Perhaps reading the following from "Narcissistic Families" will help you to understand how the subconscious stores all that stuff in an "eternal now" and how - even if it is all in the past from the conscious point of view - it controls our lives until we bring it to conscious awareness and learn to deal with it and "reprogram our circuits."
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Links between the experiences of childhood and their sometimes permanent effect on adult behavior have long fascinated observers of human behavior. Of particular interest has been the impact of one's family of origin on personal development. In the last decade the concept of the "adult child of alcoholism" (ACOA) has helped therapists to understand the nearly predictable effects of being raised in an alcoholic family system. Many therapists have worked for years with individuals suffering from what appeared to be immutable low self-esteem, inability to sustain intimacy, and/or blocked paths to self-understanding. The concept of the ACOA opened a new door to the understanding of such problems. Therapist/authors such as Woititz, Black, Gil, and Bradshaw (among others) have drawn vivid images of how children's personalities are molded in a special way by alcoholic families. The literature produced on this topic has cleared a much wider path of recovery for children of alcoholic parents. It has also increased the sensitivity of therapists to the impact of alcoholic rearing on personality development. At one time, therapists seldom asked directly about the drinking patterns of the patient's parents; now such questions are routinely explored in initial assessment interviews.
Of late, a new body of literature has been created: books written by abuse survivors both to focus attention on the devastation caused by physical and sexual abuse and to give validation and guidance to other survivors, whether male or female. Laura Bass and Susan Davis hare articulated the trauma of sexual abuse, as well as techniques helpful for recovery, in a landmark text, The Courage to Heal, while Stephen Grubman-Black was among the first to attack the myth of male invulnerability to sexual abuse in a poignant narrative, "Broken Boys/ Mending men." In fact, many bookstores now offer more self-help books for various types of survivors than they do for dieters.
Along with the benefits of working with the ACOA and abuse models came a puzzle. What about individuals who had the traits of an ACOA but whose parents did not drink, or rape, or beat?
True, there was dysfunction in their families, but the common thread was elusive.
Among adult children of dysfunctional (but non-alcoholic and non-abusive) families, there were found a body of personality traits previously identified with the ACOA model. These included chronic depression, indecisiveness, and lack of self-confidence.
Within this population were found common behavioral traits as well: a chronic need to please; an inability to identify feelings, wants, and needs; and a need for constant validation. This group of patients felt that the bad things that happened to them were well deserved, while the good things that happened were probably mistakes or accidents. They had difficulty being assertive, privately feeling a pervasive sense of rage that they feared might surface. They felt like paper tigers - often vary angry, but easily beaten down. Their interpersonal relationships were characterized by distrust and suspicion interspersed with often disastrous episodes of total and injudicious trusting and self-disclosure. They were chronically dissatisfied, but were fearful of being perceived as whiners or complainers if they expressed their true feelings. Many could hold their anger in for extremely long periods of time, then become explosive over relatively insignificant matters. They had a sense of emptiness and dissatisfaction with their achievements; this was found even among individuals who externally may have been viewed as very successful. The list of people included professionals who were obsessively involved in their enterprises, but were unable to achieve at a level at which they found satisfaction. In relationships, these individuals frequently found themselves in repeated dead-end situations.
Because these symptoms were so well defined in the popular literature about adult children of alcoholism, therapists asked some individuals from nonalcoholic dysfunctional families to read such books as "Adult Children of Alcoholics" by Janet Woititz and "Outgrowing the Pain" by Eliana Gil. The clients returned, identifying somewhat with the syndrome, but not at all with the examples of drunk or brutal parents. Some things about the model rant true - denial of feelings, a sense of emptiness, recurrent ineffective patterns of personal interaction - but not enough to be very helpful.
Therapists then did two things to deal with the discrepancies between the examples of "causes" of ACOA-abuse personality traits and the actual experiences of the clients who were products of dysfunctional families that were non-alcoholic and non-abusive.
First, when reading the self-help literature, therapists asked clients of nonalcoholic/non-abusive families to substitute the word dysfunctional for alcoholic or abusive. Second, the therapists assured those clients whose childhood memories were still vague that the books recommended would be helpful, even if their personal experiences did not fully fit the descriptions given by survivors of alcoholic or abusive parents.
At the same time, in recognition of the fact that the term "adult children of alcoholism or abuse" were too narrow, the literature began to change using variations of terms that did not limit to a specific dysfunction.
The same question, however, kept returning: what really goes on in these families that causes those common psychological problems that therapists were seeing over and over again, the problems that used to be labeled as ACOA traits?
The principle clue was that, in the absence of alcohol abuse, other forms of dysfunctional parenting such as incest, physical abuse, emotional abuse or neglect and physical absence, all seemed to produce the same symptoms.
As therapists continued to track the common traits shared by the parent systems of the survivors, they identified a pattern of interaction that was labeled the "narcissistic family." Regardless of the presence or absence of identifiable abuse, therapists found one pervasive trait present in all of these families: the needs of the parent system took precedence over the needs of the children.
Therapists have found that in the narcissistic family, the needs of the children are not only secondary to those of the parent(s), but are often seriously problematic for the latter. If one is to track the narcissistic family on any of the well-known developmental scales, such as Maslow's or Erikson's, one sees that the most fundamental needs of the child, those of trust and safety, are not met.
Furthermore, the responsibility of needs fulfillment shifts from the parent to the child.
In this family dynamic, the child must be reactive to the needs of the parent rather than the converse. In fact, the narcissistic family is consumed with dealing with the emotional needs of the parent system. The children are merely a means to this end.
In the narcissistic family, the children are recruited to the process of satisfying the parent' needs. Where the father is cocaine addicted, both the spouse and the children dance around the father so as not to induce conflict. Where the mother is "borderline," there is a similar dance performed by the spouse and the children. In the incestuous family, the children are unprotected from the victimizer, who is not confronted by the spouse. The spouse of the troubled parent puts energy into sustaining the status quo and mollifying his or her partner, to the detriment of the children.
In the narcissistic family, the child's behavior is evaluated not in terms of what it says about what he or she may be feeling or experiencing, but in terms of its impact on the parent system. For example, in a healthy family, a child's receiving an 'F' on a report card alerts the parents to the presence of a problem. This situation is then examined in terms of the child's needs and development: is the work too hard, is the child under stress, does he need help, tutoring, support, or the like? In the narcissistic family, though, the same problem is examined on the basis of the difficulty presented for the parent: the child is viewed as disobedient, lazy, embarrassing to the parents, or just "looking for attention."
In this example, the healthy family would react by expressing concern for the feelings of the child and perceiving his low grade not as a personal failure but as a problem to be solved FOR the child. In the narcissistic family, however, the reactions of the parent(s) indicate to the child that his feelings are of limited or no import. The child does not HAVE a problem, he IS a problem. To go one step further, the child does not have a need, but rather is a label: lazy, stupid, clown, screw-up, odd or whatever. The consequences of the child's actions on the parent(s) are of primary importance.
Over time, children learn that their feelings are of little or negative value. They begin to detach from their feelings, to lose touch with them. Often, this denial of feelings is functional to the child, as to express them only adds fuel to the fire. Instead of understanding, recognizing, and validating their OWN needs, these children develop an exaggerated sense of their impact on the needs of their parents.
Indeed, they become the reflection of their parents' emotional needs. The needs of the parent become a moving target on which they struggle to focus. Because they feel responsible for correcting the situation without having the requisite power and control to do so, the children develop a sense of failure. Moreover, they fail to learn how to validate their own feelings and meet their own needs. In time, the children undergo a semi-permanent numbing of feelings. As adults, these individuals may not know what they feel, except for varying degrees of despair, frustration, dissatisfaction.
The road to recovery involves the patient understanding that they were not responsible for the parent system's actions in childhood, nor could they control them. It also involves their understanding that, in adulthood, they have the power to control their own recovery and are, indeed, responsible for it. A child from a dysfunctional family is molded by the family's dysfunction, but as an adult, no longer needs to be defined by it.
It is not necessary to be severely abused to receive trauma. There are many individuals whose family history was not dramatic in any way, but who were, nonetheless, seriously affected. These individuals come from narcissistic families where the dysfunction was pervasive yet covert.
The mythological character of Narcissus has come to epitomize the concept of destructive self-love. There is another character in the legend, however, whom we often forget: Echo. It is the relationship of these two characters from which we derive the dynamic of the narcissistic family.
In the legend, Echo has lost the ability to form her own words and can only repeat the utterances of others. When she falls in love with Narcissus she follows him, hoping that he will say some kind or loving words that she can then repeat back to him. When he says "I love you" to his own reflection, Echo is finally able to say it too... but Narcissus is so taken with himself that he is unable to hear her.
The story, of course, ends with the deaths of both characters. Narcissus pines away beside the pool; his love of and absorption with his reflection in the water ultimately resulting in his death. Echo, unable to ever succeed in capturing the attention or love of Narcissus, goes into what appears to be a vegetative depression - lacking the will or inclination to eat or drink - and also dies.
The story of Narcissus and Echo is one of self-love that precludes the ability to see, hear, or react to the needs of another. Without too much of a stretch, it stands as a poignant allegory for the interactive relationships of the narcissistic family.
Narcissus represents the parent system, which is, for whatever reason (job stress, alcoholism, drug abuse, mental illness, physical disability, lack of parenting skills), primarily involved in getting its own needs met. Echo is the child trying to gain attention and approval by becoming a reactive reflection of the parents' needs, thus never developing the ability to find her own "voice" - that is, to recognize her own wants and needs and develop strategies for getting them met. Within the narcissistic family system, the locus for meeting emotional needs is reversed: where the parents in a healthy family system attempt to provide for the emotional needs of the children, in a narcissistic family system, it becomes the responsibility of the children to meet the emotional needs of the parents.
In a healthy family situation, parents accept responsibility for meeting a variety of their children's needs; they get their own needs met by themselves, each other, and/or other suitable adults. In such a family, the intrinsic expectation is that the children are NOT responsible for meeting the needs of their parents. Rather, children are responsible for gradually learning how to meet their own needs in an independent manner. The children, with their parent's support, are expected to be involved in an eighteen year (more or less) process of learning how to care for themselves. If this process works properly, the children will also learn, through modeling, how then to be parents who can take care of their own emotional needs and meet the needs of their own children. In the words of Bradshaw:
What a child needs most is a firm but understanding caretaker, who needs to be getting her own needs met through her spouse. Such a caretaker needs to have resolved the issues in her own source relationships, and needs to have a sense of self-responsibility. When this is the case, such a caretaker can be available to the child and provide what the child needs.
In a narcissistic family the responsibility for the meeting of emotional needs becomes skewed - instead of resting with the parents, the responsibility shifts to the child. The child becomes inappropriately responsible for meeting parental needs and in so doing is deprived of opportunities for necessary experimentation and growth.
As Echo could only reflect the words of others, so children raised in narcissistic families become reactive and reflective individuals. Because they learn early on that their primary job is to meet parental needs - whatever those might be - they do not develop trust in their own feelings and judgments. As a matter of fact, their own feelings are a source of discomfort: it is better not to have feelings at all than to have feelings that cannot be expressed or validated.
Thus, rather than act on her own feelings in a proactive way, the child waits to see what others expect or need and then reacts to those expectations. The reaction can be either positive or negative - the child can elect either to meet the expressed or implied needs or to rebel against the needs - but either course of action is reactive.
In the same way, the child becomes a reflection of parental expectations. This happens in all families to some extent, of course; the concept of mirroring in personality/ego development is a long-established tenet of psychology. Frequently in the narcissistic family, however, the mirror may reflect the child's inability to meet parental needs. This reflection almost always is interpreted by the child as inadequacy and failure on his or her part.
For the child of a Narcissistic family, intimate relationships are a problem. Children of these families have learned not to trust. Therefore in adulthood, as much as they may want to form close and loving relationships, they have difficulty letting down the barriers to trust they have erected.
The need for psychological and physical safety as essential building blocks for the development of trust is an elementary stage described in most psychological systems. The survivor in a narcissistic family system often learns not to trust or unlearns trust, rather than never learns to trust. As infants and young children, many survivors were fed well, kept warm, cuddled and nurtured. A needy, dependent infant poses minimal threat to the parent system; the needs are simple, and the parent system is able - and willing - to meet them.
As the child grows and seeks to differentiate from the parent, however, his needs become more complex. The parent system may be frankly unable to tend to these needs, or it may be threatened by them and become increasingly resentful. At this point the responsibility for meeting needs begins to shift from parent to child, and the erosion of trust starts.
While certain overt behaviors such as getting drunk and embarrassing the child will obviously produce a crisis of trust for the child, adults raised in narcissistic families frequently describe more covert dysfunction, describing their parents as "just there."
Beth's Story: "My mom was always there, doing the usual mom stuff. We had a lot of time in the house with her - she was... there. But I remember feeling like I couldn't get close to her. It's hard to describe. Like she was there, and she cared, but not really... I remember telling her this big thing about my best friend humiliating me in the school cafeteria - in front of everyone - and she'd nod, and make all the right noises, but it was like she was putting in her time doing the "mom thing" from the "mom book"... because as soon as I was finished, she'd start talking about Dad, about how pissed she was at him for something - like I had never said my stuff at all! ... And this wasn't one time, one incident - it was ALL the time! ... I worshipped her; I guess I still do... I know she loved me, but it was like trying to grab smoke - you see it, but you can't get it into your hand. I still feel that way."
Beth's story is not overt or dramatic abuse. It is about the emotional unavailability of the parent. Beth sensed accurately that her mother's focus was not on Beth, and she was right; it was on the relationship with her own husband. Beth's mother wanted Beth to pay attention to her, to be her ally, to meet her emotional needs when she was angry at her husband.
Though most of the focus of therapists has been on overtly narcissistic families where there is alcoholism, drug abuse, incest, violence, which are easy to diagnose, there are an equal number of cases of COVERT narcissistic families in which the dysfunction is much more subtle.
Therapists see this all the time: cases where patients are really troubled and have a lot of those traits generally identified as ACOA behaviors, but they just can't get a handle on where or why the problems started.
There was no overt abuse; nobody drank or took drugs. The family actually functioned very well. Children got fed, were clothed, had birthday parties, took family trips, and graduated from good schools with degrees and got good jobs. The family looked totally normal even on close inspection.
The problem was that the children were expected to meet the parents' emotional needs. It was subtle, it looked healthy, but it was not emotionally healthy for the children. The children from these families are the adults who come into therapy having read all the books, talked endlessly to their siblings and friends (all of whom have reinforced the idea that there was nothing wrong with the family), and thoroughly convinced themselves that there was something deficient and defective about their very core. There MUST be because there was nothing wrong with the way they were brought up!
The Narcissistic Family Model addresses this problem.
The Narcissistic Family often resembles the proverbial shiny red apple with a worm inside: it looks great until you bite into it and discover the worm. The rest of the apple may be just fine, but you have lost your appetite.
In the narcissistic family, most of what happens can be "just fine," but the emotional underpinnings are not there. The children are not getting their emotional needs met, because the parents are not focused on meeting them. In stead of providing a supportive, nurturing, reality-based mirror for their children, narcissistic parents present a mirror that reflects their own needs and expect their children to react to those needs. The focus is skewed, and the children grow up feeling defective, wrong, to blame.
When one is raised unable to trust in the stability, safety, and equity of one's world, one is raised to distrust one's own feelings, perceptions, and worth. When one is raised as a reactive/reflective being - as an Echo - one has not been taught the skills necessary to live a satisfying life.
The covertly narcissistic family can be difficult to recognize. Therapists report reviewing a patient's quite normal-appearing case history looking for abusive behavior that - based on the patient's symptoms - MUST have been there. But it was not. During a case review in one clinic staff meeting, a therapist recounted a detailed summary of a very difficult case and asked in frustration: "Who was the alcoholic? I KNOW that someone in this family had a drinking problem!" But no one did.
The problem was that the patient manifested all the symptoms associated with the alcohol-troubled family without any evidence of any familial alcohol abuse; without, in fact, evidence of ANY abuse whatsoever.
The solution to the puzzle was that the patient came from a covertly narcissistic family. This type of family looks perfect on the outside, and looks pretty good on the inside, too. In fact, survivors of such families are absolutely mystified at the suggestion that any of their problems could stem from their family relationships and dynamic. After all, nobody drank or took drugs, nobody hit anyone, nobody had a mental illness and so on. Dad always had a good job, working 9 to 5; Mom was a great homemaker, baked cookies for the PTA and so on. There were simply NO problems!
In therapy, however, it comes out: the needs of the parents were the focus of the family and the children were, in some way or other, expected to meet those needs. The children, however, are not getting their own needs met or learning how to express them, or their feelings, appropriately. Quite the contrary: what the children are learning is how to mask their feelings, how to pretend to feel things they do not feel, and how to keep from experiencing their real feelings.
In the Narcissistic family, things go along okay until one of the children makes emotional demands of the parents. Then things become very tense. The children are always expected to "act happy" so as to reflect well on the parents doing a good "parenting job." This is an aspect of "meeting the parent's emotional needs."
The degree of a family's dysfunction may vary not only in an absolute sense, but also in regard to specific children within the family as well.
Why does one child seem to escape relatively unscathed?
No two siblings grow up in exactly the same environment; parents respond differently to each child, with the response based on the personalities of both parent and child. One child may have the same weird sense of humor as the mother, one may share Dad's love of fishing, and a third may be a great cuddler. How the parents relate to these three children will differ because the children themselves are different, and because the parents' feelings about themselves in relation to each child vary. Therefore, it is possible for one child in a family to get his or her emotional needs met on a fairly consistent basis while the others do not.
In such families, the child that is best at meeting the parents' needs or reflecting the parents' image of themselves, becomes the favored child. More sensitive children with greater needs - therefore more troubling to the parents' self-interest - become the scapegoat for the family.
Survivors of narcissistic families have difficulties with trust, but not because their elementary needs went unmet. On the contrary, survivors of covertly narcissistic families appear to have been well nurtured in infancy and to have had both physical and psychological needs met in a healthy way for the first year or two, and sometimes longer. The problems in narcissistic families begin when the children attempt to assert themselves and make emotional demands on the parent system. The parent system may be frankly unable to tend to these needs and may be resentful of them and threatened by them.
As the child grows, the parents' own identity may become more and more involved with the child's development. Simultaneously, as the child's needs become both more complicated and better articulated, he or she may start to infringe more obviously on the parent system. A cranky infant who demands parental attention at an inconvenient time can, after all, be placed in a crib with the door shut. An irate and tearful nine-year-old is an entirely different matter.
As the child's psychological needs become more of a factor in the life of the family, the narcissistic family truly develops. The parent system is unable to adapt to meet the child's needs, and the child, in order to survive, must be the one to adapt. The inversion process begins; the responsibility for meeting needs gradually shifts from the parent to the child. Whereas in infancy the parents may have met the needs of the child, now the child is more and more attempting to meet the needs of the parent - to twist or deform himself so as to meet the emotional expectations of the parent - for only in this way can the child gain attention, acceptance and approval.
As a normal child develops, his or her need to please herself and his or her friends increases as the need to please the parents decreases. This is normal and healthy.
In a healthy family, however annoying this fact of life - of normal development - may be, it still does not change the basic conceptualization of parental responsibility: the parents' job is to meet the child's needs, not vice versa.
In the narcissistic family, though, as the child's need for differentiation and fulfillment of emotional needs escalates with normal development, so does the parents' belief that the child is intentionally thwarting them, becoming increasingly selfish, and so on. The parents, feeling threatened, then "dig in their heels," and demand that the child more and more conform to their wants and expectations, and thus meet their emotional needs.
Somewhere between infancy and adolescence, the parents lose the focus (if they ever had it) and stop seeing the child as a discrete individual with feelings and needs to be validated and met.
The child becomes, instead, an extension of the parents. Normal emotional growth is seen as selfish or deficient, and this is what the parents mirror to the child. For the child to get approval, he or she must meet a spoken or unspoken need of the parent; approval is contingent on the child meeting the parent's expectations/needs for self admiration.
There are predictable means by which narcissistic family members relate to each other. These are the unspoken criteria by which the family is expected to operate. The purpose of the rules is to insulate the parents from the emotional needs of their children - to protect and hold intact the parent system. Therefore, all of these unspoken "rules for maintenance" of the narcissistic family system discourage open communication of feelings by the children and limit their access to the parents (emotionally), while giving the parents unlimited access to the children.
In the narcissistic family, direct, clear communication of feelings is discouraged. Individuals express their feelings obliquely.
Requests are rarely direct; instead of "Sam, would you please set the table?" one gets "It would be nice if someone would set the table." The child that "meets the need" is given approval. This teaches the child that the way to survive is to constantly try to meet indirectly stated needs of the parent.
When parents are upset or angry, they are usually unable to express those feelings in a timely and appropriate manner. One patient recalled that whenever her mother was angry with her father, the mother would be overly solicitous of the father at the dinner table and very critical of the children for their supposed lack of concern for their father's comfort. "Ed, pass your father the potatoes first. Stacy, give your father the butter NOW before his vegetables get cold." She would keep this up until the whole family was anxious and uncomfortable and the meal was ruined. Then, she would explode at a harmless remark made by the father, jump up and run from the table in tears. The father would stay at the table for a few minutes, then throw down his napkin and stalk out leaving the children frightened, confused and resentful. At no time were any of these incidents ever mentioned again or explained.
Another ineffective communication technique used in narcissistic families is triangularization. The parents communicate through a third party, usually a child. One patient, however, reported that her parents had for years communicated through the dog: "Buffy, tell your Daddy that Mommy wants to go out Saturday night." "Buffy, remind Mommy that Saturday is Daddy's bowling night." One day, Buffy decided to move out, and she took Daddy with her. The father even signed the dog's name to the note he left.
More commonly, however, the parents will "confide" in the child, with the implicit expectation that the child will carry the message to the other parent. The parents may also use the child as a buffer so that they do not have to communicate directly.
In a third scenario, triangularization is employed by one parent to form an alliance with a child against another person - the concept of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." This is confusing and extremely damaging when the "enemy" is the other parent or a sibling.
Again, such families are covertly narcissistic. It LOOKS like the children's needs are being met, and they may indeed get a lot of time with one or both parents. The problem, of course, is that it is the parents' preoccupation with getting their own needs met that is the reason for the time together, and which is driving the relationships. The children cannot predict when or why good times will either happen or be withdrawn. They feel like they may have "gotten it right" when intimacy is encouraged, and "messed up" when it is discouraged. In reality they are not responsible for either their inclusion or exclusion from parental intimacy; it is their parents' own needs, and not the children's behavior, that is the motivation.
When speaking of parental accessibility here, we are referring to emotional accessibility - the ability to have fulfilling conversations about feelings. Many survivors of narcissistic families say that they never, in all their life, had a deep conversation with their parents. Their parents would "do work" for them, (that is, transport them, provide for them, buy things for them) but if they really wanted or needed to talk about THEIR feelings, the conversation would quickly turn to an advice-giving session (do this or that), a fight (you should have done this or that), or denial (you don't feel that way, you are just hungry or tired; you'll feel different tomorrow). The parents were always "too busy" to talk deeply, to really listen, to give of themselves in an emotional way. And, of course, the children could SEE that the parents were busy doing things FOR the children, or the job, or the family, or the home, so how could the child feel resentful unless he really was selfish, wrong and mean-spirited?
In the narcissistic family, children lack entitlement. They do not "own" their feelings; their feelings are not considered. When we do not have feelings, then others do not have to take our feelings into consideration.
In the overtly narcissistic family, there may be no rules at all governing boundary issues such as privacy. However, in the covertly narcissistic family, there are generally clear rules governing all manner of boundary issues, including physical privacy. The problem however, is twofold: first, the rules may be broken by the parents as their needs dictate, and second: there are no boundaries in terms of emotional expectations for the children. The children are always expected to meet the parents' emotional and self esteem needs but the emotional needs of the child are generally met only by happy coincidence.
Adults raised in narcissistic families often do not know that they can say "no" - that they have a right to limit what they will do for others, and that they do not have to be physically and emotionally accessible to anyone at any time. In their families, they may not have had the right to say no, or to discriminate between reasonable and unreasonable requests. Children in narcissistic families do not learn how to set boundaries, because it is not in the parents' best interests to teach them: the children might use that skill to set boundaries with them!
Regarding how a child may get his or her needs met by "coincidence" - as a by-product of the parent system getting its needs met, let us give the following example:
Susie (age 6) has a need to be nurtured. Susie's mother is usually "too busy" (it is irrelevant whether she is busy with Dad, cocaine, a job, or clinical depression, it feels the same to the children) to meet this need so she demands that Susie's older sister Joyce (age 12) "get her out of my hair." Susie does not get her needs for nurturance met by her mother and Joyce does not get either her needs for nurturance or autonomy met by Mother.
But suppose that the mother-in-law comes for a visit. Mom has needs for praise and esteem from the mother-in-law, who values good parenting. So, during the visit, Mom is available and cuddly to both her daughters. Susie and Joyce both get their nurturance needs met, Joyce gets time away from baby-sitting to be with her friends and do what she wants to do. The mother-in-law praises Mom's parenting so Mom gets her needs met and everyone is happy - temporarily. Mom met the children's needs, but only as an action coincident to getting her own needs met.
This kind of situation is particularly damaging. The children may believe that they caused Mom to be more loving, which will encourage them to believe that they have control over her actions and are therefore responsible for her emotional state. When Mom reverts to form, they may then believe that they have caused the rejection, too. They cannot win: they are taking responsibility for things they do not control. The only lesson they can learn from this pattern is that they have not gotten it right - yet. There is really something wrong with them; they got it right briefly, and then they blew it. The children will continue to try to hit the moving target - in this case, the button that causes their mother to nurture them.
The locus of difficulty on which boundary setting, intimacy concerns, and virtually every other survivor of a narcissistic family issue is centered on EMOTIONAL ENTITLEMENT.
In order to set boundaries with another person (whether it means saying no to sex, refusing to take an adolescent to a convenience store late at night to pick up a notebook for school because he "forgot" to ask earlier, or insisting on equal pay for equal work), one must know that one has the right to feel as one does: that one has the right to set the boundary, feel the feeling, or make the demand.
In narcissistic families, be they covert or overt, THE CHILDREN ARE NOT ENTITLED TO HAVE, EXPRESS, OR EXPERIENCE FEELINGS THAT ARE UNACCEPTABLE TO THE PARENTS.
Children learn to do all manner of things with their feelings so as not to create problems for themselves vis-
