by Band Back Together | Nov 16, 2015 | Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Pediatric Cancer, Perfectionism, Self Injury |
I learned about narcissistic parentification today. I’d been aware of narcissism and parentification as separate things prior to this, thanks to my son’s father, but I didn’t realize these two things often went together.
Yesterday my 6-year-old son attempted to stab himself in the eye with a pencil. This occurred after being asked not to throw paper.
He decided he needed to punish himself.
Thankfully, my husband caught the pencil and it never touched our son’s eye. Still, it was terrifying. This is not exactly new, although this is the most extreme self-punishment to date. Often when my son thinks he is in trouble for something, he will self-discipline by hitting himself or knocking his head against something. I’ve asked him why he does this, and he tells me that it’s so that he remembers what not to do.
We have an extreme perfectionist on our hands. This, too, I’ve known for a while. He has always been the kid who won’t try anything if he’s unsure he has it mastered. I had to get down on my hands and knees and physically SHOW HIM how to crawl when he was a baby! He wants to do everything perfectly the first time, and he will hide the fact he knows how to do something until he feels he can demonstrate the skill perfectly.
We’ve told him again and again how much we love him and don’t want him to hurt himself. We’ve told him it’s okay to make mistakes, that it’s expected and even necessary in order to learn and master new things. We’ve emphasized the fact that he isn’t in TROUBLE when things like this happen – that we are just reminding him to help him learn for next time. Yet, it doesn’t seem to register. He hurts himself anyway.
He is a 6-year-old self-injurer.
Lord knows he has plenty of reasons to behave this way. He is fighting cancer, has changed schools and residences in the last year, and is about to become a big brother.
And then, well, his dad is narcissistic…
Since my son’s self-injury has escalated even though the rest of our life has calmed down, I looked up the effects of narcissism on children today. And that led me to narcissistic parentification.
I learned that children of narcissistic parents are more prone to pediatric anxiety and depression. They can be self-destructive, have an irrational fear of failure, and either have difficulties in school or strive to be perfect.
Everything I read reminded me of my son.
by Band Back Together | Oct 26, 2015 | Adult Children of Narcissistic Parents, Bipolar Disorder, Child Abuse, Child Sexual Abuse, Grief, Loss, Murder, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder |
I had a younger aunt that was like a sister to me.
My sophomore year in college, I took her on spring break with me. When I moved out of state, and I would come home to visit, I didn’t stay at my parents, I would stay at her house. We were that close.
Then it all was gone. I got a call from my mother at 1AM one morning and my world stopped.
My aunt had been brutally tortured, murdered.
She was gone.
Murder brings out intense emotional reactions.
The emotional pain and anguish of murder seem unbearable. I feel an overwhelming sense of loss and deep, deep sorrow. I constantly experience thoughts about the circumstances of her death.
I relieve what I think happened and I see her being tortured and killed. I imagine the pleas for her life she was making.
Grieving for a murder victim is unlike any other grief. The murder of a loved one results in the survivors grieving not only the death, but how the person died.
I have intrusive visualizations of the murder and I see her suffering. I have flashbacks of the moment when I was notified of her death. I have flashbacks of the last time I saw her alive.
I dream of her knocking at my door and, when I open it, I see her, and she tells me, “It was a mistake! It wasn’t me.”
I never got to see her dead body, so I think part of me has denial about her gruesome death.
Her life was cut short through an act of sick cruelty. The disregard for human life adds overwhelming feelings of anger, distrust, injustice, and helplessness to the normal sense of loss and sorrow. Sometimes, I cry like I am never going to stop.
I don’t think a person can rebound from this.
I have suffered lots of childhood abuse, both childhood sexual abuse and childhood emotional abuse. I suffer from bipolar disorder and PTSD. My mother has narcissistic personality disorder.
I’ve got my hands full, but dealing with a murder is a baffling head game.
I don’t think I will ever come to terms with it.
by Band Back Together | Sep 2, 2015 | Adult Children of Narcissistic Parents, Anger, Bullying, Child Abuse, Fear, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Therapy |
I am the daughter of a Narcissicistic father.
From my earliest memories, I recall a lot of fighting between my parents. It was very violent, and oftentimes, I would curl into a ball and put a pillow over my ears to drown out the noise. When I was about eight years old, I swore that I would become educated, so that I would never be trapped like my mother was.
We lived out in the country and had only one car, which my father used for work. My father had a hair-trigger temper, especially when criticized. I recall him asking my opinion once, and I gave him my honest answer. He became enraged and flew off the handle. While he never punched me, I got thrown around a lot, pinned to the ground and wall quite often. I was deathly afraid all the time.
As I grew, his rage turned away from my mother and focused on me. In a way, I was glad because I adored my mother and wanted to protect her. I also knew instinctively that I was much stronger than she was. So …I was the Scapegoat.
I was criticized and picked on every day of my life. I could not go unnoticed; he even yelled about my sitting posture, my clothes, or the way I held my head. It was constant. I tried hard not to cause trouble, became an A student, but he still was not happy with me.
He was uber sensitive about his personal appearance and also very nosy. He’d ask anyone he met how much they made, what kind of car they had, or what church they went to. Although he was a blue-ciollar worker, he passed himself off as an executive, and people believed him. He had an air of authority and superiority.
My mother was co-dependent; whenever he and I had a row, she would come to my room and say, ” Your dad really loves you. He doesn’t show it, but that’s how he is. He would never hurt you.” Total BS.
I left the home as soon as I turned 18 and lived with friends to finish high school. He’d already made it clear that I should not get educated, as women were meant to stay home and care for their husbands in a submissive role. I attended a community college for two years and then transferred to a university, not getting my degree until I was 25. I worked two jobs, had an apartment and car. No matter what, I was always criticized, and he would not butt out of my life.
I went on to earn a Masters Degree at one of the nation’s best universities and got a great job that I loved. I met the man if my dreams, who is the complete opposite of my father, and we had four fabulous children, who are now all grown. I never once behaved as my father. I took great care to be a loving mother, and with the help of my husband, was very successful in that.
My father criticized our parenting, interfered with our marriage and exploited our children. For this, we decided to cut off all ties. We have been estranged for seven years now, and it was the best decision of my life. I still love them, pray for them and want the best for them. I am powerless to change my father, whose temper has lessened, but his criticisms and overall negativity have grown much worse. He is in his 80’s now, so he probably doesn’t have long to live.
I did have psychotherapy years ago, and that’s when I learned the name for his problem: Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Happily, I did not repeat or inherit this. But I do have one sibling who has some characteristics, despite being the Golden Child. I accept that I will never be 100% healed, but I do my very best each day and my father’s voice no longer sounds in my head. I’m free!
by Band Back Together | Aug 21, 2015 | Abuse, Anger, Anxiety, Depression, Fear, Feelings, Infidelity, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Parenting, Psychological Manipulation |
As a you child I was very sensitive and very petite. My family saw that as a weakness and did what ever they could to put me down and make me feel bad about myself. Until a week ago, I always thought the biggest bully was my sister. She would physically and mentally abuse me. She had to control me in every way she could.
So in order to protect myself from this type of abuse, I grew up to only want one thing …to never feel anything ever again. I wanted to be able to turn my emotions on and off. I became very heartless, unloving, less sensitive, and kept to myself. I never shared my feelings, and I eventually despised the word “feelings.” It made me want to gag. I did achieve this goal. I trained myself so well to never feel anything at all. But I became depressed and had anxiety that increasingly got worse. My dad sent me to a therapist, blaming my mom and sister for the cause of all this.
After a year and a half of therapy, I finally realized my dad was the problem the entire time. It was in therapy where I first discovered gaslighting, and when I finally realized he did that to me, I was very upset. Then I was told he had the traits of a narcissist. As I read about that, I became enraged. I couldn’t believe my own father would do this to me for his own personal benefit. He let me believe for so long that there was something wrong with me.
My friends always loved my dad and mom and wanted them to be their parents. My dad was a different person around friends and my moms side of the family. During my parents divorce, my dad manipulated everyone into thinking my mom was to blame for the divorce, when my dad was the one cheating. He had us all fooled for a personal, manipulative game.
My friends always wondered why I acted so different around adults compared to how I was with my friends. I just acted like it was a good girl act, but even I didn’t know why I ever did it until now. I never knew how much my dad controlled me with his narcissistic ways. And I just makes me so angry that I want to punch a hole through the wall.
My dad always says that he loves me more than I’ll ever know, and I broke his heart every time I tried to stay with my mom. It’s all a mind game with him, and it just blows my mind. It makes my even more angry that I never had a normal childhood because of him. I had to grow up too fast and be more mature than anyone I knew. He controlled my personality, and therefore, I could never be my true self. Even now, knowing all this, I am still too afraid to confront him. I’m too afraid to never see him again for what he might do.
by Band Back Together | Aug 15, 2015 | Adult Children of Narcissistic Parents, Estrangement, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Personality Disorders, Psychological Manipulation |
Oh, thank you. Thank you for creating this site. For bringing to light the disturbance and disruption created by having, knowing, or having the narcissist thrust upon you.
First thought: let’s build a gated community! Yes! A place where we can run free! A preserve! Where we are protected. A place where we can meander down to the watering hole, tell some marvelously offensive jokes, laugh till our collective sinuses are clear and then do it again.
I still want to just type the words “thank you” over and over. And I haven’t read Band Back Together but for ten or fifteen minutes, but I see that this is the place. The place where people say – hey, you’re not losing your mind. You’re not.
You’ve just met your first dyed in the wool, Grade A, First Prize, Blue Ribbon Narcissist. And you can’t return it. You don’t seem to have the receipt. No one is going to reimburse your account and basically, you’re stuck with it. You can’t unload it at a tag sale, you can’t give it away on Craig’s List, you can’t scour the shelves at CVS for a salve or a wash or treatment to make it go away. You can peruse the CDC in Atlanta and it ain’t there. You can read till you’re nodding off all of the archives of Morbidity and Mortality Weekly and there are no blips on the radar.
It’s almost a quiet killer. A killer of marriages. A killer of relationships. A killer, most assuredly, of peace of mind. It’s little like menopause when you have a hot sweat; the urgent need to pull off the sweater, fan yourself with whatever you can grab and declare to anyone nearby, “Oh my God, it’s happening!”
The need to share is common (thank goodness, we all get a turn! Just like your Mama!! Ha! Made ya laugh!) I wish having a Narc in the family was half as much fun as a hot sweat. As if the body’s response to the stress of their existence doesn’t do enough damage. My bod pumps out more Cortisol in that wretched persons’ company than is imaginable. Can’t sell that on Craig’s List either. Too bad it wasn’t like plasma and we could donate to help someone!
But! I’ve just found this site. And I said, “who is this broad? She sounds like me. That sentence sounds like mine!”
And I want to reach through the screen and shake her hand! Hi! Ohhh, you were on that bus, too? That was quite a cliff, wasn’t it? Our nodding the implied “YES!” validates the bus trip off the cliff and we exclaim heartily that we are so lucky to have come out alive. But – we’ll always be the ones who got on that bus. Unknowingly. Crap luck.
And today, out of nowhere, the other side of the luck coin crops up. Well, truth is I have read about narcissistic personality disorder, NPD, a fair amount, unfortunately leaves me feeling like I should find a rope and a branch that”ll hold me. One YouTube video left me in a funk for days – went from a fairly good mood into the bowels of hell. I yelled at myself, why oh why did you listen to that? And gave in to the tears.
Screw it. It is what it is. I’ve a habit of biting off my nose to spite my face, but my life is taking such a direction due to an extended family member’s personality disorder, that I admit I cannot do it alone. This is not a time that I’ll say that I’ll just take care of it myself. No. Nope. Can’t do it. Have been drowning for almost six years in the wake of her behavior and how the person closest to me has become estranged for his fear of being put out in the corn.
It’s a nightmare. Wake me, please. Help me. Help me to mitigate the damage she is doing to a little girl. It’s done. Done deal. And I am a piece of s?!
by Band Back Together | Aug 11, 2015 | Happiness, Narcissistic Personality Disorder |
I’m a 37 year old, a newly single mother of three children between the ages of three and seven. While I do not receive child support, we are finally happy. My ex, their father, has narcissistic personality disorder (NPD).
As I am a single parent, I’ve had to rely upon my parents. My children and I decided to move from the city we love to the country where I grew up. We thought it to be the right decision. Of course, I found my dream house out in the country but, thanks to my bad credit, I couldn’t afford to buy it. My father stepped in to help. He signed for my house and he signed for a car for me.
My parents own the business I work for – I’m even allowed to bring my kids to work – it’s pretty awesome. Until it started. Every time I make a decision or do something they don’t like, my parents ride me. My house isn’t clean enough. I’m not home on time. That’s enough to trigger a texting marathon with a million questions from them. Our personal life is now their business.
If I have anyone over to see me or if one of my children says something to that effect, it triggers a million questions. If I don’t feel like playing the game, they assume I’m hiding something bad. If they hear something or even THINK something, instead of coming to me, I get treated like crap – and I have no idea why.
In the past two years, I’ve been treated terribly by them, even though in a twist of fate, I’ve tried harder than I have in my adult years. Things have gotten so bad that my father will say terrible things to me – often things that are true, but from the past – in front of my children. He’ll even go behind my back and say nasty things about me to my children.
My parents have put me through a lot. As of late, I’ve come to the understanding that my father has these preconceived notions about the girl, and the woman he thought I should be, When I fail to live up to these expectations, he becomes irate.
Now I’ve finally woken up and realized that I do have a mind of my own and yes, I can even use it. Now it seems that my kids are being targeted so my parents can “help them be the best they can be” in their eyes, of course. I feel that they have had their chance raising my brother and I.
Now? Now it’s my turn to raise my kids. So we can be happy once again.
