On her 19th birthday, Rona (not her real name) invited a few friends over to her family’s house for coffee and cake. Returning to her room with the refreshments, her father, lying on the sofa pressed her with barely contained fury, “Why did you bring people here? I told you I don’t want you to bring anyone here.”
“He just made up that rule that second,” she says now. “I said quietly, ‘Yes, but it’s my birthday.’ I thought maybe he forgot.” He hadn’t wished her a happy birthday or given her a gift, though in any case those were things reserved for her siblings. Hoping to assuage him, she promised that her friends would drink the coffee quickly and leave. But he “arose from the sofa, stood very close to me and said to me quietly, ‘Your birthday, my ass.’ At that moment, it felt like my whole body was being stabbed. And then I had to go back to my friends and act like nothing happened.”
No fight or disrespectful conduct on her part preceded this, Rona says. Nor was it unusual. That’s how it always was, she says: Her parents humiliated and belittled her and were violent towards her irrespective of her behavior. New rules would pop up out of the blue. She was punished, never really knowing why, with long silences. She was ignored and shunned.
Rona grew up in northern Israel, one of four children to normative parents. Her father was a civil servant, her mother a housewife. Outwardly, they seemed like model parents – “friendly, hospitable.” Inside the home, it was a totally different story. “Like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” she says.
Unlike other forms of abuse, in narcissistic parenting, appearances are deceptive and the harm will always be denied
To others, their household was fine, all was well, says Yiftah (now in his 40s, not his real name) about his childhood. “When other people were around, I was the successful child, but in the home I was an endless failure,” he describes. “My parents’ expectations were focused on me and no matter what I did, I could never meet them. Even when I did, there was always something else, something I didn’t know about, that I had done wrong. My father used hurtful nicknames. The message was clear that I was his punishment.” There was violence, too: “The memories I have of my father is that I’m hiding under the table while he’s chasing after me with a belt. He would throw me down the stairs and shut me outside.”
The similarity between Rona and Yiftah’s descriptions is no coincidence. Both experienced the same thing: narcissistic parental abuse , also called “toxic parenting.”
The stories may are individual but the essence is the same. Narcissistic parenting can be manifested in physical, verbal or emotional harm, or in neglect – or all the above – on top of other types of abuse. However, it is still a distinct form of abuse.
My father, Amos Oz, sadistically abused me. The punishment was endless: The first chapter of Galia Oz’s new book How to identify gaslighting, according to a clinical psychologist Amos Oz’s daughter: He beat, cursed and humiliated me Galia Oz’s demagogic and narcissistic book proves she’s her father’s true literary heiress A parent with a narcissistic personality is incapable of seeing his children’s needs and wants. Hs projects elements of his own personality, feelings and needs onto the child. Often, one child in the family bears the brunt of all the negative aspects and is considered the “bad” child.
But unlike other forms of abuse, in narcissistic parenting, appearances are deceptive and the harm will always be denied. From the outside, the family will appear normal and nurturing, but will be missing the most basic element of parenting: that primal, unspoken pact between parent and child – that the parent wants what is good for the child and is on the child’s side.
Open gallery view Toxic parents have a lack of compassion for their children and emotional alienation, which is often cloaked in a pleasant façade,” psychotherapist Danit Bar writes in her book. Credit: Yuval Bar The ‘princess’ speaks up
Toxic parenting is “deceptive and quiet abuse. Toxic parents have a lack of compassion for their children and emotional alienation, which is often cloaked in a pleasant façade,” psychotherapist Danit Bar writes in her book, “A Childhood Fit for a Princess” (Hebrew). “It’s what seeps in under the surface, or as many people who come to therapy, and don’t know one another, describe it: ‘It’s like a dripping infusion of poison. It’s always there.”
She chose the title of her book after witnessing an argument a grown daughter had with her abusive mother who said the daughter had no right to be angry and complain because “you had a childhood fit for a princess.” “This line was said in a defiant and scornful tone,” Bar writes in the book’s preface, “and it hurt the daughter, whose biographical truth was completely different.”
Gal Emet, 27, from Ramat Gan, runs a Facebook group for victims of narcissistic abuse called “ Daughters of Estria .” It has over 3,000 members. Every woman she knows who experienced this kind of abuse immediately understands why Bar chose that title for her book, she says.
‘It’s very hard to expose it and the systematic nature of it makes it hard to grasp. As a child, you are dependent on this system, so you help to preserve it and enjoy the crumbs’
“This faux innocent attitude of – ‘What do you want, you had a childhood fit for a princess’ is something that nearly every abusive parent says when you confront them. Most of the women in the group describe very difficult relationships with mothers who never denied them any material comforts. They grew up in seemingly embracing households. Many weren’t physically beaten when they were kids, they weren’t starved, but they suffered from severe gaslighting, from incitement against them and from psychological abuse that has a strong tendency to continue into adulthood,” she explains.
Can’t anyone rummage through the past and find moments of parental failure? All parents make mistakes despite their best intentions.
Mistakes are one thing, narcissistic abuse is vastly another. “Most parents,” says clinical psychologist Ayelet Yokev, “know how to be parents. Because they naturally stand by their child’s side.”
Shiri (not her real name), who is in her 30s, illustrates what the absence of parental stability looks like. As far back as she can remember, she says, just about every day her mother would go on and on about how wonderful everything was until she was born. “The message was that I ruined everything for them. It was a ritual, in which she would tell the story and then get upset and hit me.”
At 12, Shiri began to menstruate but was afraid to tell her mother. “I knew it would lead to something not good,” she says. “So for a year, I managed on my own. I bought pads with my sandwich money.”
But after a year, her mother found out. “Something about my femininity freaked her out so much that she went into a frenzy – She took scissors and chopped my hair, while screaming that I was a slut – a word I didn’t know then – and that I had wrecked their lives.”
A half hour later, when Shiri’s mother had calmed down, she took her daughter to a hair salon. “It was ritzy sort of salon. They cut my hair and gave me a ‘girls’ day out.’ When we got back, she could tell the cover story, that we had a ‘fun day.’ The worst thing is that I was even happier to tell this story than she was. As a child, you cooperate with the abuse and the concealment.”
Open gallery view ‘Most parents,’ says clinical psychologist Ayelet Yokev, ‘know how to be parents. Because they naturally stand by their child’s side.’ Credit: Ofer Vaknin The split between the way things look on the outside, and what happens inside the home, keeps recurring in my conversations with people who suffered from toxic parenting.
“If you ask my mother, she is the brave single mother who worked multiple jobs so her children would want for nothing,” says Liel (not her real name), who is in her twenties and lives in central Israel. “And really, my brother and I always wore designer clothes, I always had a new book bag every year and I was the first in my grade to get my own phone.” But her mother also regularly humiliated her. Among other things, she kept taking her to the gynecologist and forced her to put sanitary pads in her underwear from the time she was nine, long before she got her period.
The deceptive aspects of this type of abuse make it hard to spot and to understand. “It feels like Munchausen, because it disguises itself as something else,” Shiri says. “It’s very hard to expose it and the systematic nature of it makes it hard to grasp. As a child, you are dependent on this system, so you help to preserve it and enjoy the crumbs. It’s a paradox: You’re helping to sustain the abusive structure so the structure won’t fall apart, because things falling apart is the scariest thing of all.”
‘Narcissistic abuse is so entrenched that it often takes years for people who experienced it as children to start to realize that something wasn’t right there’
“Narcissistic abuse is so entrenched that it often takes years for people who experienced it as children to start to realize that something wasn’t right there,” Liel agrees. “Even now, I’m still discovering how abnormal things were in my home – because they didn’t whip me with a belt, but rather with whispers, with ‘nice’ moments. Once, when I was 16, for example, I got ready to go to a friend’s house and I put on eyeliner. My mother leaned over to me and said quietly, ‘Yes, yes, put on eyeliner. Maybe that way he won’t notice how gross your pussy is.’”
Toxic parenting is more common than people think. The therapists who were interviewed for this article spoke of dozens, sometimes hundreds, of cases that they saw in their clinics.
Open gallery view Psychologist Menashe Cohen, pictured, has been treating post-trauma of different origins for many years. Credit: Inbar Cohen Bar, 40 years a therapist, says she once devoted an episode of a radio show to the subject. “In the 30 years that this show was on the air, no other subject elicited so many responses. I walked out of the radio station at two in the morning, turned on my phone, and all night long I heard from listeners who burst into tears and said, ‘Now I finally understand my story.’ And most of them were people in their fifties and sixties.”
Raising an object
Psychologist Menashe Cohen has been treating post-trauma of different origins for many years. He came to the subject of narcissistic parenting a decade ago after wondering why some people just weren’t being relieved of their emotional distress. “I would come to a dead end in therapy,” he says. But digging a little more would uncover parental or spousal narcissism.
“Most of the people who come to me aren’t able to put a name to their problem. They just think they are messed up. There are different kinds of things that can be described as ‘narcissistic abuse.’ It’s not uniform,” he says.
Narcissistic parents may treat the child as their property. “In a normal situation, when a child is born, he gradually creates separation from the parent. He is not an object that is tended to, but a subject with feelings and desires of his own,” Cohen explains. The perception of the child as a subject does not exist for the narcissistic parent. He will supervise and care for the child, but as you would care for an inanimate object.”
‘Most of the people who come to me aren’t able to put a name to their problem. They just think they are messed up’
Clinical psychologist Anat Sarig-Shmueli puts it this way: “A narcissistic parent may appear to be very caring and nurturing, but it’s like a rock star who has a beloved guitar – he or she takes care of it, but might also smash it on stage in a fit of ecstasy. These children become an object for their parents’ use. On the softer and less violent end of the scale of narcissistic parenting, it could be a parent who expects his children to fulfill all his wishes while being blind to their own needs, or a parent who ignores and neglects his children. And on the more severe end, it could be sexually exploiting the child or making the child a scapegoat. Narcissistic parents will often praise their children when they fulfill the parents’ needs but humiliate and crush them if they don’t.”
To understand narcissistic parenting, it helps to consider the definition of narcissistic personality disorder, which appears in Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). As with everything, narcissism exists on a spectrum. On one end are the traits of self-love and self-concern and the need for approval from others; we all have some of that. Far at the other end is psychopathy, in which the person does not see the other person at all and will use the other person for his own needs.
The black sheep
As in the myth from which the name originates, the narcissist needs others only as a mirror. Their main characteristics are megalomania, extreme egocentrism and a lack of empathy, despite the desire for external approval. Parents with narcissistic personality traits portray themselves as all-knowing and all-understanding. Meanwhile, the child is seen as not knowing anything and incapable, loses confidence in his own opinion, and develops dependence. Narcissists lack emotional depth and cannot understand or accept others’ complex emotions. With their own emotions, there is no middle ground. Everything is black or white.
“A narcissist has a deficiency in the experience of self-worth and self-fulfillment, and therefore he uses others,” Sarig-Shmueli explains. Very often, narcissism is an outgrowth of trauma. Many narcissistic parents were subjected narcissistic parenting themselves, or other difficult life circumstances. “People ask me what my mother gained by her behavior,” Liel says. “They don’t get that it’s not a Hollywood movie about The Joker. The real tragedy is that it wasn’t done deliberately. I’m basically a random statistic in my mother’s life, but one that she had to deal with every day, and so I suffered from her personality more than others did.”
Open gallery view Clinical psychologist Anat Sarig-Shmueli. Credit: Rotem Sarid Shmueli Another prominent characteristic of narcissistic parenting may be an obsessive need to control the child. “A ‘toxic parent’ experiences every opposing view voiced by the child, or any autonomous life choice, as a challenge to his parental authority and an offense to his honor,” Bar writes.
Perhaps the cruelest part of the narcissistic parent’s control of family members involves rigid assignment of roles. “These families have a strong dynamic of a black sheep alongside the favored children,” Yokev says. “The black sheep receives less or is not praised in the same way. This is the child that is identified as problematic, the tough one, and then there will be another sibling or siblings who are the favorites. They are on the receiving end much less frequently, if at all, of the anger or violence or emotional alienation that the parent can dole out. They get emotional and financial support.”
‘A narcissistic parent may appear to be very caring and nurturing, but it’s like a rock star who has a beloved guitar and might smash it on stage in a fit of ecstasy’
Different roles tend to develop in every family – one child is considered the most responsible, another is the peacemaker, another is the rebel. But this is taken to a much more dramatic extreme in a family in which there is toxic parenting.
Unlike in normative families, where there is a connection between the role the child assumes and his nature and personality, in families with narcissistic parenting, the black sheep often is not a particularly challenging child.
“Most of the children I know who were subjected to toxic parenting are really good and successful kids,” Bar says. “A child who is born into this interaction has to work hard to earn his parents’ love, and so his survival tendency is to be a good child. However, even good kids who aim to please – when they realize at some point in a more conscious way that it won’t help them and that there will always be something wrong with them, they may ultimately rebel.”
“I wasn’t a challenging child,” says Yiftah, who today holds a senior position and has had a very successful career. He says he was a bright child who wanted to please others, and brought home top grades, but his parents were never satisfied. “When I’d come home with a grade of 100, my mother would ask, ‘Who else got 100?’ in order to diminish the achievement. When I got a 99, she had to know what I got wrong, and if I came home with a 90, they would say, ‘Even the street cleaners would never take you.’ I understood that I was a failure.”
Open gallery view ‘Most parents know how to be parents. Because they naturally stand by their child’s side.’ Credit: Jean-Francois Badias,AP “In the literature, there are several main recurring roles,” Cohen says. “The favorite child is called the ‘golden child’ – He is wonderful and faultless. The ‘black sheep’ is the one that everything is wrong with, no matter what he does – This one is bad and everything can be dumped on him. And the third role is ‘the invisible one.’”
“No one talked to me at home. My mother didn’t speak to me,” Shiri says. “She didn’t put a hand on me. I couldn’t say to her, ‘Mom, hug me.’ They ignore you. You become invisible. The thing is that you’ve got a role to fill – to be the problem of the family, and if you’re not in the role, then you’re behind the scenes, you don’t exist.”
To get affection from her mother, Shiri had to be sick. And she often was sick. “When I was sick, my mother took good care of me,” she says. “Those were the moments of relief. I knew that if I were sick, she would take care of me. It would be pleasant at home. Once, I was brought to the hospital and it was the happiest day of my life. I had intense stomach pain, they thought I had appendicitis and wanted to operate. When I heard that, I was happy, because I understood it meant that I would spend a couple of weeks in the hospital. But in the end, they ruled that out and just kept me for a few days for observation. I enjoyed the peacefulness there so much. Everyone was nice to me and smiled at me and took good care of me. I enjoyed being somewhere where no one hated me.”
The division of roles among the children is part of the narcissistic parent’s “divide and conquer” strategy by which he weakens and isolates the individuals in the family, which enables him to control them
As a child, Yiftah was also routinely ignored and not spoken to. The longest silence last 10 whole months and happened when he was a soldier. “When my older sister was in the army, my parents set up a regular deposit for her and then when I went into the army, it was transferred to me, but that was a few years later and there wasn’t enough money in the account.” Yiftah, who from a young age had paid for his own extracurricular activities and summer camp with money he earned from tutoring, worked up the nerve to ask his parents to add just 20 shekels more to the allowance. In response, they went ballistic: “They said, ‘All you want from us is money’ and after that my mother stopped speaking to me altogether.” Desperate, he went to speak to the welfare noncom on his base to ask for some financial help “But when she came to our house, my parents opened the fridge and showed her how full it was, so even my attempt to escape from home didn’t succeed.”
As a child, Yiftah was also routinely ignored and not spoken to. The longest silence last 10 whole months and happened when he was a soldier
Me and not – me
The victims of abuse who were interviewed for this article say that they were treated differently than the other children in the family. In Yiftah’s family, his younger sister was the parents’ favorite. Rona, now in her forties, says that she was the only one of her siblings who was regularly degraded and shunned. Liel says she started out as the favorite and her younger brother was the black sheep, but when she was about 10 or 11, the roles switched – something that commonly happens in families with narcissistic parenting.
Shiri’s older sister was the beloved one. “My mother would lock me in my room while she drove her to activities,” she says. “I wasn’t allowed to do the activities that my sister did. She painted, so I couldn’t paint. Years later, I discovered that I actually love to paint. I wasn’t allowed to touch any of her things or her clothes, or to even come close. Otherwise, my mother would get violent with me.”
What explains the reasoning behind this theatrical division of roles? Sarig-Shmueli says, “The narcissist perceives the world in extreme terms of good and bad, of ‘me’ and ‘not me.’ Everything that relates to good – is me, and all that is bad – is not me. So one child is associated with what is good in me and assumes the role of the successful child, and another child becomes the garbage bin of the whole family. The parents see in him everything that is ‘not’ – essentially all of those parts of himself and emotions of his that he cannot abide, which are projected onto the child. It works on an either-or dynamic – If you’re not for me, you’re against me. If you are not me, you are a stranger.”
Open gallery view A family where most members confront the child by saying they didn’t know constitutes a second alienation. Credit: ANDY BUCHANAN / AFP The division of roles among the children is part of the narcissistic parent’s “divide and conquer” strategy by which he weakens and isolates the individuals in the family, which enables him to control them. Thus, in many of these families, there are rifts between the grown children. “It’s part of the same rigidity that divides and separates and doesn’t allow for a free flow,” Cohen says. “There’s always someone who’s directing the traffic. I see it in the clinic over and over again – There is no fellowship among the siblings. They are very isolated.”
“My mother always played on the relationship between me and my brother,” says Liel. “Even a child who is not physically abused or humiliated by an abusive parent is a victim, since if you have a brother who embodies everything you’re not allowed to be, you must not – for the sake of your survival – protect him but rather the person who is victimizing him, otherwise you’ll be in the same boat as he is. It was rare for me or my brother to come to one another’s aid. When she’d do something to my brother and I’d nevertheless try to protect him, she would turn her head toward me and say: ‘Why are you wrecking things? Don’t you want to be my friend?’”
Flying monkeys
“Families with narcissistic parents are usually families that speak with one voice,” Yokev explains. Usually one person is generating the dynamics, experts say. The second parent and others tend to cooperate with that person through silencing, blurring and denial. The professional jargon terms this “flying monkeys,” a term that refers to family members and friends who unconsciously cooperate with the victimized narrative of the narcissist while participating in a campaign of denigration against the victim of abuse.
Yet if one child in a family is reporting being abused, couldn’t the problem lie with the child, not the parent?
“The correct starting point which is true for the absolute majority of cases is that children love their parents,” says Yokev. “In order for a child to distance himself or herself from a parent, that parent has to ‘work’ hard for years, in the negative sense of the word, obviously.”
Narcissistic abuse is not restricted to parents. It can occur in couples or in a workplace. But when it occurs between a parent and child, the damage is especially serious
“The question is not whether we believe the child or not,” answers Bar. “It’s not one word against another. Children don’t make up toxicity. They may inflate a particular story, but you can’t make up emotions. There isn’t a child who doesn’t know whether it’s loved or not. If an adult says his mother didn’t love him, there is no room for interpretation.”
“When a therapist meets a client several times, he knows the client’s story can’t be based on a lie,” says Cohen. “You can’t make up something like that, since the story is coherent, sharp and focused.”
Shiri elaborates: “The very fact that there are such different stories in one family with an abused child is the essence of the problem. The divergence is the nature of the beast. How is it possible that the two narratives existed side by side for so many years? That’s what madness looks like.”
Narcissistic abuse is not restricted to parents. It can occur in couples or in a workplace. But when it occurs between a parent and child, the damage is especially serious. “Everyone I know who was a child living in a toxic environment feels unequal or unworthy,” says Bar. “They could be successful and talented people but it doesn’t matter, they walk around with a sense of failure and of being ugly.”
The realization that your parent can’t stand you is something you don’t get over, says Shiri. “There’s no way of fixing it when you’re so hated. When you’re so deprived as a child, you get used to expecting the worst from yourself. The fear of transmitting this to my children is always there. I check myself seven times an hour. It took me a long time to understand how to be a mother. I only knew what I didn’t want to do, but not what I did want.”
Liel struggles with the aftermath of traumas daily, she says. In her case, the humiliation and damage were of a sophisticated sexual nature
Liel struggles with the aftermath of traumas daily, she says. In her case, the humiliation and damage were of a sophisticated sexual nature. “When my mother would get angry at me,” she relates, “she’d go to the garbage pail and take out my pads and hers and compare them. She’d then tell me how dirty I was. ‘Yuck, look what’s in your body’ she’d say, before carrying on with her day.”
When one delves deeper into psychotherapy that deals with narcissistic parenting, one encounters a realm of terms. In addition to ‘black sheep’ or ‘golden child’ and ‘flying monkeys’ one can find the term ‘hoovering.’ Narcissists create so much sympathy and admiration around themselves that they suck in anyone coming in contact with them. If relatives try to distance themselves, these narcissists try to suck them back into their sphere of dominion, including through “tempting behavior” that dangles carrots, in the form of money or gifts.
“The narcissist cannot let go of a child, since he regards any distancing or criticism as abandonment or as an attack, “explains Cohen. “If there is some distancing, he will employ an entire armada, including neighbors, family members and friends, in order to bring back the child who’s moved away. He turns the child into an evil person, or a rebel.”
When the black sheep grows up
Children of narcissistic parents are in a state of conflict. They strongly feel that something is wrong, but any question or claim about a parent hits a wall of silence. What could resolve such a conflict? “Either the child continues as an adult to walk around with the feeling that their parent was good and that they were bad children,” says Yokev, “or he understands that something was wrong with his parent, and he’ll proclaim so loudly, to family and acquaintances.”
Narcissists create so much sympathy and admiration around themselves that they suck in anyone coming in contact with them
If he opts for the first choice, she explains, “he’ll continue to be the black sheep of the family even in late adulthood. The alienation, the rupture, the exclusion and the damage to other family ties, and the sense of a conditional belonging to the family, will continue into adulthood. If the toxic behavior was presented as love all those years, he may search for toxic relationships for his entire life.”
Bar says that one of the amazing things she’s encountered is “the number of people in their 60s or older who are caring for older toxic parents. They visit them in hospitals and get abused – why did you come now, you forgot something again, complaints about grandchildren and more. Children come out broken but still feel a duty to nurse their parents till the end.”
And what if the adult child chooses the second option?
“Usually,” says Yokev, “no one believes them. The specious presentation of wonderful parents was so consistent over the years, with the child tagged as a troublemaker, a bad and ungrateful child, that there’s no chance he’ll be believed. Everyone is already a captive of the parent’s narrative. Everyone shouts, ‘gevalt, the child is alienating himself.’ A family where most members confront the child by saying they didn’t know constitutes a second alienation. It’s a further slap in the face, and the sense of loneliness a person can feel in these circumstances is terrible. When a child decides to break off relations, others relate to it as an act of revenge, and usually this is not the case. It’s simply the only way a person can protect himself.”
Many people who were hurt by narcissistic parents indeed feel that the only way to survive is to break away from their parents, often from the entire family. “I tried to talk to my mother thousands of times, or even to my sister,” says Shiri. “But there was no dialogue. In my teens I realized it was endless, without a solution in the deepest sense of the word. The only thing you want is recognition but they’re incapable of giving it since that means recognizing themselves as abusers, which is something narcissists cannot tolerate.”
“I broke away from my mother too, and paid for it with a rupture with my entire family,” says Liel. “My brother chose my mother; that paralyzed me for several months, and I grieve that till this day. I don’t talk to him, not out of anger, but because he’s still in that matrix and I’m outside it.”
Ultimately, one must also ask: can this kind of relationship be repaired? Can there be forgiveness? “Forgiveness is a very personal matter, it’s like love,” says Yokev. “There’s no right or wrong here. Sometimes one feels that it’s right for them to forgive, while another feels that forgiving is like cooperating with the blurring of the violence that took place, especially when the other side doesn’t recognize what they did.”
“It constitutes distress surrounded by a roaring silence,” explains Shiri. “A wall of silence, which is part of the insult. The main thing you can do is talk about what was forbidden to talk about. Ultimately, when facing narcissists, the battle is over the narrative.” In the absence of a true recognition of the wrong that was done, many of the afflicted feel, as described by Liel, that they have only one way of healing: “Stand on the top of the highest mountain and scream into space: it’s me, and this is what happened to me.”
