The Wounded Child: 7 Needs Narcissistic Parents Cannot Provide

I have been in your exact shoes. I put up with it for 20 years. My lightbulb came on when my ex held my daughter up by her neck to our sliding glass doors. I then filed for divorce. I knew it was going to be rough and that it was. I lost everything of assets I had.

Today I have re built myself and have my own house, 2 cars, and most importantly A Peace of Mind!

Yes, I agree! I keep hearing a lot from experts about victims of narcissistic mothers but hardly anything about narcissistic fathers. Which strikes me as odd because most of the people commenting on narcissistic-abuse-awareness sites are women who’ve been burned by men, and some experts have said there are more narcissistic men than women.

Also interesting would be the differences between how narcissistic mothers act and how they affect their children (male versus female) and how narcissistic fathers act and how it affects their children (if any).

Agreed…..this has been an exhausting 9 years of this, and now back in court, in which feels like a fight for my daughters life and my own… for some reason the laws such as “ the accuser, claiming absolute false claims, shall carry the burden of proof” doesn’t seem to be upheld in family court. Yet I have all the documentation to discredit, it’s like I’m on trial based off nothing but fallacies created by my ex… at what point do they take into consideration the constant emotional abuse and attempts at alienation? Court papers apparently mean nothing, and when they choose to go against court orders repeatedly, police can do nothing. Then we actually have to pay to go to court in attempt to hold them accountable, and wait to see if the judge chooses to place them in contempt. To constantly have people accuse me of doing what he has done to me, and know that in order to prove them wrong, would require anyone actually interested in my daughters best interest, to go through the ludicrous amount of documentation I have acquired over the years. So, without have an insurmountable limit of financial abilities to pay, it’s all rendered useless. Seriously???
Very hopeful for the woman and her case against the judge in family courts in Illinois! Family courts need to take a much deeper look at their process, and should be required to observe any and all documentation that is pertinent to either claims. It states use can question authenticity of a claim, (carry the burden) of claims filed. Then when it’s apparent they were concocted manipulative claims, therefore causing stress and damage to accused. Last I checked, perjury is punishable by law.. Why does his mean nothing in Family Court??

I’m so sorry you’re going through this! I went through it, too, and it took three years before I finally won sole custody. Once that happened, my ex completely lost interest in my daughter and faded out of her life. He just wanted to torture me. Get a good lawyer. Document EVERYTHING. This is the age of the father, in which everyone in the legal system (the country, really!) seems to assume children are better off with their fathers than their mothers, no matter what, but you can prove otherwise. Make sure you never say (or write!) anything negative about him to or in front of your children or any of their caregivers. Don’t make it difficult for him to see the children — I know you’re trying to protect them from him, but that makes you look bad in court and he’ll only wind up with more time with them if you go that route. Get them a good therapist with experience with parental alienation. If you really believe they’ve been sexually abused, take them to the doctor. Accept that your children are going to have to spend time with your ex. In this country even abusive fathers get time with their children. Your job is to look like you want them to have a good relationship with him (even if you don’t), and try to make that happen. If you don’t let him know how much all of this bothers you, he won’t be entertained by it and will eventually stop and go away. Try to make him think you’re happy he’s spending time with the kids so that you get a break — he might start skipping visits if he thinks they’re helping you. It’s awful and scary when you’re in the middle of this, but you can come out ahead.

I feel for you….I feel so emotionally exhausted and defeated at times. The attacks only continue, have even escalated to him trying to run me off the road…he said she said..nothing to be done about it. My daughter gets physically ill and vomits because of how worried she is about being with her dad, or displeasing him. He’s got financial abilities I do not, and I’ve had issues with obtaining counsel due to my case, and the fact that it is high conflict…worst thing I have ever dealt with in my life, and has taken it’s toll on me physically as it has gone on for so long.
Hope your case ended well and you were/are able to get actual justice for you and your children’s sake.

I’m the same age as you, but my story’s a bit different (covert narc father/empathic mother, no alcohol or drugs, sister became the “Golden Child” to whom I was always negatively compared when not getting the silent treatment for weeks or years at a time, I’m on my second marriage) …

But I’m totally with you on being SOOOOOO glad I didn’t have children (for many reasons, one of them being that I knew I would make a terrible mother and never had a romantic partner I felt could make up for my inadequacy–although, despite “inexplicably” being what I called a “narcissist magnet” in relationships, it wasn’t until I was 54, AFTER my father succeeded in verbally abusing my mother into a state of CONSTANT stress and finally a nursing home, four years after he told me she had dementia–which neither I nor my sister could believe–and belonged in a nursing home, proceeding to use her risk factors of high blood pressure and diabetes, which she had kept well under control up until then–to keep her in a state of CONSTANT STRESS, since he couldn’t convince me because I live next door and would see/talk to her at LEAST a couple of times a week until then … and after which she kept running over to my house to get AWAY from his ever-increasing abuse, meanwhile running a smear campaign against me with my sister via e-mail to the point where SHE started giving me the silent treatment without any explanation about three years ago based on what they diagnosed as a MILD case of dementia–that I FINALLY figured out my strange attraction/attractiveness to narcissists was that HE was a narc. Seeing ME as her primary caregiver, which my mother approved of, the nursing home social worker told me that she wasn’t in the dementia ward because her dementia was actually mild and that putting her in the dementia ward wouldn’t be beneficial (in fact, before my “father” had her incarcerated there, her PCP had recommended she attend a day program and have a home nurse; “coincidentally” enough, my “father” had been put in charge of administering her medications). Unfortunately, I was still learning that narcissism was more than just gaslighting and the silent treatment and only later about smear campaigns or that the narc/”codependent” dynamic runs in families and that my mother was actually an empath/victim of his abuse–rather than my previous belief that they only argued constantly because they were incompatible and my mother had stayed with him “for the sake of the children” (my sister and me, which I now realize was a mistake) and because, as she told me when I asked her why she didn’t just leave him when he started treating her so badly, she took her wedding vows seriously (probably trauma bonding), and that she was tough enough to handle him (I’d never taken sides in their constant complaining about each other to me because I loved them both, and she had long ago made excuses to me for his behavior, saying he’d been abused as a child and that it was just a “thing” in his family that there was ALWAYS somebody not speaking to someone else, to which I attributed his extremely damaging silent treatments–which she got him to stop doing to me in my 20s or so, but I now wish he’d kept it up instead of gaslighting and word-salading me into believing if only I did this or that, he would finally see that I wasn’t the bad seed he thought I was! All those concepts, in addition to the smear campaign, were things I only learned AFTER it was too late!)

So I was still speaking to him only as necessary regarding my mother’s care (but learning to recognize the gaslighting and TRYING to grey rock) when I mistakenly let it slip (still having ZERO inkling that he would ever INTENTIONALLY harm ANYONE, much less my mother, whom he had told me he really loved but it was SHE who for some reason he couldn’t understand wasn’t loving him back but was always yelling at him–i.e., playing the victim, and I was still buying it!) that she wasn’t in the dementia ward. All of a sudden he demanded to know how I knew that, like it came as a huge SHOCK to him, and I naively told him it was because I had made friends with all her nurses, and (due to my frequent visits, signing her out to take her shopping or out for lunch, and basically acting as her translator since nobody else could understand what she was trying to convey after her last ministroke had taken away much of her vocabulary, whereas she and I were so close that we could pretty much finish each other’s sentences, whereas my “father” always criticized everyone ELSE if they didn’t conform to HIS very rigid comprehension) the staff there all treated ME as her primary caretaker and told me everything that was going on with her. Suddenly HE started “visiting” her on weekday mornings, when he knew I couldn’t go (after which my mother told me a few times that she couldn’t stand it when he visited because he’s so self-centered and got bored with her so he brought in a portable DVD player ostensibly as a gift for her, but she didn’t care to watch TV anymore; he actually bought it for HIMSELF to pass the time while pretending to care about her!) instead of only stopping by for an hour on Saturdays with my sister and HER family, including sometimes my nieces, with whom my sister cut me off from all contact as he HAD been doing. Meanwhile, he started enacting his plan by making friends with the head nurse (to the point that my mother believed they were having an affair, which at the time I ALSO couldn’t believe he would be capable of, whereas now I DO!) AND the social worker–who leaves at 3 p.m., so I’d never met her either, only talked to her on the phone. Well, about four months into her incarceration, right around Easter of 2017, I got a certified letter inexplicably banning me from visiting my mother based on my allegedly screaming and yelling and disturbing people, but when I called the social workers, she adamantly REFUSED to tell me WHEN this supposedly happened but INSISTED it wasn’t retaliation for the night that an agency nurse (one of the ones who steal things from patients’ rooms, according to the regular nurses) REFUSED to look at the open wound on my mother’s foot and kept picking a FIGHT with me EVERY TIME I approached him for something (like the sandwich the nurses regularly had on their cart–and he had one too and didn’t know it–with her name pre-printed on it for when she got hungry later at night, and THAT day, she told me she hadn’t had lunch because people’s kids were visiting, running around, and taking things off her lunch tray. So I tried to contact the hospital system that owns the nursing home, and they told me to file a complaint, which I immediately did. But the social worker SWORE up and down that the certified letter restricting my visits to an hour at a time, supervised at the nurses’ station, requiring 24 hours, and only between 1-3 p.m., when they KNEW I wasn’t able to get there, was just “coincidentally” dated the day after my complaint and in NO WAY any sort of retaliation for the complaint (which would be illegal). And when I turned to my “father” for help, he pretended to KNOW that I had been screaming and yelling (which I WASN’T) and kept gaslighting me when I said that I hadn’t and tried to explain really DID happen. And one of the FEW times I was able to visit her after that, he had managed to set up the situation so that he KNEW it would trigger a panic attack (insisting, repeatedly via e-mail despite my concern that I hadn’t received any letter to confirm it, that the head nurse told him very clearly that there were NO restrictions whatsoever on my visits). I left the building before it became full-blown, but he then used my panic disorder to convince the social worker that I’m a danger to my mother and that I (of all people!) “upset” her and therefore shouldn’t be allowed to see or speak to her again. So now if I try calling there, the social worker just refers me back to my “father,” since he’s legally her “next of kin,” while he kept telling me that it was the SOCIAL WORKER who was the gatekeeper. Despite HIS having left a signed note next to the nurses’ station–the only phone provided for ALL the patients to use, so my mother was afraid to use it, stating that they were NOT to let me speak to my mother and telling ME that I can’t ever see her again until I “learn how to act like a normal person” and that my “temper tantrums” (HIS term for my panic attacks) won’t get me what I want. (As if I ENJOY having panic attacks or that I’ve EVER gotten anything I wanted by having one???) And also, for good measure, adding that the entire staff was afraid of me. (Also, in the only letter I ever got from them restricting my visits in the first place that, if I didn’t obey all their restrictions–OR if my mother exhibited any “behaviors,” whatever THAT means or as if I even have any CONTROL over her “behaviors”!) after I left, they’d have me removed from the premises by security or the police! And that’s where things have stood for the past two years … apart from my father having told me a few months ago (again by e-mail) that my mother is now so frail that she can’t be transported OUT of the building anymore requiring all her doctors go THERE to see HER. (She could already be DEAD now for all I know!)

So (sorry, I got all rambly there, but I’ve been in a constant state of anxiety and grief over my mother and having had the rug pulled out from under me with the realization that the close, loving family I THOUGHT I had all this time was a total illusion held together solely by my mother’s force of will and constant battle against my “father,” who, not only was never really a father to me–and NOW he has total influence over the grandkids as well, whom my mother had taught to be loving and kind while being USED by my sister and her self-centered husband as a 24/7 on-call babysitter until she started showing signs of illness. (I mean, what kind of parents go to DISNEY WORLD, where they’d been like 10 times already before even HAVING children, leaving their five-year-old twins behind while having a grandparent come and stay at their house and babysit for a WEEK??? And then FRAME the photo of THEMSELVES having fun on one of the rides to display in the living room???!!!)

Anyway, my point was that I too am SOOOOOO glad I never had children and have PARTIALLY ended the cycle. But I feel sorry for my nieces … and, of course, have no way to get in touch with them and make sure THEY know what narcissism is and don’t perpetuate the cycle! (Even though they just turned 18, I have NO DOUBT that my “father” has teamed up with my ex-sister’s gaslighting husband to SMEAR me to them just like he tried to smear my mother to me and almost had me believing she was a hypochondriac who could make herself deathly ill and require hospitalization at will, just to get attention, except it turns out that I have the same rare genetic disease whose symptoms get progressively worse with time as my mother since I’m coming down with the same symptoms she supposedly “willed” herself to get, and I wouldn’t will them on ANYONE! (And one of the twins has signs that SHE may have it too–and many of the worst symptoms can be prevented with early diagnosis–but my then-sister wouldn’t HEAR of it when I suggested she get checked out; in fact, I think THAT was the last time she spoke to me.) He would even mock his own sister to us to turn us against him and gaslight me by accusing me of “reminding” me of her. (How could I remind him so much of his one sister who moved across the country when I was about five years old and whom I had only MET maybe five times in total in my life?) So with my mother (the only GOOD influence on our nuclear family, whom he had moved away from HER family when I was four and my sister was about a year old, and it was the 1960s, so she wasn’t in a position to divorce him) when the company he worked for was closing down in that city and accepted a job in another city, where my sister and I grew up with no cousins, aunts, uncles, or grandparents, unlike all the other kids I knew, and had no way of knowing our upbringing wasn’t normal or even HEALTHY, without ANY discussion with my mother, and to a HOUSE his father paid for and helped him pick out–again with NO discussion with my mother. (And when it came time to put her in the nursing home, he actually believed it was HIS house alone and my mother wasn’t legally entitled to HALF of EVERYTHING acquired by either of them once they were married!)

Actually, I wish my PARENTS had never had children … and that my mother had never had the misfortune of meeting the foul monster that sired me. (She even told me she only got engaged to him after HIS father had called up her father and LIED to him about my mother just to get HER in trouble. Having just turned 18, she was so upset with her father for believing the lie, she got engaged just to get out of the house. And she had second thoughts on her wedding day but went through with it anyway. I always knew my mother resented him for moving us so far away from her family–who were very close-knit unlike his inbred pack of psychopaths–yes, “psychosis” is on his grandfather’s death certificate as a cause of death–he did try to commit suicide after his daughter died, while his wife was a particularly nasty piece of work–and inbred isn’t an exaggeration either; my ex-sister did the shocking genealogy on his side of the family! And my mother told me about the incestuous child molester/rapist living in the very HOUSE my ex-“father” was born in as some sort of “house arrest” to protect the neighboring children from him … and his only living sister unwittingly confirmed everything my mother told me his other now-late sister had told HER.)

So you’re absolutely right (and so is Ross Rosenberg; is that where you first heard the theory too?): Narcissism and codependency go together and run in families! (I have a proposed corollary, having thought back in my family to the people I did know before they died and based on other stories that have been handed down: The way to tell which of the spouses was the narcissist is that the narcissist always outlives the codependent. Although I hope it will be different for my mother so I can see her again before she dies and straighten out all the lies I know my ex-“father” told her about me and why I stopped visiting! I won’t shed one tear when that maliciously EVIL spawn of Satan living next door to me, in a giant house blocking all the light out of our windows with a view of my old room that later became my mother’s, and his next door–a constant reminder of what he did to my now-absent mother–finally kicks the bucket and finds his reward in hell!!! I never in my wildest dreams imagined the depths to which he was capable of sinking … and ALL of the harm he’s done planned out in detail WELL in advance! He has even MORE my mother never told me about him because she was a decent person and even in the nursing home tried to tell me to be nice to him because he really loved me, as if it weren’t HIS fault he CHOSE to be evil–and knowingly too given how COVERT he is and how he has ALL my friends and the nursing-home staff totally charmed and the so-called “social worker” insisting to me that he’s NOT a narcissist–but all my mom would say was that there was a LOT I didn’t know about him. I only wish she’d understood narcissism and that staying married to one “for the sake of the kids” is an oxymoron because without her, I’m finding it out the hard way!)

Since I can’t get rid of his evil DNA, I wish there were a legal way to have the name of that fiend and his fiendish family removed from my birth certificate! I HATE my long, stupid, unpronounceable, unspellable maiden name, seeing it on my birth certificate, my old school papers, my old nameplates from desks and offices I had at work; I want NO connection between him and me whatsoever. Since we were torn away from them and I never got to go to my mother’s high school, the same one my cousins went to, and I never had any relatives nearby, I want my mother’s last name, her father’s last name, my cousins’ last name, the last name my grandmother never changed even 48 years after my only REAL grandfather died!

Kudos to you for having the courage to question whether you were a narcissist and being able to admit to making mistakes–which means you’re NOT a narc. I was my mother’s first-born too, and of course she made mistakes on me that she didn’t make on my sister. All parents make mistakes, but narcissists can’t admit them, even to themselves much less on a public forum. And I think I know how she feels. Even the fact that my mother TRIED to apologize for her “mistakes” means a lot, even though I never felt she owed me any and tried to tell her that. I myself don’t know how I’d have dealt with having an extremely hyperactive, impulsive ADHD first child back when there wasn’t even a socially acceptable name for it. (They used to call it “minimal brain damage,” and, unbeknownst to me at the time, she had taken me to the doctor to find out what was wrong with me after I tried to jump out a second-floor window at school running away from a hated gym teacher, and he told her NOT to have me diagnosed with that label because it would stigmatize me. It also says a lot that your daughter chooses to be close to you. I was MUCH closer to my mother as an adult than my sister, the “perfect” one, turned out to be. My mother was my best friend and the only person who ever truly knew me and loved me unconditionally. That’s not to say we didn’t have our arguments and get angry at each other sometimes, but I think that’s normal in any relationship that lasts for half a century. And for all the times we argued and it turned out I was right, we probably had ten times that many when we still lived under the same roof and she was working and cooking meals every night for a whole family and getting reports of the trouble I’d gotten into at school and my bad grades.

I have anxiety too and lots more, but I see very clearly now that she’s only human and that SHE’s not the parent who caused my psychological problems. I often wonder what I’d be like now if she had actually divorced my father when they were thinking about it and I was hysterical because I didn’t want to live apart from either of them at 10 years old–and whether I’d even realize the bullet we’d have dodged if she had–but she was his victim as much as, or maybe even MORE than (now that I realize how much she’d been protecting me from him) I was. In fact, *I* still feel guilty for potentially having prevented them from splitting up and how much happier my mother could have been without him! (Then again, knowing now about “The Human Magnet Syndrome” and how little was known about the effects of narcissistic abuse back then–and still is–she could’ve ended up marrying *another* narcissist, and then I’d have had TWO narc-dads! I guess we can’t second-guess our decisions in the past but only learn from them and, hopefully, make better ones in the future. Although I’m still making mistakes. Like learning the hard way what happens when you finally figure out your “father” is a narcissist and then actually TELL him so while he’s in the process of putting your mother in a nursing home because of the dementia he purposely gave her. BTW, in case anybody reading this doesn’t already know … DON’T EVER tell a narcissist they’re a narcissist–at LEAST until you’re ready to cut ALL ties with them, change your name and phone number, and move far away with no forwarding address. And definitely NEVER tell them if they have the power to hurt someone they know you love.)

Pretend you’re happy he’s spending time with her. If he sees it doesn’t bother you, he may fade out of the picture. Mine did.

Dear Karen, please stay strong. If pee-wee is homeless, too bad, so sad ;/ such is, evidently, the outcome of his malicious behavior.

Me. too.

Hi Anon,

It’s best to let a professional trauma therapist help your son. It may not be appropriate for him to relive the incident at this time. A trauma specialist would be able to help him process this incident, as well as the many others he endured while you were in that relationship.

Kim