I just peeped in on the boards right when you posted this Eagle. I want to send you a huge hug and a lot of love. I loved reading about your growing self awareness, your conversations with yourself in the car -- I do that too all the time though I often talk to God, it helps me direct my thoughts toward something better than me!
About the rest of your post -- I was reading along sort of normally but thinking about all the checkmarks of NPD your description was hitting. When I got to the drunk part, my jaw literally dropped and I felt like crying. Thinking of your son on his bike on the way home, drunk and confused in his heart even if he didn't realize it, that just kills me. I work with teens and just love their souls so much, they are almost always in so much pain just from waking up into this world, even without the terrors inflicted by the MLCer! I don't care if it's legal there, that is so messed up. My H is also an alcoholic and would do that the first second he could, he already encouraged my D to drink wine when she was like 10 and drinks a bottle or more of wine in front of her everytime they are together.
Is S17 in therapy? I am the child of a family that literally had three people with cluster B disorders, two diagnosed and one never diagnosed -- my mom, my brother and my father. My fear now is that my kids will be drawn to marry such a person, just as I was, without having any idea that that was driving their attraction, so I just focus on trying to get them to get a clarity of mind and a self-confidence I never had. I think the only hope for our kids is to process everything and be able to see more clearly, I didn't do that and looking back, it's astonishing how clear it is that I married my wounds and then had no idea that the way my H treated me was not normal or okay, even long before BD, maybe from the earliest days of our dating. So that would be my advice to you, get those kids into therapy so that they can process this pain and understand boundaries and what kind of relationships they should seek in this world. Even before H, all of my relationships followed this pattern.
I want to paste something below about children with an NPD parent. Do some research on that if you haven't already, it will help you understand what your child is going to face and what he will need to do to heal. I assure you it's all real, this describes my upbringing and the effect it had on me exactly, just didn't understand until very recently that the way I felt and functioned was not normal. I even believe that my cancer was tied to this chronic stress.
Lots of love to you and especially to your sons. Thank god they have you to bring light into their lives.
6 Common Traits of a Narcissistic Parent and The Trauma Symptoms They Can Cause
1. Self-Importance The word that comes to mind is “grandiose.” The narcissistic parent will exaggerate and lie about themselves. They’ll demand your attention while neglecting your needs. Worse, they often view their child’s increasing independence and autonomy as a threat to their own interests. If so, they likely squelched and sidelined your talents, interests, and growth and kept the focus on their dreams.
Being raised around someone who takes up all the psychic space can lead a person to feel chronic shame, worthlessness and unimportance.
2. No Respect For Boundaries. A narcissist seems incapable of recognizing that other people have needs. As a result, they will not respect the boundaries their child sets. In fact, a narcissistic parent is adept at making their kid feel guilty for even daring to set a healthy boundary. Their wishes and demands are framed as something you owe them and should want to do. Guilt and manipulation are common ways that your boundaries are breached.
In a sense, boundary issues are the hallmark of early trauma. Inadequate boundaries are one of the most challenging traits of children with narcissistic parents. Many of my clients have struggled to strengthen weak, wobbly or non-existent boundaries. Others were at the opposite end of the spectrum. They needed help letting down their walls and allowing someone in. After what they endured, trust in others did not come so easy.
3. Communication as Warfare To put it mildly, you will not experience honest communication from a narcissistic parent. For years, your mother or father may make it a habit to put you down, making it clear that they are superior and in control. They will be inappropriately or hurtfully competitive, persistently critical, unfavorable comparisons, subtly humiliating, and more.
Over time, the way they invalidate you and keep you off balance wears down your self-esteem. It robs your relationship, such that it is, of genuine positivity. Instead, you feel confused, rejected, and traumatized by the lack of love and acceptance. Have you experienced a parent who
Talks over you Makes every conversation about them Avoids topics of importance to you Assumes dominant and threatening postures Never asks about you Doesn’t listen Interrogates you A major therapeutic task for many of my clients has been to learn how to break the deeply ingrained survival response of fawning. This is the tendency to make yourself invisible and focus on meeting the needs of others. It’s a survival strategy that evolves out of our nervous system’s natural ability to submit and withdraw when we feel we are in the presence of a predator and are facing mortal danger.
Other patients I’ve worked with were stuck in constant battle. They sought my help because they had to learn to disengage their fight response. Our therapeutic work involved softening their chronic defensiveness and belligerence. It was making them miserable..
4. Gaslighting Don’t expect your narcissistic parent to own up to a mistake. They will manipulate you into believing you either misunderstood or made up the whole thing. By the end of the discussion, they may even have you apologizing.
While gaslighting is a term that is being bandied about these days, it’s a real thing. The lack of insight that a narcissist displays is very real and it’s effects can linger for years. For many of my clients, growing up with parents who played mind games resulted in endless bouts of self doubt and genuine confusion about their perceptions. Their lack of self confidence led to chronic difficulty making decisions. Haunted by aloneness, many felt as if no one could understand or believe their story.
Support and encouragement helped them to learn to trust themselves and the safe people in their lives.
5. Playing the Victim Expect to be provoked into confrontations. The moment you show anger, your narcissistic parent will likely accuse you of attacking them. It’s also very likely they will accuse you of being abusive yourself. Often very narcissistic people will punish you by mounting a smear campaign against you. They may badmouth you and try to damage your reputation. This effectively keeps you quiet, frustrated, and prone to doing their bidding for the sake of peace.
Remember the saying, “hate usually comes from below?” This means that the reason the narcissist lashes out is because they are desperately trying to ward off deep feelings of shame in themselves. One client put it like this “This has left me with a bucket of emotional slime that I’ve spent years wiping off me”. That slime included; chronic anger, helplessness and fear.
6. Abusive Behavior and Neglect Aside from the more covert manipulation listed above, a narcissistic parent will also engage in openly abusive behavior. Without a hint of compassion or empathy, they may subject you to mockery, humiliation, and physical threats or violence and neglect.
This type of behavior led my clients to battle some of the more classic symptoms of complex traumatic stress disorder. The common symptoms have included:
Emotional numbing Dissociation Distrust and fear in relationships Emotional regulations problems. Flashbacks- Emotional and physical Difficulty with relationships Self loathing- and a particularly vicious inner critic. Arousal dysregulation of the nervous system. (problems with fight, flight, freeze, submit) Stress related health problems
Last edited by Gerda; 05/24/2202:45 PM.
I believe I will see the bounty of the Lord in the land of the living. Wait for the Lord with courage. Be stouthearted, and wait for the Lord.
