How to Recover From Narcissistic Parenting

Pi Venus Winslow, used with permission

According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5; APA, 2013), narcissists are emotionally cold, lacking in empathy, and insensitive to the feelings and needs of others. What can you do if you’ve had a parent like this?

If we grow up with a narcissistic parent, we often struggle with feelings of inadequacy and anxiety (Määttäi, Määttä, Uusiautti, & Äärelä, 2020). Research has shown that children of narcissistic parents can even suffer from complex trauma (Mahoney, Rockspoone, & Hull, 2016).

Pi Venus Winslow, a survivor of narcissistic parenting, now works as a life coach to help others recover from such parenting. Narcissistic parenting, she told me in an interview, "trains us to be codependent and compliant. We can become people-pleasers with a desperate need to look good to maintain our image. We become acutely aware of other people's emotional states while being disconnected from our own."

“We struggle with low self-worth, inadequacy, and anxiety,” she explains. We have a lot of fear—"fear of judgment, rejection, and conflict. We may fear people in power.” And we can neglect our own physical and emotional health because our narcissistic parents neglected our needs.

“Believing that we're unlovable, unintelligent, we can develop a victim mentality,” she says. We get into relationships with other narcissists, she says, because the pattern feels “familiar to us.”

Our narcissistic parents did not provide us with what Abraham Maslow (1971) identified as our basic needs for food, shelter, safety, security, and love. As Winslow says, all children need “to be cared for, to be seen, to be understood. We need love; we need connection; we need significance, certainty, and security. And we need a sense of belonging and purpose.”

Winslow points out that “a lot of adult children of narcissistic parents really struggle with being emotionally stuck in old childlike ways of feeling.” We can become chronically stressed, hypervigilant, and easily triggered by anything that resembles an old pattern from the past. Flooded with fear, we feel like the helpless child we once were. As neuroscience research has shown, we react from our amygdala, the brain’s alarm center, which limits our options. The fight-flight-or-freeze response shuts down our higher brain centers and our ability to think rationally (LeDoux, 1996).

The Road to Recovery

Winslow points to five key steps in the process of recovery.

1. Soothing Ourselves. Our path of recovery begins by recognizing when we’ve been triggered and soothing ourselves so we can respond more effectively. Winslow recommends taking a deep breath, “and on the exhale, relax your body, relax your shoulders, relax your face. Relax your hands, relax your chest. Just try to relax your major muscle group. And just keep taking deep breaths.”

This cuts the stress reaction, calming our minds and bodies. Her advice parallels Buddhist tradition, mindfulness-based stress reduction, and research at the HeartMath Institute, which shows how slow, heart-focused breathing can bring our emotions and bodies back into balance (Childre, Martin, & Beech, 1999; Dalai Lama, 2002; Kabat-Zinn, 1994).

2. Recognizing Our Patterns. Once we’ve soothed ourselves, Winslow says, we can begin recognizing our patterns, “the similarities between our childhood and the choices we're making in our adult lives.” To make better choices in the future, we can reflect on why we feel the way we do and why we’ve made our past decisions. Then, we can take steps in the direction we want to go in our lives. It’s a process of “catching ourselves in our old patterns, then shifting and changing them.”

3. Dealing With Grief and Unresolved Issues. The journey of recovery will bring up unresolved issues and painful feelings. “As children of narcissistic parents,” Winslow explains, “we were often taught not to feel our feelings.” Recovering from narcissistic abuse, “we're going to have grief and unresolved issues come up, which is a natural part of the healing process. So we're going to experience shock and pain, anger, sadness, and fear.”

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Instead of feeling ashamed of such feelings, repressing or denying them, we need to acknowledge our feelings, work through them, and eventually “get to a place of acceptance and peace.” We may need professional help to work through this process.

4. Setting Healthy Boundaries. When we become aware of our feelings, we can set healthy boundaries. This can be challenging since our narcissistic parents continually violate our boundaries, and setting boundaries brings up fear of offending someone we’re close to. Winslow refers to boundaries as “safety limits” and says that now, as adults, “we're responsible for making decisions to keep ourselves safe.” We can realize that a boundary has been crossed “when we feel anger or resentment. And then we can communicate that boundary to other people in a healthy and respectful way.”

To develop our ability to set boundaries, she says, we can begin by “setting boundaries with ourselves,” for example, by eating more vegetables each day. Setting our own boundaries builds our trust and confidence in ourselves so we can then set boundaries with others.

5. Becoming Our Own Inner Parent. The ultimate goal of recovery, Winslow says, is to give ourselves respect, security, stability, love, and attention we needed growing up: “We can ask ourselves, ‘what can I do to support myself emotionally, to soothe my inner child to get my needs met?’”

This approach resembles internal family systems therapy (Schwartz, 1995), which works with the different parts within us. We have an inner parent, our centered self, as well as other parts, like our six-year-old, frightened child part. Our centered self can soothe that child part, saying, “I sense what you're feeling. I'm an adult, and I'll take care of you.”

Recovery from narcissistic parenting is an ongoing practice. Winslow sees it as training, “like martial arts or learning a new language or a musical instrument. With practice, you're literally rewiring your brain, so things that used to send you in a tailspin no longer have power over you.” It's a continuous process of growth and development “where we can embrace our authentic selves and live our lives intentionally, free from codependency and narcissistic abuse.”

This post is for informational purposes and should not substitute for psychotherapy with a qualified professional.

© 2024 Diane Dreher, All Rights Reserved.