Have you ever heard the joke:
Why did the narcissist cross the road?
He thought it was a boundary.
A part of me loves dark humor. Another part of me gets physically sickened at the thought of narcissistic abuse. Like pull out the barf bag sick!
You see, I’m an adult child of a narcissist and many of my clients are survivors of narcissistic abuse.
I grew up with no boundaries. Correction. I grew up with the boundaries my father set. And those boundaries had a very specific purpose: Create a reality in which my father had the most power and control over us. Raise your hand if you can you relate to this!
A dehumanization process ensues.
You start off being born a person innately connected to the full spectrum of your aliveness. You have access to the whole color palette of your humanness and its infinite possibilities. You could paint your inner and outer worlds as you see fit if given the time, space, and love to flourish. Your default position is trust. You trust yourself first and foremost. And you’re able to navigate the world knowing there’s a safe home to return to.
For those of us who are adult children of narcissists we have a very different story. It begins with a home that is chaotic, unsettling, neglectful, psychologically and physically dangerous. The psychological abuse may be obvious or it may be hidden in the underbelly of the beast barely noticeable. Whatever the case, one day…
You wake up unrecognizable even to your own self. You feel like an empty shell of a person. You’ve exiled within you what makes you YOU in the hopes of becoming who the narcissistic parent wants you to be. If you’re people-pleasing enough, smart enough, successful enough, beautiful enough, strong enough, [fill in the blank] ENOUGH, maybe then you can be acknowledged, accepted, or loved.
But puppets aren’t made to be loved for who they are according to a narcissistic parent. They’re loved for how they can be used, manipulated, and taken advantage of. You start believing you don’t have a right to be your own person, embody your humanness, experience and express your vitality. You don’t see the life force within you. All you know is a world in black and white. Whatever feels true and real for you is invalidated, muted, or discarded. Your truth becomes dangerous.
You discover all kinds of survival strategies. Your parts–one by one–take on the necessary burdens and roles in an attempt to get you to the other side of hell. Your protectors are dedicated to not having you experience your wounded, exiled parts as we say in Internal Family Systems (IFS) lingo. You may feel numb, dizzy, sedated, frozen, or just plain dead inside. You may shut down, dissociate, self-isolate, or self-soothe using substances, activities, or people.
The narcissistic parent attempts to “snuff out” your core Self. Your Self with its curiosity, compassion, connectedness, creativity, confidence, courage, calm, and clarity is a threat to the narcissist. And ultimately a threat to you in that environment. Remember, your survival as a child depends on the attention and responsiveness of your narcissistic parent. Threatening the person your survival depends on is not an option.
Your internal system blocks access to the experience of who you really are to prevent your core self (not yet fully developed) from becoming damaged. It’s the one last Hail Mary. You believe your painful vulnerabilities and layers of armor are who you are as a result. You betray or abandon yourself in the hopes of becoming who others need or want you to be. The good news is that’s not the end of the story. It’s not the end of your story.
I’ve been fortunate enough as an Internal Family Systems therapist to witness countless clients brave their inner wilderness and discover this one truth:
You are not damaged, never were and never can be. Regardless of what hell you’ve been through to be reading this right now. There’s no loss. Only lost access to your true nature.
There’s another way to live. There’s a way out. I’m sharing with you here 5 ways out. As always feel free to take what works and leave the rest. This is simply an invitation.
5 Ways to Overcome Narcissistic Abuse for Adult Children of Narcissists using Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy:
1. THE WAY OF COMPASSION.
Compassion towards yourself. If you’re an adult child survivor of narcissistic abuse and reading this right now, you are strong beyond measure. You’re a testament to the spirit of human resilience. You’ve had to bear a type of abuse whose sole purpose was to break you down and make you powerless. You were lost even to yourself. You didn’t know who you were, which way was up or down, left or right. You grew up in a home with fun house mirrors. The only thing they reflected back to you was someone else’s distorted perceptions or projections of their traumas. That was not you. It was not your burden to bear.
I’m sorry you had to go through that. You did absolutely nothing to deserve having a narcissistic parent or caregiver. A part of me wants to say, “You were raised by EVIL in one of its cruelest human forms and you’re still here deserving of the love that should have been your birthright.” I want to extend my compassion and appreciation to the protective parts of you who did their best and got you to where you are today. Even the parts looked down upon in today’s society. I want to say to them, “You did what you had to do to survive. I’m grateful for you.”
Compassion toward your narcissistic parent. Stay with me. Hear me out. I know this may not sit well with you right now. But a major–and I mean MAJOR–turning point in the recovery journey of my clients (and my own) is being able to experience compassion for the narcissistic parent. It does not mean forgiving, tolerating, or accepting the harm and destruction they have caused. Two things can be true at once. Your narcissistic parent has:
A perpetrator part that unleashes soul-crushing, life-destroying forces on others AND
An inner child part that has suffered shame, abandonment, and destruction (at another narcissist’s hands most likely).
You may be thinking, Sofia, Why would I even want to think about my narcissistic parent’s inner child? It’s enough to be dealing with my trauma!
Let me explain. I call it the “Wizard of Oz” effect. When my father was 4-years-old, his mother would tell him that if he didn’t do as he was told she would jump into the village well to drown herself. He cried, screamed, and tugged at her dress in desperation. My grandmother’s reaction? Laughter.
I could see my father as a 4-year-old boy when my resentful, angry parts softened in therapy. I too have a little girl part who knows terror, abandonment, and humiliation. All of a sudden my system experienced a sense of relief. My parts got updated. As an adult, I can see my father is not the boogey-man. He’s not a monster out to get me. He’s not all powerful. It was like the scene from Wizard of Oz when the curtains get pulled, and there’s no “mighty or powerful Oz.” Just an old man. Or just an injured, terrorized 4-year-old. It’s the “Wizard of Oz” effect.
This clarity helped the parts of me that were still scared of my father relax WITHOUT sacrificing my self-protection. I was even more connected to my capacity to stand up for myself because the fear was no longer in the driver’s seat. With clarity came even more compassion and I could discover some beliefs my father’s parts held:
If others need me, they will never abandon me.
If I’m the best and most powerful, no one can ever hurt me.
If others admire me, worship me, or fear me, I will never feel shame or unworthy.
If I control how other people think and feel, I will never be at the mercy of others.
This information informed my thinking regarding the best way to protect myself. And ultimately led to my making a self-led decision bringing more joy, peace, freedom, and love into my life.
ACTION STEP:
Write your inner child a letter extending your compassion and setting an intention to get to know them when it feels safe to do so. Let them know that you’re an adult. Offer some information about your present life (for example your age, your physical body, your achievements, the security or stability in your life, the relationships that are important to you, the choices you make in your day to day, etc).
Imagine the inner child of your narcissistic parent. Practice the Wizard of Oz effect. Pull the curtain in your mind’s eye and seeing a 4-year-old version of your narcissistic parent. What experiences have they had? What beliefs do they hold? Chances are they are similar to your inner child parts who have suffered at the hands of narcissistic abuse! Treat this exercise as another kind of update for your parts. Maybe the “mighty and powerful Oz” is not as mighty and powerful in the present as some of our scared inner child parts think they are.
2. THE WAY OF CURIOSITY
Do you feel like you are your trauma? This is especially the case if you’re early in your healing journey. I went through a stage where I felt so raw and exposed all the time that if the wind blew in the wrong direction I might collapse into a puddle of shame and despair. I could swear I was carrying my vital organs on the outside. You may feel this way too because your whole system–its time, resources, and energy–has been organized around not feeling the original wounding that happened back then and there. But your trauma, who you had to be, what you had to survive….These are all snapshots of your life movie in the long-term.
I invite you to get curious about who you could be if you heal the trauma. Who would you be if you could let go of the baggage you’ve been carrying and do whatever you could with your time, resources, and energy? What if you could take up as much or as little space as you wanted? Maybe there’s more than one answer. After all, you’re made up of different parts. Maybe there’s no answer. That’s okay too. It’s a trailhead or a pathway for further exploration. One thing is for sure—there’s no wrong answer. You’re an adult now and you have an opportunity your child self could only dream of having.
You can follow your curiosity by educating yourself about narcissistic abuse, complex trauma, and recovery. I have analytical parts that like to read, research, and take notes so this was quite a comforting self-led educational process for me and many of my clients. Maybe you can relate? If so, branch out and learn about what happened to you. Discover tools that can help you get yourself psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually out of the past and into the present. Get curious about other survivors’ stories. How did they stop being in survival mode and start thriving?
ACTION STEP:
Journal. Who would you be if you could let go of the baggage you’ve been carrying? If you could do whatever you wanted with your time, resources, and energy, what would you do? If you could be unapologetically you, what would being you feel like? If there’s no answer, that’s okay. See if you can get curious and explore just the possibility of choice. Chances are many parts of you still don’t believe you have a choice. Get to know those parts.
Research. If you have researching or analytical parts, find some resources related to information they want to know. Make a list. Here are some resources you may find useful: Doctor Ramani, Complex PTSD, Healing the Adult Children of Narcissists, The Primal Wound. Read memoirs or other people’s stories on how they overcame abuse and created lives they love. Here’s one I recommend on complex trauma. And one more by Gabby Bernstein titled Happy Days.
3. THE WAY OF CONNECTION
“Trauma blocks love, and love heals trauma,” according to IFS trauma specialist Frank Anderson. Possibly the truest statement I’ve ever heard. If you grew up with a narcissistic parent, you got the message that love is chaotic and dangerous. You may crave connection yet parts of you may be frightened by it. You may have a deep yearning to belong yet parts of you may feel suffocated by others. It all makes sense considering your history. The love you were given was not love despite what you were gaslighted into believing. It was emotional violence and relational violation meant to attack your sense of self and reality.
You have a choice as an adult. You get to choose who you connect with. You get to choose how you connect, how much you connect, and when to connect. You are the gatekeeper of your life. You can dip your toe in relationships or you can dive in head first. You get to change your mind as you see fit. I promise you there are people out there who don’t ask you to give up parts of yourself to be in connection with them. There are people who would love to meet you and all that makes you YOU. Believe it or not. Your biological family is not the end all be all. You can create a family of choice. I have found through my personal and professional journey the connection that binds a family of choice has tremendous healing power.
There are different ways of connecting. You can join an online or in-person fellowship program like Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families (ACOA). This fellowship program has had a huge impact on myself and my clients’ lives. You can join Internal Family Systems Therapy groups or meetings like this one. You can get involved in your local community. You can volunteer or be of service to others. You can also join my newsletter or facebook group to become part of The Self-Hero Community. There you’ll meet high achievers, passionate professionals, creatives, and big-hearted entrepreneurs who are ALSO trauma survivors. They are taking their self-love and self-empowerment to a whole new level by getting to the bottom of their unresolved trauma for once and for all.
ACTION STEP:
Explore your options. What are the ways you’re drawn to connecting with others? Are there any recovery programs you’d like to explore? Any healing communities that speak to the parts of you that crave fellowship or traveling side by side with others on a similar healing journey? You may have to do some research or checking in with your parts to see what feels right in this moment or season of your life.
Decide and Schedule it. Choose one way of branching out, schedule it, and show up!
4. THE WAY OF PERSPECTIVE
Sometimes I live for a good reframe. I love the feeling of taking an idea apart, twisting it about, turning it upside down, detangling it from itself and revealing a whole new level of truth. Don’t you? A change in perspective can feel like a magic wand waved over your head breaking the spell you’ve been under. And, trust me, if you’re an adult child of a narcissistic parent, you’ve been under a strong spell. Here’s a new perspective for your consideration:
Having a narcissistic parent is a call to adventure you cannot ignore.
You get to answer the call and descend into the depths of your mind, body, and soul to discover and rescue the essence of your humanness. If that’s not a hero’s journey, I don’t know what is. As Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes, “As with any descent to the unconscious, there comes a time when one simply hopes for the best, pinches one's nose, and jumps into the abyss. If this were not so, we would not have needed to create the words heroine, hero, or courage.”
Remember, you’ve been wounded on a primal level. Narcissistic abuse shakes up the entire foundation of your humanness. Your ability to exist as a person experiencing and expressing your vitality is attacked. The purpose of narcissistic abuse is to disconnect you from your true self. The endgame is complete control and power over you. Narcissistic parents attempt to transform you into a puppet living in an alternate reality of their own making. You don’t feel grounded in your own beingness. You’re detached from your body. You don’t believe in your right to exist as yourself. You question your worth and goodness. You doubt your capacity to navigate your world.
You’ve been given a gift because of the depth and breadth of your trauma. You get to become the hero of your life. You get to jump into the abyss and connect with the shadows of your inner world. The parts of you that have been exiled. You get to know who you really are. You get to integrate and invite your primal humanness back into your body to experience joy, peace, freedom, and love. You get an intimate front row seat to what it means to be alive. Truly alive.
The more extreme your trauma is, the louder your call to adventure is, the greater your hero’s arc has to be, the deeper your transformation is, and the more alive, whole, and empowered you become.
You have learned what “evil” is and survived it. When I say evil, I mean malevolence defined as having or showing vicious ill will, spite, or hatred. You have a special superpower because you encountered malevolence in another. You were confronted with soul-crushing, life-destroying forces that traumatized you. But that’s not all. Narcissistic abuse is largely traumatic because it reflects back to you what humans are capable of, and therefore, what you, as a human being, are capable of. The ultimate shadow side of our shared humanity.
Clinical psychologist and professor Jordan Peterson states that that’s actually “partially the cure for post-traumatic stress disorder. If you’ve been naive and victimized, the way out is to no longer be naive or victimized. The reason why Harry Potter can withstand Voldemort is because he’s got a piece of him or he’s been touched by it.”
Dr. Peterson goes so far as to say, “The only way to keep the psychopaths at bay is to develop your inner psychopath so you know one when you see one. It’s like a set of tools you have at your disposal which is full knowledge of evil.”
This is the kind of reframe that I’m talking about. After all, we all have parts capable of becoming perpetrators in an attempt to survive. All parts are welcome. We can be in connection with those parts of ourselves. We have to be in order to fully heal. Sometimes aggression and power wielding is absolutely necessary and the most appropriate response to life’s circumstances. You can choose to use your full knowledge of evil to protect yourselves and others in a compassionate, courageous, Self-led way.
This is a gift to society because many people in positions of power are dominated by a perpetrator part whose purpose is to act out malevolence for personal gain. Self-leadership means being able to voluntarily use the full spectrum of your humanness for the greater good of your internal system and the world at large.
ACTION STEP:
Journal. If you could let go of the burdens you had to carry as a result of your abuse, what legacy would you want to keep? What are the treasures of your hero’s journey? How could the narcissistic abuse you suffered be a gift in your life? Invite the possibility that your narcissistic parent is not just your tormentor but also your tor-MENTOR as Dick Schwartz, founder of Internal Family Systems, teaches.
Set an intention to practice gratitude for these treasures. Remember, your true knowledge of evil and awareness of perpetrator parts in yourself and others puts you in a very unique position.
5. THE WAY OF REPARENTING
You get to become the one you’ve been waiting for. On your journey into the abyss you will discover what your “shadows” or exiled parts really are. They are inner children stuck in the past waiting to be rescued by you. They still are under the spell of narcissistic abuse. They still live in a world where Oz is the “mighty and powerful” one. Not now. Not here with you. YOU get to be the reliable grown up you wish you had back then and there. This is the deep inner healing work that is your birthright. You get to reparent yourself.
What if everything you ever needed was within? What a relief! You can go from looking outside for the answers to going inside and experiencing a rich, blooming inner world from which you can nourish your life.
You become your inner loving parent, witness, healer, leader, lover, CEO. You regain access to your core Self. The protective parts of you that have worked so hard to help you survive get to meet you for the first time. They can finally rest or choose a different role better suited for your thriving. I’m reminded of the poem Love After Love by Derek Walcott:
The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
ACTION STEP:
I highly recommend looking into this Self-Therapy book if you want to go solo on this journey.
Book a free video consultation with me. I promise you this is so much easier than you think. Healing doesn’t have to be hard. It can be safe, freeing, playful, and fun!
If you’re ready to dig deep and overcome narcissistic abuse in a stress-free way, then your next step is to contact me.
I believe in my bones that you are the hero of your own story and all you need to do is uncover the innate healing potential within you.
You CAN heal from your past and achieve the life deep down you know you’re worthy of. And I’m here to tell you it doesn’t have to be painful or uncomfortable. You CAN feel joy, peace, freedom, and love along the way.
Now, it’s your turn.
I’d love to hear from you in the comments section below. How has being an adult child of a narcissist affected you, your relationships, your life as a whole? What if you could overcome the trauma of growing up in this way? Who would you want to be? What would you want your life and relationships to look like?
This is just the beginning of our conversation and hopefully many more conversations to come. I look forward to seeing you around sofiavasi.com.
With love xx,
