If we cannot trust our parents to be there for us in childhood and if they don’t allow us to develop an insight into and grounded trust in our own real feelings, needs and reactions, how can we become people who trust in life, the goodness of others and in ourselves? How can we develop self belief, inner connection and confidence as well as emotional resilience and strength.
In your childhood did your parents follow through on what they promised consistently? Did they listen to you and your wishes and needs and take them seriously? Or did they tell you didn’t feel that way, were wrong to have those needs or let you know in some way they were not very important and did not count? Was there room to negotiate with them and did they let you know when they could not meet your needs and help you to understand why and how there was such a limit?
When you cried or hurt yourself did they shame you, tell you you didnt get hurt, shouldn’t be a cry baby or show anger? If they did that is invalidation abuse it also conditions you to come to believe your needs don’t matter and your feelings don’t make sense. It also leads you to distrust yourself. It is a breeding ground for narcissistic injury and narcissitic rage (often buried and hidden if you weren’t allowed to be angry either.)
I am posting this as a follow up to recent post on the Toddler brain because if our needs were consistently ignored or frustrated in childhood we do grow up to develop a sense of impotence. This is then a breeding ground for buried rage and anger in later life. It is also a breeding ground for addictions.
It hurts a lot to have our needs frustrated and our feelings ignored in childhood. Becoming a healthy adult means realising in time that not all of our needs will be met; not all of our feelings will be understood by others with differing feelings, wishes and needs, but never the less they should be respected.
When we come from a narcissistic home these inner conditions are not met. In childhood it is important to know that our needs and feelings make sense and it is even more important that we are not humilated or come down on with a rod of iron when frustration or lack of need resolution occurs. It is well known that humiliation and discounting lead to narcissism. The angry Dad who humilates his son for crying would be an example. The one who calls his kid a sissy or ‘waste of space’ for not making the grade, leaves a lasting impression and scar on that young one’s soul. The son needs to know what that injury was about in later life. He needs to learn how not to self medicate the injury, or alternatively turn away from that young feeling part of him and discount it projecting the wound and doing the same to others later in life.
I am just at the end of a very well written novel on the journey of two sons who make a road trip later in life to connect with the father who abandoned them both in childhood, called Under The Same Stars. What makes the novel so funny and insightful is the different charaterisations of both brothers, how they respond diffently to the parental abandonment, one with denial and idealisation of the father (who later turns particularly nasty on this son) and other laden with resentment towards the abandoner. Only toward the end does the book reveal what happened to both sons and fell into their unconcious with time.
It is interesting to see how the son who idealises the father uses all kinds of mechanisms such as religiosity to deny the depth of his own wound. He becomes very antagonistic toward ‘the feminine’ and this he projects onto his brother calling him a fagot due to the fact the younger brother who lives in London favours floral shirts, cries easily and is artistic and sensitive. The younger brother doesnt get enraged and that is one of the most endearing qualities of the book which shows how wounds can get hidden. covered over or stepped around. The younger son naturally suffers from depression and has undergone years of therapy at the outset of the book.
Reading fictional accounts of the impact of narcissism can teach us a lot. It shows how others suffer and the impact that can come. Many of us in this situation learn to never trust our hearts fully, nor the hearts of others, we may be attracted to those who will hurt us again or we provoke the very abadonment we fear by our projections and reactions to new incidents and triggers. At the end of that last relationship where we find ourselves down in the sludge caused by our tears we have an opportunity of awakening. Just how was it that we got to here. That is when our tears may help us understand the wound that seeps and lead us home to answers about why and how implicit trust in the universe, life, self and others was lost.
Emerging From The Dark Night 