Why You Still Seek Your Narcissistic Parent’s Approval Even When You Know Better

RELATIONAL TRAUMA • July 19, 2026

A Quiet Moment, A Loud Question

It’s 2 a.m. and Erin is sitting on the edge of her bed. She’s 43, a hospital administrator, the person her staff calls when a policy needs untangling at midnight. The dim glow of her phone barely cuts the dark. Her chest is tight. She’s replayed today’s call with her mother three times already. The dismissive silence when Erin mentioned her promotion. The way her mother pivoted to her sister’s engagement before Erin had finished the sentence. The small, practiced comment about Erin’s weight, delivered like an observation about weather.

And yet. Sitting there in the quiet, Erin notices something underneath the anger. A familiar, humiliating hope. Maybe if she calls tomorrow and explains it differently. Maybe if she mentions the award. Maybe then.

She knows better. She’s read the books, seen a therapist, understood intellectually that her mother is unlikely to give her what she’s hoping for. And still, the longing sits there. Reaching for something that hasn’t come.

Sitting with women like Erin over more than fifteen years of clinical work, I’ve come to think this isn’t weakness or a failure of logic. It’s also not something any single framework fully explains. Before I go further, a note on how I’m using composite details in this piece: Erin and Alicia, whom you’ll meet shortly, are composites built from patterns I’ve seen across many different clients, not real individuals or verbatim sessions. Details have been changed and blended to protect privacy while keeping the emotional truth intact.

What Is a Narcissistic Parent, and What Is NPD?

Before going further, it’s worth being precise about language, because this is a place where casual use and clinical use diverge in ways that matter. When I use the phrase “narcissistic parent” in a piece like this, including in the title, I’m using it the way most people search for it and talk about it: as a description of a pattern of parenting behavior, not as a diagnosis of a specific person you know. That distinction matters, and I want to name it clearly rather than let the two blur together.

Narcissistic parenting, as I use the term clinically, describes a pattern in which a parent consistently prioritizes their own emotional needs, ego, or image over the genuine needs of their child. It exists on a spectrum. Some parents show overt grandiosity and entitlement. Others show more covert patterns: emotional unavailability, living vicariously through a child’s achievements, love that seems to come and go depending on how well the child is performing. What tends to unite these patterns is the child’s experience of being treated primarily as an extension of the parent, rather than as a separate person with an inner life of her own.

I want to be careful here about a few things this post will not claim. It will not claim that every parent who behaves this way is unaware of it, wired a particular way, or incapable of change. People are more varied than any single framework, and I don’t know your specific parent. It will also not claim that manipulation or gaslighting are universal, predictable features of every narcissistic parent’s behavior. Some parents who fit this general pattern are more subtle. Some are more overt. Some genuinely don’t see the impact of their behavior. Some do and continue anyway. I can’t tell you which is true of your parent from a blog post, and I’d be doing you a disservice if I pretended I could.

One Possible Lens: The Trauma Bond

Erin came to see me after her second panic attack in a month. “I understand on paper that my mother isn’t going to say the things I need to hear,” she told me early on. “I understand it cognitively. But every single time something good happens, the first thing I want to do is call her. Every single time.”

What Erin was describing is one thing that sometimes gets called a trauma bond, a term that’s become widely used and, in the process, somewhat overused. Patrick Carnes, PhD, a psychologist and addiction specialist, originally described trauma bonding in the context of hostage situations and cult dynamics: a bond that forms not because of the harm itself, but through an alternating cycle of harm and comfort, withdrawal and reconnection. His framework has since been extended, with real but imperfect fit, to some family systems.

I want to be direct about the limits of this framework before I say anything else about it. Trauma bond is a useful lens for some patterns in some families. It is not a diagnosis I would make about your specific relationship from a single description, and it isn’t the only way to understand persistent approval-seeking. Some of what looks like a trauma bond is that. Some of it is something else entirely, including ordinary grief, ordinary hope, or a family system with genuinely mixed messages that don’t rise to the level of a bond built on harm.

Where the framework does seem to fit, here’s the mechanism as I understand it. When a parent alternates between coldness and warmth, a child doesn’t necessarily learn to distrust the parent outright. What can happen instead is that the child learns love is unpredictable and requires effort to earn. The warm moments don’t cancel the harder ones, in this account. They can reinforce the effort of reaching for them, because sometimes reaching works. Judith Herman, MD, clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and author of Trauma and Recovery, has written about how prolonged difficulty in close relationships, especially in childhood, can produce a set of symptoms she named Complex PTSD, distinguishing it from single-incident trauma. One symptom she describes is a chronic orientation toward a difficult caregiver: watching their moods, anticipating their needs, organizing identity partly around their approval or their anger (Herman, commentary on Resick et al., 2012, PMID 22729977). That’s a real, documented pattern for some people. It’s not automatically the explanation for every instance of a grown child wanting a parent’s approval.

Some peer-reviewed research offers partial, correlational support for links between certain parenting patterns and narcissistic traits in children, though these studies describe associations, not universal rules, and none of them can tell you what’s true in your specific family. A few findings: remembered childhood overprotection has been associated with both vulnerable and grandiose narcissistic traits in the children studied (PMID 32426139). Fathers’ narcissistic traits have shown an indirect association with children’s narcissistic traits, partly through overvaluation (PMID 32751639). Maternal hostility reported by children at age twelve was associated with higher exploitativeness, a specific narcissistic trait, at age fourteen in one longitudinal study (PMID 28042186). None of these findings mean a given parent’s behavior determines a given outcome. Correlational research describes patterns across groups, not predictions about any one family.

Intermittent Reinforcement: A Partial Explanation, Not a Complete One

B.F. Skinner’s research on reinforcement schedules, conducted in the 1950s and 60s, is genuinely foundational to behavioral psychology. In his experiments, animals on an intermittent reinforcement schedule, where a reward came sometimes but not predictably, pressed a lever more persistently than animals who were rewarded every time. That’s a well-established finding about operant conditioning in a controlled experimental setting.

It’s tempting to take that finding and apply it directly to human parent-child approval-seeking, and some popular writing on narcissistic parenting does exactly that, often adding confident claims about dopamine and a brain that becomes “addicted” to the chase. I want to be more careful than that. Human attachment to a parent is vastly more complicated than a lever press, and it involves language, identity, culture, love, and decades of shared history that a pigeon in a box doesn’t have. Intermittent reinforcement may be one contributing piece of why unpredictable warmth from a parent can feel especially hard to let go of. It is a partial explanation offered with real humility, not a complete neurological account of your specific experience, and I’d be overstating the science if I claimed otherwise.

Applied cautiously to a narcissistic family pattern: when a parent sometimes offers warmth or attunement and other times withholds it, some adult children describe a felt sense of being pulled toward the unpredictability itself. Alicia, a 44-year-old operations director, sat across from me in our third session, turning a chipped coffee mug in her hands while she talked. “There were these moments when my mother was just… herself. Warm, funny, actually interested in me. Part of why I kept coming back for twenty years was that I knew she was in there somewhere. I kept thinking she’d come back for good.” I felt the familiar ache of recognition sitting with her, the one I feel often in this work: not pity, something closer to respect for how long hope can hold on.

Those warm moments were likely real. That doesn’t mean the pattern that followed them is fully explained by reward schedules, and it doesn’t mean the pull Alicia felt was a malfunction. It may simply be what hope does when it has occasional evidence to point to.

Attachment Theory: What It Does and Doesn’t Explain

John Bowlby, the foundational attachment theorist, described an attachment behavioral system that gets activated by perceived threat and seeks proximity to a primary caregiver, a pattern he documented as common across many children (Bowlby, 1969). Attachment theory offers a genuinely useful lens for understanding why children, and later adults, often keep reaching toward the people who raised them, even when that reaching hasn’t been rewarded in the way they’d hoped.

I want to resist a claim that shows up often in popular writing on this subject, including in earlier versions of this piece: the idea that approval-seeking after recognizing harm is something your biology forces on you, fixed and automatic, with no room for individual difference. That overstates what attachment research actually supports. Attachment theory describes common, well-documented patterns. It is not a universal law that applies identically to every person regardless of temperament, other relationships, therapy, or life experience. Your logical mind understanding that your parent is unlikely to change doesn’t mean some part of you can’t still feel the pull. Both things can be true without either one being a fixed biological sentence.

Allan Schore, PhD, a neuropsychologist and clinical faculty member at UCLA, has spent decades researching how early attachment relationships relate to the development of right-hemisphere functioning involved in emotional regulation (Schore, “Attachment and the regulation of the right brain,” PMID 11707891). His work describes a developmental, correlational relationship between early caregiving experiences and later patterns of emotional regulation. It’s careful, serious research, and it’s also not a claim that your brain is permanently “wired” in some irreversible way. Developmental research generally supports the idea that early patterns are influential and that later experience, including therapy and new relationships, can shape how those patterns show up over time. I don’t think it’s honest to promise you a specific timeline or outcome, but I also don’t think it’s honest to tell you that early experience is destiny with no room to move.

Here’s what I’d say plainly: your logical mind can understand a great deal about your parent, your history, and this pattern, and that understanding may not fully resolve the longing on its own. That’s not a failure of insight. It may simply mean the work has more than one layer, some of it cognitive and some of it slower, more embodied, and less linear.

Both/And: You Can Understand the Pattern and Still Feel the Pull

One of the more painful traps I see adult children of narcissistic parents fall into is believing their longing for approval must mean one of two things: either they’re weak for still wanting it, or their parent must secretly be capable of giving it to them after all. I don’t think either has to be true.

The Both/And that matters here: you can both understand that your parent may not be able to give you what you’re hoping for, and still feel the pull toward them. Both things can be real at once. The longing doesn’t cancel the understanding. The understanding doesn’t erase the longing. Pauline Boss, PhD, a family therapist and professor emerita at the University of Minnesota who developed the concept of ambiguous loss, has written extensively about what she calls both/and thinking as a tool for living with exactly this kind of unresolved situation, one where a person is present but the relationship you needed isn’t fully available. Her framework suggests that trying to force a single, tidy resolution, either full reconciliation or complete emotional closure, often causes more suffering than learning to hold both truths at once.

Alicia spent years quietly criticizing herself for “still caring” what her mother thought. Sitting with her, I noticed how carefully she carried that shame, like evidence against her rather than evidence of what she’d survived. Talking about it differently, not as weakness but as an attachment system shaped by years of inconsistent connection, something in her softened. “It’s not that I’m broken,” she said, looking out the window. “It’s that I was shaped by what happened. That’s different.” I’ve come to think of this reframe, from broken to shaped, as one of the more useful pivots in this work. She didn’t resolve the pull that day. She just stopped being ashamed of having it.

What This Costs You Day to Day

The ongoing effort to earn a narcissistic parent’s approval carries real costs, many of them easy to miss because they’ve become so normal they stop registering as costs at all.

The cost to your self-trust. When someone else’s shifting approval becomes your main barometer for your own worth, you can lose touch with your own internal compass. You get skilled at reading someone else’s moods and adjusting accordingly, and in the process you can lose track of what you actually think, want, or feel on a given Tuesday. This isn’t because your judgment is actually unreliable. It’s often because you were trained, early and repeatedly, to defer to an external authority that wasn’t reliable in the first place.

The cost to your present relationships. A template built around conditional love and approval-seeking doesn’t always stay confined to the relationship where it started. It can show up in a marriage where you over-function to avoid disapproval you haven’t actually been threatened with. It can show up in friendships where asking for what you need feels dangerous. It can show up at work, in the extra hour you put in at 9 p.m. that has less to do with the project and more to do with an old, familiar need to prove something to someone who isn’t even in the room.

The cost to your body. The vigilance involved in managing a difficult parent, tracking their moods, anticipating their reactions, adjusting your presentation to minimize friction, takes real energy. For some people this shows up as disrupted sleep, a jaw that won’t unclench, a body that stays braced even on an ordinary Tuesday when nothing acute is happening. This isn’t a physiological outcome I’d say is guaranteed for anyone in this situation. Not everyone develops the same symptoms, and I can’t tell you a specific diagnosis or timeline from a blog post. What I can say is that in my practice, I’ve seen this vigilance show up in driven women who look, from every external measure, like they’re thriving, while their bodies are quietly telling a more complicated story.

When It’s More Than Approval-Seeking: Coercive Control and Safety

Everything above describes ordinary, if painful, family disappointment: a parent who falls short, a child who keeps hoping anyway. I want to name clearly that this is different from situations involving coercive control, stalking, threats, or violence, and it matters to keep these categories distinct rather than letting one blur into the other.

If your parent has threatened your safety or the safety of people you love, monitors or tracks you in ways that feel invasive, controls your access to money, transportation, or communication as a means of control, or if you feel unsafe rather than simply disappointed or hurt, that’s a different situation that calls for individualized safety planning, not the general reflections in this piece. Ordinary family conflict and coercive control can sometimes look similar from the outside and feel very different from the inside, and only you are in a position to know which one you’re actually experiencing.

If you’re unsure, or if you’re currently in danger, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available 24/7 at 1-800-799-7233, and at thehotline.org, including confidential chat support. If you are in immediate danger, please contact local emergency services. A therapist, domestic violence advocate, or attorney who specializes in family safety can help you build a plan specific to your actual circumstances, which is something a blog post, by its nature, cannot do.

The Systemic Lens: Culture, Gender, and the Hunger for Approval

It would be incomplete to talk about narcissistic parenting without naming some of the larger systems that make these dynamics easier to miss or excuse. Cultures that prize achievement, image, and social status over emotional honesty create conditions where these family patterns can flourish largely unquestioned. A parent who pushes a child hard for reflected glory can look, from the outside, like an invested, supportive parent. A child who’s learned to perform competence and hide vulnerability gets called resilient, when what’s actually happening is quieter and more costly.

Gender is part of this picture too. Jennifer Freyd, PhD, psychologist and professor emerita at the University of Oregon, developed betrayal trauma theory to describe how people can develop a kind of protective unawareness of harm from someone they depend on, precisely because full awareness would threaten the relationship they need (Freyd, “Betrayal Trauma,” Ethics & Behavior, 1994). Her broader body of work has also examined how social conditioning around appearance and relational value can shape what girls learn to prioritize about themselves. I want to be careful not to overstate this into a universal claim: not every girl raised in an appearance- and relationship-focused environment develops the same pattern, and gender is one variable among several, not a determining one on its own. Where it does apply, the hunger for approval can become a central, quiet organizing feature of a woman’s adult life, one that shows up long after childhood in a boardroom at 4 p.m. or in the split second before hitting send on an email she’s rewritten four times.

Cultural narratives about family loyalty, about honoring your parents no matter what, about the moral high ground of forgiveness, aren’t inherently wrong. But when applied uncritically to genuinely difficult family dynamics, they can function to keep adult children stuck in a cycle of hoping, trying again, and absorbing more harm than the narrative accounts for.

“Since narcissists deep down feel themselves to be faultless, it is inevitable that when they are in conflict with the world they will invariably perceive the conflict as the world’s fault.”

M. Scott Peck, MD, psychiatrist and author of People of the Lie

Beginning to Grieve the Parent You Needed

The work of coming to terms with a narcissistic parent’s impact isn’t primarily about confronting them, changing them, or finally having the conversation that unlocks their empathy. For many of the women I work with, it’s closer to grief work, though I want to be honest that grief work doesn’t move in a straight line and doesn’t arrive at a fixed finish date.

Specifically, it’s often the grief of acknowledging what you didn’t have and may not get. Not the parent who exists, but the parent you needed: the one who saw you clearly, delighted in who you are rather than what you produce, and could hold your needs without making them about themselves. This kind of loss is complicated by the fact that the person you’re grieving is often still alive and still, in some form, present in your life. Pauline Boss calls this ambiguous loss: mourning someone who is physically present but not fully available in the way you need, a kind of loss with no built-in ritual and no clear endpoint. It asks you to grieve something that was never fully given, rather than something once had and then lost.

What I’ve seen in my practice, though this isn’t an outcome I can promise you’re guaranteed to reach, is that for some people, the moment they genuinely begin grieving the parent they needed, rather than the parent they’re still hoping to reach, something in the chronic reaching starts to loosen. The longing doesn’t necessarily disappear. But for some, its grip loosens enough that the approval stops feeling like the one thing that would finally fix everything, and starts to feel like something that was always somewhat beyond reach, and never the full measure of their worth to begin with. I can’t promise you this timeline or this outcome. I can tell you it’s possible for some people, and that the work of finding out is worth doing regardless of exactly where it leads.

You already know the pattern. This is one way to start working with it differently.

A focused self-paced course on relational patterns, why a nervous system can keep reaching for the same kind of approval, and specific practices some clients have found useful for interrupting the reach. This isn’t a guarantee the pattern resolves on any particular timeline, and it isn’t a substitute for individual support if you need more than a self-paced format can offer.

Erin came back to see me about six months after we’d worked through some of this material. She told me she’d called her mother with news of an award. For the first time, she paused before dialing and asked herself what she actually wanted from the call. Not what she was hoping her mother would give her. What she actually wanted. “I realized,” she said, “that I wanted her to be proud of me. And then I realized I’m proud of myself. I’m still working on whether that’s enough some days. Most days, it mostly is.”

That’s often what the work looks like. Slow, uneven, and worth doing anyway.

If you’re finding yourself in this pattern, you don’t have to sort through it alone. I offer individual therapy and self-paced recovery resources for driven women working through relational patterns like this one. Whether that means scheduling a consultation, joining a mini-course waitlist, or simply reading further, you get to decide what pace and format fits your life right now. What matters more than any single next step is that you don’t have to have this figured out by yourself.

References & Related Reading

• Herman, Judith Lewis. “CPTSD Is a Distinct Entity: Comment on Resick et al. (2012).” Journal of Traumatic Stress, 2012. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22729977
• Carnes, Patrick. The Betrayal Bond: Breaking Free of Exploitative Relationships. Health Communications, 1997.
• Schore, Allan N. “Attachment and the Regulation of the Right Brain.” Attachment & Human Development, 2000. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11707891
• Boss, Pauline. Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief. Harvard University Press, 1999.
• Freyd, Jennifer J. “Betrayal Trauma: Traumatic Amnesia as an Adaptive Response to Childhood Abuse.” Ethics & Behavior 4, no. 4 (1994): 307-329.
• Peck, M. Scott. People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil. Simon & Schuster, 1983. goodreads.com/quotes/52723
• Annie Wright, LMFT. “Setting Boundaries with a Narcissistic Parent Without Losing Your Mind.”
• Annie Wright, LMFT. “The Grey Rock Method: Peace Without Going No-Contact.”
• Annie Wright, LMFT. “How Does the Covert Narcissist Parent Shape Adult Relationships?”
• Annie Wright, LMFT. “Therapy for Adult Children of Narcissistic Parents.”
• National Domestic Violence Hotline. thehotline.org

If you grew up with a narcissistic parent and you’re still reaching for approval that hasn’t quite come, you’re not alone in this, and there isn’t something wrong with you for still wanting it. What you’re experiencing is a genuinely human response to an early environment that shaped you toward this particular kind of longing. For many people, over time and with support, that longing loosens its grip, even when it doesn’t disappear entirely. The work of building a sense of approval from within, becoming your own steady witness, is some of the most meaningful work a person can take on, at whatever pace fits your actual life.

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