5 Specific Ways Narcissistic Parents Abuse Their Children

In this episode, learn about 5 specific forms of abuse caused by narcissistic parents and some of the mental health challenges adult children of narcissistic parents have to face as a result.

Narcissistic parents exploit the emotions, needs, emotions, and inner reality of their children through gaslighting, parentification, and invalidation, to name a few. In this intriguing and empowering episode, Lisa A. Romano explains five forms of emotional abuse narcissistic parents use against their children and as a result, cause mental health issues later on in adult life.

Transcript

Welcome to the Breakdown to Breakthrough Podcast.

My name is Lisa A.

Romano.

I am a life coach,

Best-selling author,

YouTube vlogger,

Meditation teacher,

And expert in the field of codependency and narcissistic abuse.

I am a believer in the power of an organized mind.

My aim is to help people learn what it means to live above the veil of consciousness rather than living a reactive life.

May your heart feel blessed,

Your mind feel expanded,

And your spirit find hope as you spend time with me here at the Breakdown to Breakthrough Podcast.

In today's session,

We're going to be talking about five forms of abuse narcissistic parents employ on their children and five specific outcomes in terms of our mental health that result because of this form of abuse.

A narcissistic parent is someone who lacks empathy for their children,

Who feels entitled to exploit their children.

These are people who have a pervasive pattern of having an inability to see their children as autonomous and individual beings.

If you were raised like I was,

You felt invisible.

You felt like your emotions were irrelevant.

You felt like you couldn't connect to your parents.

And maybe you felt like it was your responsibility to make sure that your parents were okay,

That they were emotionally stable.

You might have been raised to feel like it was your responsibility to keep your parents calm.

And if your parents were narcissistic,

They enforced this idea.

So they would gaslight you.

They would tell you that it was your fault.

If they were being abusive towards you,

They would deny that they were being abusive towards you.

They would mess with your perception of reality.

They would want you to be concerned about what they thought,

And they would challenge your version of a story,

Even though it was blatantly black and white.

So when we're talking about a narcissistic parent,

We're talking about someone who can be punishing,

Someone who's very unfair,

Somebody who is oppressive,

Someone who never says that they're sorry,

Even when it's obvious that they're wrong.

These are people who,

Even if they're hurting your feeling,

You come home from school one day and your mom is on the couch with your boyfriend making out with him,

Your narcissistic mom.

And she will turn it around on you.

She will tell you that you were seeing things or you're just jealous,

You're being silly,

Nothing happened,

It was just a peck on the cheek.

So this complete invalidation of what you have observed and this messing of your head,

That is very common when it comes to a narcissistic parent.

Narcissistic parents do not know how to emotionally regulate.

And so when they're looking outside of themselves,

Remember,

They're self-focused,

But this means that they're self-focused and it implies that whatever is happening inside of them is not because of them.

It's because of something that you've done or something that you haven't done.

When you grow up under the umbrella of a narcissistic parent,

You are growing up under the umbrella of someone who only cares about themself.

So if you have a narcissistic female mom,

She might be very,

Very concerned about how she looks.

She might be very sexual provocative.

She might be very interested in gaining the attention of all the men in the room and being very competitive with other females,

Or she could be completely emotionally dominant and play the victim card to the point where everybody is running around trying to keep her happy.

Everybody loses their own sense of individuality and autonomy taking care of this toxic narcissistic mother.

It's the same with narcissistic fathers.

What's important for us as adults is that we understand the consequences of being raised by someone who could not see us,

Who could not emotionally connect to us.

And why is this important?

Because it's important because lots of us who come from toxic homes,

We were conditioned to think that nothing was wrong,

That this was normal.

And therefore,

If we have this sort of illusionary idea of normal,

Or we have this illusionary idea that nothing bad happened,

Then we are more susceptible for experiencing these types of dynamics in future relationships.

That's exactly what happened to me,

And I know that that is what happens to all of you.

When we grow up and we're conditioned to think this is normal,

We are like the frog that's in the hot pot of water that the heat has been turned up over time.

We don't even know that we're boiling in it,

And we end up dying in that pot.

And what dies in relationships?

Our soul,

The light that's inside of us,

Our hope,

Our dreams.

We sort of like stop dreaming when we come from a dysfunctional home,

And we end up in dysfunctional marriages and relationships,

Dysfunctional career choices.

And we are these frogs in these pots of water,

And we don't know how we got there.

And what's really sad is that we don't even know that anything's wrong.

How many of you know people who are in a really toxic relationship,

And they've just acclimated?

They've stopped imagining,

They've stopped dreaming,

They're not using their imagination to their advantage anymore.

It's,

Oh,

This is just the way it is.

Oh,

I just have to know how not to upset him.

Oh,

I just have to not expect certain things from her.

Oh,

I just can't say this.

Oh,

I just can't say that.

It's like we just stop fighting for health.

We stop fighting for mental wellness.

We kind of acclimate.

And this is very common for adult children of alcoholics,

Adult children of narcissistic parents,

Because we were raised in an environment that was toxic,

That wasn't healthy,

But everything around us was telling us that we shouldn't trust that inner reality,

Including our parents.

I remember being seven years old,

And this tiny little girl,

And I had the courage to say to my dad one day,

I don't think mommy loves me.

And I remember like it was yesterday,

I was seven,

I'm now 59 years old.

And I remember sitting on his lap,

We were doodling.

And he had a white tank top on,

He had just gotten home from work.

And we were just sharing a pencil and just doodling,

It's something that I still do to today.

And I said,

Dad,

I don't think mommy loves me.

And he tapped me on my forearm,

And he said,

Lisa,

Never say that again.

And I never did.

And what I realized now was that he could not validate my inner experience.

And that really was the tone of my entire childhood.

And it became who I became,

It became the young mother I was,

I could not connect to my inner reality.

Now,

If you can't connect to your inner reality,

Because people have been invalidating their reality,

Or you have been conditioned to think that your inner reality is wrong,

Don't trust it,

Which is what gaslighting is all about.

This is what a narcissistic parent will do,

They will gaslight you so that you doubt that you have this perception.

And that really screws with your ability to connect with your true self,

To become autonomous,

To individuate from your family.

So what this ends up doing is we end up feeling like it's our job to take care of our parents,

Which is parentification.

It's our responsibility to make sure that they see us a certain way,

That they never question what we think about them.

There's family enmeshment,

I'm now responsible for my parents.

There is this inability to set boundaries with a parent.

There's gaslighting,

There's triangulation,

All of these forms of,

Well,

There's symptoms of this toxic narcissistic experience as being the adult child of a narcissistic parent,

But they have tremendous mental health consequences.

I as a child developed an eating disorder,

I had suicidal ideation,

I was suffering from extreme low self-worth,

Constant rumination,

I would memorize license plates as a way to distract myself.

So I would fantasize about being rescued,

Or I would fantasize about rescuing someone.

And so these were the ways that I escaped the pain of my childhood,

Because inside my mind,

Inside my being,

My inner landscape just frightened me so much that I had to run from it,

And it frightened me because I was invalidated from toxic parenting.

And even though my father didn't mean to do that,

His intention was to try to convince me my mother loved me by how hard she worked,

Even though he may not have intended to invalidate me,

And I don't think that he intended to do that,

There was an emotional consequence.

I was taught in that moment,

Do not speak your truth,

Don't cry,

Pretend that you're happy,

Dissociate or deny what you're feeling,

Like really abandon yourself,

And that becomes a theme for so many adult children of narcissistic parents,

Which is why I'm on a mission to really help people understand the consequences of growing up in that home.

The goal is self-understanding.

The goal is to be able to emotionally regulate eventually,

Despite these triggers that have been created due to childhood trauma.

The goal is to be able to develop what I call a stainless steel spine,

Where I'm no longer in doubt of how I feel,

And I have the life skills that I need to be able to connect to how I feel,

Even though in my acknowledgement of my truth,

It's going to tick you off,

And you might never talk to me again.

What is emotional resilience?

The emotional resilience is,

Well,

To be emotionally resilient,

Which I do consider myself today,

But I wasn't then because I didn't know this information.

I was not yet healed.

I hadn't learned how to process my emotions.

I had done no inner child recovery work.

I had not committed myself long enough to apply tools over a long period of time to actually see the results.

I was trying to gather information,

But it wasn't until I really sat down and said,

Okay,

I'm going to apply these rules and see what happens.

That's when my life started to change,

And that's the truth for anything.

You can have a pile of bricks and know that you need these types of bricks and this mortar and this tool to build a wall,

But until you commit the time to taking that brick and building that wall,

The wall doesn't get done,

And it's the same thing with recovery,

But I didn't know that.

I had no one to point me in that direction.

My life changed when I began to do that.

Those of us who are adult children of alcoholics,

Those of us who have toxic parents,

We really want to take the time to be able to identify what type of family system we came from.

We do this with the intention of complete self-understanding,

Personal growth,

Spiritual growth,

The ability to break the cycles in our own childhood that were created in childhood within our own family system.

Our intention is to end generational trauma,

End generational karma.

It isn't to embarrass our parents and to justify not speaking to them.

That's not the goal,

Although you might have to do that.

I had to go no contact with my family for about a year,

And during that time,

I heard all the stories.

She's crazy.

She has an emotional problem.

She has a thyroid problem,

Which I did,

But my mother spun it and said that,

Oh,

She has a hormonal problem,

And that's why she's acting this way.

That is a common response to somebody who is very immature,

Highly narcissistic.

They create this smear campaign about you to be able to just diminish the valid reasons that you have for going no contact in the first place.

When you go no contact with a narcissistic parent,

The first thing that they want to do is create a story to justify and rationalize and invalidate your reason for going no contact.

A healthier parent wants to explore why it is that you feel that you don't need to talk to me anymore.

What is it that I have done,

And how have I hurt you?

Even if you were an immature or highly narcissistic,

Self-absorbed parent raising your children,

Hopefully on your life's path as a parent,

If this does happen in your life,

You understand that your child is entitled to their experience of you,

Even if you meant to do well.

I know I hurt my children,

And it wasn't intentional.

I was below the veil of consciousness.

I was acting out patterns.

These aren't excuses.

It's an explanation.

However,

When it became perfectly obvious that my parenting hurt my children,

I absolutely sat them all down,

And I still have those conversations.

Like,

I am so sorry I hurt you,

And I don't offer an explanation.

I'm just so sorry that I hurt you.

I could not see you as much as I wanted to see you.

I was absorbed in my own pain.

I thought I was doing the right thing.

I wasn't,

And I hurt you,

And I'm really sorry.

So the more narcissistic a parent,

The less able they're going to be to have that conversation.

Remember that a narcissist wants to run from any accountability,

And the way that their mind is created is that sort of like there's this steel wall,

And this steel wall is very sensitive to criticism,

To suggestion that they're not perfect,

To even if it's constructive criticism,

They don't want to hear it.

Like anything that suggests that they were not the best,

Then it's almost like this steel wall has these tentacles in it,

Or receptors,

And they can sense that,

Uh-oh,

Here it comes.

You're going to say something negative,

And so I have to push it back.

My dad did this all the time.

The minute that I said anything about his parenting,

I was met with,

Oh,

You don't know what you're talking about,

Or I didn't have a psychology book.

Oh,

You turned out all right.

So even though my life was hell,

And at any point in time,

I could have really imploded due to the stress and not having a release valve,

And even though at any point in time,

My life could have taken off in any direction,

The fact that I ended up on my feet through all of the recovery work that I did,

All the commitment that I put into this,

The inner child recovery work,

The codependent recovery work,

And really committing my life to putting my tools to the test,

Like really over time,

He took credit for that.

Well,

You turned out all right.

So that makes it okay.

It doesn't make it okay.

So there were these constant micro-invalidations of what I grew up with as a little girl,

And it was until the day my father died,

He was completely in denial and didn't want to hear that he had done anything wrong.

I remember visiting my mom.

She had had two strokes and was suffering from dementia.

And I'm there to visit my mom,

And my dad actually says,

I don't know why your brother is the way he is.

I was an excellent father.

And I couldn't believe that those words came out of his mouth.

Like,

I was there.

I saw the way you treated him.

I heard the words you used.

I saw how you gaslit him.

I saw how you criticized him,

How you put him down and devalued him.

I saw it every day.

And I saw that mom did nothing.

I saw that mom didn't buffer it.

I saw that mom turned red because she was afraid of you.

So this idea that my dad could completely live in this false reality that he was a wonderful parent,

This makes someone impenetrable.

Will you put these tools to the test?

And so my dad didn't have that because of,

In my opinion,

His high level of narcissism,

His inability to acknowledge that he wasn't the perfect parent.

And so this has tremendous mental health issues or consequences to one of his children.

To be his child,

You can end up feeling having codependency.

You can end up having anxious attachment style.

And when you have an anxious attachment style and you're dealing in an adult relationship with someone who's highly narcissistic,

Then that narcissistic abuse is completely off the charts.

It is like blown out of the water,

Meaning that I,

As someone who is a codependent,

Recovering codependent,

Who has a baseline of anxious attachment style,

You ignore me.

You trigger every bell and whistle in my brain.

I'm in a trauma response.

I'm feeling like it's impending doom.

I can't catch my breath.

I can't think about anything but saving this relationship.

You are oxygen to me.

And so that's really important.

If you've been raised by a narcissistic parent and as a result,

You have anxious attachment style,

You have to know if you know these things,

If you educate yourself about these things,

Then you're not in denial.

Then you become coachable.

You become learnable.

You can learn.

You can apply tools and your life can change.

You need to know that if you were raised by a narcissistic parent,

You have an anxious attachment style,

That you have a propensity to fawn and to people please,

To lack the ability to set boundaries.

You do not feel good enough.

Your psychic wound is I am not enough.

Love is conditional.

I have to prove myself worthy.

Now,

When you hook up with someone who is highly narcissistic,

That person's narcissistic abuse,

The triangulation,

The stonewalling,

The silent treatment,

The gaslighting,

It's going to enhance the trauma bond in which you feel like you can't escape.

Now,

Why am I telling you this?

It's because I want you to see the connection between being raised in this type of an environment and how it follows you through your adult life and how it makes you more susceptible to tolerating a narcissistic relationship.

And in the narcissistic relationship with your anxious attachment style,

You are going to be more and more triggered by someone who is highly narcissistic because your wounds play to how this person plays in the realm of relationships,

Which is to dominate and to control.

You need to know that.

Now,

If you know that from a higher state of consciousness,

You can make adjustments.

You can learn how to heal from codependency.

You can learn how to pay more attention to your inner child.

You can learn about toxic family dynamics.

And in the gaining of awareness,

This is how you can break the cycles.

I'm not saying it's going to be easy,

Right?

It takes effort.

It takes time to put tools into place.

It takes time to think about this.

It takes time to self-care and make self-care a priority.

It takes time to find a therapist or a life coach or support group.

It takes time to meditate.

It takes time to pull back and extract your mind from this relationship.

It takes time to heal.

However,

The benefits far outweigh the effort that you have to put in to heal your life because if you don't,

Then you stay on this wheel.

If you don't,

Then you might be somebody who continues to tell yourself things aren't as bad as they really are.

And so coming up and out of denial about a toxic family system is super helpful.

Recognizing the tools by which narcissistic parents manipulate their children is just one way that you can empower yourself to heal.

So let's talk about five ways in which a narcissistic parent will use forms of emotional,

Psychological manipulation to create this dependency upon the children,

Which in turn develops and turns into mental health issues later on in a child's life.

Parentification.

This happens when a child is forced to take on adult responsibilities and to care for the parent instead of the other way around.

For example,

A child has to comfort and reassure their parent when they're upset or they're angry,

And this will lead to feelings of guilt and inadequacy within the child.

Gaslighting.

A narcissistic parent may manipulate their child into doubting their own perception of reality.

This causes the developing psyche of the child to live in a state of confusion,

Self-doubt,

A distorted sense of reality,

And they do this by refusing to acknowledge that their children's feelings are hurt,

And they challenge the child's memory and recollection of the facts.

Emotional neglect.

Narcissistic parents will prioritize their own needs,

Their own emotions,

Their own feelings and desires over the child's emotional wellbeing.

This can lead in a child to feelings of emptiness,

Low self-worth,

And a lack of emotional regulation in a child.

This also diminishes their ability to develop self-worth.

Enmeshment.

In enmeshed relationships with narcissistic parents,

The boundaries between a parent and a child are blurred,

And this leads to a lack of independence and autonomy and identity formation in the child.

For example,

A parent who expects their child to fulfill their emotional needs.

This is somebody who will be a smothering parent and feel entitled to be up in every area of the child's life,

And so the child won't be allowed to have their own personal life.

Mom,

Your daddy have to be absolutely involved.

And this is to soothe the parent's emotional dysregulation.

The parent will justify it and say that,

Oh,

We have a close relationship,

But in fact,

It'll be enmeshed.

The adult child will feel absolutely responsible for the nature of the parent's life,

Their emotions,

Their financial situation,

Their social gatherings or responsibility.

The adult child will take that all on.

Invalidation.

Narcissistic parents dismiss and belittle their children's feelings and experience,

And what this does is it leads to a sense of invalidation and emotional neglect within the child.

So what happens then is that you as an adult,

And even as a child,

You have a difficult time expressing your emotions,

And it's difficult for you to trust other people.

It's difficult for you to believe that you have the self-worth that other people are going to love you and never leave you.

Now,

I want to offer you some research-backed suggestions to help you overcome the childhood emotional trauma from being raised by a toxic or narcissistic parent.

Number one,

Seeking therapy or coaching.

When you seek therapy or coaching with a qualified professional,

This can help you process these childhood experiences and develop coping strategies and allow you to develop goals that you can set each day to help you work towards healing this trauma so this is how you get unstuck.

Number two,

Self-care practices.

When you make self-care a priority,

Such as mindfulness,

Meditation,

Exercise,

And hobbies,

This can help you manage stress,

Regulate your emotions,

And build self-esteem while building autonomy and developing healthy boundaries between you and your parents.

Number three is actually setting boundaries.

Learning to set and enforce healthy boundaries with toxic family members can help you protect your emotional well-being,

And it also helps you to establish a new sense of autonomy.

Here I am,

There you are,

And I have a right to be me,

And you have a right to be you.

Number four,

Building a support network.

Connecting with supportive friends,

Family members,

Or support groups can provide the validation,

The understanding,

And the encouragement for individuals like you healing from childhood emotional trauma.

This is also a great resource to learn from others.

What did you do?

What skills did you employ?

What did you do every day?

What meditations did you listen to?

What in a child program did you take part in?

There is tremendous healing that occurs when someone who has grown up in this environment and they've been forced to stuff their emotions is suddenly around a validating community.

Last but not least is educating yourself like you're doing now.

Learning about narcissism,

Learning about emotional abuse,

And learning about childhood trauma can help you gain insight into the experiences that you experience.

It's going to help you develop awareness and empower yourself to break free of these negative patterns.

It's important that as adults we take the time to understand that whatever's going on in our adult life is absolutely tied to what happened in childhood,

Even if we can't see that link yet.

It's proven.

In psychology,

It's called repetition compulsion.

Biblically,

We hear scripture say,

The sins of the father and the mother fall on the children.

We're not going to escape this pattern-like nature until we identify the problem.

The really wonderful thing is that we can teach ourselves to get out of this loop of thinking.

We can heal ourselves.

I think we need a good set of rules.

I think we need a clear goal.

We have to know what our goal is.

I think without a goal,

We're sort of like fish out of water.

In other words,

Once I know that I've been traumatized,

Okay,

I'm not healed.

I'm just not below the water anymore.

Now I'm a fish on the beach and I'm flapping from side to side.

I'm looking for this information,

That information,

But I'm not healed.

Remember that information is important.

Knowledge is important.

Putting to the test,

Applying this knowledge is what's going to make the most change in your life.

It's like anything else.

It's like business.

It's like your health.

It's like anything else.

That's really important.

If you're here,

I hope that this information has helped you gain a little bit more insight into how certain particular ways in which toxic families treat you really do unfold into mental health issues that we have the potential to overcome once we identify our roots,

Once we identify the family of origin,

Once we identify the dynamics,

Once we identify how those dynamics impacted us,

What are the consequences,

And then we get our mind straight and then our goal is not to hurt our parents or punish our parents.

Our goal is set on the future.

How do I overcome this?

How do I transform this?

How do I create a transformation in my life despite this early childhood trauma?

And the good news is,

Dear one,

That is entirely possible.

And it is an absolute honor to bring you this information.

As a healing adult child myself,

As someone who grew up with childhood trauma,

Who was conditioned to think that nothing was wrong,

And who grew up feeling like I was the problem and felt so out of source,

Felt so unworthy,

And that feeling of unworthiness,

That feeling of not being good enough plagued me my entire life.

In fact,

It nearly took my life.

And today,

I'm a living,

Breathing example that recovery is possible.

So please,

Dear one,

Never give up.

Keep your eye on the goal.

Keep your heart in alignment with love and expansion,

And you shall get to the other side.

Reviews

🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟Whenever I feel myself slipping back into old, outdated thought patterns, like feeling unworthy, disconnected from Source, gaslighting myself into thinking I’m bad like my narcissistic grandparents did to me on the daily, Lisa Romano’s talks and meditations always help me reorient to understanding not only how wrong they were, but that I have a right to reject their treatment & give myself something better. Thank you Lisa 🙏🫂✨May we all heal from narcissistic abuse ❤️And So It Is ❤️🕊️🌍🌏🌎🕊️❤️

Thank you for explaining why it’s so hard to leave, for moving beyond blame and vilifying people in our lives. To keep the focus on ourselves and becoming a whole and healthy person while continuing to deal with unhealthy family members with compassion.

Lisa, thank you for bringing light to a dark experience. You are helping to heal this world! 🙏🏼🌍