Applying the values of an externalized society to one’s self cause narcissistic wounding. We use the word narcissistic to show that it self-love that is harmed. When self-love depends on externals, on others’ opinions of what you are and do, the self is betrayed. A woman who possesses great natural beauty was described by her boastful mother in front of company as “beautiful as a movie star”. When she heard these words, the daughter cringed in shame, feeling herself to be worthless, because she was only valued for her surface.
A healthy self has nothing to do with stardom. Psychological health comes from acceptance starting in early infancy of all that you are, good and bad, dirty and clean, naughty and nice, smart and stupid. In the adult, health is manifested by an accord between ideals and actions, by the ability to appreciate yourself for what you attempted to do as well as for what succeeds. It means recognizing that although you are not perfect you are still worthy of love.
In high school, coaches attempt to strengthen character by telling their charges to do their best and to ignore whether the outcome is win or lose. Our externalized society is so addicted to winning that such advice is but a weak antidote to the pressure placed on youngsters by hysterical parents, idealizing students, and the school board, all of whose egos need a win to contradict a basically shaky self-image.
To grow up to be a whole person, infants, toddlers, and children in their formative stages need the experience of genuine acceptance, they have to know that they are truly seen and yet are perfect and lovable in their parents’ eyes, they need to stumble and sometimes fall and to be greeted by a father’s or mother’s commiserating smile. Through parental acceptance, children learn that their “is-ness”, their essential selves, merit love. Self-love is learned through identification. Positive self-regard is the opposite of what the narcissist knows. He is “in love” with himself precisely because he cannot love himself.
As a child, the narcissist-to-be found his essential self rejected by his narcissist parent. The wounds of the parent are a template for the wounding of the child. Each narcissistic parent in each generation repeats the crime that was perpetrated against him. The crime is non-acceptance. The narcissist is more damaging, and deforming of the child he identifies with more strongly, although all of his children are pulled into his web of subjectivity. How can he accept offspring who are the product of his own unconsciously despised self? His attitude is a variant of the Groucho Marx Syndrome, “I would not love any child that would have me as its parent.” The child has rejection as its birthright.
The child who will eventually turn into a full-scale narcissist most often had a narcissistic mother. The reason why the maternal narcissist is more often likely to turn her child into a fellow narcissist is because the mother most often provides the predominant care that defines the baby’s early world, if the father is narcissistic and the mother is not, the father’s traumatic impacts the attenuated at the time when the child is establishing a sense of self.
