This is a fascinating post to get some perspective from the narcissist side.
In my experience, beyond the suffering and abuse, it is nearly impossible to describe to someone else the experience of extended engagement with someone with narcissistic personality disorder or someone with borderline personality disorder. Friends and family often have no frame of reference in dealing with NPD or BPD. It makes finding help and treatment much harder. Often you have to discover on your own that you have been the target of NPD or BPD abuse. It takes time.
I'm sure there are children who unjustifiably cut off their parents, and the reverse. I can say that I read Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents and it rocked my world: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/adult-children-of-emotional... by thoroughly describing my upbringing. I've not cut off contact but I have containerized it and set strict boundary conditions, if you will, and my parents seem not to understand their own behavior, at all.
This book really helped me figure out my parents and my childhood. For my entire life I've essentially thought "my parents aren't really narcissists and they weren't outright abusive, so why have I always felt like something was wrong with my upbringing, and why do I seem to harbor resentment towards them?". Turns out they were / are very emotionally immature. This quote summarizes it pretty well:
> Growing up in a family with emotionally immature parents is a lonely experience. These parents may look and act perfectly normal, caring for their child’s physical health and providing meals and safety. However, if they don’t make a solid emotional connection with their child, the child will have a gaping hole where true security might have been.
If you can admit your own flaws, you can't be that bad. Or at least there's hope for you.
When I pushed my parents bad behavior front and center, I got hung up on. The next time we spoke on the phone the incident was not mentioned - like it never happened.
That thing you're talking about with your parents is exactly how I behave. I did have a big problem with admitting, or rather realizing, many things about myself, even while other people were telling them to me. I didn't realize until this year that I am incompetent as a parent. My oldest kid is 9. Watching her grow up and watching the consequences of my own negative influence on her is what led to realization.
I wish it were as easy as awareness but it's so deep. There was supposed to be some kind of interpersonal development feedback loop accumulated over years and it just didn't happen. Now I can only sometimes get into a mood where I think I can re-develop a personality. But there is no rational basis for that hope.
> Because they probably weren’t allowed to express and integrate their emotional experiences in childhood, these people grow up to be emotion-ally inconsistent adults. Their personalities are weakly structured, and they often express contradictory emotions and behaviors. They step in and out of emotional states, never noticing their inconsistency. When they become parents, these traits create emotional bafflement in their children. One woman described her mother’s behavior as chaotic, “flip- flopping in ways that made no sense.”
I already figured this all out by myself.
The book is only wrong when it says things like "never noticing." I noticed.
> Growing up with an inconsistent parent is likely to undermine a child’s sense of security, keeping the child on edge. Since a parent’s response provides a child’s emotional compass for self- worth, such chil-dren also are likely to believe that their parent’s changing moods are somehow their fault.
This is what I did. On edge. Insecure. Victim of abuse. It's visible in body language.
> Instead of learning about themselves and developing a strong, cohe-sive self in early childhood, emotionally immature people learned that certain feelings were bad and forbidden. They unconsciously developed defenses against experiencing many of their deeper feelings. As a result, energies that could have gone toward developing a full self were instead devoted to suppressing their natural instincts, resulting in a limited capac-ity for emotional intimacy.
The book is wrong in the same way once again. Because I remember by the time I was 16 years old I was entirely conscious of the idea that feelings were bad and had a conscious belief in the pro-active suppression of negative emotion, including through the use of drugs. I remember getting into an internet argument about the topic at that age. The only part I wasn't aware of was how completely fucked up dysfunctional it was.
Yep. You try and explain the arguments or situations, but in peoples minds they apply the model of a normal person that they have in their head to the narc because they look at the narc and see a normal person, and they think well you just explain this to them or just say that to them. They don't understand that their mental models of how someone will behave and what they will feel and say and do are not applicable to the situation, and that trying to apply them will give you the wrong answer. like playing a familiar game with the controls reversed.
Not sure what you need exactly but BPDFamily https://www.bpdfamily.com/ (especially the forums) is a great resource for people with a BPD person in their lives. Good luck.
In my experience, beyond the suffering and abuse, it is nearly impossible to describe to someone else the experience of extended engagement with someone with narcissistic personality disorder or someone with borderline personality disorder. Friends and family often have no frame of reference in dealing with NPD or BPD. It makes finding help and treatment much harder. Often you have to discover on your own that you have been the target of NPD or BPD abuse. It takes time.