Growing up with a narcissistic parent: the child as a mirror

A music school recital. A girl plays her piece without a mistake, and as she takes her bow her mother, in the third row, is already looking round to see who was watching. In the corridor she accepts the congratulations: “Yes, she gets it from me, I used to play too.” The car is silent. At home the girl hears: “You rushed the second movement. Everyone noticed.” A year later she says she would rather stop playing the piano. Her mother does not speak to her for three days.

Thirty years on, that girl sits at work listening to her manager’s praise and waiting for the “but”. She doesn’t know what she herself would like for her birthday. When her mother takes offence, her stomach tightens as if she were nine again. And one evening she reads a description of a “narcissistic mother” online and cannot stop reading.

That is what this post is about: growing up beside a parent who needed their child as a mirror. I will not tell you whether your father or mother was a narcissist. What I can do is describe the patterns such families often carry, the roles of the golden child and the scapegoat, and what an adult takes away from all of it.

First, about the word

Narcissistic personality disorder is a diagnosis made by a psychiatrist or a clinical psychologist after talking to the person. As a therapist in training in marriage and family therapy I do not make diagnoses, and nobody can diagnose your parent from your description, however precise it is. There is more on this in the post Who may diagnose, who may prescribe, and who leads the process.

Nor do you need a diagnosis for what happened to you. A child is not shaped by a label but by everyday life: what happened when they were sad, who was allowed to be angry, what they were praised for, and what happened when they disappointed. So in this post I use the word “narcissistic” as a description of a pattern in a relationship: a parent so occupied with their own image and their own needs that they saw the child mainly through what the child meant for them.

The child as a mirror

The paediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott wrote down a thought that developmental psychology still repeats today: when a baby looks into the mother’s face, the baby sees itself. A parent is a child’s first mirror. When the child lights up and the parent lights up with them, when the child cries and the parent says “That gave you a fright, didn’t it?”, the child slowly learns what they feel, and that what they feel is all right. This is how a sense of “I” takes shape.

In some families the direction is reversed. The parent does not mirror the child but expects the child to mirror them: to confirm, through their achievements, behaviour and even their mood, that the parent is good, successful, special. Alice Miller described exactly these children in The Drama of the Gifted Child. They are sensitive and bright, quick to read what the adult needs, and they provide it. The price is that they put their own needs aside so early and so thoroughly that later they can no longer find them.

This does not necessarily look like neglect. The child often has everything: clubs, nice clothes, holidays, a parent who turns up to every recital. That is why it is so hard for the adult to say something was missing. Attention was not missing. What was missing was attention meant for the child, not for the impression the child made.

Conditional love: warmth with small print

The most tangible form of this pattern is love tied to a condition. When you are good, successful and agreeable, the parent is warm. When you disappoint, the warmth withdraws: through silence, coldness, hurt feelings, the sentence “After everything I’ve done for you.” The child does not remember the rule as a rule but as a truth about themselves: I am worth something when I fit.

Research knows this mechanism well. Assor, Roth and Deci (2004) asked students whether their parents had rationed affection according to success, good behaviour and control of emotions. Those who had experienced this did, more often, what their parents wanted, but with a sense of inner compulsion. Satisfaction after success was short-lived, failure brought shame and guilt, and they felt resentment towards their parents. So conditional love works, and that is precisely where its harm lies.

The other side is overvaluation. Brummelman and colleagues (2015) followed 565 children and their parents in the Netherlands across several successive measurements. Children whose parents told them they were more special and worth more than others later showed more narcissistic traits themselves. Healthy self-esteem, on the other hand, was predicted by parental warmth, that is, by the experience of being accepted, not of being better. A pedestal and warmth are two different things, even though they look alike from the outside.

The golden child and the scapegoat

Where there is more than one child, the parent’s image is often divided among them. One becomes the proof that the parent is good: the golden child. Another becomes the explanation for everything that goes wrong: the scapegoat. “Golden child” is a popular term, but family therapy has described roles for a long time. In the 1980s Sharon Wegscheider-Cruse described the hero, the scapegoat, the lost child and the mascot in families with addiction. The roles were later recognised in other families where one adult took up all the room.

The golden child looks like the winner, yet the price is no smaller. They are loved for what they represent, and they know it. They are often tightly bound to the parent as confidant and comforter, which is what the term parentification describes. When, at thirty, they want to do things their own way, they discover they have no permission. The scapegoat gets the criticism, the comparisons and the blame, but sometimes also something the golden child lacks: since the family disapproves of them anyway, they find it easier to leave and easier to see what is going on.

Research on unequal treatment of children shows that nobody wins. Pillemer and colleagues (2010) found more depressive symptoms in adult children where, as they experienced it, their mother differentiated among her children, and this held regardless of whether they themselves were on the more or the less favoured side. The roles are described more broadly in the post Roles in the family: the hero, the scapegoat, the invisible child. Which was yours? and in the knowledge-base entry roles in the family, and the quiet inequality between children in the post The favourite child: a quiet inequality in the family.

What cannot be said in the family

Families like this are held together by a few unwritten rules. The parent’s mood is the weather everyone plans around. What goes on at home is not discussed outside, because the outward image is sacred. Criticising the parent is ingratitude. And if the child says something hurt, the conversation turns: now the parent is the injured one, and the child comforts them and apologises.

Siblings are a chapter of their own. Because there is too little parental favour to go round, the children compete for it, and the parent often compares them or confides complaints about one to the other. A brother and sister who could have been each other’s only witness and support grow up as rivals. Many people realise only in adulthood that their sister was not the enemy but a child in the same house with a different role. Comparison is the subject of the post “Why can’t you be like your sister?” Sibling comparison and how you see yourself.

What you carry into adulthood

A child who was a mirror develops an extraordinary antenna for other people. They walk into a room and know who is in a bad mood. It is a skill and a burden at once, because the antenna is always on and always pointed outwards. Inside there is often fog. The question “And what do you want?” brings a blank, or anxiety.

Other common traces:

• People-pleasing that is not kindness but a safety measure. More in the post People-pleasing: when your worth is in other people’s hands.
• An inner critic with the parent’s voice, which corrects any praise at once. Where it comes from is described in the post Your inner voices were once outer ones.
• Guilt at every boundary, as if “no” were an attack on the other person.
• Distrust of praise and, at the same time, a hunger for it.
• Familiar relationships: you are drawn to people whose warmth has to be earned, because that is what home feels like.

A short exchange (composed, not a real person) shows how the pattern lives on:

“Mum, I’ve got a job in Maribor. I’m moving in October.”
“I see. And what am I supposed to tell people, that my daughter has left me on my own?”
“I’m not leaving you. I’ll be an hour and a half away.”
“Your brother would never do this. But you always did keep yourself to yourself.”
“… Maybe I could hold off on the move for a bit.”

Nobody asked what the job was or whether she was pleased about it. In three sentences, news about the daughter’s life became news about the mother. And the daughter, aged thirty-four, did what she already knew how to do at nine: she put her own joy away to make things easier for her mother.

When it was abuse

A parent who is preoccupied with themselves is not necessarily abusive. But sometimes what you describe as a “difficult childhood” was emotional abuse: regular humiliation, ridicule, threats of abandonment, days of silence as punishment, setting the children against one another. Sometimes there were blows as well. The fact that the same parent paid for your education and loved you in their own way does not erase this, and the reverse is also true. What this kind of abuse looks like is described in the post Emotional abuse: how to recognise it when there are no bruises.

If you are under eighteen and reading this because of what is happening at home now, in Slovenia you can call the TOM helpline for children and young people on 116 111. Adults experiencing violence in the family can call the SOS helpline for women and children who are victims of violence in Slovenia on 080 11 55, or the police on 113 if in danger. If these memories flood you with thoughts that you cannot go on, the Slovenian mental health crisis line is available at night on 01 520 99 00, and the Samarijan confidential helpline in Slovenia round the clock on 116 123.

An exercise: whose is this?

A child who was a mirror finds it hard to tell their own wishes from the expectations they have absorbed. This exercise takes twenty minutes and a sheet of paper.

1. Write five sentences beginning with “I must” or “I mustn’t”. The first ones that come to mind: I must be successful, I mustn’t be a burden, I must ring every Sunday.
2. Beside each, note whose voice you hear. Your mother’s, your father’s, your grandmother’s, a teacher’s, your own? Don’t think for long; the first answer counts.
3. Rewrite each sentence with “I choose to …”. Read it aloud and watch your body. With some it stays calm: that one is yours. With others it tightens: that one you took on.
4. Pick one sentence that is not yours and, once this week, don’t obey it. In a small way: ring on Tuesday instead of Sunday. Hand in something that is good enough rather than perfect.
5. Write down what happened. Guilt usually arrives, and strongly. Here guilt is not proof that you did something wrong. It is a sign that you stepped over an old rule.

If you would like to write this down in a more structured way, the knowledge base has two tools: A boundary letter and the Boundary diary.

Where this story does not hold

The description of a narcissistic parent is seductive because it explains everything at once. That is exactly why it needs checking. A parent who was cold, critical or wrapped up in themselves may have been depressed, exhausted, addicted, a child of violence themselves, or simply raised in a time and place where children were not praised and feelings were not discussed. The effect on you may be similar; the explanation and the way forward are different.

The second point is memory. We remember childhood through what we feel today, and siblings often remember the same house very differently. That does not mean you are making it up. It means your experience is real as an experience, even if it is not the whole picture.

Third: a label can keep you in the place you want to leave. If all your effort goes into proving what your parent was, you stay turned towards them, just as you were as a child. And fourth, which is uncomfortable: most parents are a mixture. The same mother who compared you with your little sister may have knitted you socks every winter. You do not have to choose one of the two truths. What to do with the anger that remains is described in the post Anger at your parents in adulthood: what to do with it.

What to do with the relationship today

Between “everything is fine” and “I’m cutting contact” there is a great deal of room. Most people settle somewhere in between: shorter visits, topics that are no longer discussed, a phone call you end when the comparing starts. A boundary here is not a punishment for the parent but a description of what you will do. Being able to stay in contact and still remain yourself is what family therapy calls differentiation.

It helps to let go of one expectation: that your parent will one day say “You’re right, I’m sorry.” Some can manage it, many cannot, and waiting for that sentence keeps you in the role of the child. When the relationship can still be repaired and when it cannot is discussed in the post Adult children and parents: can the relationship still be repaired?

Relational family therapy, the approach I am training in, starts from the idea that early relationships are written into the body and repeat themselves in later ones until we become aware of them. So the work is not a search for someone to blame but slowly learning what was not there at home: that someone stays with what you feel, and nothing terrible happens. It often helps to look one generation further back, because the parent who needed a mirror did not invent that either. This is what the longer genogram session A Look into the Past is for. Sessions take place in person in Ljubljana, and I also work with English-speaking clients.

What to remember

• A diagnosis is made by a psychiatrist or a clinical psychologist. You do not need one to understand your childhood: a description of how it was is enough.
• A child used as a mirror learns to read others and loses touch with what they themselves feel and want.
• Conditional love works, and that is exactly why it leaves short-lived satisfaction after success and shame after failure.
• The golden child and the scapegoat are places in a family, not characters. Both pay the price.
• Guilt at your first boundary is not proof that you are doing wrong. It is a sign that you have stepped over an old family rule.