The Stages of Realizing Your Parent Is a Covert Narcissist

First, you are so deeply conditioned to believe they sacrificed their whole world for you. So indoctrinated by their self-proclaimed martyrdom that it becomes unimaginable that they could possess any traits of narcissism inside of them. You simply don’t see it. Some people, unfortunately, never will.

And when you look back, your brain purposely chooses the memories that fit the narrative you have been told your whole life. Those are the memories you feed to the world around you. You see yourself repeating how lucky you are to have the best parent in the wold: selfless, giving, forgiving, and many other adjectives that you could attribute to a modern, loving God.

But one day, you became an adult. Many years pass. Something changes. Something triggers you to look back at those memories with a second set of eyes. The eyes of the grown adult you have become. And slowly, you begin to see the cracks.

You see something that, before, you wouldn’t even dare to name inside your own head. But now, the word is there. It screams inside you, and wants to come out:

Abuse

Verbal abuse. Physical abuse. Psychological abuse. All of it, bundled together. For several years you pretended it didn’t happen. Or you convinced yourself that it was justified because that was the only way to preserve the narrative you had been given along with that relationship.

The deeper you dig into those memories, the harder it becomes. You remember being slapped by a full grown adult. You remember being punched. And now, as an adult yourself, you know there is nothing that justifies repeatedly treating a child that way.

And maybe the most painful part is remembering that the same adult who was supposed to take care of you, and who was instead hurting you inside the house would tell the world outside that they never laid a finger on you. And you repeated that lie, you protected their clean image. It became your responsibility to protect their dignity while they stripped away yours at home.

Then you realize that because you were constantly on high alert to prevent physical abuse, you initially overlooked the daily verbal and psychological abuse.

Name-calling:

Dumb

Retarded

Imbecile…

Over and over again, until the insults began to feel less like words and more like a second name.

Then there was the psychological abuse disguised as care:

“How are you going to survive out there? You can’t do anything right!”

“Look how gross you look. What are people going to think about you?”

After you struggle to process the sheer lack of empathy that leads someone to treat another human being like this, especially a child, you start paying attention to the moments when they were not there when they were suppose to be.

And neglect enters the combo, almost passing unnoticed. You realize the amount of hours you have been left alone at home or were not properly fed. And, of course, there was emotional neglect as well.

It almost makes you feel as if you were a piece of furniture, just another decoration in the house without any needs.

Eventually, you realize that the world they supposedly sacrificed for you never existed. It was an illusion they created and trapped you inside for years.

And once you are outside that illusion, you begin to understand that is not possible to build a genuine relationship with a parent who never actually existed. All the kindness you might have seen was a projection of your own humanity, created so that you could survive an environment that was not meant for a child, meant for no one, really, but especially not a child.

You realize, then, that the relationship you had with your parent was similar to a cult. And as the cult leader, they made you believe they are above everyone else. Even what could have seemed like a flaw was considered justifiable because they were supposedly better than the rest of humanity.

Inside the cult, you diminish the people from the outside and uplift your cult leader and your own cult. That illusion makes you mimic their narcissistic trait.

When you are finally out of the cult, it is so hard to build genuine connections, because you never had one with your parent, and they never fully allowed you to build genuine connections with others.

But the void that is left inside of you, knowing they won’t ever be able to build a genuine connection with you, is so deeply heartbreaking.