Therapy for Adult Children of Narcissistic Parents
Online in California, New York, & Texas

Therapy for Adult Children of Narcissistic Parents

 

You're probably the person everybody else relies on.

 

People trust your judgment. Your work holds up. When something goes wrong, you're the one they bring it to, and you handle it, because you always have.

 

You also hide it very well. You dress the part. From the outside none of this looks like a crisis, and that's part of what makes it so hard to bring anywhere. Including here.

 

Where this usually starts

 

Parents are a child's entire universe. A child's sense of self is deeply connected to their parents. Children come to understand who they are largely through their relationship with their parents. The younger the child, the more completely that relationship shapes their developing sense of self.

 

I often talk about parents as oak trees. A child needs a parent to be an oak tree. Solid, immovable, reliable. They need to know that oak tree is not going anywhere.

 

So when a parent's own needs are setting the weather for everybody else in the house, a child will do all kinds of mental gymnastics to protect the image of that parent, because they need that oak tree to hold. If the parent is dysregulated, the child is going to try to regulate that parent so the child can feel safe. And they'll often internalize whatever badness there is, again, to preserve the image of the parent. If something is wrong, it must be my fault.

 

Sometimes a child becomes parentified, which is to say the child becomes the emotional caretaker of the parent. They monitor that parent's feelings and they attempt to stabilize that parent.

 

None of this is about assigning blame. It's about understanding how something formed and how it still operates.

 

What you carry into adulthood

 

What you learned in childhood was skillful. Reading a room before you walk into it. Knowing what somebody needs before they say it. Being very, very good at handling things. Those adaptations made sense, and usually they were the things that worked.

 

But nobody tells your nervous system that you've grown up and moved out. So here's what those same adaptations can look like now.

 

You monitor other people's moods, frequently, and so automatically that you don't notice you're doing it anymore. You read an email and then you read it again, looking for hidden meaning, assuming something bad is coming. Rest is something you have to earn, and you haven't earned it yet. You have a really hard time letting anybody else carry something important, even when you're well past your own capacity. Criticism doesn't arrive as information, it arrives as exposure, and then it sits with you for days.

 

You have trouble asking for what you need, because asking for things historically led to consequences, so you learned to keep yourself pretty small. You question your own perception. Maybe I'm imagining all of this. Maybe I'm the problem.

 

And when something good happens, when you get the thing you worked for, it shows up as relief instead of pride. It doesn't last very long either.

 

Oftentimes, still, a text from that parent can set something off in you before you've even opened it.

 

So why does that happen, all these years later? Because the nervous system doesn't automatically get the message that things have changed. From the outside a reaction like that can look like an overreaction. From the inside it makes complete sense. It's self protection, and it's doing exactly what it learned to do.

 

Why nobody else seems to see it

 

A couple of things make this very hard to explain to people.

 

The first is that narcissism isn't binary. It exists on a spectrum. Ideally we all have a healthy sense of narcissism, and that's the part of us that says we're worthy, we deserve to take up space, and we matter. It's the part that lets you walk into a coffee shop, order a beverage, and expect that you're going to receive it. As you move along that spectrum, these are people who get increasingly rigid and increasingly unable to make that same kind of space for anybody else. It's a question of degree, and a question of degree is a very hard thing to point to.

 

The second thing is charm. These are people who are extremely preoccupied with how they're perceived, so they're usually very skilled at being charming and likable. They can seem thoughtful. They can seem compelling. They can command a room. And honestly, the warmth of that glow can just feel fabulous. Which is why the people in your life may have met your parent and found them delightful, and why you probably stopped trying to explain it a long time ago.
 

There's also a reason the apology never comes.

 

Some kinds of psychological distress are experienced by the person as a problem. Broadly speaking, this includes symptoms of depression and anxiety, among others.  They don't like how they feel, so they go looking for help. They'll try therapy, they'll see a psychiatrist, because they want something to be different. Personality disorders, including Narcissistic Personality Disorder, work the other way around. Their behavior makes perfect sense to them, and in their mind, if there's a problem at all, it is other people. So these are not usually people who turn up in a therapist's office wanting to change.

 

That's a hard thing to sit with. For a lot of people it's also a relief, because it means you can stop waiting for something that was never coming.

If you've tried therapy before
 

Sometimes it felt shapeless, or it felt slow, and it was hard to justify the hour against everything else you're responsible for. Sometimes you came out with a great deal of insight and nothing much changed. And sometimes being the capable one just followed you into the room. You managed the session. You were easy to work with. You gave your therapist something useful to respond to, again and again, and the thing you came in for never quite got touched.
 

That's worth naming out loud early, so that we don't simply do it again.

I like to think of therapy as getting a PhD in yourself. It begins with deeply understanding and unpacking your story: how it shaped you, what you learned from it, and the ways it continues to operate in your life. The difference is between being controlled by your story and understanding it well enough that you have more choice about what happens next. Then it's up to you to decide what you want to keep, what you want to leave behind, and what you want to do differently.

 

How I work

 

I often tell my clients to replace the judgment hat with the curiosity hat. The judgment hat is cheap. It's easy. It's easy to decide something is good or bad, write it off, and move on. The curiosity hat requires more of you, your insight and your time, because it asks why. But that's where all the information is.

So rather than focusing only on behaviors, we get curious about the feelings underneath them, because behavior is really just the visible manifestation of whatever is happening beneath the surface. That doesn't mean everything that happened to you was reasonable or acceptable. It means that asking why gives us a great deal more to work with than judging it does.
 

I'm ACNP Certified, which is to say I'm trained in Dr. Karyl McBride's five-step recovery model for adult children of narcissistic parents. It gives this work a shape and a sequence, and I've found that matters quite a bit to people who are wary of anything open-ended.
 

I'm also a strong proponent of establishing healthy boundaries. Sometimes people hear that word and think distant or rigid. That isn't what I mean by it. I mean creating a level of emotional safety in your life that opens you up to a sense of freedom that may feel foreign at first, and ultimately liberating.

Alongside that model, I practice depth-oriented psychotherapy. The work is careful and collaborative, and it's grounded in curiosity rather than urgency.

 

What tends to change

 

Generally not your standards, and not your ambition. Those are yours and they're useful. What changes is what they cost you.

 

Criticism starts to land as information you can weigh instead of something you have to survive. You find you can hand something important to somebody else and let it stay handed over. The commentary in your head gets quieter, and a good deal less certain of itself. What you're worth stops depending on what you produced most recently. And contact with your parent, in whatever form you decide on, stops taking the rest of the week with it.

 

About me

 

My name is Gila Brown. I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist specializing in the complex relational dynamics that can develop in narcissistic families and relationships. I'm licensed to practice psychotherapy in California, New York, and Texas.

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Sessions are online and typically take place weekly.

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If you recognize yourself in what you've read here, I'd like to hear from you.

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