Living with a Parent with Narcissistic Patterns

Last week, I shared some reflections on what it means to grow up with a parent who has traits of borderline personality. Today, I want to talk about a different but equally complex experience: living with a parent who shows narcissistic patterns.

What Does It Mean to Have a Narcissistic Parent?

When we talk about narcissistic traits, we're not necessarily talking about the pop-culture version of vanity or self-obsession. A parent with narcissistic tendencies may be emotionally unavailable, critical, or unpredictable. Their love often feels conditional, dependent on your achievements, compliance, or ability to reflect their image back to them.

This can leave children feeling like they must earn love, constantly prove their worth, or even disappear emotionally to avoid rejection or conflict. As adults, many people raised in this dynamic describe feeling chronically inadequate, unseen, or unsure of their own needs.

Why Does This Happen?

Narcissistic behaviors often stem from a parent’s own unresolved pain, trauma, or emotional immaturity. Their focus on control, admiration, or perfection may have once served as a coping mechanism, but it can deeply affect those around them, especially children who rely on them for emotional safety.

These parents might:

• Dismiss your emotions or make everything about them.

• Undermine your accomplishments if they feel threatened.

• Be charming and charismatic in public, while being cold or controlling in private.

• Expect you to parent them emotionally, rather than being your caregiver.

Does Any of This Feel Familiar?

• Have you ever felt like you can’t fully relax around your parent?

• Do you catch yourself constantly seeking approval or fearing criticism, even now?

• Were your emotional needs minimized or met with anger, silence, or guilt?

If so, you’re not alone. The pain of growing up in this kind of environment is often invisible to others, but deeply felt inside.

How Can We Begin to Heal?

Healing from this kind of upbringing is often a slow, nonlinear process. Some tools we might explore include:

• Naming the Pattern: Understanding narcissistic behaviors helps depersonalize them. Their inability to attune to you wasn’t your fault, it was a limitation in their emotional capacity.

• Building Boundaries: Learning that it’s okay to say “no,” to set emotional distance, or to choose what kind of contact (if any) you want to maintain.

• Connecting with Your Inner Child: Tuning into the younger parts of yourself that needed nurturing, acceptance, and consistency. What did she need? How can you begin to meet those needs now?

• Cultivating Self-Validation: Practicing self-affirmation rather than relying on external approval. You are allowed to trust your own experience.

• Letting Go of Fantasies: Many people carry a lifelong hope that their parent will change. Grieving that loss can be painful, but also liberating.

What We Explore in Sessions

In sessions, we might work on strengthening your sense of self, unlearning people-pleasing behaviors, or processing grief around the parent-child relationship you never had. It's about creating space for your own needs, perhaps for the first time.

These experiences are difficult to name, let alone untangle. But working through them with compassion and clarity can change how you relate to yourself, others, and your future.

Further Reading

If you want to explore this topic more deeply:

• Will I Ever Be Good Enough? by Dr. Karyl McBride

• Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents by Lindsay C. Gibson

• Children of the Self-Absorbed by Nina W. Brown

• The Narcissistic Family by Stephanie Donaldson-Pressman & Robert M. Pressman

You don’t have to keep holding it all in. Your story matters, and it's not too late to begin writing it on your own terms.