because the breakthrough is right there.

You might struggle with suddenly feeling angry towards the more passive parent because what you're going to realize eventually is you never felt safe.

You were not protected by the parent who was more overtly aggressive.

That hit me like a sledgehammer between the eyes.

When I realized,

Wow,

Yes,

My mother was overt,

But my father let it happen.

My father knew this was happening and he did not protect me from this other big person.

I was a tiny little dear one and no one protected me.

It wasn't like he didn't know.

He knew and he let it happen.

He ignored it.

He denied it.

He pacified my mother and he expected me to just suck it up,

To act like this wasn't happening.

That is so horrible to do to a little child,

To say,

I can't deal with this,

So you should.

I don't know how to take care of you,

So I'm just not going to.

I have no idea what to do in this situation,

But you know what?

You're not giving her a hard time.

You're stuffing your emotions.

I'd rather see you stuff your emotions and develop an eating disorder,

Which is what happened.

I would rather you bite your fingernails to the bone,

Which is what happened.

I would rather you develop some obsessive compulsive disorder as a way to cope with this tremendous anxiety.

I'd rather you be addicted to boys.

I'd rather you have all these issues than me actually step in and take care of this for you.

It was a really interesting dynamic,

But I know that I'm not alone.

I hear this story played out over and over and over,

Where they knew that one parent was overt and on the healing journey,

When they start to realize,

But where was my mother?

Where was my mother?

My mother knew how I felt about my father,

And she didn't protect me.

My mother knew how I felt about that boyfriend,

But she married him anyway.

My mother knew that I didn't like this person,

And he was abusive,

And she didn't protect me.

She didn't protect any of us from that.

You need to know,

As the adult child will deal with that first,

That you're going to have to move into a state of allowing and not resisting your perception of mom to change,

Because we don't want you to be a caretaker for mom forever.

That doesn't mean you don't care.

It means that you release the role of caretaking,

Because the caretaking is going to foster a sense of self-abandonment.

It's going to get really,

Really complicated.

Mom's going to lean on you in unhealthy ways.

You're going to become basically like her mentor,

Her coach,

Her therapist,

Her doctor,

Her everything,

And you're not going to feel seen in the relationship.

As you age,

It's going to make you angrier,

And angrier,

And angrier,

And we don't want you to get stuck there.

Getting angry is fine,

As long as you know,

I need boundaries,

And it's okay that I see this clearly now.

It's okay that I acknowledge my mom as a codependent and having her own issues,

And I don't fault her,

But that doesn't mean I'm not going to pin the tail on the donkey and set boundaries.

That doesn't mean I'm not going to step back and let her handle her own stuff.

It means that I'm not getting pulled into her drama.

I'm not getting pulled into her choices and or her consequences.

It could be hard,

Because this isn't a blanket statement.

This isn't a black and white issue.

Some of our parents are married to really,

Really horrible people,

And there's financial abuse,

And they can't get out,

And that's fine.

You could get to a point where you're a little bit more objective about everything and still be able to put things in their place,

Because what mom needs is outside support.

Mom should not be leaning on her children.

That flips the switch.

I always use with my private clients,

I always talk about the totem pole,

Where mom is supposed to be at the top,

Children are underneath mom.

Mom has to find the support.

Mom has to go to CODA.

Mom has to read.

Mom has to put what she reads into action.

Mom has to take the coaching program.

Mom has to find a mentor.

Mom's got to do it.

For adult daughters that are seeing this,

It can be really hard.

In adult sons,

It could be really hard to start pulling yourself away and say,

I can't do this anymore.

But it's really important that you start to take a step back so that you can emotionally detach and you don't stay enmeshed in this codependent relationship with your mom or the more passive parent.

Now,

As a codependent mother myself,

I know how painful it is to hear that.

When I realized I was hurting my children,

That I was so wrapped up in the addiction cycle between me and my ex,

Me fearing abandonment,

Me fearing his persecution,

Me taking care of him and then being angry at him when he didn't respond to me the way I had the little girl inside of me wanted him to.

It was crazy.

It was a crazy house.

And my kids watched that.

When I realized that,

The shame that came over me was so beneficial because it rocked me to my core because I loved them so much and I thought,

That's never going to happen again.

I'm never,

Now that I see it,

Can't fix a hole in the wall you don't see.

But once you see it,

It's like toothpaste out of the tube.

You can't get it back in again.

That self-awareness worked that way for me.

And I thought I wasted all of my,

Almost all of my thirties,

Mid thirties,

Right?

So three decades,

Over three decades,

Worrying about what people think about me,

Worrying about how they feel,

Worrying.

And meanwhile,

These people didn't care about how I felt about them.

Oh my God,

That is like insane to me now that I realize it like,

Wow.

And when I made that connection as a codependent mother,

It was then that I said,

This will never happen again.

But I can tell you,

It took some time for me to really hold myself to the fire because even after the divorce,

I went,

I downward spiraled into severe withdrawal and abandonment and it was not pretty.

And it took me a few years to like,

Know that that's what I wanted and just like really move the needle,

Really move the needle to the point where it's like,

I can put my kids first before any man,

Before anyone.

I can do that.

And that has really changed my life.

And now they're all adults.

Now our relationships are so much more balanced and I still have to work on not losing myself to them,

Not losing myself to what's going on in their life.

And also minding my own damn business and shutty shutty,

Because you know,

We codependents,

We like to tell people what to do.

We like to tell them what to think.

We like to tell them how they feel.

We have this obsession with being needed and this obsession with helping,

Helping,

Helping.

And I have learned that the less we help,

The better they are.

The more that we just support,

The more that we just listen.

We're not supposed to be telling our kids,

Especially our adult kids,

What to do all the time.

If they ask us,

That's fine,

But we need boundaries.

If we want to have these amazing relationships with our children,

We have to come correct with ourselves.

We cannot lie to ourselves.

We can't continue to say,

This is why I am this way and it's not my fault.

You're right,

It's not your fault,

But what are you going to do about it?

What are you going to do about it?

We can't be the people that cry wolves and expect our lives to change.

That's not how I changed my life.

I changed my life by holding myself accountable every single day to the best of my ability.

And it got better as I went along,

But it did not happen overnight.

Don't be surprised if on your emotional recovery journey,

You start to swing from seeing the overt parent,

And you start to swing and see issues with not being protected by the more passive,

By the more codependent parent.

And that's when it's time to accept how you feel,

Set up boundaries,

Always set up boundaries with love,

Unless you really need to set a hard boundary,

Because sometimes that happens.

And recognize that lots of times if you have a codependent mom,

She doesn't see it.

And all she sees is that she's been taking care of this pain in the neck person.

And why don't you understand how hard her life is,

Which represents the self-absorption and her inability to see outside the relationship and take a healthy inventory of how her obsession or her addiction or her codependency with her spouse has really caused her children to feel invisible.

And what are those consequences?

If you have a mom that recognizes that,

That's amazing.

It goes for dads too.

That's someone that needs to be celebrated.

And for the moms that are way below the veil and just so far below the veil and so inundated with these layers of this narcissistic relationship,

There's a chance you may never get out.

So somehow you have to be able to accept what you can't control and allow these people to live out the karma that they're creating for themselves.

Because let's face it,

We all reap what we sow.

And being ignorant of this karmic law is not going to save you and it's not going to save them.

But the more you know,

The more rational you get,

The more objective you get,

The easier your relationships become and it will be easier for you to let go and set boundaries with love.

We're all doing our best based on our level of self-awareness.

And that's a hard pill to swallow,

But it does make healing and recovery a little bit easier.

So thank you so much for being here.

Bye for now.

Reviews

So needed. I’ll be returning to this one!