- Hey, everybody, happy Thursday.
Now, today's question is a good one
but before we jump into that, are you new to my channel?
Welcome.
I am a licensed therapist
talking about all things mental health
and I release videos on Mondays and on Thursdays
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so that you don't miss out
but let's jump into today's question
and it is Kati, speaking of this,
can you talk about narcissistic abusive parents
and how to cope?
Now, I believe I found this question below
on my Three Types of Narcissists video.
Before we really get into this question
and how we can best cope, there are a few things
that I really wanna discuss with you first.
Number one, when we grow up with a narcissistic parent,
what we struggle with most is emotional neglect.
This happens most commonly when a parent is a narcissist
because they always put their own needs
ahead of their child's.
Remember, narcissism is when we demonstrate
a pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration
and have a lack of empathy.
So having a child isn't something that we can emotionally do
or at least not healthfully
and if we need a lot of admiration
and have to feel important,
being a parent to a baby and a child
couldn't be farther from that.
Even from my very limited experience as a nanny
and watching my friends have children,
it's obvious to me that being a parent
is one of the most humbling experiences of your life.
Children cry frequently.
They need most of the attention, care and affection.
They truly cannot survive on their own without their parent
and therefore they're gonna need us all the time
to feed them, change them and also love and care for them.
If we grew up with a parent who is narcissistic,
this could mean that they weren't able to do anything
more than keep us alive.
Forget the cuddles, forget the patience when we were upset
or even them trying to figure out
what was causing us to cry.
If anybody's ever watched a baby when they're crying,
you're like what do you want, need?
I bathed you, I fed you, I changed you.
You're trying to figure it out.
So they probably didn't do much of that.
If a narcissistic parent becomes embarrassed by their child
which happens all the time 'cause kids cry in public,
they might throw things in public,
they might try to take their clothes off.
You don't even know.
Children are unpredictable but as a result,
a narcissistic parent could lash out at their child
or even at their spouse
therefore this could mean that as a child
you were possibly emotionally or physically abused
or at least neglected in many ways.
Now, as far as treatment for this goes,
if we're out of that situation and we're trying to heal,
we're trying to figure out what we should do first,
I would consider trauma treatment to be your best option.
While I do think therapy in general could be really helpful
because it's validating, supportive
and can give you a safe place to talk through
all that happened while you were growing up
but I think being abused or neglected in any way
is a trauma obviously
and working with someone who specializes in that
could speed things along for you
because some of the things that a regular therapist,
not a trauma specialist would bring up
might not be pertinent.
You might need someone just to jump right in with you
and start challenging you in ways
that maybe you don't even know you need
in order to process things through
and this could be like EMDR therapy.
I have a video about that
if you're curious what I'm talking about.
I'll link it in the description but these are just,
there are a bunch of different types of trauma treatment
and finding someone who specializes
could be really, really great.
Next, depending on whether the narcissistic parent
was your mother or father,
you may wanna consider picking up one of these books,
The Emotionally Absent Mother,
I'll link to these in the description,
and The Unavailable Father.
These are great.
You can see all of my tabs.
Great books but regardless of who it was,
something we will need to do is to heal the hole
they left in us as a child.
When we don't get our emotional needs met as a young child
or a baby, we can begin to not trust ourselves,
not trust how we feel or what we think we need.
We can begin to believe that we are making it all up
or aren't important enough anyways.
In most cases, having a narcissistic parent
means you were gaslit for most of your life
and when I talk about gaslighting,
it means that you were manipulated so often
that you may not even trust your own sanity
or your own perception of certain experiences
or things you know happened, you think maybe you made it up.
Overall, whatever messages we internalize
from this neglect and abuse,
it's important now to do our best to be a detective,
again this detective, I love being a detective,
to figure out what's affecting us,
what our triggers are and how we react.
Being more mindful of all of this can give us more evidence
that can really help lead us to our healing
and my next tip is journaling
or writing letters that we don't send.
This is a great way to express all we may be feeling
or felt in the past and any anger or hurt
that we may have stuffed down for years and years.
Any way to get those feelings out of our head
is really helpful as long as it is safe to do so.
That's why I said letters that you don't send.
So a lot of it's just ways for you to express it.
You can talk about it with your therapist,
talk to friends about it, anything like that
as long as it's not being trapped in here
and stuffed down there and also if you still live at home
with these narcissistic parents,
please get out as soon as possible.
I have an older video about this
that's called Dealing With Toxic Parents.
I'll link it in the description
because you should really check it out
and it could really help if you're feeling stuck
in this situation because you still live with them
and my next tip is remothering or refathering ourselves.
Whomever it was that wasn't there for us
or abused or neglected us in any way,
we're gonna have to heal from that.
I believe that trauma therapy or talk therapy in general
can help with this but we'll need to spend some time
figuring out what messages we wished we had received
from that parent and find other ways
to give it to ourselves.
It could be caring for a wound when we've hurt ourselves
like if we tripped and fallen and scraped our knee,
we might want to care for that ourselves and clean it up
and put a bandage on it.
It could also be taking care of ourselves when we're sick
or saying kind and loving things to ourselves each morning.
There's that positive self-talk.
You knew I was gonna sneak it in in some way
but whatever it is and it may be all of those things
just FYI, it could be a bunch of different things
that you do to show love and care for yourselves
but make sure you give yourself the time to do it
and to heal because this hurt didn't happen overnight
so unfortunately it's not gonna heal overnight either
and I hope you found that helpful.
I hear about these things all the time,
those of us growing up with narcissistic parents
and how painful it can be
so I hope that that just offers a little bit of guidance
on how you can begin that process
but if you've been through this yourself,
can you just leave us some tips and tricks and tools
and maybe resources that you know of
because together we're working towards a healthy mind
and a healthy body and I will see you next time, bye.