This is the letter I didn’t want to write.
All month long, I’ve been producing content about how our attachment styles and our ability to perceive love get deeply impacted by who raised us—and whether or not that person was narcissistic. We’ve explored the skewed relational palette, the way being raised by or partnered with a narcissist conditions us to accept breadcrumbs as a full meal. We’ve talked about how we unconsciously seek out partners who feel familiar in all the wrong ways.
And that’s important work. That’s the dominant narrative, and it’s real.
But there’s something else—something under-discussed and harder to say out loud—that I need to bring into the light today. Because so often I find that the letters I resist writing are the ones I most need to write. And if there’s resistance, there’s usually something worth looking at underneath it.
So here it is, plainly: Children of narcissists may become narcissistic in their own romantic relationships themselves.
I know. It’s a sentence that might make your stomach clench. It makes mine clench, too, because I’m not talking about this in the abstract. I’m talking about me.
There was a part of my early adult life—and sometimes these patterns exist for the same person at different points in their life; they certainly did for me—where the male imprint I’d had earlier in life, a man with extremely strong narcissistic traits in addition to his personality disorder, conditioned me to seek out partners who, while on the surface didn’t exactly appear like him, still had narcissistic tendencies. The selfishness. The one-sided nature of love. The conditional quality of it all. That was my twenties. That relational palette was the only one I had.
And then, in my later twenties, I met my husband.
My husband is 100% not a narcissist. I’m very proud of that, and I understand what it means—it’s incredible that I did enough healing to attract somebody like him and to recognize him as safe when he showed up. But what’s also true is that in a safe, devoted, loyal relationship, a whole new set of work arrived.
Because freed from the trap of being partnered to a narcissist, my pendulum swung in this other direction. And I got to meet the parts of me that were, I’ll honestly name it, highly narcissistic.
These were really young parts. Parts that never got the care, the attention, the time, the devotion they deserved. I came from a pretty egregious childhood background with three younger sisters—the first of which arrived when I was nineteen months old. That, combined with being raised by a single mother and being deeply harmed by my father figure, left me with what felt like a bottomless well of needs. And at that point in my life, I didn’t know how to meet my own needs myself. I over-relied on my partner to do it. There were very young parts of me that saw my partner as an extension of myself and wasn’t as honoring of his personhood as I could have been.
Thinking about it now, it reminds me of something Dr. Gabor Maté would call the hungry ghost—that Buddhist parable of creatures with immense, empty bellies, tiny mouths, and thin necks. Maté used it as a metaphor for addiction: the insatiable, desperate search to fill an internal emotional void with external substances and behaviors. But I think the same image applies to what can happen in a relationship when someone who has been starved of love finally finds it. An insatiable, desperate search to fill that internal void with the things we never received from our early attachment figures.
It’s like being someone who’s been starving and walking into a fully stocked grocery store for the first time—with free rein—and wanting to tear everything off the shelves. Not because you’re greedy. Because you’re starving.
If this letter is hitting close to home, I want you to know there’s a place to take this deeper. On Friday, February 27th, I’m hosting a 90-minute live transformational workshop: Loving When You Were Raised by or Partnered With a Narcissist. We’ll work with the Three Mirrors framework to identify your specific romantic operating system, name your archetype, translate the neuroscience, and practice three interventions you can use immediately. $47 includes lifetime recording access and a robust companion workbook. Limited to 100 participants.
