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.
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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. [...]
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.
