Before we start, you absolutely need to learn about the shocking effects of narcissistic abuse on your brain! Know that the effects of narcissistic abuse are not only emotional but physical! It makes your brain shrink and have PTSD and anxiety for your whole life. Read the post to understand this and fix it!

Being raised by a narcissistic parent leaves a great amount of damage in your life. And even after you get out of your narcissistic parent’s house, the damage is still with you, the effects of narcissistic abuse are still in you, so you need to understand how it affects the way you interact with others in your relationships and see what patterns are you adopting because of that emotional abuse that went on for years and years.

If you think your mother or father is a narcissist, you MUST protect yourself and your sanity. Learn the narcissistic mother traits and tactics checklist and be free of their control over your life once and for all by preventing the abuse coming your way and reacting accordingly.

Before you start, this post is part of a series of posts about the Narcissistic Parents topic:

1. How to know if you were raised by Narcissistic Parents? (Evaluation of your family situation): here I help you analyze your life up until this point with concrete examples for you to introspect on your family issues.
2. Signs, Traits, and Behavior of Narcissistic Parents (Evaluation of the signs of Narcissism): here I give specific information about narcissistic signs and the behavior they use on their children, with a list at the end.
3. How Narcissistic Parents Affect their Child (Evaluation of Self): here I explain the issues that come after growing up with narcissistic parents, showing common traits and behavior children adopt because of the constant narcissistic abuse from their narcissistic parent.
4. How to Live with a Narcissist and Cope with Life? (Evaluation of what to do): here I explain in 17 steps steps how you can cope with life after you discover your parent is a narcissist. It is a deep post about all the different tips that can help you live your life having a narcissistic mother or father.
5. What are the Narcissistic Mother Traits and Signs? (Evaluation and understanding of their tactics): here I give a quick checklist for anyone to easily figure out if they have a narcissistic mother and learn the signs of narcissism to identify them in their everyday life.
6. Effect of narcissistic abuse in your relationships. (Understanding the wounds left by Narcissistic Parents on their children): current post – how being raised by a narcissist influences the way you behave with others.

Effects of Narcissistic Abuse After Childhood

Every child born in a family with a narcissistic parent is a child that has emotional and physical wounds (brain damage – anxiety, PTSD, panic attacks, amygdala problems, memory problems, etc.). Those are the effects of narcissistic abuse.

So if you are such a survivor of early narcissistic abuse, know that your parents had an effect on you, and as a result, you have specific behaviors in your relationships with others because of that early abuse.

The difference is that when you have a physical wound, you know how to treat it and it can’t be unnoticed. But in this case, emotional wounds are not visible, and we tend to neglect them and forget that they are even there in the first place.

But, there is no crisis here. Everything can be fixed. You just need to:

First understand that you have been damaged by your own parent/s.

Secondly, that damage has made you behave in certain ways around people.

And thirdly, if you don’t treat those wounds, they will affect everyone around you, including you, of course.

After this realization, you can then understand how you created the life you are living now and decide for yourself if you are happy with it or not.

You can either believe you are happy, or you can actually know you aren’t. Depending on the amount of “brainwash” your narcissistic parent exerted on you.

So below you can take a closer look at 3 different but similar behaviors that children from narcissistic parents can adopt into their lives due to the effects of narcissistic abuse.

3 types of Behavior you might adopt in your future relationships

These are 3 typical types of behavior that you could potentially be doing because of the effects of narcissistic abuse that went on for years and years:

Anxious-Preoccupied Attachment Style

You will want to “cling” on to your loved one like a crab. Due to your insecurity of being left alone, you became too dependent on others, as you will believe that someone else has to come to save you from your darkness.

When you were a child, your emotional needs weren’t taken care of in a normal way, your mother had a needy type of love and didn’t let you be independent on your own. So you ended up developing in a way that makes you only feel “whole” when you are around other people. You need to get a lot of approval and acceptance, and makes it harder for you to be independent and rely on yourself and be confident by yourself, as you will focus your attention in life onto how other people treat you and how are your relationships.

The childhoods they described were often characterized by intense efforts to please their parents, considerable anger and disappointment, and by role reversals in which the child had tried to parent the adult. Jeb Kinnison 

What you’ll need to learn?

Be happy alone by yourself, be less possessive, stop the dependency. Find your inner love. You don’t need someone else to say you deserve to be doing the things you wish for. It’s not the other person’s job to fix you and tell you that you deserve to be loved.

Your life isn’t a reflection of how other people treat you or what relationships you have. You are a solo individual, you are your own person. Everyone dies eventually or leaves. And you can’t be putting your whole self-worth onto other people, because you can’t control what happens to those people, it’s external. But what you can control is how you feel about yourself! 

So practice self-love, invest time in yourself, your physical, your emotional, your intellectual self. Go and be independent. Go study abroad, go work alone, go live by yourself, go travel by yourself. Go and do things on your own, even if it scares you. You absolutely need to let go of your dependency towards other people.

Read many books that will enrich your perspective of reality – Osho is a great one here:

(I will earn a small commission if you click the link, but regardless of that, this is still a great book, otherwise I could just put something random here instead)

In this book Osho talks about how to break free of the existent conditioned belief systems and prejudices that limit our capacity to enjoy life and enjoy our relationships in a better and healthier way. It focuses on how “love” is perceived nowadays, and why it seems that we as humans have no idea how to properly love each. Osho focuses on examine the Western society and emphasizes how we should all learn the art of loving ourselves and being alone by ourselves in peace. It is really a different book, with a new perspective on life. It will open your eyes on how you perceive relationships and why many of us fail to be happy in our relationships.

Cultivate self-love with positive thoughts about yourself. For example, start listening to positivity, go watch Gary Vee on YouTube he will boost your appetite for change and progress in your life! You need outside stimuli everyday!

Don’t allow criticism or the “look of others” to dictate what you should do, or what sounds good or bad. You are your own boss; you decide everything that happens in your life. You always have choices to make.

Learn to be comfortable alone by yourself. Go for walks by yourself. Go to the movies by yourself. Go do physical exercise by yourself. Do things on your own and own it like you deserve it.

It’s important to cultivate both the mental and physical side of yourself, step by step, and after a lot of steps, you will see a difference. But it will take time. As only reading sweet things online won’t help you build better self-esteem. Do physical, real things too. Because every time you achieve something in the physical realm, you will feel proud and satisfied for reaching that result because you will see it and be able to “touch it”. And the more you do that, the more you’ll feel better and better about yourself.

Step by step, you’ll be creating a prouder and stronger self. Step by step, just like climbing the stairs. And hopefully, in a near future, you’ll find someone decent and secure to have a relationship without dependency. It’s all on you!

Dismissive-Avoidant behavior in relationships

If you are dismissive-avoidant, you are emotionally distant in your relationships, the same way your parents were to you. Somehow they showed you that you couldn’t have strong emotions and you learned that you should always rely on yourself. However, this is a consequence of your parent’s bad emotional intelligence. You came to believe that you don’t need anyone, and you think you don’t need emotional connections and emotional sharing.

Your parents might not have shown great emotional intimacy and so you don’t really open up to other people, and even though you can connect with others and be out-going, you never really let anybody inside.

Studies show these parents disregard or ignore their children’s needs, discouraging crying and leading to those children becoming unusually independent at an early age.

And when things get serious in a relationship, you usually get uncomfortable and try to get away. You generally need to really trust someone before you can open up. And those gates are open for only reserved few.

So this means that for you, independence is key. And when you are in a relationship (if you allow yourself) you will try to avoid conflict, avoid talking about your emotions and feelings.

With this attachment style, it so happens that many times your first real relationship with someone can have ended with unresolved issues. Or there was no explanation for the separation. Or you simply started to get so dismissive that the relationship just disappeared by itself, due to your inability to talk things through, or to share what you were up to. And the other person just couldn’t handle the secrecy and lack of sharing.

The problem with this attachment style is that you learned how to survive by yourself, and you made yourself the king of the hill. You show confidence and assertiveness and are even charismatic and make lots of jokes to hide your insecurities. But deep down, you know that it is just a mask. You learned to be those things to protect yourself from being hurt by others.

What you’ll need to learn?

Step by step, try to express yourself more often with others. You can try to journal your emotions on your phone or notebook. Use music to relax. Try to exercise, or do some physical activity to express those emotions and release that tension within when you feel anxious or angered – you will use all that stress and burn tons of calories and feel good. Try to text your loved one about your emotions if you are not always comfortable to sit and talk about them. Write on paper, and express yourself like that in the beginning stages, as it will help to express yourself more freely and in the future, you’ll be able to actually have real conversations around how you really feel.

Your secret weapon is to trust others and allow yourself to feel. You need to learn how to trust other people. There won’t ever be someone perfect to your ideal image of a friend or loved one. But you can’t possibly avoid deep emotional connections, because you need them to be happy. You need to find people you can be around and learn how to open up to them. You can’t go solo all the time. You need rest. You need other people (even though you don’t think you do). Otherwise, you’ll end up with some kind of health problem due to so much pressure and hard work, and no one to take care of you.

Bonus tip: If you choose partners that are more open to sharing your emotions and feelings, it will be much easier for you to open up, and you will learn from these partners how much sharing how you feel is important in life. Don’t go for the “bad guys or girls” that seem pretty and adventurous but then when it comes to real life (and not fantasy world), they are unable to deal with the everyday stresses and issues. Choose wisely, choose someone that will be a good emotional match, someone understanding, not someone demanding, critical, harsh, unavailable. You had that already.

Fearful-Avoidant Attachment Style (or Anxious-Avoidant)

These survivors of narcissistic abuse can be afraid of attachment, but at the same time, crave for if (opposed to the dismissive style, that doesn’t acknowledge consciously that they need other people). So if you have this behavior, you can be jumping between short-term relationships, due to fear of being fully open to another person out of the expected fear of being criticized (because your parent did that your whole childhood).

So in a moment you are craving deep emotional connections, but you are afraid of them at the same time because you are insecure with yourself. You don’t really know how to share and show love in a normal way, so you might adopt a come here-go away type of behavior. Meaning that when someone starts to get close to you in an emotional level, you start to feel afraid of their intentions. And doubt that they are trustworthy to share your deep feelings, and start looking for things that are “off” and signals of mistrust, because of fear of being rejected or mistreated (as that has already happened before).

Instead of the dismissive’s defense mechanism of going it alone and covering up feelings of need for others by developing high self-esteem, the fearful-avoidant subconsciously believe there is something unacceptable about them that makes anyone who knows them deeply more likely to reject or betray them, so they will find reasons to relieve this fear by distancing anyone who gets too close. Jeb Kinnison 

What you’ll need to learn?

Here is important to acknowledge the hidden need for intimacy and deep emotions and try to actually accept and see that yourself. Trying to find someone who will help you with that, instead of looking for short-term people in the same old places. It is about allowing someone else to enter your life more deeply.

Because the reason you are jumping from short-term relationships is that you fear all the behavior that your parent did to you will somehow be present in someone else. You are afraid of opening yourself up to other people to not get hurt, you change relationships constantly so you don’t have to deal with emotions – which are the essential part of any relationship with a human being.

So the cycle will continue because even though you can’t accept it, you crave for a deep connection with someone, but you never allow yourself to have it, always ending it at mid-road.

It is important to learn self-acceptance. You don’t need to be showy for someone to love you deeply. You don’t need to wear masks all the time. You just need to be yourself. And only if you allow yourself to share your emotions, you will have the gift of love. Only when you allow yourself to open up. Otherwise, you’ll continue to be unhappy, always chasing for that deep love but brushing it off when it comes to you.

Your secret weapon is self-acceptance and acceptance of your deep emotions. Allow yourself to share them, allow vulnerability. You can’t pretend you are a rock. You are human. You need real love. Not sex or idealized images.

Build your confidence. Check the Anxious-Preoccupied attachment style for tips.

By hiding their true selves, such people live with a social support network that has been attracted by their fake persona, so that when a crisis occurs, those who might have cared for them aren’t around, and those who are around don’t care for the real person revealed by the crisis. Jeb Kinnison 

For all the 3 types, an important message

Accepting your darker side is a must. We all need to accept our faults and acknowledge our fears and just be true to ourselves. Otherwise, we are ultimately just hurting ourselves, running blindly from our own fears and expecting to be happy.

The narcissistic parent has no self-perception and has no idea that they are hurting other people, as they are completely egocentric. And if you don’t understand your attachment style in your relationships, then you will continue hurting people and hurting yourself along the way, just like the narcissist is. But the difference is that a narcissist doesn’t understand and doesn’t want to understand, but you can understand and learn to change!

The people around you will suffer. And your future or present kids are already suffering from this behavior of yours as well. So it’s really not good for anyone.

You need to just straight out understand that you have been damaged and need to heal that wound. You need to face your own fears of rejection and just accept who you are. Accept who you have become and start doing what your soul really needs.  Don’t go running around invalidating what and how you feel and making yourself believe that you are happy in that neglect of your own emotional needs.

No one can save you from yourself.

You need to go through the darker parts to release the prejudice, the fear, and the shame you might feel. It’s not your fault your parents were the way they were. And you can’t be letting their early childhood abuse to dictate how you live your life now. The effects of narcissistic abuse are real, and you can’t pretend you have none of these issues, because even your brain has changed due to their abuse. So be real, know your issues, study them, and go solve them so that other people around you won’t suffer with you.

 

Instead of being either of those 3, try this:

• Break free from your abusive family. Move away from them if you are still living with them or are still listening to their advice every day. Stop asking for their help. Stop asking for their advice. Their control will never cease, so distance yourself from them. Create boundaries, step by step or just completely shut them off.
• Understand that you got used to being in constant alert for abuse around you, so you probably have some kind of anxiety, phobias, possibly PTSD, or problems with memory or problems studying. Understand what issues you might have, and start treating them! Your life and your happiness depend on that! (and also the other people around you, including your children or future children and their children as well)
• Acknowledge all of the above behaviors that you came to adopt and be aware of them and change them. Life is all about every-day steps. Start by changing your everyday habits, changing your way of thinking, hearing more positivity, being with more positive people.
• Self-coach by reading books on the subject and journal your thoughts and emotions. Don’t be ashamed of yourself by allowing feelings to come out. Be true and honest with yourself. Or find a specialist who will boost that growth even faster.
• Become open to someone else (but the proper one this time – the best attachment for any of the three is a secure attachment, one where the person is emotionally stable and available, and isn’t afraid of intimacy or of sharing their thoughts and expressing compassion). And let them enter your life. Be conscious of who you choose to let into your life and be aware of the signs you so well know. Don’t get swept out of your feet with the same old types of partners you know are not going to work for you, otherwise, you can end up being caught in the same narcissistic relationship.
  Move past the types that somehow make you feel in a rush, or give you extreme emotions of attraction, because those are the types that you are unconsciously searching for because one of your parents was this way. It will feel too familiar, yet not for you if you want a happy relationship without drama. Also, don’t think a calm person is too dull for you. Because your old relationship patterns made you believe you needed to have drama and emotional pain. But that is not the way to be happy.
• Learn saying “no” more often. You don’t have to stay in a relationship with someone because of your insecurity of finding someone better, or because you are too comfortable or don’t want to hurt the other person or the other people involved in the family. Everyone deserves a happy life. Don’t accept a miserable relationship out of fear of not finding someone else.
• You don’t owe anyone anything for having been born. Don’t let guilt and self-doubt overcome you. Instead, build your confidence (if you are an anxious or fearful attachment style).
• Understand your deep fears and your deep needs. And be honest with yourself. Forget about other people, your friends, and your family. To start your life again, you need to know what you want. And that comes from accepting that you have deep fears, emotional wounds, and issues that resulted from your narcissistic parents. Childhood wounds are the worst wounds because they stay with us for our whole lives if we do nothing about it. You need to take care of them. Either through your own means, or with the help of a specialist. But you need to do it! It’s a life or death situation. You either save your life and your health (and your future generation) or you let it drag on and be at mercy of your parent’s effect on you forever.

 

The Ultimate Key to solving your problems

The biggest key for changing your life after narcissistic abuse is to boost your confidence, self-love, and self-esteem, and learn self-awareness. Do it by all means! That is the ultimate key to solve all your problems. Literally.

But everyone has different ways to feel confident. So you must find your own. There are many ways to boost your confidence. Starting by feeling comfortable in your own skin, being comfortable being alone, being comfortable being yourself, and not judging yourself. Being comfortable with other people, being comfortable expressing how you feel to others.

You can boost it with physical activities that make you feel empowered, or that you feared before. Maybe some boxing classes, jiu-jitsu, krav maga, Systema. Maybe dance classes, maybe singing classes, maybe playing the drums. Maybe going racing in racing cars. Maybe buying a sports car. Maybe completely changing your closet to bold and powerful clothes that you have never dared to buy. Maybe boldly saying goodbye to people that are hurting you and putting your needs back in the first place. Maybe changing your career and changing where you live. Maybe throwing away stuff you have in the house that you no longer need.

Depending on the person, the ways to make yourself feel more powerful and confident will change. But that is the key. Self-love, self-confidence and self-awareness (the good and the bad). Being proud of yourself.

We have no idea why we are here in the first place, but every single one of us is a personal entity, and we must evolve as a person every single day. We must understand our purpose, what we like, what we dislike. We need to understand ourselves and our fears and weaknesses and be honest about them with ourselves. Otherwise, we will engage in stupid and avoidant behavior that will be unconscious but will bring us a lot of pain, health problems, and confusion. Once we understand ourselves, we evolve and become happier and happier. That is the key.

Did I help you in some kind of way? Did you realize you had any of these issues in your life? I would love to know!

Wish you all the best and lots of inner strength!

Stay healthy and curious!