Intergenerational narcissism article

Started by treesgrowslowly, July 10, 2020, 08:24:57 AM

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treesgrowslowly

https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/the-legacy-distorted-love/201105/the-narcissistic-family-tree

What I like about this article is that it starts by talking about the denial that is in a Narcissistic family. My N parent was extremely proud and defensive about being withholding. As a child, that adult denial was really confusing.

Intelligent narcissistic parents can deny the existence of these conditions quite well. They can even have a story they tell people about how spiritual they are for being this tuned out emotionally to their own children. As she describes being "tuned out" in the article.

Since I am in later stages of being no contact now, an article like this reminds me of the reality that my FOO really had gotten to a place of misery and my no contact was of course breaking all the rules. I was not supposed to break out of the misery.

My question is, I do wonder what people who had less narcissistic parents, how this article fits for them. And I also wonder, how do people who try to understand us, children of PD parents, come to understand what we dealt with?

Trees


Psuedonym

Hey trees,

The book this article quotes The Narcissistic Family, is very good. It's meant for psychologists and really is about diagnosing adult children of NPDs, who look a lot like adult children of alcoholics but often without the addiction part, but it's dead on.

I think rather than less narcissistic parents there are different types. Mine was the covert/victim/woe is me type, who disguised 'you need to fix me because you owe me so much and that's your purpose in life' with 'I love you so much and would kill myself if anything happen to you'. Just as much an NPD but more passive aggressive.  All the same symptoms apply.

Jerry Wise has some excellent videos about family systems, systems feelings, and multi-generational narcissism that are very good. I'd check them out if you haven't seen them!