Narcissist's Adult Child: A Painful Role

Looking back across the life cycles of the individuals within the family is a way to understand, holistically, the effects the narcissist parent has on a child’s development. It can help see why it was difficult for the now adult to “grow up” with a parent who is a narcissist.

It helps because the patterns tend to morph as the family members age. Adult children may become aware of the dynamic, but still unable to extract themselves from it. As the family unit changes, so do the manifestations of the narcissism. And the wounding from it.

One way I’ve explored this parent-child dynamic is by using Erik Erikson’s life stages as a kind of structural framework in When Your Parent Is a Narcissist.

Though created to delineate the stages of development in individuals throughout the life cycle, here Erik Erikson’s life stages allows us to view narcissism in the family (using the family as an individual unit, so to speak) as the child grows and the parents age—and as adult children become caregivers.

For example, if a baby’s needs are supposed to come first, but the parent is focused on their own survival, the baby’s needs are subjugated.

What follows, then, if this dynamic is pulled through the family’s life cycle, is that the baby’s (now adult child’s) needs (now suggestions, for example, about caregiving, about helping, about decision-making) are going to be challenged or criticized in the most spectacular way (quietly and loudly) no matter how much the parent insists he or she needs (or doesn’t need) the adult child’s help.

And another thing: once it’s formed, this dynamic seems to have a life of its own. It progresses (like an untreated addiction). It continues to exist, as I see it, continues to lie in wait. It’s not always the narcissist parent who triggers the dynamic.

Sometimes the adult child will attempt to engage, often on an unconscious level. Their desire, often, stems from their own sadness about never having had the desired connection with their parent (who is not capable of giving it).

Magazine articles, self-help books, blogs, relationship gurus and others often say: “Get over it,” they say. “Grow up already.”

But understanding one’s own anger as a result of the profound sense of loss is one of the keys to “getting over it.” Once they feel the anger, however, many people don’t want to go back to the sadness.

It is only by truly acknowledging, feeling, experiencing this sadness (again—as the adult one is today) that “getting over it” starts. And getting over it doesn’t have to mean (nor should it) putting one’s life on hold or stepping out of life while one processes. It means integrating the loss and synthesizing it, using its energy rather than running from it.

This is what growing up means.