When Your Parents Are Narcissists

Narcissist parents can turn a home into hell on earth for their children, leaving emotional scars that could affect these children for the rest of their lives. Understanding how these parents think and feel, however, is a key step in helping those children heal.

- Jennifer F. Netto and Lim Teck Choon

Vanessa’s father Charles is, to everyone around him, the epitome of a great person. He is charming, generous with help and advice and constantly talks about how much his children mean to him. To Vanessa and her siblings, however, their father becomes a completely different person behind closed doors. He is cold and demanding, and everything they say and do have to meet his approval. Everything they do is criticized, and he constantly tells them how worthless they are. The smallest infractions are punished severely. Vanessa was once locked in her room over the weekend, deprived of food and was told to drink from a bucket, for acting too "flirty" with a boy during a shopping trip. She was only 11 at that time.

THE DAMAGE THAT PARENTS CAN DO

Charles is a parent who may have narcissistic personality disorder (NPD). NPD can manifest in different ways in different people, but their behavioural pattern is more intense, obsessive and

damaging than typical ‘bad parenting’. Here are some common traits that manifest in parents with NPD:

• They think they are better than everyone else, regardless of whether this assumption is justified or not. There is nothing they cannot do – or so they claim. For some parents, it can also be about moral superiority – they may feel that they are more virtuous than everyone else. A closer look at their behaviour often reveals that they tend to take credit for other people’s successes, blame their failures on other people or reinterpret situations in which they are always the superstar.