Anyone out there dealing with a narcissist parent?

[t666666]

Having a very hard time dealing with an interim sole custody filing.  I feel very empathetic for my son if this means he won't have his Dad around.  His Dad is a textbook narcissist and I would be really interested in hearing from children who have gone through growing up with a narcissist parent.  Do you feel that you would have been happier without that in your life?  Thank you.

[moglow]

Hello and welcome to Out of the FOG! I understand your dilemma, but I can't in good conscience encourage what you're suggesting, not without more background. Depending on where you live, family courts may also take a very dim view of removing a child from a parent. Parental alienation is the term that comes to mind, and it's a real problem.

Admitted bias here - In my case, my mother (the custodial parent) was/is the personality disordered, and she abused that position in every possible way. She was so angry with Daddy that she did everything she could to destroy our relationship with him. Unfortunately, with us living in her home, it worked for far too long. We believed her lies and that carried over into our adult lives. We simply didn't know any different and our brief visits with him didn't lend opportunity to see him who he truly was rather than the ogre she'd painted him to be.

Would I have been better off not being exposed to her abuse and volatility? Absolutely! BUT I also know what her insistence that we have no relationship with Daddy did to me/us, what her off-repeated insults and divide/conquer attitude left me with. She was completely unable to separate their marriage from our relationship with him, and she drove her bitterness home to us every chance she got. There were no depths to which she wouldn't sink, including telling us that he never wanted us and didn't believe we were his.

Short of abuse and neglect, I honestly believe children have a right and a need to spend time with each of their parents, however disordered that parent may be. They have a separate relationship with each parent and may deeply resent being removed from the other, with (to them) no reason.

Perhaps start out with you as primary custodian, with the father having visitation and see how things go? Should that not go well, is supervised visitation a possibility, where an unbiased third party can observe? Without definitive proof of (mis)behavior, I'm just not sure courts would or should cut either parent out.

[RavenLady]

My uNPDf definitely damaged me, as did my uBPDm. However, I think what would have been helpful was for somebody to SEE and ACKNOWLEDGE what he was doing and coach me in how to interpret it = his stuff, not my stuff. And then to provide other stable, healing sources for the love and validation I simply could not get from him. I would have been devastated to have been cut off from him and I don't think it would have been a good thing in my life. And like moglow said, I think it would have created resentment toward my mother.

Others will have different experiences. Narcissistic abuse can be very extreme and even life-threatening, and there are definitely cases where a child should be completely removed from all contact with a NPD, no looking back. But these cases are relatively rare and should probably involve Child Protective Services or whatever the equivalent is where you are. It depends on the individual, the family, and the circumstances and what supports are available for the child. It's a cost/benefit thing for the kid: the damage of losing a parent v. the damage of the abuse. Not a great choice for any kid, to be sure. 

I do think the most important question in all of these matters is: What's in the best interest of the child? And this can be very difficult to suss out alone when you are in the middle of a dispute with a narcissist, because they like to play with our heads.

[HeadAboveWater]

My parents had joint custody, but I spent 80 percent of the time with my PD (likely N) mother. In the past year, and in particular over the past month, I've been reflecting about what that meant to me while growing up.

I was six years-old when my parents separated. I had no conflicts with either of them at the time. If I had been suddenly unable to see one of them, it would have been traumatic, and I probably would not have forgiven the custodial parent for that choice.

Everyone's story is different, so please understand that my story is just one person's journey and not indicative of what could happen for your family. I found that I started having conflicts with friends around age 10. By 12 I was depressed, and by 15 I was severely depressed. At 18 my depression interfered with my health and with my ability to carry on with my life routines so much that I suspended my post-secondary schooling for a year. At the time, I believed in the prevailing mental health philosophy of that moment that depression runs in families and is due to a chemical imbalance in the brain. Looking back, I think a lot of what I experienced had more to do with emotional abuse, codependency, and a poor sense of boundaries. My non-PD father was empathetic and trying to help, but had his own limitations. To this day he does not fully understand personality disorders, nor is he entirely emotionally healthy, so he had a lot of shortcomings in his ability to sense from where my problems were coming and help me find a way out of them. (If you're here on this forum, you are already way ahead of where my father was. Kudos to you for working on yourself and for trying to do what's best for your child.)

For me, the problems started with non-criminal neglect. I was a mature child, so it would have been hard for anyone to see the neglect. Other than making and cleaning up after dinner, I did all of the house chores for myself from a very young age. For reasons I still don't understand, my mother did not facilitate my social interactions with others once I was older than 12. She never communicated with other parents or offered to drive me places. (In fact, she complained when I asked for rides.) So I became really socially isolated. She didn't talk to me about hygiene or have routines for me to follow, so I was a bit awkwardly unclean and ungroomed relative to my peers of the same age, but you might not have seen the dirt under my nails or have noticed that my hair needed a wash. I learned quickly that she was more inclined to assume the worst and criticize me, so I did not ask her questions about anything social-emotional and tried to forge my own way.

In some cases my N mother put us in situations that could have been dangerous. She had to travel on business and, owing to her dysfunctional relationships with other adults, she chose a really controlling acquaintance whom we'd never met to care for me and my sibling. This carer spent our food and entertainment petty cash for the week on eradicating pantry moths and purchasing organizational supplies for the house (it was quite disorganized). We children were forced to spend our free time at the kitchen table learning Catholic prayer. My mother also dated several people who were not really appropriate to have in the house around children. One of them turned out to be a drug addict who was routinely bringing his firearm and drugs into the house in his hip bag.

The hardest part for me to endure, though, was the resentment. I've just come to realize how she treated me with scorn, much the same way you would a discarded former romantic partner. As soon as I hit the most difficult parts of my teen life, she mostly checked out. 

All of that said, a true joint custody arrangement would have gone a long way to help my situation. I think if my father had seen me on school days, he would have had a better sense of what I needed. Also, earlier mental health intervention for me as a child would have been beneficial. Though I don't think of myself as particularly old, I know that things have really changed in the way schools and health systems proactively address mental health with children now. Around age 15 I eventually did choose to live full-time with my father. Eventually I gave it up to be closer to my friends who lived more than 15 miles away and to return to my primary bedroom, which I found more comfortable to live in. I am thankful, however, that I had that break and that my parents were willing to be flexible about their custody agreement. I think too that limited visitation with my mother could have been just fine. If we had been baking cookies together or going to watch movies, the most damaging issues of neglect and resentment would not have grown for us.

I don't know if any of that helps to know. Wishing you the best as you navigate custody.