How To Recover From Growing Up With A Narcissistic Parent

NARCISSISTIC ABUSE • May 27, 2018

LAST UPDATED: JUNE 2026

Do any of these scenarios feel familiar?

A father who puts his 11-year-old daughter on the bathroom scale and tells her that no man will ever love her if the line goes above 150 pounds, then says he’s “only telling her this for her own good.”

A mother who’s the perfect, well-regarded soccer mom in public, sweet and helpful to the other parents, who rages and screams at her children at home the moment they displease her.

A father who plays blatant favorites among his children and only shows love when they do what he wants, or perform the way he wants them to.

A mother who deliberately makes her kids doubt themselves, telling them something didn’t happen when it objectively did, teaching them, drip by drip, that they can’t trust their own minds.

Did those scenarios make you uncomfortable? Do they remind you of anyone? Each one describes a narcissistic parent, or, more precisely, the kind of thing a narcissistic parent may do to a child.

And in each example, assuming these aren’t one-off moments, the impact on the child can be profound. This is a painful, complex, and deeply important thing to talk about. The relational collateral damage of being raised by a narcissistic father or mother can be vast, and sometimes it repeats itself across generations, especially when it’s left unhealed by the adult child.

In this post, I’ll explain what defines a narcissistic parent and how this kind of parenting shapes children over time. I’ll also share the specific work, and the resources, that support recovery if you grew up with one.

What defines a narcissistic parent?

It helps to be clear about a distinction. Narcissism, meaning an excessive interest in oneself, exists on a spectrum. All of us are narcissistic to some degree, and some of it is developmentally appropriate. Think of toddlers who still haven’t figured out that the world doesn’t revolve around them.

But for people who fall on the more severe end of that spectrum, or who meet the full criteria for narcissistic personality disorder, this self-focus is no longer a passing developmental stage. So there’s narcissism as a trait, which varies across a wide spectrum. And then there’s a narcissist, meaning, for the purposes of this post, someone who meets the criteria for narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

What are the clinical criteria for narcissistic personality disorder?

The DSM-5 defines NPD as “a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by five (or more) of the following”:

1. Has a grandiose sense of self-importance (for example, exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate accomplishments).
2. Is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love.
3. Believes that he or she is “special” and unique, and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people or institutions.
4. Requires excessive admiration.
5. Has a sense of entitlement, meaning unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance.
6. Is interpersonally exploitative, meaning takes advantage of others to reach their own ends.
7. Lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others.
8. Is often envious of others, or believes that others are envious of them.
9. Shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes.

According to the DSM-5, prevalence rates for NPD range from 0 to 6.2 percent of the population, and of those diagnosed, 50 to 70 percent are male (American Psychiatric Association 2013).

Is there one universal profile of a narcissistic parent?

There isn’t. A narcissist can be a leader of the free world or a mediocre small-business owner, a washed-up con man or a homebody recluse, a brilliant academic or a stay-at-home parent. Narcissists can be male or female, and they turn up, indiscriminately, across every work sector, race, and socioeconomic stratum.

Whatever the profile, narcissists are defined by an almost exclusive, self-serving focus on themselves, and by firmly entrenched psychological defenses that guard against nearly intolerable feelings of shame stemming from a deeply wounded psyche. Put simply: deep down, narcissists feel terrible about themselves, and they do whatever they can to feel better.

That drives them to cope in a variety of ways, all of them aimed at appearing and feeling more important and more special than, at their core, they truly feel. And in the pursuit of appearing special, they often wound the people closest to them, particularly their spouses and their children.

Why is being raised by a narcissistic parent so damaging?

The psychological effects of childhood neglect and emotional abuse are, fortunately and unfortunately, well documented. We know that children have core developmental needs: consistent attachment, mirroring, attunement, and positive regard from their primary caregivers, in order to build a stable, cohesive, positive sense of self and to learn secure attachment.

John Bowlby, MD, the British psychiatrist who founded attachment theory, spent his career documenting what happens when that early attunement is missing. When children instead receive consistent invalidation, insecure attachment, an absence of empathy, or outright hostility, it shapes them in countless ways. Allan Schore, PhD, the psychologist whose work on affect regulation and the developing right brain I return to constantly, has shown how early relational failures become wired into a child’s nervous system, not as a memory they can narrate, but as a baseline they carry in the body.

Here’s the hard part. Parents with NPD possess character traits almost antithetical to providing what a child needs to develop and thrive. The very thing the child requires, a parent who can set themselves aside long enough to attune, is the thing a narcissistic parent is least able to give.

What does narcissistic parenting actually look like?

Narcissistic parenting shows up in many ways. A few of the most common:

• Narcissists can struggle to focus attention on someone other than themselves, which is exactly what parenting asks of us.
• A child’s normal, natural needs can register as a “bother” to a narcissist.
• Their moods may be highly variable and explosive, especially when their fragile emotional regulation gets challenged, which is inevitable with children.
• They may put their children down to feel better, and play favorites, stabilizing themselves by manipulating the family dynamic.
• Seeing the child as an extension of themselves, they may try to control the child’s appearance, pursuits, and trajectory, so it all aligns with the image they want to project.
• They may show love only when the child performs or pleases them, which shuts down the child’s authentic self.
• They may invert the dynamic entirely, expecting validation and esteem from their children, parentifying them.
• Faced with a strong-willed or independent child, a narcissistic parent may rage, abuse, or even disown the scapegoated child.

Whatever the specific behaviors, and whether a child was raised by a single narcissistic parent or in a family that colluded with one, it’s safe to say that no child escapes the effects, whether they were the favorite or the family scapegoat.

So what can those effects look like? They vary as widely as the behaviors themselves, but they often include:

• Absorbing and deeply believing destructive templates of what love looks like.
• Learning that worthiness depends on what you do, not on who you are.
• Struggling to set healthy, appropriate boundaries.
• Failing to recognize healthy romantic partners, and sometimes being drawn to dating or marrying narcissists.
• Falling into caretaking and rescuing roles, seeking worthiness through people-pleasing.
• Neglecting your own needs, or becoming, as I sometimes hear it described, “needless and wantless.”
• Struggling to trust that your feelings are valid or that your needs will ever be met.
• Struggling with self-esteem and with holding a stable, cohesive sense of self.
• Coping with the pain through addictive or self-destructive substances and behaviors.

None of this is an exhaustive list. The effects depend on context: how strong the child’s sense of self was, whether they had stabilizing relationships with other adults, whether they were the scapegoat or the favorite, how much contact they had with the narcissist. Still, the adult children of narcissists tend to face complex healing tasks, and those tasks grow directly out of what they lived through.

How do you begin healing from a narcissistic parent?

One of the most important things adult children of narcissistic parents can do early in recovery is simply to name what happened. Clearly, without qualification, without the reflex to protect the parent who couldn’t protect them. Ramani Durvasula, PhD, clinical psychologist and researcher specializing in narcissistic personality disorder and abuse recovery, author of It’s Not You and Should I Stay or Should I Go?, has done significant work making the experience of adult children of narcissists legible: naming the specific patterns of manipulation, emotional unavailability, and conditional love, and validating the confusion that comes from being raised to believe those patterns were normal.

In my work with clients who grew up in narcissistic family systems, what I see consistently is that naming isn’t enough on its own. The deeper, more sustained task is identity reconstruction, building, often for the first time, a stable and coherent sense of self that was never allowed to form inside that family. Driven women in particular tend to have built an impressive external identity that looks like solidity but rests on a foundation that was never truly theirs. That’s the work. You can read more about the long-term relational impact in my guide on covert narcissism and its effects.

The healing work usually includes the following:

Educate yourself.

Whether through books (see my reference list below) or through therapy, you’ll likely need to start learning what narcissism is, how it shows up in parenting, and what its effects can look like. The first step in any healing process is bringing awareness to what actually is, and I find that psychoeducation about narcissists can be deeply illuminating as you start to make sense of your past.

Confront your personal history of trauma and neglect.

I strongly recommend working with a therapist or another trained professional as you begin to remember, talk about, and make sense of your past. And a side note: if you have memory gaps or questions, don’t necessarily look to your family of origin for an accurate account. They may not be willing or able to validate your history, given their own experience with the narcissist.

Grieve what you did not receive.

Inevitably, as you educate yourself and confront your past, you’ll need to grieve what you didn’t receive, which was, essentially, the chance to simply be a child. This grieving can take a long time. It can feel endless. It’s also valid and necessary.

Work through the developmental milestones you may have missed.

Children of narcissists often don’t get to fully be children or teenagers with their own identities, needs, and preferences. You may have missed milestones: experimentation, dating, even the education or career you actually wanted. Part of your healing is circling back to work through those milestones alongside your grief and history work.

Learn to set boundaries.

Either with the narcissist still in your life or with the people you tend to over-accommodate. Learning what healthy boundaries are, and how to set them, is critical for anyone recovering from narcissistic parenting.

Seek out healthier, more functional relationships.

At first these can feel hard, even impossible, to recognize, and you may not trust that you can draw them toward you. That’s okay. Start with the relationship with your therapist, a trained professional whose job is to show up in a healthy, boundaried way, and let them show you what’s possible. Over time, that can shape who you let into your life.

Rebuild a cohesive, stable sense of self.

For most adult children of narcissists, the core work is developing a more cohesive and stable sense of self: learning to value yourself for who you are, not for who you think you “should” be to win approval. A shaky sense of self touches everything, from your physical and mental health to your relationships to your career, and yes, even your bank account. Focusing your work here is one of the most powerful ways to organize your healing.

Both/And: Mourning the Parent You Deserved and Accepting the One You Got

In my clinical work, recovery from narcissistic parenting almost always involves a grief no one prepared you for. You’re grieving not a death, but an absence. The absence of a parent who could see you as a separate human being, with your own needs, feelings, and right to exist fully.

Renee, a 39-year-old who runs a $200 million venture fund, described the moment this grief hit her. “I was watching my daughter’s school play, and she kept looking at me in the audience. Not performing for me. Just checking that I was there. And I realized I spent my entire childhood performing for my mother, and she never once just watched me. She was always watching herself through me.”

The both/and is this. You can mourn the parent you deserved, the one who would have celebrated your separateness rather than punished it. And you can accept, with fierce compassion for yourself, that that parent was never available. Both the mourning and the acceptance are necessary. One without the other leaves you stuck, either in fantasy or in bitterness.

The Systemic Lens: How Culture Protects Narcissistic Parents

There’s something individual therapy can miss if we’re not careful: the cultural scaffolding around daughters of narcissistic parents. Our culture holds a deep, almost religious reverence for parenthood, and for motherhood in particular. “Honor thy father and mother.” “But she’s your mother.” “Family is everything.” These scripts work like a social immune system, shielding the family unit from scrutiny even when that unit is causing harm.

For adult children of narcissistic parents, that protection is devastating. Every time you try to name what happened, the culture pushes back: you’re ungrateful, dramatic, disloyal. The parent’s behavior gets shielded by the very norms that should be protecting the child.

This isn’t accidental. Systems that center parental authority over children’s wellbeing serve the people who hold the power in them. Healing requires recognizing that your family’s dysfunction didn’t happen in a vacuum. It was enabled and reinforced by a culture that still, in many ways, prioritizes the comfort of parents over the safety of children. Naming that system is part of the work, not just working on yourself inside it.

This post isn’t meant to demonize narcissists. Narcissistic parents most likely developed this way because of what was modeled to them by their own parents. And so it travels down the generations, until one person, in one generation, decides consciously and intentionally to break the cycle. My hope is that if you saw yourself in this article, whether as the child of a narcissist or as someone recognizing these traits in yourself, you’ll make the choice to break the cycle, for yourself and for whatever family or legacy you create.

Here’s to healing relational trauma and building thriving lives on solid foundations.

Warmly,
Annie

References

• American Psychiatric Association. 2013. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. 5th ed. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Publishing.
• Bowlby, John. 1969. Attachment and Loss: Vol. 1. Attachment. New York: Basic Books.
• Durvasula, Ramani. 2024. It’s Not You: Identifying and Healing from Narcissistic People. New York: The Open Field.
• Kernberg, Otto F. 1975. Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism. New York: Jason Aronson.
• Main, Mary, and Judith Solomon. 1990. “Procedures for Identifying Infants as Disorganized/Disoriented During the Ainsworth Strange Situation.” In Attachment in the Preschool Years: Theory, Research, and Intervention. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• McBride, Karyl. 2008. Will I Ever Be Good Enough? Healing the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers. New York: Free Press.
• Schore, Allan N. 2003. Affect Dysregulation and Disorders of the Self. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
• Brummelman, Eddie, Sander Thomaes, Stefanie A. Nelemans, Bram Orobio de Castro, Geertjan Overbeek, and Brad J. Bushman. 2015. “Origins of Narcissism in Children.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112 (12): 3659-62.

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